324 INVOLUTION. 



face to face with the real relation. Tree and root — the 

 seed apart — find their explanation not in one another 

 nor in something in themselves, but mainly in some- 

 thing outside themselves. The secret of Evolution lies, 

 in short, with the Environment. In the Environment, 

 in that in which things live and move and have 

 their being, is found the secret of their being, and 

 especially of their becoming. And what is that in 

 which things live and move and have their being ? It 

 is Nature, the world, the cosmos — and something 

 more, some One more, an Infinite Intelligence and an 

 Eternal Will. Everything that lives, lives in virtue 

 of its correspondences with this Environment. Evolu- 

 tion is not to unfold from within ; it is to infold from 

 without. Growth is no mere extension from a root 

 but a taking possession of, or a being possessed by, an 

 ever widening Environment, a continuous process of 

 assimilation of the seen or Unseen, a ceaseless re-dis- 

 tribution of energies flowing into the evolving organ- 

 ism from the Universe around it. The supreme factor 

 in all development is Environment. Half the con- 

 fusions which reign round the process of Evolution, 

 and half the objections to it, arise from considering 

 the evolving object as a self-sufficient whole. Produce 

 an organism, plant, animal, man, society, which will 

 evolve in vacuo and the right is yours to say that the 

 tree lies in the root, the flower in the bud, the man in 

 the embryo, the social organism in the family of an 

 anthropoid ape. If an organism is to be judged in 

 terms of the immediate Environment of its roots, the 

 tree is a clay tree ; but if it is to be judged by stem, 

 leaves, fruit, it is not a clay tree. If the moral or 

 social organism is to be judged in terms of the Envi- 



