The Idea of Development 51 



a perfect Being. That would be to close the circle and system and 

 to leave no place for evolution, no room for causation, no scope 

 for Will. 



In so far as it deals with the facts of nature ; Evolution must 

 be included under what are natural laws, though from the broad- 

 est point of view all laws are natural laws. The " supernatural " 

 is merely descriptive of nature that has not yet been organ- 

 ised according to the forms of human intelligence. But the term 

 is essentially relative, and involves a wider glance at the facts 

 of nature than men can compass. The supernatural is but the 

 natural writ too large for men to take in its significance at a 

 glance. In the narrower sense, however, the term Evolution 

 refers to those distinct uniformities and necessities of organic 

 activity which can be realised by the mind and spirit of man. 

 If it is to be a law of Nature, Evolution must be universally 

 valid as the description of a general process of development. 

 In other words it must not only accord with all the facts of the 

 phenomena and be contrary to none, but it must also be subjec- 

 tively valid, in the sense of being intelligible and rational to the 

 mind of men. It does not follow that every fact in nature will 

 immediately be seen and thought of in evolutionary terms, but 

 it does involve a certain breadth of observation and of experi- 

 ment with the result that no negative instance can be discovered. 

 The various conceptions of Evolution that have up to this time 

 been worked out in extensive detail have in one respect or an- 

 other proved unsatisfactory either because the scope of observa- 

 tion has not been sufficiently wide, or because some personal 

 bias has entered in as a disturbing factor. Yet this individual 

 element that impairs the validity and renders uncertain the final 

 form of particular interpretations of Evolution in no way alters 

 the fundamental character of the principle itself. Our attitude 

 to the world does not afifect its constitution except from the 

 point of view of intellectual reorganisation and voluntary reaction 

 to situations. The Copernican revolution in astronomy furnished 

 the basis for a generalisation regarding philosophical attitude 

 which men have been rather slow to make. The fact that Evolu- 

 tion in its broadest conception is a constitutive principle of our 

 thought bears a close relation to the scientific postulate of the 

 objective uniformity of nature, and brings it into relation with 



