AND ITS SELF-CONSEKVATION. 271 



of function in the organism, though primarily such 

 function must have received its definiteness of direction 

 from the " environment." 



What is of special significance here is, that so long as 

 the environment was regarded as merely an aggregate of 

 physical forces, it was impossible to avoid a feeling that 

 somehow the difficulty which presented itself in face of 

 the new view respecting the origin of Life, and even of 

 the variations of structure and of function in organisms, 

 had received little more than a mythical treatment. It 

 is, in fact, only when we come to regard the physical 

 world as itself but the outer mode of the spiritual, only 

 when we come to regard "things" as nothing more nor 

 less than the expression of thought (aspects, that is, of 

 the perfect Thought which constitutes the Method of 

 Creation), that the "environment" assumes a really 

 intelligible character. * For then in any given case the 

 "environment" itself must appear to us as nothing else 

 and nothing less than a more or less complex phase in 

 the concrete unfolding of the divine creative Energy, 

 conformity to the Method of which means increased ade- 

 quacy of life; antagonism with which means and can 

 only mean degradation of life; continued antagonism with 

 which can mean nothing less than final extinction ; that 

 is, the utter dissolution of the organism as organism. 



It is in and through the World-Energy, then, that 

 whatever of Life we know or can ever hope to know 

 must have its origin. In other words, Life comes from 

 the living and, from this point of view, it can come 

 from nothing else. 



* In fact, we can really think nothing else than thought. And when we 

 think out the "laws of nature," those laws are by that very fact proven to 

 be nothing else than modes of thought. 



