296 THE WORLD-ENERGY 



Doubtless Man was made of the dust of the earth, 

 and, still more remotely, of cosmic dust. But the process 

 of his development is nothing less than the process of 

 Reason by which the concurrence of elements has tended 

 unfalteringly toward ever greater complexity of relation, 

 until at length there arose a unit which, though it could 

 not be said to think, yet was itself a marvelous embodi- 

 ment of Thought, and which, by further advance, grew 

 into that degree of complexity of relations which may be 

 termed self-relation a characteristic better known under 

 the name of self-consciousness, which is, in fact, the 

 highest term of centrality, and without which the word 

 centrality itself would be altogether meaningless; nay, 

 without which all words and all things were impossible. 



It would seem, then, that Darwin and his associates 

 have only indicated to us in rough outline the more con- 

 spicuous physical aspects of the mode or method by which 

 Man, the progressively unfolding thinker, has descended 

 from the eternally perfect, creative Thinker. The inter- 

 mediate links may very likety be: savage, primate, worm, 

 protoplasmic pulp, nebula; but these are in reality only 

 roots that still have their origin in and draw their sole 

 nutriment from the primal World-Energy. This is the 

 real secret of their incessantly struggling upward through 

 darkness and time into more and more complex forms of 

 Reason, to emerge at length into the light of Eternity, 

 which for every man is but the ever increasingly clear 

 consciousness of his own identity in nature with the 

 primal Thinker, of whose Thought the whole Universe 

 is but the outer, organic form. 



And yet this ideal identity in nature of the created 

 thinker with the divine Thinker can be realized only 



