THE AWAKENING OF PHILOSOPHY 



Three great riddles have from time immemorial 

 puzzled this brain. These riddles are the origin 

 of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin 

 of man. And the solution of these riddles is 

 supposed to answer the questions : What will be 

 the fate of the universe? What part is death 

 playing in relation to life? Does individual life 

 imply individual immortality? And the efforts 

 made in the ages past to solve these problems 

 constitute the essence of all theories of evolution. 



Evolution means development. It is frequently 

 understood to signify only development in a for- 

 ward direction, progressive advance in a straight 

 line. But the movement of universal evolution 

 does not proceed by uninterrupted forward steps 

 of all forms of matter. It is rather made up of 

 advance and retreat. At any stage of the world- 

 process, certain parts of the universe are on the 

 upward grade of their career, while others are 

 on the downward grade. But out of the general 

 interaction of the sum of forward and back- 

 ward movements, there seems to develop a grad- 

 ual supremacy of one part of the universe over 

 another, so that things which were the controlling 

 element at one epoch are gradually superseded 

 by others, until the concentration of the control 

 of the entire process by one factor changes the 



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