370 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, [pt. hi. 



in tliis way the ultimate test of riglit and wrong action came 

 to be the welfare of the community, instead of the welfare of 

 the individual; the long process of social evolution, thus 

 inaugurated, has all along reacted upon individual evolution, 

 by increasing the power of mental representation, and 

 nourishing sympathy at the expense of egoism; and thu3, 

 through one and the same endlessly complicated plexus of 

 causes, has arisen the historic Man, with his Intellect and 

 his Moral Sense. Yet endlessly complicated as the process 

 has been, we see that it is throughout definable as the gradual 

 substitution of adjustments that are relatively-indirect, hetero- 

 geneous, and highly organized, for adjustments that are 

 r'^latively- direct, homogeneous, and slightly organized. 



Thus we have fulfilled all the requirements laid down in 

 ^ilki concluding chapter of our Prolegomena. We have found 

 u hypothesis which is based upon properties of matter and 

 principles of dynamics that have previously been established ; 

 which appeals to no unknown agency and invokes no un- 

 known attribute of matter or motion; and which, accord- 

 ingly, contains no unverifiable element. This hypothesis 

 has been successfully subjected to both deductive and in- 

 ductive verification. In every department of nature it has 

 triumphantly borne the supreme test of reconciling the order 

 of conceptions with the order of phenomena. And in our 

 sociological chapters, as well as in the chapters on the 

 Genesis of Man, it has enabled us to detect relations among 

 phenomena which had hitherto remained in obscurity. 



It remains to add that this grand hypothesis, for the con- 

 ception and elaboration of which I have ventured to liken 

 Mr. Spencer to the thinker who conceived and elaborated 

 ihe hypothesis of gravitation, affords in itself a striking 

 illustration of that process of Evolution which it formulatea 

 Considered as an event in intellectual development, this dis- 

 covery is an immense extension in time of the correspondence 

 between the order of human conceptions and the order of 



