42 /ISSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



requirements of the logic in the situation are met. 

 These requirements point us, first and unavoidably, 

 to the intelligence immanent in the field of evolution, 

 the intelligence of man and his conscious companions 

 on the great scene of Nature ; and, at closest hand of 

 all, — first of all, — to the typical intelligence of 

 man simply. The whole question, so far as any- 

 thing more than conjectural evidence is concerned, 

 is man's question : he is the witness to himself for 

 evolution ; in Iiis consciousness, directly, and only 

 there, does the demand arise for an explanation of 

 it ; in himself he comes upon the nature of mind as 

 directly causal of the form in Nature — of the ideally 

 genetic connexion holding from part to part in it — 

 and of the reality of progress there as measured by 

 his ideals of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. 



Here, now, we arrive at the point where we natu- 

 rally pass from the criticism of agnostic evolutionism 

 to that of pantheistic idealism, or Cosmic Theism. 

 We promised, you will recollect, to attend carefully 

 to what the fullest historic philosophy has to say in 

 judgment of this theory of the world as well as of the 

 other. We shall see that this world-view gains much 

 over the agnostic, and yet that it falls short of the 

 explanatory ideal. 



The commanding question, let us remember, is 

 whether the mind in the world, and preeminently the 

 mind of man, is only a phenomenon like the objects 



