58 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



disorder in our temporal affairs by man's mind and 

 directivity. 



Now, we have every reason to believe physical as- 

 tronomers who tell us that our own universe was origin- 

 ally a fiery vapour, or cosmic nebula. It has somehow 

 become arranged into a beautiful order of sun, planets 

 and satellites ; and, as far as the earth is concerned, 

 with many series of living beings terminated by Man. 



Once given protoplasm we find all plants, animals 

 and man can have been evolved out of it. 



If man wields limited powers as inventor and con- 

 structor to meet wants and requirements, that is, adapta- 

 tions to the needs of his environment ; he sees very 

 similar processes going on all around him in the past 

 and present. He, therefore, is justified in logically con- 

 cluding that there must be some conscious Directivity 

 akin to his own behind the infinite adaptations to needs 

 in all organic beings. 



One notices that man himself never gets perfection 

 all at once. In music he began with, we will say, a tom- 

 tom, but he has now got to an orchestra. In drawing, 

 prehistoric man began by scratching the figure of a 

 mammoth on a flat bone. He now fills galleries with 

 beautiful compositions ; and so is it with the appliances 

 of forces, electricity, etc. 



Just so is it with Nature. We notice that the adu// 

 stages of her earliest efforts in the various groups of 

 animals represented the embryonic conditions of later 

 ones of the same kinds. 



A progress from simple to compound has always 

 taken place, just as man progressed himself in his know- 

 ledge of the sciences and in the progress of the arts. 



He at once recognises a Mind akin to his own in 

 such parallels in the working out the structure of pro- 



