THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 5 



creatures to their environment, has been superseded by what 

 may be termed a consistently biological view of the universe. 

 The whole scheme of things is now regarded as a single 

 organism, advancing methodically through stages of its 

 growth in obedience to inevitable laws of self-expansion. 

 This does not dispel the mystery which surrounds life. It 

 does not pretend, when rightly understood, to give a final 

 or sufficient explanation of Being. Nor, again, does it yield 

 the world to chance, or remove the necessity by which we 

 postulate the priority of thought, intention, spirit, to all 

 manifestations of material existence. But it compels us to 

 regard this form-giving spiritual potency as inherent in the 

 organism : as the law of its life, not as the legislation of some 

 power extraneous to it. In another very important point 

 Evolution has reacted destructively on popular Christianity. 

 By penetrating our minds with the conviction that all things 

 are in process, that the whole universe is literally in per- 

 petual Becoming, it has rendered it impossible for us to 

 believe that any one creed or set of opinions possesses 

 finality. Religions, like all things that are ours and human, 

 have their day of declension ; nor can Christianity form an 

 exception to the universal rule. What is perishable in its 

 earthly historical manifestation must be eliminated; and 

 the permanent spirit by which it is animated, the truth it 

 reveals, will be absorbed into the structure of creeds destined 

 successively to supersede it and be superseded. 



IV 



The fundamental conception which underlies the Evolu- 

 tionary method of thought is that all things in the universe 

 exist in process. No other system has so vigorously enforced 

 the truth that it is impossible to isolate phenomena from 

 their antecedents and their consequents. No other system 

 has given the same importance to apparently insignificant 

 details and to apparently monstrous divergences from normal 

 types, in so far as such details supply links in the sequence 

 of development, or such divergences can be used to illustrate 



