THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 11 



external to the human soul. But this alienation of man from 

 the surrounding universe, which constitutes him, and which 

 he helps to constitute, can no longer be maintained. We 

 must return with fuller knowledge to something like the 

 earlier, more instinctive faith about the world, whereof our- 

 selves, body and spirit, are part. And nothing seems more 

 evident than that we are being led back to this point by the 

 hand of Science, enemy as she is supposed to be of poetry, of 

 mysticism, of spiritual contemplation. 



The ground for this apparent paradox may thus be stated. 

 Science establishes the unity of the Kosmos, together with the 

 exact correspondence and correlation of its parts. But when 

 we begin to regard this unity with eyes from which the scales 

 of Christian antagonism have fallen, we discover that we 

 cannot think of it except as spiritual. The one only thing 

 we can be said to know and to be sure of, is the paramount 

 importance in ourselves of mind. Cogito, ergo sum, as the 

 starting-point for speculation, may sound an antiquated 

 formula, yet it contains incontestable truth, which is hourly 

 verified by experience, and only too pompously proclaimed by 

 ontologists. If, then, we are mind, and nothing in the last 

 resort but mind, logic compels us to expect mind in that of 

 which we are an integrating element, and from the total com- 

 plex of which we cannot be dissevered. The last ambitious 

 system of constructive metaphysics, that of Hegel, made the 

 most of this position. But Hegel overstrained the point when 

 he identified the world-mind with the human mind. His 

 elaborate reasoning from subjective data has been rejected 

 by the common sense of generations trained in the explora- 

 tion of the actual universe. Man's thought does not make 

 the world, into which man entered at a comparatively recent 

 date, and on a relatively minor planet. Quite independent 

 of his thought, the heavens, the earth, the rocks, the rivers, 

 the forests, flowers, and animals, and birds, of which he 

 obtains cognisance through his five senses, would enjoy their 

 own existence. Most of them were prior to him in time, and 

 it is only the vanity of egotism which makes him represent 

 his thought as necessary to their being. The truth, however, 



