THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 13 



processes of reasoning are shared by men with brutes. 

 Memory, dreaming, inference, even a simple power of 

 generalisation, are possessed by the animals nearest to 

 humanity in organic development. It is, therefore, by no 

 means clear that mind in all its phenomenal manifestations, 

 inferior or superior to man's, should be ratiocinative. That, 

 indeed, is the differentia of mind in our own state of being. 

 Yet we believe that humanity forms the climax of a series 

 which started from simple animated cells. And having 

 admitted that there is no abrupt breakage between these cells 

 and us in the long chain of organised existence, how can we 

 refuse mind in its simpler form to those simpler organisations ? 

 It may even be queried whether our complex mode of being 

 does not render us incapable of appreciating the degrees of 

 consciousness in things lower than ourselves. Because atten- 

 tion is not roused in us by the peristaltic action, it does not 

 follow that ascidians, who are all stomach, have not an acute 

 consciousness of this, their principal activity. On the other 

 hand, analogy leads us to believe that man is not the final 

 product of Nature. Consequently we are justified in enter- 

 taining the belief that existences, higher in the scale of 

 being, may be endowed with intellects more fully organised 

 than ours. Such existences, possibly, transcend the ratio- 

 cinative stage of mind. Similar reasoning may be applied to 

 what we call the inorganic realm. We can only seize form 

 by thought, by mind, by intellect. Shall we not then be bold 

 enough to say that all form form in molecules, in crystals, in 

 planetary systems, in the undulations of light and sound is 

 fundamentally a mode of mind ? To call form merely a mode 

 of matter loses meaning when we have abandoned the abrupt 

 division between man and the rest of the animal and veget- 

 able world. It is true that the transition from inorganic to 

 organic phenomena has not yet been seized. But the doctrine 

 of continuity in Nature ought to render us very doubtful as 

 to the old-fashioned dichotomy, which places an impassable 

 barrier between them. So long as mind was regarded as 

 extraneous to Nature, as a prerogative given to man alone 

 by God, the omnipresence of mind in every particle of the 



