46 METAPHYSICS 



speak, on the elements of the time spent, and the work 

 accomplished in the great process of the conversion of 

 chaos " into cosmic order, and the ordering into being 

 of the flora and fauna of the earth's surface, each know- 

 ledge stratum answering to a well-marked period of 

 genetic time and work. 



Each of the six days, or periods, of the creative activity 

 was marked by well-defined features, which gave it a 

 distinctiveness at once recognisable and memorable in the 

 stratigraphic deposits of ancient knowledge which enabled 

 the early teacher to reach the intelligence of his pupil with 

 a directness and success which the more diffuse, unstrati- 

 fied, and promiscuous methods of later times have too 

 often failed to do. Moreover, on the completion of the 

 great story of creation and its culmination in the appear- 

 ance of man as its final outcome, we see the principle of 

 stratification most effectively utilised in the unfolding of 

 man's place in the hierarchy of being and the shaping of 

 his destiny in the present world and "that which is to 

 come." 



When man at last appeared at the end of the biological 

 line as the last link in the long biological chain, we see 

 the advent of perfected animality, and, as such, we are 

 compelled to look upon him as possessed of qualities of 

 mind and body entitling him to be regarded as altogether 

 happy, innocent, and blessed amid the earliest Edenic life 

 on which the first human pair were called upon to enter. 



This pair, we may assume, were altogether pure, and 

 therefore innocent and happy in their pristine condition, as 

 ' ' to the pure all things are pure," and had not yet been 

 tried by conditions higher than those of perfected ani- 

 mality ; but the time was now ripening when a beginning 

 had to be made in laying the foundation of the great 

 fabric of coming humanity from which were to be evolved 

 a knowledge of the difference between good and evil, a 

 feeling of accountability for the exercise of this know- 

 ledge, and the adoption of laws of justice and righteous- 

 ness and what constitutes the texture of absolutely perfect 

 human society and mutual human helpfulness. 



The earliest creation knowledge strata thus became 

 overlaid with the earliest story of the human race, a story 



