Postulates of Evolution. 1 2 7 



isted. But science has no evidence on which to affirm 

 that the antecedent mode of being manifested in the 

 dynamic laws of matter and motion and force was its 

 sole cause. No connecting links can be shown to 

 account for the transition from the insensate to the 

 sensate : nothing has been brought to light by science 

 which is fitted to elucidate the origin of feeling. It 

 is an assumption wholly without warrant that the 

 physical causes already operating in the universe, at 

 the moment when feeling first came into existence as 

 a mode of being, were adequate to produce it. It is 

 more reasonable to suppose that it came to be by the 

 immediate operation of the inscrutable first cause, 

 whose continued existence in relation to the pheno- 

 menal Mr. Spencer affirms. 



But the exception to the universality of physical 

 .law, which stands out most clearly and indubitably, 

 is the beginning of self-conscious intelligence. When 

 the universe had reached a state in which it afforded 

 a fitting habitat for such a being, man appeared. 

 Conscious thought, knowing itself and its environ- 

 ment, is the most notable of all phenomena in the 

 cosmos. Till man is accounted for, the first question 

 of philosophy, and the question which gives the key 

 to every other, is unanswered. If the law of the 

 ontinuous redistribution of matter and motion can 

 account for consciousness, it has won universal do- 

 minion, and is the law of all knowable being ; but if 

 it does not furnish a true solution of this problem, 



