24 THE BIOCOSMOS GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



III. 



EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION. 



Ultimately Evolution will have to be ap- 

 plied to itself, if it be truly universal. It 

 must be tested at last by its own principle, 

 subsumed under its own law; what then be- 

 comes of it? And the author of Evolution 

 we have to consider as evolutionary in him- 

 self, as subject to his own process, as an ex- 

 ample of his own work, as something evolved. 



It is by no means the least fact of Evolu- 

 tion in the Nineteenth Century that it 

 evolves its evolver, Charles Darwin. It 

 makes him corporeally appear in his rise 

 through thousands of bodily forms, from the 

 lowest to the highest, after the procession of 

 untold aeons, possibly a hundred million of 

 years, if we may dare suppose with some 

 scientists that life on our planet began so 

 long ago. It is no wonder, then, that such an 

 appearance is mightily acclaimed by the time. 

 For every man sees now his true genealogy- 

 if not his own origin, at least his physical his- 

 tory; he begins to understand himself organi- 

 cally. Evolution of life has been going forward 

 in a dumb unconscious way for all these mil- 

 leniums ; but now it gets a voice for the first 

 time, yea an historian who looks back and in- 



