28 THE BIOCOSMOS GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



was it is true, but lie had the power of making 

 his particular science universal, of causing 

 his special category (Evolution) to be applied 

 to every other department of knowledge- 

 history, philosophy, institutions, and finally 

 even theology. 



Of course there can be heard in these days 

 the anarchic protest against the work of the 

 Genius in the World's History. Lombroso 

 and his disciples have sought to show that 

 the Great Man of the Age is mostly crazy; 

 but really he is to be conceived as the sanest 

 person of his time, who communes with and 

 shares in the universal Reason in a deeper 

 sense than any other mind. Just on this 

 ground he may be thought to be mentally out 

 of order, but one cannot help thinking that the 

 man who deems just the world-historical 

 Genius to be crazy is himself the crazier. 



Undoubtedly Nature had long been evolv- 

 ing, from the very beginning in fact, though 

 without the presence of the evolutionary con- 

 sciousness ; but it is now made conscious of its 

 evolution through the Ego of Darwin, who 

 thus stands at a grand node of Nature's un- 

 folding. Man was indeed conscious or self- 

 knowing long before the Nineteenth Century, 

 many thousands of years doubtless; still he 

 was not conscious of himself as evolved, of 

 his evolutionary principle. But the fullness 



