70 The Bible of Nature 



know how the potential becomes actual, we can 

 watch the process. In an absolutely transparent 

 egg, like that of the moth Botys hyalinalis, we can 

 follow the whole visible process with unbroken 

 continuity — the minting and coining of the cater- 

 pillar out of the egg, the emergence of obvious 

 complexity out of apparent simplicity. We can- 

 not, of course, see the development of the cater- 

 pillar's instincts any more than we can see the 

 growth of the chick's mind by any amount of 

 embryology, but we see what takes place, and it 

 looks like an automatic autonomous unfolding. 

 The only way in which we can meet the difficulty 

 of the emergence of the apparently new is by sup- 

 posing that the apparently new was potentially 

 there in the beginning.^ In short, we read back 

 the consequents into the antecedents. So, in the 

 development of the earth, we have to do with what 

 we believe to be a perfectly continuous series of 

 distributions and re-distributions of matter and 

 energy in the ambient ether. The meteorites be- 

 come a nebula, and the nebula becomes a star. 

 It differentiates and integrates as it cools, and we 

 try to chronicle stage after stage. We do not sup- 



1 Later on we shall have to qualify this by recognizing 

 that the living organism is in a real sense ' creative,' using 

 its experience to make thereof something new; but even 

 this creative power is 'given,' that is to say, inborn. 



