426 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



It is not said that the view here given of the 

 process of Evolution has been the actual process. 

 The illustrations have been developed rather to 

 clear up difficulties than to state a theory. The 

 time is not ripe for daring to present to our 

 imaginations even a partial view of what that 

 transcendent process may have been. At present 

 we can only take our ideas of growth from the 

 growing things around us, and in this analogy 

 we have taken no account of the most essential 

 fact — the seed. Nor is it asserted, far as these 

 illustrations point in that direction, that the course 

 of Evolution has been a continuous, uninterrupted, 

 upward rise. On the whole it has certainly been 

 a rise ; but whether a rise without leap or break 

 or pause, or — what is more likely — a progress in 

 rhythms, pulses, and waves, or — what is unlikely — 

 a cataclysmal ascent by steps abrupt and steep, 

 may possibly never be proved. 



There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the 

 fields of Nature and the books of Science in search 

 of gaps — gaps which they will fill up with God. 

 As if God lived in gaps ? What view of Nature 

 or of Truth is theirs whose interest in Science is 

 not in what it can explain but in what it cannot, 

 whose quest is ignorance not knowledge, whose 

 daily dread is that the cloud may lift, and who, as 



