v EVOLUTION AND TELEOLOGY 349 



necessitate each other's existence, i.e. no one can exist for 

 any time without the other. The totality of things at any 

 time, then, either is a harmony or is a collocation derived 

 from a harmony, either as proceeding out of one or as 

 leading up to and existing for the sake of one. 1 



Now in a harmonious whole, any constituent part ob, 

 with a constitution of its own dictating an orderly series of 

 internal changes (or preserving itself unchanged, as the 

 case may be), is maintained in this, which we may call its 

 internal life, by the residue, such maintenance being a con- 

 dition of the action of that residue. Such a whole then 

 may be destroyed from without, but not from within. It 

 follows, that if Reality as a whole is organic, its harmony 

 is indestructible, and within it every part must pursue its 

 own orderly life, contributing thereby to the life of the 

 remainder. But since discord exists such a harmony does 

 not exist and never has existed. It follows, that if its 

 existence is implied in the structure of experience, that 

 existence must be in the future, and the actual constitution 

 of things at any time must be determined by the element 

 in that harmony which each one of them is to contribute. 2 



1 It may be said that this conclusion requires us to conceive of the 

 universe as a definite sum of being, whereas being infinite it cannot be 

 summed. This is not the case. We can make true assertions of infinite 

 scope, e.g. that all pairs of two make four, though we cannot exhaust the 

 numbers of pairs. The conclusion before us asserts that whatever exists 

 is or is dependent on a harmony which must extend to all co-existent 

 realities whatever and how many soever they be. 



2 It may be said that the conception of harmony only proves that the 

 ultimate elements of the world order are indestructible, a fact already 

 known to the mechanical theory. A, B, C imply one another, but they 

 also interact and produce a,/?, 7, which may involve a destruction of what 

 from our human point of view is of value in the combination. But this 

 argument ignores the essential point, that it is not the mere existence of 

 elements which is involved in harmony but their particular collocation. 

 A must be understood as a combination of elements aa, B as a combina- 

 tion bfi, and the harmony involves the maintenance of the principle of 

 combination. But in that case, again, it may be said we prove too 

 much. Harmony must arrest all change, and this arrest is death. Not 

 so, aa may have its own internal process of change, and so may bft. The 

 harmony between them means that the one series of changes is a neces- 

 sary condition of the other. Hence harmony is compatible with change, 

 but with only that kind of change which is the product of the internal 

 development of each part. 



