INTRODUCTION 



tions possible, and with the helpless and long 

 needy infants that were to teach him the road 

 to virtue. But now, if the evolutionary pro- 

 cess is One, if the inscrutable Power is not a 

 collection of many various beings, but is a sin- 

 gle Being, then to find meaning anywhere is 

 to suggest strongly that one has found at least 

 a hint of the meaning that must be everywhere. 

 Fiske tells us, in the Preface to the " Idea of 

 God," that when this conception first dawned 

 upon him, it came to him with all the force 

 of a " revelation." In any case, evolution is 

 henceforth for him a positively teleological pro- 

 cess. And because, in the case of man, one 

 can most clearly read its meaning, the outcome 

 of the theory of evolution is to make man once 

 more central in significance amongst the phe- 

 nomena of the natural world. 



(2) The second of the considerations that 

 Fiske found potent in his later thought is closely 

 connected with this first. If the process of evo- 

 lution has a meaning, and if its meaning in- 

 volves the creation, through this process, of an 

 ethical being, then for reasons which have often 

 been discussed by those concerned with the pro- 

 blem of immortality, the defeat of the aspira- 

 tions of this ethical being through death would 

 seem to be opposed to the attainment of the 

 meaning in question. Here is an argument in 

 cvii 



