1 98 THE METAPHYSICS OF EVOLUTION. 



things. Neither of them is gratuitous or useless, 

 but each is adapted to certain purposes. In 

 ordinary Hfe and science, where we think back- 

 wards, and are more concerned with the past than 

 with the future of things, the explanation by their 

 causes, germs and potentialities is more in point. 

 But in ultimate analysis none of these explanations 

 are metaphysically adequate : things must be ex- 

 plained by their significance and purpose instead 

 of by their ''causes," by their ideals instead of by 

 their germs, by their actualities instead of by their 

 potentialities. And these two ways of looking upon 

 things are reconciled by the fact that they regard 

 the same connexion of things in reverse order ; the 

 process is one and the same, but we find it con- 

 venient to look at it now from the one end and 

 now from the other. 



§ 18. Applying these results of the Aristotelian 

 analysis to the prothyle of evolutionism, it appears 

 that the more certainly it can reduce the whole 

 sensible and material world to a pure potentiality, 

 the more necessary does it make the existence of 

 a prio7^ actuality, as the cause of the evolution of 

 the sensible. And that actuality must be not only 

 prior (in Time, if the process is conceived as one 

 in Time, or only in idea, or in both), but, by the 

 very terms of the hypothesis, external to the evolv- 

 ing world, non-material and non-phenomenal. For 

 since the whole of the material and phenomenal 

 was supposed to have been derived out of the^ 

 pure potentiality, the reality pre-supposed by thai 

 potentiality cannot itself have formed part of th< 

 material and phenomenal world. 



And thus, so far from dispensing wdth the nee( 

 for a Divine First Cause, the theory of Evolution, 



