I 



I 



THE END OF THE WORLD-PROCESS. 20/ 



lastingly reproducing itself, without beginning and 

 without end. It might be that the development of 

 prothyle into matter and of matter into prothyle 

 should go on to all time, without change of charac- 

 ter. 



But though this would be a conception tenable in 

 itself, it must yet be rejected as inadequate to the 

 explanation of terrestrial history. The evolution of 

 the planets and of the life they bear would be an 

 utterly irrelevant concomitant of the evolution of 

 prothyle. Terrestrial evolution would be an inex- 

 plicable and meaningless bye-product, which has 

 aimlessly diverged on a bye-path very remote from 

 the world's real process, viz., the formation of atoms 

 at its confines and their subsequent destruction in 

 the centres of the hottest stars. For in the majority 

 of cases the life-history of the atoms would come 

 to an end, without their reaching any further stages 

 of development into inorganic and organic com- 

 pounds, animal life and human reason at all. If, 

 therefore, the world- process is one, either our terres- 

 trial evolution has no part in it, or our view of the 

 development of prothyle was an imperfect one. For 

 its development cannot include our terrestrial evolu- 

 tion. Biological, and even the later forms of chemi- 

 cal, development cannot be stated in terms of this 

 merely chemical evolution, and so they must either be 

 illusory, or our formulation of the latter is erroneous. 



And that the latter is the alternative to be 

 adopted, appears not only from the fact that it can- 

 not interpret a large portion of our data, and that 

 the evolution of the earth lies without its scope, but 

 also from this, that a constant generation and de- 

 struction of atoms is not properly a process at all. It 

 could hardly be called even a history of the world. 



