300 MAN AND THE WORLD. 



whether as an " objective hallucination " or other- 

 wise ? 



The objection sounds more serious than It Is, and 

 the evolutionist Idealist at least will have no diffi- 

 culty In answering It. For In the first place, what 

 does the previous existence of the world prove ? 

 What but that the world-process was proceeding at 

 a time when, to judge by the knowledge which we, 

 immersed in a certain stage of that process, at 

 present possess, there were no beings in that phase 

 of the process represented by physical existence on 

 our earth. But this falls very far short of being 

 a refutation of Idealism, or of proving that the 

 material world Is not a phenomenon In the con- 

 sciousness of spirits. 



For (i), as we saw In chapter vIII., material 

 evolution Is an Integral part of the world-process, 

 and obeys the same law as spiritual evolution, viz., 

 that of the development of the individual In associ- 

 ation. Hence it Is not true that the material existed 

 outside of and before the spiritual process, We 

 may not be in the habit of calling the development 

 of atoms an evolution of spiritual beings, but the 

 process which developed the material world and 

 developed spiritual beings is one and the same, 

 and the material Is but an earlier and less perfect 

 phase of the spiritual development. 



(2) It Is at the utmost true only from our present 

 point of view that in Its earlier stages the universe 

 contained no spiritual beings for whom it existed, 

 and our Ignorance of the possibilities of existence 

 is no proof against the idealist view of Matter. For 

 there might have existed, and still exist, myriads of 

 beings In the world of a different order from our- 

 selves, the denizens of stellar fires or interstella 



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