PRESENT EVOLUTIONARY CONFUSION 29 



culiarity of our cerebral functioning. The human 

 intellect is strangely reluctant of the inverse process 

 coming to it slowly and only after long familiar- 

 ity with the direct. The historical development of 

 mathematics bears witness to this natural antipathy 

 of the mind to reverse the order of its thinking ; like- 

 wise, the pedagogical. Listen to the child as he 

 solves his example in subtraction, " What number 

 added to five will make twelve? " Is it surprising, 

 then, that concerning a process so far-reaching and 

 complex as Evolution we have quite overlooked the 

 inverse? But as multiplication carries with it divi- 

 sion, so does Evolution carry with it a process which 

 logically should be called Involution. It is the same 

 which gave Huxley great trouble when he tried to 

 account for human progress in terms of Darwinism. 

 Science, in order to give a complete account of the 

 phenomena of life, must needs postulate, as operative 

 with Darwinism, a process the antithesis of Darwin- 

 ism both in principle and action. For the establish- 

 ing of a biological continuity, as well as a logical syn- 

 thesis, Evolution requires to be supplemented by its 

 inverse, Involution; the one process necessitates the 

 other. The attempt to explain these two processes 

 by means of the same hypothesis has led, not only to 

 much confusion in scientific thought, but to great 

 retardation of that thought. Whatever laws may 

 be set up for Evolution, there is a change of meaning 

 in kind, sooner or later, when it comes to their appli- 



