The Philosojyhy of Evolution. 363 



religion spirit, or intelligence, or God. All these diverse terms 

 involve ultimately the union of space and time or of the infinite 

 and the absolute. The chief advantage of the Philosophy of Evo- 

 lution is that it can explain the connecting link between mind and 

 matter, by bringing into interdependence intellectual and physical 

 phenomena, by explaining the point of contact between the spirit 

 and nature. This harmony of thought and feeling is what the 

 religionist most longs to comprehend, for it alone can bring peace 

 to the mind, it alone can dispel the contradictions which arise 

 between the belief in a divine love and the evidence of a suffering 

 humanity. The ultimate analysis which harmonizes the meaning 

 of our most general terms is a logical fact, which appeals only to 

 a class of specialists, but this analysis, so necessary to philosophy, 

 can be explained in the language of every-day life. There is no 

 limit to its applications and to its simplifications, and it will be 

 found to be the key to the Philosophy of Evolution. In Language 

 we have the connecting link between the intellectual and the phys- 

 ical. Language is a natural development, beginning in rude soimds 

 and gestures, and progressing in perfectly comprehensible steps 

 from the expression of concrete experiences to that of general 

 principles. In this vast development, resulting in the creation of 

 literature and science and j^hilosophy, there is no interposition of 

 the miraculous or the supernatural, and all the mysteries and su- 

 perstition of religion can be shown to result from infelicities of 

 speech, the lispings of primitive races, which have reached us 

 through tradition; the efforts of undeveloped language to voice 

 the abstract truths of life. The greatest feat of language is the 

 discovery of a single term to represent divine unity, the formation 

 of the ultimate generalization. The Philosophy of Evolution has 

 had its beginning in the great discovery of Darwin, who revolu- 

 tionized zoology by establishing the mutability of species, by 

 proving that organic life is a single family, developed by natural 

 agencies from a few primordial types. This theory he completed 

 by including in zoological classifications the species Man. He 

 neither attempted to show the filiation of the lower organic activ- 

 ities with chemical and physical actions on the one hand, nor on 

 the other to show the relations of higher organic life with the 

 phenomena of mind. Darwin, therefore, was not a student of the 

 mind. He was a naturalist as distinguished from a philosopher. 

 It is to such men as Meyer and Ilelmholtz, who discovered the 

 correlation and equivalence of the physical forces, and to such 

 men as Spencer and Lewes, who have established the interdepend- 

 ence of the organic and the mental forces, that we owe the exten- 



