330 INVOLUTION. 



unexplained. It is as if one were to construct a theory 

 of the career of a millionaire in terms of the pocket- 

 money allowed him when a schoolboy. Disregard the 

 fact that more pocket-money was allowed the school- 

 boy as he passed from the first form to the sixth ; that 

 his allowance was increased as he came of age ; that 

 now, being a man, not a boy, he was capable of more 

 wisely spending it ; that being wise he put his money 

 to paying uses; and that interest and capital were in- 

 vested and re-invested as years went on — disregard 

 all this and you cannot account for the rise of the mill- 

 ionaire. As well construct the millionaire from the 

 potential gold contained in his first sixpence — a six- 

 pence which never left his pocket — as construct a 

 theory of the Evolution of Man from the protoplasmic 

 cell apart from its Environment. It is only when in- 

 terpreted, not in terms of himself, but in terms of 

 Environment, and of an Environment increasingly 

 appropriated, quantitatively and qualitatively, with 

 each fresh stage of the advance, that a consistent 

 theory is possible, or that the true nature of Evolu- 

 tion can appear. 



A child does not grow out of a child by spon- 

 taneous unfoldings. The process is fed from with- 

 out. The body assimilates food, the mind assimi- 

 lates books, the moral nature draws upon affection, 

 the religious faculties nourish the higher being from 

 Ideals. Time brings not only more things, but new 

 things ; the higher nature inaugurates possession 

 of, or by, the higher order. " It lies in the very 

 nature of the case that the earliest form of that 

 which lives and develops is the least adequate to 

 its nature, and therefore that from which we can 



