24 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



A process which led from the amoeba to Man appeared 

 to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though 

 whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not 

 known. Hence the cycle of changes which science had 

 shown to be the probable history of the past was wel- 

 comed as revealing a law of development towards good 

 in the universe an evolution or unfolding of an idea 

 slowly embodying itself in the actual. But such a view, 

 though it might satisfy Spencer and those whom we may 

 call Hegelian evolutionists, could not be accepted as 

 adequate by the more whole-hearted votaries of change. 

 An ideal to which the world continuously approaches is, 

 to these minds, too dead and static to be inspiring. Not 

 only the aspiration, but the ideal too, must change and 

 develop with the course of evolution : there must be no 

 fixed goal, but a continual fashioning of fresh needs by 

 the impulse which is life and which alone gives unity to 

 the process. 



Life, in this philosophy, is a continuous stream, in 

 which all divisions are artificial and unreal. Separate 

 things, beginnings and endings, are mere convenient 

 fictions : there is only smooth unbroken transition. 

 The beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, if they 

 carry us along the stream ; but to-morrow they will be 

 false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to meet the 

 new situation. All our thinking consists of convenient 

 fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream : reality 

 flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be 

 lived, it cannot be conceived in thought. Somehow, 

 without explicit statement, the assurance is slipped in 

 that the future, though we cannot foresee it, will be 

 better than the past or the present : the reader is like 

 the child which expects a sweet because it has been told 

 to open its mouth and shut its eyes. Logic, mathematics, 



