144 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
motion, involving or expressing new relations thus far not in being. 
Then within this organic matrix, already ‘ qualitied’ (as he says) by 
life, there arises the quality of consciousness, the highest that we know. 
What may lie beyond this in Mr. Alexander’s scheme may be learnt 
from his book. 
This thumb-nail sketch can do slight justice to a theme worked out 
in elaborate detail on a large canvas. The treatment purports to formu- 
late the whole natural plan of progressive evolution. From the bosom 
of space-time emerge the inorganic, the organic, the conscious, and, 
perchance, something beyond. And with this successive emergence of 
new qualities goes the progressive emergence of new orders and modes 
of relatedness. The plan of evolution shows successively higher and 
richer developments. 
Such a doctrine, philosophical in range but scientific in spirit—to 
which, I may perhaps be allowed to say, I, too, have been led by a rather 
different route—I call emergent evolution. 
The concept of emergence is dealt with by J. S. Mill, in his ‘Logic,’ 
under the consideration of ‘ heteropathic laws.’ The word ‘ emergent,’ 
as contrasted with ‘resultant,’ was suggested by G. H. Lewes in his 
‘Problems of Life and Mind.’ When oxygen, having certain properties, 
combines with hydrogen having other properties, there is formed water, 
some of the properties of which are quite different. The weight of the 
compound is an additive resultant, and can be calculated before the 
event. Sundry other properties are constitutive emergents, which 
could not be predicted in advance of any existent example of combina- 
tion. Of course, when we have learnt what happens in ‘ this’ par- 
ticular instance under ‘ these’ circumstances, we can predict what will 
happen in ‘ that’ like instance under similar circumstances. We have 
learnt something of the natural plan of evolution. We may also predict 
on the basis of analogy as we learn to grasp more adequately the 
natural order or plan of events. But could we predict what will happen 
prior to any given instance—i.e. prior to the development of this stage 
of the evolutionary plan? Could we predict life from the plane cf 
the inorganic, or consciousness from the plane of life? In accordance 
with the principles of emergent evolution we could not do so. The 
Laplacian calculator is here out of court. 
This is not the place to adduce the many facts at the inorganic stage 
of evolution, which, as I think, exemplify emergence (in this technical 
sense) with its hall-mark of something new, and its saltatory form of 
continuity—saltatory because there is often an apparent jump from one 
relatively stable product to another; continuous because there is no 
unfilled hiatus in the course of events. It is exemplified, as I think, 
in the modern story of the so-called chemical elements, in the very 
structure of the Mendeléeff table, in the systems of crystallography, 
and soon. In organic evolution it is recognised (though not under this 
name) by some biologists in the acceptance of mutations, in the out- 
come of much Mendelian research, and in the clue it affords to the 
origin of variations. 
More to our present purpose, however, is its explicit recognition by 
Wundt in his advocacy of ‘a principle of creative resultants ’ (Lewes 
a a ae 
