24 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 
endowment within the individual—a tendency to secure such 
a vital and beneficial experience or realization. Evolution as 
seen in the progress of the individual thus becomes an expres- 
sion of the modifications incident on the growth of this 
beneficial and developing experience. From this it must 
become evident that the facts of evolution are to be viewed as 
a resultant manifestation rather than as a primary cause. 
If, moreover, all individual development starts with such 
a tendency for a beneficial experience, then the organic world 
must constitute a rational system, in other words, the indivi- 
dual must represent a particular manifestation in a single 
purposive universe. If, again, the individual secures his 
development through being an individual expression in such a 
rational universe, then it becomes evident that this selective 
tendency, with which we have seen that all organic develop- 
ment must begin, is but the habit of the universal in its 
particular manifestations. Thus evolution is thrown into the 
arms of idealism for a philosophic explanation of its phenomena. 
Let us examine this, however, more closely. 
To account for the selective principle through which the 
facts of evolution find a scientific explanation the biologist 
must postulate the presence of a universal tendency inherent in 
the organism toward a beneficial realization of the individual. 
Since, however, the individual secures this beneficial realiza- 
tion in virtue of its contact with and relations to other indivi- 
dual manifestations, it follows that the individual constitutes 
an expression within an organic universe. From this again 
we infer that the universe itself must represent an organism 
developing toward a rational end in its several individual 
manifestations. Thus the particular manifestation is found 
to constitute the expression of the spiritual ideal of a rational 
universal. 
While depending, however, on idealism for its philosophic 
interpretation, evolution, on the other hand, repays its debt to 
idealism. In unfolding the principles of organic develop- 
ment it has unfolded the aspects and conditions under which 
the universal manifests itself in the particular. In this way 
