GEORGE THOMAS WHITE PATRICK 133 



atoms; they are organisms, and have the character- 

 istic properties of organisms. Evolution is not a 

 process of drawing out what is potential in certain 

 lower forms of being, but a process of building up 

 something new upon these lower forms. The nine- 

 teenth century had its gaze fixed upon the lower forms, 

 upon the elements of things, hoping to find Nature's 

 secret there. The twentieth century is turning rather 

 to the whole process of evolution itself, and hopes to 

 find its real meaning not in what it works with, but in 

 what it works out, believing that the final result is a 

 better expression of reality than the original material. 



The critics of Darwinism were wrong in supposing 

 that evolution is the gospel of despair. It appears to 

 be the gospel of hope, since it means the successive 

 upspringing of more and more complex and highly in- 

 tegrated organisms with their accompaniment of new 

 powers and capacities, such as the capacity for growth 

 and reproduction, the capacity for feeling and emotion, 

 for thought, memory and imagination, for aesthetic 

 enjoyment, for creative and inventive genius, for moral 

 progress, for religious worship. Spencer has been 

 censured for his identification of progress and evolu- 

 tion, but nevertheless evolution is progressive, since 

 science, art, religion, and philosophy are all its out- 

 come, as well as the human mind itself. Spencer's 

 error was in applying evolution to the future of so- 

 ciety. Even here there is, no doubt, progress, though 

 perhaps not in the narrow time limits of the Spencerian 

 sociology. 



The history of evolution has been a history of new 

 forms and new functions. It bears none of the marks 

 of a wholly mechanistic process, since it transcends 



