476 DARWINISM chap. 



These three distinct stages of progress from the inorganic 

 world of matter and motion up to man, point clearly to an 

 unseen universe — to a world of spirit, to which the world of 

 matter is altogether subordinate. To this spiritual world we 

 may refer the marvellously complex forces which we know 

 as gravitation, cohesion, chemical force, radiant force, and 

 electricity, without which the material universe could not 

 exist for a moment in its present form, and perhaps not at all, 

 since without these forces, and perhaps others which may be 

 termed atomic, it is doubtful whether matter itself could have 

 any existence. And still more surely can we refer to it those 

 progressive manifestations of Life in the vegetable, the 

 animal, and man — which we may classify as unconscious, 

 conscious, and intellectual life, — and which probably depend 

 upon different degrees of spiritual influx. I have already 

 shown that this involves no necessary infraction of the law of 

 continuity in physical or mental evolution ; whence it follows 

 that any difficulty we may find in discriminating the inorganic 

 from the organic, the lower vegetable from the lower animal 

 organisms, or the higher animals from the lowest types of 

 man, has no bearing at all upon the question. This is to 

 be decided by showing that a change in essential nature (due, 

 probably, to causes of a higher order than those of the 

 material universe) took place at the several stages of progress 

 which I have indicated ; a change which may be none the less 

 real because absolutely imperceptible at its point of origin, 

 as is the change that takes place in the curve in which a body 

 is moving when the application of some new force causes the 

 curve to be slightly altered. 



Concluding Remarks. 



Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now ad- 

 duced — strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which 

 are clearly what ought not to be on the materialistic theory — 

 will be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in 

 any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as de- 

 pendent on those fundamental laws and causes which furnish 

 the very materials for evolution to work with. They will 

 also be relieved from the crushing mental burthen imposed 

 upon those who — maintaining that we, in common with the 



