Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/103

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42
ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

requirements of the logic in the situation are met. These requirements point us, first and unavoidably, to the intelligence immanent in the field of evolution, the intelligence of man and his conscious companions on the great scene of Nature; and, at closest hand of all, — first of all, — to the typical intelligence of man simply. The whole question, so far as anything more than conjectural evidence is concerned, is man’s question: he is the witness to himself for evolution; in his consciousness, directly, and only there, does the demand arise for an explanation of it; in himself he comes upon the nature of mind as directly causal of the form in Nature — of the ideally genetic connexion holding from part to part in it — and of the reality of progress there as measured by his ideals of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Here, now, we arrive at the point where we naturally pass from the criticism of agnostic evolutionism to that of pantheistic idealism, or Cosmic Theism. We promised, you will recollect, to attend carefully to what the fullest historic philosophy has to say in judgment of this theory of the world as well as of the other. We shall see that this world-view gains much over the agnostic, and yet that it falls short of the explanatory ideal.

The commanding question, let us remember, is whether the mind in the world, and preeminently the mind of man, is only a phenomenon like the objects