ists? And why, if any correspondence is to exist, should that particular bit of reality that comes at the end of a physical process called evolution be just the one bit that is to answer my ideal demands? It will be very satisfactory if such correspondence between the real and the ideal is found to result; but how can I know beforehand that it must result?
Evolution and progress: what do the terms respectively mean? Evolution, we learn, is an increase in the complexity, definiteness, individuality and organic connection of phenomena. But progress is any series of changes that meets with the constantly increasing approval of somebody. The growth of a tree or of a thistle is an evolution. The climbing of a hill for some purpose may throughout be a progress. Evolution may or may not meet with the approval of anybody; and a pessimist might fully accept some proposed law of evolution. But unless there is some approval from some source, we have no progress. How thoughtless then it is, our idealist insists, to confound such different notions. But is a case of evolution ever a process of degeneration? Certainly. You want to eat asparagus before it is full grown. Hence every moment of its evolution after a certain point is for you distinctly a degeneration. You want the potatoes in your cellar to keep fresh. If they sprout, a process of evolution has begun, but every moment of it is for you the reverse of progress. The egg that begins to incubate is in full course of evolution; but what if it is wanted for market? Might not the evolution of the whole world conceivably be for the moral consciousness
