Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/413

Rh Creation then is the birth of new things through the union and cooperation of preexisting things. Its product may be a new star; a chemical compound; an inanimate machine; a living mechanism with the properties of growth and renewal; or any one of the many kinds of cooperating groups, or associations, of men. We may not correctly use the term "Creative Evolution," for there can be no creation without evolution and no evolution without creation. The ceaseless flow of creative processes is evolution, and evolution is serial creation.

While nature's methods of creating are always the same, the quality of her products is as unknowable, and the extent of her resources as unpredictable, to-day as they were yesterday and as they will be tomorrow. The first cooperative union of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water created a new substance, with new properties and qualities, with new potentialities for world service, in no wise comparable with those of its constituents. This familiar process, whereby a substance, such as water, is produced by the cooperative union of things that appear to us so utterly unlike it, is no more or less mysterious in its power to create new things, new properties, new possibilities for further creation, than the cooperative union of a much larger number of elements to form protoplasm, with its newly created properties called "vitality."

As the formal chemistry of cooperating elements creates new chemical substances, with new properties and new powers for world service, so the super-chemistry of cooperating lives creates new organisms whose sum total of reactions may be expressed in unified bodily, or social activities, or in terms of bodily or of social consciousness, with their new powers for world service. These new properties, born of the cooperative union of a group of cells to form a "living body," or of a. group of men to form a "team," a college, a city, or a state, constitutes the distinctive properties, or what is often called the "soul" or "spirit," of that group; and just as the properties of water and the "vitality" of protoplasm are new things, unlike anything else in the whole world, so are the essential, distinctive properties of each class of cooperating things unlike anything else in the whole world; hence they can only be measured, or compared, in terms of themselves.

The only attribute common to each class, and to all classes of nature's manifestations, is the inherent power, through the union and cooperation of their respective constituents, to create new things with new properties and with new powers for world service. The only common measure of their powers for service is the extent of the unions and cooperations that created them, and the extent of the new unions and cooperations they, in turn, create.

Progress therefore in organic evolution, as in cosmic evolution, consists in a measurable approach towards uniting the maximum number