Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/128

Rh or coherently. Still sharper inquiry at last makes it equally clear, too, that atheistic pantheism will carry idealism as consistently as it carries materialism, if doubtless less naturally. For although in the sum-total of the particular existences there must be recognised a gradation from such as are unconscious up to those that are completely conscious, and it would therefore be the more obvious step to read the series as a development upward from atoms to mind, still the mystery of the transit from the unconscious to the conscious cannot fail to suggest the counter-hypothesis, and the whole series may be conceived as originating ideally, in the perceptive constitution and experience of the conscious members of it. There is a marked distinction, however, between the idealism given by acosmic pantheism and the idealism given by the