Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/150

Rh sicist Balfour Stewart has well named it, of the power of the universe. Into this “waste-heap” all the active energies in the world of sense seem to be continually vanishing, and to be destined at last to vanish utterly. Under the light of this principle of dissipation, we shift from a primal energy immanent but not transcendent to one immanent in the sum of the correlated actual motions and also transcendent of them. Very impressive is the view that here arises of a dread Source of Being that engulfs all beings. It is Brahm again, issuing forth through its triad, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, — creation, preservation, annihilation, — to return at last into its own void, gathering with it the sum of all its transitory modes. And let us not forget that the conceptions out of which this image of the One-and-All is spontaneously generated are the ascertained and settled results of the science of Nature in its exactest empirical form.

When to this powerful impression from the principle of conservation, as modified by that of dissipation, we now add the proper effect of the principle of evolution, the pantheistic inference appears to gather an overpowering weight, in no way to be evaded. As registered in terms of a rigorous empirical method, evolution presents the picture of a cosmic Whole, constituted of varying members descended from its own primitive form by differentiations so