Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/153

92 but natural to identify the potential energy of correlation — the “waste-heap” of power — with the Whole of natural selection. And thus we appear to reach, by a cumulative argument, the One-and-All in which all must be absorbed.

If we now add to these several indications, given by the method and the two chief results of modern science, the discredit that the principles of conservation and evolution appear to cast directly upon the belief in freedom and immortality, the pantheistic note in modern science will sound out to the full. In the case of free-agency, this discredit comes (1) from the closer nexus that the correlation of forces seems plainly to establish between every possible conscious action and the antecedent or environing chain of events out of which the web of its motives must be woven, and (2) from the pitch and proclivity that, according to the principle of evolution, must be transmitted by the heredity inseparable from the process of descent. In the case of immortality, the discredit comes first by way of the principle of evolution, through its indication of the transitoriness of all survivals, and its irremediable failure to supply any evidence of even a possible survival beyond the sensible world, with which empirical evolution has alone to do. But it comes also by way of the principle of the conservation and dissipation of energy.