Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/89

28 resemblance, and a continued progression of resemblance, among all the parts of the inorganic world, and between the parts of the inorganic and those of the organic too — is to our mental nature indispensable. What is the true sense in which the reality of this continuous connexion ought to be taken? Some explanation of it is for our intelligence imperative. It cannot mean literal descent by physiological generation; it cannot be by reproduction through sap or through blood. What, then, can it mean — what alone must it mean? Inexplicability by anything merely sensible — even psychic, when this is taken simply as the sensibly psychic — here shows up plainly. If the notion of continuous genesis is to be made apprehensible to our understanding, if it is not to vanish into something utterly obscure and meaningless, the meaning for it must be sought and found in some mode of mind — of our mind — quite other than the mode of sense. But such a mode the agnostic interpretation of evolution, and, reciprocally, the evolutional interpretation of mind as originating out of non-mind, necessarily denies.

At this juncture, then, where a new break is discovered, — the break between physiological and logical genesis, — the philosophical reach of evolution betrays its Third Limit.