Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/98

Rh the inorganic, the organic, and the psychic, and thus spans all the breaks between mechanical, chemical, physiological, and psychic genesis, by a continuous logical genesis, and at the same time closes the gap profound between the so-called Unknowable and explanation.

The bond of kindred uniting all these beings and orders of being, so contrasted and divergent, so incapable of any merely natural or physical generation one from the other, is the inner harmony between the lawful members in a single intelligible Plan, issuing from one and the same intelligent nature. In short, the only cosmic genesis, the only genesis that brings forth alike from cosmic vapour to star, from star to planetary system, from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, from the physiological to the psychic, is the genesis that constitutes the life of logic — the genesis of one conception from another conception by virtue of the membership of both in a system of conceptions organised by an all-embracing Idea. This all-determining Idea can be nothing other than the organic form intrinsic in the self-active mind, whose spontaneous life of consciousness creatively utters itself in a whole of conceptions, logically serial, forming a procession through gradations of approach, ever nearer and nearer, to the Idea that begets them each and all. By this it becomes plain that the theme of evolution, if it is to be indeed