Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/433

414 taken merely as human experience. The very meaning of our own ideas regarding the interpretation of nature will be found, in our later cosmological discussions, to involve the thesis that the realm called our own finite experience is only, so to speak, a very special case of an universal type. When the modern doctrine of evolution regards man as a product and outcome of nature, our own view of the universe will in the end have to accept the extremely subordinate place that this empirical doctrine assigns to the finite being called man amongst the beings that people nature. Our cosmology must not be anthropocentric in any special sense. There is, indeed, a sense, in which, according to our view, any rational idea in the whole universe seeks and in its complete development finds, as the expression of its ultimate meaning, the whole of the universe. But we have no right whatever to regard man as the only finite being whose ideas are rational. On the contrary, as we shall see in the second half of the present course, there is no possibility of giving any unity to the inner meaning of human existence without regarding man as a single group only in a vast society of finite beings, whose relationships, although very faintly hinted to us in our experience of natural phenomena, are as concrete and significant as any rational relationships can be. It is precisely in the history of the process called evolution that we have some indication of the type of these extra-human relationships amongst the finite beings who are present in the world in the same sense in which we are present.

In consequence of such aspects of the natural order, I should accordingly reject as inadequate the fashion of