ry of the universe. All it does is to offer us an
hypothetical picture--true or false--of the manner in which the
changes of organic and inorganic life succeeded one another in their
historic creation. Evolutionists have to make their start somewhere,
just as "personalists" have; and it is much more difficult for them to
show how masses of utterly unconscious "nebulae" evoked the
mystery of personality than it is for us to show how the primordial
existence of personality demands at the very start some sort of
material or bodily expression, whether of a nebular or of any other
kind.

Evolutionists, forgetting the presence of that invisible "watcher" of
their evolutionary process which they have themselves projected
into the remote planetary past, assume as their axiomatic "data" that
soulless unconscious chemical elements possess "within them" the
miraculous power of producing living personalities. All one has to
do is to pile up thousands upon thousands of years in which the
miracle takes place.

But the philosophy of the complex vision would indicate that no
amount of piling up of centuries upon centuries could possibly
produce out of "unconscious matter" the perilous and curious "stuff"
which we call "consciousness of life." And we would further reply
to the evolutionists that their initial assumption as to the objective
existence, suspended in a vacuum, of masses of material chemistry
is an assumption which has been abstracted and isolated from the
total volume of those sense-impressions, which are the only actual
reality we know, and which are the impressions made, in human
experience, upon some living personality.

This criticism of the evolutionists' inevitable attack upon us enters
naturally at this point; because, while the average mind is willing
enough to grant some sort of vague omnipresent "will to evolve" to
the primordial "nebula" and even prepared to allow it such obscure
consciousness as is implied in the phrase "life-force" or "elan vital,"
it is startled and shocked to a supreme degree when we assert that
such "nebula," if it existed, was the outward body or form of a
living "soul-monad" possessed, even as human beings are, of every
attribute of the complex vision.

The average mind, in its vague and careless mood, is ready to accept
our contention that some sort of will or reason or consciousness
existed at the beginning of things. It is only when such a mind
comes to realize that what we are pr