anging individuals, comes to be
regarded as something which is beyond modification, unchanging so long
as it exists.

"I believe," said the rose to the lily in the parable--"I believe that
our gardener is immortal. I have watched him from day to day since I
bloomed, and I see no change in him. The tulip who died yesterday told
me the same thing."

As a flash of lightning in the duration of the night, so is the life of
man in the duration of nature. When one looks out on a storm at night,
he sees for an instant the landscape illumined by the lightning-flash.
All seems at rest. The branches in the wind, the flying clouds, the
falling rain are all motionless in this instantaneous view. The record
on the retina takes no account of change, and to the eye the change does
not exist. Brief as the lightning-flash in the storm is the life of man
compared with the great time-record of life upon earth. To the untrained
man who has not learned to read these records, species and types in life
are enduring. Thus arose the theory of special creation and permanence
of type, a theory which could not persist when the fact of change and
the forces causing it came to be studied in detail.

But when man came to study the facts of individual variation and to
think of their significance, the current of life no longer seemed at
rest. Like the flow of a mighty river, never returning, ever sweeping
steadily on, is the movement of all life. The changes in human history
are only typical of the changes that take place in all living creatures.
In fact, human history is only a part of one great life-current, the
movement of which is everywhere governed by the same laws, depends on
the same forces, and brings about like results.

The facts and generalizations of change constitute the subject-matter of
evolution. And as the fact of life is a fundamental one, and in some
degree modifies all phenomena which it concerns, we have as the central
axis of the science in question, the study of organic evolution. In
fact, while inorganic evolution, or orderly change in environment,
exists, we do not know to what degree the laws and forces of organic
evolution can be reduced to the same terms of expression. The theory of
the essential and necessary unity of life and non-life, of mind and
matter, is still a matter of philosophical speculation only. We can
neither prove the truth of Monism, nor understand it; nor is the
contrary hypothesis either comprehensible