life with the fullest
activity; all activity being of the nature of response to stimulus, that
is, correspondence to reality. As soon as consciousness supervenes on
the lower forms of life it is evident that the pleasures of sight,
hearing, taste, mind, and affection all depend on, and consist in, the
consciousness of this successful accommodation of the subject to the
object; and that all pain and disease is simply the felt failure of such
adaptation. What was anciently and very wisely called the "natural
appetite" of living creatures is in this view nothing else but their
response to the modifying attraction exerted upon them by the objective
Reality which presses upon them on every side, and tends to draw them
into conformity with itself so far as they have latent capacity for such
a correspondence. It is the light that makes (or rather elicits) sight;
and it is sound that develops the sense of hearing: and it is the ideas
embodied in Nature that call our intellect into play. Hence it follows
that, desire for truth and justice, for society and for religion, which
assert themselves as invariably in the soul of man at certain stages of
progress, as the desire for mere life asserts itself from the first, is
simply the felt result of the as yet unsuccessful endeavour of Nature to
draw man into a fuller kind of correspondence with herself.

Thus conceived, the course of evolution is comparable, not as before, to
the gradual unveiling of a blank canvas, revealing simply a greater
extent of the same appearance, but to the gradual unveiling of a picture
whose full unity of meaning is held in suspense till the disclosure is
completed. We do not now interpret the higher by the lower, but the
lower by the higher; the beginning by the end. This may seem perilously
near to finalism, yet it is no more necessarily so, than the process of
photography; we only need a self-adaptive tendency in life-matter
responsive to the stimulating-tendency of the environment. Not, of
course, that this bundle of words really explains anything, but that
like other formulae of the kind, it prescinds from the question of ends
and origins, by making a statement of what happens serve as a cause of
what happens, and calling it a Law or a Tendency, or a Latent
Potentiality--thus filling the gap which mere agnosticism creates in our
thought.

With this conception of Evolution our ordinary estimates of "higher" and
"lower" are saved; also the value of our