action before it can become
possible; the "energies" of ponderable matter cannot be reduced to the
"ether" and its processes of motion, nor the complex play of the chemical
affinities to the attraction of masses in general or to gravity. And thus
the series ascends throughout the spheres of nature up to the mysterious
directive energies in the crystal, and to the underivable phenomena of
movement in the living substance, perhaps even to the functions of
will-power. All these can be discovered, but not really understood. They
can be described, but not explained. And we are absolutely ignorant as to
why they should have emerged from the depth of nature, what that depth
really is, or what still remains hidden in her mysterious lap. Neither
what nature reveals to us nor what it conceals from us is in any true
sense "comprehended," and we flatter ourselves that we understand her
secrets when we have only become accustomed to them. If we try to break
the power of this accustomedness and to consider the actual relations of
things there dawns in us a feeling already awakened by direct impressions
and experience; the feeling of the mysterious and enigmatical, of the
abyssmal depths beneath, and of what lies far above our comprehension,
alike in regard to our own existence and every other. The world is at no
point self-explanatory, but at all points marvellous. Its laws are only
formulated riddles.

Evolution and New Beginnings.

All this throws an important light upon two subjects which are relevant in
this connection, but which cannot here be exhaustively dealt
with,--evolution and new beginnings. Let us consider, for instance, the
marvellous range and diversity of the characteristic chemical properties
and interrelations of substances. Each one of them, contrasted with the
preceding lower forms and stages of "energy," contrasted with mere
attraction, repulsion, gravitation, is something absolutely new, a new
interpolation (of course not in regard to time but to grade), a phenomenon
which cannot be "explained" by what has gone before. It simply occurs, and
we find it in its own time and place. We may call this new emergence
"evolution," and we may use this term in connection with every new stage
higher than those preceding it. But it is not evolution in a crude and
quantitative sense, according to which the "more highly evolved" is
nothing more than an addition and combination of what was already there;
it is evolution