uman race, may be said to have elaborated and specialized
the rude conceptions of the Fiji Islander, and to vie with him in peopling
space with invisible entities and potencies. In spite of the dictum of
science, the world, intelligent and ignorant alike, believes, and will
continue to believe, in the reality of the unseen universe, and the
Platonic doctrine of "emanation" and the "world of divine ideas" not only
begin where modern physical science leaves off, but at this very point
science either begs the question, or ignores it entirely.

How things come to be what they are, and to evolve as they do, science
nowhere declares. It simply takes things as it finds them, and dubs
the ultimate and antecedent causation the _Unknowable_. The philosophy
of Plato, it is true, reaches at last the unknowable and the
incomprehensible, but only after revealing another universe, the
metaphysical and spiritual, entirely unknown to, or ignored or derided by
the materialist.

It is, however, from this invisible realm that all visible things have
come forth, the two being not only under absolute and universal law, but
bearing everywhere definite analogies to each other. Hence Plato says,
"God geometrizes." Absolute mathematics determines the relations of atoms
to suns, and the circulation of the blood in man to the revolutions of
suns and solar systems.

A further general consideration remains to be noted before taking up the
evidence of belief in the separable soul, and that is, the evolutionary
life-wave of humanity on our earth.

The progress of man for some millions of years past has by no means been a
straightforward climbing from barbarism to civilization. The wave of
evolution has ebbed and flowed. While at one place man has slowly emerged
from savagery, at another he has as surely sunk to it. Continents and
islands have risen from and again sunk to the bottom of the sea, bearing
the races of men in their upheavals or descent, and cataclysmic and
seismic or volcanic upheavals have blotted out in a day the accumulated
progress of centuries. The poles of the earth have shifted with results to
the life of the globe more awful than the imagination can portray. Bodies
of people like our North American Indians represent the remains of many
peoples, as in Russia or India to-day, fragments of many nationalities are
being absorbed in one.

Bearing in mind, therefore, that owing to many causes a nation may descend
to barbarism or disa