insertion of anything alien into a growing thing, is possible. What it
is now, it was in the beginning; and what it will be, it is now.
Granting the hypothesis of evolution, there can be no quarrel with the
view that the crude beginnings of things, matter in its most nebulous
state, contains potentially all the rich variety of both natural and
spiritual life.

But this continuity of all existence may be interpreted in two very
different ways. It may lead us either to radically change our notions of
mind and its activities, or "to radically change our notions of matter."
We may take as the principle of explanation, either the beginning, or
the end of the process of development. We may say of the simple and
crass, "There is all that your rich universe really means"; or we may
say of the spiritual activities of man, "This is what your crude
beginning really was." We may explain the complex by the simple, or the
simple by the complex. We may analyze the highest back into the lowest,
or we may follow the lowest, by a process of synthesis, up to the
highest.

And one of the most important of all questions for morality and religion
is the question, which of these two methods is valid. If out of crass
matter is evolved all animal and spiritual life, does that prove life to
be nothing but matter; or does it not rather show that what we, in our
ignorance, took to be mere matter was really something much greater? If
"crass matter" contains all this promise and potency, by what right do
we still call it "crass"? It is manifestly impossible to treat the
potencies, assumed to lie in a thing that grows, as if they were of no
significance; first, to assert that such potencies exist, in saying that
the object develops; and then, to neglect them, and to regard the effect
as constituted merely of its simplest elements. Either these potencies
are not in the object, or else the object has in it, and is, at the
first, more than it appears to be. Either the object does not grow, or
the lowest stage of its being is no explanation of its true nature.

If we wish to know what the forms of natural life mean, we look in vain
to their primary state. We must watch the evolution and revelation of
the secret hid in natural life, as it moves through the ascending cycles
of the biological kingdom. The idea of evolution, when it is not
muddled, is synthetic--not analytic; it explains the simplest in the
light of the complex, the beginning in the light