nceasing
control. Whence is this extraordinary human element, and what
explanation can be given of the contradiction unless there be some
higher synthesis into which the antinomy is taken up and resolved into
unity? If out of the primordial nebula both the cosmos and man, with
all that he is, have been evolved, then it would appear, plain as the
writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come
over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element utterly
irreconcilable with all that has appeared previously manifests itself
in him, not as an accident or a fortuitous occurrence, but as an
essential, nay, as _the_ essential law of his being.

How can we explain this? How can we account for this complete _volta
face_ in Nature, which bids man turn his back on all that made the
universe and him, and resolve to live by a law so irreconcilable with
the methods of the cosmos, that I take it we should be justified in
saying that had it been in operation before man Nature itself could not
have been evolved?

We believe the contradiction receives its explanation in the synthesis
already suggested, that above the two processes, the cosmical and
ethical, there is another, that of absolute intelligence or mind,
energising through them both from first to last, but in widely
different ways. In the cosmos, by ways which we describe as non-moral;
in us by law, which we recognise as moral. In every grade of being, in
every stratum of Nature, the self-same ever-active Mind is manifest,
nay, the very distinctions of Nature's life are fixed by the intenser
or remisser energy wherewith the eternal Mind functions in them. From
first to last it is mind-power behind all and in all. "In the
beginning was Mind; in the beginning was the Reason." Lao-tze is
right; the Alexandrian mystic is right; _En arche ho Logos_, and the
Mind was the light of man, the light of reason, the holier light of
conscience, leading him if he will but follow it, in the way which has
been described in language of philosophic precision by the Hebrew poet
as "the way everlasting".

Man may sing a _Magnificat_, because mighty things have been done in
him, such as a cosmos or an infinity of worlds never knew or shall
know. And thus the very contradictions manifested by evolution do but
contribute to the truth of the general conclusion, that there is a
Power, not dead, dull, inert, but an ever-living, ever-energising Mind,
whence the migh