Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/389

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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

his extensive discussions in other places, and therefore with a suggestion of ideas whose discussion would carry me far beyond the present limits. For the rest, as Professor Le Conte’s pupil, who first learned from his lips the meaning of the doctrine of Evolution, I must frankly confess that, as Professor Le Conte well knows, I have never been able to give to this doctrine, justly central as it is in the world of recent empirical science, the far-reaching, the philosophical, the universal significance which he still attributes to this aspect of reality. Evolution, to me, is not a process in the light of which we can hope to learn much either concerning the Absolute or concerning the relation of the eternal to the temporal world. On the other hand, evolution is by no means any mere illusion or any merely human appearance, without foundation in extra-human metaphysical truth. In recent papers in the Philosophical Review, I have offered, as an hypothesis in philosophical Cosmology, an interpretation of the metaphysics of evolution which, if right, would make this collection of natural processes an indication of a real, and extra-human, finite world of life, whose relations to our own finite life are viewed by us, as it were, in perspective. Thus viewing our relations to other finite life in the universe, we naturally conceive the portions of the finite world more distant from us in type as lifeless, and the various forms of life which, in temporal sequence, or in contemporaneous relations to us, gradually approach our own type as indicative of a real progress from what we call “dead Nature” to our own grade. This process,