Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/105

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ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

fore all-important for true human interests that a reality unqualifiedly noumenal shall be vindicated not only to human nature, but to each particular human mind. If the reasoning about to be employed for this purpose should seem to the reader to carry its conclusions widely beyond man, — as wide as all conscious life, of which human consciousness must now be regarded as only the completed Type, — I know no reason why men should hesitate at this, or grudge to living beings whose phenomenal lives are at present less fulfilled than their own the chance for larger existence that immortality and freedom give. But let us come to the argument.

Reverting to our analysis, we may now clearly see that the elements essential to evolution are simply the elements organic in the human mind. Evolutional philosophy, of whatever form, teaches that these elements — Time, Space, Causation, Logical Unity, Ideality — are, in the human mind, the results of the process of evolution. The agnostic evolutionist holds that they are gradually deposited there through associations ever accumulating in the long experience of successive generations, until at length they become in us practically indissoluble, though theoretically not. The pantheistic idealist