that is altruistic. To unfold this law, to define and demonstrate that to be the richest largest life, and best worth living, that aims to live for others and in others, is the education of evolution. The religion of evolution is that system of ethics, in belief and practice, that reaches after higher forms, higher functions, and nobler expressions of idea and being, of progress and hope; that links life to life, and infuses Nature with God; that demonstrates the conscious compensation that comes to benevolence, charity, and self-denial in the way of a crown of freer, larger life. No king, enjoying a royal triumph, ever reached a tithe of the joy of a Jesus dying for his enemies!

We are in all probability but just over the threshold of the ethic career of life. How can the evolved jelly-fish comprehend evolution that is to be eternal? Civilization has hardly begun to fulfill its purpose. Our heredity is strong with animalism, but it has opened sufficiently wide to enable us to hear the sound of the distant future coming to us as hope of immortality. We have thought out victory over death. All our life-energy will yet be concentrated in larger, nobler, intenser living. Decay can not touch the life-principle of the universe. The whole universe is food for the ethical purpose. Not an act of Nature, from the winds that leaped ages ago across Himalayan heights to the trickle of lime-drops building stalagmites in a sunless cavern, but pointed toward the evolution of moral character in creatures not yet evolved. Man is the fruit, but not the ripe fruit, of evolution; and his moral character is the product of all the conjoined forces that work in atoms, or in universes. He is already child of cosmical environments, but it does not yet appear what he shall be. He weaves now at the loom of his own destiny. It is Nature and her child-the Father and the Son; the Infinite finitely félt; the finite infinitely yearning.

"Let us take to our hearts a lesson-no lesson can braver be

From the ways of the tapestry-weavers on the other side of the sca.

Above their heads the pattern hangs; they study it with care;
The while their fingers deftly weave, their eyes are fastened there.
They tell this curious thing, besides, of the patient, plodding weaver-
Ile works on the wrong side evermore; but works for the right side ever.
It is only when the weaver stops, and the web is loosed and turned,
That he sees his real handiwork-that his marvelous skill is learned.
Ah! the sight of its delicate beauty! how it pays him for all it cost!
No rarer, daintier work than his was ever done by the frost.
The years of man are Nature's looms; let down from the place of the sun,
Wherein we are weaving alway, till the mystic web is done.

Sometimes blindly; but weaving surely, cach for himself his fate;
We may not see how the right side looks; we must often weave and wait."

LECTURE VII.

THE SELF THAT IS HIGHER THAN OURSELVES.

THE history of life, grand in all its chapters, leads us steadily on to the supreme question: In whom do I live, and move, and have my being? Is matter the matrix in which, by the action of mechanical and chemical forces, is given birth to all the varied phenomena of the visible universe? Whither has evolution led us? Does it drop us into a heartless materialism, or lead us to the open arms of a Father?

It had become an absolute necessity that the world should lapse into atheism. From the diminutive standpoint of a God who acted the part of creator from nothing, and involved in his moral government the weakest traits of mortals, there was no possibility of rising to any adequate conception of a Supreme Being. Yet science used the language of atheism only in antagonism to unworthy conceptions, which it has hastened to displace with generalization and synthesis of all the facts at the command of the human intellect.

Take your stand at that indefinite point where life began on our globe. Passing by the cell, we come to the rhizopods, which have not even cell-walls; and which by the utmost analysis can not be said to have one specialization, except hunger. The rhizopod eats, it devours protoplasm; it grows. It has the functions of life. Biologists agree that it has sensibility. Just this side of it cell

organization begins. The rhizopod is as much a part of the inorganic world as of the organic; and it is a self; a subject, as well as an object.

Lower down, or rather on a concomitant line, the crystal arranges its atoms according to principles depending on sensation. Touch a crystal that is forming, or touch an insect's wing that is growing, and growth in either case adapts itself to touch. A nerve is the organization of this primitive sensibility. Trace nerve development from its rise as an imperfectly defined filament, step by step, until you find the superb complexity of the human nerve-system; observe sensation differentiate into senses; its functional potency become organic in smelling, tasting, hearing, and seeing. In the sponge these are merged in common sensation; but are they not truly there? The sensitiveplant recognizes touch; is it not the same all-embracing sensibility that exists in our senses? Nor does the utmost differencing of function and organs prevent the retention. of a degree of sensibility of a general sort, underlying the senses, rarely called into service, and seldom recognized, but capable of being called into action, even in man, under abnormal conditions. There is no escaping the conclusion that the universe possesses sentience as a universal quality and fact; and that sentience is never devoid of aim and intent.

So it is that, in considering the origin of life, the cell does not detain us at all. Life does not begin there. Protoplasm itself involves previous subjectivity. It is life-stuff with a purpose in it. This purpose may not yet be expressed in arms, legs, and a head, but it will come to its destination in due time. We are carried back of organic life in spite of ourselves, to find substantial life and logical life. According to anatomy, function precedes organism; the cause of all organic change is or involves functional effort. So life, with its sum of potential functions, logically precedes organic phenomenal life. Mind is the

are one.

subjective of matter; matter is the objective of mind; as subjective and objective of the same substantial unity, they Mind is only in matter; matter is only in mind; they twain are one. It is the eternal and primal marriage; the dual oneness of the universe. The objective material universe is the subjective mental universe, approached from the outside. Mind is not something apart from matter; but is the sum of feelings, actualities, phenomena in

matter.

To place this in light as clear as possible, we must rid ourselves of false conceptions of the organic and inorganic. Precisely as the animal kingdom does not rise out of the vegetable kingdom, but they two are collateral evolutions of one common organic tendency in life, so the organic and inorganic are two concomitant outcomes or processes of a common universe. The universe as a whole contains the potentiality of the two forms of existence, organic and inorganic. The parallel is accurate, for as the plant and the animal kingdoms diverge, they grow into a companionship and interchange of offices, whereby each reaches a perfection it could not have done alone; and they both hold ever in common certain functions, that indicate their rise from a common matrix; so the organic and inorganic universes are mutually interdependent, exchanging offices and substances, yet neither ever passing wholly over to, or containing the other. If either could be the matrix it must be the organized, for it contains what the inorganic does not. The inorganic contains substance and energy; the organic contains substance, and energy, and sentience. Back then of both must lie the matrix that contains both, a cosmos that is substance, and energy, and sentience. Out of this evolve, divergingly, the inorganic and the organic co-ordinate universes.

Nor can the terms inorganic and organic be used without more careful definition. In reality the inorganic is itself organized. The crystal has its definite laws that gov