what is called Evolution means simply _change_, then we have
not the least objection to the word. The universe obviously
changes. It is undergoing a perpetual series of violent and
revolutionary changes. But it does not necessarily improve or
progress. On the contrary during enormous periods of time it
deteriorates. Both progress and deterioration are of course purely
human valuations. But according to our valuation of good and evil
it may be said that during those epochs when the malicious, the
predatory, the centripetal tendency in life predominates over the
creative and centrifugal tendency, there is deterioration and
degeneracy; and during the epochs when the latter overcomes the
former there is growth and improvement.

It is quite obvious that from our point of view, there is no such
thing as inanimate chemical substance, no such isolated
evolutionary _phases_ of "matter," such as the movements from
"solids" to "liquids," from "liquids" to "gases," from "gases" to
"ether," from "ether" to "electro-magnetism." All these apparent
changes must be regarded as nothing less than the living organic
changes taking place in the living bodies of actual personal souls.

According to our view the real and important variations in the
multiform spectacle of the universe are the variations brought
about by the perpetual struggle between life and death, in other
words between the personal energy of creation and the personal
resistance of malice.

For us the universe of bodies and souls is perpetually re-creating
itself by the mysterious process of birth, perpetually destroying
itself by the mysterious process of death.

It is this eternal struggle between the impulse to create new life
and the impulse to resist the creation of life, and to destroy or to
petrify life, which actually causes all movement in things and all
change; movement sometimes forward and sometimes backward
as the great pendulum and rhythm of existence swings one way or
the other.

And even this generalization does not really cover what we regard
as the facts of the case, because this backward or forward
movement, though capable of being weighed and estimated "en
masse" in the erratic and violent changes of history, is in reality a
thing of particular and individual instances, a thing that ultimately
affects nothing but individuals and personalities, in as much as it is
the weighing and balancing of a struggle which takes place
nowhere else except in the