n organism
of organisms, so that it is a universal life which really lives in all
animate beings. "Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next
inferior and predicts the next higher. There is one animal, one plant,
one matter, and one force." In its still wider application by poetry and
philosophy, the idea of evolution gathers all being into one
self-centred totality, and makes all finite existence a movement within,
and a movement of, that final perfection which, although last in order
of time, is first in order of potency,--the _prius_ of all things, the
active energy _in_ all things, and the _reality_ of all things. It is
the doctrine of the immanence of God; and it reveals "the effort of God,
of the supreme intellect, in the extreme frontier of His universe."

In pronouncing, as Browning frequently does, that "after last comes
first" and "what God once blessed cannot prove accursed"; in the
boldness of the faith whereby he makes all the inferior grades of being
into embodiments of the supreme good; in resolving the evils of human
life, the sorrow, strife, and sin of man into means of man's promotion,
he is only applying, in a thorough manner, the principle on which all
modern speculation rests. His conclusions may shock common-sense; and
they may seem to stultify not only our observation of facts, but the
testimony of our moral consciousness. But I do not know of any principle
of speculation which, when elevated into a universal principle of
thought, will not do the same; and this is why the greatest poets and
philosophers seem to be touched with a divine madness. Still, if this be
madness, there is a method in it. We cannot escape from its logic,
except by denying the idea of evolution--the hypothesis by means of
which modern thought aims, and in the main successfully aims, at
reducing the variety of existence, and the chaos of ordinary experience,
into an order-ruled world and a kosmos of articulated knowledge.

The new idea of evolution differs from that of universal causation, to
which even the ignorance of our own day has learnt to submit, in this
mainly--it does not leave things on the level on which it finds them.
Both cause and evolution assert the unity of being, which, indeed, every
one must assume--even sceptics and pessimists; but development
represents that unity as self-enriching; so that its true nature is
revealed, only in the highest form of existence which man can conceive.
The attempt of poe