ring for the beginning of the beginning. All that we can do is to
investigate our perceptions, to see what they presuppose. A perception
plainly presupposes a self that perceives, or that resists, and on the
other side, something that forces itself upon us, or, as Kant says,
something that is given. This "given" element might be mere confusion, but
it is not; it displays order, cause and effect, and reveals itself as
rational. This revelation of a rational world may, however, be explained
in two ways. That there is reason in nature, even the majority of
Darwinians admit, but they think that it arises of itself, since in the
struggle for life that which is most adapted to its conditions, fittest,
best, necessarily survives. In this view of the world, however, if I see
it aright, much is admitted surreptitiously. Whence comes all at once this
idea of the best, of the good, the fit, the adapted, in the world? Do
roasted pigeons fall from the sky? Is the pigeon itself an accidental
combination, an evolution, that might as well have been as it is, or
otherwise? It is all very fine to recognise in the ascending series of
protozoa, coelenterata, echinoderms, worms, mollusks, fishes, amphibia,
reptiles, the stages of progress toward birds and finally to mammals and
man. But whence comes the idea of bird or pigeon? Is it no more than an
abstraction from our perceptions of thousands of birds or pigeons, or must
the idea of bird, of pigeon, even of the wood pigeon, be there already,
that we may detect it behind the multiplicity of our perceptions?

Is the pigeon, in whose wing each feather is counted, a mere accident, a
mere survival which might have been what it is or something different, or
is it something willed and thought, an organic whole? It is the old
question whether the idea preceded or followed the reality, on which the
whole Middle Ages broke their teeth, the question which separated and
still separates philosophers into two camps,--the Realists and the
Nominalists. I think that the latest investigations show us that the Greek
philosophers, and especially Plato, saw more correctly when they
recognised behind the multiplicity of individuals the unity of the idea,
or the species, and then sought the true sequence of evolution not in this
world, in a struggle for existence, but beyond the perception of the
senses, in a development of the Logos or the idea. The circumstances, it
appears to me, in this view remain just the sa