me; the sequence, and the
purposiveness in this sequence, remain untouched, only that the Greeks saw
in the rational and purposive in nature the realisation of rational
progressive thoughts, not the bloody survivals of a monstrous gladiatorial
combat in nature. The Darwinians appear to me to resemble the Roman
emperors, who waited till the combat was ended, and then applauded the
survival of the fittest. The idealist philosophy, be it Plato's or
Hegel's, recognises in what actually is, the rational, the realisation of
eternal, rational ideas. This realisation, or the process of what we call
creation, can never be conceived by us otherwise than figuratively. But we
can make this figurative presentation clearer and clearer. That the world
was made by a wood cutter, as was originally implied in the Hebrew word
_bara_, and in the German _schoepfer_, _schaffer_, in the English
_shaper_, or in the Vedic _tvashta_, and the Greek {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}, was quite
comprehensible at a time in which man's highest product was that of the
carpenter and the stone mason; and in which the name of timber
(_materies_) could become the universal name for matter ({~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH DASIA AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}, wood). After
this idea of the founder of the universe as a carpenter or builder was
abandoned as inadequate, the world was divided into two parties. The one
adopted the theory of material primitive elements, whether they be called
atoms, or monads, or cells, which by collision or struggle with each
other, and by mutual affinity, became that which we now see around us. The
other saw the impossibility of the rise of something rational out of the
irrational, and conceived a rational being, in which was developed the
original type of everything produced, the so-called Logos of the universe.
How this Logos became objectively and materially real, is as far beyond
human comprehension as is the origin of the cosmos out of countless atoms,
or even out of living cells. So far, then, one hypothesis would be as
complete and as incomplete as the other. But the Logos hypothesis has the
far-reaching advantage, that instead of a long succession of wonders,--call
them if you like the wonder of the monads, or the worm, or the mollusk, or
the fish, or t