sunrise and the
poetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes might
secure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, so
conceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins.

[Sidenote: Evolution by ideal attraction.]

At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about
it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of
a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined
and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a
full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise,
the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution
suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent
manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed
consummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet
evolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact
denial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a
return to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it
was the essence of Aristotle's physics--of which his theology was an
integral part and a logical capping--that the forms which beings
approached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been
inherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterfly
shrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to
their origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of
seeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they
might possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved
into a chicken not by mechanical necessity--for an egg had a
comparatively simple structure--but by virtue of an ideal harmony in
things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen
should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent,
hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the
parent's semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the
perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why
Aristotle's God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at
the same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known
which way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal,
already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and
direction into the world's structureless substance.

The unde