deduction of the phenomena exhibited by material bodies from
physico-mathematical first principles. Whether the human intellect is
strong enough to attain the goal set before it may be a question, but
thither will it surely strive.

[Sidenote: (3) Evolution.]

The third great scientific event of our time, the rehabilitation of
the doctrine of evolution, is part of the same tendency of increasing
knowledge to unify itself, which has led to the doctrine of the
conservation of energy. And this tendency, again, is mainly a product
of the increasing strength conferred by physical investigation on the
belief in the universal validity of that orderly relation of facts,
which we express by the so-called 'Laws of Nature.'

[Sidenote: Early stages of this theory]

The growth of a plant from its seed, of an animal from its egg, the
apparent origin of innumerable living things from mud, or from the
putrefying remains of former organisms, had furnished the earlier
scientific thinkers with abundant analogies suggestive of the
conception of a corresponding method of cosmic evolution from a
formless 'chaos' to an ordered world which might either continue for
ever or undergo dissolution into its elements before starting on a new
course of evolution. It is therefore no wonder that, from the days of
the Ionian school onwards, the view that the universe was the result
of such a process should have maintained itself as a leading dogma of
philosophy. The emanistic theories which played so great a part in
Neoplatonic philosophy and Gnostic theology are forms of evolution. In
the seventeenth century, Descartes propounded a scheme of evolution,