trace each successive degree of complication as it introduces itself. Having found conditions operating historically by themselves, we can see what happens when these conditions come together. We can refer the more complicated fact to the combination of conditions. Here we have the counterpart of the synthetic recombination, or cumulative method of experiment. We put together the separate threads coming from different sources, and see how they are woven into a pattern so extensive and minute as to defy the analysis of direct inspection.
We should be prepared, from our foregoing discussion, to see how this superiority and logical value is also given ontological significance. Just as the materialist isolates and deifies the earlier term as an exponent of reality, so the idealist deals with the later term. To him it is the reality of which the first form is simply the appearance. He contrasts the various members of the series as possessing different degrees of reality, the more primitive being nearest zero. To him the reality is somehow 'latent' or 'potential' in the earlier forms, and, gradually working from within, transforms them until it finds for itself a fairly adequate expression. It is an axiom with him that what is evolved in the latest form is involved in the earliest. The later reality is, therefore, to him the persistent reality in contrast with which the first forms are, if not illusions, at least poor excuses for being. We are all familiar with these applications of the Aristotelian metaphysics to the evolutionary process. We are not concerned here with the metaphysical problems involved, though they are serious enough: as the notion that the real somehow chooses an imperfect mode or vehicle of expression for itself, and only after a long series of more or less abortive attempts succeeds in showing itself as the reality. It is enough for present purposes to note that we have here simply a particular case of the general fallacy just discussed—the emphasis of a particular term of the series at the expense of the process operative in reference to all terms.
Both the earlier and the later are simply limits which define the process in question. They are the framework which gives it outline; they are the terms which characterize the problem to be
