should say that it makes that world discoverable and prospective so that in intelligent beings we find a discovered and a prospective evolution. We find the contrast between what might be and what was and is. We find the progress of history alterable in the interest of what is desired, hoped for, and imagined. We find nature submitting to be idealized and evoking the spiritual enterprises which enlarge the happiness of men.
In the light of evolution, intelligence is seen thus to have the kind of operation which does more than excuse the vagaries of intelligent beings. Their attempts to construe the world as itself a rational process and to read the mind into its substance and into its every operation; their making of mythologies even; their superstitions, their blunders, their faiths, their hopes, their ambitions; their irrationalities also; their sciences, their philosophies, their poetry, and their art; their morality and their religion; their likes and dislikes; their loves and their hates; their cults and their ceremonies; their societies and their Utopias; their nationalities and their politics; their laws and their institutions; their comedies and their tragedies; their impotence and their strength;—all these things are no less ontological than nebulæ and ions. They are as much factors in evolution as anything that can be named. They have to be reckoned with as much as climate and soil. They are as dignified as electricity or gravitation. That the world should have become the home of the imagination is no less cosmically important than that it should have become the home of stellar systems. If man was destined to be an instance of physics and chemistry, he was also destined to be an instance of the "life of reason."
That intelligent beings should recover their history is no reason why they should repudiate it, even if they find many things of which to be ashamed; for they are examples of the recovery of the past with the prospect of a future. In reading their own history, they may find that they may smile at that which once they reverenced and laugh at that which once they feared. They may have to unlearn many established lessons and renounce many cherished hopes. They may have to emancipate themselves continually from their past; but note that it is from their
