Metaphysically considered, evolution is Nature's process of unfolding and bringing about her changes and developments. It goes on its way irresistibly and taken as a whole moves in orderly routine. This is not always obvious, but the exceptions are only apparently such. The fault lies in our lack of ability to observe all the facts and conditions. If we could investigate fully we should find that all apparent hitches are balanced or offset by an advance in some other direction and that there has been and can be no check or disorder in the process of evolution.

Whatever deflects the course or changes the character of an evolution does not necessarily hinder it, and if it seems to stop still that is only a question of the point of view.

The people of a race, or nation, or a community may deteriorate physically, intellectually, or in their commercial activity, but that does not prove that their development has come to an end. It only marks a cessation of progress along certain special lines. The American Indians are practically extinct, and it may appear that their race evolution has stopped. But that would be taking note of only one aspect of their condition. If we observe that they have decreased in ferocity, diminished in numbers and sunk to the commonplace grade of hard working farmers we must agree that their evolution does not proceed along romantic lines as it did in the days of Fenimore Cooper. But the few that remain may be more useful for the world's upbuilding than were all the savage hordes that ever started out on the war path to exterminate each other.

Numbers are not essential to a healthy evolution. China with its starving myriads is not a high example of progress.

The variations and fluctuations that make themselves visible in evolution are like ripples. We should never notice them if we took a broader view.

Evolution does not go stiffly and solidly forward like a self-propelled wall of masonry. It is more like the resistless ebb and flow of the incoming tide.

One ripple overwhelms or effaces another and a curling breaker leaps up from behind them and sprays the shore far in advance of the main body of invading waters.

Evolution reaches out similarly, now advancing, now retreating in unconsidered wavelets, always gaining, always effacing the old with the new, and inevitably dominating the entire situation at last.

The ebb tide affords a symbol of Involution which lays bare the way for another era of flood, so that every drop in the ocean taking its turn may ultimately rise to its highest mark of attainment.

Involution is usually described as a sort of compensatory process, coÖrdinate with evolution, though not co-incident with it. It is regarded as a return swing of the pendulum of evolution and is sometimes crudely illustrated by comparing the two to the corresponding halves of a circle matched together so as to form a completed ring or hoop. But this symbol though impressive is misleading, for involution matched with evolution can not bring about any condition of finality.

If that were possible evolution would end in extinction—and extinction is unthinkable.

The pairing of the two processes does not complete a circle. One does not match the other and neither can undo the other's work. If there could be a counter-action between them, each would efface the results of the other, as soon as its hour of activity began.

For illustration one may consider the progress of a bud which in due course of evolution unfolds into a rose fully expanded. That rose does not refold and become again a bud.

And if it did, that would not be involution. It would be only retrogression. Involution does not follow upon the heels of evolution to match its movements with opposing influences. It doesn't interfere at all. If it did there would be no unfolding of Nature's plans, for all her efforts would cancel each other.

Doubtless the two processes work towards the same result in obedience to a systematic divine idea and purpose, and, not leading up to any finality, they form a cycle rather than a circle and may be best pictured as a continuous spiral and not as a completed hoop.

It would then be seen that involution and evolution succeed each other in rotation as the night follows day and the day gives place to night. Each period of one followed by the other forms a coil in the spiral. And the spiral is continuous, being itself only one coil in a greater cycle which, in its turn, forms part of a still more extensive series of coils. And thus they go on to infinity, for they can never reach a limit. And the processes of our involution and evolution are only coils of a cycle that has gone on forever and they will continue to form new coils to all eternity.

But the contemplation of the present coil in which we find ourselves involved is quite confusing enough for it extends back farther than our comprehension can grasp and is still very far from finished. It will never be complete until we have all reached our limit of attainment, and that is yet a long way ahead of us.

It is obvious that these mighty processes lead to some ultimate object, and that they could never have been started into operation without a reason.

The ultimate object is easily found. It is quite evidently progress. And the reason seems by analogy to be similar to that which dominates every living thing in the Universe—the desire to expand, to create, to perpetuate. This desire seems to have impelled that incomprehensible Power which is back of all life and expression to make itself manifest. A Breath of itself took the form of matter and in obedience to the immutable law of compensation sought at once to return to its original exalted condition.

That descent into matter was Involution. The regeneration, the re-ascent to the original purity is Evolution.

The creative Consciousness awoke to a desire for manifestation and produced from its thought, substance. Then were set in motion the forces through whose operations substance took on form and living organisms appeared.

The degradation of that Spiritual Essence into a condition of matter was Involution. It was a degradation or descent because it was a change. No change could have exalted it, so the altered condition was a descent. The process of regeneration, the work of purification from the stain of material existence began at once and still goes on. And that is evolution.

When man began to assume domination over the other products of evolution and became a reasoning, responsible creature, that was evidence that he is the medium through which matter is to be uplifted to its former spiritual condition. In other words, it is a certainty that matter reaches its highest development in man and that the next step beyond the physical man is the divine man—the man of pure spirituality practically unsullied by matter. All the processes of evolution lead to the supremacy of the physical man over all other material development, and as he continues to advance he will inevitably reach a condition so exalted as to be virtually divine while still living in the flesh. Such men exist even to-day and have been known in all ages.

They are those who occasionally appear as Saviours and Messiahs. They are the pioneer wavelets which spray the shore in advance of the incoming tide.

When man reaches that point of perfection that will free him from the material or physical life forever, his evolution is complete and involution may begin again upon a new world as it has done countless millions of times before and will continue to do to all eternity.

We cannot of course comprehend why the Divine Consciousness has arranged all this stupendous machinery for the mere sake of becoming manifest. We cannot assume that it is for any reason that we could understand even though it were revealed to us. But we may wonder less perhaps when we consider that time and space are nothing in actual fact, and the immensity of our universe and the tremendous stretches of time that paralyze all thought of reckoning are but trifles not to be considered in contemplating the Infinite.

Our entire solar system doesn't make a speck in space and the age of the world cannot be reckoned, for time has no value, no existence in the super-material world.

It is frequently urged by sceptics that to an all powerful consciousness it should be easy to assume a personal character without employing the complicated process of producing mankind and awaiting humanity's slow growth to a divine perfection. But when it comes to preparing plans and specifications for a better and simpler method they have never shown ability superior to the divine thought.

Leaving out the consideration of time and the immensity of the finite world, which are of no importance to the Supreme Architect, the plan seems simple enough. There was a divine desire for expression. The Supreme was alone and unmanifest. There was consciousness but no knowledge, for there was nothing to know. The impulse to Be, produced the world, every atom of which is part of the Creator that produced it. The world is synthesized in man, for man holds in his physical body the essence of everything that is in the world. There is nothing, mineral, vegetable, animal, solid, fluid or gaseous that has not its place in man's organization. Man is pressing forward, evolving to a condition of purity that shall make him perfect and divine, a God enriched with the knowledge gained from numberless lives on earth. He becomes again a spark of the Supreme, but individualized and omniscient. And thus is the divine purpose accomplished and the divine impersonal self made divinely manifest.

Whether this be the true theory or not cannot be determined by any process of reasoning. The Finite mind is unable to comprehend the Infinite. We cannot analyze the act of the super-mundane power or find a reason that we can understand and prove by mental progress.

So therefore we can not trace involution even as we can evolution, for it is not of this plane. Whatever we note that seems to us to be involution is only some variation of the other. It has to do with our material progress while involution is a product of the impulse of a consciousness beyond our comprehension.

We may then consider involution briefly as the descent of spirit into a material condition and evolution as the refinement of matter into spirit. We may safely believe that under this stupendous plan the present is not the first and will not be the last cycle, but that they stretch their never ending spirals in both directions without limit. Whether or not there ever was a beginning to this endless coil of cycles of involution and evolution is beyond our feeble comprehension.

Logic and reason are but the dull weapons of conquest over problems of the Finite, and are entirely too crude to be used with confidence in giving battle to the mysteries of the Infinite.

Only the intuitions can help us beyond the boundaries of the super-material world and they tell us that there never was a beginning to the things which are and that there will never be an end. This condition of Being, without ever a time of actual commencing, is paradoxical and confusing to the mind and we cannot easily realize that although apparently impossible it is true. But it is only one of many similar contradictions that attend upon the Contemplation of Infinity.

We cannot even comprehend a beginning to the present cycle of our existence. The birth of this world is lost in the misty obscurity of the infinite Past and is as hopelessly beyond us as is the record of the countless myriads of similar creations which preceded it. It is therefore of little value to attempt to fix an era from which to begin tracing the evolution of man from the irresponsible, mindless monster that archaic teachings describe him to have been before he assumed conscious domination over the other creatures of this world. And it is equally vain to seek for information regarding the various changes through which he arrived at even that primitive condition of being only a mass of inert semi-conscious matter. Perhaps in this as in the other aspects of the transmigration of the Divine into the Finite, there never was any beginning.

The Vedanta, which is that phase of Indian Philosophy that treats specially on this subject, says that the world proceeded from an inscrutable principle, darkness, neither existent nor non-existent and from "one that breathed without afflation, other than which there was nothing, beyond it nothing."

According to the Vedanta there is but one substance or reality immutable and eternal, the supreme spirit, the impersonal Self, the spiritual absolute atman—and that of course is summed up in the idea of Deity.

Science, which professes to reject all theories that cannot be proven, suggests tentatively that all of nature's innumerable products have evolved from the result of a fortuitous combination of unconscious causes that produced a beginning.

But there should be something beyond mere accident in the movements of non-intelligent forces. There must always be a first cause even for a beginning and that first cause cannot be an accident.

That should be an uncomfortable theory for those who are scientific enough to believe it, for they have no guarantee against other accidents of Nature. They can never feel secure against some awkward occurrence that might counteract that initial commingling of forces and restore this world to its original condition of nothingness.

We read of various vibrations that shiver into the production of light, color, heat, sound, power, electricity and even the life principle, but these vibrations are not even said to be self-produced. There has never been a theory satisfactory to the intuitions—which are the most accurate of all our truth finders, except that of an universal, Conscious Self, impersonal but all pervasive, that is the Cause, the Beginning and the ultimate Attainment of everything.

The only theory that agrees with the intuitions without offending the reasoning perceptions should offer the safest foundation upon which to build a philosophy. It is therefore not remarkable that ages ago the sages of the Orient, men who were fitted by training and inherited faculties for metaphysical contemplation, elaborated a philosophy based upon the belief in an impersonal First Cause that seeks personality only through involving Spirit in matter and evolving back to Spirit. Tinted with the results of that experience, Spirit, they believe, becomes self-conscious and individualized by its contact with a life or lives of manifestation. Evidently it can never be absolutely stainless again. It has exchanged entire purity for knowledge and self-consciousness. Therefore, man, who is the highest attainment of this evolution, can never be infinitely perfect, but can ever more and more approximate to perfection. He can never again be absorbed and swallowed up and engulfed in absolute divinity. He will never become entirely Divine in the sense of being re-absorbed into the unrecognizable All-consciousness, for that would extinguish all the effects of his earth experiences and his long pilgrimage would be a profitless waste of time and toil. He has become an individualized conscious being, less than Deity, but by reason of his completed evolution he is relatively a God to us.

He may therefore reach up to the Infinite even now, and can also extend a hand down to Earth to help us on our upward climb. Innumerable divine men have been reborn and have dwelt among us to teach us how to live. Even in comparatively modern times we have a line of such whose example and teachings have helped forward our evolution and made it easier for us.

From Zoroaster and Buddha and Jesus and others have come revelations that justify the theory of man's perfectibility through evolution and as we can trace the growth of all matter up to its culmination in humanity, the divine plan seems to stand revealed, and our ultimate destiny is plainly outlined. The method of evolution, like everything else in Nature, seems entirely a process of compensations. We gain and renounce; we take on higher qualities and drop the meaner characteristics. We advance by such methods as we can command as we go along. Higher ideals being reached, we look upward for still loftier points of attainment.

In the prehistoric stages of our development, while pure physicality dominated us, we asserted our supremacy by superior strength or speed. Further along a cunning mentality gave us a wider range of power. Still later we have grown into wisdom, and as we near the end we shall discard all the physical desires, the tastes and appetites, the hopes and ambitions, the affections and passions that tie us to the earth life, and take on instead the finer spiritual attributes that are inseparable from the higher planes of existence.

The severing of the earth desires marks the end of the process of evolution of spirit from matter. What follows that we may infer from analogy. The process of unfolding doubtless continues on planes of which we have no conception, but obviously need not dread to encounter.

Of course we have moved slowly forward in our various stages of development from whatever we were before we took on human qualities up to our present degree of attainment. It is not hard to believe that we have developed superior understanding and the other higher attributes of humanity only as our growing needs and opening opportunities have called for them.

The evolution of species and the laws governing the development of physical organs as they became necessary for the growth and preservation of the infinite variety of living things have been a favorite study for materialistic scientists for the past century. More than that, long ago the learned Jean Baptiste Lamarck formulated four propositions that are now accepted as self-evident.

First. Life, by its proper forces, tends continually to increase the volume of every body possessing it, and to enlarge its parts up to a limit which it brings about. This covers the phenomenon of growth to maturity.

Second. The production of a new organ in an animal body results from the supervention of a new want continuing to make itself felt, and a new movement which this want gives birth to and encourages.

This is shown in the long neck of the giraffe, which enables him to feed on the tender top leaves of tall tropical plants, and in the camel's hump which supplies him with vigor during long intervals without feeding, and the receptacle for water, which enables him to traverse long stretches of barren and streamless lands.

Third. The development of organs and their force of action are constantly in ratio to the employment of those organs.

The kangaroo, a large animal carrying its young for safety in a natural pouch, stands erect and never uses its fore legs in walking. It leaps forward in prodigious bounds, propelled by the muscular power of its tail, which has grown and developed beyond even the hind legs in strength; while the fore legs have dwindled to insignificant size and importance.

Fourth. All which has been laid down or changed in the organization of individuals in the course of their life, is conserved by generation and transmitted to the new individuals which proceed from those which have undergone these changes.

This is because evolution carries us constantly beyond certain needs and progress does not let us go back to those needs, neither in our own persons nor in those of our posterity. Man and beast alike have only and always such organs as they require and no others. The laws of heredity are not whimsical or recalcitrant, and the changes brought about by evolution are carried forward by them in strict obedience to its demands. Recognizing this fact, but building from a false premise, the followers of Darwin search for a link to connect humanity with the tailless apes of earlier periods, assuming that man was developed from them, and that the ape is the link between mankind and the next lower order of being. There is absolutely nothing in support of this theory beyond a resemblance in the physical conformation. And that is far more likely to result from the ape being a descendant of prehistoric man.

All these speculators stop short at any valuable foundation on which to build theories. They see in evolution only the generation and development of living organisms and the reason or cause of the infinite variety of form, color and habits.

Kant and Laplace theorized vaguely on the formation of the solar system from a gaseous condition to its present character, but they shared the perplexity of all biological thinkers when they endeavored to peer behind the mechanical beginning in search of a First Cause. It is probable that even the mechanical beginning had never a first hour or day or year or era. And so Science, bound and boxed up in materialism, observes the growth and development of species and placidly stops at that, having begun with a guess and ended with—a bundle of axiomatic conclusions.

But the philosophy of the ancients, backed up by the teachings of the divine men who from time to time have come back to us, and endorsed by our own inner convictions, tells us that evolution is the concerted effort of all the atoms that comprise the Universe to return to a condition not recognized by science—the condition of spirit which is the ultimate aim of everything.

And every infinitesimal atom is alive and has a consciousness of its own. They cluster together and form living organisms, developing and progressing in even pace with those organisms, flying off into space as their work goes on and rushing together to build up some other organism. Had we ultra-microscopic vision we could see them streaming from us continually and being replaced by corresponding streams of new atoms. And each one of these has its own divine spark. It is a living entity.

They abide with us according to our attraction, some shunning us, others preferring us. Evil people attract such atoms as have just come from others of like disposition and leave their impress upon them and gain nothing good from them. Every evil thought taints every atom of the stream that we contact with at the time. They advance in their evolutions no faster than does humanity and reach spirituality when we do and not sooner or later. Man arrives finally at this condition clothed in the "spiritual body" of which theologians speak without any idea or comprehension of its true nature.

All who would shun contact with the particles that emanate from vile people must live the life that repels such atoms. Those who live a life of pure thought and fraternal consideration draw towards them atoms of such quality as makes their personality pleasant and attractive and their bearing gracious. No pure life builds up a vile personality. There are other ways to recognize traits of character besides the mere facial expression. Even scientists know that.

It is therefore evident that every one should shun evil thought just as he would any other deadly and destructive infection. It rests with every man to carry forward with him on his upward journey all the material that goes toward his own physical composition.

There is no one who has not attracted all grades of atoms to him, and it is well to bear in mind that they are the very same that have formed the bodies of all the population of the world, man and beast, since life first was. There has been no addition, no diminution. Nothing in nature is ever destroyed. Nothing ever ceases to be. There is no place to banish material. It must be spiritualized and we must be the medium.

And, therefore, it is no poetic fancy to say that we are of one common clay and that humanity is all one. Every man, at every moment, is building and rebuilding himself of the same materials, particle for particle as have built up every other man. Prince or pauper, saint or demon, society flower or foul tramp, we are all of the very same dust and we can determine which sort we shall use for our own bodies. It is not a question of proximity. It is entirely one of sympathy and character and affinity. We evolve as fast as our thoughts and conduct permit, and we purify our souls and our bodies alike and together.

If we recognize the brotherhood of humanity we need no reminding to see that it is our duty to ourselves—to our personal selves as well as to our spiritual selves, to help to make cleaner and sweeter the whole world through our own mental, moral and the resultant spiritual cleanness. That will not hurry evolution much in each separate instance, but by the contagion of sympathy and the dynamic power of thought these beneficent, physical atoms can be attracted to us and we can carry about with us their gentle influence for good.

That is the secret of the curative influence of sweetsouled people upon those who are sick in mind or body, and if people could understand these influences as they are and value them justly we should soon see a happier world with less sorrow, less injustice, less sickness and a far wider recognition of the material as well as spiritual truth that brotherhood is an universal fact in Nature, and that our evolution can never be complete until all realize it and live accordingly.