Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art

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PARALLEL PATHS
All Rights Reserved
A STUDY IN BIOLOGY, ETHICS, AND ART BY T. W. ROLLESTON
“Il faudrait, en un mot, suivre la grande route si profondément creusée ... mais il serait nécessaire aussi de tracer en l’air un chemin parallele, une autre route, d’atteindre les en deça et les après, de faire, en un mot, un naturalisme spiritualiste; ce serait autrement fier, autrement complet, autrement fort.”
J. K. Huysmans.
LONDON DUCKWORTH & CO. 3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 1908

IN a recent work by an eminent man of science, Dr. J. Reinke, Professor of Botany at the University of Kiel, there occurs a passage which I cannot do better than place in the forefront of this book as an indication of its aim.
If this X force exists and can be established, it will give us the clue, I believe, to much more than the operations of physical nature. The following pages are an attempt to establish it, to define its character, and to indicate the lines on which this unknown factor in evolution seems to bring into a rational unity the phenomena of the physical world and the moral and æsthetic faculties of man. The time appears to have come for such an attempt. The fermentation of mind produced by Darwin’s massive and victorious promulgation of the evolution theory is beginning to subside; it is now possible in some measure to take stock of what has been destroyed, of what has been left intact, by the immense tidal wave of new thought which then swept over the world. Some conceptions which were thought to have been submerged for ever are reappearing in more or less altered shapes, and science is called on to reconstruct a universe less one-sided, less aridly simple, than that which Darwinism, as at first understood, appeared to have left us. The result, so far as it is successful, will be the establishment of a spiritual view of the universe on a natural basis. It is an attempt which is at present occupying many minds, and which will doubtless have to occupy many more before complete success is attained.