we are compelled to trace it not to a psychical, but to a dynamic principle. Consciousness suffers nothing by being delivered from the embarrassment of irrational claims. It rises in dignity the more we can view it as the outcome of a process deeper than its own; it becomes more precious to us the more closely we can link it with life; it takes highest rank when, as revealer, it patterns forth, however imperfectly and unsatisfactorily, something of the wonderful resources of the organism and the inexhaustible richness of cosmic power.

CHANGE AND ENDURANCE.

Power is here regarded, not as an aggregated multiplicity, but as a divisionalized unity. Its differentiation into material units makes groupings, collocations, moving systems and configurations of them possible. The impulsion of the cosmic system to self-maintenance, its conversion of differential stresses through motion into equalized stresses, result in the arrangements we call intelligent adaptations. The "end" of maintenance, of endurance, is implicit in the nature of the system, whether inorganic or organic; it finds realization through the displacements and replacements which the system imposes. Contrivance or design in nature is the elementary form of the endreaching we witness and practise in our own lives as organisms. Out of a process which has endurance for its goal emerges in both living and not-living the intelligence of "intelligent adaptations." In accepting this view we deliver purposiveness in nature from its supposed origin in psychic elements; the notion of a cosmos ruled by mind widens out into the thought of a cosmos potential of mind, as well as of possibilities unutterably beyond the grasp of mind; the appeal to the argument from design yields to the argument from the nature of power. Purposiveness in life is meanwhile emancipated from both vitalistic and

mechanistic assumptions-from the crude symbolism of the one, from the narrow empiricism of the other. The organism is under determination: in all its acting and developing the cause-effect relation may be traced. But as a self-maintainer it is none the less relatively self-centered, self-acting, autonomous. The physico-chemical properties of matter are servants, not masters in the house of life. The determinism is that of a system that wields itself. The freedom involved is that of organic causation.

The cosmic flux, like the organic flux, must be regarded as a means to endurance. Change is eternal, but things flow and continue to flow in the same general way, in modes that can be relied on and predicted: the vicissitudes succeed each other, their order remains. There are plenty of unteleological conflicts in nature, yet the emergence of enduring form-there as suns, planets and their furnishings, here as the crowded display of the organic world— shows beyond peradventure a final triumph of the collectivizing over the dissipating, the purposive over the fortuitous tendencies. As motion in the inorganic ensures the conservation of power, so changes in the organism are means to self-maintenance. The functions of life in the moneron and in man do not essentially differ; the class frameworks remain throughout organic ascent-it is only their content which undergoes multiplication and enrichment. In human activities, in tools and machines, even in social and political systems, men work towards the things which endure. Speech is a body of signs whose general character survives all changes; human thought, through whatsoever vicissitudes and controversies, keeps its fundamental elements unmodified. There is an inertia of mind as well as of matter, a conservation of ideas as well as of energy. The drift of science is towards a body of truths that shall endure; sure foothold in their own affirmations is also the quest of the theologians. The world's

great thinkers still "beacon from the abode where the eternal are."

Insistence on the flow of things is thus only half the story. All material objects are time-and-space wholes: only as such, and as arising out of the cosmic whole, can we have reliable knowledge of them. To sum them up as present existences in time or as local existences in space is to cut them off from the universe. Even if we could isolate the flow from the things that flow, we should need to take account of its direction and end. Only by realizing the flux as teleological, as a working towards intelligent forms, do we grasp the meaning of change, and to that extent the meaning of reality. The changes that seem to expend power do but insure its continuance. The power that changes not survives all change as the very possibility of change. The French poet spoke more wisely than he knew when he declared that "nothing endures eternally, in order that all may endure."

BOSTON, MASS.

EDMUND Noble.

DEATH.

DEATH, in thee we reach life's consummation; In thee we shall find peace; in thee our worries, Anxieties and struggles will be past.

Thou art our truest friend! Thou holdest
The anodyne which cureth every ill.

Thou lookest stern, O Death; the living fear thee;
Thy countenance is severe and awe-inspiring,
And creatures shrink from thee as their worst foe.
They know thee not, for they believe that thou
Takest delight in agonies and horrors,

Disease and pain. The host of all these ills
Precedes thee often, but thou brook'st them not.
'Tis life that is replete with suffering,

Not thou, O refuge of the unfortunate,

For thou com'st as surcease of pain; thou grantest
Release from torture, and thy sweetest boon
Is peace eternal. So I call thee friend
And will proclaim thy gift as greatest blessing.

Death is the twin of birth: he blotteth out
The past but to provide for life's renewal.
All life on earth is one continuous flow
Which death and birth cut up in single lives
Of individual existences

So as to keep life ever new and fresh.

Oblivious of the day, that moulded us,
We enter life with virgin expectations;
Traditions are we of parental past,

And gain of our expanding souls we hand
To the succeeding ages which we build.
The lives of predecessors live in us
And we continue in the race to come.

Thus in the Eleusinean Mysteries

A burning torch was passed from hand to hand,
And every hand was needed in the chain

To keep the holy flame aglow-the symbol
Of spirit-life, of higher aspirations.

'Tis not desirable to eke out life
Into eternity, world without end.
Far better 't is to live in fresh renewals,
Far better to remain within time's limits.
Our fate 't is to be born, to act our part
And, whether we approve of it or not,
When all is finished, to depart resigned.
Again and evermore again, life starteth
In each new birth a fresh new consciousness
With wider tasks, new quickened interests,
And with life's worn-out problems all renewed.
But we must work the work while it is day,
For thou, O Death, wilt hush life's turbulence
And then the night will come to stay our work.

When we have tasted of the zests of life,
Have breathed the air of comprehension, have
Enjoyed the pleasures of accomplishment,
When we have felt the glow of happiness,
The thrill of love, of friendship, of endeavor,

When we have borne the day's heat and have sweated Under the burden of our tasks, we shall,