Coming up to man let us think of what scientists point out as the effects of man’s disturbing influence in nature, and then pass from these on to the facts of anthropology in respect of the conquest of environment by what we call invention and inheritance and free initiative. “In placing _invention_,” says a writer of to-day in a recent brilliant book, “at the bottom of the scale of conditions [_i.e._ of the conditions of social development], I definitely break with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely natural process.... It is pre-eminently an _artificial construction_.”[180] Now it requires but the reflection of a moment or two upon considerations such as the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of history as to the breaking up of the tyranny of habit and custom by the force of reflection and free action and free initiative, to grasp how really great should be the significance to philosophy of the active and the volitional nature of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not only of our progress, but of civilization itself. If it be objected that while there cannot, indeed, from the point of view of the general culture and civilization of mankind, be any question of the importance to philosophy of the active effort and of the _active thought_ that underlie this stupendous achievement, the case is perhaps somewhat different when we try to think of the pragmatist glorification of our human action from the point of view of the (physical?) universe as a whole.[181] To this reflection it is possible here to say but one or two things. Firstly, there is apparently at present no warrant in science for seeking to separate off this human life of ours from the evolution of animal life in general.[182] Equally little is there any warrant for separating the evolution of living matter from the evolution of what we call inanimate matter, not to speak of the initial difficulty of accounting for things like energy and radio-active matter, and the evolution and the devolution that are calmly claimed by science to be involved in the various “systems” within the universe--apart from an ordering and intelligent mind and will. There is therefore, so far, no necessary presumption against the idea of regarding human evolution as at least in some sense a continuation or development of the life that seems to pervade the universe in general. And then, secondly, there is the familiar reflection that nearly all that we think we know about the universe as a whole is but an interpretation of it in terms of the life and the energy that we experience in ourselves and in terms of some of the apparent conditions of this life and this energy. For as Bergson reminds us, “As thinking beings we may apply the laws of our physics to our world, and extend them to each of the worlds taken separately, but nothing tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor even that such affirmation has any meaning; for the universe is _not made_ but