The advantage of the theory of emergent evolution is that it furnishes the evolutionary process with a power capable of bringing it about, while the idea of matter evolving itself implies a universe trying to lift itself by its bootstraps. It also removes the difficulties of time (of which there is never enough for thoroughgoing Darwinians) and of finding survival value for half-developed mechanisms. “_Bien des choses s’expliqueraient si nous pouvions connaître notre genéalogie véritable_,” wrote Flaubert--much more wisely than he knew. Perhaps not only many things but nearly everything will be explained from the moment our true genealogy is recognized. But it must be our true genealogy, not a part of it. Emergent Evolution permits us to have our place in the natural order, and yet remain children of God. The soul may be the greatest--or next to the greatest--emergence of all. Is it such a distressing idea? That should not trouble the realists, for they notoriously attribute reality to things in proportion to the amount of unpleasant odor which things exhale. Thus they unite with the Hindus in considering life a curse. Matter taken by itself certainly is either painful or boresome, and if one wishes to stop with the half and consider only matter as real, I know of no way in which one may logically escape despair. The trouble with the idea, then, is that it is not distressing. The moment we agree that something more divine may emerge through matter, or at least thrust up beneath it till matter rises here and there to a glorious psychic mountain peak (“emergence” is not quite the right word, for there still remains the material covering)--from that moment even evolution loses its repellent features. From that moment the greatest thinkers of all the ages are on our side--which is sometimes a comfort. We develop a strange capacity for happiness. Is this an evidence that we are fools? “_Le malheur_,” says Paul Bourget in “_L’étape_,” “_démontre l’idée fausse, comme la maladie la mauvaise hygiène._”[114] That probably is not conclusive reasoning if you are not convinced beforehand. But why is happiness any more apt to be the result of illusion than is misery? We do not say that the best body is the one which suffers the most pain. Have not the pessimistic philosophers accustomed us to some strange and monstrous inversion of thought? Let emergence, then, have its way. We are no longer contained in our physical ancestors. The man is not even contained in the child. We change from day to day. There is a continuity, yet it is added to--or subtracted from. The soul accepts this and rejects that.