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times one, sometimes the other; sometimes both side by side. Where we find both we usually find a balance in favour of one or the other. We have often to deal with an intricate profit and loss account.

In our own bodies, for example, the tissues are not only in process of up-building but also in process of down-breaking. During adult life some sort of balance is maintained on the credit and the debit side of the account. In the healthy child there is a balance of profit through evolutionary upbuilding. In old age there is more loss than gain. In what we speak of as “senile decay” dissolution, through degeneration of the bodily tissues, entails an increasingly adverse balance.

This distinction between building upward under evolution, and breaking down under dissolution is of very great importance. Surely, wherever we look we find not only progress but regress; we find not only building up but breaking down. That which is progressively built up under evolution has that mark of the higher which stamps it as a fuller and richer whole with substantial unity. That which ultimately results from dissolution is the scattering of the components which went together to constitute that whole. Much modern work on the atom illustrates dissolution; of atoms in process of evolution there is now little evidence. But many of us believe that it has taken place in the past and may still occur. And what about social life? Here we find abundant evidence of evolution in progress. But is there no evidence of dissolution in regress? Must we not recognise fall to lower levels as well as rise to higher levels?

The question is one of fact. My belief is that this reversal of order, this downward passage in state or in status is a feature of the world in which we live, seen alike in disintegrating molecules and atoms, in degenerate organisms,