A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

THE COSMOS: THE MACROCOSM. 257tibns. This is che involution and evolution going onthroughout the whole of Nature. Therefore,the wholeof this universe must have been involuted before itcame out, and has unfolded itself in all these various formsto be involved again once more. Take for instance, thelife of a little plant. We find the two things that makethe plant a unity by itself ;itsgrowth and development, itsdecay* and death. These make one unity, the plantlife.So, taking that plant life as only one link in the chain oflife, we may take the whole series, one life, beginning in theprotoplasm and ending in the most perfect man. Man isone link, and, as the evolutionists say, the various shapesof monkeys, then lower animals and plants are other links.Now go back to the smallest particles with which it started,and take the whole series as but one life, and applying thelaw which we have just found out, we find that every evolution here is the involution of something which existedpreviously, and this whole series, beginning with the lowest, and reaching up to the highest, the most perfect manmust have been the involution of something else. Theinvolution of what ? That is the question. What was involved ? The evolutionist will tellyou that your idea ofGod is wrong. Why ? Because you say intelligence createdthe universe, but on the other hand we find everyday thatintelligence comes much later on. It is in man and thehigher animals that we find intelligence, but millions ofyears have passed in this world before this intelligence came.Do not get frightened, but apply your theory. The treecomes out of the seed, goes back to that seed ;the beginningand the end are the same. The earth comes out of causeand ends in cause. What is the end of this whole link ?We know that if we can find the beginning, we can find theend. E converse, if we find the end we can find the begin-17