Crossword-Solution: EVOLUTIVE 9 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 15

The evolutive force, dying out in the using, is either the same conjecture repeated, or a misapplied analogy.

The real nature of a tree is not to be discovered in the first swellings of the acorn, or the first out-pushing of its rootlets, but rather are acorn and rootlet themselves parts of that generic idea, that _evolutive potentiality_, which is only to be understood when manifested in its completer form in the full-grown monarch of the forest.

Yet it will be well to pause here long enough to make it clear to the reader just what motor automatisms I am about to discuss as _evolutive_ phenomena, and as therefore falling within the scope of this treatise;--and what kind of relation they bear to the dissolutive motor phenomena which occupy so much larger a place in popular knowledge.

Our question, Supernormal or abnormal?--may then be phrased, Evolutive or dissolutive? And in studying each psychical phenomenon in turn we shall have to inquire whether it indicates a mere degeneration of powers already acquired, or, on the other hand, the "promise and potency," if not the actual possession, of powers as yet unrecognised or unknown.

These remarks, I hope, may have sufficiently cleared the ground to admit of our starting afresh on the consideration of such motor automatisms as are at any rate not morbid in their effect on the organism, and which I now have to show to be _evolutive_ in character.