Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/66

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THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION
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prefers to designate Naturalism and Transcendental Idealism. Were the complete substitution of either for the philosophy underlying the older religion conclusively to take place, we of the Western civilisation should literally have entered a new world.

Many doubtless believe that we are in that new world already, and beyond return. But many, probably more, still hang back, disturbed by anxious questionings — by an inward struggle between the sense of authority in what seems truth declared by science and the sense of majesty in what is felt to be an ineffable good which the apparent truth seems to put in peril. For my own part, I side with those who feel that the vaunted new world of evolutional philosophy is of a portent so threatening to the highest concerns of man that we ought at any rate to look before we leap, and to look more than once. We ought to ask insistently what this new world really makes of mankind, of its vocation and its destiny, and we ought to insist upon an unevasive answer. Undoubtedly it may be said, and in so far said well, that the unfavourable bearing of a doctrine on hopes indulged by man cannot alter the fact of its truth. But we have at least the right, and in the highest case we have the duty, to demand that we shall know what its bearings on our highest interests are. If the truth bodes us ill, that very ill-boding is part of the whole truth; and though, unquestionably, we