The Limits of Evolution/Essay 1

by George Holmes Howison

THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION.^[1]

It has become a commonplace, that in the thinking of the nineteenth century the characteristic and epochal fact is the conception of Evolution. This conception has at length been carried out into every province of human experience even, is now in some loose sense a general habit of thought, and seems on the eve of becoming all-dominant. Its raptest devotees have for some years demanded that the mind of man itself, in which the conception has its very origin and basis, shall confess its own subjection to the universal law, shall henceforth acknowledge itself to be simply a result of development from what is not mind, and shall regard all that it has been accustomed to call its highest attributes — its ideality, its sense of duty, its religion — as tracing their origin back to the unideal, the conscienceless, the unreligious, and as thus in some sense depending for their being on what has well been termed “the physical basis of life.”

This doctrine of mental origins need not be taken, however, in the sense of materialism. Indeed, its able and exact advocates expressly repudiate the materialistic construction often put upon it; and to meet their views with precision and justice, one ought carefully and persistently to discriminate their doctrine from materialism. To do this may cost much exercise of subtlety; but the distinction is real, be it as subtle as it may. Rather, the new doctrine is in its exactest statement a mode of idealism; and this idealistic philosophy takes two different forms.

In the hands of most evolutionists, the philosophy is agnosticism — idealism arrested at the line of mere subjectivity and sceptical negation. It demands that the God of our familiar traditional religion, the omniscient Creator who sees in the beginning that consummate end when the children of his hand shall bear his perfect spiritual image, and who thus is eternally their Redeemer, shall abdicate in favour of the Unknowable — the omnipresent Power that doubtless is immanent in all things, and whose resistless infinity comes forth in the ever growing process of evolution, but whose nature and whose final goal are forever hidden from even possible knowledge; the Immutable Energy, of which we may declare neither that it is conscious nor unconscious, neither that it is material nor spiritual, but only that it is the Secret behind the Veil.

But in the hands of others the philosophy of evolution becomes an affirmative idealism: the theory of the Unknowable gives way to the theory of Cosmic Theism, the Persistent Force to the Omnipresent Mind. God is made immanent in Nature — as directly present throughout the immensity of the universe as each person’s mind is to its own body. Every member in the vast whole, nay, every atom, is represented ,as instinct with God; yes, as being God in some limitation or other, and in some victorious expression or other, of his incessant energy. As declared in the threadbare lines of Pope, —

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

All things are accordingly but aspects in the self-vision of the one and only eternal Consciousness, whose ceaseless rending of his successive disguises, that he may at length appear to himself in his proper image, unconfined and unobscured, is the explanatory cause of that ever changing, ever broadening, and ever deepening stream of existences which we have come to name the Drama of Evolution: —

They change and perish all, but He remains;
A moment guess’d — then back behind the fold
Immerst of darkness round the Drama roll’d
Which, for the pastime of eternity,
He doth himself contrive, enact, behold.

One or the other of these philosophies now claims the right to supplant the venerable forms of old religion, and seems almost on the verge of effecting its desire. The science of our century, stimulated to unprecedented discovery by ideas derived from the philosophy that ushered the century in, comes at the century’s close to the support of these ideas with its vast accumulations; and the new consensus of our time appears to gain its proper utterance, now in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and now in that Neo-Hegelianism regarding which the current question is, whether it can get its best expression by being read as Hegel darwinised, or as Darwin hegelised. The change that seems imminent, in whichever way interpreted, would be profound indeed, — far profounder than appears on the surface. Its revolutionary character is so little comprehended by the mass of the intelligent that many of the official teachers of Christianity, to say nothing of its less critical laity, not only dally with the new views, chiefly with Cosmic Theism, but openly embrace them, with no apparent suspicion of their hostility to the principles that are fundamental to the Faith. Yet the hostility is real; and it is not from any caprice of his merely private way of thinking, but from a genuine, even if obscure, apprehension of the things indispensable to this Faith, that Mr. Balfour in his Foundations of Belief assails both forms of the new philosophy, which he 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 should have to submit to it even though it destroyed us, it cannot follow that we could approve of it or that we ought to approve of it. To glorify what is our destruction would be indeed to play the fool, and add to the tragedy of our being the anguish of self-contempt.

It ought to be plain, and I think it will be plain on a careful and exact examination, that the so-called Philosophy of Evolution, when given such a scope as to make evolution the ground and explanation of the existence of mind in man, is destructive of the reality of the human person, and therefore of that entire world of moral good, of beauty, and of unqualified truth, which depends on personal reality for its being. This hostility to personality and its threefold world of ideal life is a trait belonging to every evolutional account of the mind in man, whether the account be made in terms of the agnostic or the cosmotheistic view of the Eternal Ground. Both views aim to explain the origin and progressive sustentation of the whole human consciousness by the merely productive causation exerted by that Ground. The Immanent God of the idealistic evolutionists is just as truly the sole real agent in producing and carrying on the consciousness of his creature, is just as incessantly and directly the creature’s executive cause, as the Persistent Unknowable of the agnostic. The world of moral freedom, which is a fundamental postulate of the Christian Faith, is annulled by both conceptions alike; and while the theory of Cosmic Theism, if treated with such idealistic methods as those employed by Professor Joseph Le Conte in his later writings, may be made to provide for a quasi-immortality of the distinct single soul, we should nevertheless remember that the ever-present brooding of the immanent Cosmic Mind forever suppresses the possibility of real freedom, and consequently takes away from everlasting continuance all that could make the soul a genuine individual, and therefore all the moral worth that alone could give to continuance what religion means by Life Eternal.

Under a sheer evolutionary account of man, the world of real persons, the world of individual responsibility with its harmony of spontaneous dutifulness, disappears. With it disappears the genuine personality of God. An immanent Cosmic Consciousness is not a personal God. For the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognises others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest. The doctrine of a Cosmic Consciousness, on the contrary, reduces all created minds either to mere phenomena or, at best, to mere modes of the Sole Divine Life, and all their lives to mere effects of its solitary omnipresent causation: —

When me they fly, I am the wings.

This discovery, that the leading conceptions of the evolutional philosophy are opposed to the vital conceptions underlying the historical religion of our Western civilisation, of course does not in the least settle the merits of the issue between these conceptions in the court of rational evidence. But the interests at stake touch everything that imparts to human life the highest worth, and all that our past culture has taught us most to value. These interests, it may well be contended, are so great as to justify us in challenging any theory that threatens them. Human nature is not prepared to face despair, until it shall have been proved beyond all question, and after a search entirely exhaustive, that despair must indeed be faced.

Amid all the clamour of the times in extolling evolution, then, it is eminently seasonable to ask, Just how much can the principle of evolution really do? Is it of such reach and such profundity as actually to serve for the explanation of everything known? To state the question more exactly. How far over the fields of being does evolution really go, and with unbroken continuity? Let us try to discuss this question critically and definitively, and so let us ask, —

(1) Whether evolution really has no limits at all?

(2) Whether it has not limits even within the universe of phenomena, and, if it has, what these limits are?

(3) If these limits, though recognisable, can still be passed, what is the only clue to the possibility of making evolution cosmically continuous?

But here many a reader will probably say. How can there be any serious question in this matter at all, at least for minds that have finally broken with external authority, and believe the human faculties, working upon the evidence of facts, to be the only judges of what is true? Has not science now spoken in this matter, and in words that cannot be reversed? To this I would reply, that on the question really started in the mind of our times, the question which I raise in this essay, science in its own proper function has absolutely nothing to say. The truth is, science never has said anything about it, and never will nor can say anything about it. Many scientific experts have no doubt had much to say in the matter, and oftenest in the interest of the evolutional philosophy. But they ought to get aware, and everybody else ought to keep aware, that when they talk of a universal principle of evolution, they have left the province of their sciences, and the very bounds of all science as such.

Of course, there is no longer any question at all as to the reality of evolution as a fact, within the specific region where it has been the subject of scientific inquiry. There is no question, either, of the use and importance of the hypothesis of evolution as a method of science, in that same definite and tested region. On this matter, it is the business of scientific experts alone to discover and to speak, and it is the privilege as well as the duty of philosophers, as of other people not experts in science, to listen to what the men of science report, and to accept it as soon as it comes with their settled consensus. But whatever some men of science may do in the way of philosophical speculation, science makes no claim whatever that evolution goes a hair’s breadth farther than its scientific evidences carry it; and hitherto these evidences are strictly confined to the morphology and the physiology of living beings, and of living beings only — to the thread of descent by reproduction, convincingly traceable by observation and experiment from the lowest forms of plant life to the highest of animal.^[2]

The extension of evolution from this limited and lowly scope in the region of life into a theory of cosmical reach, and, still farther, into a theory of the origin of life, and then of the origin of mind, is an act for which science furnishes no warrant whatever. The step into boundlessness is simply the work of philosophical speculation, as it always is. I do not mean to say that philosophical speculation is necessarily without warrant, or destitute of evidences of its own, more or less valid within its own field. But what I do wish to say is, that these evidences are not the evidences of science; that scientific evidences must by their nature stop short of such sweeping universals; and that when either scientific men or the general public assume that such speculative extensions of principles reached in some narrow field of science have the support and the prestige of science, they are deluded by a sophism — a sophism really so glaring that its common prevalence is matter for astonishment, and might beforehand well be incredible. The correctness of this statement will appear as we go on.

No, our question is not in the least a question of science. It is only when men of science, or other people fascinated by the powers of the scientific method, undertake to raise this into the universal method of philosophy that our question ever comes forward. Upon it science is reservedly silent. It is a question of philosophy alone; and philosophers, whether professedly such or not, who make this new and surprising claim for the method and evidences of science, must not expect to carry the day by mere proclamation. They must come to the bar of historic philosophy, and be judged by that Reason which is the source of philosophical and of scientific method both, and the sole authority to determine the limits of either.

I

Directing our attention first to the agnostic form of the new philosophy, and taking up the first of our foregoing questions, we find at once a fact of the greatest significance. Yet in the popular apprehension of evolution this fact is continually so ignored or neglected that its statement will likely enough come to many readers as a genuine surprise, and not improbably as a mystery hard to fathom. The fact is this: When the question is brought home whether evolution has no limits at all, the careful and really qualified advocates of the evolutional philosophy are found to be the most stringent deniers of the limitless range of evolution. Its limits, they say, are rigid and absolute: it reigns only in the field of phenomena, including the “outer” or physical world of the external senses, and the “inner” or psychical world open to mental experience, otherwise called “inner sense.”

The distinction here implied is so very important that I shall surely be pardoned for going far enough into the explanation of philosophical technicalities to make it clear. It is the distinction between (1) the facts of direct experience — the realities that present themselves to our sensible apprehension, “outer” or “inner” as the case may be, forming a series of innumerable items arranged either by contiguity in Space or by succession in Time — and (2) a higher or profounder kind of reality which reason requires us to assume as the indispensable and sufficient ground for the occurrence and the ceaseless changing of the former, and, above all, for those changeless connexions of sequence and position which we observe among them, and which by common consent we designate as the laws of cause and effect, or of the uniformity of Nature. To mark the fact that the realities of the first sort are without other evidence than their presentation to our senses “outer” or “inner,” it is agreed in philosophy to call them “phenomena,” that is, simply appearances in consciousness. To mark the counter-fact that the underlying Reality contrasted with appearances, and required as their explanation, is forever hidden from the senses, and is therefore without other evidence than that of pure reason, philosophical consensus names it a “noumenon,” that is, a reality present simply to the reason.

Upon this distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal the whole discussion hangs and turns. To the proposition maintained by evolutionist philosophy, that evolution has no application beyond phenomena and can have none, historic philosophy at once gives its assent and its authority.^[3] The dispute begins, only when the school of evolution goes on to place the whole of human or other living nature in the realm of the phenomenal, denying to the living, even as a psychic being, any noumenal reality of its own, and treating even the human person as a mere form in which, as in all other phenomena, the supersensible Noumenon, one and sole, appears; or, in other words, as a mere manifestation or effect of the Noumenon, which is held by the school to be omnipresent, immutable, immanent in all phenomena, indivisible and all-embracing, solitary and universal.

Beyond this point of agreement among all evolutionists, agnostic and pantheistic alike, the dispute opens further, and within the evolutionist school itself, when those of the agnostic party go on to declare that the Reality beyond phenomena — which they insist exists as an “immutable datum of consciousness” — must be regarded as permanently the Unknowable. The dispute gets to its keenest when they base this agnostic dogma on the claim that nothing deserving the name of knowledge is attainable in any way except the method of natural science. To this extravagant estimate of scientific method, to the superficial philosophy of this method which it implies, and to the consequent construing of the Noumenon as unknowable, the pantheistic idealists demur, and go on to vindicate the complete knowableness of the Reality at the basis of experience by attempting to show Reason itself to be that Reality, which as perfectly self-knowing must be perfectly knowable to reason in men. The issue thus becomes implacable between the agnostics and these affirmative idealists; and it is only just to say that in the demurrer to the overestimate of natural science and its method, in the criticism of the shallow analysis of the method, and in the protest against the finality of agnosticism, historic philosophy sides with these quasi-theists. The agnostic position, the largest historic view of philosophy would say, is an unwarrantable arrest of the philosophic movement of reason; and its unjustifiable character appears in the fact, which can clearly be shown, that it involves at once a petitio and a self-contradiction.

This largest philosophy would no doubt also convict pantheistic idealism of an undue arrest of reason; but its first concern is to approve the protest of this form of idealism against the assault on the power of reason to reach absolute reality. It approves, too, when this idealism criticises the agnostic interpretation of the method of science, as a shallow analysis of what the method presupposes. Still, its condemnation of pantheism, even when pantheism is idealistic, is unyielding, and renders its discredit of the logic employed by agnosticism only the more inexorable. Its justification in both of these adverse judgments will be our main occupation for the rest of this essay, but our first attention must go to what it declares against agnostic evolutionism. And let us turn, first of all, to the proof that this agnosticism, as just alleged, involves a self-contradiction and a begging of the question.

If it were indubitable that we can only know what our inner and outer senses tell us, — only the facts of present and past experience, — then “it needs must follow as the night the day” that we can know only phenomena, and that the noumenal Reality behind phenomena must remain forever unknowable. But to say, even with deep Tennyson (God save the mark!), that “we have but faith,” that “we cannot know,” that “knowledge is of things we see,” is to dogmatise in the very premises of the debate, and to raid upon the central matter at issue. The question whether we have not some knowledge independent of any and all experience — whether there must not, unavoidably, be some knowledge a priori, some knowledge which we come at simply by virtue of our nature — is really the paramount question, around which the whole conflict in philosophy concentrates, and on the decision of which the settlement of every other question hangs. To cast the career of a philosophy upon a negative answer to it, as if this were a matter of course, — which the English school from Hobbes onward has continually done, — is to proceed not only upon a petitio, but upon a delusion regarding the security of the road.

This placid and complacent delusion might far more fitly be called an ignoratio elenchi — an “overlooking of the thumbscrew” — than the fallacy which actually has that name; for those who entertain it are blind to the snare laid for them in the very structure of that experience on which they build their doctrine, and risk unawares the thumbscrew prepared by Kant. He suggested that experience may be not at all simple, but always complex, so that the very possibility of the experience which seems to the empiricist the absolute foundation of knowledge may depend on the presence in it of a factor that will have to be acknowledged as a priori. This factor issues from the nature of the mind that has the experience, and introduces into experience all that distinguishableness, that arrangedness, and that describable form, without which it could not be conceived as apprehensible or intelligible, that is, as an experience at all.

The almost surprisingly happy thought of Mr. Spencer and his school at this juncture — to turn the flank of Kant and his “pure reason” by applying the conception of evolution to the origin of ideas, and thus explaining a priori knowing away — does not do the work it was contrived for. It is certainly adroit to say that cognitions which in us human beings are felt as irresistible, as if part of the nature of things and incapable of change or of alternative, are simply the result in us of transmitted inheritance; that our remote ancestral predecessors had these cognitions at most as associations only habitual, regarding which no incapability of exception was felt, and that our feeling them as necessities is merely the result of their coming to us through generation after generation of successive ancestors, handing on their accumulated associations in ever increasing mass and cohesion. But this clever stroke cannot get rid of Kant’s suggestion, that in order to the solidifying of associations in any consciousness there must be some principle — some spring — of association, of unification, of synthesis, in that consciousness itself. Nor can anybody merely by the suggestion of a counter-theory, however plausible, dispose of those profound and penetrating arguments of Kant’s by which the great Königsberger shows Time and Space, for instance, to be a priori, and exposes the fact that every attempt to explain them as generalisations from experience must tacitly assume them already operative in the very formation of the experiences from which the generalisation is made. Without them, Kant’s point is, the thinker could not make use of the experiences to generalise to them; he must have had them, and in forming experiences employed them already, in order to his having in the experiences the requisite characters on which to rest and support the generalisation.

The theory that the synthetic processes in our human consciousness are merely associations of habit, Hume, to be sure, construed as referring to each single mind only; and Kant’s force in replying to him might at first seem owing to this neglect of the evolutional series in which experiences really run. But adding the vast enginery of æonic evolution to Hume’s views really does nothing toward removing that weighty and piercing objection of Kant’s. For even supposing all other cases conceded, whatever seeming necessity of other ideas evolution and heredity might be assumed to explain, the attempt to explain by them the origin of our consciousness of Time must fall under the ban of Kant’s saying. Time is presupposed in any association of sensible items at all; myriadfold is it presupposed in the ever accumulating, ever consolidating associations in the drift of evolution. It is the indispensable presupposition of our even figuring to ourselves the process of evolution, and it cannot have been transmitted to us except by having previously been acquired somewhere among our progenitors, more or less remote. When did it cuter the stream of evolution, and how?

Strive as one may, there is no escape from Kant’s implication that not even evolution^[4] can produce Time in our consciousness — the perception of the infinite possibility of succession. For Time is the necessary presupposition without which evolving consciousness could not have the groupings of succession, hardening evermore, that are supposed to lead slowly on to the consciousness of Time as a necessary and immutable condition of experience. There is for the evolutionist no escape from Kant’s clutches, except he maintain either that succession can exist without Time, or else that Time is per se itself a thing, instead of a relating-principle for things. If he take the former alternative, he falls into Kant’s clench more hopelessly than ever, for he will have to tell what, in that case, succession intelligibly is. If he take the latter, he will recede into antiquated metaphysics, which talks about existence per se, out of all relation to minds, and which, at any rate in respect to the nature of Time, received its quietus in Kant’s Transcendental Æsthetic.

The cautious thinker, then, who would estimate the value of agnostic evolutionism in the light of the history of philosophical discussion, will join in the verdict that the current philosophy of evolution is guilty of the fallacy of petitio when it offers its argument for the Unknowable as if it were a proof conclusive. The argument rests on a parti pris in the fundamental dispute in philosophy, especially in modern philosophy, and so leaves in the air the whole system built upon it. A much more serious matter is, that by its neglect of Kant’s profound and hitherto unrefuted considerations, and by disregarding the presumption thus established in favour of the opposing view, agnosticism draws upon itself the discredit of philosophising somewhat in the dark, and not in the wide daylight of entire historic thought. Far from being the conclusive truth which its tone of so confident propagandism would imply, and which the throng of its generally intelligent but inexpert readers are prone to take for granted, the agnostic system appears to the critical student of philosophy as logically an open question at best.

The self-contradiction of agnosticism — to pass now to its second alleged defect — is a characteristic which it shares in common with other philosophies that fall short of a view completely comprehensive. The self-contradiction comes out in a peculiar way, particularly interesting for the critical history of thought. It may be made apparent as follows. The system maintains at once the two propositions, (1) that all knowledge is founded wholly on sense-perception, physical or psychic, and is consequently restricted to the objects and items of experience, that is, to phenomena merely; and (2) that the Reality beyond phenomena is nevertheless an immutable datum of consciousness, that is, an unquestionable certainty, or, in equivalent words, a matter of unqualified knowledge. In short, it is maintained that we can only know by means of sense, and yet can really know that the supersensible exists; that our cognitive powers are confined to the field of phenomena, and yet that they somehow penetrate beyond that field sufficiently to know that a Noumenon is real. We are naturally led to ask, By what strange power is this feat accomplished? — by what criterion of truth is this certainty tested? Of course it cannot be by sense, for the object is supersensible; how, then, is it managed? We get this answer: We know the truth that the Unknowable exists, by the criterion of all truth, namely, the “inconceivability of the opposite.” But if this criterion really says anything in support of genuine certainty, it says that a pure conception of the mind, going quite beyond the literal testimony of sense, is objectively valid, in and of itself.

Manifestly, the only way of escape from this very awkward conclusion, so plainly contradictory of the prime thesis that our knowledge rests on sense alone and is confined to things of sense, is to say that inconceivability means nothing but the incapacity which limited experience begets in us — our impotence to think beyond the bounds built for us by the accumulated pressure of hereditary impressions. But here, if we would maintain the empiricist theory of knowledge in its consistent integrity, we are confronted with two difficulties: (1) How can impotence to pass the limits of experience suddenly be transformed into power to pass them and pierce to a Noumenon, even as barely existent? (2) How can our incapability of conceiving the opposite of existence for the Noumenon mean anything more than that we are so hemmed in by the massed result of our sense-impressions as to be incapable of releasing our thoughts from their mould? — that we must think as sense compels us, and are unable to tell whether the thinking means anything more than its own occurrence, or not? Construed with rigorous consistency, then, the existence of a noumenal Unknowable as “an immutable datum of consciousness” turns out to mean nothing but this: That our conceptions are built for us in such irresistible fashion we cannot help supposing there is such a Noumenon; but whether a genuine Reality answers to this helpless thought, there is nothing to indicate.

There thus comes to light a more secret and more deeply constitutional contradiction in this agnostic scheme — the contradiction between the merely evolutional origin of our power of thought and the reality of that Unknowable from which the system derives its main agnostic motif. Here we learn, if we attend to what the situation means, that we cannot affirm an absolute Reality and then stop short, with the result of leaving it entirely vacuous and blank. If we can trust our conceiving powers or our judgment in the transcendent act of asserting the reality of the Noumenon, why should we be smitten with sudden distrust of these supersensible powers when we come to the problem of knowing the nature of this transcendent Being? Surely there ought to be shown some justification for this arrest of the transcending cognition, this apparently arbitrary discrimination between one of its acts and other possible similar acts. It will not do to plead here that the Noumenon is per se supersensible, but that the reach of our conceptive powers, on the contrary, is limited to the world of sense. If we assume that our cognising the existence of the Noumenon is anything more than an illusion, we have already granted to one of our conceptions the privilege of overstepping this limit.

Thus at every turn the inherent inconsistency and inner contradiction lurking in the evolutional explanation of mind, with its consequent doctrine of mental limitation, comes into light. The noumenal changeless Energy, incessant and ubiquitous, is rightly felt by Mr. Spencer and his school to be indispensable to the explanation — yes, to the very existence — of evolution. Without it no new form could arise among phenomena; nor could there be such a fact as variation of species in response to varying environment, or as natural selection resulting from a struggle for existence. In short, the Unseen Power must be a certainty, if evolution is to be, and is to work; yet when evolution exists, when it works with the unbounded sweep desired, and mind becomes its product, then mind can have no faculty by which to reach the certainty of an Unseen Power, since consciousness is then reduced to sense alone, to sense-perceptions and abstractions from them.

In this impotence of the principle of evolution to cross the break between the phenomenal and the noumenal, displayed, as it is, in such an apparel of contradictions and assumptions, the philosophic range of evolution finds its First Limit.

II

Passing to our second question, we ask: Can evolution be made validly continuous throughout the world of phenomena? Here we speedily become aware that it cannot have even this compass, except at the cost of undergoing a change of meaning in kind. The primary meaning of evolution is the meaning proper to the world of living beings, in which it had its first scientific suggestion, and where alone its scientific evidences are found. But biological evolution — the only evolution thus far known to science — means not only logical community, or resemblance for observation and thought, but also likeness due to descent and birth; due to a physiological community, through the process of reproduction. It is directly dependent on the generative function,^[5] and its native meaning is lost when we pass the boundaries of the living world. What is it to mean when it has lost its first and literal sense? What is the continuous thread by which a unity of development is to hold, not only among living beings, but also among those without life, since it cannot any longer be physiological descent? How is this chasm, that now comes into view between the inorganic and the organic, to be bridged?

Empiricist principles would fain bridge it with some element of sensible experience, by some hypothesis made in terms of such experience alone. There is no hypothesis of this kind, however, but that of “spontaneous generation,” — whatever this handy phrase may mean. This hypothesis historic philosophy and recent science alike correctly designate as a generatio œquivoca, and they show that all the indications of careful biology are steadily more and more against the assumption which it covers. The logical march of the notion Evolution here suffers a certain arrest; the thread of continuity disappears from the region recognised by agnosticism as verifiably known, and it seems to vanish into something unknowable. We instinctively ask, as we before asked about the unknowable Noumenon, Why should we believe that such a continuity exists at all? How can there be any evidence of its actuality, if there is no real evidence but the evidence of experience?

In this break between the inorganic and the organic, evolution, as a principle of such continuity as philosophic explanation requires, finds its Second Limit.

III

But, coming now to our third question, continuity in some sense or other — a logical or intelligible resemblance, and a continued progression of resemblance, among all the parts of the inorganic world, and between the parts of the inorganic and those of the organic too — is to our mental nature indispensable. What is the true sense in which the reality of this continuous connexion ought to be taken? Some explanation of it is for our intelligence imperative. It cannot mean literal descent by physiological generation; it cannot be by reproduction through sap or through blood. What, then, can it mean — what alone must it mean? Inexplicability by anything merely sensible — even psychic, when this is taken simply as the sensibly psychic — here shows up plainly. If the notion of continuous genesis is to be made apprehensible to our understanding, if it is not to vanish into something utterly obscure and meaningless, the meaning for it must be sought and found in some mode of mind — of our mind — quite other than the mode of sense. But such a mode the agnostic interpretation of evolution, and, reciprocally, the evolutional interpretation of mind as originating out of non-mind, necessarily denies.

At this juncture, then, where a new break is discovered, — the break between physiological and logical genesis, — the philosophical reach of evolution betrays its Third Limit.

IV

The preceding result is recognised — in fact, is proclaimed — by agnostic evolutionism itself, in its tenet of an Omnipresent Energy, whose existence it maintains as a certainty, but whose nature it declares inscrutable. This inference of some necessary noumenal Ground is the deep trait in Mr. Spencer’s doctrine, answering to the true nature of the philosophic impulse, and constituting the profoundest claim of his scheme to the title of a philosophy. But the dogma that the nature of this Ground is past finding out really means that the universal resemblance among phenomena of every order — the mysterious kinship, not only of the inorganic and the organic, but of the entire physical and physiological world and the psychic world — must be accepted as a dead and voiceless fact, a “final inexplicability,” as Stuart Mill used to say. But surely philosophy means explanation, else it is not philosophy; surely, too, a “final inexplicability” does not explain. While, then, historic philosophy, disallow as it may their theory of knowledge, goes heartily along with Mr. Spencer and his school in their metaphysics thus far, it declines to arrest its progress with them here, and pronounces that in the Something at the heart of universal phenomenal resemblance, still to be explained, but by their form of evolutionism confessedly inexplicable, evolution as an explanatory principle comes upon a fatal check.

In this self-confessed inability to supply any final explanation of the great fact upon which its own movement rests, evolution as a principle of philosophy, that is, of thorough explanation, exposes its Fourth Limit. There is a bottomless chasm between the Unknowable and the Explanatory.

V

When the philosophic progress has arrived at this point, however, its further pathway becomes evident, and consistent thought will discover what this limiting Something is. It may provisionally be called, correctly enough, the Omnipresent Energy; it might well enough be called by the apter and still less assumptive title of the Continuous Copula. We can now determine the real nature of this undefined Something; and I say its nature purposely, and with the intention of discriminating; for our immediate settlement will only be in regard to its kind, and not as to the specific being or beings, amid a possible world of noumena, in which that kind is presented. We cannot, by our next philosophic advance, determine forthwith whether the being having the nature referred to is the absolutely Ultimate Being of that kind; but the kind may be ultimate, even though the being be not so. It will be an important step, however, if we can show now what the nature of the yet undetermined Copula is. Moreover, it will at once appear in what being, known to us, the proximate seat of that nature is — the seat first at hand, relatively to the connexion between the parts and species of Nature, and to the evolutional character which that connexion undeniably wears.

It is a common characteristic of most philosophies that they proceed somewhat precipitately with the act of noumenal or metaphysical inference, and, passing human nature forgetfully by, leap at once to the being of what they call the Absolute Reality, and to the determination of the nature belonging to that. This is like settling the nature and reality of the landscape while ignoring the nature and existence of the eye that sees it and in truth gives it being, or helps to give it being. Not the Absolute Being, not the Absolute Mind, or God, which the reality of evolution may finally presuppose, but rather mind as a nature or kind, and, proximately, mind in man, as the immediate and direct expression of the Copula whose nature we seek to know, must be the first and unavoidable Reality reached by metaphysical cognition.

That this is the accurate truth will become apparent by analysing the conception of evolution and noting in the result the conditions essential to the conception if it is to be taken as a real principle as wide as the universe of possible phenomena. It will readily become evident that the elements uniting in the notion Evolution are the following:

(1) Time and Space. — The conception of evolution is a serial conception, relating only to a world of items arranged in succession, or else in contiguity more or less close, or more or less remote. But Time and Space are the media without which this seriality essential to evolution could neither be perceived nor thought.

(2) Change and Progression. — Evolution is not a static but a dynamic aspect of phenomena. Under evolution, the items in the time-series and the space-series are viewed as undergoing perpetual change; and not simply change, but change that on the whole is marked by stages of increase in complexity and diversity of being, so that the world of phenomena, as a whole, is conceived as gradually attaining a greater and greater fulness and richness of life. The expert in biology would very rightly tell us that the “ascent of life” is extremely irregular; that there is decline and decadence as well as growth and aggrandisement. But even the biologist finds the persistent ascent in life when life is regarded in the large, in the range from the lowest plant to the highest animal, and through the series of the great genera within these kingdoms. And when we take the still larger view of cosmic evolution, this element of progression or ascent becomes the central one in the conception.

(3) Causation. — This would be better described as natural causation or physical causation, in order to distinguish it, by an apt term, from another element which, we shall presently see, enters into evolution, and which we should correspondingly name metaphysical or supernatural^[6] causation. The causation we are considering now is directly involved in evolution by the preceding elements — Change and Progression. We should mean by it the Mechanism, the Chemism, or the Association, involved in the changes of phenomena. The habit of popular speech and surface thought is to regard and describe causation as a process by which one phenomenon “produces” another. But an exacter thought states the two as simply in a certain relation, the relation of Cause and Effect. To such thought, causation holds both in physical and psychical succession, and means a peculiar connexion, or nexus, between phenomena.

The philosophy of evolution most current, based on the dogma of the sense-origin of all knowledge, and on the sole and final efficiency of the method of science, unanalysed to its true presuppositions, consistently interprets this connexion into the merely regular succession of the past — a sequence merely de facto; but if we thoroughly consider what is logically presupposed in scientific method as actually used by the competent, we shall readily see that it should be interpreted as necessary and irreversible succession, a sequence inevitable forever. For the vital process in scientific method is induction, or generalisation; and the secret of it, as actually employed in scientific practice, lies in taking observed successions in phenomena, and when with the help of the various methods of precision — agreement, difference, joint agreement, concomitant variation — they are brought to represent exactly what occurs, then suddenly giving to these merely historical successions the value of universal laws, having a predictive authority over the future in perpetuum.

If in this process there is always a cautious reserve in the mind of the practised and sedate man of science, — as indeed there is, — the reserve has no reference to the amazing final act of generalisation: all the anxieties of the expert are about the precision of his facts. His instinctive assumption about the generalisation is, that, when once the particulars are settled, this process takes place of itself, is matter-of-course, is resistless and flawless: if there is error anywhere in the scientific procedure, it is in the observations and experiments, or in the sifting and correcting of them by the methods of precision. The moment we are satisfied that our particulars are exactly settled, that moment the generalisation becomes irresistible, and we declare that a law of Nature is disclosed.

But now the crucial question is on us: What prompts and supports the generalisation? It cannot be just the facts; for, simply by themselves, they can mean nothing but themselves. What is it, then? The implication is not to be escaped: the ground of every generalisation is added in to the facts by the generalising mind, on the prompting of a conception organic in it. This organic conception is, that actual connexions between phenomena, supposing them to be exactly ascertained, are not simply actual, but are necessary. The logic of induction thus rests at last on the mind’s own declaration that between phenomena there are connexions which are real, not merely apparent, not simply phenomenal, but noumenal; that the reality of such connexions lies in their necessity, and that the processes of Nature are accordingly unchangeable. But the implication most significant of all in this tacit logic is the indispensable postulate of the whole process; namely, that this necessity in the connexion of phenomena issues from the organic action of the mind itself. The mind itself, then, if the processes of science are to be credited with the value of truth, is the proximate seat of that nature for which we are seeking as explanatory of what the Continuous Copula really is. At next hand to Nature, our mind itself — the mind of each of us — is that Copula. This truth will become clearer as we proceed with the analysis of evolution.

(4) Logical Unity. — It is of course obvious that evolution, like every other scheme of conception, must have its parts conformed to the laws of logical coherence, and that in this sense Logical Unity is a factor in the very notion of evolution. But we can now see that it is present there in a sense far profounder and more vital. In fact, according to the result of the preceding step in our analysis, Logical Unity is simply the direct and manifest version of causation in terms of mind, which we just now came upon as the authentic meaning of the causal Copula. As the logic of induction sends us directly to the organic or a priori activity of thought for a warrant of science, and thus indicates mind to be the real nature of the Omnipresent Energy, it now becomes evident that the vague thread of kinship running through all phenomena is the thread of logic, and that the suggested common parentage of all is just the parentage of thought. The unity of logic, the unity of congruous conceptions, is the only unity that joins by one unbroken tie the diverse forms of the inorganic, the organic, and the psychic, and thus spans all the breaks between mechanical, chemical, physiological, and psychic genesis, by a continuous logical genesis, and at the same time closes the gap profound between the so-called Unknowable and explanation.

The bond of kindred uniting all these beings and orders of being, so contrasted and divergent, so incapable of any merely natural or physical generation one from the other, is the inner harmony between the lawful members in a single intelligible Plan, issuing from one and the same intelligent nature. In short, the only cosmic genesis, the only genesis that brings forth alike from cosmic vapour to star, from star to planetary system, from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, from the physiological to the psychic, is the genesis that constitutes the life of logic — the genesis of one conception from another conception by virtue of the membership of both in a system of conceptions organised by an all-embracing Idea. This all-determining Idea can be nothing other than the organic form intrinsic in the self-active mind, whose spontaneous life of consciousness creatively utters itself in a whole of conceptions, logically serial, forming a procession through gradations of approach, ever nearer and nearer, to the Idea that begets them each and all. By this it becomes plain that the theme of evolution, if it is to be indeed cosmic and reign in all phenomena, must have all its previous elements — succession, contiguity, causal connexion, generation (mechanical, chemical, physiological, and psychic) — translated upward into this logical genesis. We have just seen that this has its source in the mind’s organic Idea, or primal self-consciousness of its own intrinsic coherence, its own variety in unity.

(5) Final Cause, or Ideality. — This, the mind's consciousness of its own form of being as self-conscious, — that is, spontaneously conscious and spontaneously or originally real, — is the ultimate and authentic meaning of causality. In the cause as self-conscious Ideal, the consciousness of its own thinking nature as the “measure of all things,” — as “source, motive, path, original, and end,” — we at length come to causation in the strictest sense, Kant’s Causality with freedom. It might happily be called, in contrast to natural causation, supernatural^[7] causation; or, in contradistinction from physical, metaphysical causation. The causality of self-consciousness — the causality that creates and incessantly re-creates in the light of its own Idea, and by the attraction of it as an ideal originating in the self-consciousness purely — is the only complete causality, because it is the only form of being that is unqualifiedly free.

Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond of their law which in the mood of vague and inaccurate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an effect. More exactly, it is only a cause in the sense in which every effect in its turn becomes a cause. Still more exactly, it is the proximate or primary effect of the creating mind; within and under which prime effect, and subject to its control as a sovereign conception in the logic of creation, every other effect — every phenomenon and every generic group of phenomena — must take its rise, and have its course and its exit. Throughout Nature, as distinguished from idealising mind, there reigns, in fine, no causation but transmission. As every phenomenal cause is only a transmissive and therefore passive agent, so Nature itself, in its aggregate, is only a passive transmitter. But because of its origin in the Final Causation of intelligence, its whole must conform to the ideal that expresses the essential form of intelligent being, and all its parts must follow each other in a steadfast logical ascent toward that ideal as their goal. Thus Teleology, or the Reign of Final Cause, the reign of ideality, is not only an element in the notion Evolution, but is the very vital cord in the notion. The conception of evolution is founded at last and essentially in the conception of Progress: but this conception has no meaning at all except in the light of a goal; there can be no goal unless there is a Beyond for everything actual; and there is no such Beyond except through a spontaneous ideal. The presupposition of Nature, as a system undergoing evolution, is therefore the causal activity of our Pure Ideals. These are our three organic and organising conceptions called the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. They are the fountains, severally, of our metaphysical and scientific, our aesthetic, and our moral consciousness.^[8] They are the indispensable presuppositions without which our judgment that there is progress would be impossible: this judgment once vacated, the reality and even the conception of evolution alike disappear. Yet there is no existence for them, and therefore no authority, except the spontaneous putting of them by and in our thought. Here we reach the demonstration that evolution not only is a fact, and a fact of cosmic extent, but is a necessary law a priori over Nature.^[9] But we learn at the same time, and upon the same evidence, that it cannot in any wise affect the a priori self-consciousness, which is the essential being and true person of the mind; much less can it originate this. On the contrary, we have seen it is in this a priori consciousness that the law of evolution has its source and its warrant. Issuing from the noumenal being of mind, evolution has its field only in the world of the mind’s experiences, — “inner” and “outer,” physical and psychic; or, to speak summarily, only in the world of phenomena. But there, it is indeed universal and strictly necessary.

In the light of the foregoing analysis, a thorough philosophy would now move securely forward to the conclusion that the Continuous Copula required in evolution, the secret Active Nexus without which it would be inconceivable, is at nearest inference the spiritual nature or organic personality of man himself.^[10] Whether there is not also involved a profounder, an absolute Impersonation of that nature, to be called God, is a further and distinct question, legitimate no doubt, but not to be dealt with till the immediate requirements of the logic in the situation are met. These requirements point us, first and unavoidably, to the intelligence immanent in the field of evolution, the intelligence of man and his conscious companions on the great scene of Nature; and, at closest hand of all, — first of all, — to the typical intelligence of man simply. The whole question, so far as anything more than conjectural evidence is concerned, is man’s question: he is the witness to himself for evolution; in his consciousness, directly, and only there, does the demand arise for an explanation of it; in himself he comes upon the nature of mind as directly causal of the form in Nature — of the ideally genetic connexion holding from part to part in it — and of the reality of progress there as measured by his ideals of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Here, now, we arrive at the point where we naturally pass from the criticism of agnostic evolutionism to that of pantheistic idealism, or Cosmic Theism. We promised, you will recollect, to attend carefully to what the fullest historic philosophy has to say in judgment of this theory of the world as well as of the other. We shall see that this world-view gains much over the agnostic, and yet that it falls short of the explanatory ideal.

The commanding question, let us remember, is whether the mind in the world, and preeminently the mind of man, is only a phenomenon like the objects it perceives in Time and in Space, or is transcendently different from these, and noumenal. The favourable significance of Cosmic Theism for man and his supreme interests, and of every other species of affirmative idealism, lies in its passing beyond the agnostic arrest at the Omnipresent Energy, by its recognition that the logic of evolution, as depicted in such an analysis as we have just made, requires in the Noumenon a self-conscious nature. This is a step greatly human, because it opens somewhat more widely than agnosticism, and certainly more affirmatively, the chance for hope that the existence of no conscious beings may fail of everlasting continuance and fulfilment. Yet it has also an unfavourable bearing on the highest human aspirations, not only because it fails to reach immortality as an assured and necessary truth,^[11] but for the far graver reason that it decidedly tends to leave all individual minds in the world of mere phenomena; or, if it permits them to be conceived of as sharing in absolute reality, by being parts or modes of the Sole Noumenon, deprives them by this very fact of that real freedom which is essential to personality and to the pursuit of a genuine moral ideal.^[12] It is therefore all-important for true human interests that a reality unqualifiedly noumenal shall be vindicated not only to human nature, but to each particular human mind. If the reasoning about to be employed for this purpose should seem to the reader to carry its conclusions widely beyond man, — as wide as all conscious life, of which human consciousness must now be regarded as only the completed Type, — I know no reason why men should hesitate at this, or grudge to living beings whose phenomenal lives are at present less fulfilled than their own the chance for larger existence that immortality and freedom give. But let us come to the argument.

Reverting to our analysis, we may now clearly see that the elements essential to evolution are simply the elements organic in the human mind. Evolutional philosophy, of whatever form, teaches that these elements — Time, Space, Causation, Logical Unity, Ideality — are, in the human mind, the results of the process of evolution. The agnostic evolutionist holds that they are gradually deposited there through associations ever accumulating in the long experience of successive generations, until at length they become in us practically indissoluble, though theoretically not. The pantheistic idealist penetrates behind the associations, to explain their possibility and their origin by his doctrine that the rational elements have their seat, not directly in the mind of each man, but in the eternal and universal Mind to which he gives the name of God. In neither view is a priori consciousness admitted in the individual person as individual, nor in the human mind at all, as specifically human. In fact, by the associative agnostic method, which would build these elements up outright in the course of evolution from what seems to be their assumed non-existence, they are all put as if explicable by evolution. But as our analysis has shown, they are all, on the contrary, prerequisites to the existence of evolution as well as to our conceiving of it. Legitimately, they are likewise inexplicable by the pantheistic method of seating them a priori in God, to be thence gradually imparted to minds as they are slowly created by the process of psychic evolution; for this ignores the fact that a priori cognition, by virtue of its pertinent proofs, is an act in the mind of each particular conscious being, be the development of the mere experience of such being as low as it may. The proper interpretation of a priori consciousness, at the juncture where it is established, is at most, and at next hand, as a human, not a divine, original consciousness, and, indeed, as a consciousness interior to the individual mind.

As for the proofs of a priori consciousness in us, these have perhaps been clearly enough given in the analysis by which it was shown that the several elements are prerequisite not only to the conception of evolution, but to our human experience itself, and to the system of Nature into which they organise that experience. This is the case, at any rate, with all the elements except Time and Space, and is emphatically so with the most important conditions of the notion Evolution, namely, the Pure Ideals; and, among these, preeminently with the Moral Ideal. But as a difficulty about the a priori or ideal character of Time and Space disturbs many minds, it may be necessary in part to restate what has already been said in proof of the ideality of Time, and to reinforce this by certain new points. I speak only of Time, because the same reasoning, obviously, must also apply to Space.

The necessarily a priori nature of Time can be shown, even should we grant for the sake of argument that the dispute over hereditary transmission of acquired characters, now going on in the school of evolution between the Spencerians and Weismann, were decided in favour of the former, and that transmission were a fact. For transmission of acquired habit can never explain the infinity and necessity of Time. Nor can this infinity and necessity be explained away by the theory that it arises from a confusion of conceptions — of infinity with mere indefiniteness, and of necessity with mere subjective inability to get rid of a hardened habitual association. These properties of Time, taken, too, in their unrestricted meaning, are unreservedly true by Mr. Spencer’s own criterion — the “inconceivability of the opposite.”

Moreover, as pointed out near the beginning of the present essay, they are conditions precedent to forming any habitual association at all. It is just in thinking all these elements in an active originating Unit-thought, or an “I,” that the essential and characteristic nature of man or any other real intelligence consists. Such an originating Unit-thinking, providing its own element-complex of primal thoughts that condition its experience, and that thus provide for that experience the form of a cosmic Evolutional Series, is precisely what an intelligent being is. Thus creatively to think and be a World is what it means to be a man. To think and enact such a world merely in the unity framed for it by natural causation, is what it means to be a “natural” man; to think and enact it in its higher unity, its unity as framed by the supernatural causation of the Pure Ideals, supremely by the Moral Ideal, is what it means to be a “spiritual” man, a moral and religious man; or, in the philosophical and true sense of the words, a supernatural being — a being transcending and yet including Nature, not excluding or annulling it.

Evolution itself, then, and not evolutional philosophy merely, in finding in this rational nature of every mind its proximate source and footing, finds there its Final Limit.

VI

We have here reached the proof that what is most distinctively meant by Man is not, and cannot be, the result of evolution. Man the spirit, man the real mind, is not the offspring of Nature, but rather Nature is in a great sense the offspring of this true Human Nature. As we have seen, the only thing that can overspan all the breaks which evolution must pass if it is to be a cosmic principle, is idealising thought — the humane nature, in its highest, largest sense. It is this that adds in to the chaotic insignificance of the mere mass of things the lofty theme of ever-ascending Progress. Apart from this ideality, there would be no cosmic order at all, no Manward Procession. Yet, that the whole of Nature cannot be referred to men alone, or to other conscious beings directly on the scene of Nature; that the existence of an absolutely universal form of their nature is required for her cosmic being, — this will not be denied when our psychology is as exact and all-recognising as it should be. Such a psychology will discover within the complex of experience, human or other, in addition to the system of a priori elements that constitutes the core of intelligence, another component. This other component, which Kant named “sensation,” to mark the fact that it expresses something insufficient in us, something which must be supplemented to us by reception from what is not ourselves, is best interpreted as a limit which points to the coöperation^[13] of some other noumenal being with men and other conscious centres. But when once the conditioning relation is shown to exist from man toward Nature, as the scene of evolution, instead of from Nature toward man; when once it is seen — as Huxley, the protagonist of evolution, at last came so clearly, if so unawares, to imply^[14] — that in Conscience at least, the ideal of Righteousness, man has that which no cosmic process can possibly account for, but to which, rather, the cosmic process presents an aspect of unmistakable antagonism, then our way will come open to determine the coöperating Noumenon, the Supreme Reality, as also having this higher human nature, as having it in its ideal perfection, and we shall have found the entrance to the path toward the demonstration of God. For the survey and the tracing of that path, this is neither the place nor the occasion.^[15]

VII

Let us turn back now to the point struck upon near our beginning, — to the question, Is evolution consistent with the Christian religion? It is a trite question now, perhaps overworn; and probably very many readers think that it is already settled in the affirmative. Yet it is a question of the utmost pertinence, and ought to be pushed to a decisive but discriminating answer. There are those who are only too ready with an answer decided enough, but unfortunately they are of two opposed extremes. Both parties are of one mind as to the incompatibility of Christianity and evolution; but while the one says that all evolution must therefore be anathema, the other jeeringly retorts, “So much the worse, then, for your religion!” And the loose verdict of the times is doubtless in favour of whatever can be made to appear as the cause of science. The trouble with such disputants is, that their assertions are far more decided than discriminating, and so are not in any final sense decisive. We may justly claim, however, that the outcome of our inquiry into limits enables us to answer this question with the definite discrimination required. This outcome shows us the narrow limits of evolution as a doctrine of unpretending science. Still more significantly, it brings out the unavoidable limits of evolution as a philosophy, as regards the origin of man and the nature of the eternal creative Power. In short, it teaches us that the answer to the question whether Christianity and evolution are compatible, turns wholly on the stretch that evolution has over existence, especially over human nature.

But it is time we all understood how finally at variance with the heart of Christian faith and hope is any doctrine of evolution that views the whole of human nature as the product of “continuous creation,” — as merely the last term in a process of transmissive causation. The product of such a process could not be morally free, nor, consequently, morally responsible. It must needs be merely a mass of “inherited tendency”; and, howsoever fair its effect might appear, no life of genuine dutifulness, no life of goodness freely chosen, could enter into its being. As a speculative possibility there may be ways of conceiving man thus “continuously created” and yet in such relations to the Creator as would provide for his immortality, in the sense merely of his everlasting duration; Professor Le Conte has expounded some of them impressively.^[16] It is doubtless with a view to such conceptions that ministers of religion nowadays so often say, “The evolution of man is well enough, if biologists will only leave us a Personal God at the beginning of the process.” But that if, when conjoined with that consequent, is an if of tragic meaning: the Power behind evolution, were the whole of man evolved, could never be a personal God — in short, would not be a God at all. For it is the essence of a person to stand in a relation with beings having an autonomy, in whom he recognises rights, toward whom he acknowledges duties. No conception of a professed God that fails to give this moral quality, can by providing continuance of existence, however lasting, compensate for the loss; since it should never be forgotten, that, when moral freedom is cancelled, immortality can have no moral worth, no genuinely human dignity, and consequently cannot answer to what we mean by the hope of Eternal Life. But hope of immortality as Life Eternal and faith toward Duty — fealty to our human dignity as moral free-agents, quickened by fealty to God as the grounding Type of that freedom — are the very soul of Christian Faith. The impartial philosophical observer cannot but be filled with surprise, then, at seeing official teachers of the Christian Religion so strangely oblivious of real bearings as to accept — yes, sometimes proclaim — an evolution unlimited with respect to man as consistent with their faith. Plain in the doctrinal firmament of every Christian, clear like the sun in the sky, should shine the warning: Unless there is a real man underived from Nature, unless there is a spiritual or rational man independent of the natural man and legislatively sovereign over entire Nature, then the Eternal is not a person, there is no God, and our faith is vain.

Doubtless, as I have already said, planting the contrast between Christianity and evolutional philosophy in this firm way, in itself settles nothing as to which of the two is true. Indeed, responding to the impression so strongly made by later science, one might well say that the onus probandi had been shifted, and that the true form of the pressing question should be, Is Christianity consistent with evolution? But the truth can never be settled until issues are rigorously defined. And if our inquiry in this essay has a solid result, it establishes the fact that evolution cannot have the universal sweep essential to a sufficient principle of philosophy. The professed Philosophy of Evolution is not an adult philosophy, but rather a philosophy that in the course of growth has suffered an arrest of development. The result of our inquiry here, in making this plain, goes far toward settling the issue between such philosophy and the Christian belief in personality. Does it not in fact settle it against evolutionism, and in favour of the older and higher view? Fulfilled philosophy vindicates our faith in the Personality of the Eternal Ideal, in the reality of God, by vindicating the reality of man the Mind, and exhibiting his legislative relation to Nature and thence to evolution. It thus secures a stable footing for freedom, and for immortality with worth, and thereby for the existence of the Living God who is Love indeed, because the Inspirer of an endless progress in moral freedom.

Let men of science keep the method of science within the limits of science; let their readers, at all events, beware to do so. Within these limits there is complete compatibility of science with religion, and forever will be. Let science say its untrammelled say upon man the physical, the physiological, or the experimentally psychological; upon man the body and man the sensory consciousness, — these are all doubtless under the law of evolution issuing from man the Rational Soul. But let not science contrive its own destruction by venturing to lay profane hands, vain for explanation, on that sacred human nature which is its very spring and authorising source. And let religion stay itself on the sovereignty of fulfilled philosophy, on man the Spirit, creative rather than created, who is himself the proximate source of evolution, the cooperating Cause and Lord of that world where evolution has its course.

Notes

1. A lecture delivered at Stanford University, October, 1895. First printed in the New World, June, 1896.
2. It is of course not ignored here that the entire series of physiological phenomena is everywhere accompanied by a “parallel” or concomitant series of psychic or “mental” phenomena, which cöordinately undergoes an evolution of its own. In fact, one might say, with many of the biologists, that this psychic series is but a part of “physiology” totally conceived; though the thread of genetic connexion is of course not at all the same as that in physiology proper. But this implication does not touch the question of the essential mind, the intelligent principle. See below, however, pp. 16-25. Cf. pp. 39-41.
3. Just as, at the same time, it condemns and discredits Positivism for its attempt to ignore this fundamental distinction, essential to the being of philosophy and expressive of the very nature of reason.
4. Even the cosmic conception of evolution was perfectly familiar to Kant. In fact, Kant was the first to expound it in grand detail (in his Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens), and he therefore cannot have failed to include it mentally in his sweeping assertion that there is a vicious circle in every attempt to found our consciousness of Time on generalisation.
5. Either sexual or asexual (by fissure, etc.), as the case may be.
6. The reader is warned that in interpreting this word in the present volume, he must divest himself of all its magical and thaumaturgical associations. It means nothing but supersensible, rational, or ideal.
7. Again a caution against false associations with this word.
8. It must not be supposed, however, that they do not themselves constitute a system, in which the Good is the organic principle, and this itself the first principle of intelligence.
9. As is maintained also by Professor Joseph Le Conte. See his Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 65. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1892.
10. The reader will notice that all the argumentation which follows really proceeds upon the tacit implication that this intelligent nature is not limited to man, but is, in whatever degree of phenomenal manifestation, common to all living beings. It is stated in terms of human nature, first, because, as brought out below, it is the human being who raises the question here argued, and argues it; and, secondly, because in man alone do we come by the path of experience upon its rounded Type.
11. See Professor Royce in The Conception of God, pp. 322-326. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1897.
12. For the thorough, if unwitting and unwilling, acknowledgment of this by a leading representative of this philosophy, see Professor Royce’s discussion of this question in The Conception of God, pp. 292 f., 305 f., 315 mid. (where the last sentence, if logically legitimate, would read, “The antinomy is [not] solved”), and 321, cf. the foot-note.
13. The reader should beware not to interpret these terms “reception” and “coöperation” literally, that is, in the light of ordinary natural or efficient causation only, as it is our bad uncritical habit to do. Their genuine interpretation must be by means of final cause. But see the essay on “The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom,” pp. 332-351.
14. See his Romanes Lecture on “Evolution and Ethics,” in his Collected Essays, vol. ix; especially pp. 79-84, and Note 20. In these pages and in this Note, their great author holds out for the inclusion of Conscience, in some vague way, in the evolutional process as a whole; but he has demonstrated an antagonism that is fatal to the hypothesis.
15. For one form of the argument here alluded to, see pp. 351-359, below.
16. See, especially, the statement in his contribution to The Conception of God, pp. 75-78.