The Christian Faith and Modern Science

A discussion of the present relations between science and the Christian Faith must be very largely a discussion of the theory of evolution. Our age has been called evolution-mad; we can scarcely speak or even think except in biological terms and under biological categories. The evolution theory has influenced every department of thought and even the science of thought itself, and it is often assumed that everything pre-Darwinian must be thrown to the intellectual scrap-heap.

Half a century ago the time was ripe for a new generalization in science which should include the organic world. Newton had extended the reign of mechanism in space, and Lyell, by substituting the uniformitarian for the catastrophic theory of the formation of the earth's crust, had effected the same extension in time. Men's minds had become familiar with the thought of immense reaches of space and of vast periods of time, and with the idea in both spheres of the reign of natural law instead of immediate divine intervention. The Darwinian hypothesis of Natural Selection came as the culmination of this movement of a progressive substitution of a natural for a supernatural explanation of things. The motions of planets and heavenly bodies, the formation of the strata of the earth's crust, and now the kingdom of organic life were brought within the domain of natural and general law.

It is not necessary to describe in detail the ferment in religious thought which followed the publication of the "Origin of Species," 1859; but we may notice briefly the extreme inferences which were drawn unfavourable to religion, and then the inevitable reaction. On the one hand there were loud claims at first that the death-knell of religion had been sounded. A cause other than creation had been discovered for the origin of species and by analogy for other origins formerly assigned to the Creator. Chance, not only blind but apparently cruel, was enthroned in the place of design in the production of the various forms of life. The higher was evolved from the lower, but in a way that gave to the higher the quality of the lower. Man was no longer the child of God, not even the prodigal child. He was the progeny of the brute and shared his destiny. The obligation to be moral, or even decent, had no higher sanction than the fierce struggle for existence. Theism was derived from animal-or ancestor-worship, and had no higher authority or credibility. Man, no longer made in the divine image, could lay no claim to a divine inheritance; not fallen, but rising out of his brute inheritance, he had no need for the divine mercy.

Renan in France, Haeckel in Germany, and Grant Allen in England agreed that religion was doomed.[51] Religious beliefs, according to the last named, were destined "to be entirely discredited as grotesque, fungoid growths which had clustered around the thread of primitive ancestor-worship." Renan inferred as one result of Darwinism the gradual dying out of religion; while the fundamental postulates of religion, God, Freedom and Immortality, were, according to Haeckel, all given the coup de grace. The life of man, entangled by descent with lower orders of being, seemed divorced from the wisdom and purpose of God, and an all-engulfing mechanism threatened to swallow up the hopes and aspirations of mankind. The situation illustrated the statement of Emerson: "The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization."

From this extreme position there was an inevitable reaction. Evolution was seen to present a face not so unfavourable to religion. Origin and destiny were two questions; the higher might be evolved from the lower, but not in such a way as to deprive the higher of its proper quality. If nature and man were so closely related, our idea of the worth of nature could be exalted without depriving man of his dignity. "A man's a man for a' that," whether sprung from the dust of the earth, as had been always held, or derived from organic material below him. An orthodox evolutionist developed a new and powerful argument for immortality; if man had gone so far, why not farther? The meaning of the whole evolutionary process, of the long travail of nature, was obviously, if it had a meaning (and why deny this to our intellectual confusion?), the production of man with his endowments, aspirations and hopes. Descent may become ascent, and the meaning of evolution may well be the development of freedom, and immortality but evolution at the end of its journey. A new and grander teleology was discernible in nature, not seen in the details of its products so much as in the great tendencies and lines of its development and the outworking of its laws. Most impressive of all, it was found that devout Christians, like Charles Kingsley, could become evolutionists without losing their faith; and that evolutionists like Romanes (who had spoken, during his eclipse of faith, of the evolutionary theory as a deluge, "uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless destruction"[52]) could become Christians, or regain their faith, without affecting their scientific views.

With all the problems which evolution has set for religious thought, it should be noticed that it has distinctly relieved the pressure of one difficulty which has been felt, though now much less acutely than formerly, since the time of Copernicus. In the words of Aubrey De Vere:

Life, and life upon the earth, is the centre of attention in the thought of the day. With the physicist who sees the promise and potency of all terrestrial life in the primitive star-dust, with the biologist who speaks of the fitness of the environment to sustain life, or with the philosopher who sees in the vital impulse the most important thing in the history of the universe, the viewpoint is necessarily biocentric. Yet it has been pointed out that the sum of organized matter "is but an atom in the mass of the solar system, it occupies but a moment in its duration; it has hardly a place in space; it is but a temporary film on one of the smaller planets. It can exist only in a very small part of the scale of temperatures through which the spheres pass from their first to their last state. Set against the visible universe it is as near to nothing as we can well conceive anything to be."[53] A distinguished evolutionist has developed an argument to prove that the earth alone in the solar system or elsewhere fulfills the conditions of the existence of any high form of life.[54] It is not necessary to estimate the value of Wallace's argument in order to emphasize, from an evolutionary point of view, the importance of life and of man in the universe. If the standpoint of science to-day is frankly biocentric, in spite of the insignificant bulk of organized matter, religious thought need not be accused of provincialism because it is anthropocentric in its interest.

In studying a little more closely the religious bearings of evolution, it will be convenient to notice, I. The Method of Evolution, or the biological discussion; II. The Meaning of Evolution, or the philosophical discussion; and III. Theism and Evolution, or the more directly religious aspects of the theory.

I. The Method of Evolution

While there is general agreement among biologists that species have been derived from one another by natural causes, there is a wide diversity of opinion as to the method by which this result has been brought about. Darwin's theory of natural selection has a struggle for existence of its own, a fight for life with other evolutionary theories. Emphatic protests are made from the side of experimental biology (de Vries), of paleontology (Osborn), and of philosophical evolution (Bergson) against the Darwinian hypothesis that the selection of minute fortuitous variations can account for the rise of new species or explain the great lines of development. It is only necessary to read the two volumes published in England and America[55] in honour of the hundredth anniversary of Darwin's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the "Origin of Species" to see that scientific opinion upon the question of the method of evolution is widely divided.

In Biblical language, the question of the hour in biology is, Who (or what) made thee to differ? "It is the question," in the words of C. H. Eigenmann, "of how the straight line of exact hereditary repetition may be caused to swerve in a definite direction to reach an adaptive point. This is the question of the present generation, perhaps of the entire twentieth century."[56]

The Newton of biology, who will discover the laws of variation and heredity, has not, it is safe to say, yet appeared. Variation in a definite direction in virtue of an internal tendency in the organism (NÄgeli); variation in response to the specific stimulus of the environment (Eimer); variation due, at least in animals, to the conscious effort of the individual (Lamarck); variation inciting a corresponding strengthening of parts of the individual organism, until time should be given for hereditary strengthening of these parts (organic selection as taught by Baldwin, Osborn and Lloyd Morgan); variation due to the preservation and accumulation of minute fluctuations by natural selection (Darwinism in its usual form); variation from unknown causes suddenly and discontinuously (the mutationism of de Vries); variation due to a mystical vital impulse in organic life as a whole (the creative evolution of Bergson):—no one of these views, if we take scientific opinion as a whole, can be said to have torn aside the veil behind which nature carries on her creative works.

The most notable attempt to supplement and strengthen the theory of natural selection has been made by Weismann in his theory of Germinal Selection. In Weismann's hypothesis, which has furnished in a sense the philosophical basis for the popular Eugenics movement, the struggle for existence is transferred to a struggle among the constituents of the germ-plasm. The minute invisible "determinants" of the germ-plasm, which give rise to the variations in the organ, or cell, which they determine, are unequally nourished by the nutritive stream. A determinant at first favoured by chance may at length gain strength actively to nourish itself to the detriment of its fellow-determinants, and thus attain a permanent upward movement. With Weismann the fluctuations within the germ-plasm "are the real root of all hereditary variations, and the preliminary condition for the occurrence of the Darwin-Wallace factor of selection." The struggle for existence, or the struggle for possession of the mate in sexual selection, practically goes back to "the struggle between the determinants within the germ-plasm"[57] for food and space.

Let us see how this theory of determinants will apply to the famous case of the antlers of the elk or stag. The antlers would increase in size, in this case, only because the determinants, corresponding in the germ-plasm to the antlers in the adult organism, attracted nourishment to themselves, and withdrew it to a certain extent from their fellows. Instead, therefore, of a corresponding strengthening in the whole anterior half of the animal, which Weismann admits would be necessary,[58] we should have, with the increased weight of the antlers, a decrease in weight and strength of other parts of the body. The problem, instead of being solved, seems to be involved in deeper mystery, and there will be hesitation in accepting the statement that "thus in our time the great riddle has been solved—the riddle of the origin of what is suited to its purpose without the coÖperation of purposive forces."[59] T. H. Morgan thinks it unfortunate that Weismann should seek to supply the deficiencies of Darwin's theory by new speculative matter skilfully removed from the field of verification.[60]

Biologists are generally agreed in holding the doctrine of "descent with modifications," but there is no agreement as to the method by which variations in species are brought about. Bateson even declares that "evolutionary orthodoxy developed too fast," and that "the time is not ripe for the discussion of the origin of species."[61] S. Herbert concludes: "In short, while natural selection can be looked upon as the efficient cause of the progress of evolutionary lines, their first beginnings must still be attributed to a still 'unknown factor in evolution.'"[62]

The neo-Darwinian who sees in the accumulation of minute chance variations a sufficient explanation of the origin of species, cannot be said to hold the field in such a way as to call for the unquestioning acceptance of his views by the lay public; far less need the more remote philosophical inferences sometimes drawn from his premises be accepted without challenge as the teaching of science. While the central mystery, in the opinion of leading biologists, remains unsolved in the biological field, evolution or natural selection should be used with caution as the solvent of all the problems of the universe. The masterkey should first unlock the doors nearer home.

II. The Meaning of Evolution

The more philosophical discussion of the Meaning of Evolution includes in its scope the questions of mechanism and design and of preformation and epigenesis.

1. Is the doctrine of evolution a foe to design, or does evolution make more teleology than it destroys? Let us assume for the present the neo-Darwinian position, and ask whether design can be excluded, first from the organic world without man, and then from the organic world including man. The whole system of things so ordered that through the operation of the laws of variability, struggle for existence, inheritance, elimination and selection, there should be worked out the myriad forms of life in ever increasing complexity, calls more loudly for the postulate of intelligence than do the special contrivances and adaptations in nature when viewed from the standpoint of their separate origin. If Paley's watch calls for a watchmaker, a system or arrangement of nature which has been likened, not to a simple watch, but rather to a watch (or a sundial) which makes all other watches, and these watches of a constantly improved quality and increased complexity, cannot permanently be regarded in any other than a teleological light. If the whole process should prove to be mechanical, the evidence for design is seen even more strikingly in the complex machinery itself than in the product.

Huxley says that "there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution."[63] When A. R. Wallace at first argued that many of the characteristic human qualities were not due to natural selection, because of no value in the struggle for existence,[64] his view incurred the ridicule of his critics, who interpreted it to mean that "our brains are made by God and our lungs by natural selection." After forty years of reflection, Wallace now takes a broader view of the place of purpose in evolution, and says: "I now uphold the doctrine that not man alone, but the whole World of Life, in almost all its varied manifestations, leads us to the same conclusion—that to afford any rational explanation of its phenomena, we require to postulate the continuous action and guidance of higher intelligences; and further, that these have probably been working towards a single end, the development of intellectual, moral, and spiritual beings."[65] A distinguished biologist has said that "to believe that all the countless myriads of centres of coÖperation and coÖrdination which have been required for this cosmos could have been originated and maintained by unintelligent force acting fortuitously makes an immensely greater strain upon faith than the alternative hypothesis."[66]

The teleological argument has shown of late unusual vitality, and its renewed support has come, singularly enough, from the evolutionary quarter. Thus L. J. Henderson, inquiring into the biological significance of the properties of matter, concludes that "the process of cosmic (inorganic) evolution is indissolubly linked with the fundamental characteristics of the organism; that logically, in some obscure manner, cosmic and biological evolution are one."[67] The biologist, he thinks, "may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric."[68] Wallace, in his "World of Life," draws the inference which Henderson suggests but, as a scientist, feels that he cannot adopt: "The remote but more fundamental cause [of the living world], which has been comparatively little attended to, is the existence of a special group of elements possessing such exceptional and altogether extraordinary properties as to render possible the existence of vegetable and animal life-forms." These elements are like the fuel, iron and water in a steam-engine. "We may presume that the Mind which first caused these elements to exist, and built them up into such marvellous living, moving, self-supporting, and self-reproducing structures, must be many million times greater than those which conceived and executed the modern steam-engine."[69]

It does not appear, then, that biological evolution at all necessitates the acceptance of a mechanical view of the universe from which the action of purpose is excluded. Protests against such a view have, in fact, been coming of late from the scientific philosophers and the philosophical scientists. Bergson, a type of the former, insists that spontaneity, movement, indeterminateness are the differentia of life. Among the scientists, Ostwald thinks that an absolutely determined world is not the real world, but an ideal world;[70] and Sir O. Lodge speaks of the theory that everything in the world is mechanically determined as a "modern superstition."[71] How is the southward flight of the bird and its return in the spring to its own nest, or the journey of an eel thousands of miles up an inland river and its return thence to spawn in the deep waters of the ocean, to be explained as the result of purely mechanical causes? Driesch insists that the chemical-physical processes "do not constitute life, they are used by life."[72]

The mechanical interpretation of things, however useful for some purposes it may be, appears increasingly thin and ghostly as we advance into the realms of life, consciousness and freedom. It becomes a caricature of reality. It is not merely a colourless photograph as over against a portrait—everything reduced to black and white; but it is like an X-ray photograph of a living man, a mere skeleton without flesh and blood. Mechanism is independent of time, but time is, in a sense, of the essence of the organism. The mechanical movement can be reversed, while life processes are irreversible.

The life and career of a great scientist such as Pasteur, it has been said, is a more impressive evidence of design than any adduced by Paley and the Bridgwater treatises.[73] Man has been called "Nature's rebel," and the endowments of man and his achievements in controlling nature and understanding nature are a disturbing element in any theory which would exclude the operation of intelligence from the course of evolution. Romanes tells us: "When I wrote the preceding treatise ["The Candid Examination"], I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of human nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in an inquiry touching Theism."[74]

The drama of evolution as unfolded by science inevitably suggests that in the fortunes and life of humanity is to be heard the motif of nature's music, unless indeed all is chaos and discord. The diapason ends full in man, or rather begins in man and the history of his life upon the earth. It may still be believed—because of evolution avowedly, or in spite of evolution—that man is a happy or an unhappy accident, a sport, a monstrosity, the miscarriage of an ape, a faux pas of nature, the strangest event in a purposeless series; or man may be regarded, with much to support such an interpretation, as the intended goal of evolution, giving significance, rationality and purpose to the whole history. However slow and gradual the steps by which man has been produced, and however mechanical in one aspect the process, it may be insisted that a mechanism so perfect as to produce the varied forms of organic life, culminating in man, with his mental and moral endowments, is as strong evidence as could be produced of purpose as the ultimate and only explanation of the mechanism.

Certainly the difficulty of evolving the fit from the fortuitous becomes accentuated when man is included within the series. Man, a purposive and moral being, sees in himself and the structure of his mind and the experience of his life the crowning evidence of the action of purpose. If the cause must be adequate to produce the effect, man cannot regard himself as the product of an accidental or mechanical process from whose inception and operation the action of intelligence is excluded. In a word, a purposive being cannot have been the result of a purposeless process.

It is significant that those who have interpreted evolution to the masses have quite uniformly done so in terms of progress. But progress is a teleological conception. In a world where atoms shift unceasingly, but without the guidance of intelligence or will, there may be change but there will be no progress; for one arrangement of atoms will be as high in the scale of values as another. Evolutionists who, as evolutionists, are inspired with an ideal of human progress must in some sense be finalists. If the history of the world and of man presents any real progress, it can only be because it is in so far an expression of purpose.

2. It is an example of what Cardinal Newman called the development of doctrine that the theory of Evolution has come to mean, in popular regard, quite the opposite of what it meant etymologically or in the mind of its early advocates. Evolution means the unfolding of what was enfolded, either in primordial living germs or, to go still further back, in the primitive star-dust. Whatever is in the product must be read back into the elements from which it emerged, and a complete knowledge of these elements and their properties would thus disclose potencies for the production, under suitable conditions, of the completed development.

A glance, almost at random, at current literature in which the conception of evolution is employed in philosophical and theological discussion, shows that the theory has suffered a sea-change. It has now come to mean, to many who use it freely, not the unfolding of the implicit, but the production or appearance of something essentially new, a creative synthesis or epigenesis. Bergson, James Ward, Baron von HÜgel and Loisy are among those who use the term in this sense. Thus the last named writer says: "That which constitutes man as a human being is that which he possesses more than the beasts, and not that which he possesses in common with them. From the fact that humanity proceeds from animality, it does not follow that it is explained and defined altogether by animality, otherwise evolution must be denied."[75]

This modification of meaning is important when the doctrine of evolution is extended downward into the inorganic sphere. Since species are derived from one another, it used to be argued, life must be derived from the lifeless; and it is obvious that if this process is pursued it will lead to an infinite regress. We go back from the civilized to the savage, from the conscious to the unconscious, from the organic to the inorganic, till finally the evolution of the atom becomes the problem of problems. We go back in an infinite regress, approaching the ideal limit: In the beginning, nothing. The goal would seem to be the evolution of primitive matter out of nothing, as Alfred Noyes has suggested in his poem, "The Origin of Life":

The principle of continuity urges the evolutionist to extend his theory downward into the inorganic world and upward into the sphere of the moral and the spiritual. At the crucial points of the origin of life and of the human race, the advocate of preformation has greater difficulty than the supporter of epigenesis or creative evolution, which is a sort of rapprochement between evolutionism and creationism. Let us see how the case stands at present as regards the origin of life and the origin of man.

Life may be generated any day in the laboratory, but as yet this has not been done.[76] In fact so great are the difficulties that Arrhenius thinks that there was no beginning of life, life being eternal and persisting, in spite of acknowledged scientific difficulties in the conception, amid the vicissitudes of cosmic changes and flights through interstellar space.[77] Weismann does not think that a living germ could be conveyed in the crevices of meteorites to our planet, because "it could neither endure the excessive cold nor the absolute desiccation to which it would be exposed in cosmic space, which contains absolutely no water. This could not be endured even for a few days, much less for immeasurable periods of time."[78]

Lord Kelvin will not go as far as Arrhenius, but believes that a meteorite brought the first living germs to this planet. K. Pearson thinks that under favourable conditions in the remote past life arose, but arose only once, out of the non-living.[79] The bridge was so slender that it was crossed but once under imaginary conditions not controllable by experiment; and as a unique event even in imaginary history it cannot be said to be subject to any general law. It is questionable, in fact, whether in scientific merit the hypothesis is superior to that of special creation.

Dr. SchÄfer sees this and points it out very clearly in his Presidential Address.[80] A scientific account of the origin of life must refer it to causes operating to-day; so, instead of Arrhenius' eternity of life, or of Pearson's spontaneous production of life but once under inaccessible conditions, or Lord Kelvin's meteoric conveyance of life, he believes that life is constantly being produced, and has always been produced, from certain colloidal substances which he describes. But what has become of all this life, constantly generated? He admits there is trace of only one paleontological series. While assuming that it is the nature of life to evolve, he admits that there is no evidence accessible to the senses or discerned as yet by the most delicate instruments for the existence of these countless beginnings of life. The real question then concerns not this kind of life, which eye hath not seen, but the origin of the life which we know, and whose marvellous development evolution traces. Ostwald thinks that "it is undecided whether originally there were one or several forms from which the present forms sprang, nor is it known how life first made its appearance on earth. So long as the various assumptions with regard to this question have not led to decisive, actually demonstrable differences in the results, a discussion of it is fruitless, and therefore unscientific."[81]

A comparison has often been drawn between the birth of the individual and that of the race. Theologians have discussed the question whether the child in his spiritual nature is to be referred to a special act of creative power, or whether all of his endowments are derived from his parents.

To the poet the birth of the child suggests the presence of forces other than those of the seen and temporal. The new life is "out of the deep, from the true world, within the world we see." Its roots are in another dimension of being than that of nature or the world of time and sense. In moments of insight, "though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither."

Again to the philosopher there is in the individual something indescribable, unique, not to be compressed within the compass of any general law, something in each individual which his ancestry or antecedents will not explain nor his environment produce.[82]

Says a distinguished professor of biology[83]: "Familiarity with development does not remove the real mystery which lies back of it. The development of a human being, of a personality, from a germ cell seems to me the climax of all wonders, greater even than that involved in the evolution of a species or the making of a world." He remarks that "if personality is determined by heredity alone, all teaching, preaching, government, is useless." The only hope for the race, he says, is in eugenics—always supposing that enough freedom is left to carry out its program.

If the birth of the individual and the full story of his origin is thus enveloped in mystery for theologian, poet, philosopher and even scientist, it is not to be expected that the problem of the origin of the human race can be solved by a neat formula. Here the mystery of the birth of the individual from parents of the same species is intensified many fold. Here the problems of mind and body, of their genetic and metaphysical relations to each other, and of the ultimate relation of the spirit world to each, press for solution before there can be any full and final answer to the question of the origin of man. Is it any wonder that the single occurrence upon which was based the birth of all future generations which have peopled the earth should be thought to involve more than can be included in any scientific hypothesis?[84]

When we seek to interpret these critical points in the history of the world, such as the origin of life and of man, two roads are open before us. We may emphasize, with the advocates of preformation, the principle of continuity alone; and, explaining the higher by the lower, we may go back as Mr. Noyes would carry us, back on the dwindling track, explaining civilization by savagery, the non-moral by the moral, the conscious by the unconscious, the living by the non-living. In this process, it has been often pointed out, there lurks a sort of generatio Æquivoca; primitive star-dust is endowed with the attributes of life, of consciousness, and even of purpose and morality. Thus J. A. Thomson says that "if we see any good reason for believing in the erstwhile origin of the living from the not-living, we give a greater continuity to the course of events, and we must again read something into the common denominator of science—Matter, Energy, and the Ether. We have already read into this Wonder and Mystery, Harmony and Order, and we must now read into it—Progress and, from a philosophical standpoint, Purpose."[85]

The objection will be made that to regard the primitive atoms or cells as practically self-preserving, self-repairing and self-improving, the fountain of all life, of all consciousness and morality and civilization, is to endow these entities with attributes that are manifestly inappropriate.

Seeing the difficulties of a theory of evolution based upon the principle of continuity alone, we may emphasize, with many popular interpreters, not so much this principle of continuity, as that of progress. Evolution would then mean not a mere shifting of the elements, a redistribution of matter and motion, but a creative synthesis, an epigenesis. It will then mean, not "There is nothing new under the sun," but rather, "What next?" The descent of man will no longer suggest the inference that as the progeny of the brute man must share his destiny, but rather the thought that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

But how to explain the new element which has arisen, not out of, but alongside of, the others? We would not be content to say, "Now the inorganic elements incapable of producing life; and now, presto! living matter;" for this after all would be a break in continuity not explained, and would lead once more to a sort of creation ex nihilo. The necessities of the case seem to call for some new conception which shall unite the two great principles of continuity and progress.

III. Theism and Evolution

We have reached the point where it can be seen that evolution, when elevated from a biological hypothesis into a theory of the universe, is in need of the theistic postulate in order to make it workable. Theism, in fact, offers a twofold advantage to the evolution theory. It satisfies the causal demand, and it furnishes the means of combining the two ideas of continuity and progress which have impressed themselves so deeply upon the mind of our generation.

In the first place it satisfies the causal demand. If evolution is but the unfolding of the implicit, as the preformation view would have it, an explanation is naturally sought for the marvellous properties of the original star-dust, or mind-stuff, or the primordial living germ. The more mechanical the interpretation of the course of things becomes, the more insistent, again, will be the questions, Who made the mechanism? Who drives the mechanism? Even from the standpoint of epigenesis, the appearance of an entirely new element, which by hypothesis is not merely implicit in the previous state of things, must be referred to some adequate cause or ground. Evolution, in any of its forms, is the name of a method rather than of a cause; and "logic compels the evolutionist to assume a force that was not evolved, but which existed before evolution began."[86]

If we interpret the power behind evolution in a theistic sense, and believe that God is immanent in nature and in the life of man, we are not absolved from the task of tracing as far as possible the natural history of life and mind, but we may view that history from a standpoint from which both origin and progressive development become intelligible. No scientific hypothesis is able in itself to carry us all the way from "concentrating nebulÆ to the thoughts of poets." A theory of the universe which shall do justice to the conceptions both of continuity and progress can best be framed with the aid of the category of purpose.

The continuity is preserved in the unity of the developing plan, no stage of which is sudden or abrupt, but is related "filially" to the stage and the stages which preceded. The relation between two stages is not like that between the two members of an equation, a relation of exact equivalence between the evolved and the involved. There is a really new element in the later stage if there is a real progress. But the new factor comes not in dramatic or spectacular fashion; it comes without observation, and comes not to destroy but to fulfill.

If the evolution theory is to cover the whole history of the world and of man, it must be hospitable to the ideas both of continuity and progress. An interpretation of evolution so framed would be opposed, indeed, to the conception of a Creator touching the world only with His finger-tips, and exhausting His creative power in its initial exercise. It would be opposed to materialistic monism, as well as to an idealistic or pantheistic monism which would reduce the evolutionary and historic process to mere appearance. Evolution in its theistic construction sees in the lower orders of existence and in the earlier stages of life the promise, but not the potency, of the higher. It assumes the existence of a power immanent in the universe and adequate to account for the appearance of new forces. It can interpret alike the continuity of the evolutionary process, and the appearance once for all in the irreversible moments of progress of new forms and forces of life. It admits the possibility of the appearance of new spiritual forces in the course of history, and opens a vista of illimitable progress.

No one was more certain than Huxley, when speaking of the relation of man to the lower animals, that "whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them."[87] Man's peculiar endowments, his sense of law and beauty, his spiritual capacities and aspirations, all of these, if laws of analogy and causation are to hold, point to a different dimension of being from that of nature below him. If "man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin,"[88] he bears in the framework of his mind and moral nature the indelible stamp of his spiritual origin. His spiritual endowments can find their explanation only in a spiritual world. They have arisen, not from the lair of the wild beast, but rather from the bosom of God. No ascertained fact of science, nor any legitimate or necessary inference from any such fact, forbids the affirmation of faith, "It is He that hath made us," and "we are His people."

With each advance of science the thoughts of men are disturbed. The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo seemed to destroy the foundations of the Christian, or even the theistic, view of the world; but the astronomer to-day can see anew God's glory in the heavens and more impressive evidence of His greatness and majesty. When Newton's laws of motion displaced the idea that the planets were conveyed about their orbits by angelic beings, it was feared that atheism was the logical inference. But Newton himself remained a devout theist, and even Voltaire, his admirer, was ready

So when evolution, through the genius of Darwin, came into popular discussion and acceptance, it was feared that chance had been enthroned in the universe, and that religion was destined to extinction. But in the progress of the evolution theory, as its advocates have split into various camps, the sense of the mystery in the origins and laws of the organic world has deepened, and many can see in nature the evidence of a diviner wisdom than before.

Dr. SchÄfer in his presidential address before the British Association, in 1912, spoke in one sense of the continuity of life, giving to it what seemed like a mechanical or materialistic interpretation. The following presidential address, by Sir Oliver Lodge, spoke of the continuity of life in another sense, a continuation of life after death; and argued that mechanism is inadequate to explain the facts of life, and asserted that "genuine religion has its roots deep down in the heart of humanity, and in the reality of things." At each stage of advance in science, says a recent writer, "this joyful overestimate of the possibilities of mechanism becomes a marked feature of contemporary thought. As each piece of knowledge becomes assimilated, it is seen that the old problems are in their essence unaltered; the poet, the seer and the mystic again come to their own, and, in new language, and from a higher ground of vantage, proclaim their message to mankind."[89]

The horizons of mystery are not at the confines of telescopic vision, or at the far boundaries of the material universe, but are in the objects which are most familiar, in the meanest flower that blows, in the minutest seed and in the smallest atom. As the poet finds in the flower thoughts too deep for tears, so the scientist sees in it problems too vast and far-reaching for human comprehension. He can see in the very atom minute solar systems, and in electricity a mystery lying at the very heart of material things.

It is the paradox of science that the more the world is understood, the deeper does the mystery of its existence become. With the enlarging boundaries of knowledge there is a growing appreciation of mysteries perhaps insoluble which lie beyond. Science, in fact, only deals with the connections of things, and the processes by which they came to be what they are, but not with the ultimate origins and the final ends. The deeper study of nature will lead men, we may believe, in the future as it has done in the past, to the reverent attitude of a Kepler, a Newton, a Clerk-Maxwell, and a Lord Kelvin. They will see in the bird's feather and the butterfly's wing, in the constitution of the cell and the atom, in the stellar universe and the mind of man, evidences of creative Power and Purpose; and, turning from the study of nature, will exclaim, "How wonderful are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all!"

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