ZOOLOGY, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 



evolutionist has any power by the aid of which it could deduce 

 anything whatever from homogeneity, even if it were present at 

 the beginning. 



There are homogeneous solutions of sugar and homogeneous 

 solutions of brine, and no one without experience of similar facts 

 has any way to tell what potencies are latent in a solution except 

 by finding out. While we find no reason to suppose a homo- 

 geneous saturated solution has any power to initiate anything, 

 we cannot think of it as inert. It is, as it were, alive with energy, 

 and its inactivity is due to the exact balancing of all its powers. 

 It is prepared to spring into energetic action the instant the 

 bonds that chain it are broken by something that disturbs the 

 balance and sets its forces free. 



So, too, the primeval homogeneity of the evolutionist is imagined 

 as instinct with world-producing energy, ready to evolve stars and 

 systems and worlds and oceans and continents and living things and 

 men, and all that is " in the round ocean, and the living air, and the 

 blue sky, and in the mind of man," the instant it is set free; and 

 so on to the end, which will come when all the energy has worked 

 itself out in motion, and all the matter has found rest in stable 

 equilibrium. 



Unless he who worships this idol of the theatre is prepared to 

 assert that there is only one kind of indefinite incoherent homo- 

 geneity; and unless he knows, in some way of which men of science 

 are ignorant, what sort of homogeneous solution our universe was 

 at the beginning ; the only way for him to learn what potencies are 

 latent in it is to find out by studying their products. It is hard to 

 see how he can deduce anything whatever from his necessary law 

 of universal progress except what he discovers. If his premises 

 are admitted, all he can deduce from them regarding our subject 

 is that, if he finds natural selection, the potency of natural selection 

 was latent in his solution. 



The philosophy of evolution is of no more use as a substitute 

 for science than any other system of philosophy, although it is, no 

 doubt, not only the latest, but the most consistent with our know- 

 ledge of nature, and although it may, for all I know to the contrary, 

 be true. All this fails to give it any value as a short cut to natural 

 knowledge. 



