8 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 



that the man of science seems to the unscientific to 

 claim finahty for his results. He himself is the first to 

 point out that dogmatism is unjustified when its asser- 

 tions are not so thoroughly grounded in reasonable fact 

 as to render their contrary unthinkable. He seeks only 

 for truth, realizing that new discoveries must oblige 

 him to amend his statement of the laws of nature with 

 every decade. But the great bulk of knowledge con- 

 cerning life and living forms is so sure that science 

 asserts, with a decision often mistaken for dogmatism, 

 that evolution is a real natural process. 



The conception of evolution in its turn now de- 

 mands a definite description. How are we to regard the 

 material things of the earth? Are they permanent 

 and unchanged since the beginning of time, un- 

 changing and unchangeable at the present? We do 

 not need Herbert Spencer's elaborate demonstration 

 that this is unthinkable, for we all know from daily 

 experience that things do change and that nothing is 

 immutable. Did things have a finite beginning, and 

 have they been '^made" by some supernatural force 

 or forces, personified or impersonal, different from those 

 agencies which we may see in operation at the present 

 time? So says the doctrine of special creation. 

 Finally, we may ask if things have changed as they 

 now change under the influence of what we call the 

 natural laws of the present, and which if they operated in 

 the past would bring the world and all that is therein 

 to be just what we find now. This is the teaching of 

 the doctrine of evolution. It is a simple brief state- 



