EVOLUTION AND TELEOLOGY. 821 



nothing more than development under the action of the laws of 

 Mature imposed by God on the elements in the beginning. It is 

 evolution from lower to higher forms under the action of what St. 

 Thomas calls the Divine Administration, and in consequence of the 

 action of what St. Augustine terms seminal reasons — rationes semi- 

 nales. Absolute creation is direct, immediate, supernatural; de- 

 rivative creation is indirect, and is effected by the Almighty through 

 the agency of secondary causes. In the beginning God created the 

 elements once for all, but on these simple elements he conferred the 

 power of evolving into all the countless forms of beauty which now 

 characterize the organic and inorganic worlds. What, then, the 

 older theologians called secondary or potential creation or formation 

 — development under the guidance of God's providence — we may 

 now call, and with the utmost precision of language, evolution. 

 For God, as St. Augustine observes, did not create animals and 

 plants directly, but potentially and causally — in fieri, in causa; 

 potentialiter atque causaliter. This, however, is theistic evolution, 

 not agnostic evolution which relegates God to the region of the un- 

 knowable; nor atheistic evolution which finds in the chance interac- 

 tion of eternal force and eternal matter an adequate explanation of 

 all the problems of the existing universe. For, let me insist, evolu- 

 tion does not and can not account for the origin of things. The best 

 it can do is to throw some light on their historical development; and 

 this for the simple reason that it does not and can not deal with the 

 origin of things, but only with the modus creandi, or rather with 

 the modus formandi, employed by Omnipotence, after the universe 

 had been called into existence by divine Fiat. " Evolution, then," 

 as I have elsewhere shown,* " postulates creation as an intellectual 

 necessity, for if there had not been a creation there would have been 

 nothing to evolve, and evolution would, therefore, have been an 

 impossibility. 



" And, for the same reason, evolution postulates and must pos- 

 tulate a Creator, the sovereign Lord of all things, the Cause of 

 causes, the terminus a quo as well as the terminus ad quern of all 

 that exists or can exist. But evolution postulates still more. In 

 order that evolution might be at all possible, it was necessary that 

 there should have been not only an antecedent creation ex nihilo, 

 but also that there should have been an antecedent involution or 

 creation in potentia. To suppose that simple brute matter could, 

 by its own motion or by any power inherent in matter as such, have 

 been the sole efficient cause of the evolution of organic from inor- 

 ganic matter, of the higher from the lower forms of life, of the 

 rational from the irrational creature, is to suppose that a thing can 



* Evolution and Dogma, pp. 431, 432. 



