612 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



cannot have been evoked by organic selection from the primitive 

 forms of loyalty. Granting, if only for the sake of argument, 

 that our highest ethical ideals have no survival value, Theism 

 is not the only alternative to selection, though Mr. Balfour here, 

 as elsewhere, reduces the alternatives to these two. The highest 

 ethical ideals may be greatly valued ; but their value in our eyes 

 does not, any more than the value of the highest aesthetic ideals, 

 logically include the inference that it was intentionally bestowed. 

 There is no logical compulsion to believe that " Selection must 

 be treated as an instrument of purpose, not simply as its mimic." 

 The term " mimic " begs the whole question. Our valuation of 

 a result does not make it a " mimic " of a purpose. Why, 

 again, should our " noblest ideals lose all power of appeal " 

 because we were not actually intended to have them ? The 

 simple fact that noble ideals do appeal to us has no obvious 

 connection with a divine design that this appeal should exist. 



After aesthetic and moral values, intellectual values. The 

 discussion of these culminates in a subsumption of all values 

 under the doctrine of congruity. There must be a congruous 

 origin for the maintenance of " the value of our highest beliefs 

 and emotions. Beauty must be more than an accident. The 

 source of morality must be moral. The source of knowledge 

 must be rational." A source that is rational, moral, and capable 

 of originating beauty is — Theism. 



This " Doctrine of Congruity " is simply another name for 

 the prepossession, or indurated prejudice, of the reflective 

 human mind that the effect cannot be superior to, or essentially 

 different from, its cause or series of causes. Stated in one of 

 its simplest forms, this prejudice is equivalent to the assumption 

 that to every item in the effect there corresponds a similar item 

 in the cause. It is a product of reflection, for in the naiveness 

 of primary experience there may be great unlikeness between 

 producer and produced. Thales regarded water as the parent 

 of all, rational and non-rational. The egg is an unconscious 

 body, while the chick is both conscious and intelligent. Ra- 

 tional humans develop from infants that are little more than 

 bundles of vague feelings and sensations, and spring, in their 

 turn, from germs devoid not merely of intelligence but of con- 

 sciousness itself. There is but little apparent equivalence 

 between the death of a man and the flight of a bullet, between 



