330 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



takes its stand on the impossibility of explaining the higher from the lower," writes 

 Prof. Pringle-Pattison. It is certain, explanation or no explanation, that the 

 " Idea of God" will be very attenuated if the fundamental process of the universe 

 be not from higher to lower levels. Idealism obviously " takes its stand" on a 

 principle that flatly contradicts all experience. Prof. Pringle-Pattison might try 

 to turn the flank of this argument by suggesting that God and man — to mention 

 one item of the universe — are related as father to child. The father still exists 

 when his child is born ; the infant issues as an inferior from a superior ; the 

 development of the child appears as a growth from a lower to a higher stage. 

 Such an argument, so far as experience is concerned, attaches more significance 

 to an incident of the process than to the process as a whole. The primal fathers 

 of the plain and forest have passed, through the children of thousands of genera- 

 tions, into the fathers of to-day. One set of habits, one set of conceptions, one set 

 of practices and institutions, one set of languages have grown into others and 

 merged in them. When experience is narrowed to a point it may discover a 

 passage from higher to lower ; whenever experience makes a sweep it finds the 

 rivers rising higher than their source. It is possible that the process from lower 

 to higher may be suddenly and permanently inverted at a point. The widest 

 sweep our experience can make, however, has failed to reveal it. Mind has arisen 

 from life and life, apparently, from the non-living. " Both life and self-conscious- 

 ness," Prof. Pringle-Pattison admits, "appear to emerge from antecedent con- 

 ditions in which these distinctive qualities cannot be detected " ; and he adds that 

 he cannot believe that abiogenesis has any philosophical significance. It has one 

 very material bearing on the theistic issue. The growth of the living out of the 

 non-living is, at any rate, very near to the utmost limit of the sweep of experience. 

 That widest sweep still discovers the lower passing into the higher. When the 

 idealist elects to stand on the " impossibility of explaining the higher from the 

 lower," he stands on a speculative construction ; experience gives no warrant for 

 the choice. The theistic hypothesis must involve descent from high to low. 

 Experience insists on the opposite description. The Theist should be able to 

 describe some process of descent : in every region of experience, if that region 

 have any range at all, the run must be described as up and not down. 



" Philosophical criticism is simply the thinking out and setting in a clear light 

 of the conceptions and methods which science actually employs." Science follows 

 closely, though not by any means exclusively, the method of description derived 

 from observation and experience. The survey of evolution discovers "continuity 

 of process and the emergence of real differences " — this process constantly follows 

 an upward path. Theism must suppose that the universe, including man, must be 

 grounded as an inferior in the superiority of God. The contradiction between this 

 supposition and the process as experience constrains us to describe it is a simple 

 matter of fact. It remains true even if " the autonomy of life " supersedes physical 

 and chemical forces. Contrasting organisms as " self-maintaining individuals " 

 with the operations of physics as " only a continuous transmutation of energy " 

 leaves the same fact untouched. Interpreting the facts does not alter them. 

 " Interpreting the more developed by the less developed " may be " logically 

 tantamount to a reduction of the more to the less " ; " The world without con- 

 scious subject" may be "a world waiting for its meaning" ; Theism's speculative 

 reference of the universal process to a source higher than itself contrasts sharply, 

 in spite of these asseverations, with Bosanquet's descriptive resume" that " in 

 apparent cosmic development, whether inorganic, organic, or logical, the rule is 

 for the stream to rise higher than its source." 



