THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



physical phenomena are limited by time and space 

 while thought is not; to transcend the laws of time 

 and space is the definition of a miracle. The judge- 

 ment of Sir Thomas Browne is far clearer than theirs, 

 when he says of his own life that: "It is a miracle of 

 thirty years, which to relate, were not a History, but 

 a piece of Poetry, and would sound to common ears 

 like a Fable." Life and thought are the great mys- 

 teries of the universe which can be explained only by 

 themselves. To talk of the evolution of thought from 

 sea-slime to the amoeba, and from the amoeba to a 

 self-conscious, thinking man, means nothing; it is the 

 easy solution of the thoughtless mind. 



We have already compared the philosophies of 

 monism and dualism and have shown that the earlier 

 Greek thinkers attempted to define all phenomena in 

 terms of a single fundamental principle. Some as- 

 sumed the arche to be the essence of life, and others, 

 that things, animate and inanimate, were reducible 

 to atoms and motion. Then came Plato and Aristotle, 

 who cut the knot by affirming that we cannot do more 

 than to interpret the phenomena of life in terms of 

 life, and those of material things in terms of matter. 

 The organic body is material, but the organic per- 

 sonality is immaterial and the most we can do is to 

 discover the mutual reactions of the one on the other. 

 As Aristotle sums it up: the dead man differs from 

 the living man by something else than chemical 



C 244 3 



