THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



Even Spencer, who founds his philosophy on ag- 

 nosticism, is forced to pass from the negation of 

 knowledge to the a priori postulation of universal 

 truths. He denies a God and postulates an Inscrutable 

 Power or Absolute Unknowable as a positive creator 

 of law and order; he denies absolute knowledge and 

 proposes a Universal Postulate of truth. 



The only criterion of the Truth which this advo- 

 cate of observation and reason can give us is: "The 

 test by which, in the last resort, I determine whether 

 a belief is one I must perforce accept, is that of try- 

 ing whether it is possible to reject it — whether it is 

 possible to conceive its negation. In other words, the 

 inconceivability of its negation is my ultimate cri- 

 terion of a certainty."^'' On this standard of certainty 

 we may easily base the certainty of free-will, for on 

 the inconceivability of its negation has been judged 

 the life of every man and the history of human so- 

 ciety both by the humanists and by the Evolutionists 

 themselves. 



I confess to a sly pleasure in the idea that even 

 Haeckel, Huxley, and mechanistic monists of all 

 shades of that stupefying doctrine unconsciously pre- 

 serve in their subliminal minds a modicum of belief, 

 or rather an unalterable faith, that the machine of the 

 universe is under the control of an inscrutable En- 

 gineer who controls its actions and guides the world 

 perhaps beneficently or perhaps ruthlessly, and who 



"^^Autobiography, vol. I, p. 484. 



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