LIFE 353 



accepted as part of a conceptual model of the universe ; 

 it cannot serve — like the formula of evolution, for 

 example — as a means of linking together phases of our 

 perceptual experience : it would not bring unity into the 

 phenomena of life nor enable us to economise thought. 

 Had the universe been created, just as it is, yesterday, the 

 scientific mind would describe and classify its immediate 

 sense-impressions and its stored sense-impresses far better 

 by aid of the theory of evolution than by aid of a " special 

 creation," and in this sense science cannot accept the 

 hypothesis of a special creation as any contribution to 

 knowledge at all. Knowledge is the description in 

 conceptual shorthand of the various phases of our 

 perceptual experience, and the very statement of the 

 hypothesis — as " the operation in time of some ultra- 

 scientific cause " ^ — shows us that we have gone beyond 

 knowledge, and are metaphysically separating time from 

 perception and projecting causation beyond the sphere 

 of sense-impression (p. 156). 



The history of human thought shows us that at 

 whatever stage men's power of describing the sequence 

 of phenomena fails, that is, wherever their knowledge 

 ends and their ignorance begins, there, to fill the place of 

 the unknown antecedent, they call in a " special creation " 

 or an " ultra-scientific cause." To the untrained minds of 

 earlier ages this cloak to ignorance seemed natural enough^ 

 but in a scientific age it is only an excuse for intellectual 

 inertia ; it shows that we have given up trying to know, 

 where to strive to know is the first duty of science. For 

 many centuries a seven days' creation of the world sufficed 

 to screen our ignorance of the physical history of the 

 earth, and of organic evolution, or the origin of species. 

 On these points science is now perfectly definite, but it 

 has had a hard struggle to get rid of the obstacles across 

 the path of knowledge. The scrubby plantation by which 

 mythology sought to screen human ignorance had become 



1 This form of the statement is due to Sir G. G. Stokes : On the 

 Beneficial Effects of Light, p. 85. (Third Course of Buraett Lectures.) 

 London, 1887. 



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