358 RAYMOND J. NOGAR 



of the evolutionary process. The fact that he goes so far as to 

 label any opposition either " lower superstition " or " higher 

 superstition " is of rhetorical importance, manifesting clearly 

 the personal philosophical intensity of his vie\vs/° 



It is crucial to evolutionary analysis to detect the steps which 

 are taken in the mental process by which what is known about 

 prehistory can be gradually universalized into a philosophical 

 principle of cosmic development without even noticing the ille- 

 gitimate inference. In a restricted sense, evolution can be called 

 a fact, but we must have a care for equivocation. In no sense 

 is evolution a law of the cosmos; it cannot be so generalized. 

 Here the false step is taken: 



For, where comparative anatomy offers only probability, paleon- 

 tology brings certitude. Paleontology becomes, because of the 

 breadth of its conclusions, a truly philosophical science.^ 



76 



By some giant mutation of insight, science demonstrates that 

 the historical process is immanently necessitated by the physi- 

 cal properties of the elements to produce increasing complexi- 

 ties, and that is simply all there is to the process. What began 

 as scientific prehistory has suddenly become a life-philosophy 

 of historicism, and its basis is " a necessary inference from sci- 

 ence itself." A biological theory has become a monistic, mecha- 

 nistic, historicist, life-philosophy of the cosmos by an illogical 

 leap that remains to most observers completely undetected. 

 Huxley finds it easy to draw this conclusion from the scientific 

 findings of prehistory: 



All reality is in a perfectly proper sense evolution, and its essen- 

 tial features are to be sought not in the analysis of static structures 

 or reversible changes but through the study of the irrevocable 

 patterns of evolutionary transformations." 



" " The World Into Which Darwin Led Us," ed. cit., p. 973. 



^* M. Vandel, quoted by Msgr. B. de Solages, " Christianity and Evolution," 

 translated by H. Blair for Cross Currents from the Bulletin de Litterature Ecclesi- 

 astique, no. 4, 1947. 



'''Review of Life of the Past by G. G. Simpson, Scientific American, CLXXXIX 

 (1953), 88. 



