CHAP. XV.] THE PEDIGREE AND ORIGIN OF THE CAT 527 



that experience. Now tlic highest entities thus known to us are 

 human intellect and human will. Besides these, we know only the 

 merely animal, the vegetal, and the inorganic worlds. Should 

 we then imagine the Universal First Cause in terms of some gas or 

 some merely physical force .^ Such a conception has but to bo 

 stated to show its absurdity. But if we attribute to the Great Cause, 

 active in organic nature, an activity which is intelligent in its 

 results, but not in itself — not in the agency which produces those 

 results — we thereby attribute to it a sort of imtinct, and, in order to 

 avoid the error of anthropojuovphism, we fall into the vastly greater, 

 and more absurd, error oi zoomorphism ! 



We have no choice, then, but to imagine this Great Cause in 

 terms derived from human nature while confessing their inadequacy 

 and being careful to render them as little inadequate as is possible, 

 by considering all that is positive in them as raised to infinity, and 

 at the same time eliminating from the conception all that is negative 

 and imperfect. 



When, however, extending our view over the whole of Nature, 

 we include in our study man's faculty of apprehending truth, good- 

 • ness, and beauty, together with his wonderful power of occasionally 

 controlling by his free will his own thoughts, desires, and actions, and 

 so actively intervening in the chain of physical causation, the idea of 

 the first cause as God becomes evident to the mind ; nor can it bo 

 rejected without self-stultification. The denial of the validity of 

 this inference involves a negation of facts and of intellectual prin- 

 ciples, which negation carried out to its logical consequences destroys 

 itself by the sceptical destruction of those very premises on which 

 that denial must itself repose. 



The philosopher then has the strongest possible ground for affirm- 

 ing (in reply to the question as to the cause of Psychogenesis) that 

 in the process of evolution we have evidence of the activity of a 

 Great First Cause, ever and always operating throughout nature in 

 a manner hidden indeed from the eye of sense, but clearly mani- 

 fested to the intellectual vision of every unprejudiced mind. This 

 action is that secondary or derivative creation,* "per temponim 

 moras,'' distinguished by St. Augustine, from that instantaneous 

 primary creation which took place, " potentialiter atque causalifer," 

 in the beginning. Thus a belief in '' evolution " far from leading to 

 a denial of " creation," distinctly affirms it. 



Indeed the candid study even of merely organic life makes 

 evident the logical need which exists for the Thcistic conception. 

 The course of individual development as it goes on in every kitten, 

 shows the existence of a fnal, no less tban of an efficient cause of 

 the developmental process. Anyone who would pretend that the 

 mere conflict of independent efficient causes can produce a co-ordi- 

 nated series of effects, resulting in the attainment of a definite end, 

 which they have all concurred to produce, would certainly go against 



* See "Lessons from Nature," p. 429. 



