3i6 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



example, as if it were true that elements are composed of atoms having certain 

 characters. The dispersal of the myth which had provided the primitive 

 mind with an interpretive context, with its C and D, showed that the mere 

 AS IF link did not confer truth on that interpretive context. Myths were n ot 

 true, though it had been possible to express phenomena as if they were. 

 When other interpretive contexts, corpuscular theories for example, were 

 substituted for the mythological, the ingrained dogmatic habit constantly 

 tended to rest belief on them : belief tended to exchange for a mjrthological 

 context another context because the as if connection commended its truth. 

 The critical habit, prominent in Greeek thought, which reaUsed that C and D 

 need not be true because A and B happen as if they were, had a long struggle 

 to impose itself. It has secured its position in modern thought, though, like 

 the priest of the Arician Artemis, it is constantly Hable to challenge. Des- 

 cartes, as previously noted, appreciated the significance of the as if. Reid 

 dealt with it harshly: " Conjectures and theories are the creatures of men, 

 and will always be very unlike the creatures of God." ^ Prof. Drake, 

 writing to-day, suggests that " everything is as if reaUsm w^ere true " : he 

 thinks realism is true but he concedes the as if.^ Prof. Rivers allows 

 consistency as a working hypothesis to Freud's psychology of the unconscious : 

 things do happen as if desires were repressed into the unconscious and 

 appeared as abnormal mental manifestations. ^ Karl Pearson insists that 

 science is a conceptual description, and not a plan in phenomena themselves * : 

 things happen as if the conceptual description were, more or less, true 

 and no other inference is warranted. " Nowadays," writes Dr. Houston, 

 " we do not so much speak of the truth of a theory as of its utility, or rather 

 the truth of a theory lies in its utility. ... A theory works if it connects 

 the facts together and enables us to predict new facts. . . . Physical theories 

 are metaphors. When we say that light is propagated in wave motion, 

 we mean that it is propagated like wave motion." ^ 



The emergence of critical intelligence from primitive dogmatism is the 

 emergence of a new mental species which may be compared to the emergence 

 of mammals from lower types of life. Socrates, says Townsend, is the fore- 

 runner of all critical minds, and his Greek confreres threw their thoughts 

 into the form of hypothetical judgments.^ Primitive thinkers perceived 

 that events happened as if certain stories were true, and believed impartially 

 in both. Dr. Houston perceives that hght behaves as if it were propagated 

 in waves, and condemns belief to halt at the as if. As if is a small phrase, 

 but the discovery of its significance is one aspect of the evolution of new 

 mental species which is associated with the development of the critical 

 spirit in the passage of thought from myth to science. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF FBECOCITY IN EVOLUTION. 

 (A. D. Wilde) 



In an Article published in September 1920 I propounded a theory respecting 

 the process of Organic Evolution, which I believe to be both true and im- 

 portant, and to have at least some degree of novelty. Here I propose to 

 restate that theory as shortly as possible, both on account of those who did 

 not read, or have forgotten, that Article, and because I believe its interest 



1 Inquiry, vol. i, p. i. 



' Essays in Critical Realism, p. 6. 



* Instinct and the Unconscious, p. 169. 



* The Grammar of Science, ch. vii. 



* Nature, Sept. i, 1921, " The Present Position of the Wave Theory of 

 Light." 



« Phil. Rev., vol. xxx, p. 4, " Education as Criticism," 



