148 HUMANISM vm 



fictions, and happy is he who can avoid bending the knee 

 to such bogeys. 



And this idolatry leads to terrible confusions, as these 

 very cases show. When the economic man is taken 

 seriously, and made a practical ideal, he leads to results 

 which are incompatible with the maintenance of political 

 and social cohesion, and with the sanctity of moral laws. 

 And he provokes a reaction even worse than himself 

 in the direction of revolutionary socialism. 



So, too, with the Darwinian assumption. When it is 

 taken as a fact and as the last word on the subject of 

 evolution, it leaves no room for the Argument from 

 Design, and leads to consequences entirely inconsistent 

 with any teleology. Moreover, the misrepresentation 

 of the principle of indefinite variation is a very easy and 

 common one, and has been adopted in this very article in 

 exhibiting the conflict between Darwinism and teleology. 

 But, once it is recognised as a misinterpretation, as a case 

 of confusing a method of examining facts with the facts 

 themselves, the danger of any further conflict is averted. 



It remains to give practical confirmation of this inter 

 pretation of the real meaning of the Darwinian principle. 

 To do so, it may be pointed out, in the first place, that 

 Darwin assumed the indefiniteness of Variation initially 

 upon utterly insufficient evidence, or, rather, upon no 

 relevant evidence at all. For he was not in the position 

 to make any positive statements about the variations that 

 actually occurred, and had not had the time to study 

 them exhaustively. In fact, it is only in these days that 

 the actual facts of Variation are beginning to be observed 

 and recorded, and many generations of workers will 

 probably pass away before it will be possible to state 

 with approximate certainty what variations actually take 

 place, and can be conceived as likely to take place. If, 

 then, Darwin s knowledge of Variation were to be regarded 

 as the logical basis for asserting Variation to be in fact 

 indefinite, the foundations of Darwinism would have been 

 extremely insecure, and Darwin ought to have begun 

 with an exhaustive study of variations before broaching 



