14 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 



however, may be given as to why a problem is 

 insoluble. One reason is that the problem is too 

 high for intelligence ; the other is that the question 

 in its very asking makes assumptions that render 

 the question meaningless. The latter alternative 

 is unerringly pointed to in the celebrated case 

 of design versus chance. Once admit that the sole 

 verifiable or fruitful object of knowledge is the 

 particular set of changes that generate the object 

 of study together with the consequences that then 

 flow from it, and no intelligible question can be 

 asked about what, by assumption, lies outside. 

 To assert as is often asserted that specific 

 -values of particular truth, social bonds and forms 

 of beauty, if they can be shown to be generated 

 by concretely knowable conditions, are meaningless 

 and in vain; to assert that they are justified only 

 when they and their particular causes and effects 

 have all at once been gathered up into some in 

 clusive first cause and some exhaustive final goal, 

 is intellectual atavism. Such argumentation is re 

 version to the logic that explained the extinction 

 of fire by water through the formal essence of 

 aqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water 

 through the final cause of aqueousness. Whether 

 used in the case of the special event or that of 

 life as a whole, such logic only abstracts some 

 aspect of the existing course of events in order 

 to reduplicate it as a petrified eternal principle 



