16 DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 



ing the facts of experience in the face ; it prevents 

 serious acknowledgment of the evils they present 

 and serious concern with the goods they promise 

 but do not as yet fulfil. It turns thought to the 

 business of finding a wholesale transcendent remedy 

 for the one and guarantee for the other. One 

 is reminded of the way many moralists and theo 

 logians greeted Herbert Spencer s recognition of 

 an unknowable energy from which welled up the 

 phenomenal physical processes without and the 

 conscious operations within. Merely because 

 Spencer labeled his unknowable energy &quot; God,&quot; 

 this faded piece of metaphysical goods was greeted 

 as an important and grateful concession to the 

 reality of the spiritual realm. Were it not for 

 the deep hold of the habit of seeking justification 

 for ideal values in the remote and transcendent, 

 surely this reference of them to an unknowable 

 absolute would be despised in comparison with the 

 demonstrations of experience that knowable ener- 

 are daily generating about us precious values. 

 The displacing of this wholesale type of philos 

 ophy will doubtless not arrive by sheer logical dis 

 proof, but rather by growing recognition of its 

 futility. Were it a thousand times true that 

 opium produces sleep because of its dormitive en 

 ergy, yet the inducing of sleep in the tired, and the 

 recovery to waking life of the poisoned, would not 

 be thereby one least step forwarded. And were 



