yo ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



choose between this (supposing we believe in a 

 spiritual world at all) and a Pantheism which 

 rarely appeals to scientific minds. One theory 

 evolution certainly militates against, and that is 

 the eternity of matter. For the ideal of materialistic 

 evolution is to trace all the variety of material 

 forms back to a unity, and this primal unity, 

 whether it be an amorphous cell of protoplasm 

 with infinite potentialities, or a fiery cloud in which 

 the genius of Shakespeare and Raphael were 

 latent, 1 could hardly have existed from eternity 

 as a barren unity and then at a point in time begun 

 to differentiate. The ordinary scientific evolu- 

 tionist, whatever his objection to the Mosaic 

 account of Creation, has no quarrel with the belief 

 in a primary or original creation, except that it is 

 "not proven," that it has no analogies in the 

 material world with which we are familiar. Yet 

 even the mystery which surrounds such an 

 original creation has its parallel in that creative 

 process which science traces. One is more com- 

 mon, the other less common, but that is all. For 

 the thoughts " of God are incorporated in creation 

 at one time directly, at another indirectly, both 

 which modes of incarnation of Divine ideas are to 

 us equally incomprehensible. 2 Only as St. Gregory 



1 Tyndall, Use and Limits of Imagination in Science, p. 47. 

 Tyndall, of course, speaks of this as "an absurdity too monstrous to 

 be entertained by any sane mind." 



2 Heer ap. Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, p. 373. 



