PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE QUESTION 13 



by Darwin himself in a letter written a year before his 

 death. With reference to his doubts as to the exis 

 tence of God, he asks Can one trust to the convic-j/ 

 tions of a monkey s mind ? But if the idea of God 

 may be a phantom of an ape-like brain, can we trust 

 to reason or conscience in any other matter ? May 

 not science and philosophy themselves be similar 

 fantasies, evolved by mere chance and unreason ? In 

 any case, does not this deprive science of the ennobling 

 idea that nature is the development of Divine Mind, 

 and so reduce it to mere drudgery, pursued only for 

 its useful applications or for self-interest ? 



This seems a serious indictment against evolution, 



at least in its extreme forms, but its validity seems to 



be proved by a careful scrutiny of the developments 



that have followed the publication of the Origin of 



Species, and which, despite the efforts of so-called 



theistic and Christian evolutionists, may be held to 



have tended constantly to a lower and lower depth of 



materialistic agnosticism, and, at the same time, of 



debasement of natural science into a jumble of false 



classifications and visionary speculations. Neither 



science nor theology need, however, slide hopelessly 



into this gulf, and it may even be possible to stand 



near to the treacherous margin and to rescue some 



grains of truth from this confused movement of the 



mind of our age, as it has been called by a recent 



German writer. 1 



1 Wiegand, Darwinismus, notice in the Academy, Aug. 25, 1877. 



