EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



he would rather believe nothing than that any 

 fact or law of this cosmos is inconsistent or in- 

 compatible with any other fact or law. Else why 

 not call a spade a spade, and this house divided 

 against itself not a cosmos or universe, but a 

 chaos or higgledy-piggledy? When we are faced 

 with such apparent contradictions it is our duty 

 to suspend judgment that foremost sign of the 

 trained mind until there shall be discovered some 

 higher truth, in the light of which contradiction is 

 seen to be not contradiction, but confirmation and 

 complement. 



If we examine the history of knowledge we shall 

 discover an additional reason for hating facile 

 formulas such as the "practical synthesis of 

 contradictories" 1 in that empty words are un- 

 surpassed as building material for barriers to close 

 the avenues to truth. To accept these antinomies 

 is to darken the mind's eye and to manacle its 

 feet. 



Convinced, then, that the higgledy-piggledy the- 

 ory of all things is a lie, and discontented with 

 half-truths, let us see how Spencer abolished the 

 "antinomy" that ideas cannot be innate and yet 

 that there are ideas before experience. It is evo- 



1 Mill would be distressed, and would be entitled to aston- 

 ishment, at the persistence of the ridiculous fallacy which he 

 exposed, that practice and theory are antithetic or opposed 

 as if any practice were other than the expression of a theory. 

 If the inventor's theory is wrong, his machine will not work. 

 If the machine works, in spite of the handsomest theory, the 

 theory is a He practically and theoretically. 

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