THE THEORY OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 429 



days of hot-blooded controversy. It seems to be gen- 

 erally recognised, for instance, that the evolution 

 formula is not antithetic to transcendental formulae. 

 The Theory of Descent tacitly makes the assumption 

 — ^the basal hope of all biology — that it is not only 

 legitimate but promiseful to try to interpret scien- 

 tifically the history of life upon the earth. If we 

 have good reasons for believing that the long process 

 of Becoming which has led eventually to ourselves 

 and our complex animate environment is altogether 

 too mysterious or too marvellous to admit of success- 

 ful treatment by ordinary scientific methods, then we 

 deny at the outset the validity of the evolution for- 

 mula. 



Here is a parting of the ways, and there is no 

 via media. Is there no hopefulness in attempting 

 this scientific analysis of the confessedly vast and 

 perplexing problem ? — then let us remain poets and 

 artists, philosophers and theologians, and sigh over 

 a science which started so much in debt that its bank- 

 ruptcy was a foregone conclusion. On the other 

 hand, if the scientific attempt is legitimate, and if 

 it has already made good progress, considering its 

 youth, then let us rigidly exclude from our science 

 all other than scientific interpretations ; let us cease 

 to juggle with words in attempting a mongrel mix- 

 ture of scientific and transcendental formulation ; let 

 us stop trying to eke out demonstrable factors by 

 assuming, alongside of these, " ultra-scientific 

 causes," '^ spiritual influxes," et hoc genus omne: let 

 us cease writing or buying books such as God or 

 Natural Selection, whose titular false antimony is 

 an index of their misunderstanding. I^ot that we 

 are objecting for a moment to any metaphysical or 

 theological interpretations whatsoever ; we are simply 



