48 The Concept of Method 



twist to men's investigation, often turning it off from the high- 

 way of thought just at the critical turning of the roads. This 

 curious foihng of humanity just as it is about to discover one of 

 the secrets of nature is illustrated throughout the entire philo- 

 sophical and scientific history of mankind. It is this very mis- 

 conception of ontological significance that in the last century 

 caused the Darwinian interpretation of Evolution to be for so 

 long held in ill-repute by so many truly religious people. These 

 persons had an anthropomorphic conception of what was to be 

 understood by creation or the origin of things, which they had 

 imagined by looking at their own process of mechanical con- 

 struction as they made a table or a book, and then they had mag- 

 nified this power beyond their own imagination, adding thereto 

 the conception of something coming out of nothing. From this 

 magnified activity of human beings they then arrived at the meta- 

 physical impossibility of having created a God whom they made 

 do thus and so. And yet, just because human nature can never 

 go wrong, this conception was a wonderfully grand one and was 

 in some respects a permanently true conception. 



It is small wonder then that when the conception of Evolution 

 had so grown throughout the ages and had so developed in the 

 quietness of men's minds that when it forced itself to definite ex- 

 pression in the nineteenth century, it should be so misconstrued 

 and charged with all the heresies that put to death Socrates and 

 Christ and philosophers and scientists without number. There 

 is a curious commentary upon the history of man in the fact 

 that those very ideas for which men once were killed and cruci- 

 fied and burned at the stake have in turn in later ages put to death 

 those very ideas that were the executioners of the early martyrs. 



The most casual examination of our experience or of the order 

 of nature indicates a relation to which we have given the name 

 Causation, and which consists in the necessary relation of two 

 phenomena. The old conception of Causation involved temporal 

 considerations such as the priority of the cause, with its attendant 

 logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. Subsequent philo- 

 sophical discussion of the subject was thus confused by the inter- 

 pretation of a merely formal element as an essential one. 



From the point of view of Evolution, there are no specific acts 

 of causation, no fact of creation in time and space : such views 



