28 All tlie Articles of tlie Darwin Faith. 



The utmost he proves, not merely in his present but in his 

 former book, is not what has been, but what may have 

 been, and he converts the ' may ' into a ' must ' by the sole 

 force of the ever-present assumption that all forms of 

 nature have been developed out of other forms. To our 

 minds, the book bears in its very mode of expression, of 

 which we have given some illustrations above, a character 

 which is wholly unscientific. Science tells us what has 

 been, what is, and what will be. But Mr. Darwin's argu- 

 argument is a continuous conjugation of the potential 

 mood. It rings the changes on ' can have been,' ' might 

 have been,' ' would have been,' until it leaps with a bound 

 into ' must have been,' " 



" When Mr. Darwin is confronted with the extremely 

 remote and uncertain nature of the agencies on which he 

 relies, he continually falls back on what ' might have been ' 

 in the lapse of unlimited periods of time. Such a style of 

 argument is, to say the least, destitute of any scientific 

 value. It is impossible to say what might or might not 

 have been during periods so vast that we have no 

 experience of them. For all we know, the vitality of 

 species might wear itself out in the lapse of ages, or by 

 some law of cyclic change, they might assume new forms. 



