THE RELATION OF EVOLUTION TO MATERIALISM 49 



axis is supported l)y a string or otherwise. The wheel remains 

 suspended in the air while slowly gyrating. What mysterious force 

 sustains the wheel when its only point of support is at the end of the 

 axle, six or eight inches away ? Scientific and popular literature were 

 flooded with explanations of this seeming paradox. And yet it was 

 nothing new. The boy's top, that spins and leans and will not fall, 

 although solicited by gravity, so long as it spins, which we have seen 

 all our lives without special wonder, is precisely the same thing. 



Now, evolution is no new thing, but an old familiar truth; but, 

 coming now in a new and questionable shape, lo, how it startles us out 

 of our propriety ! Origin of forms l)y evolution is going on everywhere 

 about us, 1:)oth in the inorganic and the organic world. In its more 

 familiar forms, it had never occurred to most of us that it was a 

 scientific refutation of the existence of God, that it was a demonstra- 

 tion of materialism. But now it is pushed one step farther in the 

 direction it has always been going — it is made to include also the origin 

 of species^ — only a little change in its form, and lo, how we start! To 

 the deep thinker, now and always, there is and has been the alterna- 

 tive — materialism or theism. God operates Nature or Nature 

 operates itself; but evolution puts no new phase on this old question. 

 For example, the origin of the individual by evolution. Everybody 

 knows that every one of us individually became what we now are by a 

 slow process of evolution from a microscopic spherule of protoplasm, 

 and yet this did not interfere with the idea of God as our individual 

 maker. Why, then, should the discovery that the species (or first 

 individuals of each kind) originated by evolution destroy our belief 

 in God as the creator of species ? 



3. It is curious and very interesting to observe the manner in 

 which vexed questions are always finally settled, if settled at all. 

 All vexed questions — i.e., questions which have taxed the powers of 

 the greatest minds age a.'ter age — are such only because there is a real 

 truth on both sides. Pure, unmixed error does not live to plague us 

 long. Error, when it continues to live, does so by virtue of a germ of 

 truth contained. Great questions, therefore, continue-to be argued 

 pro and con from age to age, because each side is in a sense — i.e., 

 from its own point of view — true, but wrong in excluding the other 

 point of view; and a true solution, a true rational philosophy, will 

 always be found in a view which combines and reconciles the two 

 partial, mutually excluding views, showing in what they are true and 

 in what they are false — explaining their ditTerences by transcending 



