THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 5 



prefers to designate Naturalism and Transcendental 

 Idealism. Were the complete substitution of either 

 for the philosophy underlying the older religion con- 

 clusively to take place, we of the Western civilisation 

 should literally have entered a new world. 



Many doubtless believe that we are in that new 

 world already, and beyond return. But many, proba- 

 bly more, still hang back, disturbed by anxious 

 questionings — by an inward struggle between the 

 sense of authority in what seems truth declared by 

 science and the sense of majesty in what is felt to 

 be an ineffable good which the apparent truth seems 

 to put in peril. For my own part, I side with those 

 who feel that the vaunted new world of evolutional 

 philosophy is of a portent so threatening to the high- 

 est concerns of man that we ought at any rate to 

 look before we leap, and to look more than once. 

 We ought to ask insistently what this new world 

 really makes of mankind, of its vocation and its 

 destiny, and we ought to insist upon an unevasive 

 answer. Undoubtedly it may be said, and in so far 

 said well, that the unfavourable bearing of a doctrine 

 on hopes indulged by man cannot alter the fact of 

 its truth. But we have at least the right, and in the 

 highest case we have the duty, to demand that we shall 

 know what its bearings on our highest interests are. 

 If the truth bodes us ill, that very ill-boding is part 

 of the whole truth ; and though, unquestionably, we 



