6 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



should have to submit to it even though it destroyed 

 us, it cannot follow that we could approve of it or 

 that we ought to approve of it. To glorify what is 

 our destruction would be indeed to play the fool, and 

 add to the tragedy of our being the anguish of self- 

 contempt. 



It ought to be plain, and I think it will be plain 

 on a careful and exact examination, that the so-called 

 Philosophy of Evolution, when given such a scope as 

 to make evolution the ground and explanation of the 

 existence of mind in man, is destructive of the real- 

 ity of the \iwxi\2i^ person, and therefore of that entire 

 world of moral good, of beauty, and of unqualified 

 truth, which depends on personal reality for its 

 being. This hostility to personality and its three- 

 fold world of ideal life is a trait belonging to every 

 evolutional account of the mind in man, whether 

 the account be made in terms of the agnostic or the 

 cosmotheistic view of the Eternal Ground. Both 

 views aim to explain the origin and progressive sus- 

 tentation of the whole human consciousness by the 

 vaQXQly productive causation exerted by that Ground. 

 The Immanent God of the idealistic evolutionists is 

 just as truly the sole real agent in producing and 

 carrying on the consciousness of his creature, is just 

 as incessantly and directly the creature's executive 

 cause, as the Persistent Unknowable of the agnostic. 

 The world of moral freedom, which is a fundamental 



