12 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



people fascinated by the powers of the scientific 

 method, undertake to raise this into the universal 

 method of philosophy that our question ever comes 

 forward. Upon it science is reservedly silent. It 

 is a question of philosophy alone ; and philosophers, 

 whether professedly such or not, who make this new 

 and surprising claim for the method and evidences 

 of science, must not expect to carry the day by mere 

 proclamation. They must come to the bar of his- 

 toric philosophy, and be judged by that Reason 

 which is the source of philosophical and of scientific 

 method both, and the sole authority to determine 

 the limits of either. 



I 



Directing our attention first to the agnostic form 

 of the new philosophy, and taking up the first of our 

 foregoing questions, we find at once a fact of the 

 greatest significance. Yet in the popular appre- 

 hension of evolution this fact is continually so ig- 

 nored or neglected that its statement will likely 

 enough come to many readers as a genuine surprise, 

 and not improbably as a mystery hard to fathom. 

 The fact is this : When the question is brought 

 home whether evolution has no limits at all, the 

 careful and really qualified advocates of the evolu- 

 tional philosophy are found to be the most stringent 

 dcniers of the limitless rans^e of evolution. Its 



