284 The Evolution Hypothesis. 



tion will be strenuously assailed by the evolutionist. 

 It will be maintained that there is nothing in experi- 

 ence in the least favouring the belief in creation. 



Of course experience is unable to testify to its own 

 origin ; it cannot transcend itself. A witness has no 

 evidence at first hand to give as to the date or manner 

 of his own birth. His presence, however, is conclusive 

 proof that he has come to be. At the same time ex- 

 perience has relevant and important testimony to offer 

 on the question at issue. There lie in it regulative 

 principles that are proof of a something prior to it 

 its mould and law. These principles, indispensable to 

 experience not its outcome but its condition, we may 

 call into court and receive from them valuable evidence 

 as to the first origin of the things we see. 



(1.) The knowledge of effects compels us to believe 

 in an ultimate cause. "We cannot think at all about 

 the impressions which the external world produces in 

 us, without thinking of them as caused, and we cannot 

 carry out our inquiry concerning their causation with- 

 out inevitably committing ourselves to the hypothesis 

 of a First Cause." * 



(2.) Over the whole range of observation we find 

 form and order. At the earliest moment when the 

 universe conies into the view of science it emerges in 

 thought under the reign of law, orderly in its arrange- 

 ment and movement a cosmos, not a chaos. This 



* First Principles, 12. 



