8 EVOLUTION THE KEY TO NATURE 



try to make it clearer that evolution is a great dis- 

 covery in spite of all the disputes about its machinery. 



Evolution is not a "force" or an agency that does 

 things. Strictly speaking, ''forces" and "laws" are 

 not agencies that do things, though we often speak 

 of them as if they were. ^ But evolution is not a force 

 or energy; and it is a "law" only in the strict sense. 

 It is an invariable /flc^. It is the fact of the unrolling 

 of the scroll, not the hand that unrolls it. So there 

 may be perfect certainty about the fact of evolution, 

 and complete uncertainty about the machinery or 

 agencies at work. Some say that, if this is so, evolu- 

 tion explains nothing. There could not be a greater 

 mistake. It is literally true that the whole of nature 

 is lit up when we recognize the fact that it was evolved. 

 Any thoughtful person can see how intelligible man 

 and his institutions become if we recognize that they 

 were evolved. Hundreds of features which puzzled 

 us before are now understood. This will become 

 quite clear in the course of the book. 



Now, Darwinism is not evolution. It is a theory of 

 the way in which the evolution of living things was 

 brought about: a theory of the machinery of a part 

 of nature. Even if Darwin's theory comes to be re- 

 jected, his magnificent service in getting the fact of 



^ Force is an abstract word used in physics to express certain 

 features of work or movement. It is matter or ether that really 

 works. Law — a "law of nature" — is also an abstract word to 

 express the fact that things do actually move or behave on certain 

 definite lines. 



