46 Some Wayside Problems 



their misnamed fruit because in commercial phrase the 

 article has been a paying one. Nay, more than this; 

 the ideas which we are apt to consider the most deeply 

 rooted in our own nature are but evidences of what has 

 helped to pull our own forefathers through their primeval 

 difficulties. What we call the true, the good, or the 

 beautiful, is but what has proved advantageous in the 

 long run towards winning the aforesaid race. If men 

 agree to stamp dishonesty as bad, it is because in a very 

 strict sense honesty has been the best policy, and if we 

 instinctively admire the hue of a rose, a glacier, or a 

 rainbow, it is because a keen eye for such colours was 

 once upon a time a useful thing to have, when fruits so 

 tinted formed the food of our distant kindred. 



The last-mentioned articles of the evolutionary creed 

 are held, it is true, or at least are preached, only by the 

 more extreme of its disciples : still preached they are, 

 and they should not therefore be omitted from a review 

 of its features. At present, however, my business is not 

 with them. The relation between evolution and the 

 soul of man is a subject too vast to be treated conjointly 

 with any other, and I am just now concerned with the 

 more primary and simpler question as to how far the 

 doctrine so incessantly and so confidently propounded 

 is to be admitted by us as proved in regard of the 

 external world of which our senses tell us. 



In approaching this inquiry, there are two points 

 which I hold to be clear, though one of them at least 

 may not generally be much regarded. Firstly, the 

 evolutionary doctrine is after all but a theory and like 

 other theories should be judged by its accordance or 

 non-accordance with facts. And it must fit all facts. 

 It is not sufficient that of some here and some there it 

 should seem to afford a plausible explanation; nor on 

 the strength of its so sufficing may we assume that in 

 other cases where no such explanation is forthcoming 

 it nevertheless exists. We are dealing with that which 

 claims to be the key to unlock all the riddles of nature, 

 and every riddle which it can make no attempt to unlock 



