A PURE POTENTIALITY IS NOTHING. 1 95 



§ 15. Shall we conclude from this result that the 

 evolutionist method is worthless, after the fashion of 

 many who have perceived this intrinsic weakness of 

 a professedly " unmetaphysical " {i.e., pseudo-meta- 

 physical) evolutionism ? It is true that as an ulti- 

 mate explanation of things it has failed. It has 

 reduced the "complex" to the ''simple," until it 

 arrived at things so simple as to be indistinguishable 

 from nothing, at simple substances which had a 

 meaning only with reference to the complex ones 

 which they were supposed to explain. Must we 

 then reject the whole method as an error and the 

 whole process by which it traced the connection 

 between the higher afid the lower as a delusion ? 

 To do this would be to do violence to our best 

 instincts : we cannot lightly or wholly abandon a 

 method which has added such great and varied 

 realms to science. But the difticulty is such as 

 might convince even the most anti-metaphysical of 

 [he necessity of a systematic criticism of ultimate 

 [uestions, and of an investigation of the metaphys- 

 :al implications of the evolutionist method, as being 

 done capable of separating the valid and valuable 

 elements in it from those which ^re delusive and 

 ibsurd. 



§ 16. Taken as the type of the pseudo-meta- 

 physical method, which explains the higher by the 

 >wer, the theory of Evolution derives the actual 

 j'eality from Its germ, i.e., from that which was, 

 ^hat it became, potentially. Wherever we cannot 

 conceive the lower as containing the germ of the 

 ilgher potentially, the method fails. Thus it does 

 lot explain the genesis of consciousness out of 

 mconsclous matter, because we cannot, or do not, 

 Lttribute potential consciousness to matter. 



