330 Evolution as Related to Religious Thought. 



the words of Dr. Abbot* (not of Plymouth Church but of 

 the Church Universal), the author of " Scientific Theism," — 

 " While the mechanical theory proves itself utterly unable 

 to explain its own fundamental concept, that of the machine, 

 and much less that of the organism, without calling in the 

 assistance of the teleological idea which it claims to reject, 

 the organic theory finds in this very idea the l open sesame' 

 of philosophy — the rational and real unity, not only of all 

 organic facts, but of all facts whatever ; and it shows that, 

 teleology, so far from being overthrown by the fact of Evo- 

 lution or the theory of Darwin, is the only principle which 

 renders either Evolution or Darwinism philosophically in- 

 telligible. It is, in truth, the only principle which lights 

 up the universe from within, and renders it luminous and 

 transparent, so to speak, from centre to circumference." 

 This is no bringing back of Paley's God. The teleology of 

 Organic Evolution is not the old fashioned teleology which 

 sought to find in every statical arrangement a proof of 

 wisdom and beneficence. It is a teleology of dynamics, of 

 tendencies. It is "immanent in the universe as its omni- 

 present thought and life, not external to it as that of a me- 

 chanical Creator, working in material alien to or other than 

 himself." Here is no aimless drift, destructive of all faiths 

 and aspirations of religion, but a tide that sweeps forever 

 through the universe of matter and of men in the direction 

 of the True, the Beautiful, the Good. 



Darwin entered upon no discussion of fundamental prob- 

 lems. Like Voltaire's Canclide, he was too busy tending 

 his garden, listening for what the earth-worms had to say 

 to him and the trailing plants. Orthodoxy, covetous of his 

 fame, has easily convinced herself that he was no material- 

 ist. She has his word for it — a God impressing laws upon 

 matter — in the last paragraph of the "Origin of Species." 

 But it is impossible for any intellectually serious person to 

 follow up the process of organic development as described 

 by Darwin in his various writings, and arrest his feet before 

 the verbal barrier opposed to him in a single place. The 

 rush of the great argument carries him through and beyond 

 this barrier as if it were a wisp of straw. He cannot give 

 good heed to the immense induction, and after all believe 

 that organic evolution is a part and not the whole. Every 

 experiment arranged to test the problem of spontaneous- 



♦Scientific Theism, p. 194. 



