332 INVOLUTION. 



nation^ it does nothing to diminish the diflBculty or 

 the wonder of it for thought^ ^ 



The value of philosophical criticism to science has 

 seldom appeared to more advantage than in these 

 words of the Master of Balliol. The following passage 

 from Martineau may be fitly placed beside them : — 

 " In not a few of the progressionists the weak illusion 

 is unmistakable, that, with time enough, you may get 

 everything out of next to nothing. Grant us, they 

 seem to say, any tiniest granule of power, so close up- 

 on zero that it is not worth begrudging — allow it some 

 trifling tendency to infinitesimal movement — and we 

 will show you how this little stock became the 

 kosmos, without ever taking a step worth thinking 

 of, much less constituting a case for design. The 

 argument is a mere appeal to an incompetency in the 

 human imagination, in virtue of which magnitudes 

 evading conception are treated as out of existence ; 

 and an aggregate of inappreciable increments is simul- 

 taneously equated, — in its cause to nothing^ in its 

 effect to the whole of things. You manifestly want 

 the same causality, whether concentrated in a 

 moment or distributed through incalculable ages ; 

 only in drawing upon it a logical theft is more 

 easily committed piecemeal than wholesale. Surely it 

 is a mean device for a philosopher thus to crib causa- 

 tion by hairs-breadths, to put it out at compound 

 interest through all time, and then disown the debt." '^ 



It is not said that the view here given of the process 

 of Evolution has been the actual process. The illus- 

 trations have been developed rather to clear up dif- 



1 Edward Caird, The Evolution of lielicfion, Yol. i., pp. 49-50. 



2 Martineau, Essays, Philosophical and Theological, p. 141. 



