234 REV. JAMES WHITE, M.A., ON 
same creative power, which gave existence to the protoplasm, with 
its capacity for cell-building as the basis of all living forms. Though 
“evolution” may not constitute a philosophy, since it fails as a 
sufficient basis for the simplification of knowledge, the word 
conveniently expresses a great law, which is something more than 
the “ development” of the individual, as of a bird or mammal, from 
its ovum. It expresses what is included under Lord Kelvin’s happy 
phrase, ‘‘ Creative and Directive Power.” 
When we speak of “ Evolution” as a term connoting a general 
law, we of course use it to express the “subsumption” or gathering 
up of many minor evolutions ; just as we use the phrase “the law 
of universal causation” to connote the subsumption of minor 
observed laws or uniform sequences of phenomena. ‘The fact seems 
to be that we must recognize in nature many minor evolutions of 
form and structure, which it is not always easy to correlate exactly 
with one another. But it is fair to contend that in every case there 
is the principle of directivity behind.* I fail to see how we can get 
away from that, if we accept the fundamental axiom of the unchange- 
ableness of the Creator. The one is as necessarily postulated in that 
axiom as the other; and we may claim that this principle of 
directivity working for ends by way of adaptation is the only 
explanation for those variations which make for advance. These 
must be the esse of such variations (as Darwin admits) before there 
can be mutual reaction between them and environment leading 
‘*from lower and simpler to higher and fuller harmonies” ; and thus 
we come to see in “ Evolution” a divine method of working for ends 
in accordance with those laws, which belong to elemental matter and 
force. As Asa Gray puts itt “In each variation lies hidden the 
mystery of a beginning.” From such a point of view we are 
justified in speaking of the whole process of Creation as a “‘ continuous 
flow,” but not as a simple stream nor as an uniformly continuous 
flow, as seems to be contended by Professor Starling among the 
latest contributors to the discussion, in his Presidential Address to 
* In the discussion Mr. Woods Smyth asserted that “ directivity is 
unscientific.” This is to “beg the question.” “Science” as limited to the 
plane of “ observation and experiment” has nothing to say on this matter. 
It is a question of philosophy, and is arrived at by inductive reasoning. 
—A. I. 
+ See Natural Science and Religion ; Scribner, New York. 
