122 WALTER KIDD, M.D., F.Z.S., ON 



then you have got two strings to your bow, both converging to 

 produce the great conclusion. Then " Purj^ose " is also used in a 

 very tentative way by the persons to whom reference has been 

 made. It may be immediate or something far distant, and the 

 further distant it is the more mind is implied. If a thing is done 

 for the immediate moment it may seem to be done casually ; but 

 if you do a thing to-day the result of which is not discovered for 

 a hundred years, the action is read in its full meaning and then 

 you see, at once, purpose. Now supposing that some far-reaching 

 purpose, instead of being simple in its nature, is complicated ; 

 so much the more difficult it is to prove purpose or the opposite 

 to purpose, mind or absence of mind ; and if you test mind or 

 mindlessness in creation, not by a simple case but by one great 

 conglomeration ot cases, and when you see a mass of what might 

 be isolated instances of purpose running on into systems accumu- 

 lating not only through space but through time, you have 

 impressed on your mind that there is something not human, but 

 superhuman, and you read the superhuman tlirough the human. 

 Thus, you read the Mind at the back of the iiniverse through the 

 mind that you have in your own selves- 



Almost all the words, I think, that we have brought before us 

 to-day were originally associated with ourselves as human beings. 

 Then the evolutionist, not having any other words and not having 

 the skill to invent any, as suggested just now, is compelled to 

 utilize words and, as far as possible, to emasculate them and take 

 out their sense, and to believe that such things as " beneficence " 

 and "adaptation" are floating about somcAvhere in the universe, 

 and if later on they happen to catch on somewhere, certain 

 results follow. If that is so, the less reason we have the better. 

 God has given us reason in order that we may investigate the 

 laws of His universe, and the more we honour human reason the 

 more we shall realize the magnitude of the Divine mind ; not to 

 recognize the Divine mind seems to me to be an abuse of one of 

 the greatest gifts that we have in nature. There is another word 

 that I should like Dr. Kidd to introduce a substitute for — it is 

 hardly a mental word — I mean the word " tendency." It is a 

 most convenient word for evolutionists. They say there is a 

 " tendency " to do this or that. That is true, but they do not tell 

 you the origin of the tendency at all. Suppose we say, " I believe 

 that at a certain time there was a strong tendency in creatures 



