368 Science Religion and Reality 



intelligence behind it can hardly be called a machine at all. All 

 that science has done to establish the uniformity and regularity of 

 nature's operations tells heavily in favour of the existence of a single 

 creative intelligence, and tells with equal force against the non- 

 Christian hypothesis of a plurality of gods, against the Manichean 

 theory of a good and an evil spirit contending on nearly equal terms 

 in the arena, against the hypothesis of an inert and yet intractable 

 " matter," and against any other theory which makes God a spirit 

 among other spirits, struggling with only partial success to enter 

 into His kingdom. It is against this dualism or pluralism that 

 scientific men, and many others who cannot claim to be men of 

 science, protest when they reject the vulgar conception of miracle 

 as the suspension of a lower law by a higher. They find no valid 

 evidence for such suspensions ; but they also feel that the classifica- 

 tion of events as natural or supernatural withdraws the natural 

 order from the immediate j urisdiction of God, and virtually hands 

 it over to some lower principle, or to blind and unintelligent 

 " necessity." 



Naturalism declares that neither purposes nor ideas are to be 

 found anywhere in nature, neither in the whole nor in the parts. 

 They are driven to this, not by dislike of the idea of an intelligent 

 Creator, which does not interfere with the freedom of science in 

 any of its branches, but by the attempt to reduce everything to the 

 quantitative formulas which are used in physics, chemistry, and 

 mathematics. There must be nothing in the consequent which 

 was not in the antecedent. The Naturalist is bound by his theory 

 to deny all real change. Evolution, if he uses the word, is a mer€ 

 mechanical unpacking of what was there all the time. There is 

 nothing in this theory of mechanical unpacking which necessarily 

 conflicts with Aristotle's theory of entelechies. Aristotle taught 

 that the perfect " form " of everything was implicit in it from 

 the beginning, and determined the course of its development. 

 Naturalism, however, rejects this theory because it implies a kind 

 of vitalism or panpsychism, an inner unconscious will residing in 

 the developing organism, or, if this is not asserted, it merely describes 

 what happens, and gives no explanation of it. This dispute does 

 not concern religion, which needs only to assert that, however 

 evolution is efFected, a divine purpose is being realised in it. 

 Religious teleology is belief in an eternal purpose. Every addi- 

 tional proof that the world is a closely interwoven system of means 



