THE RELATION OF EVOLUTION TO MATERIALISM 49 
axis is supported by a string or otherwise. The wheel remains 
suspended in the air while slowly gyrating. What mysterious force 
sustains the wheel when its only point of support is at the end of the 
axle, six or eight inches away? Scientific and popular literature were 
flooded with explanations of ‘this seeming paradox. And yet it was 
nothing new. The boy’s top, that spins and leans and will not fall, 
although solicited by gravity, so long as it spins, which we have seen 
all our lives without special wonder, is precisely the same thing. 
Now, evolution is no new thing, but an old familiar truth; but, 
coming now in a new and questionable shape, lo, how it startles us out 
of our propriety! Origin of forms by evolution is going on everywhere 
about us, both in the inorganic and the organic world. In its more 
familiar forms, it had never occurred to most of us that it was a 
scientific refutation of the existence of God, that it was a demonstra- 
tion of materialism. But now it is pushed one step farther in the 
direction it has always been going—it is made to include also the origin 
of species—only a little change in its form, and lo, how we start! To 
the deep thinker, now and always, there is and has been the alterna- 
tive—materialism or theism. God operates Nature or Nature 
operates itself; but evolution puts no new phase on this old question. 
For example, the origin of the individual by evolution. Everybody 
knows that every one of us individually became what we now are by a 
slow process of evolution from a microscopic spherule of protoplasm, 
and yet this did not interfere with the idea of God as our individual 
maker. Why, then, should the discovery that the species (or first 
individuals of each kind) originated by evolution destroy our belief 
in God as the creator of species ? 
3. It is curious and very interesting to observe the manner in 
which vexed questions are always finally settled, if settled at all. 
All vexed questions—i.e., questions which have taxed the powers of 
the greatest minds age after age—are such only because there is a real 
truth on both sides. Pure, unmixed error does not live to plague us 
long. Error, when it continues to live, does so by virtue of a germ of 
truth contained. Great questions, therefore, continue to be argued 
pro and con from age to age, because each side is in a sense—i.e., 
from its own point of view—true, but wrong in excluding the other 
point of view; and a true solution, a true rational philosophy, will 
always be found in a view which combines and reconciles the two 
partial, mutually excluding views, showing in what they are true and 
in what they are false—explaining their differences by transcending 
