96 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Darwin concluded that the impossibility of assigning the world to 

 chance as a whole and to design in its parts indicated the insolubility 

 of the question. Two radically different reasons, however, may be 

 given as to why a problem is insoluble. One reason is that the prob- 

 lem is too high for intelligence; the other is that the question in its 

 very asking makes assumptions that render the question meaningless. 

 The latter alternative is unerringly pointed to in the celebrated case 

 of design versus chance. Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruit- 

 ful object of knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate 

 the object of study, together with the consequences that further flow 

 from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what, by as- 

 sumption, lies outside. To asserts — as is often asserted — that specific 

 values of particular truths, social bonds and forms of beauty, if they 

 can be shown to be generated by concretely knowable conditions, are 

 meaningless and in vain; to assert that they are justified only when 

 they and their particular causes and effects have all at once been 

 gathered up into some inclusive first cause and some exhaustive final 

 goal, is intellectual atavism. Such argumentation is reversion to the 

 logic that explained the extinction of fire by water through the formal 

 essence of aqueousness and the quenching of thirst by water through 

 the final cause of aqueousness. Whether used in the case of the special 

 event or in that of life as a whole, such logic only abstracts some as- 

 pect of the existing course of events in order to reduplicate it as a 

 petrified eternal principle by which to explain the very changes of which 

 it is the formalization. 



When Henry Sidgwick casually remarked in a letter that as he grew 

 older his interest in what or who made the world was altered into in- 

 terest in what kind of a world it is anyway, his voicing of a common 

 experience of our own day illustrates also the nature of that intellectual 

 transformation effected by the Darwinian logic. Interest shifts from 

 the wholesale essence back of special changes to the question of how 

 these special changes serve and defeat concrete purposes ; shifts from an 

 intelligence that shaped things once for all to the particular intelligences 

 which things are even now shaping; shifts from an ultimate goal of 

 good to the direct increments of justice and happiness that intelligent 

 administration of existent conditions may beget and that present care- 

 lessness or stupidity will destroy or forego. 



In the second place, the classic type of logic inevitably set philoso- 

 ophy upon proving that life must really have certain qualities and 

 values — no matter how experience presents the matter — because of 

 some remote cause and eventual goal, while the logic of the new 

 science frees philosophy from this apologetic habit and temper. The 

 duty of wholesale justification inevitably accompanies all thinking that 

 makes the meaning of special occurrences depend upon something that 



