22-i THE REV. A. K. WHATELY^ M.A., D.D., ON 



concrete visible world, he would have rendered a greater service. 

 But the main point is that, as be clearly saw, Eeligion does not 

 rest upon an abstract philosophy, but upon one that exposes 

 the emptiness of abstract ideas except in their proper sub- 

 ordination to those larger and higher ideas that involve them. 



Philosophy, then, has to free us from abstractions, not to bind us 

 to them. It has to seek the concrete. Even the philosophy of 

 Hegel was devoted to that search, however unsuccessfully pursued. 

 But do w^e need to be freed from abstractions ? Does not the 

 ordinary unsophisticatedmind, wiiatever its failings, live and move 

 in a solid world and pay unreserved homage to hard fact ? Now if 

 all minds were unsophisticated : if we all lived by plain common 

 sense on the one hand and simple faith on the other, there might 

 be no more to be said. But, as we have already seen, Philosophy 

 often enters at the back-door uninvited, and when it has entered, 

 we can never be the same as before. We try our old catch-words, 

 we work our working-hypotheses for all they are worth, and we 

 find that the old instruments break and bend against the new 

 material. So especially when questions arise about the truth of our 

 religious beliefs. Let us take one prominent example. 



Paley,like many others, set out to prove that the world exhibits 

 many marks of design, and must therefore have an intelligent 

 Creator. This was a simple — hardly even philosophical — argu- 

 ment, and it has served — and in some form will no doubt continue 

 to serve — an important purpose as against various forms of un- 

 belief. But the controversy was bound to become more complex. 

 The Nineteenth Century saw the rise of Evolutionism, wliich 

 entered the human mind in Europe just as philosophical ideas 

 enter individual minds — by the back-door. By this I mean that 

 we are greatly mistaken when we speak of Evolution as a mere 

 theory, something that as it were presented itself definitely to 

 thinking men of the century for acceptance or rejection. It 

 was a deep-lying tendency of thought which made itself felt 

 when the time was ripe. The theory of Darwin was un- 

 doubtedly based on definite data, and very wide data indeed, 

 but even as a scientific proposition its discovery was due, surely 

 not by chance, to two independent investigators at the same 

 time. And it was preceded by the comprehensive philosophical 

 Evolutionism of Hegel. 



Behind all the theories and investigations there was the great 

 movement of the human mind towards continuity. As we 

 become more conscious of the laws of our own minds, and the 

 dependence of our ideas upon one another, we are the more com- 

 pelled to demand an ordered universe, a universe which, however 



