THE PRE-EEQUISITES OF A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 225 



little we know of it, is at least bound together by certain 

 great principles recognizable even by our finite minds. 



Indeed, the Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century had gone 

 further than to proclaim the close reciprocity of Thought and 

 Being. Passing over Berkeley and Hume, let us note how Kant 

 explicitly maintained that the object must conform to the subject, 

 and also that the subject, the thinking mind, draws the multi- 

 plicity of objects into its own unity, the unity of self-conscious- 

 ness. 



If this is a little too obscure and technical for the present 

 occasion, it will suffice to glance at the main point upon which, 

 as I think, it throws light. The doctrine of Evolution — taking 

 this term in a wide sense — entered by way of Philosophy, not 

 only by way of scientific investigation. It had become a 

 necessity of thought. It satisfied in part that demand for the 

 unity of the universe as known to us, a unity answering to that 

 unity of our own self-consciousness which, as Kant rightly 

 taught, is behind all our mental processes. 



Well, this new doctrine had an inevitable effect upon the old 

 Teleological Argument, commonly known as the Argument from 

 Design. I need not pause to explain how it was criticized by 

 Kant himself, for we are deaUng with a broad tendency of 

 thought rather than with individual thinkers. Clearly it w^as no 

 longer possible to rest upon the 'prima facie evidence of design, 

 that is to say, the coincidence between the effects inKature and 

 the effects visibly following from the efforts of human intelligence. 

 The weakness of Huxley's reply to Paley's celebrated argument 

 about the watch may even tend to blind us to the greatness of 

 the mental revolution which divided these two writers. But 

 indeed the very fact that the Evolutionists had their own way 

 of accounting for design made the Paleyan position, for the time 

 being at least, no longer so much a defence as a point to be 

 defended. It might be successfully defended, but it had to be 

 defended. Plenty of apparent designs are the result of chance, 

 and, given an indefinite material of variations, an indefinite time, 

 and the operation of a principle to eliminate the irrelevant and 

 obstructive elements, what need to postulate a directing Will ? 

 It is true (let me remark parenthetically) that not Chance, but 

 Necessity, or Law, is the general watchword of the anti- 

 teleologists. But I believe it can be shown that, as against 

 intelligent free-will, blind Necessity and blind Chance are not 

 contradictories, but the same principle viewed from different 

 sides. 



However, let us return to Philosophy. Let us note how much 



Q 



