TWO PATHS, ONE GOAL. 



103 



grown organism, human or other, the argument for purpose that 

 order affords woukl be the weaker thereby. But no such 

 mechanical, fixed development of the world and its inhabitants 

 as this much- vaunted picture is supposed to exhibit, is found in 

 the world around. Tliis fallacious conception of the picture of 

 the phylogeny of living things which the ontogeny of a particular 

 organism is held to illustrate might easily be dragged in by the 

 teleologist as an aid to proving the agnostic evolutionist wrong 

 out of his own mouth, when he denies the existence of order and 

 purpose in the world. But for those who prefer to think for 

 themselves, and only to avail themselves of the well-tried 

 and matured conclusions of modern Science, it is a very 

 dancrerous thino- to trust to tlie armour of Saul when the five 

 smooth stones of the brook are at their service. The develop- 

 ment of the individual organism is very interesting to the 

 embryologist, and even to the biologist in general, and the 

 history of the development of the race of plants, animals, and 

 man is of still greater interest, but let us beware of resting any 

 argument for the latter upon any supposed analogy afforded by 

 the former. The general rational order of the world is also 

 further illustrated by the slow process of mental development 

 found to have taken place, until modern man has found 

 himself surrounded, as in a fairy palace, witli a profusion of 

 beautiful, useful, mysterious, and yet progressively interpretable 

 phenomena. 



It was a foremost physicist, Professor Larmor, who proclaimed 

 at the British Association of Science in 1900 the rationality of 

 natural ^processes, and every notable man ot" science to-day will 

 claim that Science has much more to do with phenomena than 

 to observe, describe, record, and admire them, and that is to 

 interpret them. I speak not here of final causes so abhorrent 

 to the agnostic, and supposed, but wrongly, to have been entirely 

 banned by Francis Bacon (as a matter of fact he only con- 

 demned the study of final causes as a barren one when it led 

 the student to take his mind off" the natural and discoverable 

 links of causation), but it must be acknowledged by all that the 

 final business of Science is to arrange in the order of nature 

 the phenomena which they can reach ; in other words to 

 interpret their meaning with the powers of finite minds. This 

 would be a fruitless or certainly most fallacious pursuit if there 

 were no meaning in them ; and, if an increased knowdedge of 

 nature were to reveal to them the fact that confusion and chaos 

 had taken the place of that cosmos which they once had more 

 or less clearly perceived ; it were disastrous indeed to have been 



H 



