86 THE REV. CANON E. McCLURE, M.A., M.R.I. A., ON 



itself, go forward to a goal which is ' itself ' — development bring 

 out nothing but what was in, and bring it out, not from external 

 compulsion, but because it" is in it." 



Dr. Bradley's view of evolution was meant to show infer- 

 entially the absurdity of prevailing concepts. He did not see, 

 perhaps, that it was destined to express the latest opinions of 

 biologists on the subject. In his Presidential Address to the 

 British Association at Melbourne in August, 1914, Professor 

 Bateson seemed inclined to place the potentialities of all evolu- 

 tionary processes in the primordial protoplasm. " At first," he 

 says, " it may seem rank absurdity to suppose that the primordial 

 form or forms of protoplasm could contain complexity enough 

 to produce the divers types of life. But is it," he asks, 

 " easier to imagine that these powers could have been conveyed 

 by extrinsic additions ? " The answer is iu the negative if we 

 are to trust the trend of modern research. 



Professor Bateson is inclined not only to regard the primor- 

 dial protoplasm as containing within it potentially all the forms 

 which have since proceeded from it, but also, to look upon the 

 process of development as caused, not by extrinsic additions, 

 but by loss of certain elements inhibitory of change — " evolu- 

 tion by loss," and not by factors acquired from without, is a 

 new view, but it seems to fall in with much of our present 

 knowledge. 



We have learned of late, for instance, that abnormal develop- 

 ment in the mental and physiological constitution of human 

 beings are held in check by certain inhibitory functions. If 

 these be removed, we have as a result unbridled and irregular 

 products. A parallel to this inhibitory physiological action is 

 to be found sociologically in what we call "self-control." Indi- 

 viduals and nations that lose their " self-control " are a prey to 

 wild revolutionary impulses, even supposing that these impulses 

 are necessary to further developments. That the future should 

 be actually contained in the present is not startling when we 

 think, as Professor Bateson instances, that what became Shake- 

 speare was once a minute speck of protoplasm, and that all 

 additions to that speck were exclusively such material as would 

 go to the building up of an ape or a rat. Christianity had 

 within it at the outset all that it has since displayed to the world. 

 We may safely trust, from the analogy of the organic forces at 

 work in nature, that it will evolve from itself new forces which 

 for the moment may be "masked." That a new and vital 

 Christianity could arise from the labours of destructive German 

 and other critics would require a miracle to make credible. 



