but I do not agree with him. I do not pretend that my opinion on these matters is susceptible of scientific demonstration. Neither is his."* Spencer relates that Christianity never appealed to him, neither to the emotional nor the intellectual side of his nature. In this state of alienation he remained firm to the day of his death. Professor Fiske idealized the theory of evolution, and not only discovered design, but also the imminence of God in the universe. We contend that this is a departure, essential and significant, from the theory of evolution in the strictly scientific sense of the term, and the careful and extended examination of the sources shows to every candid reader that the whole scheme of nature, as outlined by Darwin, Spencer, Huxley and Haeckel, involves the denial outright, of the argument from design, and this denial sweeps away every vestige of fundamental theological belief, theism, that is, not to speak of those traditions and teachings which are distinctively Christian.

II. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN.

The early Greek schools of philosophy were dominated by the idea of change and flow, of unfolding and growth. One step in the ceaseless passage from the lower to the higher, brought forth another, until all the world presented a scene of multiform life and endless variation, the result of differentiation, of the action of a single law, or of two laws, instead of miracle or special creation, the play of atoms in a vacuum, the product of a process of evolution from the simple to the complex, from water, or air, or earth, or slime, all the way to man, and to his soul, to the Homeric heros and to the gods. The static conception of the universe which followed, when Socrates emphasized the law of conscience and duty, and Plato and Aristotle set forth the philosophy of eternal ideas, or types and forms, came more and more to the mastery in the world of thought, and entered as a mighty current and factor, as far * Fiske, A Century of Science," p. 61.

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† Spencer, "Autobiography," Vol. I., pp. 171, 172, 173.

as its nobler phases are concerned, into the larger light of truth, which was given to mankind with the introduction of Christianity. Modern science in the narrower sense, the doctrine of evolution, that is, as promulgated by the writings of Darwin, Spencer and Huxley, is a return, in principle, to the earlier Greek movements of thought. The immortal contributions of Plato and Aristotle to fundamentals in philosophy, constitute an armor which has become useless. Hence it is cast aside. Even Hume, with all his scepticism otherwise, seemed to maintain to the end a most implicit faith in the argument from design. In the "Natural History of Religion," Hume says: "The whole frame of nature bespeaks an Intelligent Author; and no rational inquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine theism and religion. Were men led into apprehension of invisible, intelligent power by a contemplation of the works of nature, they could never possibly entertain any conception but of one single being, who bestowed existence and order on this vast machine, and adjusted all its parts according to one regular plan or connected system. For though, to persons of a certain turn of mind, it may not appear altogether absurd that several independent beings, endowed with superior wisdom, might conspire in the contrivance and execution of one regular plan, yet is this a merely arbitrary supposition, which, even if allowed possible, must be confessed neither to be supported by probability nor necessity. All things in the universe are evidently of a piece. Everything is adjusted to everything. One design prevails throughout the whole. And this uniformity leads the mind to acknowledge one author; because the conception of different authors, without any distinction of attributes or operations, serves only to give perplexity to the imagination, without bestowing any satisfaction on the understanding."*

Emanuel Kant, on the contrary, in his epoch-making

* Hume, "The Natural History of Religion," pp. 435, 442. See also Huxley's "Life of Hume," p. 91.

"Critique of Pure Reason," criticises the argument from design and declares it to be insufficient to prove the existence of God. Thus it may be said that the great Koenigsberg thinker is the author of that phase of modern philosophy whose trend has been to eliminate the idea of teleology from the world of existing objects. The field in which this movement has culminated is natural science. Kant said that the most one can postulate from the standpoint of pure reason is the existence of a divine architect, or world-builder, a demiurgos, in the ancient gnostic terminology. "The reason,' "The reason," Kant says, "could not atone to itself for passing from the causality that it knows, to dark and unprovable grounds of explanation it does not know. According to this conclusion the fitness and harmony of so many adaptations in nature would merely prove the contingency of form, but not of matter, that is, substance in the world." His conclusion concerning matter and the sum-total of the world is that these are not adapted to the idea of a necessary primal Being as a mere principle of the highest empirical unity, but that the latter must be placed outside of the world, since we can always readily deduce the phenomena of the world, and their existence, from other phenomena, as if there were no ultimate and necessary Being. And yet we ceaselessly strive after the consummation of the deduction, just as if a highest ground of existence is to be taken for granted. Hence we find here a regulative principle of the reason, rather than the evidence of an all-sufficient cause to which to ascribe the law of a systematic unity underlying and explanatory of the universal laws of the world.* Thus while seeking to demonstrate the insufficiency of the argument from design to prove the existence of God, Kant, by inversion, implies the eternal existence of matter, which conclusion we draw from the fact that a world-architect merely must have had a prius with which to work, a chaos to transform into order. † Thus, * Kant, "Kritik der Reinen Vernunft," Reclam Ausgabe, Seite 486. Lange says: "The empiricism of modern natural science arrives at exactly the same results as the apriorism of Kant." ("History of Materialism," Vol. II., p. 545.)

too, when Darwin teaches that the Creator in the beginning impressed certain laws upon matter," he in effect commits himself to the doctrine of the eternity of matter, the priority to God of the unknown and characterless stuff or substance which He endows by an original act of divine power with a certain δύναμις οι ενέργεια. This notion has again and again been shown to be purely a gratuitous assumption.*

Hegel, too, though he pursues another course in unfolding his system of the universe, and finds finality in a certain sense in the processes of the evolution of the absolute idea, clinging, in a degree, like Goethe, as a profound student of Plato and Aristotle, to the idea of types, denied the argument from design. "The bud," Hegel says in the famous preface to his "Phaenomenologie des Geistes,' "vanishes in the blossom, and one may say that the former finds its negation in the latter. In like manner, through the fruit the blossom is declared to be a false existence of the plant, and as its truth, the first takes the place of the second." He says again: "The thing is not exhausted in its purpose, but in its execution; nor is the result the actual whole; but it is this together with its becoming. The end in itself is the lifeless universe, as the tendency is merely the impulse, which still lacks reality, and

* Kant's denial of the sufficiency of the cosmological and physico-theological arguments to prove the existence of God, may be made use of as an evidence of the need of a divine revelation. That Kant himself so viewed the results of his "Critique of Pure Reason" is shown in his "Streit der Facultaeten." "Dass ein Gott sei, beweiset der biblische Theolog daraus, das er in der Bibel geredet hat, worin diese auch von seiner Natur (selbst bis dahin, wo die Vernunft mit der Schrift nicht Schritt halten kann, z. B. vom unerreichbaren Geheimniss seiner dreifachen Persoenlichkeit) spricht. Dass aber Gott selbst durch die Bibel geredet habe, kann und darf, weil es eine Geschichtssache ist, der biblische Theolog, als ein solcher nicht beweisen; denn das gehoert zur philosophischen Facultaet. Er wird es also als Glaubenssache auf ein gewisses, freilich nicht erweisliches oder erklaerliches, Gefuehl der Goettlichkeit derselben, selbst fuer den Gelehrten, gruenden, die Frage aber wegen dieser Goettlichkeit, im buchstaeblichen Sinne genommen, des Ursprungs derselben im Oeffentlichen Vortrage ans Volk gar nicht aufwerfen muessen." Denn dadurch wuerde das Volk nur "in vorwitzige Gruebeleien und Zweifel verwickelt werden." (Reclam Ausgabe, pp. 37, 38.)

the naked result is the lifeless body which the tendency has left behind." Elsewhere he says: "Nature is a spirit in alienation from itself, which as released out of itself, is full of freaks, a bacchantic god, who does not rein himself in and keep himself in hand; in nature the unity of the notion is concealed."* He comments that while in the teleological view of things there is exhibited the well-meaning interest to point out the wisdom of God in the works of nature, this search for finality in which things serve as means, does not rise above the finite, and easily degenerates into puerile reflections, as for example, when, in addition to the usefulness of the grape, the purpose of the corktree is made to be the production of bark for stoppers for the wine-flasks. The objections to such extremely utilitarian, painfully practical and unpoetic interpretations of nature are valid, but their existence does not justify a radical tendency in the opposite direction. We may say that with Darwin the concealed unity of the notion, in Hegelian terminology, is the predetermined mysterious power impressed upon matter by the Creator in the beginning, and thus the multiplicity of forms is the fruit of the riotous caprice of unconscious nature, of the capricious play of the infinite, without reason or end, governed by causality, but destitute of finality. That our contention is correct, the trend of thought in every work more or less in sympathy with modern science in the narrower sense, conclusively proves. In a recent book, most ably written, the author asserts that the principle of twofold truth constitutes the basic principle of theology, as does the law of the excluded middle in logic, and that this is most strikingly shown in the attitude of the Church to causality and teleology. Standing on the law of twofold truth, he says, the Church believes she may ignore the fact that in the last few hundred years the greatest revolution known to history has occurred in the field of knowledge. Science has moved forward from the teleological to the causal world-view, that is to * Dr. Andrew Seth, "Hegelianism and Personality," p. 143. (Hegel, "Works," VII., 24.)

† Hegel, "Encyclopaedie, Logik," p. 379.