e aforesaid latent potentialities or preordained
ends. In fine, Evolution, whatever form it take, gets rid of theism and
finality only by slipping into their place some tendency or indefinable
power which it considers adequate to account for the facts to be
explained.

Let us now see if there be room in this philosophy for our argument from
adaptability, and whether it will allow us to infer that because belief
in theism and in future retribution are beliefs postulated by our higher
moral aspirations, therefore they answer to reality more or less
approximately; whether, in short, under certain conditions (specified in
our last essay) the wish to believe may be a valid reason for believing.

Now Evolution as a philosophy or explanatory hypothesis owes its
popularity to its apparent simplicity. Wrapped in its wordy envelope,
the notion as formulated by Spencer needs no subtilty of apprehension,
but only a dictionary. Nor is the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection
more difficult.

Other things equal, the simpler hypothesis is to be preferred to the
less simple where no proof can be had of either. But none the less, the
simpler may be false and the other true. Cheapness is no proof of
goodness. We are naturally impatient of troublesome and complex
theories; but what we gain in the simplicity of an hypothesis, we
commonly lose in the difficulty of getting the facts to square with it.
It is a simple theory that circular motion is the most perfect, and that
the planets being the most perfect bodies must move with the most
perfect motion; but so many epicycles must be introduced to explain
apparent exceptions that the modern astronomical hypothesis, however
more complex in statement, is on the whole welcomed as a simplification.
So we are disposed to think it is with regard to the popular form of
Evolutionism. Its simplicity in statement is more than cancelled by its
difficulty in application; and at last we are driven to conceive it in a
form which at once deprives it of its title to popularity. So far as it
is simple it is fallacious and proves incoherent on closer inspection,
when we try to translate its terms into clear and distinct ideas; but
when we get it into intelligible form it is no simpler than the theistic
hypothesis which it wants to displace, except inasmuch as it prescinds
from the question of origin and last end. But in this, its only
intelligible form, it leaves the argument from adaptability intact, and