; and pleasure is almost the note of
vital vigour, according to this philosophy.

Plainly, our argument from the adaptability of a belief to man's higher
moral needs, vanishes into thin air as soon as the key to the order of
nature is thus sought in a blind non-moral tendency, and when that which
is lowest is put at the top, and everything above it made to minister to
it.

But then it is not only this particular argument that perishes, but all
possibility of arguing at all, all faith in our mental faculties, except
so far as they minister to the finding of food and the propagation of
life. Thus the very attempt to prove such a system of Evolution is a
contradiction, since it cuts away all basis of proof. On this I need not
dwell longer, since it has been worked out so fully and clearly by
others. We get rid of the argument from adaptability, by a conception of
the order of Nature that reduces us to mental and moral chaos.

In its semblance of simplicity this form of Evolution-philosophy shows
itself kin to those other old-world attempts to dispense with a
governing mind, and to educe the existing cosmos from the blind strife
of primordial atoms. It has indeed a more plausible basis, seeing how
many things, too quickly attributed to design in a theological age, can
really be explained by the struggle for existence. But in trying to make
an occasional and partial cause universal and ultimate, it has
undertaken the impossible task of bringing the greater out of the less;
which really means bringing their difference out of nothing--and this is
creation with the First Cause left out; that is, spontaneous creation.
It is from first to last an "aggregation" theory, and has to face the
insupportable burdens which such a theory brings with it. Haunted by a
false analogy drawn from the political organism whose members are
intelligent and self-directive, and who put themselves under an
intelligent government to be marshalled and directed to one common
end--haunted by this anthropomorphic conception, it tries to explain how
independent and indestructible units, void of all intelligence, come
together into polities with no assignable government; and how these
groups or polities, which are nothing separate from the sum of their
components, are aggregated to one another in like manner; until at last
we come to the highest organism, which again is only the sum of its
ultimate atoms, and its activity the sum of their activities--the w