to examine if there be any alternative form of the same
philosophy more bearable.

I have forborne all criticism of the supposed _facts_ on which Evolution
is based; as others have dealt frequently with their various weaknesses.
Nor do I think it necessary to deal with the extravagant subordinate
hypotheses by aid of which facts are forced under the main hypothesis,
e.g., those which explain how the horse grew out of the hipparion. The
crudest finalists have been everywhere out-stripped by Evolutionists in
dextrous application of the argument _a posse ad esse_.

III.

Assuming still that the facts collected and arranged by experimental
science in favour of the hypothesis are such as to demand some kind of
Evolution-philosophy; assuming that the very imperfect serial
classification of living things according to their degree of organic
definiteness, coherence, and heterogeneity not merely represents a
variety which has always coexisted since life was possible on this
earth, but rather traces out or hints at the genetic process by which
this variety has been produced, let us see if there be any other
governing principle directing the process, more intelligible than the
persistence of that mere organic life which cannot even be thought of as
distinct from those appliances and functions which it is supposed to
have evolved for its own service by "natural selection."

Let us admit, what is really evident, that life is nothing distinct from
the sum of those functions which minister to the preservation of life;
and that therefore it is not the same thing in a man and in a
mud-turtle. Man's superior faculties are not merely a more complicated
machinery for producing an identical effect which the mud-turtle
produces more simply and abundantly, but rather by their very play
_constitute_ an entirely different and higher kind of life. When Hume,
in his _Treatise on Human Nature_, says: "Reason is and ought to be the
slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to
serve and obey them," he implies that the exercise of reason is no
constituent factor of human life, but something outside it, subordinate
to it, whereas that life itself consists in passion, or pleasurable
sensation, of which man, in virtue of his reason and other advantages,
secures more than do his fellow-animals. This is just the conception of
life which we have seen to be incoherent on close inspection; and if it
be so, then the evolutiona