f chemical substances an
altogether similar sedation of species where there can be no question of
common descent as its cause, we may well suspend our judgment till the
established facts have excluded the many hypotheses other than Evolution
by which they may be explained.

As long as Evolution claims to be no more than a working scientific
hypothesis, like ether or electric fluid--a sort of frame or subjective
category into which observed facts are more conveniently fitted, it
cannot justly be pressed for a solution of ultimate problems; but when
it claims to be a complete philosophy and as such to extrude other
philosophies previously in possession, it must show that it can rest the
mind where they leave it restless; or that it has proved their proffered
solutions spurious. This, so far, it has absolutely failed to do. At
most it may determine more accurately the way in which God works out His
Idea in Creation. It can stand as long as it is content to prescind from
the question of ends and origins; but then it is no longer a complete
philosophy. As soon as it attempts to solve those problems it becomes
incoherent and unthinkable. Its true complement is theism and finality,
which flow from it as naturally, if not quite so immediately as the
"argument from adaptability." _Deus creavit_ is so far the only
moderately intelligible, or at least not demonstrably unintelligible,
answer given to the problem of _In principio_.

We have then in this second and soberer form of the philosophy of
Evolution, an attempt to explain the order of the universe without
explicit recourse to the hypothesis of an intelligent authorship and
government of the world: that is to say, independently of theism and
finality; and so far as this explanation admits all the effects and
consequences of an intelligent government, without ascribing them to
that cause, it admits among their number the value of the "argument from
adaptability," and allows us to infer that the postulates of man's
higher moral needs correspond approximately to reality, of which they
are in some sense the product; and that the "wish to believe" is less
likely to be a source of delusion in proportion as the belief in
question is higher in the moral scale.

But it is also clear how unsuccessful this attempted philosophy is in
many ways; and with what difficulties and mysteries it is burdened. At
best it can prescind from finalism by a confession of incompleteness and
philosoph