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Updated: June 23, 2025
Apart, however, from this scientific objection to evolutionism, there is another, derived from the undue admixture of ethical notions in the very idea of progress from which evolutionism derives its charm. Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance.
Thus the evolutionary philosopher is compelled to relinquish one theory after another; the biologist knocks out the under-pinning, the geologists and physicists demolish most of the residue; yet the advocates of evolutionism adhere to their purpose to banish God from the universe.
Herbert Spencer don't you know? and a lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in a belief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied by Topsy to her own origin and early history.
This may be puerile, if you like to think it so, and not in keeping with the transcendental aims of our fashionable theorists; the argument contains neither the subjective nor the objective point of view, neither adaptation nor differentiation, neither atavism nor evolutionism. Very well, but at least I understand it. Let us return to the habits of Pompilus apicalis.
We are thus brought back to our seeming paradox, that a philosophy which does not seek to impose upon the world its own conceptions of good and evil is not only more likely to achieve truth, but is also the outcome of a higher ethical standpoint than one which, like evolutionism and most traditional systems, is perpetually appraising the universe and seeking to find in it an embodiment of present ideals.
I have never understood why it is that those who talk most about evolution, and talk it in the very age of fashionable evolutionism, do not see the one way in which evolution really does apply to our modern difficulty. There is, of course, an element of evolutionism in the universe; and I know no religion or philosophy that ever entirely ignored it.
Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among plants and animals. Those who believed in the doctrine of Buffon and of the 'Zoonomia, and those who disbelieved in it, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the far- reaching implications of that fundamental problem. On every side evolutionism, in its crude form."
And the earlier philosophers, from Plato to Leibniz, had kept the human mind open for the thought of the universe as one idea behind all its physically apprehensible transformations. All this, remember, is the state of things in the pre-Darwin period, which so many of us still think of as a pre-evolutionary period. Evolutionism was the rage before Queen Victoria came to the throne.
Hence it is, aside from any investigation of proofs of evolutionism, clear to the Christian student that there must be some fault either in reason or in observation that vitiates the whole theory. The resurrection of Christ is a fact, a fact to which the entire history of Christianity testifies, the most tremendous fact in the history of the world.
The powerful attraction that Spencerian evolutionism has exercised on contemporary thought is due to that very cause.
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