United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
One very distinguished evolutionist, who has been forced onwards from his position to a kind of theism, declares that he is driven to a belief in immortality because he must believe in the reasonableness of God's work.
And Burke, the iron evolutionist, essentially answered, "No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the wind." It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies or becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught. The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere offense at the grotesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cage in the Regent's Park.
It was in an interview given at the beginning of his recent American tour that M. Sergei Rachmaninoff styled himself a "musical evolutionist." The phrase, doubtless uttered half in jest, is scarcely nice. It is one of those terms that are so loose that they are well-nigh meaningless. Nevertheless, there was significance in M. Rachmaninoff's use of it. For he employed it as an apology for his work.
The truth is that the ordinary anti-humanitarian only manages to harden his heart by having already softened his head. It is the reverse of sentimental to insist that a nigger is being burned alive; for sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant thoughts. And no one, not even a Higher Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned alive a pleasant thought.
His higher sentiments and aspirations, his self-denying philanthropy, his enthusiasm for the good and true, all the struggles and sufferings of heroes and martyrs, not to speak of that self-sacrifice which is the foundation of Christianity, are, in the view of the evolutionist, mere loss and waste, failure in the struggle of life. What does he give us in exchange?
To say that "right is right," sounds very oracular; but it either means that "right" is an ultimate spring of action, inexplicable on evolutionist principles, or that right is the will of the strongest, or an illusory inherited foreboding of pain, or a calculation of future pleasure and pain, or something which, in no sense, is a true account of what men do mean by right.
It was, in short, exactly the kind of primitive protoplasm which the evolutionist wanted to complete his chain of living structures, and the biologist wanted to serve as a foundation for his mechanical theory of life. If such a diffused mass of undifferentiated protoplasm existed at the bottom of the sea, one could hardly doubt that it was developed there by some purely natural forces.
You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think." Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all.
The probability of restoring friendly relations between Church and State is a matter of concern to everybody in Italy; but of even greater concern are the implications which issue from Signor Fogazzaro's thought. He is an evolutionist; he respects the higher criticism; he knows that religions, like states and secular institutions, have their birth and growth and inevitable decay.
In order to simplify the argument, we may allow what is claimed for it, and give the evolutionist credit for even greater success on the field of historical investigation which is his own field than he would, if fair-minded, claim for himself. The problem I have in view lies beyond this historical question.
Word Of The Day