We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may
explain everything else, cannot explain itself. What is the origin of
the movement, and by what power the order of development is prescribed,
are questions yet unsolved by physical science. That the solution, if it
could be supplied, would involve anything arbitrary, miraculous, or at
variance with the observed order of things, need not be assumed; but it
might open a new view of the universe, and dissipate for ever the merely
mechanical accounts of it. In the meantime we may fairly enter a caveat
against the tacit insinuation of an unproved solution. Science can
apparently give no reason for assuming that the first cause, and that
which gives the law to development, is a blind force rather than an
archetypal idea. The only origination within our experience is that of
human action, where the cause is an idea. Science herself, in fact,
constantly assumes an analogous cause for the movements of the universe
in her use of the word "law," which necessarily conveys the notion, not
merely of observed co-existence and sequence, but of the intelligent and
consistent action of a higher power, on which we rely in reasoning from
the past to the future, as we do upon consistency in the settled conduct
of a man.
Unspeakably momentous, however, we once more admit, the discovery is,
and great is the debt of gratitude due to its illustrious authors. Yet
it seems not unreasonable to ask whether in some respects we are not too
much under its immediate influence, and whether the revolution of
thought, though destined ultimately to be vast, may not at present have
somewhat overpassed its bounds. Is it not possible that the physical
origin of man may be just now occupying too large a space in our minds
compared with his ulterior development and his final destiny? With our
eyes fixed on the "Descent," newly disclosed to us, may we not be losing
sight of the _Ascent_ of man?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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