The first reproach that has been addressed to me is contained in the words, "Naturalistic Evolutionism." A conception more or less materialistic of the universe is thus attributed to me, according to which, like Herbert Spencer, I should explain all things by the single law of evolution, and end sooner or later by reducing the laws of the moral world to the laws of the physical world, since I make of the first a simple transformation of the second. Need I say that this is the very opposite of my thought? It is true that I like to use the word evolution, and to consider all phenomena in their natural succession. But this is not a metaphysical doctrine; it is a process of study, a method which consists in these two essential rules: to observe each fact as it presents itself; and to observe it in its order, _i.e._ in the conditions in which it presents itself, because a fact only possesses its truth and value in that order and succession. On our planet, moral life emerges slowly and painfully out of organic life. Must we therefore conclude that there is no more in the one than in the other, and that they are of equal value? Certainly not. Both these series of phenomena must be placed in their relations and connections; but the method which makes them known to me gives me no more right to confound them than to separate them, to ignore their differences than to forget their analogies. It shows me, on the contrary, that there is advance, _real_ progress from the one to the other; that the first in date has its end in the second; that there is a sort of living and continuous creation, each stage and degree of which reveals new riches and new glories. This is so thoroughly the oasis of my religious philosophy that there would be more ground or, at all events, more excuse for accusing me of denying the reality of the world than the continuous action of the Divine Creator.