As an empirical rule, the principle of the minimum is, no doubt, essential to the scientific method. To erect it into a metaphysical axiom, however, is preposterous; for _simple_ explanations are not necessarily _true_ explanations. In the rôle of aprioristic metaphysics, the principle of continuity is destructive, and tends to plane down everything to the dead level of materialistic monism. For those who transcendentalize it, it becomes the principle “that everything is ‘nothing but’ something else, probably inferior to it.” (Santayana.) To assert continuity, they are driven to deny, or, at least, to leave unexplained and inexplicable, the obvious novelty that emerges at each higher level of the cosmic scale. And thus it comes to pass that intelligence is pronounced to be nothing but sense, and sense to be nothing but physiology, and physiology to be nothing but chemistry, and chemistry to be nothing but mechanics, until this philosophical nihilism weeps at last for want of further opportunities of devastation. Its exponents have an intense horror for abrupt transitions, and resent the discovery of anything that defies resolution into terms of mass and motion. Evolution smooths the path for monism of this type by transforming nature’s staircase into an inclined plane of imperceptible ascent. Hence Dewey refers to evolution as a “clinching proof” of the continuity hypothecated by the monist. For the latter, there is no hierarchy of values, and all essential distinctions are abolished; for him nothing is unique and everything is equally important. He affirms the democracy of facts and is blind to all perspective in nature. He is, in short, the enemy of all beauty, all spirituality, all culture, all morality, and all religion. He substitutes neurons for the soul, and enthrones Natural Selection in the place of the Creator. He sets up, in a word, the ideal of “an animalistic man and a mechanistic universe,” and offers us evolution as a demonstration of this “ideal.” Vernon Kellogg objects to our indictment. “The evolutionist,” he says, “does not like being called a bad man. He does not like being posted as an enemy of poetry and faith and religion. He does not like being defined as crassly materialist, a man exclusively of the earth earthy.” (_Atlantic Monthly_, April 24, 1924, p. 490.) Apart from their object, the likes or dislikes of an evolutionist are a matter of indifference. What we want to know is whether his dislike is merely for the names, or whether it extends to the reality denoted by these names. Human nature has a weakness for euphemisms. Men may “want the game without the name,” particularly when, deservedly or undeservedly, the name happens to have an offensive connotation.