It would be a monstrous allegation to say that any evolutionist would defend these conclusions in all their crudity; but is only by thus pushing implied principles to their results, that their incoherence can be made plain. Once more, if this simple uniform thing called life be the sole cause, determining organic Evolution and selecting accidental variations, just in so far as they favour its own maintenance and multiplication, then every organ, appliance, and faculty by which man differs from the simplest bioplast, is merely a life-preserving contrivance. To speak human-wise, Nature in that case has but one end--animal life; and chooses every means solely with a view to that end. She does not care about pain or pleasure, or consciousness, or knowledge, or truth, or morality, or society, or science, or religion, for their own sakes; she cares for life only, and for these so far as--like horns and teeth and claws--they are conducive to life. Evolution therefore is governed by a blind non-moral principle--as blind and ruthless as gravitation. This being so, the mind is for the sake of the body, and not conversely. Evolution is not making for truth and righteousness as for greater or even as for co-ordinate ends; but simply for life, to which sometimes truth and righteousness, but just as often illusion and selfishness, are means. There is nothing therefore in this process of Nature to make us trust that our mind really makes for truth as such, or that it has any essential tendency to greater correspondence with reality, beyond what subserves to fuller animal existence. The fact that a certain belief makes animal life possible is no proof of its truth, but only of its expediency. The extent to which many pleasures depend on illusion is proverbial; and pleasure is almost the note of vital vigour, according to this philosophy. Plainly, our argument from the adaptability of a belief to man's higher moral needs, vanishes into thin air as soon as the key to the order of nature is thus sought in a blind non-moral tendency, and when that which is lowest is put at the top, and everything above it made to minister to it. But then it is not only this particular argument that perishes, but all possibility of arguing at all, all faith in our mental faculties, except so far as they minister to the finding of food and the propagation of life. Thus the very attempt to prove such a system of Evolution is a contradiction, since it cuts away all basis of proof. On this I need not dwell longer, since it has been worked out so fully and clearly by others. We get rid of the argument from adaptability, by a conception of the order of Nature that reduces us to mental and moral chaos.