The Greek myth tells us that the Goddess of Reason, the blue-eyed Pallas Athene, was not born like other gods and mortals in the natural way of a slow development. She jumped out of the head of Zeus full-armed in all her beauty and gifted with the powers of her unusual accomplishments. Is this myth true after all? Does the Logos of rational thought present us with an instance in which the development process has been interrupted? If so, we shall have to abandon the evolution theory as a theory and return to the old-fashioned view of special-creation acts. The difference between these two views is not of degree, but of kind. He who accepts the principle of evolution as the law of life abandons forever the idea of special and unconnected beginnings as much as that of special-creation acts. He cannot with consistency believe in an evolution with interruptions, for the theory of evolution is serviceable only if evolution is conceived as continuous. Prof. Max Müller of course has a right to define and use the word evolutionist as he sees fit, but if he excludes continuity from the idea of evolution, we declare that he has taken out the quintessence of its meaning and the core of its truth. Why this is so, we shall now briefly discuss. The evolution theory has been gradually developed by empirical investigations and it owes its all but universal acceptance to the great mass of _a posteriori_ evidence furnished by the natural sciences. It rests nevertheless upon a better and safer foundation than isolated instances of hap-hazard experience. Its foundation is quarried out of another and more reliable material. The evolution theory rests upon the ground of _a priori_ arguments. By _a priori_ we do not understand anything mysterious, but simply such cognition as possesses universality and necessity. That cognition which is in possession of universality and necessity is also called formal cognition. The formal sciences (for instance arithmetic, mathematics, pure logic, and pure mechanics) give us information about such truths as are applicable, because they are purely formal, to the formal conditions of anything and everything possible. Because we know _beforehand_ that the purely formal laws will hold good under all conditions Kant called their formulated theorems “a priori.” All the objections to the idea of apriority made by John Stuart Mill and other empiricists are due to their misinterpretation of the term.[10]