Manifestly, this perpetual motion, forever changing and superseding its own forms and products, cannot be considered father to even a rational stable conscience, much less a sure abiding moral law for its steady recognition and eternally reverent regard. "The child of contingency remains contingent." And so the advocates of this empirical, materialistic, and atheistic evolutionism consistently maintain that there is no absolute moral law, and that what seems so is only shifting hereditary judgments generated by experience and utility or some instinct formed by biological processes. (3) But further. In this merely naturalistic evolution all the essential presuppositions of moral law are wanting and excluded. This is easily seen. (_a_) It has already been pointed out that the action of conscience is theistic, its authority arising from its perception of a law of duty imposed on it and representing a moral law-giver (See Chap. IV, pp. 79-80; Chap. V, pp. 87-88). So moral law, as a rule of ethical righteousness, is necessarily theistic. It is thinkable only as a requirement made by rational intelligence for fitting conduct among personal agents. It rests in a world-system of rational ends and ideal requirements. The standard is established by intelligence. Should it be objected, that we may regard the standard as made by the mind of men only, and altogether a human and subjective thing, it is enough to remind the reader that according to the hypothesis, there is no human mind as a different entity from matter, the only "mentality" left being merely particular effects of molecular or brain activity, and therefore only successive passive products, simply revealing what, if it exists at all, must exist as the molecular matter behind them. The autocratic moral law which the conscience finds, but does not make, is conceivable therefore, only as part of intelligent ordering in a rational world-system. But according to the hypothesis no moral reason has framed or regulates the order of the physical forces that create the relations of life. (_b_) Moral law, with responsibility, is inconceivable except in connection with personal freedom in the subject of it. But in this kind of evolutionism, everything is reduced to the mechanism of matter; and its supporters agree that our personal freedom is an illusion. There can be no more morality in the thoughts, aims and conduct of men than in the digestion of food or the growth and decay of a tree.