Bergson sees an internal psychological principle of development,
hence the name of his book, "Creative Evolution." Osborn uses the
word "directed." Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited
to their purpose from the start; they do not have to be fitted to
their place by natural selection. Huxley uses the word
"predestined"--all the life of the globe and all the starry hosts of
heaven are working out in boundless space and in endless time "their
predestined course of evolution." Darwin must have had in mind the
same mysterious something when he said that man had risen to the
very summit of the animal scale, but not through his own exertions.
Not by his own will or exertion, surely, any more than the embryo in
its mother's womb develops into the full-grown child by its own
exertion or than our temperaments and complexions and statures are
matters of our own wills and choice. Something greater than man and
before him, to which he sustains the relation that the unborn child
sustains to its mother, must enter into our thought of his origin
and development.
The great evolutionists have been very cautious about seeking to go
behind evolution and name the Primal Cause. In such an attempt
science would at once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley were
reverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated as men of science to
put themselves in a position where no step could be taken.
Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic time into the dawn
of history, and science gropes about like a man feeling his way in
the dark or, at most, by the aid now and then of a dim flash of
light, to trace the path he has come. He has surely arrived, and we
are, I believe, safe in saying he has come by the way of the lower
orders; but the precise forms through which he has come, the houses
in which he has tarried by the way, and all the adventures and
vicissitudes that befell him on the journey--can we ever hope to
know these things? In any case, man has his antecedents; life has
its antecedents; every beat of one's heart has its antecedent cause,
which again has its antecedent. We can thus traverse the chain of
causation only to find it is an endless chain; the separate links we
can examine, but the first link or the last we see, by the very
nature of things, and the laws of our own minds, must forever elude
us. Science cannot admit of a break in the chain of causation,
cannot admit that miracles or the supernatural in the old sense, as
external and arbitrary interference with the natural order, can play
or ever have played any part in this universe. Yet science has to
postulate a First Cause when it knows, or metaphysics knows for it,
that with the Infinite there can be no first and no last, no
beginning and no ending, only endless succession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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