Unquestionably that which men sought to be rid of was the idea of purpose in nature, in the old sense of design in the mind of God, external to the material universe, of force exerted upon nature from without, so as to cause nature to conform to the design of its 'Great Original,' in Addison's high phrase. In this effort, however, the reducing of all to mere force and permutation of force, not merely explains nothing, but contradicts facts which stare us in the face. It deprives evolution of the quality which makes it evolution. To put in this incongruous quality at the beginning, because we find it necessary at the end, is, to say the least, naïve. To deny that we have put it in, to insist that in the marvellous sequence we have only an illustration of mechanism and of conservation of force, is perverse. We passed through an era in which some said that they did not believe in God; everything was accounted for by evolution. In so far as they meant that they did not believe in the God of deism and of much traditional theology, they did not stand alone in this claim. In so far as they meant by evolution mere mechanism, they explained nothing and destroyed the notion of evolution besides. In so far as they meant more than mere mechanism, they lapsed into the company of the scientific myth-makers to whom we alluded above. They attributed to their abstraction, evolution, qualities which other people found in the forms of the universe viewed as the manifestation of an immanent God. Only by so doing were they able to ascribe to evolution that which other people describe as the work of God. At this level the controversy becomes one simply about words.