We have then in this second and soberer form of the philosophy of Evolution, an attempt to explain the order of the universe without explicit recourse to the hypothesis of an intelligent authorship and government of the world: that is to say, independently of theism and finality; and so far as this explanation admits all the effects and consequences of an intelligent government, without ascribing them to that cause, it admits among their number the value of the "argument from adaptability," and allows us to infer that the postulates of man's higher moral needs correspond approximately to reality, of which they are in some sense the product; and that the "wish to believe" is less likely to be a source of delusion in proportion as the belief in question is higher in the moral scale. But it is also clear how unsuccessful this attempted philosophy is in many ways; and with what difficulties and mysteries it is burdened. At best it can prescind from finalism by a confession of incompleteness and philosophical bankruptcy; by resolutely refusing to face the problem of the whole--of the ultimate whence and whither. If it would positively exclude theism or finalism it must ascribe all seeming order and adaptation to the persistence of some blind force, subduing all things to itself, to "existence," or to "life" striving to assert and extend itself. It is this conception that seems best to bring the mystery of the universe within the comprehension of the popular mind, and is more in keeping with those "aggregation theories" of our day which regard dust as the one eternal reality whose combination and disguises delude us into believing in soul and intelligence and divinity. But on closer examination the words "life" and "existence" answer to no simple reality or force which can be regarded as governing nature, and from this radical fallacy of language a whole brood of further absurdities spring up which make the popular form of Evolution-philosophy utterly incoherent. _June, Aug. Sept._ 1899. Footnotes: [Footnote 1: This will perhaps be the most convenient term. In the _Summa of Aquinas_, the elaborate treatise _De vera religione_, called into existence by more recent exigencies, had no place. Still, in so far as it is constructed roughly on the same scheme and presupposes the same philosophy, and (were it not a deepening of the roots rather than an extension of the branches) might almost be regarded as a development of scholasticism, it may rightly be called "scholastic" to distinguish it, say, from such a work as the _Grammar of Assent_.] [Footnote 2: _Science and a Future Life_, By F. W. Myers.]