ABSTRACT
The artificial nature of the abstraction which distinguishes the scientific from the moral and the religious consciousness, as well as the impossibility of simultaneously exercising faith and repressing it, is plainly exhibited in the optimistic interpretation of evolution. Strange to say, the reason why Professor Huxley maintains that evolution will be regressive is exactly the same reason that leads Mr. Herbert Spencer to maintain that it will be progressive. It is that the law of evolution is Necessity, that evolution is the outcome of mechanical causes. The argument that evolution must be progress commits logical suicide, for in the very act of proving its conclusion it proves that progress is not progress. Regressive metamorphosis, degeneration, pathological developments, physiological, mental, moral, and religious, are all processes of evolution, but are not progress. Thus far, then, by taking the environment into consideration, we seem to have introduced no new factor into our conception of progress.
