"Until the problem has been stated in its most dangerous form, all solutions of it must be partial and inadequate. They must leave, after all, an inexplicable surd." EDWARD CAIRD. "Evolution is continuous, progressive change, according to certain laws, and by means of resident forces." LE CONTE. "There is a great distinction to be drawn between the fact of evolution and the manner of it, or between the evidence of evolution, as having taken place somehow, and the evidence of the causes which have been concerned in the process." ROMANES. CHAPTER XI. EVOLUTION AND THE OLD TESTAMENT. I. OBVIOUSLY the search for that in man which is the source of progress is beset with an ever-increasing number of facts, going to show that, at the outset, man had no moral, intellectual, religious, or social life at all, in the proper sense of these words. At the outset there was no society. Man could not be studied in his relations; for at that early day, when he had just issued from pure animalism, he had no idea of law, no definite relations. Professor Caird sees this difficulty, and says: "The phenomena of savage life are equally irrelevant to the religious and to the moral history of mankind. If morality takes its rise in the conflict between the ideal of duty and the life of animal instinct, then we can scarcely say that man, when he is almost wholly imprisoned in the circle of natural events and impulses, has yet entered on his career as a moral being. And, for the same reason, the Fetichist can scarcely be said to have entered into the sphere of religion." 1 Religion and morals are there, but they are "latent." They are present in much the same way as science and art are present in the new-born babe. And the question arises, are they in the child at the beginning, are they in his environment, or are they the outcome of the reaction 1 J. Caird's Philosophy of Religion, p. 329. of the one upon the other? A savage counting his fingers is a prophecy of the higher calculus and of quaternions. A savage bowing to sticks and stones is a prophecy of the Christian consciousness. But who fulfils this prophecy? These "latent" powers are valuable just to the extent that they are evolved. But is this evolution anything more than a manifestation of what already is? I have kept in this discussion Professor Caird's word "latent.” Modern physicists have, however, set the word aside as misleading. They say it is but another word for potential. As the word latent has been set aside in physics as misleading, so it should be in speaking of the powers of man. Says Prof. T. H. Green, "In the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to know the world, an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a history of this consciousness, which, in itself, can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its vehicle." 1 2. It is a failure to grasp this conception that must account for a vast amount of confusion in the popular religious mind on the questions of the evolution of man and of his institutions. It is forgotten that the word "origin" has a twofold meaning. It may refer to the origin of a phenomenon in time, or to the original and eternal idea which is more or less imperfectly embodied in the phenomenon. To illustrate, the beginning of a house is not to be sought in the first blow of the pick or hammer, but in the ideally formed plan and i Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 72. purpose to build a house. The true origin of an elmtree is not in the first swelling and sprouting of the life in the seed. There is the most essential element back of this, in the peculiar organization of the protoplasm which determines it as an elm, and not an ash or oak. In other words, then, the essential origin of a thing is not to be found in its earliest and most incomplete, but in its latest and most complete manifestation. The origin of science, ethics, religion, and civilization is to be found not in the remote past, but in the present. The best sample of the eternal consciousness is not the least evolved, but the most evolved consciousness. Man is not only the end, but the beginning of nature. Nature becomes conscious of herself in man, and man in his turn may read her secrets. And in spelling out these secrets, he is but traversing with nature the path that led to himself. The study of the evolution of religion must, then, begin and end with the ideally perfect man. If we leave this ideal out at the beginning of our study, and start with that which is only animal and brutish, we must posit the existence somewhere of a "latent," or hidden, or as yet unevolved, force which is to gradually appear to us.1 In other words, we would be letting in by stealth, little by little, and at a side door, what we refused admittance over the threshold. With all our pains, therefore, we may not find the true origin of our religion, and be able to state it with completeness. For even if we seek it in the present, it remains that we do not fully understand our own tendencies, our own moods, and all the grounds of our conscious life. We |