Page:Divine Selection or The Survival of the Useful.djvu/58

 lays down a principle before which all theories must give way, or accommodate themselves to it. "To suppose that during countless ages, from the sea-weed up to man, the progress of life was achieved through adjustments to external realities, but that then the method was all at once changed, and throughout a vast province of evolution the end was secured through adjustments to external non-realities, is to do sheer violence to logic and common sense. . . . . So far as our knowledge of nature goes, the whole momentum of it carries us onward to the conclusion that the unseen world, as the objective term is a relation of fundamental importance that has coexisted with the whole career of mankind, has a real existence." The conspicuous error of Evolution for which it must now pay the penalty is, that it has never acknowledged the very objective term,