Page:On an Evolutionist Theory of Axioms.djvu/22

15 It is not even necessary that the experience of the race should have been uniform. Arcs may have been seen equal to or less than their chords, but if they only came seldom, or if in the course of time their number much diminished, like that of an expiring race of animals, then according to the biological principles presupposed, the infinitely greater accumulation of contrary experiences would in time wipe away all trace of them from our organism.

Worse than this—owing to the way in which Nature has fixed our functions we could not perceive arcs which were not greater than their chords, even if there were plenty of them about us. It is therefore useless to dredge the deep seas or to go to the Poles, and indeed we do not know whether in our own parts of the world these arcs have not begun to appear. We could no more see them than a blind man could.

And thus the evolutionist, professing to have established the validity of the test of inconceivableness, has unwittingly shewn it to be consistent with the contradictory of what he supposes it to absolutely guarantee. It follows irresistibly that all that seems to us simplest, clearest, most self-evident, and more certain, according to the evolutionist himself, than anything else we can believe, may be an illusion.

The theory which was to have reconciled great philosophies has destroyed itself, and has ended in a scepticism which has not even the merit of being self-conscious.

The contradiction cannot be avoided by dogmatically affirming that the experience which has fixed our functions does, as a matter of fact, correspond to a universal truth which has no exceptions: for this involves, according as we look at it, a new inconsistency or an argument in a circle.

(i) We are told that the ultimate and only criterion for the individual who forms the last term of the series is the test of inconceivableness, and yet on the other hand that the criterion is trustworthy because an invariable experience