Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/156

138 to question this method of evolution, because it is the only method which can be checked and controlled. No alternative method is open to us except the arbitrary method of making what suppositions we choose about the past, and in that case all suppositions can be made equally good because none of them can be tested. The evolutionary attitude needs, therefore, neither apology nor justification. It may need advocacy because it is easier and often more congenial to make mythologies than to write history.

The acceptance of the evolutionary point of view is, however, no guarantee that mythology has been abandoned. Speculations about energy and force, about the origins of variation, about heredity, about nature and nurture, as well as such controversies as often mark the engagements between vitalists and the supporters of mechanism, or between the adherents of epigenesis and of preformation, seem frequently to indicate that mythology still finds a place among the general doctrines of evolution. I do not mean to imply that these speculations and controversies point to no problems in need of solution. I mean only that they too frequently display a tendency to turn the characteristic operations of things into causes why things so operate; to assign a superior efficiency to the past than to the present; to make evolution a substitute for a creator; and, in general, to suppose that the causes rather than the history of the world have been discovered.

When, for instance, we ask, Why does a hen sit on eggs? we are often forbidden to give the natural and obvious answers, Because she wants to, or, In order that chicks may be hatched; and are urged rather to give the mythological answers, Because she has an instinct to sit, or, Because her ancestors sat. Now the first of these latter answers is the attempt to turn the characteristic behavior of the hen into a cause why she so behaves, and the second is the attempt to regard her past as more efficient than her present. One might as rationally say that a clock goes because it has an instinct to go or because its antecedents went. It seems, however, that when we ask such a question as has been proposed about the hen, we desire an answer which will make