Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/161

No. 2.] a future, its past is alterable and its future therefore indeterminate. Evolution as history is thus not simply the record of accomplished events with all their principles and laws; it is rather, let us say, history as an object, a continuing process whose past is recoverable and whose future is conjecturable, but which, as a process, cannot be construed as the result or eventuation of anything.

In a certain sense, then, there is no evolution. If we conceive of the simple unfolding of potentialities once resident and determined in some primitive condition, there is no evolution. As a substitute for a creator, there is no evolution. As a set of laws or principles which, somehow controlling the stuff of things, causes that stuff to produce a world, there is no evolution. As the growth of a cosmic seed, there is no evolution. Nature defies and gives the lie to all these conceptions. She proclaims again and again that everything that happens has had a history, but that nothing happens because it has had a history. Clocks do not go because they have had a history. Hens do not sit because they have had a history. Matter does not perform its manifold functions because it has had a history. To say that the world is what it is because it has had a history is to say something meaningless. It is meaningless for two reasons: first, because the history of a thing is never the cause of it, and secondly, because the world has no history at all.

These statements may be more irritating than convincing. I am sensible that they appear to obscure an issue. It may be readily admitted that the history of anything is never its cause, since so to affirm is to confuse facts with their record. But the thing has causes and its history reveals what those causes are. The history of a house may not be the cause of a house, but its history does reveal the men who built it. Assuredly; but this is to construe causation as well as evolution historically. It is evident that builders do not build houses in a world where houses are not built. Causes do not operate where they do not produce effects. In other words, no effect points to its causes as isolated antecedents of that effect. If there is no effect without a cause, there is also no cause without an effect. Only existent things