Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/166

148 look for them? The argument against so doing is old. If progress has causes we must invoke time to delay their operation, to keep the world from being finished at a single stroke. But then what causes can we invoke for time's delay? It avails us not. We shall end by affirming that causes are progressive, and then, perhaps, delude ourselves into supposing that we have discovered the cause of progress itself. That some natures are progressive seems certain; that all are seems doubtful. And that, I suspect, is why we find the distinction between the organic and the inorganic so natural and so helpful. I venture to suggest that the triumph of mechanism would involve, not the reduction of the organic to the inorganic, but the removal of the distinction or the restatement of it in terms of a time function.

Evolution is thus discovered to be progressive. All our attempts to explain why this is so, all our appeals to energy, force, will, design, vitality, appear to be but the obscure recognition of that discovery. Or they are introduced to help out an initial misconception, the conception, namely, that the nature and efficacy of all causes are fixed and determined irrespective of the time it takes for those causes to operate. Such a conception implies to my mind a world where nothing could occur without the intervention of some new power to make it occur. But we have the best of evidence that it is not some such mysterious power which operates, but rather simply the continuing in operation of the concrete factors with which we deal.

If evolution as a natural fact is thus progressive, it is apparent that evolution as a rational enterprise, as the attempt to recover the history of things by generalizing for the past the conditions, types, factors, and rates of change which are discoverable, is itself an instance of progress. That the past is thus recoverable can be no less a natural fact and no less significant for evolution than the existence of the past itself. If it is unprofitable to construe evolution otherwise than as history, it is also unprofitable to construe it irrespective of intelligence, to suppose that the mind has had no history or that it is irrelevant to the world it contemplates. We should not say that it creates that world or serves as the ground of its character or existence. Yet we