Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/92

 only in a new form, often strikes us as something unheard of, and even as paradoxical and almost impossible. A little over thirty years ago a little philosophical toy, the gyroscope, was introduced and became very common. At first sight it seems to violate all mechanical laws and set at naught the law of gravitation itself. A heavy brass wheel, four to five inches in diameter, at the end of a horizontal axle, six or eight inches long, is set rotating rapidly, and then the free end of the axis is supported by a string or otherwise. The wheel remains suspended in the air while slowly gyrating. What mysterious force sustains the wheel when its only point of support is at the end of the axle, six or eight inches away? Scientific and popular literature were flooded with explanations of this seeming paradox. And yet it was nothing new. The boy's top, that spins and leans and will not fall, although solicited by gravity, so long as it spins, which we have seen all our lives without special wonder, is precisely the same thing.

Now, evolution is no new thing, but an old familiar truth; but, coming now in a new and questionable shape, lo, how it startles us out of our propriety! Origin of forms by evolution is going on everywhere about us, both in the inorganic and the organic world. In its more familiar forms it had never occurred to most of us that it was a scientific refutation of the existence of God, that it was a demonstration of materialism. But now it is pushed one step farther in the direction it has always been going—it is made to include also the origin of species—only a little change in its form, and lo, how we start! To the deep thinker, now and always, there is and has been the alternative—materialism or theism. God operates Nature or Nature operates itself; but evolution puts no new phase on this old question. For example, the origin of the individual by evolution. Everybody knows that every one of us individually became what we now are by a slow process of evolution from a microscopic spherule of protoplasm, and yet this did not interfere with the idea of God as our individual maker. Why, then, should the discovery that the species (or first individuals of each kind) originated by evolution destroy our belief in God as the creator of species?

3. It is curious and very interesting to observe the manner in which vexed questions are always finally settled, if settled at all. All vexed questions—i. e., questions which have tasked the powers of the greatest minds age after age—are such only because there is a real truth on both sides. Pure, unmixed error does not live to plague us long. Error, when it continues to live, does so by virtue of a germ of truth contained. Great questions, therefore, continue to be argued pro and con from age to age, because each side is in a sense—i. e., from its own point of view