Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/843

Rh nothing more than development under the action of the laws of Mature imposed by God on the elements in the beginning. It is evolution from lower to higher forms under the action of what St. Thomas calls the Divine Administration, and in consequence of the action of what St. Augustine terms seminal reasons—rationes seminales. Absolute creation is direct, immediate, supernatural; derivative creation is indirect, and is effected by the Almighty through the agency of secondary causes. In the beginning God created the elements once for all, but on these simple elements he conferred the power of evolving into all the countless forms of beauty which now characterize the organic and inorganic worlds. What, then, the older theologians called secondary or potential creation or formation—development under the guidance of God's providence—we may now call, and with the utmost precision of language, evolution. For God, as St. Augustine observes, did not create animals and plants directly, but potentially and causally—in fieri, in causa; potentialiter atque causaliter. This, however, is theistic evolution, not agnostic evolution which relegates God to the region of the unknowable; nor atheistic evolution which finds in the chance interaction of eternal force and eternal matter an adequate explanation of all the problems of the existing universe. For, let me insist, evolution does not and can not account for the origin of things. The best it can do is to throw some light on their historical development; and this for the simple reason that it does not and can not deal with the origin of things, but only with the modus creandi, or rather with the modus formandi, employed by Omnipotence, after the universe had been called into existence by divine Fiat. "Evolution, then," as I have elsewhere shown, "postulates creation as an intellectual necessity, for if there had not been a creation there would have been nothing to evolve, and evolution would, therefore, have been an impossibility.

"And, for the same reason, evolution postulates and must postulate a Creator, the sovereign Lord of all things, the Cause of causes, the terminus a quo as well as the terminus ad quern of all that exists or can exist. But evolution postulates still more. In order that evolution might be at all possible, it was necessary that there should have been not only an antecedent creation ex nihilo, but also that there should have been an antecedent involution or creation in potentia. To suppose that simple brute matter could, by its own motion or by any power inherent in matter as such, have been the sole efficient cause of the evolution of organic from inorganic matter, of the higher from the lower forms of life, of the rational from the irrational creature, is to suppose that a thing can