Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/20

Rh received an almost overwhelming reinforcement, at least for the general scientific intelligence, by the unexpected scientific proofs of biological evolution, worked out chiefly by Darwin. The change of front in the scientific world, upon the question of Species and of Origins, was almost as immediate as it was revolutionary. The conception of the origin of natural things in a direct act of “creation” — a supposed instant effect of a Divine Will operating without any means — thus seemed to the popular mind to be assailed in the seat of its life. Many felt, indeed, that this view, so ingrained in the religious tradition, had received its deathblow. In this feeling, as fact requires us to acknowledge, they had at any rate the countenance, if not the direct leading, of many of the scientific experts who promoted the new evolutional theory. The nature of the Eternal Ground of things appeared to need a radical reconception, to adjust it to the evidences, felt to be irresistible, of the presence of evolution in the world. The way was thus made, over a field widely prepared, for the favourable reception of a philosophy that proposed nothing less than the harmonious satisfaction and fulfilment, in an alleged Higher Synthesis, of the conflicting interests reflected in the Agnosticism of Hamilton, in the Positivism of Comte, in the evolutional results of science, and even in the Theism of the traditional religious consciousness. The theist was to be shown right, in so far as he resisted the positivist by asserting the fact of an “Ultimate Reality”; for this was not only an “absolute datum of consciousness,” but the unavoidable presupposition