Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/458

Rh world-plan consistently with their monarchotheistic First Principle, it soon appears that creationism itself, even in this dualistic form (which does to some degree extricate, or appear to extricate, the creature from the embrace of the Creator), must logically exclude the possibility of freedom. For the Creator cannot, of course, create except by exactly and precisely conceiving; otherwise his product would not differ from nonentity. The created nature must therefore inevitably register the will and the plan of the Creator; and there is really no more escaping this under the dualistic scheme than under the monistic, where the consequence has been fearlessly drawn for us all, for all time, in the classic illustration of Spinoza concerning the moving stone, flung from the sling and coming to consciousness after the impulse. Aware only of its unimpeded movement, and not at all of the impelling start, this would of course imagine itself self-moving and free. But those who see whence that unhindered movement really comes, know better. They know how utterly predetermined are both its direction and its rate, by the One who gave it to be.

So much for the problem of Freedom. There is another, the solution of which is also essential to the working fulfilment of a moral life, — I mean the problem of Evil. This, our third and fourth groups are clearly unequal to coping with. They indeed have alike no conscious World-Author to blame for evil, but they alike reduce all evil to natural evil, since their necessarian systems provide no room for blamable wrong in men. Thus they furnish no field for the compensation of even natural evil (to say nothing of moral) by voluntary good, and therefore they both force the unreserved acceptance of “things as they are.”

Nor is this result escaped by a resort to the second group of our systems. Neither Spencerian Agnosticism nor the higher forms of evolutional philosophy known as Cosmic Theism or Idealistic Monism can avoid making the One