Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/67

6 should have to submit to it even though it destroyed us, it cannot follow that we could approve of it or that we ought to approve of it. To glorify what is our destruction would be indeed to play the fool, and add to the tragedy of our being the anguish of self-contempt.

It ought to be plain, and I think it will be plain on a careful and exact examination, that the so-called Philosophy of Evolution, when given such a scope as to make evolution the ground and explanation of the existence of mind in man, is destructive of the reality of the human person, and therefore of that entire world of moral good, of beauty, and of unqualified truth, which depends on personal reality for its being. This hostility to personality and its threefold world of ideal life is a trait belonging to every evolutional account of the mind in man, whether the account be made in terms of the agnostic or the cosmotheistic view of the Eternal Ground. Both views aim to explain the origin and progressive sustentation of the whole human consciousness by the merely productive causation exerted by that Ground. The Immanent God of the idealistic evolutionists is just as truly the sole real agent in producing and carrying on the consciousness of his creature, is just as incessantly and directly the creature’s executive cause, as the Persistent Unknowable of the agnostic. The world of moral freedom, which is a fundamental