Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/71

10 they have left the province of their sciences, and the very bounds of all science as such.

Of course, there is no longer any question at all as to the reality of evolution as a fact, within the specific region where it has been the subject of scientific inquiry. There is no question, either, of the use and importance of the hypothesis of evolution as a method of science, in that same definite and tested region. On this matter, it is the business of scientific experts alone to discover and to speak, and it is the privilege as well as the duty of philosophers, as of other people not experts in science, to listen to what the men of science report, and to accept it as soon as it comes with their settled consensus. But whatever some men of science may do in the way of philosophical speculation, science makes no claim whatever that evolution goes a hair’s breadth farther than its scientific evidences carry it; and hitherto these evidences are strictly confined to the morphology and the physiology of living beings, and of living beings only — to the thread of descent by reproduction, convincingly traceable by observation and experiment from the lowest forms of plant life to the highest of animal.