Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/73

12 people fascinated by the powers of the scientific method, undertake to raise this into the universal method of philosophy that our question ever comes forward. Upon it science is reservedly silent. It is a question of philosophy alone; and philosophers, whether professedly such or not, who make this new and surprising claim for the method and evidences of science, must not expect to carry the day by mere proclamation. They must come to the bar of historic philosophy, and be judged by that Reason which is the source of philosophical and of scientific method both, and the sole authority to determine the limits of either.

Directing our attention first to the agnostic form of the new philosophy, and taking up the first of our foregoing questions, we find at once a fact of the greatest significance. Yet in the popular apprehension of evolution this fact is continually so ignored or neglected that its statement will likely enough come to many readers as a genuine surprise, and not improbably as a mystery hard to fathom. The fact is this: When the question is brought home whether evolution has no limits at all, the careful and really qualified advocates of the evolutional philosophy are found to be the most stringent deniers of the limitless range of evolution. Its