Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/75

14 and required as their explanation, is forever hidden from the senses, and is therefore without other evidence than that of pure reason, philosophical consensus names it a “noumenon,” that is, a reality present simply to the reason.

Upon this distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal the whole discussion hangs and turns. To the proposition maintained by evolutionist philosophy, that evolution has no application beyond phenomena and can have none, historic philosophy at once gives its assent and its authority. The dispute begins, only when the school of evolution goes on to place the whole of human or other living nature in the realm of the phenomenal, denying to the living, even as a psychic being, any noumenal reality of its own, and treating even the human person as a mere form in which, as in all other phenomena, the supersensible Noumenon, one and sole, appears; or, in other words, as a mere manifestation or effect of the Noumenon, which is held by the school to be omnipresent, immutable, immanent in all phenomena, indivisible and all-embracing, solitary and universal.

Beyond this point of agreement among all evolutionists, agnostic and pantheistic alike, the dispute opens further, and within the evolutionist school