Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/86

Rh is per se supersensible, but that the reach of our conceptive powers, on the contrary, is limited to the world of sense. If we assume that our cognising the existence of the Noumenon is anything more than an illusion, we have already granted to one of our conceptions the privilege of overstepping this limit.

Thus at every turn the inherent inconsistency and inner contradiction lurking in the evolutional explanation of mind, with its consequent doctrine of mental limitation, comes into light. The noumenal changeless Energy, incessant and ubiquitous, is rightly felt by Mr. Spencer and his school to be indispensable to the explanation — yes, to the very existence — of evolution. Without it no new form could arise among phenomena; nor could there be such a fact as variation of species in response to varying environment, or as natural selection resulting from a struggle for existence. In short, the Unseen Power must be a certainty, if evolution is to be, and is to work; yet when evolution exists, when it works with the unbounded sweep desired, and mind becomes its product, then mind can have no faculty by which to reach the certainty of an Unseen Power, since consciousness is then reduced to sense alone, to sense-perceptions and abstractions from them.

In this impotence of the principle of evolution to cross the break between the phenomenal and the