Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/222

 oped, it has shut the door that enters where the knowledge of causes resides, and has locked itself out in the outer court of visible effects. Having turned away from the realm of causes, it has become bewildered and lost in its search for causes where they are not.

The condition of the materialistic school of scientists and philosophers may be thus illustrated. If there is reluctance to concede, let it for a moment be assumed that nature is a series of effects deriving all its forces from a superior world wherein are the causes: then suppose the existence of the world of causes to be denied or regarded unknowable because imponderable; would not the present materialistic philosophy with its theory of Evolution, "innate aptitude," "fortuitous concourse of atoms," "survival of the fittest," "natural selection," "projected efficiency," and the like, be the inevitable result? But this is not an assumption. It is the true reason why there has been so deplorable a failure to offer an intelligible or definite explanation of nature's forces. On the other hand the discernment of discrete degrees provides a satisfactory philosophy.

It has been observed that creation descended and terminated in passive matter, to which creative forces descend, and where they com-