The Collapse of the Faith [pp. 164-184]

THE COLLAPSE OF FAITH.
functions. For this progress some definitely working agency
must be subsidized and some semblance of law and regularity
must be provided, and forthwith heredity and tendency to variation and the struggle for existence and natural selection
emerged in succession upon the arena, all being summed up
under the general title of evolution. Some of these forces or
laws were hospitably admitted within the temple of the new
physics without the tests and passwords usual to science of
verification by induction and formulation through laws. They
have certainly enriched our scientific vocabulary if they have
not added to the definiteness of our scientific conceptions.
They have immensely stimulated if they have not completely
satisfied the scientific imagination.
But the entire history has not yet been told. At a somewhat early stage of this history which we have traced, palmontology had begun to read in the records of the remoter ages
an undeniable testimony to progress and development of some
sort, such as would be altogether consistent with the working
of the law of evolution, so soon as it should be hypostasized as
an agent or force in the way already explained. Plausible analogies suggested themselves between the development of living germs into complicated organisms and certain mechanical
changes in form, structure, or orbit. These again were assumed
to have been provided for in some original impulse of motion,
which it was conjectured might involve the development of the
several forms of molecular activity which were required to ac
count for the phenomena of heat, light, and color, etc. Very
suddenly our scientific dialect is enriched by three separate
conceptions used in swift and unnoticed interchange with one
another, viz.: development mechanically viewed, evolution in the
organic sense, and last of all differentiation-a purely logical term.
These three, as we have said, are used interchangeably by many
scientists, and not infrequently are inextricably confounded.
Similarly, mechanical accretion, structural growth, with a capacity for special functions, and logical integration, were included
under one indiscriminate generalization. Last of all, by one
gigantic leap of personification founded on a most comprehensive analogy the progressive movement of evolution was exalted as at once the originating force and the ultimate law of
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