EVOLUTION AND THE ABSOLUTE.[1]
TWO principles of modern science—conservation and evolution—seem to come into fatal conflict. It appears as if we were driven to accept one of two alternatives: the universe is either a closed system or a progressive growth. Yet either view taken by itself involves us in grave difficulties.
The arguments for the former alternative are found in the facts and law of conservation of energy, upon which is based the mechanical theory of nature. The arguments for the latter are found in the facts and law of growth, which seem to support a teleological interpretation of the universe. On the one side, we are compelled to conceive of the world as a completed whole and to regard all apparent evolution as simply redistribution of parts with no increase in amount. This is the doctrine of the conservation and convertibility of energy. There is nothing new under the sun. There is nothing quantitatively new because there can be no addition to the sum of existence. And there can be nothing qualitatively new because all differences of quality ultimately reduce to differences of degree or quantity.
On the other side, we have the doctrine of evolution. It appears as if things came to be what they are. It seems as if at first they were not and later came into existence by a process of development. Growth from childhood to maturity seems to be a process of becoming, in which something which was not enters into being, in which something comes out of nothing. If evolution is not to mean mere universal undulation a cosmic game of hide-and-seek then in progress there must always be an increment, a reinforcement. But when we seek to generalize this idea for the universe at large in a doctrine of absolute evolution or creation ex nihilo, it is rejected as irrational and absurd. The whole history of science has been a search for the causes of things, and to suppose that some things are uncaused, produced out of the void as by magic, is to make science either a tragedy or a farce.
- ↑ Read in part before the American Philosophical Association, at the Cambridge meeting, December 28, 1905.
