This is the problem of essence or nature versus origin, of being versus becoming, a problem which has divided schools of philosophy from the beginning of reflective thought. The "conception of the eternity of the forms of things," says Professor Royce, "is, historically considered, by far the most significant opponent that the philosophical doctrine of evolution has had or ever can have."[1] Is reality eternal, complete, perfect, and the appearance of change and evolution merely illusory, or is it what on the surface it appears to be, a dynamic progressive achievement in which reality literally comes into being for the first time from moment to moment by the voluntary act of intelligent and free agents? Is it a block universe with all its events predetermined from the first, or is it an indeterminate equation some of whose elements are conditional upon facts not yet come to light? Here is the dilemma. We cannot believe that something has evolved out of nothing. This strikes at the rationality of the universe; it contradicts the best established principles of science. But to regard the universe as a completed system strikes at its morality, because it destroys all possibility of progress, initiative, freedom, and responsibility.
The problem of the absolute origin of anything is one of the time-honored puzzles of metaphysics. We of course see beginnings and endings of events or processes in a relative sense. But to conceive of a time in the past when nothing whatever existed, or of a time in the future when nothing will exist, seems not only beyond our powers of thought but actually self-contradictory. It seems to follow that because something is, something always has been and always will be. Apparently the conceptions of being and non-being are mutually incompatible.
The question of the origin of a thing, as Professor Baldwin has shown, cannot be considered apart from the question of the nature of the thing. "The nature—the 'what'—of a thing is given in, and only in, its behaviour, i.e., in the process or changes through which it passes." A thing is what it does. Its reality is exhausted in the statement of its functions. Now this behavior is not a fixed, finished-up event. It is a continuous, progressive
- ↑ Herbert Spencer, p. 29.
