people the word 'evolution' is the key to all mysteries, though evolution may mean to them nothing more than a vague belief that the Universe is 'toddling along somehow'; and, when they come to say more about it, they deny the existence of any Universe and let everything run along in an absolute flux. Evolution belongs only to the world of appearance; but that does not mean that it is an 'illusion.' Illusions are detected by a want of coherence in our practical experience: the world of appearance is the reality in which the plain man believes. And the idealist believes in it, too, for to him, though it is not in itself the absolute reality, it is the only manifestation of that absolute reality which the human mind can possibly know. And it is a strange objection to make,[1] that a philosophy is treating the world in space and time as an 'illusion,' because that philosophy regards this world—not, indeed, as the absolutely real, but as something more worth study than if it were—as the revelation of Supreme Reason, of what old theologies have described as that Co-eternal Reason of God, who creates nature and becomes incarnate in man.
David G. Ritchie.
Jesus College, Oxford.
- ↑ Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, in this Review, Vol. II, p. 589, alleges that "upon Hegelian principles, if the Diety exists eternally, the time-process must be illusory altogether."
