Pratt H. - Evolution - A Problem

CAN there be existence without cause; creation without process; evolution without supervision? Can anything originate, be formed and fashioned independently of agency, material, and constructive ability?

Science postulates the preexistence of matter and force; claims that these have always existed; ever will exist; and that, acting and reacting on each other through the outcome of both, they are adequate to the production of all the phenomena of the universe.

But then science has never been able to demonstrate the existence of matter and force in a free state, so to say, whether separately or in combination. All its attempts to detect the constitution of the one, and follow the methods of the other have simply led to the discovery that the subjects of experiment, whatever that may be, are vehicles of constant change, which 419by their successive metamorphoses, veil the ultimate element from the keenest perceptions of the investigator, and only enable him to deal with the products of transformation – themselves liable to yet further decompositions.

The scientist believes in an ultimate atom and a molecular force. Thinks they are mutually dependent, the one on the other. But cannot decide whether force originated the motion of matter; was itself derived therefrom; or was due to some other cause.

Thus the problem which science has, so far, failed to solve is the primary origin of the mutual relations of its accepted theoretical ultimates, matter and force. It cannot determine whether either, or which, of these mysterious principles preexisted; why interaction commenced between them; or How it originated. And yet to leave these questions unsettled, or to claim that matter and force have always existed, have always interacted, and that their mutual interaction will never cease, is to passover the primary source and origin of the universe, and to admit that the mystery of Creation has wholly eluded its grasp.

Religion affirms the existence of a God, who creates by the mere act of volition – directly or through the intervention of spirit on other agencies. And to maintain this position, it claims, by the occasional production through its ministers of unusual, irregular and abnormal phenomena, which it assumes to be supernatural, to establish the truth of its teaching – God thus witnessing on its behalf, as it would fain make believe. But all it really shows in this way is, that some individuals possess the power, upon occasion, of producing the unexpected by inducing unforeseen and unexplained, though not inexplicable, natural or simulated natural action. And, since other individuals apart from its teaching produce similar or analogous phenomena of equal value to its own, while it has no further evidence to offer apart from the workings of nature, it fails to prove the existence of God, or to demonstrate the presence and action of spirit. So that religion, like science, has been foiled in its efforts to clear up the mystery of Creation.

Reason sees in the phenomena of nature the results of functional action; and, as the earth is acted on by the sun and moon, as well as by the planets, and possibly by other stellar bodies, with which the sun at any rate has relations – if only of association – it regards the universe as a functioning whole, inseparable from and dependent on that in which its functions are discharged – space.

And, as the first and most obvious function of this functioning whole is circulation; and as circulation in nature always has relations to, and is for the well-being of that in which it takes place; reason very naturally concludes that the circulation of the universe is carried on with reference to and is for the well-being of space.

Hence reason regards space as the primary source and comprehensive exponent of the functioning whole.

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Reason cannot say what space is, cannot define it, any more than science can define matter and force, or religion God and Spirit.

The fact is that the words Space, Matter, Force, God, Spirit, and so on, are so many conventional terms invented by man to enable him to discourse about and discuss the unknown in the hope of ultimately determining its relations and so bringing it down to comprehension or making it knowable. But reason knows that in the universe the existence of space, apart from any conventional designation, is a logical necessity; and that it is, as necessarily, infinite and boundless.

But if infinite and boundless, then is space the Unknown of the unknown.

While, again, through having no limits, it is outside the jurisdiction of number, weight, and measure, and therefore absolutely unknowable; although science, in its unconsidered and inconsequent utterance, talks of its three dimensions – as though that which has neither beginning nor ending, neither centre nor circumference, could have dimensions of any kind.

Space is the container of all things. In it all live and move and have their being. Hence space preceded all things, or was the pre-existent of all the constituents of the visible universe.

This is a logical induction. And in this way, by going back to first principles, reason is able to lead up to the conclusion that the first cause of the visible universe is to be sought in some action in that which man in his ignorance is pleased to term space.

Now the circulation of the universe, itself evidently the agency and result of function and the source of yet further function, suggests that this action is the outcome of an unknown and possibly unknowable primary function which induces the secretion, excretion, or condensation of matter in a diffused and impalpable form.

But the production of this matter was the result of action in space, or the outcome of the functional action of an active force: so that an active force acting in space originates, produces, or creates, matter therefrom; and the order of succession of the elemental principles which are the bases of the constituents of the universe is thus shown to have been that of space, and force, and matter: which are all concerned in producing the functional action of the functioning whole.

But when this position is reached, the important result is gained that creation is produced by process and is the outcome of function; so that, since each step secured by this process is due to a functioning action, the whole will follow the order of a functional evolution.

It can thus be affirmed with reasonable certainty that, apart from the nature of its primary cause or incentive – whether volitional or other – the created universe is the outcome of a functioning action which itself is engaged in carrying on.

Matter, as first formed in space by the unknown action of an unrecognised force going on therein, whether secreted, excreted, or produced 421by simple condensation, brings with it from space certain passive forces which endow it with re-active properties and cause it to resist the action of the active force which has produced it and will, through its continued action and the induced re-action consequent thereon, gradually complete and perfect the initiated work of creation.

Two classes of forces are thus seen to be working in nature. The active or generating, which initiate each successive operation; and the passive or resisting, which limit and control the initial generating action. And these distinctive forces, while and by working in opposition to each other on the matter through which they act, are the agents by which the operations of nature are maintained, carried on and perfected. Creation is by process. This is a truth which cannot be too much dwelt upon. Every made thing is made. Nothing can be called into being in the natural order without process; and, since created existence originates in and is maintained by the natural order, this process must be natural.

A lump of clay could not be turned into a living man without process. Nature has but one process by which it could be so transformed. It would have to go through sundry decompositions and recompositions. To be submitted to organising influences, and passed through fashioning changes to animation by generation. The clay was itself originally produced by the action of the active and passive forces on the primary matter drawn forth from space. No other agents are discoverable. Hence the continuation of the work must be attributed to the continued action of the agents initiating it. This is the reasonable conclusion. And reason accepting this conclusion can see but one way of explaining the action by which the observed results, as manifested in the phenomena of nature, are produced.

What if in these phenomena the active force producing the results has gradually clothed itself, is progressively clothing itself in organic forms? In such a clothing would it not commence with the simple cell? And then of these build up, in passing through them, the several forms, through which it passes in succession, in an advancing order – thus producing the evolution of nature? In such a clothing might it not, would it not, during, by and through this evolution of form, and the uses it made of the successive forms, in its embodied passage through them, gradually individualise and personify a succession of potential living selves, while progressively developing and maturing in each instincts, appetites, and affections, aptitudes, faculties, and powers, physical, vital and intelligential, with the organs through which these act, until in man the culmination of the work was gained and the lump of clay transformed into the human being?

By such a process might not, would not, this active force acquire aspirations, intelligence, and affections, or be transformed into spirit, as the instinctive originator, and then as the intelligent producer and the intelligently developing evolver of the visible order of nature?

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If spirit exists in an individualised state distinct from the forces of nature, it must have been individualised or created by process; by natural process; by some such process as the above suggested. But if spirit be itself the outcome of evolution, a developed, a transformed force, does not the perception of the possibility of such a transformation point to the reasonable conclusion that a further transformation may have been provided for in the life of man, under which his matured spirit, if he so lives as to make this possible, will be converted into a living soul, to pass from his body at death as a being fitted to enter a renewed life in another state or order of existence?

From such a point of view the question reason submits to science, as to the transformations of form in the passage of force through physical and physiological, through inorganic and organic evolution is – Are not the material forms through which active force passes in the evolutions of nature, so many matrices, by passage through which the seemingly dissipating force gathers itself up, and prepares for yet further advance? And is not the thus progressively individualising, and personifying, or transforming force gradually fitting itself for higher purposes – if not in the present in some other order of nature?

Such a view would give its due import to the doctrine of evolution, and rescue it from the aimless and purposeless course in which science has, so far, hopelessly left it.

Henry Pratt, M.D.

Footnotes