APPENDIX II - DR. M^cCOSH ON EVOLUTION

Summary

The venerable ex-president of Princeton has just issued (1890) a second edition of his little work, The Development Hypothesis under a new name: The Religious Aspect of Evolution. The work makes no serious attempt to prove the validity of any of those various and often conflicting theories of evolution, the insufficiency of which, regarded in the light of scientific causation, I have endeavoured to show in the preceding pages. It assumes them all as established scientific results, and then proceeds to show that they can be received up to a certain point without destroying our belief in God. Perhaps it would be correct to say that the actual thesis of the work is that the belief in secondary causes in creation is perfectly consistent with a belief in a Divine First Cause. This is very clearly stated, and with much interesting illustration; and as setting forth this great principle the work is of value, and its use in this respect will remain, even if all those imaginary and partial causes of development on which it relies should be swept away as of no scientific validity, and replaced by more rational views of the vastly complicated and still mysterious causes which have no doubt conspired under Creative guidance to bring about the succession of living beings in geological time. In this respect the work is similar in its tendency to Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World; and in another aspect both may be regarded as examples of the tendency of theology to conform itself to the philosophical and scientific hypotheses which are ever cropping up and disappearing.