Abstract
THE main argument of the book is clearly summarised in the preface. Nothing has any real existence except mind. There are a number of coexistent minds. All else is but the items of their experience, which they arrange in order for themselves. God is the “fulfilled type of every mind,” an ideal to which it is trying to assimilate itself. These minds are citizens of an eternal republic. They have had no origin in time. They have not been created in the sense in which the word is ordinarily understood. They are free: “nothing but their own light and conviction determines their action towards each other and towards God.” This freedom is made possible by the substitution of a final for an efficient cause. “Real creation means such an eternal dependence of other souls upon God that the nonexistence of God would involve the non-existence of all souls.” Evolution is the “movement of things changeable towards the goal of a common ideal,” and spirits can “neither be the product of evolution nor in any way subject to evolution,” which can only reign in “the incomplete and tentative world of experience.”
The Limits of Evolution.
By Prof. Howison. Pp. xxvii + 380. (New York: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1901.) Price 7s. 6d. net.
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The Limits of Evolution . Nature 64, 323–324 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/064323a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/064323a0
