There is some force in this argument, but it cuts both ways.  For, even if it be admitted that the category was successfully applied in the past, it is also admitted that it was applied without being understood; and it cannot now be questioned that the philosophers were right in rejecting it as the final explanation of the relation of objects to each other, and in pointing to other and higher connecting ideas.  And this consideration should go some way towards convincing evolutionists that, though they may be able successfully to apply the idea of development to particular facts, this does not guarantee the soundness of their view of it as an instrument of thought, or of the nature of the final results which it is destined to achieve.  Hence, without any disparagement to the new extension which science has received by the use of this new idea, it may be maintained that the ordinary view of its tendency and mission is erroneous.

“The prevailing method of explaining the world,” says Professor Caird, “may be described as an attempt to level ‘downwards.’  The doctrine of development, interpreted as that idea usually is interpreted, supports this view, as making it necessary to trace back higher and more complex to lower or simpler forms of being; for the most obvious way of accomplishing this task is to show analytically that there is really nothing more in the former than in the latter."[A] “Divorced from matter,” asks Professor Tyndall, “where is life to be found?  Whatever our faith may say our knowledge shows them to be indissolubly joined.  Every meal we eat, and every cup we drink, illustrates the mysterious control of Mind by Matter.  Trace the line of life backwards and see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition."[B] And then, rising to the height of his subject, or even above it, he proclaims, “By an intellectual necessity I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial life."[C] A little further on, speaking in the name of science, and on behalf of his scientific fellow-workers (with what right is a little doubtful), he adds—­“We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory.  All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science, must, in so far as they do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of controlling it.”  But if science is to control the knowable world, he generously leaves the remainder for religion.  He will not deprive it of a faith in “a Power absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of man.  As little in our days as in the days of Job can a man by searching find this Power out.”  And, now that he has left this empty sphere of the unknown to religion, he feels justified in adding, “There is, you will observe, no very rank materialism here.”