The doctrine of the evolution or gradual development of organisms has had a most interesting history in recent years. In speculative philosophy, as is well known, the evolutionary conception is by no means new. The work of Darwin and his immediate predecessors and successors has given it a definiteness, however, and a backing of facts which have since kept it in the forefront of thought.

Because it is a direct blow at arbitrary and supernaturalistic explanations and exalts orderliness as the supreme law of procedure, it has been deemed by many thinkers to be essentially atheistic and irreligious. Much of the early polemic literature raged about this point. Out of this debate gradually emerged the conclusion that the process of evolution and the theory of development do not contribute in any way, either favorably or unfavorably, to the solution of the question as to the possible existence of God, and to the validity of the higher spiritual aspirations of man. It has been realized that evolution can, in the nature of the case, have nothing to say as to ultimate origins, and it has therefore been concluded that it can neither be theistic nor atheistic, but must be merely agnostic. The view of the majority of thoughtful men on the subject today probably is, that the religious problems stand on the whole about where they did before the wide acceptance of the evolutionary doctrine; that religious views are, after all, purely a matter of philosophy, and as such take us back of the point where evolution must begin.

It has come to be frankly allowed that a man may be an evolutionist and at the same time believe in a theistic solution of the universe. Only in relatively recent years, however, is it appearing that the evolutionary philosophy has something constructive to offer regarding the higher human qualities and the religious impulses.