"That is so evidently a theological subtlety," said Mr. Spence, "science deigns it no reply."
"And yet," said Hester, "your last and highest formula, which refuses to represent the unknowable in any conception of human thought, bows down in worship and transcendent wonder to the 'cause' which makes murder, suicide, and every species of human wickedness result from 'A Law'!
"Because we believe that ultimately that law will evolve good. It appears a fact now thoroughly established, that all the organisms we are acquainted with, have been evolved by a gradual process rather than produced by a series of special creations, as has been so long the theory. And the evolution tends upward; that is, to produce new and more complicated organisms as time speeds on. This must in the end evolve higher good."
"Do you mean that the lesser is ever producing the greater; and that in the aggregation of insentient matter life is evolved?"
"Does not the infant grow into the man by the aggregation of insentient matter assimilated into his being in the shape of food?"
"Yes, but life was there already; character and power, expansion and development it receives, but no new function."
"That is not so certain; or rather it is certain that evolution constantly manifests changes, which can only be accounted for on the ground of a great universal law, a law ever producing diversity of phenomena in unity of operation."
"But I do not see that it explains anything of the ultimate cause."
"Have I not already said that the cause is unknown and unknowable?"