Nothing is of any use unless it gives me a stronger body and
mind, a more beautiful body, a happy existence, and a soul-life
now. The last phase of philosophy is equally useless with the
rest. The belief that the human mind was evolved, in the process of
unnumbered years, from a fragment of palpitating slime through a thousand
gradations, is a modern superstition, and proceeds upon assumption alone.

Nothing is evolved, no evolution takes place, there is no record
of such an event; it is pure assertion. The theory fascinates
many, because they find, upon study of physiology, that the
gradations between animal and vegetable are so fine and so close together,
as if a common web bound them together. But although they stand so near they
never change places. They are like the
figures on the face of a clock; there are minute dots between,
apparently connecting each with the other, and the hands move
round over all. Yet ten never becomes twelve, and each second
even is parted from the next, as you may hear by listening to
the beat. So the gradations of life, past and present, though
standing close together never change places. Nothing is evolved.
There is no evolution any more than there is any design in nature. By
standing face to face with nature, and not from books, I have convinced
myself that there is no design and no evolution. What there is, what was the
cause, how and why, is not yet known; certainly it was neither of these.

But it may be argued the world must have been created, or it
must have been made of existing things, or it must have been
evolved, or it must have existed for ever, through all eternity.
I think not. I do not think that either of these are "musts," nor that any
"must" has yet been discovered; not even that there "must" be a first cause.