Part 13 (1/2)

EVIDENCE is that which makes evident, which enables the mind to see truth.

It may be (_a_) _intuitive_, i.e. resting on the direct testimony of consciousness, of perception or memory, or on fundamental principles of the human intellect; or it may be (_b_) _demonstrative_, i.e. in a strict sense, proofs which establish with certainty as in mathematical science certain conclusions; or it may be (_c_) _probable_, under which cla.s.s are ranked _moral evidence_, _legal evidence_, and generally every kind of evidence which, though it may be sufficient to satisfy the mind, is not an absolutely certain and incontrovertible demonstration.

In jurisprudence evidence is cla.s.sified into that which is _direct_ and _positive_ and that which is _presumptive_ and _circ.u.mstantial_. The former is that which is proved by some writing containing a positive statement of the facts and binding the party whom it affects; or that which is proved by some witness, who has, and avers himself to have, positive knowledge thereof by means of his senses. Whenever the fact is not so directly and positively established, but is deduced from other facts in evidence, it is _presumptive_ and _circ.u.mstantial_ only. The following are the leading rules regarding evidence in a court of law:

(1) The point in issue is to be proved by the party who a.s.serts the affirmative. But where one person charges another with a culpable omission this rule will not apply, the person who makes the charge being bound to prove it. (2) The best evidence must be given of which the nature of the thing is capable. (3) Hearsay evidence of a fact is not admissible. The princ.i.p.al exceptions to this rule are--death-bed declarations, evidence in questions of pedigree, public right, custom boundaries, declarations against interest, declarations which accompany the facts or are part of the _res gestae_, &c. (4) Insane persons and idiots are incompetent to be witnesses. But persons temporarily insane are in their lucid intervals received as witnesses. Children are admissible as witnesses as soon as they have a competent share of understanding and know and feel the nature of an oath and of the obligation to speak the truth.--BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sir J. F.

Stephen, _Digest of the Law of Evidence_; W. M. Best, _Law of Evidence_.

EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. These may be divided broadly into two great cla.s.ses, viz. _external evidences_, or the body of historical testimonies to the Christian revelation; and _internal evidences_, or arguments drawn from the nature of Christianity itself as exhibited in its teachings and effects, in favour of its divine origin. The first Christian apologies--those of Justin Martyr, Minucius Felix, and Tertullian, written in the second century--were mainly intended as justifications of the Christian religion against the charges of atheism and immorality commonly made at that time. Of a more philosophical kind, and dealing more comprehensively with the principles of religion and belief in general, are the works of Origen, Arn.o.bius, and Augustine in the centuries immediately succeeding. During the Middle Ages, the scientific representation of Christianity is mostly the work of the schoolmen occupied in welding Aristotelian or Platonic philosophy with the fabric of Christian dogmatics, or writing attacks on the Jewish and Mohammedan faiths.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the influences of the Renaissance and the Reformation gave rise to a spirit of inquiry and criticism which developed English deism as represented by Herbert and Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and Collins and Bolingbroke in the eighteenth. The general position of English deism was the acceptance of the belief in the existence of G.o.d, and the profession of natural religion along with opposition to the mysteries and special claims of Christianity.

It was in confutation of this position that the great English works on the evidences of Christianity of Butler, Berkeley, and Cudworth were written.

In France the new spirit of inquiry was represented by Diderot, D'Holbach, and the encyclopedists in general, who a.s.sailed Christianity mainly on the ground that it was founded on imposture and superst.i.tion, and maintained by sacerdotal trickery and hypocrisy. No reply of any great value was produced in the French Church, although in the previous age Pascal in his _Pensees_ had brought together some of the profoundest considerations yet offered in favour of revealed religion. The nineteenth century has been distinguished by the strongly rationalistic spirit of its criticism. The works of such writers as Strauss, Bauer, and Feuerbach, attempting to eliminate the supernatural and the mysterious in the origin of Christianity, have been answered by the works of Neander, Ebrard, and Ullmann on the other side.

The historical method of investigation, represented alike by the Hegelian school and the Positivists and Agnostics in philosophy, and by the Evolutionists in science, is the basis of the chief attacks of the present time against the supernatural character of Christianity. The tendency of all the critics is to hold that while Christianity is the highest and most perfect development to which the religious spirit has yet attained, it differs simply in degree of development from any other religion. Notable amongst later apologists of Christianity have been Paley (_Natural Theology_), Chalmers (_Natural Theology_), Mansel, Liddon, and others.--BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. R. Illingworth, _Reason and Revelation_; A.

Garvie, _Handbook of Christian Apologetics_.

EVIL, ORIGIN OF. The difficulty of the question lies mainly in this, that the existence of evil in the world seems inconsistent with the view that it was created and is maintained by an omnipotent and beneficent creator. The various theories on the subject have all sought to elude this difficulty either by the supposition of some principle of evil equally eternal with that of good, or by regarding evil as having only a relative existence, being a kind of good in an imperfect and immature stage. Perhaps the oldest theory upon this subject is that of Pa.r.s.eeism, or the religion of Zoroaster, according to which there were two original principles, one good (Ormuzd) and the other evil (Ahriman). This is the doctrine that is now very often spoken of as Manichaeism, from the fact that it was adopted by Manes, who attempted to engraft it on the doctrines of Christianity. In contradistinction to this dualistic theory with reference to the origin of evil stand the Monistic theories of Brahmanism and Platonism. According to the Brahmanic doctrine of the emanation of all things from one original being (Brahma), this original being was regarded as the sole true existence, and the phenomenal world, with all the evils appearing in it, was held to be mere illusion. Similarly, Plato held that the good was the essence of all things, and that the evil and imperfect contained in them had no real existence. The theory enunciated by Leibnitz in his _Theodicee_ resembles that of Plato. In that work he a.s.signs to the evil existing in the world created by G.o.d, which he holds to be the best of all possible worlds, a merely relative existence. According to Plato, all that we call evil is only evil to us because we do not see it in relation to the rest of the universe, for in relation to the universe it is not evil but good, and accordingly cannot be evil in its own nature. Another view on the subject is that which neither a.s.signs to the evil principle (as it does to G.o.d or the good principle) an original existence, nor denies the real existence of evil, but ascribes it to the exercise of man's free-will. Besides the theoretical problem of the origin of evil, there is the practical one of the elimination of evil which forms the subject of _Ethics_.--BIBLIOGRAPHY: H. Rashdall, _The Theory of Good and Evil_; B. Bosanquet, _The Value and Destiny of the Individual_.

EVIL EYE, a power which, according to an old and widespread superst.i.tion, resides in some people of doing injury to others by a mere look, or a look accompanied by certain words or charms. This belief, common amongst the ancients, is still prevalent among the more ignorant cla.s.ses in Italy, Russia, Andalusia, the Highlands of Scotland, and other places. The Finns, Lapps, and Scandinavians, the Arabs and the Turks are all firm believers in the evil eye.

EV'OLUTE. The evolute of a curve is the curve which is the envelope of all its normals or the locus of all its centres of curvature. The first curve is called the involute of the second. These names are given to the curves because the end of a stretched thread unwound from the evolute will describe the involute.

EVOLUTION, a term introduced into biological writings in the early part of the eighteenth century to denote the mode of generation of living things.

At first it was used in the same sense as we now apply the word development, more especially with reference to the process whereby the germ of an animal or plant becomes transformed into the adult organism; but it is now used in biology for the process by which more complex plants or animals have been derived from a series of less specialized ancestors by transformation. In accordance with the teaching of modern biology, all living creatures are the progeny of one original group of microscopic unicellular organisms, different branches of which during many millions of years have become diversely modified in structure and function to form the vast mult.i.tudes of diverse species of plants and animals with which we are acquainted.

The idea of a transformation of one type of being into another is extremely ancient, and its origin was in all probability genetically related to the primitive conceptions which have survived to the present day in totemism (q.v.) and such myths as the story of the were wolf. For once it was believed that a totem-animal, like a cow or a pig, could give birth to human beings, or that the Great Mother could at will a.s.sume a great variety of living forms, ranging from a mollusc or a grain of barley to a higher mammal, it was a comparatively simple step to arrange these potential 'ancestors' in a series, and provide mankind with a mythical genealogy. It is possible that such beliefs may have suggested to the Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, speculations as to the process by which custom and change of habit might modify the structure of animals. But it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the trend of philosophical speculation, a.s.sociated with the growing understanding of natural processes, started lines of investigation which, after many failures, eventually brought forth Charles Darwin's _Origin of Species_ in 1859, and established once for all the fact that different species of animals and plants have been produced by the differentiation of the progeny of the same ultimate ancestors. The history of these events was admirably summarized by Huxley in 1878 in an article _Evolution in Biology_, republished in _Darwiniana_ (1893, p. 187); in this account due credit is given to the pioneers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Lamarck, and to Darwin's co-discoverer of the hypothesis of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace.

At the present time there is a general concensus of opinion among serious biologists, and, in fact, most educated men, as to the reality of evolution; but there is wide divergence of opinion as to the exact pedigrees of the various groups of plants and animals, and especially as to the mechanisms whereby the processes of transformation have been effected.

The evidence that establishes the proof of evolution is of manifold kinds.

”The gradations of structure, from extreme simplicity to very great complexity, presented by living things, and of the relation of these graduated forms to one another. The existence of an a.n.a.logy between the series of gradations presented by the species which compose any great group of animals or plants, and the species of embryonic conditions of the highest members of that group. Large groups of species of widely different habits present the same fundamental plan of structure; and parts of the same animal or plant, the functions of which are very different, likewise exhibit modifications of a common plan. Structures are found in a rudimentary or apparently useless condition in one species of a group which are fully developed and have definite functions in other species of the same group. These considerations, when studied in conjunction with the facts of the geological succession of the forms of life, of geographical distribution, and the effects of varying conditions upon living organisms, establish the truth of evolution” (Huxley).

The full meaning of these statements will be better understood if a concrete example is studied, and perhaps the case of man and his ancestry is most instructive for this purpose. The fact that man has a vertebral column, a brain and nervous system, a heart and blood-vessels, digestive and other systems of organs, built up in accordance with the arbitrary plan which is shared also by all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, proclaims that man belongs to the vertebrate group of animals, and that all such vertebrata must originally have sprung from the same common ancestors. The possession of four limbs with five fingers or toes on each, and a host of identical arrangements of bones, muscles, nerves, &c., in these limbs, reveals the fact that all the four-limbed creatures or Tetrapoda represent one group which developed from some fish-like ancestor to become an amphibian. The discovery of fossilized remains of extinct animals reveals that the fishes are much older than the amphibians, and that a number of intermediate stages demonstrate the process of gradual transformation which converted one group of fishes into four-limbed, semi-terrestrial amphibians. Geological evidence also proves that the reptiles came definitely later than the amphibians, and that only one small group of very primitive amphibians shared in the progressive modifications of brain, limbs, and organs of circulation, &c., to become reptiles--creatures able to live wholly on the dry land, and capable of a wider range of activities than the Amphibia. From the primitive reptiles were derived not only the highly specialized forms that have survived to the present day as lizards, tortoises, snakes, &c., creatures that differ profoundly from their earliest reptilian ancestors, but also the ancestors of birds and the ancestors of mammals. One particular group of primitive reptiles is known, from fossilized remains found in South Africa, that reveals many of the distinctive peculiarities of mammals not shared by other reptiles; and it is now certain that these cynodonts--so called from their dog-like teeth--include the parents of the mammals. The fact that all the Mammalia are provided with glands which in the female supply milk for the nutrition of their young, that they have a hairy coat, that they have a highly developed brain more fully adapted for learning by experience than is the case in other vertebrates, that they have limbs capable of a much more varied and active range of skilled movements, and a host of identical transformations of viscera, muscles, nerves, and vessels prove the common ancestry of mammals from some very primitive cynodont reptile. Different mammals have been specialized in structure for amazingly varied modes of life, on land, under the ground, in trees, in the air, or in rivers or the sea. Of the terrestrial animals some have been modified for fleetness, like the horse and the antelope; others for strength, like the elephant; others again, like the lion and the tiger, to prey upon their weaker relatives. At the dawn of the age of mammals one particular group was able to survive without any of the profound alterations of the structure of the limbs which such creatures as the horse and the ox, the elephant and the whale, the tiger and the bat had to adopt to avoid extinction, and retained the primitive type of limbs with their fingers and toes which became the most useful and plastic instruments for performing skilled movements and acquiring experience and knowledge as soon as the brain was sufficiently advanced in structure and capability to put these instruments to their full use. The group of mammals which delayed the time of specialization until it was able to profit by its greater adaptability was the Prosimiae, the ancestors of the apes and man. These small creatures for a long time lived a life of obscurity in trees without submitting to those extreme adaptations of structure which are found in most arboreal and flying mammals. But the cultivation of their powers of vision, and the acquisition of skill in the use of their primitive but plastic hands, guided by vision, eventually conferred upon some of these Prosimiae vastly enhanced powers of skilled action and of learning by experience and of acquiring knowledge, which culminated in the attainment of the supreme power of discrimination distinctive of human intelligence.

The fact that man belongs to the same order (Primates) as the apes is proved not merely by the possession of a body which in most respects is identical in structure with such of them as the gorilla and the chimpanzee, of a similar process of development characterized by identical stages up to a certain stage, but also by the fact that the blood of man and the apes react towards one another as those of relatives, and in a way not shared by the blood-reactions of other mammals. The apes, also, are subject to certain human diseases from which other mammals are immune. Man shares with the anthropoid apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, orangs, and gibbons) so many peculiarities which differentiate all of them from the tailed monkeys that there can be no doubt that the human family was derived from a primitive anthropoid ape, possibly a species that lived in the foothills of the Himalayas in Miocene times, as is suggested by fossils recently discovered by Dr. Pilgrim, director of the Geological Survey of India.

The vestigial remains of the muscles, blood-vessels, &c., of the tail reveal the fact that man's Primate ancestry began with a tailed form. In fact, the human embryo actually possesses a tail for some weeks of its existence. If India reveals the fossilized remains of a variety of Miocene anthropoid apes closely akin to the ancestors of man, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, and the orang, the Egyptian Fayum has provided the evidence of the origin of the anthropoid apes in Oligocene times as very diminutive creatures distantly akin to the gibbons, but bearing very obvious indications in the form of their teeth of an affinity with the Prosimian sub-order Tarsioidea, a very interesting group of Eocene Primates found in a fossilized condition in North America and France, one of the members of which has survived in the peculiar Spectral Tarsier still found living in the forests of Borneo, Java, and the Philippines. The detailed study of the structure and development of Tarsius, and comparisons with other Primates and mammals of other orders, provide the information necessary to fill in the gaps left in the geological record, and enable us to sketch out the general scheme of man's ancestry, and to appreciate the nature of the factors which determined the evolution of such an intelligent mammal as man.

Within recent years the increasing knowledge of embryology and comparative anatomy, and the recovery of fossilized remains of vast numbers of hitherto unknown animals, has established the truth of evolution and the exact line of ancestry of many animals. Professor Osborn's work on the evolution of the horse, and Dr. C. W. Andrews's revelation of the ancestry of the elephant, are striking recent ill.u.s.trations of the exactness of the demonstration palaeontology can give of the past history of mammals. Dr.

Robert Brown and Professor D. M. S. Watson have given conclusive proofs of the origin of mammals and birds from primitive reptiles, and the latter zoologist has pushed back the ancestry of these higher vertebrates still further, and shown how the reptiles were derived from primitive Amphibia, and the changes that occurred in vertebrate anatomy when certain fishes crawled out of the water and developed into four-footed Amphibia. All of these conclusions are matters of fact and not of theory, even if we are still in the dark as to the exact mechanism whereby the variations which the forces of evolution use in effecting transformations were themselves brought about. Within recent years there has been a revival of interest in the problem whether characters acquired by parents as the result of their individual experience can be transmitted to their offspring. For the last thirty years biologists have been influenced by the teaching of Weismann that nothing happening to the parents can affect the morphological capabilities of the germ plasm from which the next generation is derived; but recent research suggests that this negative doctrine is too rigid, and makes it probable that certain influences brought to bear upon the parents may be transmitted also to the offspring. If this is so, it opens one avenue of explanation of how structural modifications are effected and the possibility of evolution is created. But at the present moment the whole question is being actively investigated and discussed.

Just as every complex animal can be shown to be derived during development from a simple microscopic cell or egg, so the study of evolution reveals the fact that all animals were originally derived from microscopic unicellular animals known as protozoa, which are with difficulty distinguishable from unicellular plants, from which all the varied forms of complex vegetable life were derived. It is equally certain that these unicellular plants and animals are themselves only the specialized descendants of common ancestors--unspecialized unicellular organisms which are neither strictly vegetable nor animal. But we are quite in the dark as to the processes whereby these most primitive living organisms were evolved from inorganic matter, and how they acquired these peculiar properties of growth and differentiation and their powers of reproduction, commonly called vital, which are their distinctive characteristics. Bibliographical references to most of the matters mentioned in this article will be found in the Presidential Address to Section H of the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, Dundee meeting (see Report of British a.s.sociation, 1912).

EV'ORA, a town in Portugal, capital of the province of Alemtejo, 75 miles east of Lisbon. It is an ancient place, poorly built, and its walls, citadel, and forts are all in a state of ruin. It has a Roman aqueduct still serviceable, a Gothic cathedral, and an ecclesiastical seminary. Pop.

17,900. The district of Evora has a pop. of 144,300.

EVREMOND, or EVREMONT. See _St. Evremond_.

EVREUX (ev-r_eu_), a town of N.W. France, capital of the department of Eure, in a fertile valley on the Iton. It is an ancient town with narrow streets and has many fine buildings, including an ancient Gothic cathedral.