56 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
to interpret Dreiser’s novels as an elaborately documented
rejection of “the spirit of the beatitudes” would be the
greatest possible error. His life work, to be sure, was an
inquiry into overwhelming outward evidence that “the con-
structive genius of nature . .. is not beatific,” and in Cowper-
wood he drew the portrait of a materialist who built his
career upon that judgment. But Theodore Dreiser, far more
closely akin to Eugene Witla than to Frank Cowperwood,
never loses sight of a radically different, yet equally tenable,
interpretation of the same evidence: “that this material seem-
ing in which we dwell is itself an illusion.” Undoubtedly
thinking of himself, Dreiser describes Witla as “introspective,
imaginative, psychical” (ibid., p. 694). Although Eugene
oscillates between views of the universe as an expression of
evil, of good, and of mixed good and evil, until he finally
reaches a dead-center of uncertainty, at his nadir of spiritual
distress he is cheered to learn from his reading that evolu-
tionary theory does not “shut out a conception of a ruling,
ordaining Divinity.” A writer on biology explains the cellu-
lar basis of life as “God’s instrument and mediator in ma-
teriality”; a physicist, describing the world newly revealed
by the ultramicroscope, concludes that “every motion is con-
trolled by mind. . . . This micro-universe is rooted and
grounded in a mental base.” (Ibid., pp. 696-697.) More espe-
cially, an article by Alfred Russel Wallace interests Eugene
Witla “as a proof that there might be, as Jesus said and Mrs.
Eddy contended, a Divine Mind or central thought in which
there was no evil intent, but only good” (ibid., p. 697), and
thus bears most directly upon the focal Witla-Dreiser prob-
lem of the moral quahty of the universe. Because it is quoted
in the novel at considerable length and with evident ap-
proval, the article is an important index to Dreiser’s own
evolutionary thinking.