did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding

general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and, if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week, for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

It is often said that a man's religion concerns himself only. So far as the value of the majority of people's opinions on such high matters goes, this is true; but it is a shallow saying when applied to men whose words carry weight, or whose discoveries cause us to ask what is their bearing on the larger questions of human relations and destinies to which past ages have given answers that no longer satisfy us, or that are not compatible with the facts discovered. Whatever silence Darwin maintained in his books as to his religious opinions, intelligent readers would see that unaggressive as was the mode of presentments of his theory, it undermined current beliefs in special providence, with its special creations and contrivances, and therefore in the intermittent interference of a deity; thus excluding that supernatural action of which miracles are the decaying stock evidence.

Nor could they fail to ask whether the theory of natural selection by "descent with modification" was to apply to the human species. And when Darwin, already anticipated in this application by his more daring disciples, Professors Huxley and Haeckel, published his Descent of Man, with its outspoken chapter on the origin of conscience and the development of belief in spiritual beings, a belief subject to periodical revision as knowledge increased, it was obvious that the bottom was knocked out of all traditional dogmas of man's fall and redemption, of human sin and divine forgiveness. Therefore, what Darwin himself believed was a matter of moment. His answers to inquiries which were made public during his lifetime told us that while the varying circumstances and modes of life caused his judgment to often fluctuate, and that while he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, "I think," he says, "that generally (and more and more as I grow older) but not always, an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind." The chapter on Religion, although a part of the autobiography, is printed separately in the Life and Letters. As the following quotation shows, it is interesting as detailing a few of the steps by which Darwin reached that suspensive stage.

Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come by this time--i. e., 1836 to 1839--to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. The question, then, continually rose before my mind, and would not be banished--is it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, etc., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament? This appeared to me utterly incredible.

By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported--and that the more we know of the fixed laws of Nature the more incredible do miracles become--that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, that the Gospels can not be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seems to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses: by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with me.

But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress.

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered.

Without doubt, the influence of the conclusions deducible from the theory of Evolution are fatal to belief in the supernatural. When we say the supernatural, we mean that great body of assumptions out of which are constructed all theologies, the essential element in these being the intimate relation between spiritual beings, of whom certain qualities are predicated, and man. These beings have no longer any place in the effective belief of intelligent and unprejudiced men, because they are found to have no correspondence with the ascertained operations of Nature.

2. _Herbert Spencer._

Contact with many "sorts and conditions of men" brings home the need of ceaselessly dinning into their ears the fact that _Darwin's theory deals only with the evolution of plants and animals from a common ancestry. It is not concerned with the origin of life itself, nor with those conditions preceding life which are covered by the general term_, Inorganic Evolution. Therefore, it forms but a very small part of the general theory of the origin of the earth and other bodies, "as the sand by the seashore innumerable," that fill the infinite spaces.

We have seen that speculation about the universe had its rise in Ionia. After centuries of discouragement, prohibition, and, sometimes, actual persecution, it was revived, to advance, without further serious arrest, some three hundred years ago. A survey of the history of philosophies of the origin of the cosmos from the time of the renascence of inquiry, shows that the great Immanuel Kant has not had his due. As remarked already, he appears to have been the first to put into shape what is known as the nebular theory. In his General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or an Attempt to Account for the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Universe upon Newtonian Principles, published in 1775, he "pictures to himself the universe as once an infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he supposes a single centre of attraction set up, and shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. In vivid language he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widening the margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos. But what is gained at the margin is lost in the centre; the attractions of the central systems bring their constituents together, which then, by the heat evolved, are converted once more into molecular chaos. Thus the worlds that are lie between the ruins of the worlds that have been and the chaotic materials of the worlds that shall be; and in spite of all waste and destruction, Cosmos is extending his borders at the expense of Chaos."

Kant's speculations were confirmed by the celebrated mathematician, Laplace. He showed that the "rings" rotate in the same direction as the central body from which they were cast off; sun, planets, and moons (those of Uranus excepted) moving in a common direction, and almost in the same plane. The probability that these harmonious movements are the effects of like causes he calculated as 200,000 billions to one.

The observations of the famous astronomer, Sir William Herschel, which resulted in the discovery of binary or double stars, of star-clusters, and cloud-like nebulæ (as that term implies) were further confirmations of Kant's theory. And such modifications in this as have been made by subsequent advance in knowledge, notably by the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy (the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace being based on gravitation alone), affect not the general theory of the origin of the heavenly bodies from seemingly formless, unstable, and highly-diffused matter. The assumption of primitive unstableness and unlikeness squares with the unequal distribution of matter; with the movements of its masses in different directions, and at different rates; and with the ceaseless redistribution of matter and motion. For all changes of states are due to the rearrangement of the atoms of which matter is made up, resulting in the evolution of the seeming like into the actual unlike; of the simple into the more and more complex, till--speaking of the only planet of whose life-history we can have knowledge--with the cooling of the earth to a temperature permitting of the evolution of living matter, the highest complexity is reached in the infinitely diverse forms of plants and animals. Therefore, as our knowledge of matter is limited to the changes of which we assume it to be the vehicle, it would seem that science reduces the Universe to the intelligible concept of Motion.

Since the great discovery by Kirchoff, in 1859, of the meaning of the dark lines that cross the refracted sun-rays, the spectroscope has come as powerful evidence in support of the nebular theory, while the photographic plate is a scarcely less important witness. The one has demonstrated that many nebulæ, once thought to be star-clusters, are masses of glowing hydrogen and nitrogen gases; that, to quote the striking communication made by the highest authority on the subject, Dr. Huggins, in his Presidential Address to the British Association, 1891, "in the part of the heavens within our ken, the stars still in the early and middle stages of evolution exceed greatly in number those which appear to be in an advanced condition of condensation." The other, recording infallible vibrations on a sensitive plate, and securing accurate registration of the impressions, reveals, as in Dr. Roberts's grand photograph of the nebula in Andromeda, a central mass round which are distinct rings of luminous matter, these being separated from the main body by dark rifts or spaces. To quote Dr. Huggins once more, "We seem to have presented to us some stage of cosmical Evolution on a gigantic scale."

The great fact that lies at the back of all these confirmations of the nebular theory is the fundamental identity of the stuff of which the universe is made; a fact which entered into the prevision of the Ionian cosmologists. Dr. Huggins says that "if the whole earth were heated to the temperature of the sun, its spectrum would resemble very closely the solar spectrum."

In referring to this, there may be carrying of "owls to Athens," but that re-statements may sometimes be needful has illustration in Lord Salisbury's Presidential Address to the British Association, 1894, wherein the assumed absence of oxygen and nitrogen in the sun's spectrum is adduced as an argument against the theory of the common origin of the bodies of the solar system. Speaking of the predominant proportion of oxygen in the solid and liquid substances of the earth, and of the predominance of nitrogen in our atmosphere, his lordship asked, "if the earth be a detached bit whisked off the mass of the sun, as cosmogonists love to tell us, how comes it that, in leaving the sun, we cleaned him out so completely of his nitrogen and oxygen that not a trace of these gases remains behind to be discovered even by the searching vision of the spectroscope?" If Lord Salisbury had consulted Dr. Huggins, or some foreign astronomer of equal rank, as Dunér or Scheiner, he would not have put a question exposing his ignorance, and unmasking his prejudice. These authorities would have told him that when a mixture of the incandescent vapours of the metals and metalloids (or non-metallic elementary substances, to which class both oxygen and nitrogen belong), or their compounds, is examined with the spectroscope, the spectra of the metalloids always yield before that of the metals. Hence the absence of the lines of oxygen and other metalloids, carbon and silicon excepted, among the vast crowd of lines in the solar spectrum. Then, too, in extreme states of rarefaction of the sun's absorbing layer, the absorption of the oxygen is too small to be sensible to us.

"While the genesis of the Solar System, and of countless other systems like it, is thus rendered comprehensible, the ultimate mystery continues as great as ever. The problem of existence is not solved: it is simply removed further back. The Nebular Hypothesis throws no light on the origin of diffused matter; and diffused matter as much needs accounting for as concrete matter. The genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the genesis of a planet. Nay, indeed, so far from making the universe a less mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery. Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a machine; but he cannot make a machine develop itself. The ingenious artisan, able as some have been so far to imitate vitality as to produce a mechanical pianoforte player, may in some sort conceive how, by greater skill, a complete man might be artificially produced; but he is unable to conceive how such a complex organism gradually arises out of a minute structureless germ. That our harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless diffuse matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending 'the mechanical God of Paley' as does the fetish of the savage."

This quotation is from an essay on the Nebular Hypothesis, which appeared in the Westminster Review of July, 1858, and which must, therefore, have been written before the eventful date of the reading of Darwin and Wallace's memorable paper before the Linnæan Society. The author of that essay is Mr. Herbert Spencer, and the foregoing extract from it may fitly preface a brief account of his life-work in co-ordinating the manifold branches of knowledge into a synthetic whole. In erecting a complete theory of Evolution on a purely scientific basis "his profound and vigorous writings," to quote Huxley, "embody the spirit of Descartes in the knowledge of our own day." Laying the foundation of his massive structure in early manhood, Mr. Spencer has had the rare satisfaction of placing the topmost stone on the building which his brain devised and his hand upreared. While the sheets of this little book are being passed for press, there arrives the third volume of the Principles of Sociology, which completes Mr. Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. In the preface to this, the venerable author says:

"On looking back over the six-and-thirty years which I have passed since the Synthetic Philosophy was commenced, I am surprised at my audacity in undertaking it, and still more surprised by its completion. In 1860 my small resources had been nearly all frittered away in writing and publishing books which did not repay their expenses; and I was suffering under a chronic disorder, caused by overtax of brain in 1855, which, wholly disabling me for eighteen months, thereafter limited my work to three hours a day, and usually to less. How insane my project must have seemed to onlookers, may be judged from the fact that before the first chapter of the first volume was finished, one of my nervous breakdowns obliged me to desist.

"But imprudent courses do not always fail. Sometimes a forlorn hope is justified by the event. Though, along with other deterrents, many relapses, now lasting for weeks, now for months, and once for years, often made me despair of reaching the end, yet at length the end is reached. Doubtless in earlier years some exultation would have resulted; but as age creeps on feelings weaken, and now my chief pleasure is in my emancipation. Still there is satisfaction in the consciousness that losses, discouragements, and shattered health have not prevented me from fulfilling the purpose of my life."

These words recall a parallel invited by Gibbon's record of his feelings on the completion of his immortal work, when walking under the acacias of his garden at Lausanne, he pondered on the "recovery of his freedom, and perhaps the establishment of his fame," but with a "sober melancholy" at the thought that "he had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion."

HERBERT SPENCER, spiritual descendant--_longo intervallo_--of Heraclitus and Lucretius, was born at Derby on the 27th of April, 1820. His father was a schoolmaster; a man of scientific tastes, and, it is interesting to note, secretary of the Derby Philosophical Association founded by Erasmus Darwin. In Mr. Spencer's book on Education there are hints of his inheritance of the father's bent as an observer and lover of Nature in the remark that, "whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume." He was articled in his seventeenth year to a railway engineer, and followed that profession until he was twenty-five. During this period he wrote various papers for the Civil Engineers' and Architects' Journal, and, what is of importance to note, a series of letters to the Nonconformist in 1842 on The Proper Sphere of Government (republished as a pamphlet in 1844), in which "the only point of community with the general doctrine of Evolution is a belief in the modifiability of human nature through adaptation to conditions, and a consequent belief in human progression." After giving up engineering, Mr. Spencer joined the staff of the Economist, and while thus employed, published, in 1850, his first important book, Social Statics, or the Conditions essential to Human Happiness specified, and the first of them developed. In a footnote to the later editions of this work Mr. Spencer points out a brace of paragraphs in the chapter on General Considerations in which "may be seen the first step toward the general doctrine of Evolution. After referring to the analogy between the subdivision of labour, which goes on in human society as it advances; and the gradual diminution in the number of like parts and the multiplication of unlike parts which are observable in the higher animals; Mr. Spencer says:

"Now, just the same coalescence of like parts and separation of unlike ones--just the same increasing subdivision of function--takes place in the development of society. The earliest social organisms consist almost wholly of repetitions of one element. Every man is a warrior, hunter, fisherman, builder, agriculturist, toolmaker. Each portion of the community performs the same duties with every other portion; much as each slice of the polyp's body is alike stomach, muscle, skin, and lungs. Even the chiefs, in whom a tendency towards separateness of function first appears, still retain their similarity to the rest in economic respects. The next stage is distinguished by a segregation of these social units into a few distinct classes--warriors, priests, and slaves. A further advance is seen in the sundering of the labourers into different castes, having special occupations, as among the Hindoos. And, without further illustration, the reader will at once perceive, that from these inferior types of society up to our own complicated and more perfect one, the progress has ever been of the same nature. While he will also perceive that this coalescence of like parts, as seen in the concentration of particular manufactures in particular districts, and this separation of agents having separate functions, as seen in the more and more minute division of labour, are still going on.

"Thus do we find, not only that the analogy between a society and a living creature is borne out to a degree quite unsuspected by those who commonly draw it, but also that the same definition of life applies to both. This union of many men into one community--this increasing mutual dependence of units which were originally independent--this formation of a whole consisting of unlike parts--this growth of an organism, of which one portion cannot be injured without the rest feeling it--may all be generalized under the law of individuation. The development of society, as well as the development of man and the development of life generally, may be described as a tendency to individuate--_to become a thing_. And rightly interpreted, the manifold forms of progress going on around us are uniformly significant of this tendency."

_Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto_: "I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me." This oft-quoted saying of the old farmer in the Self-Tormentor of Terence might be affixed as motto to Herbert Spencer's writings from the tractate on the Proper Sphere of Government to the concluding volume of the Principles of Sociology. For thought of human interests everywhere pervades them; social and ethical questions are kept in the van throughout. Philosophy is brought from her high seat to mix in the sweet amenities of home, in the discipline of camp, in the rivalry of market; and linked to conduct. Conduct is defined as "acts adjusted to ends," the perfecting of the adjustment being the highest aim, so that "the greatest totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fellow-men" is secured, the limit of evolution of conduct not being reached, "until, beyond avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others, there are spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others." Emerson puts this ideal into crisp form when he speaks of the time in which a man shall care more that he wrongs not his neighbour than that his neighbour wrongs him; then will his "market-cart become a chariot of the sun."

That humanity is the pivot round which Mr. Spencer's philosophic system revolves is seen in the earliest Essays, and notably in his making mental evolution the subject of the first instalment of his Synthetic Philosophy. For, in the Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, he limits feeling or consciousness to animals possessing a nervous system, and traces its beginnings in the "blurred, undetermined feeling answering to a single pulsation or shock" (as for example, to go no lower down the life-scale, in the medusa or jelly-fish), to its highest form as self-consciousness, or knowing that we know, in man. This dominant element in Mr. Spencer's philosophy secures it a life and permanence which, had it been restricted to explaining the mechanics of the inorganic universe, it could never have possessed. It has been observed how the Darwinian theory aroused attention in all quarters because it touched human interests on every side. And, although less obvious to the multitude, the Synthetic Philosophy, dealing with all cosmic processes as purely mechanical problems, interprets "the phenomena of life (excluding the question of its origin), mind, and society, in terms of matter and motion." Anticipating the levelling of epithets against such apparent materializing of mental phenomena involved in that method, Spencer remarks on the dismay with which men, who have not risen above the vulgar conception which unites with matter the contemptuous epithets "gross" and "brute," regard the proposal to reduce the phenomena of Life, of Mind, and of Society, to a level which they think so degraded. "Whoever remembers that the forms of existence which the uncultivated speak of with so much scorn, are shown by the man of science to be the more marvellous in their attributes the more they are investigated, and are also proved to be in their ultimate natures absolutely incomprehensible--as absolutely incomprehensible as sensation, or the conscious something which perceives it--whoever clearly recognises this truth, will see that the course proposed does not imply a degradation of the so-called higher, but an elevation of the so-called lower. Perceiving, as he will, that the Materialist and Spiritualist controversy is a mere war of words,--in which the disputants are equally absurd, each thinking that he understands that which it is impossible for any man to understand,--he will perceive how utterly groundless is the fear referred to. Being fully convinced that no matter what nomenclature is used, the ultimate mystery must remain the same, he will be as ready to formulate all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force, as in any other terms; and will rather indeed anticipate, that only in a doctrine which recognises the Unknown Cause as co-extensive with all orders of phenomena, can there be a consistent Religion, or a consistent Philosophy."

This is clear enough; yet such is the crass density of some objectors that eighteen years after the above was written, Mr. Spencer, in answering criticisms on First Principles, had to rebut the charge that he believed matter to consist of "space-occupying units, having shape and measurement."

The Principles of Psychology was both preceded and followed by a series of essays in which the process of change from the "homogeneous to the heterogeneous," i. e., from the seeming like to the actual unlike, was expounded. Mr. Spencer tells us that in 1852 he first became acquainted with Von Baer's Law of Development, or the changes undergone in each living thing, from the general to the special, during its advance from the embryonic to the fully-formed state. That law confirmed the prevision indicated in the passages quoted above from Social Statics, and impressed him as one of the three doctrines which are indispensable elements of the general theory of Evolution. The other two are the Correlation of the Physical Forces, or the transformation of different modes of motion into other modes of motion, as of heat or light into electricity, and so forth, in Proteus-like fashion; and the Conservation of Energy, or the indestructibility of matter and motion, whatever changes or transformations these may undergo.

In permitting the quotation of the useful abstract of the Synthetic Philosophy which, originally drawn up for the late Professor Youmans, was imbodied in a letter to the Athenæum of 22d of July, 1882, Mr. Spencer was good enough to volunteer the following details to the writer:--

"You are probably aware that the conception set forth in that abstract was reached by slow steps during many years. These steps occurred as follows:--

1850. Social Statics: especially chapter General Considerations. (Higher human Evolution.)

1852. March. Development Hypothesis, in the Leader. (Evolution of species, _vid. ante_, p. 111.)

1852. April. Theory of Population, etc., in Westminster Review. (Higher human Evolution.)

1854. July. The Genesis of Science in British Quarterly Review. (Intellectual Evolution.)

1855. July. Principles of Psychology. (Mental Evolution in general.)

1857. April. Progress: its Law and Cause: Westminster Review. (Evolution at large.)

1857. April. Ultimate Laws of Physiology. National Review. (Another factor of Evolution at large.)

"From these last two Essays came the inception of the Synthetic Philosophy. The first programme of it was drawn up in January, 1858." ...

When seeing Mr. Spencer on the subject of this letter, he took the further trouble to point out certain passages in the essays originally comprised in the one volume edition of 1858 which contain germinal ideas of his synthesis. That they are his selection will add to the interest and value of their quotation, revealing, as perchance they may, a fragment of the autobiography which it is an open secret Mr. Spencer has written.

"That Law, Religion, and Manners are thus related--that their respective kinds of operation come under one generalisation--that they have in certain contrasted characteristics of men a common support and a common danger--will, however, be most clearly seen on discovering that they have a common origin. Little as from present appearances we should suppose it, we shall yet find that at first, the control of religion, the control of laws, and the control of manners, were all one control. However incredible it may now seem, we believe it to be demonstrable that the rules of etiquette, the provisions of the statute-book, and the commands of the decalogue, have grown from the same root. If we go far back enough into the ages of primeval Fetishism, it becomes manifest that originally Deity, Chief, and Master of the Ceremonies were identical" (Essays, vol. i, 1883 edition; Manners and Fashion, p. 65).

"Scientific advance is as much from the special to the general as from the general to the special. Quite in harmony with this we find to be the admissions that the sciences are as branches of one trunk, and that they were at first cultivated simultaneously; and this becomes the more marked on finding, as we have done, not only that the sciences have a common root, but that science in general has a common root with language, classification, reasoning, art; that throughout civilisation these have advanced together, acting and reacting on each other just as the separate sciences have done; and that thus the development of intelligence in all its divisions and subdivisions has conformed to this same law to which we have shown the sciences conform" (Ib. The Genesis of Science, pp. 191, 192).

(In correspondence with this, recognising that the same method has to be adopted in all inquiry, whether we deal with the body or the mind, the following may be quoted from Hume's Treatise on Human Nature.

"'Tis evident that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that, however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even _Mathematics_, _Natural Philosophy_, and _Natural Religion_ are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN, since they lie under the cognisance of men, and are judged of by their powers and qualities.)

"The analogy between individual organisms and the social organisms is one that has in all ages forced itself on the attention of the observant.... While it is becoming clear that there are no such special parallelisms between the constituent parts of a man and those of a nation, as have been thought to exist, it is also becoming clear that the general principles of development and structure displayed in all organised bodies are displayed in societies also. The fundamental characteristic both of societies and of living creatures is, that they consist of mutually dependent parts; and it would seem that this involves a community of various other characteristics.... Meanwhile, if any such correspondence exists, it is clear that Biology and Sociology will more or less interpret each other.

"One of the positions we have endeavoured to establish is, that in animals the process of development is carried on, not by differentiations only, but by subordinate integrations. Now in the social organism we may see the same duality of process; and further, it is to be observed that the integrations are of the same three kinds. Thus we have integrations that arise from the simple growth of adjacent parts that perform like functions; as, for instance, the coalescence of Manchester with its calico-weaving suburbs. We have other integrations that arise when, out of several places producing a particular commodity, one monopolises more and more of the business, and leaves the rest to dwindle; as witness the growth of the Yorkshire cloth districts at the expense of those in the west of England.... And we have yet those other integrations that result from the actual approximation of the similarly-occupied parts, whence results such facts as the concentration of publishers in Paternoster Row, of lawyers in the Temple and neighbourhood, of corn merchants about Mark Lane, of civil engineers in Great George Street, of bankers in the centre of the city" (Essays, vol. iii, 1878 edition; Transcendental Physiology, pp. 414-416).

But, divested of technicalities, and summarized in words to be "understanded of the people," the following quotation from the Essay on Progress: Its Law and Cause, gives the gist of the Synthetic Philosophy:

"We believe we have shown beyond question that that which the German physiologists (Von Baer, Wolff, and others) have found to be the law of organic development (as of a seed into a tree, and of an egg into an animal), is the law of all development. The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations (i. e., the appearance of differences in the parts of a seemingly like substance), is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back; and in the earlier changes which we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth, and of every single organism on its surface; it is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilised individual, or in the aggregation of races; it is seen in the evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its economical organisation; and it is seen in the evolution of all those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which constitute the environment of our daily life. From the remotest past which Science can fathom, up to the novelties of yesterday, that in which Progress essentially consists, is the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous" (Essays, vol. i, 1883, p. 30).

To this may fitly follow the "succinct statement of the cardinal principles developed in the successive works," which Mr. Spencer, as named above, prepared for Professor Youmans.

1. Throughout the universe in general and in detail there is an unceasing redistribution of matter and motion.

2. This redistribution constitutes evolution when there is a predominant integration of matter and dissipation of motion, and constitutes dissolution when there is a predominant absorption of motion and disintegration of matter.

3. Evolution is simple when the process of integration, or the formation of a coherent aggregate, proceeds uncomplicated by other processes.

4. Evolution is compound, when along with this primary change from an incoherent to a coherent state, there go on secondary changes due to differences in the circumstances of the different parts of the aggregate.

5. These secondary changes constitute a transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous--a transformation which, like the first, is exhibited in the universe as a whole and in all (or nearly all) its details; in the aggregate of stars and nebulæ; in the planetary system; in the earth as an inorganic mass; in each organism, vegetal or animal (Von Baer's law otherwise expressed); in the aggregate of organisms throughout geologic time; in the mind; in society; in all products of social activity.

6. The process of integration, acting locally as well as generally, combines with the process of differentiation to render this change not simply from homogeneity to heterogeneity, but from an indefinite homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity; and this trait of increasing definiteness, which accompanies the trait of increasing heterogeneity, is, like it, exhibited in the totality of things and in all its divisions and subdivisions down to the minutest.

7. Along with this redistribution of the matter composing any evolving aggregate there goes on a redistribution of the retained motion of its components in relation to one another; this also becomes, step by step, more definitely heterogeneous.

8. In the absence of a homogeneity that is infinite and absolute, that redistribution, of which evolution is one phase, is inevitable. The causes which necessitate it are these--

9. The instability of the homogeneous, which is consequent upon the different exposures of the different parts of any limited aggregate to incident forces.

The transformations hence resulting are--

10. The multiplication of effects. Every mass and part of a mass on which a force falls subdivides and differentiates that force, which thereupon proceeds to work a variety of changes; and each of these becomes the parent of similarly-multiplying changes; the multiplication of them becoming greater in proportion as the aggregate becomes more heterogeneous. And these two causes of increasing differentiations are furthered by--

11. Segregation, which is a process tending ever to separate unlike units and to bring together like units--so serving continually to sharpen, or make definite, differentiations otherwise caused.

12. Equilibration is the final result of these transformations which an evolving aggregate undergoes. The changes go on until there is reached an equilibrium between the forces which all parts of the aggregate are exposed to and the forces these parts oppose to them.

Equilibration may pass through a transition stage of balanced motions (as in a planetary system) or of balanced functions (as in a living body) on the way to ultimate equilibrium; but the state of rest in inorganic bodies, or death in organic bodies, is the necessary limit of the changes constituting evolution.

13. Dissolution is the counter-change which sooner or later every evolved aggregate undergoes. Remaining exposed to surrounding forces that are unequilibrated, each aggregate is ever liable to be dissipated by the increase, gradual or sudden, of its contained motion; and its dissipation, quickly undergone by bodies lately animate, and slowly undergone by inanimate masses, remains to be undergone at an indefinitely remote period by each planetary and stellar mass, which since an indefinitely distant period in the past has been slowly evolving; the cycle of its transformations being thus completed.

14. This rhythm of evolution and dissolution, completing itself during short periods in small aggregates, and in the vast aggregates distributed through space completing itself in periods immeasurable by human thought, is, so far as we can see, universal and eternal--each alternating phase of the process predominating now in this region of space and now in that, as local conditions determine.

15. All these phenomena, from their great features down to their minutest details, are necessary results of the persistence of force under its forms of matter and motion. Given these as distributed through space, and their quantities being unchangeable, either by increase or decrease, there inevitably result the continuous redistributions distinguishable as evolution and dissolution, as well as all these special traits above enumerated.

16. That which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form, under these sensible appearances which the universe presents to us, transcends human knowledge and conception--is an unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognise as without limit in space and without beginning or end in time.

All that is comprised in the dozen volumes which, exclusive of the minor works and the Sociological Tables, form the great body of the Synthetic Philosophy, is the expansion of this abstract. The general lines laid down in that Philosophy have become a permanent way along which investigation will continue to travel. The revisions which may be called for will not affect it fundamentally, being limited to details, more especially in the settlement of the relative functions of individuals and communities, and cognate questions. Into these we cannot enter here. Suffice it, that to those who have the rare possession of sound mental peptics, no more nutritive diet can be recommended than is supplied by First Principles and the works in which its theses are developed. For those who, blessed with good digestion, lack leisure, there is provided in a convenient volume the excellent epitome which Mr. Howard Collins has prepared.

The prospectus of the then proposed issue of the series of works which, beginning with First Principles, ends with the Principles of Sociology (1862-1896), was issued by Mr. Spencer in March, 1860. Through his courtesy the writer has seen the documents which prove that the first draft of that prospectus was written out on the 6th of January, 1858, and that it was the occasion of an interesting correspondence between Mr. Spencer and his father--mainly in the form of questions from the latter--during that month. The record of these facts is of some moment as evidencing that the scheme of the Synthetic Philosophy took definite shape in 1857. Therefore, the Theory of Evolution, dealing with the universe _as a whole_, was formulated some months before the publication of the Darwin-Wallace paper, in which only _organic evolution_ was discussed. The Origin of Species, as the outcome of that paper, showed that the action of natural selection is a sufficing cause for the production of new life-forms, and thus knocked the bottom out of the old belief in special creation.

The general doctrine of Evolution, however, is not so vitally related to that of natural selection that the two stand or fall together. The evidence as to the connection between the succession of past life-forms which, regard being had to the well-nigh obliterated record, has been supplied by the fossil-yielding rocks; and the evidence as to the unbroken development of the highest plants and animals from the lowest which more and more confirms the theory of Von Baer; alike furnish a body of testimony placing the doctrine of Organic Evolution on a foundation that can never be shaken. And, firm as that, stands the doctrine of Inorganic Evolution upon the support given by modern science to the speculations of Immanuel Kant.

There is the more need for laying stress on this because recent discussions, revealing divided opinions among biologists as to the sufficiency of natural selection as a cause of all modifications in the structure of living things, lead timid or half-informed minds to hope that the doctrine of Evolution may yet turn out not to be true. It is in such stratum of intelligence that there lurks the feeling, whenever some old inscription or monument verifying statements in the Bible is discovered, that the infallibility of that book has further proof. For example, until the present year, not a single confirmatory piece of evidence as to the story of the Exodus was forthcoming from Egypt itself. Even the inscription which has come to light does not, in the judgment of such an expert as Dr. Flinders Petrie, supply the exact confirmation desired. But let that irrefragable witness appear, and while the historian will welcome it as evidence of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt, thus throwing light on the movements of races, and adding to the historical value of the Pentateuch; the average orthodox believer will feel a vague sort of satisfaction that the foundations of his belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation are somehow strengthened.

3. _Thomas Henry Huxley._

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY was born at Ealing, on the 4th of May, 1825. Montaigne tells us that he was "borne between eleven of the clock and noone," and, with like quaint precision, Huxley gives the hour of his birth as "about eight o'clock in the morning." Speaking of his first Christian name, he humorously said that, by curious chance, his parents chose that of the particular apostle with whom, as the doubting member of the twelve, he had always felt most sympathy.

Concerning his father, who was "one of the masters in a large semi-public school" (the father of Herbert Spencer, it will be remembered, was also a schoolmaster), Huxley has little to say in the slight autobiographical sketch reprinted as an introduction to the first volume of the Collected Essays. On that side, he tells us, he could find hardly any trace in himself, except a certain faculty for drawing, and a certain hotness of temper. "Physically and mentally," he was the son of his mother, "a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament." His school training was brief and profitless; his tastes were mechanical, and but for lack of means, he would have started life in the same profession which Herbert Spencer followed till he forsook Messrs. Fox's office for journalism. So, with a certain shrinking from anatomical work, Huxley studied medicine for a time under a relative, and in his seventeenth year entered the Charing Cross Hospital School as a student. In those days there was no instruction in physics, and only in such branch of chemistry as dealt with the nature of drugs. _Non multa, sed multum_, and what was lacking in breadth was, perhaps, gained in thoroughness. Huxley had as excellent a teacher in Wharton Jones as the latter had a promising pupil in Huxley, and in working with the microscope, the evidence of that came in his discovery of a certain root-sheath in the hair, which has since then been known as "Huxley's layer."

Up to the time of his studentship, he had been left, intellectually, altogether to his own devices. He tells us that he was a voracious and omnivorous reader, "a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience." Among the books and essays that impressed him were Guizot's History of Civilization; and Sir William Hamilton's essay On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned which he accidentally came upon in an odd volume of the Edinburgh Review. This, he adds, was "devoured with avidity," and it stamped upon his mind the strong conviction "that on even the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable." Thus, before he was out of his teens, the philosophy that ruled his life-teaching was taking definite shape.

In 1845, he won his M. B. London with honours in anatomy and physiology, and after a few months' practice at the East End, applied, at the instance of his senior fellow-student, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Joseph Fayrer, for an appointment in the medical service of the Navy. At the end of two months he was fortunate enough to be entered on the books of Nelson's old ship, the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital. His official chief was the famous Arctic Explorer, Sir John Richardson, through whose recommendation he was appointed, seven months later, assistant surgeon of the Rattlesnake. That ship, commanded by Captain Owen Stanley, was commissioned to survey the intricate passage within the Barrier Reef skirting the eastern shores of Australia, and to explore the sea lying between the northern end of that reef and New Guinea. It was the best apprenticeship to what was eventually the work of Huxley's life--the solution of biological problems and the indication of their far-reaching significance. Darwin and Hooker had passed through a like marine curriculum. The former served as naturalist on board the Beagle when she sailed on her voyage round the world in 1831; the latter as assistant-surgeon on board the Erebus on her Antarctic Expedition in 1839. Fortune was to bring the three shoulder to shoulder when the battle against the theory of the immutability of species was fought.

During his four-years' absence Huxley, in whom the biologist dominated the doctor, made observations on the various marine animals collected. These he sent home to the Linnæan Society in vain hope of acceptance. A more elaborate paper to the Royal Society, communicated through the Bishop of Norwich (author of a book on birds, and father of Dean Stanley), secured the coveted honour of publication, and on Huxley's return in 1850 a "huge packet of separate copies" awaited him. It dealt with the anatomy and affinities of the Medusæ, and the original research which it evidenced justified his election in 1851 to the fellowship of the society whose presidential chair he was in after years to adorn. He would seem to have won the blue ribbon of science _per saltum_. Probably, so far as their biological value is concerned, nothing that he did subsequently has surpassed his contributions to scientific literature at that period; but if his services to knowledge had been limited to the class of work which they represent, he would have remained only a distinguished specialist. Further recognition of his well-won position came in the award of the society's royal medal. But fellowships and medals keep no wolf from the door, and Huxley was a poor man. After vain attempts to obtain, first, a professorship of physiology in England, and then a chair of natural history at Toronto (Tyndall was at the same time an unsuccessful candidate for the chair of physics in the same university), a settled position was secured by Sir Henry de la Beche's offer of the professorship of palæontology and of the lectureship on natural history in the Royal School of Mines, vacated by Edward Forbes. That was in 1854. Between that date and the time of his return Huxley had contributed a number of valuable papers on the structure of the invertebrates, and on histology, or the science of tissues. But these, while adding to his established qualifications for a scientific appointment, demand no detailed reference here. With both chairs there was united the curatorship of the fossil collections in the Museum of Practical Geology, and these, with the inspectorship of salmon fisheries, which office he accepted in 1881, complete the list of Huxley's more important public appointments. He surrendered them all in 1885, having reached the age at which, as he jocosely remarked to the writer, "Every scientific man ought to be poleaxed." Perhaps he dreaded the conservatism of attitude, the non-receptivity to new ideas, which often accompany old age. But for himself such fears were needless. He was never of robust constitution; in addition to the lasting effects of an illness in boyhood, Carlyle's "accursed Hag," dyspepsia, which troubled both Darwin and Bates for the rest of their lives after their return from abroad, troubled him. Therefore, considerations of health mainly prompted the surrender of his varied official responsibilities, the loyal discharge of which met with becoming recognition in the grant of a pension. This secured a modest competence in the evening of life to one who had never been wealthy, and who had never coveted wealth. To Huxley may fitly be applied what Faraday said of himself, that he had "no time to make money." And yet, to his abiding discredit, the present editor of Punch allowed his theological animus, which had already been shown in abortive attempts in the pages of that "facetious" journal to appraise a Roman Catholic biologist at the expense of Huxley, to further degrade itself by affixing the letters "L. S. D." to his name in a character-sketch.

His public life may be said to date from 1854. The duties which he then undertook included the delivery of a course of lectures to working men every alternate year. Some of these--models of their kind--have been reissued in the Collected Essays. Among the most notable are those on Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature. At the outset of his public career lecturing was as distasteful to him as in earlier years the trouble of writing was detestable. But mother wit and "needs must" trained him in a short time to win the ear of an audience. One evening in 1852 he made his début at the Royal Institution, and the next day he received a letter charging him with every possible fault that a lecturer could commit--ungraceful stoop, awkwardness in use of hands, mumbling of words, or dropping them down the shirt front. The lesson was timely, and its effect salutary. Huxley was fond of telling this story, and it is worth recording--if but as encouragement to stammerers who have something to say--at what price he "bought this freedom" which held an audience spellbound. How he thus held it in later years they will remember who in the packed theatre of the Royal Institution listened on the evening of Friday, 9th of April, 1880, to his lecture On the Coming of Age of the Origin of Species.

In 1856 Huxley visited the glaciers of the Alps with Tyndall, the result appearing in their joint authorship of a paper on Glacial Phenomena in the Philosophical Transactions of the following year. But this was a rare interlude. What time could be wrested from daily routine was given to the study of invertebrate and vertebrate morphology, palæontology, and ethnology, familiarity with which was no mean equipment for the conflict soon to rage round these seemingly pacific materials when their deep import was declared. The outcome of such varied industry is apparent to the student of scientific memoirs. But a recital of the titles of papers contributed to these, as e. g., On Ceratodus, Hyperodapedon Gordoni, Hypsilophodon, Telerpeton, and so forth, will not here tend to edification. The original and elaborate investigations which they embody have had recognition in the degrees and medals which decorated the illustrious author. But it is not by these that Huxley's renown as one of the most richly-endowed and widely-cultured personalities of the Victorian era will endure. They might sink into the oblivion which buries most purely technical work without in any way affecting that foremost place which he fills in the ranks of philosophical biologists both as clear-headed thinker and luminous interpreter.

In this high function the publication of the Origin of Species gave him his opportunity. That was in 1859. As with Hooker and Bates, his experiences as a traveller, and, more than this, his penetrating inquiry into significances and relations, prepared his mind for acceptance of the theory of descent with modification of living forms from one stock. Hence the mutability, as against the old theory of the fixity, of species.

In the chapter On the Reception of the Origin of Species, which Huxley contributed to Darwin's Life and Letters, he gives an interesting account of his attitude toward that burning question. He says--

* * * * *

"I think that I must have read the Vestiges (see p. 119) before I left England in 1846, but if I did the book made very little impression upon me, and I was not brought into serious contact with the 'species' question until after 1850. At that time I had long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony which had been impressed upon my childish understanding as Divine truth with all the authority of parents and instructors, and from which it had cost me many a struggle to get free. But my mind was unbiassed in respect of any doctrine which presented itself if it professed to be based on purely philosophical and scientific reasoning.... I had not then and I have not now the smallest _a priori_ objection to raise to the account of the creation of animals and plants given in Paradise Lost, in which Milton so vividly embodies the natural sense of Genesis. Far be it from me to say that it is untrue because it is impossible. I confine myself to what must be regarded as a modest and reasonable request for some particle of evidence that the existing species of animals and plants did originate in that way as a condition of my belief in a statement which appears to me to be highly improbable....

"And by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to give to the evolutionists of 1851-58. Within the ranks of the biologists of that time I met with nobody, except Dr. Grant, of University College, who had a word to say for Evolution, and his advocacy was not calculated to advance the cause. Outside these ranks the only person known to me whose knowledge and capacity compelled respect, and who was at the same time a thoroughgoing evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds of a friendship which I am happy to think has known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed which had been made was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable.

"As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter were very much in my own state of mind--inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists 'A plague on both your houses!' and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion to labour in the fertile fields of ascertainable fact. And I may therefore further suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the Origin in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way. That which we were looking for and could not find was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts, and have their validity tested. The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought. Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing us for ever from the dilemma--refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had no answer ready, and I do not think that any one else had. A year later we reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed by such an inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the Origin was 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!' I suppose that Columbus's companions said much the same when he made the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough, but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the Origin guided the benighted."

But the disciple soon outstripped the master. As was said of Luther in relation to Erasmus, Huxley hatched the egg that Darwin laid. For in the Origin of Species the theory was not pushed to its obvious conclusion: Darwin only hinted that it "would throw much light on the origin of man and his history." His silence, as he candidly tells us in the Introduction to the Descent of Man, was due to a desire "not to add to the prejudices against his views." No such hesitancy kept Huxley silent. In the spirit of Plato's Laws, he followed the argument whithersoever it led. In 1860 he delivered a course of lectures to working-men On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals, and in 1862, a couple of lectures on the same subject at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. The important and significant feature of these discourses was the demonstration that no cerebral barrier divides man from apes; that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction between him and the lower animals is futile; and that "even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life." The lectures were published in 1863 in a volume entitled Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature; and it was with pride warranted by the results of subsequent researches that Huxley, in a letter to the writer, thus refers to the book when arranging for its reissue among the Collected Essays--

I was looking through Man's Place in Nature the other day. I do not think there is a word I need delete, nor anything I need add, except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down. That is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it would certainly ruin all my prospects.

The sparse annotations to the whole series of reprinted matter show that the like permanence attends all his writings. And yet, true workman, with ideal ever lying ahead, as he was, he remarked to the writer that never did a book come hot from the press, but he wished that he could suppress it and rewrite it.

But before dealing with the momentous issues raised in Man's Place in Nature, we must return to 1860. For that was the "Sturm und Drang" period. Then, at Oxford, "home of lost causes," as Matthew Arnold apostrophizes her in the Preface to his Essays in Criticism, was fought, on Saturday, 30th of June, a memorable duel between biologist and bishop; perhaps in its issues, more memorable than the historic discussion on the traditional doctrine of special creation between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the French Academy in 1830.

Both Huxley and Wilberforce were doughty champions. The scene of combat, the Museum Library, was crammed to suffocation. Fainting women were carried out. There had been "words" between Owen and Huxley on the previous Thursday. Owen contended that there were certain fundamental differences between the brains of man and apes. Huxley met this with "direct and unqualified contradiction," and pledged himself to "justify that unusual procedure elsewhere." No wonder that the atmosphere was electric. The bishop was up to time. Declamation usurped the vacant place of argument in his speech, and the declamation became acrid. He finished his harangue by asking Huxley whether he was related by his grandfather's or grandmother's side to an ape. "The Lord hath delivered him into my hands," whispered Huxley to a friend at his side, as he rose to reply. After setting his opponent an example in demonstrating his case by evidence which, although refuting Owen, evoked no admission of error from him then or ever after, Huxley referred to the personal remark of Wilberforce. And this is what he said--

I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a _man_, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

Perhaps the best comment on a piece of what is now ancient history is to quote the admissions made by Lord Salisbury--a rigid High Churchman--in his presidential address to the British Association in this same city of Oxford in 1894--

Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by differences far exceeding those that distinguish what we know as species have yet descended from common ancestors.... Darwin has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species.

Few, also, are now found to doubt not only that doctrine, but also the doctrine that all life-forms have a common origin; plants and animals being alike built-up of matter which is identical in character. This doctrine, to-day a commonplace of biology, was, thirty years ago, rank heresy, since it seemed to reduce the soul of man to the level of his biliary duct. Hence the Oxford storm was but a capful of wind compared with that which raged round Huxley's lecture on The Physical Basis of Life delivered, thus aggravating the offence, on a "Sabbath" evening in Edinburgh in 1868. People had settled down, with more or less vague understanding of the matter, into quiescent acceptance of Darwinism. And now their somnolence was rudely shaken by this Southron troubler of Israel, with his production of a bottle of solution of smelling salts, and a pinch or two of other ingredients, which represented the elementary substances entering into the composition of every living thing from a jelly-speck to man. Well might the removal of the stopper to that bottle take their breath away! Microscopists, philosophers "so-called," and clerics alike raised the cry of "gross materialism," never pausing to read Huxley's anticipatory answer to the baseless charge, an answer repeated again and again in his writings, as in the essay of Descartes' Discourse touching the method of using one's reason rightly, and in his Hume. In season and out of season he never wearies in insisting that there is nothing in the doctrine inconsistent with the purest idealism. "All the phenomena of Nature are, in their ultimate analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness." The cyclone thus raised travelled westward on the heels of Tyndall, when in 1874 he asserted the fundamental identity of the organic and inorganic; dashing, as his Celtic blood stirred him, the statements with a touch of poetry in the famous phrase that "the genius of Newton was potential in the fires of the sun."

The ancient belief in "spontaneous generation," which Redi's experiments upset, was the subject of Huxley's Presidential Address to the British Association in 1870. But while he showed how subsequent investigation confirmed the doctrine of Abiogenesis, or the non-production of living from dead matter, he made this statement in support of Tyndall's creed as to the fundamental unity of the vital and the non-vital.

"Looking back through the prodigious vista of the past, I find no record of the commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of any means of forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given to me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter. I should expect to see it appear under forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates, and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me; but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an act of philosophical faith."

Huxley was the Apostle Paul of the Darwinian movement, and one main result of his active propagandism was to so effectively prepare the way for the reception of the profounder issues involved in the theory of the origin of species, that the publication of Darwin's Descent of Man in 1871 created mild excitement. And the weight of his support is the greater because he never omitted to lay stress on the obscurity which still hides the causes of variation which, it must be kept in mind, natural selection cannot bring about, and on which it can only act. He insists on the non-implication of the larger theory with its subordinate parts, or with the fate of them. The "doctrine of Evolution is a generalisation of certain facts which may be observed by any one who will take the necessary trouble." The facts are those which biologists class under the heads of Embryology and Palæontology, to the conclusions from which "all future philosophical and theological speculations will have to accommodate themselves."

That is the direction of the revolution to which the publication of Man's Place in Nature gave impetus; and it is in the all-round application of the theory of man's descent that Huxley stands foremost, both as leader and lawgiver. Mr. Spencer has never shrunk from controversy, but he has not forsaken the study for the arena, and hence his influence, great and abiding as it is, has been less direct and personal than that of his comrade, "ever a fighter," who, in Browning's words, "marched breast forward." Man's Place in Nature was the first of a series of deliverances upon the most serious questions that can occupy the mind; and its successors, the brilliant monograph on Hume, published in 1879, and the Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, delivered at Oxford, 18th of May, 1893, are but expansions of the thesis laid down in that wonderful little volume; wonderful in the prevision which fills it, and in the justification which it has received from all subsequent research, notably in psychology.

If the propositions therein maintained are unshaken, then there is no possible reconciliation between Evolution and Theology, and all the smooth sayings in attempted harmonies between the two, of which Professor Drummond's Ascent of Man is a type, and in speeches at Church Congresses of which that delivered by Archdeacon Wilson (see p. 161) is a type, do but hypnotize the "light half-believers of our casual creeds." To some there are "signs of the times" which point to approaching acquiescence in the sentiment of Ovid, paralleled by a famous passage in Gibbon, that "the existence of the gods is a matter of public policy, and we must believe it accordingly." It looks like the prelude to surrender of what is the cardinal dogma of Christianity when we read in the Archdeacon's address that "the theory of Evolution is indeed fatal to certain _quasi_-mythological doctrines of the Atonement which once prevailed, but it is in harmony with its spirit." For those doctrines, as the Venerable apologist may learn from the evidence in Frazer's Golden Bough (chap. iii, _passim_), are wholly mythological, because barbaric. But, in truth, there is not a dogma of Christendom, not a foundation on which the dogma rests, that Evolution does not traverse. The Church of England adopts "as thoroughly to be received and believed," the three ancient creeds, known as the Apostles', the Athanasian, and the Nicene. There is not a sentence in any one of these which finds confirmation; and only a sentence or two that find neither confirmation nor contradiction, in Evolution.

The question, on which reams of paper have been wasted, lies in a nutshell. The statements in the Creeds profess to have warrant in the direct words of the Bible; or in inferences drawn from those words, as defined by the Councils of the Church. The decisions of these Councils represent the opinion of the majority of fallible men composing those assemblies, and no number of fallible parts can make an infallible whole. As Selden quaintly puts it (Table Talk, xxx, Councils), "they talk (but blasphemously enough) that the Holy Ghost is president of their General Councils, when the truth is the odd man is still the Holy Ghost." With this same "odd man" rested the decision as to what books should be included or excluded from the collection on which the Church bases its authority and formulates its creeds. So, in the last result, both sets of questions are settled by a human tribunal employing a circular argument. But, dismissing this for the moment, let us see to what issues the controversy is narrowed, to quote Huxley's words (written in 1871), by "the spontaneous retreat of the enemy from nine-tenths of the territory which he occupied ten years ago."

The battle has no longer to be fought over the question of the fundamental identity of the physical structure of man and of the anthropoid apes. The most enlightened Protestant divines accept this as proven; and not a few Catholic divines are adopting an attitude toward it which is only the prelude to surrender. Matters must have moved apace in the Church which Huxley, backed by history, describes as "that vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral, and social life of mankind," to permit the Roman Catholic Professor of Physics in the University of Notre Dame, America, to parley as follows:

"Granting that future researches in palæontology, anthropology, and biology, shall demonstrate beyond doubt that man is genetically related to the inferior animals, and we have seen how far scientists are from such a demonstration (?), there will not be, even in such an improbable event, the slightest ground for imagining that then, at last, the conclusions of science are hopelessly at variance with the declarations of the sacred text, or the authorised teachings of the Church of Christ. All that would logically follow from the demonstration of the animal origin of man, would be a modification of the traditional view regarding the origin of the body of our first ancestor. We should be obliged to revise the interpretation that has usually been given to the words of Scripture which refer to the formation of Adam's body, and read these words in the sense which Evolution demands, a sense which, as we have seen, may be attributed to the words of the inspired record, without either distorting the meaning of terms, or in any way doing violence to the text" (Evolution and Dogma. By the Reverend J. A. Zahm, Ph. D., C.S.C., pp. 364, 365).

Upon this suggested revision of writings which are claimed as forming part of a divine revelation, one of the highest authorities, Francisco Suarez, thus refers, in his Tractatus de Opere sex Dierum, to the elastic interpretation given in his time to the "days" in the first chapter of Genesis. "It is not probable that God, in inspiring Moses to write a history of the Creation, which was to be believed by ordinary people, would have made him use language the true meaning of which it was hard to discover, and still harder to believe." Three centuries have passed since these wise words were penned, and the reproof which they convey is as much needed now as then.

In near connection with the question of man's origin is that of his antiquity. The existence of his remains, rare as they are everywhere, in deposits older than the Pleistocene or Quaternary Epoch is not proven. This applies to the remarkable fragments found by Dr. Dubois in Java, the character of which, in the judgment of several palæontologists, indicates the nearest approach between man and ape hitherto discovered. But the evidence of the physical relation of these two being conclusive, the exact place of man in the earth's time-record is rendered of subordinate importance.

The theologians have come to their last ditch in contesting that the mental differences between man and the lower animals are fundamental, being differences of kind, and therefore that no gradual process from the mental faculties of the one to those of the other has taken place. This struggle against the application of the theory of Evolution to man's intellectual and spiritual nature will be long and stubborn. It is a matter of life and death to the theologian to show that he has in revelation, and in the world-wide belief of mankind in spiritual existences without, and in a spirit or soul within, evidence of the supernatural. The evolutionist has no such corresponding deep concern. When the argument against him is adduced from the Bible, he can only challenge the ground on which that book is cited as divine authority, or as an authority at all. Granting, for the sake of argument, that a revelation has been made, the writings purporting to contain it must comply with the twofold condition attaching to it, namely, that it makes known matters which the human mind could not, unaided, have found out; and that it embodies those matters in language as to the meaning of which there can be no doubt whatever. If there be any sacred books which comply with these conditions, they have yet to be discovered.

When the argument against the evolutionist is drawn from human testimony, he does not dispute the existence of the belief in a soul and in all the accompanying apparatus of the supernatural; but he calls in the anthropologist to explain how these arose in the barbaric mind.

Meanwhile, let us summarize the evidence which points to the psychical unity between man and the lower life-forms. As stated on p. 187, Mr. Herbert Spencer traces the gradual evolution of consciousness from "the blurred, indeterminate feeling which responds to a single nerve pulsation or shock." There is no trace of a nervous system in the simplest organisms, but this counts for little, because there are also no traces of a mouth, or a stomach, or limbs. In these seemingly structureless creatures every part does everything. The amoeba eats and drinks, digests and excretes, manifests "irritability," that is, responds to the various stimuli of its surroundings, and multiplies, without possessing special organs for these various functions. Division of labour arises at a slightly higher stage, when rudimentary organs appear; the development of function and organ going on simultaneously.

Speaking broadly, the functions of living things are threefold: they feed; they reproduce; they respond to their "environment," and it is this last-named function--communication with surroundings--which is the special work of the nervous system. It was an old Greek maxim that "a man may once say a thing as he would have said it: he cannot say it twice." This is the warrant for transferring a few sentences on the origin of the nerves from my Story of Creation. They are but a meagre abstract of Mr. Spencer's long, but luminous exposition of the subject.

"As every part of an organism is made up of cells, and as the functions govern the form of the cells, the origin of nerves must be due to a modification in cell shape and arrangement, whereby certain tracts or fibres of communication between the body and its surroundings are established.

"But what excited that modification? The all-surrounding medium, without which no life had been, which determined its limits, and _touches_ it at every point with its throbs and vibrations. In the beginnings of a primitive layer or skin manifested by creatures a stage above the lowest, unlikenesses would arise, and certain parts, by reason of their finer structure, would be the more readily stimulated by, and the more quickly responsive to, the ceaseless action of the surroundings, the result being that an extra sensitiveness along the lines of least resistance would be set up in those more delicate parts. These, developing, like all things else, by use, would become more and more the selected paths of the impulses, leading, as the molecular waves thrilled them, to structural changes or modification into nerve-cells, and nerve-fibres, of increasing complexity as we ascend the scale of life. The entire nervous system, with its connections; the brain and all the subtle mechanism with which it controls the body; the organs of the senses alike begin as sacs formed by infoldings of the primitive outer skin."

Biologists are agreed that a certain stage in the organization of the nervous system--the germs of which, we saw, are visible in the quivering of an amoeba, and probably in plants as well as animals--must be reached before consciousness is manifest. Obscurity still hangs round the stage at which mere irritability passes into sensibility, but so long as the continuity of development is clear, the gradations are of lesser importance. And, for the present purpose, there is no need to descend far in the life-scale; if the psychical connection between man and the mammals immediately beneath him is proven, the connection of the mammals with the lowest invertebrate may be assumed as also established. Speaking only of vertebrates, the brain being, whether in fish or man, the organ of mental phenomena, how far does its structure support or destroy the theory of mental continuity? In Man's Place in Nature, and its invaluable supplement, the second part of the monograph on Hume, this subject is expounded by Huxley with his usual clearness. In the older book he traces the gradual modification of brain in the series of backboned animals. He points out that the brain of a fish is very small compared with the spinal cord into which it is continued, that in reptiles the mass of brain, relatively to the spinal cord, is larger, and still larger in birds, until among the lowest mammals, as the opossums and kangaroos, the brain is so increased in proportion as to be extremely different from that of fish, bird, or reptile. Between these marsupials and the highest or placental mammals, there occurs "the greatest leap anywhere made by Nature in her brain work." Then follows this important statement in favour of continuity.

"As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent to brains little lower than that of Man." After giving technical descriptions in proof of this, and laying special stress on the presence of the structure known as the "hippocampus minor" in the brain of man as well as of the ape--in the denial of which Owen cut such a sorry figure, Huxley adds:

"So far as cerebral structure goes, therefore, it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.... Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result,--that the structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes. But in enunciating this important truth I must guard myself against a form of misunderstanding which is very prevalent ... that the structural differences between man and even the highest apes are small and insignificant. Let me then distinctly assert, on the contrary, that they are great and significant; that every bone of a Gorilla bears marks by which it might be distinguished from the corresponding bone of a Man; and that, in the present creation, at any rate, no intermediate link bridges over the gap between _Homo_ and _Troglodytes_. It would be no less wrong than absurd to deny the existence of this chasm; but it is at least equally wrong and absurd to exaggerate its magnitude, and, resting on the admitted fact of its existence, to refuse to inquire whether it is wide or narrow. Remember, if you will, that there is no existing link between Man and the Gorilla, but do not forget that there is a no less sharp line of demarcation, a no less complete absence of any traditional form, between the Gorilla and the Orang, or the Orang and the Gibbon."

The brains of man and ape being fundamentally the same in structure, it follows that the functions which they perform are fundamentally the same. The large array of facts mustered by a series of careful observers prove how futile is the argument which, in his pride of birth, man advances against psychical continuity. Vain is the search after boundary lines between reflex action and instinct, and between instinct and reason. Barriers there are between man and brute, for articulate speech and the consequent power to transmit experiences has set up these, and they remain impassable. "The potentialities of language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the faculty of modulating and articulating the voice. The potentialities of writing, as the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw, and in the mimetic tendency which we know was gratified by drawing as far back as the days of Quaternary man" (Huxley's Essays on Controverted Questions, p. 47). But these specially human characteristics are no sufficing warrant for denying that the sensations, emotions, thoughts, and volitions of man vary in kind from those of the lower creation. "The essential resemblances in all points of structure and function, so far as they can be studied, between the nervous system of man and that of the dog, leave no reasonable doubt that the processes which go on in the one are just like those which take place in the other. In the dog, there can be no doubt that the nervous matter which lies between the retina and the muscles undergoes a series of changes, precisely analogous to those which, in the man, give rise to sensation, a train of thought, and volition." This passage occurs in Huxley's Reply to Mr. Darwin's Critics, which appeared in the Contemporary Review, 1871, and it may be supplemented by a quotation from the chapter on The Mental Phenomena of Animals in his Hume. "It seems hard to assign any good reason for denying to the higher animals any mental state or process in which the employment of the vocal or visual symbols of which language is composed is not involved; and comparative psychology confirms the position in relation to the rest of the animal world assigned to man by comparative anatomy. As comparative anatomy is easily able to show that, physically, man is but the last term of a long series of forms, which lead, by slow gradations, from the highest mammal to the almost formless speck of living protoplasm, which lies on the shadowy boundary between animal and vegetable life; so, comparative psychology, though but a young science, and far short of her elder sister's growth, points to the same conclusion."

Within recent years the psychologists are doing remarkable work in attacking the problem of the mechanics of mental operations, and already in Europe and America some thirty laboratories have been started for experimental work. The subject is somewhat abstruse for detailed reference here, and it must suffice to say that the psychologist, beginning with observations upon himself, measuring, for example, "the degree of sensibility of his own eye to luminous irritations, or of his own skin to pricking, passes on to like inquiry into the numerical relations between the energy of the stimuli of light, sound, and so forth, and the energy of the sensations which they arouse in the nerve-channels." An excellent summary, with references to the newest authorities on the subject, is given by Prince Kropotkin in the Nineteenth Century of August, 1896.

All this, to the superficial onlooker, seems rank materialism. But we cannot think without a brain any more than we can see without eyes, and any inquiry into the operation of the organ of thought must run on the same lines as inquiry into the operations of any other organ of the body. And the inquiry leaves us at the point whence we began in so far as any light is thrown on the connection between the molecular vibrations in nerve-tissue and the mental processes of which they are the indispensable accompaniment. Changes take place in some of the thousands of millions of brain-cells in every thought that we think, and in every emotion that we feel, but the nexus remains an impenetrable mystery. Nevertheless, if we may not say that the brain secretes thought as we say that the liver secretes bile, we may also not say that the mind is detachable from the nervous system, and that it is an entity independent of it. Were it this, not only would it stand outside the ordinary conditions of development, but it would also maintain the equilibrium which a dose of narcotics or of alcohol, or which starvation and gorging alike rapidly upset.

In his posthumous essay On the Immortality of the Soul, Hume says: "Matter and spirit are at bottom equally unknown, and we cannot determine what qualities inhere in the one or in the other." That is the conclusion to which the wisest come. And in the ultimate correlation of the physical and psychical lies the hope of arrival at that terminus of unity which was the dream of the ancient Greeks, and to which all inquiry makes approach. How, in these matters, philosophy is at one, is again seen in Huxley's admission that "in respect of the great problems of philosophy, the post-Darwinian generation is, in one sense, exactly where the præ-Darwinian generations were. They remain insoluble. But the present generation has the advantage of being better provided with the means of freeing itself from the tyranny of certain sham solutions."

Science explains, and, in explaining, dissipates the pseudo-mysteries by which man, in his myth-making stage, when conception of the order of the universe was yet unborn, accounted for everything. But she may borrow the Apostle's words, "Behold! I show you a mystery," and give to them a profounder meaning as she confesses that the origin and ultimate destiny of matter and motion; the causes which determine the behaviour of atoms, whether they are arranged in the lovely and varying forms which mark their crystals, or whether they are quivering with the life which is common to the amoeba and the man; the conversion of the inorganic into the organic by the green plant, and the relation between nerve-changes and consciousness; are all impenetrable mysteries.

In his speech on the commemoration of the jubilee of his Professorship in the University of Glasgow last year, Lord Kelvin said, "I know no more of electric and magnetic force, or of the relation between ether, electricity, and ponderable matter, or of chemical affinity than I knew and tried to teach my students of natural philosophy fifty years ago in my first session as professor."

This recognition of limitations will content those who seek not "after a sign". For others, that search will continue to have encouragement not only from the theologian, but from the pseudo-scientific who have travelled some distance with the Pioneers of Evolution, but who refuse to follow them further. In each of these there is present the "theological bias" whose varied forms are skilfully analyzed by Mr. Spencer in his chapter under that heading in the Study of Sociology. This explains the attitude of various groups which are severally represented by Mr. St. George Mivart, and the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter; by Professor Sir Geo. G. Stokes, and Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace. The first-named is a Roman Catholic; the second was a Unitarian; the third is an orthodox Churchman, and the fourth, as already seen, is a Spiritualist. In his Genesis of Species, Mr. Mivart contends that "man's body was evolved from pre-existing material (symbolised by the term 'dust of the earth'), and was therefore only derivatively created, i. e., by the operation of secondary laws," but that "his soul, on the other hand, was created in quite a different way ... by the direct action of the Almighty (symbolised by the term breathing)," p. 325. In his Mental Physiology, Dr. Carpenter postulates an Ego or Will which presides over, without sharing in, the causally determined action of the other mental functions and their correlated bodily processes; "an entity which does not depend for its existence on any play of physical or vital forces, but which makes these forces subservient to its determinations" (p. 27). Professor Mivart actually cites St. Augustine and Cardinal Newman as authorities in support of his theory of the special creation of the soul. He might with equal effect subpoena Dr. Joseph Parker or General Booth as authorities. Dr. Carpenter argued as became a good Unitarian. In his Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, Professor Stokes asserts, drawing "on sources of information which lie beyond man's natural powers," in other words, appealing to the Bible, that God made man immortal and upright, and endowed him with freedom of the will. As, without the exercise of this, man would have been as a mere automaton, he was exposed to the temptation of the devil, and fell. Thereby he became "subject to death like the lower animals," and by the "natural effect of heredity," transmitted the taint of sin to his offspring. The eternal life thus forfeited was restored by the voluntary sacrifice of Christ, but can be secured only to those who have faith in him. This doctrine, which is no novel one, is known as "conditional immortality." Professor Stokes attaches "no value to the belief in a future life by metaphysical arguments founded on the supposed nature of the soul itself," and he admits that the purely psychic theory which would discard the body altogether in regard to the process of thought is beset by very great difficulties. So he once more has recourse to "sources of information which lie beyond man's natural powers." Following up certain distinctions between "soul" and "spirit" drawn by the Apostle Paul in his tripartite division of man, Professor Stokes, somewhat in keeping with Dr. Carpenter, assumes an "Ego, which, on the one hand, is not to be identified with thought, which may exist while thought is in abeyance, and which may, with the future body of which the Christian religion speaks, be the medium of continuity of thought.... What the nature of this body might be we do not know; but we are pretty distinctly informed that it would be something very different from that of our present body, very different in its properties and functions, and yet no less our own than our present body." "Words, words, words," as Hamlet says.

Reference has been made in some fulness to Mr. Wallace's limitations of the theory of natural selection in the case of man's mental faculties. We must now pursue this somewhat in detail, reminding the reader of Mr. Wallace's admission that, "provisionally, the laws of variation and natural selection ... may have brought about, first, that perfection of bodily structure in which man is so far above all other animals, and, in co-ordination with it, the larger and more developed brain by means of which he has been able to subject the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms to his service." But, although Mr. Wallace rejects the theory of man's special creation as "being entirely unsupported by facts, as well as in the highest degree improbable," he contends that it does not necessarily follow that "his mental nature, even though developed _pari passu_ with his physical structure, has been developed by the same agencies." Then, by the introduction of a physical analogy which is no analogy at all, he suggests that the agent by which man was upraised into a kingdom apart bears like relation to natural selection as the glacial epoch bears to the ordinary agents of denudation and other changes in producing new effects which, though continuous with preceding effects, were not due to the same causes.

Applying this "argument" (drawn from natural causes), as Mr. Wallace names it, "to the case of man's intellectual and moral nature," he contends that such special faculties as the mathematical, musical, and artistic (is this faculty to be denied the nest-decorating bower bird?), and the high moral qualities which have given the martyr his constancy, the patriot his devotion, and the philanthropist his unselfishness, are due to a "spiritual essence or nature, superadded to the animal nature of man." We are not told at what stage in man's development this was inserted; whether, once and for all, in "primitive" man, with potentiality of transmission through Palæolithic folk to all succeeding generations; or whether there is special infusion of a "spiritual essence" into every human being at birth.

Any perplexity that might arise at the line thus taken by Mr. Wallace vanishes before the fact, already enlarged upon, that the author of the Malay Archipelago and Island Life has written a book on Miracles and Modern Spiritualism in defence of both. The explanation lies in that duality of mind which, in one compartment, ranks Mr. Wallace foremost among naturalists, and, in the other compartment, places him among the most credulous of Spiritualists.

Despite this, Mr. Wallace has claims to a respectful hearing and to serious reply. Fortunately, he would appear to furnish the refutation to his own argument in the following paragraph from his delightful Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection:

"From the time when the social and sympathetic feelings came into operation and the intellectual and moral faculties became fairly developed, man would cease to be influenced by natural selection in his physical form and structure. As an animal he would remain almost stationary, the changes in the surrounding universe ceasing to produce in him that powerful modifying effect which they exercise on other parts of the organic world. But, from the moment that the form of his body became stationary, his mind would become subject to those very influences from which his body had escaped; every slight variation in his mental and moral nature which should enable him better to guard against adverse circumstances and combine for mutual comfort and protection would be preserved and accumulated; the better and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower and more brutal would give way and successively die out, and that rapid advancement of mental organisation would occur which has raised the very lowest races of man so far above the brutes (although differing so little from some of them in physical structure), and, in conjunction with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has developed the wonderful intellect of the European races" (pp. 316, 317, Second Edition, 1871).

This argument has suggestive illustration in the fifth chapter of the Origin of Species. Mr. Darwin there refers to a remark to the following effect made by Mr. Waterhouse: "_A part developed in any species in an extraordinary degree or manner in comparison with the same part in allied species tends to be highly variable._" This applies only where there is unusual development. "Thus, the wing of a bat is a most abnormal structure in the class of mammals; but the rule would not apply here, because the whole group of bats possesses wings; it would apply only if some one species had wings developed in a remarkable manner in comparison with the other species of the same genus." And when this exceptional development of any part or organ occurs, we may conclude that the modification has arisen since the period when the several species branched off from the common progenitor of the genus; and this period will seldom be very remote, as species rarely endure for more than one geological period.

How completely this applies to man, the latest product of organic evolution. The brain is that part or organ in him which has been developed "in an extraordinary degree, in comparison with the same part" in other Primates, and which has become _highly variable_. Whatever may have been the favouring causes which secured his immediate progenitors such modification of brain as advanced him in intelligence over "allied species," the fact abides that in this lies the explanation of their after-history; the arrest of the one, the unlimited progress of the other. Increasing intelligence at work through vast periods of time originated and developed those social conditions which alone made possible that progress which, in its most advanced degree, but a small proportion of the race has reached. For in this question of mental differences the contrast is not between man and ape, but between man savage and civilized; between the incapacity of the one to count beyond his fingers, and the capacity of the other to calculate an eclipse of the sun or a transit of Venus. It would therefore seem that Mr. Wallace should introduce his "spiritual essence, or nature," in the intermediate, and not in the initial stage.

As answer to Mr. Wallace's argument that in their large and well-developed brains, savages "possess an organ quite disproportioned to their requirements," Huxley cites Wallace's own remarks in his paper on Instinct in Man and Animals as to the considerable demands made by the needs of the lower races on their observing faculties which call into play no mean exercise of brain function.

"Add to this," Huxley says, "the knowledge which a savage is obliged to gain of the properties of plants, of the characters and habits of animals, and of the minute indications by which their course is discoverable; consider that even an Australian can make excellent baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and beautifully balanced spears; that he learns to use these so as to be able to transfix a quartern loaf at sixty yards; and that very often, as in the case of the American Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which a well-trained European finds it difficult to master; consider that every time a savage tracks his game, he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation, and I think one need ask no further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains."... But Mr. Wallace's objection "applies quite as strongly to the lower animals. Surely a wolf must have too much brain, or else how is it that a dog, with only the same quantity and form of brain, is able to develop such singular intelligence? The wolf stands to the dog in the same relation as the savage to the man; and therefore, if Mr. Wallace's doctrine holds good, a higher power must have superintended the breeding up of wolves from some inferior stock, in order to prepare them to become dogs" (Critiques and Addresses, p. 293).

After all is said, perhaps the effective refutation of the belief in a spiritual entity superadded in man is found in the explanation of the origin of that belief which anthropology supplies.

The theory of the origin and growth of the belief in souls and spiritual beings generally, and in a future life, which has been put into coherent form by Spencer and Tylor, is based upon an enormous mass of evidence gathered by travellers among existing barbaric peoples; evidence agreeing in character with that which results from investigations into beliefs of past races in varying stages of culture. Only brief reference to it here is necessary, but the merest outline suffices to show from what obvious phenomena the conception of a soul was derived, a conception of which all subsequent forms are but elaborated copies. As in other matters, crude analogies have guided the barbaric mind in its ideas about spirits and their behaviour. A man falls asleep and dreams certain things; on waking, he believes that these things actually happened; and he therefore concludes that the dead who came to him or to whom he went in his dreams, are alive; that the friend or foe whom he knows to be far away, but with whom he feasted or fought in dreamland, came to him. He sees another man fall into a swoon or trance that may lay him seemingly lifeless for hours or even days; he himself may be attacked by deranging fevers and see visions stranger than those which a healthy person sees; shadows of himself and of objects, both living and not living, follow or precede him and lengthen or shorten in the withdrawing or advancing light; the still water throws back images of himself; the hillsides resound with mocking echoes of his words and of sounds around him; and it is these and allied phenomena which have given rise to the notion of "another self," to use Mr. Spencer's convenient term, or of a number of selves that are sometimes outside the man and sometimes inside him, as to which the barbaric mind is never sure. Outside him, however, when the man is sleeping, so that he must not be awakened, lest this "other self" be hindered from returning; or when he is sick, or in the toils of the medicine-man, who may hold the "other self" in his power, as in the curious soul-trap of the Polynesians--a series of cocoa-nut rings--in which the sorcerer makes believe to catch and detain the soul of an offender or sick person. When Dr. Catat and his companions, MM. Maistre and Foucart were exploring the "Bara" country on the west coast of Madagascar the people suddenly became hostile. On the previous day the travellers, not without difficulty, had photographed the royal family, and now found themselves accused of taking the souls of the natives with the object of selling them when they returned to France. Denial was of no avail; following the custom of the Malagasays, they were compelled to catch the souls, which were then put into a casket, and ordered by Dr. Catat to return to their respective owners (Times, 24th March, 1891).

Although the difference presented by such phenomena and by death is that it is abiding, while they are temporary, to the barbaric mind the difference is in degree, and not in kind. True, the "other self" has left the body, and will never return to it; but it exists, for it appears in dreams and hallucinations, and therefore is believed to revisit its ancient haunts, as well as to tarry often near the exposed or buried body. The nebulous theories which identified the soul with breath, and shadow, and reflection, slowly condensed into theories of semi-substantiality still charged with ethereal conceptions, resulting in the curious amalgam which, in the minds of cultivated persons, whenever they strive to envisage the idea, represents the disembodied soul.

Therefore, in vain may we seek for points of difference in our comparison of primitive ideas of the origin and nature of the soul with the later ideas. The copious literature to which these have given birth is represented in the bibliography appended to Mr. Alger's work on Theories of a Future Life, by 4977 books, exclusive of many published since his list was compiled. Save in refinement of detail such as a higher culture secures, what is there to choose between the four souls of the Hidatsa Indians, the two souls of the Gold Coast natives, and the tripartite division of man by Rabbis, Platonists, and Paulinists, which are but the savage other-self "writ large"? Their common source is in man's general animistic interpretation of Nature, which is a _vera causa_, superseding the need for the assumptions of which Mr. Wallace's is a type. As an excellent illustration of what is meant by animism, we may cite what Mr. Everard im Thurn has to say about the Indians of Guiana, who are, presumably, a good many steps removed from so-called "primitive" man. "The Indian does not see any sharp line of distinction such as we see between man and other animals, between one kind of animal and another, or between animals--man included--and inanimate objects. On the contrary, to the Indian all objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ in the accident of bodily form. Every object in the whole world is a being, consisting of a body and spirit, and differs from every other object in no respect except that of bodily form, and in the greater or lesser degree of brute power and brute cunning consequent on the difference of bodily form and bodily habits. Our next step, therefore, is to note that animals, other than men, and even inanimate objects, have spirits which differ not at all in kind from those of men."

The importance of the evidence gathered by anthropology in support of man's inclusion in the general theory of evolution is ever becoming more manifest. For it has brought witness to continuity in organic development at the point where a break has been assumed, and driven home the fact that if Evolution operates anywhere, it operates everywhere. And operates, too, in such a way that every part co-operates in the discharge of a universal process. Hence it meets the divisions which mark opposition to it by the transcendent power of unity.

Until the past half-century, man excepted himself, save in crude and superficial fashion, from that investigation which, for long periods, he has made into the earth beneath him and the heavens above him. This tardy inquiry into the history of his own kind, and its place in the order and succession of life, as well as its relation to the lower animals, between whom and itself, as has been shown, the barbaric mind sees much in common, is due, so far as Christendom is concerned (and the like cause applies, _mutatis mutandis_, in non-Christian civilized communities), to the subjection of the intellect to pre-conceived theories based on the authority accorded to ancient legends about man. These legends, invested with the sanctity with which time endows the past, finally became integral parts of sacred literatures, to question which was as superfluous as it was impious. Thus it has come to pass that the only being competent to inquire into his own antecedents has looked at his history through the distorting prism of a mythopoeic past!

Perhaps, in the long run, the gain has exceeded the loss. For, in the precedence of study of other sciences more remote from man's "business and bosom," there has been rendered possible a more dispassionate treatment of matters charged with profounder issues. Since the Church, however she may conveniently ignore the fact as concession after concession is wrung from her, has never slackened in jealousy of the advance of secular knowledge, it was well for human progress that those subjects of inquiry which affected orthodox views only indirectly were first prosecuted. The brilliant discoveries in astronomy, to which the Copernican theory gave impetus, although they displaced the earth from its assumed supremacy among the bodies in space, did not apparently affect the doctrine of the supremacy of man as the centre of Divine intervention, as the creature for whom the great scheme of redemption had been formulated "in the counsels of the Trinity," and the tragedy of the self-sacrifice of God the Son enacted on earth. The surrender or negation of any fundamental dogma of Christian theology was not involved in the abandonment of the statement in the Bible as to the dominant position of the earth in relation to the sun and other self-luminous stars. To our own time the increase of knowledge concerning the myriads of sidereal systems which revolve through space is not held to be destructive of those dogmas, but held, rather, to supply material for speculation as to the probable extension of Divine paternal government throughout the universe. And, although, as coming nearer home, with consequent greater chance of intrusion of elements of friction, the like applies to the discoveries of geology. Apart from intellectual apathy, which explains much, the impact of these discoveries on traditional beliefs was softened by the buffers which a moderating spirit of criticism interposed in the shape of superficial "reconciliations" emptying the old cosmogony of all its poetry, and therefore of its value as a key to primitive ideas, and converting it into bastard science. Thus a temporary, because artificial, unity, was set up. But with the evidence supplied by study of the ancient life whose remains are imbedded in the fossil-yielding strata, that unity is shivered. In a Scripture that "cannot be broken" there was read the story of conflict and death æons before man appeared. Between this record, and that which spoke of pain and death as the consequences of man's disobedience to the frivolous prohibition of an anthropomorphic God, there is no possible reconciliation.

To the evidence from fossiliferous beds was added evidence from old river-gravels and limestone caverns. The relics extracted from the stalagmitic deposits in Kent's Hole, near Torquay, had lain unheeded for some years save as "curios," when M. Boucher des Perthes saw in the worked flints of a somewhat rougher type which he found mingled with the bones of rhinoceroses, cave-bears, mammoths, or woolly-haired elephants, and other mammals in the "drift" or gravel-pits of Abbeville, in Picardy, the proofs of man's primitive savagery, so far as Western Europe was concerned. The presence of these rudely-chipped flints had been noticed by M. de Perthes in 1839, but he could not persuade savants to admit that human hands had shaped them, until these doubting Thomases saw for themselves like implements _in situ_ at a depth of seventeen feet from the original surface of the ground. That was in 1858: a year before the publication of the Origin of Species. Similar materials have been unearthed from every part of the globe habitable once or inhabited now. They confirm the speculations of Lucretius as to a universal makeshift with stone, bone, horn, and such-like accessible or pliable substances during the ages that preceded the discovery of metals. Therefore, the existence of a Stone Age at one period or another where now an Age of Iron (following an Age of Bronze) prevails, is an established canon of archæological science. From this follows the inference that man's primitive condition was that which corresponds to the lowest type extant, the Australian and Papuan; that the further back inquiry is pushed such culture as exists is found to have been preceded by barbarism; and that the savage races of to-day represent not a degradation to which man, as the result of a fall from primeval purity and Eden-like ease, has sunk, but a condition out of which all races above the savage have emerged.

While Prehistoric Archæology, with its enormous mass of _material_ remains gathered from "dens and caves of the earth," from primitive work-shops, from rude tombs and temples, thus adds its testimony to the "great cloud of witnesses"; _immaterial_ remains, potent as embodying the thought of man, are brought by the twin sciences of Comparative Mythology and Folklore, and Comparative Theology--remains of paramount value, because existing to this day in hitherto unsuspected form, as survivals in beliefs and rites and customs. Readers of Tylor's Primitive Culture, with its wealth of facts and their significance; and of Lyall's Asiatic Studies, wherein is described the making of myths to this day in the heart of India; need not be told how the slow zigzag advance of man in material things has its parallel in the stages of his intellectual and spiritual advance all the world over; from the lower animism to the higher conception of deity; from bewildering guesses to assuring certainties. To this mode of progress no civilized people has been the exception, as notably in the case of the Hebrews, was once thought--"the correspondence between the old Israelitic and other archaic forms of theology extending to details."

While, therefore, the discoveries of astronomers and geologists have been disintegrating agencies upon old beliefs, the discoveries classed under the general term Anthropological are acting as more powerful solvents on every opinion of the past. Showing on what mythical foundation the story of the fall of man rests, Anthropology has utterly demolished the _raison d'être_ of the doctrine of his redemption--the keystone of the fabric. It has penetrated the mists of antiquity, and traced the myth of a forfeited Paradise, of the Creation, the Deluge, and other legends, to their birthplaces in the valley of the Euphrates or the uplands of Persia; legends whose earliest inscribed records are on Accadian tablets, or in the scriptures of Zarathustra. It has in the spirit of the commended Bereans, "searched" those and other scriptures, finding therein legends of founders of ancient faiths cognate to those which in the course of the centuries gathered round Jesus of Nazareth; it has collated the rites and ceremonies of many a barbaric theology with those of old-world religions--Brahmanic, Buddhistic, Christian--and found only such differences between them as are referable to the higher or the lower culture. For the history of superstitions is included in the history of beliefs; the superstitions being the germ-plasm of which all beliefs above the lowest are the modified products. Belief incarnates itself in word or act. In the one we have the charm, the invocation, and the dogma; in the other the ritual and ceremony. "A ritual system," Professor Robertson Smith remarks, "must always remain materialistic, even if its materialism is disguised under the cloak of mysticism." And it is with the incarnated ideas, uninfluenced by the particular creed in connection with which it finds them, that anthropology deals. Its method is that of biology. Without bias, without assumptions of relative truth or falsity, the anthropologist searches into origins, traces variations, compares and classifies, and relates the several families to one ordinal group. He must be what was said of Dante, "a theologian to whom no dogma is foreign." Unfortunately, this method, whose application to the physical sciences is unchallenged, is, when applied to beliefs, regarded as one of attack, instead of being one of explanation. But this should not deter; and if in analyzing a belief we kill a superstition, this does but show what mortality lay at its core. For error cannot survive dissection. Moreover, as John Morley puts it, "to tamper with veracity is to tamper with the vital force of human progress." Therefore, delivering impartial judgment, the verdict of anthropology upon the whole matter is that the claims of Christian theologians to a special and divine origin of their religion are refuted by the accordant evidence of the latest utterances of a science whose main concern is with the origin, nature, and destiny of man.

The extension of the comparative method to the various products of man's intellectual and spiritual nature is the logical sequence to the adoption of that method throughout every department of the universe. Of course it starts with the assumption of differences in things, else it would be superfluous. But it equally starts with the assumption of resemblances, and in every case it has brought out the fact that the differences are superficial, and that the resemblances are fundamental.

All this bears closely on Huxley's work. The impulse thereto has come largely from the evidence focussed in Man's Place in Nature, evidence of which the material of the writings of his later years is the expansion. The cultivation of intellect and character had always been a favourite theme with him, and the interest was widened when the passing of Mr. Forster's Elementary Education Act in 1870 brought the problem of popular culture to the front. The wave of enthusiasm carried a group of distinguished liberal candidates to the polls, and Huxley was elected a member of the School Board for London. Then, although in not so acute a form as now, the religious difficulty was the sole cause of any serious division, and Huxley's attitude therein puzzled a good many people because he advocated the retention of the Bible in the schools. Those who should have known him better thought that he was (to quote from one of his letters to the writer) "a hypocrite, or simply a fool." "But," he adds, "my meaning was that the mass of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them, nor shut out from the perception of its place in the whole past history of civilised mankind." He lamented, as every thoughtful person must lament, the decay of Bible reading in this generation, while, at the same time, he advocated the more strenuously its detachment from the glosses and theological inferences which do irreparable injury to a literature whose value cannot be overrated.

For Huxley was well read in history, and therefore he would not trust the clergy as interpreters of the Bible. After repeating in the Prologue to his Essays on Controverted Questions what he had said about the book in his article on the School Boards in Critiques and Addresses, he adds, "I laid stress on the necessity of placing such instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief that it would thus gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical contents would come more and more into view."

Subsequent events have justified neither the hope nor the belief. Had Huxley lived to see that all the sectaries, while quarrelling as to the particular dogmas which may be deduced from the Bible, agree in refusing to use it other than as an instrument for the teaching of dogma, he would probably have come to see that the only solution in the interests of the young, is its exclusion from the schools. Never has any collection of writings, whose miscellaneous, unequal, and often disconnected character is obscured by the common title "Bible" which covers them, had such need for deliverance from the so-called "believers" in it. Its value is only to be realized in the degree that theories of its inspiration are abandoned. Then only is it possible to treat it like any other literature of the kind; to discriminate between the coarse and barbaric features which evidence the humanness of its origin, and the loftier features of its later portions which also evidence how it falls into line with other witnesses of man's gradual ethical and spiritual development.

Huxley's breadth of view, his sympathy with every branch of culture, his advocacy of literary in unison with scientific training, fitted him supremely for the work of the School Board, but its demands were too severe on a man never physically strong, and he was forced to resign. However, he was thereby set free for other work, which could be only effectively done by exchanging the arena for the study. The earliest important outcome of that relief was the monograph on Hume, published in 1879, and the latest was the Romanes lecture on Evolution and Ethics, which was delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford on the 18th of May, 1893. Between the two lie a valuable series of papers dealing with the Evolution of Theology and cognate subjects. In all these we have the application of the theory of Evolution to the explanation of the origin of beliefs and of the basis of morals. To quote the saying attributed to Leibnitz, both Spencer and Huxley, and all who follow them, care for "science only because it enables them to speak with authority in philosophy and religion." In a letter to the writer, wherein Huxley refers to his retirement from official life, he says:--

I was so ill that I thought with Hamlet, "the rest is silence." But my wiry constitution has unexpectedly weathered the storm, and I have every reason to believe that with renunciation of the devil and all his works (i. e., public speaking, dining, and being dined, etc.) my faculties may be unimpaired for a good spell yet. And whether my lease is long or short, I mean to devote them to the work I began in the paper on the Evolution of Theology.

That essay was first published in two sections in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, and was the sequel to the eighth chapter of his Hume. The Romanes Lecture supplemented the last chapter of that book. All these are accessible enough to render superfluous any abstract of their contents. But the tribute due to David Hume, who may well-nigh claim place among the few but fit company of Pioneers, warrants reference to his anticipation of accepted theories of the origin of belief in spiritual beings in his Natural History of Religion, published in 1757. He says: "There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.... The _unknown causes_ which continually employ their thought, appearing always in the same aspect, are all apprehended to be of the same kind or species. Nor is it long before we ascribe to them thought, and reason, and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves." In his address to the Sorbonne on The Successive Advances of the Human Mind, delivered in 1750, Turgot expresses the same idea, touching, as John Morley says in his essay on that statesman, "the root of most of the wrong thinking that has been as a manacle to science."

The foregoing, and passages of a like order, are made by Huxley the text of his elaborations of the several stages of theological evolution, the one note of all of which is the continuity of belief in supernatural intervention. But more important than the decay of that belief which is the prelude to decay of belief in deity itself as commonly defined, is the resulting transfer of the foundation of morals, in other words, of motives to conduct, from a theological to a social base. Theology is not morality; indeed, it is, too often, immorality. It is concerned with man's relations to the gods in whom he believes; while morals are concerned with man's relations to his fellows. The one looks heavenward, wondering what dues shall be paid the gods to win their smiles or ward off their frowns. In old Rome _sanctitas_ or holiness, was, according to Cicero, "the knowledge of the rites which had to be performed." These done, the gods were expected to do their part. So in new Rome, when the Catholic has attended mass, his share in the contract is ended. Worship and sacrifice, as mere acts toward supernatural beings, may be consonant with any number of lapses in conduct. Morality, on the other hand, looks earthward, and is prompted to action solely by what is due from a man to his fellow-men, or from his fellow-men to him. Its foundation therefore is not in supernatural beliefs, but in social instincts. All sin is thus resolved into an anti-social act: a wrong done by man to man.

This is not merely readjustment; it is revolution. For it is the rejection of theology with its appeals to human obligation to deity, and to man's hopes of future reward or fears of future punishment; and it is the acceptance of wholly secular motives as incentives to right action. Those motives, having their foundation in the physical, mental, and moral results of our deeds, rest on a stable basis. No longer interlaced with the unstable theological, they neither abide nor perish with it. And one redeeming feature of our time is that the churches are beginning to see this, and to be effected by it. John Morley caustically remarks that "the efforts of the heterodox have taught them to be better Christians than they were a hundred years ago." Certain extremists excepted, they are keeping dogma in the background, and are laying stress on the socialism which it is contended was at the heart of the teaching of Jesus. Wisely, if not very consistently, they are seeking alliance with the liberal movements whose aim is the "abolition of privilege." The liberal theologians, in the face of the varying ethical standards which mark the Old Testament and the New, no longer insist on the absoluteness of moral codes, and so fall into line with the evolutionist in his theory of their relativeness. For society in its advance from lower to higher conceptions of duty, completely reverses its ethics, looking back with horror on that which was once permitted and unquestioned.

It is with this checking of "the ape and tiger," and this fostering of the "angel" in man, that Huxley dealt in his Romanes Lecture. There was much unintelligent, and some wilful, misunderstanding of his argument, else a prominent Catholic biologist would hardly have welcomed it as a possible prelude to Huxley's submission to the Church. Yet the reasoning was clear enough, and in no wise contravened the application of Evolution to morals. Huxley showed that Evolution is both _cosmical_ and _ethical_. _Cosmic Evolution_ has resulted in the universe with its non-living and living contents, and since, dealing with the conditions which obtain on our planet, there is not sufficient elbow-room or food for all the offspring of living things, the result is a furious struggle in which the strong win and transmit their advantages to their descendants. Nature is wholly selfish; the race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong.

But there are limits set to that struggle by man in the substitution, also within limits, of social progress for cosmic progress. In this _Ethical Evolution_ selfishness is so far checked as to permit groups of human beings to live together in amity, recognising certain common rights, which restrain the self-regarding impulses. For, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, "that which is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee" (Med., vi, 54). Huxley aptly likens this counter-process to the action of a gardener in dealing with a piece of waste ground. He stamps out the weeds, and plants fragrant flowers and useful fruits. But he must not relax his efforts, otherwise the weeds will return, and the untended plants will be choked and perish. So in conduct. For the common weal, in which the unit shares, thus blending the selfish and the unselfish motives, men check their natural impulses. The emotions and affections which they share with the lower social animals, only in higher degree, are co-operative, and largely help the development of family, tribal, and national life. But once we let these be weakened, and society becomes a bear-garden. Force being the dominant factor in life, the struggle for existence revives in all its primitive violence, and atavism asserts its power. Therefore, although he do the best that in him lies, man can only set limits to that struggle, for the ethical process is an integral part of the cosmic powers, "just as the 'governor' in a steam-engine is part of the mechanism of the engine." As with society, so with its units: there is no truce in the contest. Dr. Plimmer, an eminent bacteriologist, describes to the writer the action of a kind of yeast upon a species of Daphnia, or water-flea. Metschnikoff observed that these yeast-cells, which enter with the animal's food, penetrate the intestines, and get into the tissues. They are there seized upon by the leukocytes, which gather round the invaders in larger fashion, as if seemingly endowed with consciousness, so marvellous is the strategy. If they win, the Daphnia recovers; if they lose, it dies. "In a similar manner in ourselves certain leukocytes (phagocytes) accumulate at any point of invasion, and pick up the living bacteria," and in the success or failure of their attack lies the fate of man. Which things are fact as well as allegory; and time is on the side of the bacteria. For as our life is but a temporary arrest of the universal movement toward dissolution, so naught in our actions can arrest the destiny of our kind. Huxley thus puts it in the concluding sentences of his Preface--written in July, 1894, one year before his death--to the reissue of Evolution and Ethics:

"That man, as a 'political animal,' is susceptible of a vast amount of improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of his intelligence to the adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt. But, so long as he remains liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as he is compelled to be perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his ends, without and within himself; so long as he is haunted by inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him to acknowledge his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; the prospect of attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there have been many of them. That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organised polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilisation, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself, until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet."

But only those of low ideals would seek in this impermanence of things excuse for inaction; or worse, for self-indulgence. The world will last a very long time yet, and afford scope for battle against the wrongs done by man to man. Even were it and ourselves to perish to-morrow, our duty is clear while the chance of doing it may be ours. Clifford,--dead before his prime, before the rich promise of his genius had its full fruitage,--speaking of the inevitable end of the earth "and all the consciousness of men" reminds us, in his essay on The First and Last Catastrophe, that we are helped in facing the fact "by the words of Spinoza: 'The free man thinks of nothing so little as of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.'" "Our interest," Clifford adds, "lies with so much of the past as may serve to guide our actions in the present, and to intensify our pious allegiance to the fathers who have gone before us and the brethren who are with us; and our interest lies with so much of the future as we may hope will be appreciably affected by our good actions now. Do I seem to say, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?' Far from it; on the contrary I say, 'Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together.'"

Evolution and Ethics was Huxley's last important deliverance, since the completion of his reply to Mr. Balfour's "quaintly entitled" Foundations of Belief was arrested by his death on the 30th of June, 1895.

In looking through the Collected Essays, which represent his non-technical contributions to knowledge, there may be regret that throughout his life circumstances were against his doing any piece of long-sustained work, such as that which, for example, the affluence and patience of Darwin permitted him to do. But until Huxley's later years, and, indeed, through broken health to the end, his work outside official demands had to be done fitfully and piecemeal, or not at all. Notwithstanding this, it has the unity which is inspired by a central idea. The application of the theory of evolution all round imparts a quality of relation to subjects seemingly diverse. And this comes out clearly and strongly in the more orderly arrangement of the material in the new issue of Collected Essays.

These show what an omnivorous reader he was; how well equipped in classics, theology, and general literature, in addition to subjects distinctly his own. He sympathized with every branch of culture. As contrasted with physical science, he said, "Nothing would grieve me more than to see literary training other than a very prominent branch of education." One corner of his library was filled with a strange company of antiquated books of orthodox type; this he called "the condemned cell." When looking at the "strange bedfellows" that slept on the shelves, the writer asked Huxley what author had most influenced a style whose clearness and vigour, nevertheless, seems unborrowed; and he at once named the masculine and pellucid Leviathan of Hobbes. He had the happy faculty of rapidly assimilating what he read; of clearly grasping an opponent's standpoint; and what is a man's salvation nowadays, freedom from that curse of specialism which kills all sense of proportion, and reduces its slave to the level of the machine-hand that spends his life in making the heads of screws. He believed in "scepticism as the highest duty, and in blind faith as the one unpardonable sin." "And," he adds, "it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates holds them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature--whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation--Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification." Therefore he nursed no illusions; would not say that he knew when he did not or could not know, and bidding us follow the evidence whithersoever it leads us, remains the surest-footed guide of our time. Such leadership is his, since he has gone on "from strength to strength." The changes in the attitude of man toward momentous questions which new evidence and the _zeit-geist_ have effected, have been approaches to the position taken by Huxley since he first caught the public ear. His deep religious feeling kept him in sympathetic touch with his fellows. Ever present to him was "that consciousness of the limitation of man, that sense of an open secret which he cannot penetrate, in which lies the essence of all religion." In one of his replies to a prominent exponent of the Comtian philosophy, that "incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry," as he calls it, Huxley protests against the idea that the teaching of science is wholly negative.

I venture, he says, to count it an improbable suggestion that any one who has graduated in all the faculties of human relationships; who has taken his share in all the deep joys and deeper anxieties which cling about them, who has felt the burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has stood alone with his dead before the abyss of the Eternal--has never had a thought beyond negative criticism.

That is the Agnostic position as he defined it; an attitude, not a creed; and if he refused to affirm, he equally refused to deny.

* * * * *

Thus have the Pioneers of Evolution, clear-sighted and sure-footed, led us by ways undreamed-of at the start to a goal undreamed-of by the earliest among them. To have halted on the route when the graver difficulties of the road began would have made the journey futile, and have left their followers in the wilds. Evolution, applied to everything up to man, but stopping at the stage when he appears, would have remained a fascinating study, but would not have become a guiding philosophy of life. It is in the extension of its processes as explanation of all that appertains to mankind that its abiding value consists. That extension was inevitable. The old theologies of civilized races, useful in their day, because answering, however imperfectly, to permanent needs of human nature, no longer suffice. Their dogmas are traced as the lineal descendants of barbaric conceptions; their ritual is becoming an archæological curiosity. They have no answer to the questions propounded by the growing intelligence of our time; neither can they satisfy the emotions which they but feebly discipline. Their place is being slowly, but surely, and more effectively, filled by a theory which, interpreting the "mighty sum of things," substitutes clear conceptions of unbroken order and relation between phenomena, in place of hazy conceptions of intermittent interferences; a theory which gives more than it takes away. For if men are deprived of belief in the pseudo-mysteries coined in a pre-scientific age, their wonder is fed, and their inquiry is stimulated, by the consciousness of the impenetrable mysteries of the Universe.

INDEX

Abdera, 16. Abiogenesis, 216. Abraham, 54. Adam, fall of, 104. ---- stature of, 107. Advent, the Second, 50, 70. Ægean, the, 3. Agassiz, 162. Agrigentum, 13. Air as primary substance, 13. Alexander the Great, 17. Alexandria, conquest of, 77. ---- philosophical schools of, 77. Allegorical method, 75. Allen, Grant, 2, 113, 167. Amazons, river, 136. America, discovery of, 84. Amoeba, the, 224. Anatomy, comparative, 230. ---- human, 90. Anaxagoras, 14. Anaximander, 7, 20. Ancestor-worship, 70. Andromeda, nebula in, 178. Angels, belief in, 69. Animism, 69, 97, 244, 255. Anthropology and belief in the soul, 241. ---- and dogmas of the Fall and the Redemption, 247, 250. ---- and man's place in Evolution, 245. Antioch, 47. Ape and man, brain of, 227. ---- general relation of, 228. Aquinas, Thomas, 20, 75. Arab conquest, 76. ---- philosophy, 79. Arch-fiend, 54. Aristotle, 17-19, 20, 32, 35, 36, 74, 80, 81, 87, 163. Arnold, Matthew, 13, 213. Ascent of Man, Drummond's, 219. Asklepios, 29. Astruc, Dr., 103. Athens, intellectual decay in, 35, 77. ---- persecution in, 14. ---- religious revival in, 11. Atomic theory, 16. Atonement, doctrine of the, and Anthropology, 250. Augurs, 31. Augustine, St., 20, 55, 74. Augustus, Cæsar, 42, 48. Aurelius, Marcus, 51, 259. Averroes, 80. Avicenna, 101.

Bacon, Lord, 93, 108. Bacon, Roger, 82. Bacteria and leukocytes, 260. Bagehot, Mr., 2. Baghdad, 79. Balfour, A. J., 262. Baptism, origin of rite of, 66. Bates, H. W., 134, 136, 162, 167, 208. Beagle, voyage of the, 131. Benn, A. W., 9, 19. Bible, Dictionary of the, 107. Biology, advance in study of, 108. Black magic, 83. Body and mind, mystery of connection between, 231. Bone, resurrection, 90. Bonnet, Charles, 21. "Boundless," the, 7. Breathing, symbolism of, 69. Bruno, Giordano, 89. Buddha, 64. Buffon, place of, in theory of Evolution, 110. ---- submission to the Sorbonne, 104. Burnet, Prof., 5, 7, 16. Burton's Anatomy, 60. Butcher, Prof., 4.

Caesalpino, 91. Cairo, 80. Canon of the Bible, 58, 88. Carpenter, Dr., 150, 233. Carthage, 78. ---- Council of, 58. Casalis, Mr., 1. Catat, Dr., 242. Celtic religion, 70. Chaldæa, 4. Chambers, Robert, 119. Charles Martel, 78. Chosroes, 77, 79. Christianity and Anthropology, 251. ---- anti-social nature of, 50. ---- causes of success of, 48, 56. ---- opposition to inquiry, 40. ---- origin of, 37. ---- pagan elements in, 59-73. ---- philosophic elements in, 57. ---- polytheism of, 69. ---- varying fortunes of, 38. Christians, persecution of, 49. Church Congress and Evolution, 159, 219. Circumnavigation of the globe, 85. Clifford, Prof., 261. Collings, 41. Colophon, 9. Columbus, Christopher, 84. Communion at Hawarden Church, 68. Comtism, 264. Conduct, bases of, 186, 254. Consciousness, evolution of, 187, 224. ---- self-, 187. Conservation of energy, 33, 120, 149, 177. Copernicus, 20, 86. Cordova, 80. Correlation of forces, 189. Cosmic Evolution, 258. Councils, general, 220. Courthope, W. J., 164. Creation, days of, 103, 106. Credulity of the learned, 148. Creeds, 52, 220. Criticism of religions, features of modern, 40. Cronus, myth of, 56. Crooke, Mr., 30. Cross, relics of the, 72. Crown of thorns, 72. Cuvier, 114, 117, 163. ---- and Geoffroy St. Hilaire, 214. Cybele, 29.

Dalton, John, 16, 125. Daphnia, Dr. Plimmer on, 260. Darwin, Charles, 126-134, 157-175. ---- Life and Letters of, 127, 157. ---- religious belief of, 173. ---- Erasmus, 21, 111. Days of creation, 102, 106. De Gama, Vasco, 85. Deluge, 104, 107, 250. Demeter, 29, 67. Democritus, 16, 22, 33. Demons, 55, 75, 87. De Perthes, Boucher, 120, 248. De Rerum Natura, 24. Descartes, 91, 94, 216. Descent into Hell, 88. Descent of Man, 167, 172, 218. Development, law of, 189. Devil, 54, 83. De Vinci, Leonardo, 102. Diagoras, 63. Dictionary of the Bible, 107. Dionysus, 67. Dispersion of the Jews, 56, 77. Dogma and Evolution, 220. Driver, Rev. Canon, 53, 107. Dubois, Dr., 222. Dunér, Professor, 179.

Earth as "element," 13. ---- Greek notions about the, 6, 8. Education and dogma, 253. Egypt, 4, 6, 7. ---- conquest of, 77. Eleatic school, 10. Elviri, Synod of, 62. Embryology, 118, 218. Empedocles, 13, 22, 27. Ephesus, 11. Epictetus, 51. Epicurus, 22, 27. Epigenesis, 21. Ethical Evolution, 259. Etruscan haruspices, 31. Eve, stature of, 107. Evil eye, 69. Evolution and dogma, 220. ---- cosmic, 258. ---- ethical, 258. ---- inclusion of man in, 245. ---- inorganic, 175. ---- organic, 200. Evolution and Ethics, Huxley on, 219, 254.

Fall, doctrine of the, and anthropology, 247. Fire, as primary substance, 12. First Principles, 167, 188. Fiske, Professor, 8. Flint implements, 248. Folk-lore, value of study of, 249. Fontenelle, 2. Fossils, theories about, 104. Frazer, J. G., 66, 220.

Galen, 90. Galileo, discoveries and persecution of, 91. Geology, effect of study of, 100. ---- revival of study of, 100. ---- principles of, 117. Gesner, 91. Gibbon, 57, 58, 72, 219. Gladstone, Mr., 68. Gnosticism, 48. Gods in Rome, 29. Golden Bough, The, 66, 220. Gospels, origin of, 46. Gosse, P. H., 104. Gower, Dr., 155. Granada, 80. Greece, 3. ---- conquest and intellectual decline of, 23. Greek philosophers, Table of, 36. Greeks, early conception of earth by, 6, 8. ---- search of, for the primary substance, 6. Grote, 15.

Haeckel, 115, 164. Hallucinations, 153. Haroun al-Raschid, 79. Hartley, 124. Haruspices, 31. Harvey, William, 21, 93. Hawarden Church, Communion at, 68. Heine's Travel-Pictures, 153. Hellenized Jews, 56, 77. Helmholtz, 125. Henrion, 107. Heraclitus, 11. Herakles, 29. Herodotus, 62. Herschel, Sir William, 95, 177. Hesiod, 10. Hippocampus minor, 227. Hobbes' Leviathan, 60, 263. Holy Communion, barbaric origin of rite of, 66, 68. Homer, 8, 10, 12, 75. Hooker, Sir Joseph, 141, 162. ---- Sir William, 119. Horace, 63, 75. Huggins, Dr. Wm., 178. Humanity and Evolution, 192. Humboldt, 121, 135. Hume, 97, 192, 216, 255. Hutton, 115. Huxley, 94, 157, 159, 201-266.

Indigitamenta, 30. Inductive philosophy, the, 93. Inquisition, the, 89, 91. Instinct, 229. Ionia, 3, 4, 6, 32. Isis, 29, 62.

Jerome, St., 24, 105. Jerusalem, early disciples of Jesus at, 47. ---- fall of, 77. ---- Jesus at, 44. Jesus, summary of life of, 42-46. ---- superstition shared by, 53-56. Jews, Hellenized, or of the Dispersion, 56, 77.

Kant, 94, 175, 200. Kelvin, Lord, 233. Kent's Hole, 248. Khalifs, 76. Kirchoff, 178. Kropotkin, Prince, 231.

Lamarck, 114. Language, 229. La Peyrère, 102. Laplace, 95, 176. Leading Men of Science, Table of, 123-125. Leibnitz, 124, 254. Leo III., 78. L'Etui de Nacre, 45. Leucippus, 16, 23, 33, 36. Leukocytes, 260. Life and Letters, Darwin's, 127, 157, 173. Lightfoot, Dr., 103, 120. Linnaeus, 108. Linnæan Society, famous meeting at, 141, 181. Living and non-living matter, connection between, 34, 216. Locke, 94. Lodge, Prof. Oliver, 147. Love as an "element," 14. Lubbock, Sir John, 168. Lucretius, 17, 23, 24-29, 41, 248. Luther, 87. Lyall, Sir Alfred, 30, 38, 249. Lyell, Sir Charles, 117, 134, 162.

Madonna, 64. Magellan, 85. Maine, Sir Henry, 5. Malay Archipelago, 138. Malpighi, 21. Malthus on Population, 119, 133, 139. Man and Evolution, 97, 143, 218, 227, 236. ---- and ape, brain of, 227. ---- and ape, general structure of, 143. ---- antiquity of, 222. ---- inclusion of, in Evolution, 233. ---- lower animals and, 218, 227. ---- primitive state of, 248. ---- suckling, period of, 8. Manning, Cardinal, 160. Man's Place in Nature, 164, 167, 213, 218, 252. Marcus Aurelius, 51, 259. Martin, R. B., 169. Martyr, Peter, 87. Maskelyne, Mr., 148. Matter, indestructibility of, 33. ---- living and non-living, 34, 217. ---- mystery of, 180, 188, 216, 232. Matthew, Patrick, 118, 165. Maudsley, Dr., 156. Meckel, 118. Messiah, Jewish belief in, 44, 46. Metals, age of, 28, 35, 248. Middleton, Conyers, 60. Miletus, 6. Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, 145, 237. Mithra worship, 42, 50, 71. Mivart, Prof. St. George, 233. Mohammed, 76. Montaigne, 38, 62. Morality, essential nature of, 256. Morals and Evolution, 254. ---- scientific base of, 256. Morley, John, 39, 170, 251, 257. Motion, concept of, 178. ---- indestructibility of, 33. ---- mystery of, 180, 187, 216, 232. Mummius, 23. Munro, Mr., 24. Mysteries, Greek, 49. Mystery of matter, 231. ---- motion, 186, 187, 216, 232. Myth, primitive, features of, 2.

Nebula in Andromeda, 178. Nebular theory, 94, 180. Nero, 48. Nervous system, disorders of the, 153. ---- origin of the, 225. New Testament, canon of, 58, 88. ---- origin of, 51. Nicene Creed, 52, 220. Nous of Anaxagoras, 16. Numbers, in primitive thought, 9. ---- Pythagorean theory of, 9, 36.

Organic Evolution, 200. Origin of species, 142, 168, 211. ---- publication of, 157. ---- reception of, 157, 162. Osborn, Prof., 102, 119. Ovid, 219. Owen, Sir Richard, attitude of, towards Darwin's theory, 162, 214. ---- review of the Origin of Species, 162.

Pagan elements in Christianity, 59-73. Paladino, Eusapia, 148. Palæontology, 218. Palissy, Bernard, 102. Pantheon, Roman, 29. Papacy, origin of the, 58. Paul, St., 47. Pausanias, 13. Pentateuch, 103. Pericles, 14. Persia, intellectual activity in, 79. Perthes, Boucher de, 120, 125, 248. Petrie, Prof. Flinders, 201. Philo, 58. Philosophy, synthetic, 181, 195, 199. Photography in Science, 178. Physical Basis of Life, Huxley on, 215. Pineal gland, theory of soul in, 91. Plato, 5, 52, 212. Polytheism, feature of, 49. ---- in Christianity, 71. Pontius Pilate, 44, 48. Poppaea, Sabina, 48. Preformation theory, 21. Primary substance, 33. ---- search after, 6. Protoplasm, 119. Psychical Research, Society for, 148. Psychology, experimental, 230. ---- Principles of, 187, 189. Ptolemaic System, 20, 88. Punch, 206. Pythagoras, 9. Pythagorean theory of numbers, 9, 36.

Redi, experiments of, 216. Reformation, non-intellectual, 88. ---- character of the, 86. Relics, collection of, 71. ---- worship of, 70. Revelations, condition of, 223. Rhys, Professor, 64. Rodd, Rennell, 29. Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, 67. Rome, bishop of, 58. ---- fire in, 48. ---- gods in, 29. ---- polytheism of, 49. Royal Society, 99.

Sacraments, barbaric origin of, 65-68. Saints, fictitious, 64. Salisbury, Lord, Presidential Address of, 179, 215. Samos, 22, 36. Sanctitas, 256. Saracens, 78. Savages, brain of, 240. Scheiner, Professor, 179. School Boards, 252. Schwann, Theodor, 125. Science, Leading men of, 123-125. Second Coming of Jesus, 50, 70. Sedgwick, 162. Selden, 47, 220. Serapis, 71. Sin, essence of, 257. Sizzi, 92. Smith, Professor Robertson, 250. ---- William (geologist), 118. Social Statics, 184. Society, evolution of, 184, 193. ---- modification of struggle in, 259. Sociology, Principles of, 186, 199. ---- study of, 233. Socrates, 15. Solar spectrum, lines in, 178. Sorbonne, the, 104, 256. Soul, origin of belief in, 241-245. ---- location of, 91. ---- Lucretius on location of, 25. Spain, intellectual advance in, 80. Spectroscope, the, 178. Spencer, Herbert, 31, 118, 121, 162, 175-201, 233, 241, 254. Spinoza, 94. Spiritualism, 145, 156. Spontaneous generation, 20, 74. Sprengel, 119, 125. St. Hilaire, 107, 114. Stagira, 17. Stokes, Sir G. G., 234. Stone, ages of, 28, 35, 248. Strabo, 101. Strife as an "element," 14. Struggle for life, 131, 140, 258. Suarez, Francisco, 222. Synthetic philosophy, 182. ---- abstract of the, 195, 199. ---- first draft of, 199.

Table of Greek Philosophers, 36. ---- of leading men of science, 123-125. Tacitus, 48. Thales, 6, 8, 17. Theology and Evolution, final issue between, 223. Theophrastus, 7, 16. Theosophy, 9. Tozer, Mr., 30. Transubstantiation, origin of belief in, 67. Turgot, 39, 256. Tylor, Dr., 168, 241, 246. Tyndall, Professor, 205, 207, 216.

Usher, Archbishop, 103.

Van Helmont, 20. Vatican Council on Creation, 33. Vesalius, 90. Vestiges of Creation, 119, 135, 209. Virgin Mary, 60. Virgins, Black, 64. Visual sensations, subjective, 154. Von Baer, 118, 125, 189, 194, 200. Von Mohl, 119, 125. Votive offerings, 62.

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 134-157. ---- as biologist, 143. ---- as spiritualist, 145-157. ---- limitation of natural selection to man's physical structure, 144, 235-241. ---- theory of origin of species identical with Darwin's, 140. "Wallace's Line," 139. Water as primary substance, 7. Water-worship, 61, 63. Weismann, 117. Wells, Dr. W. C., 166. Wesley, John, 55, 105. Whewell, Dr., 159. White, Dr., 103. Wilberforce, Bishop, and the Origin of Species, 160. ---- and Huxley, 213. Wilson, Archdeacon, 161, 219. Winifred's Well, St., 63. Witchcraft, belief in, 55. ---- causes of decay of belief in, 98. Worms, Darwin on the Action of, 168.

Xenophanes, 9, 19.

Zahm, Professor, 222. Zeller, 9. Zeno, 10.

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Transcriber's note:

A few punctuation errors have been corrected silently.

The following corrections were made on the page indicated:

10 "Then" changed to "The" (The tendency of that school)

15 "news" changed to "new" (introducing new ones)

36 "Anaximender" changed to "Anaximander" (TABLE)

120 "95" changed to "103" (see p. 103)

124 "Renè" changed to "René" (René Descartes)

191 "Cermonies" changed to "Ceremonies" (Master of the Ceremonies)

239 "genius" changed to "genus" (of the same genus)

254 "Liebnitz" changed to "Leibnitz" (attributed to Leibnitz)

259 "we" added and "we" changed to "be" (once we let these be weakened)

263 "pelluccid" changed to "pellucid" (the masculine and pellucid Leviathan)

271 "Linnean" changed to "Linnæan" in the index (Linnæan Society, famous)

278 "enthusiams" changed to "enthusiasms" (will arouse many enthusiasms).

Otherwise this text has been preserved as in the original, including archaic and inconsistent spelling and hyphenation.