Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/219

 20S H. SIDGWICK : fleet of meteors : they must therefore have come into being on the planet : but how ? ' Special Creation ' was a popular answer; but, scientifically considered, special creation was a purely negative notion : it simply denied a causal relation between the novel fact, the newly existing species, and all antecedent cosmical facts : and no philosopher could accept such a denial, at least without evidence which can hardly be conceived and certainly could not be produced. But if the new organism was not, physically speaking, uncaused, it must be causally related either to pre-existing inorganic matter, or to other organic life : these were the only two alternatives, and of the two the latter was indefinitely more probable even before we had any evidence from which we could infer the particular nature of this causal connexion. Hence the new history of organic life which the Darwinian theory gave us, so far from invalidating anything that we had before taken for positive knowledge of living beings, did not even meet, in philosophically trained minds, with any negative prepossessions that had to be overthrown. It may be thought, however, that even granting what I have just urged to be true of the study of organic life gene- rally it cannot be true of the living being that interests us more than all the rest, of man. Surely, it may be said, if we admit that man has been gradually developed out of an ascidian, or other low organism, the old conception of a dual nature of man, a mysterious combination of spirit and body, has to be given up : materialism clearly wins in its old con- flict with spiritualism. I know that this is a popular inference from the Darwinian theory ; but I cannot see that it has any philosophical basis. However completely we accept the theory, all the really philosophical obstacles in the way of a purely materialistic view of man appear to me co remain unchanged. It remains true, as Mr. Spencer says and the statement is perhaps more impressive as coming from him than if made by a more idealistic philosopher it remains true that psychical facts, as known to us by " sub- jective observation and analysis " have no " perceptible or conceivable community of nature " with physical facts, ascer- tained by objective observation and analysis : it remains true that as the same writer says " of the two it seems easier to translate so-called matter into so-called spirit, than to translate so-called spirit into so-called matter (which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible) "- 1 Still, it may be replied, even granting the untenability of 1 Princ. of Psychology, 41, 63.