Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/88

80 master of them that know"; and will borrow from the other twin luminary of the mediæval Church, St. Augustine, that most apt of all mottoes for a really "Catholic" philosopher, "The Christian claims as his Master's own possession every broken fragment of truth, wherever it may be found." In the firm conviction, then, that in Mr. Spencer's works much truth—not in detached fragments merely, but in large, coherent masses—is to be found, the present writer hopes to show how little there is to repudiate, how much to accept and to be sincerely grateful for, in his masterly speculations:

1. First of all, Mr. Spencer led us in his interesting article to take a retrospective view of religion, in its origin and history. Naturally, he does not approach the question in the old-fashioned way. His purpose is not dogmatic, but analytic. That lovely Haggada, therefore, or religious story whereby, for babes and philosophers alike, the wonderful genius which constructed the Jewish Scriptures has projected, once for all, upon a plane surface (as it were) a picture of the origin of all things—this our man of science properly passes by; and he proceeds to inquire how precisely the beginnings of things, and especially of religion, may be conceived. And since, in these days, we have all of us "evolution" upon the brain, it was not to be expected that any other line of thought should be attempted. Indeed, it may be fairly conceded that, amid our modern scientific environment, no other method of inquiry is just at present possible. We belong to our own age. And while other ages have taken grand truths en bloc and have deftly hammered them out into finer shapes for practical use, the special delight and the crowning glory of our own age consist rather in a power of tracking things backward. Hence a hundred books of (so-called) "origins" issue annually from the press. Of course, no origin is ever really described, simply because there is no such thing in nature as "an origin." If there were, at that point all hunt upon the traces of evolution would abruptly come to an end; whereas, by the usual scientific hypothesis, evolution knows neither beginning nor end. By "origins," therefore, can only be meant arbitrary points a little way back, marked (as children or jockeys set up a starting-post) for commencing the inquiry. Indeed, it is very easy to imagine some imperturbable savage—say, a Zooloo of Natal or an English school-boy—asking the most reprehensible questions as to what happened before the "origin" began. Such a critic would be sure to express a languid wonder, for instance, as to how the primeval star-mist got there; or he would casually inquire whence the antediluvian thunder-bolt, which introduced vegetable life upon this globe, procured its vegetation; or he would ask why Mr. Spencer's aboriginal divine, roused from his post-prandial nightmare, should have selected a "ghost," out of the confused kaleidoscope of his dreams, as the recipient of divine honors. Nay, as was long ago suggested by a much