Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/481

Rh creative activity which is manifested in the physical universe." But really from the scientific stand-point we are not much concerned with what things can be made to seem; we are concerned with what they can be proved to be. Opinion can not take the place of knowledge, nor yet of belief; and, in regard to all such questions, only knowledge and belief are of any avail. Prove to us that such and such things are so: well and good—our minds yield to evidence. Persuade us that they have been supernaturally revealed: well and good also—our minds take the desired set. But give us only probable opinions, the product of a kind of pseudo-scientific casuistry, and you do nothing for us at all, except perhaps diminish in some degree our sense for truth and reality.

The word "seem," above emphasized, may be said to furnish the key-note of the whole of what may be called the apologetic element in the work before us. The first Mr. Fiske tells us what things are, and how they have come to be what they are. The second tells us what they seem like to those who wish to think that the foundations of Christian theology have not been disturbed either by the Copernican astronomy or the Darwinian theory of the origin of species. The weakness of this kind of thing is that it may be worked in any direction and in any interest. Say what you want things to seem like, and they can easily be made to assume the desired complexion. Take an example. After animals have been devouring one another and starving one another out of existence for long ages, there appears an animal who assumes a predominance which he never afterward loses, and who goes on increasing his power and improving his position from century to century. Well, if one wishes to believe that the object toward which all this inter-mastication and inter-starvation of the myriad tribes of earth and air and sky was tending was the production of man, himself for long ages one of the most hideous of animals, there is no obstacle in the way except the complete lack of evidence in a positive sense plus the fact that the inter-mastication and inter-starvation are still going on now that man has come. If any one chooses to describe natural selection as a "simple and wasteful process," and then to say that it is "a slow and subtile" one, there is no obstacle in the way except the contrast which common sense establishes between simplicity and subtilty. If any one chooses to say that "the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in order to bring forth that last consummate specimen of God's handiwork, the human soul," let him; for the phrase, if not scientific, is at least apostolic. Under the régime of "seems," a great deal can be done that is quite impossible under the unaccommodating rule of "is."

Take, for a moment, this expression of the creation "groaning and travailing together." What idea does it convey to which science gives the faintest confirmation? So far as we have any acquaintance with the facts, they are better expressed by the Lucretian idea of endless