Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/482

466 combinations in endless series. There was groaning enough to be sure, by the way, but who can tell us, as a sober fact, that this groaning was an expression of Nature's effort to produce man, or that Nature is capable of any "effort," as we understand the word? Let us not mix up our poetry with our science. If we wish to think of Nature as groaning and travailing, we are at liberty to do so; but let us remember that in indulging such a conception we are poetizing, not adhering to scientific facts. "We are not dealing," says our author, "with vague general notions of development, but with the scientific Darwinian theory." All right, belay! Keep the sails just in that trim, and we shall get to some port of scientific truth, provided always the strict Darwinian theory is itself based on truth. As far as I am aware, Darwin himself had not caught sight, up to the time of his death, of any groaning and travailing of Nature over the work of producing the human soul.

There are a great many phrases and suggestions throughout the volume before us, besides those already noted, which might be quoted as showing the intention of the writer to make a kind of' Darwinian philosophy à l'usage des families. My space, however, is so nearly exhausted that I must pass over all but one of these. On page 117 we read that "the greatest philosopher of modern times, the master and teacher of all who shall study the process of evolution for many a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is not the product of a collocation of material particles, but is, in the deepest sense, a divine effluence." This I do not hesitate to say is a misrepresentation, involuntary, no doubt, of Mr, Spencer's position. If there is any meaning in language, it makes Mr. Spencer ascribe a special divinity to mind. Mr. Spencer, however, does nothing of the kind; he holds that there is one unknowable, unconditioned being, and that this manifests itself in the two conditioned forms of mind and matter. The material particles, therefore, can claim, according to his system of thought, just as much divinity of origin as the mind or soul itself. The word "divine," moreover, is not a word to the use of which Mr. Spencer is prone, and I could not readily turn to any passage in which he employs it to express any idea of his own. He speaks in his recent articles of "an Infinite and Eternal Energy"; but of the mind, in particular, as "a divine effluence," he does not speak. To say, therefore, so positively that Mr. Spencer regards the mind as "in the deepest sense a divine effluence," and that in distinction to the body, is not fair, to say the least, to the distinguished philosopher to the exposition of whose views Mr. Fiske has devoted his own most serious labors.

The conclusion of the whole matter appears to be this, that there is nothing to be gained by trying to read old theology into new science. It may be, as Mr, Fiske affirms, that the foundations of Christian theology have not been shaken—no one needs to be dogmatic on that point—but, as theology is a matter of revelation and science a matter