Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/483

Rh of observation, it is well to keep the two as separate as possible. The method of science is a gradual method: little by little, we widen the circle of our knowledge; little by little, we improve our hypotheses. Theology makes from the first the most comprehensive statements, and offers solutions of the profoundest problems. To apply, therefore, the dicta or the general conceptions of theology to the province of science is to run much risk of injuring the work of science by the forcing of premature conclusions; admitting that theology has nothing to teach that is positively erroneous. That loyalty to truth so fittingly referred to by our author requires us to content ourselves with such conclusions as we can reach by lawful and appropriate methods. If we see a law of natural selection at work, let us try to get as clear an understanding as possible of the manner of its working; but let us be very careful how we personify it, and how we impute to our personification feelings and purposes which correspond with nothing in the facts as we know them. Nothing could be more opposed to the human idea of "work" than the process of natural selection as described by our author himself, yet he constantly speaks of the "work" of natural selection. He tells us that "in the desperate struggle for existence no peculiarity has been too insignificant for natural selection to seize and enhance"; just as if natural selection were some vigilant intelligence watching for opportunities to advance its designs. The same fact which is thus expressed in, as I think, misleadingly metaphorical language could have been expressed in honest prose by saying that "in the desperate struggle for existence no peculiarity was too insignificant to contribute to survival or destruction as the case might be." There we have the fact without any illegitimate implications; and it is thus, as it strikes me, that scientific facts should be described. Species were formed, if the theory of natural selection is sound, in very much the same way in which the corners are ground off bowlders carried down by glaciers or swept away by torrents. Whatever projections happen to be in the way are knocked off; finally, the stone is reduced to a shape in which it is comparatively safe from further injury by friction. So with species. Darwin has discovered no law in nature by which good qualities (as such) are produced; he has simply discovered a law by which all kinds of qualities (differentiations), good, bad, and indifferent, are produced, and by which the bad ones (bad, i. e., in relation to the environment) are knocked off, like so many projecting angles, by the destruction of the individuals manifesting them. Mr. Fiske tells us that, for a Ions: time past, so far as man is concerned, natural selection has been unable by itself to "rectify any particular unfitness." It never could rectify unfitness at any time; as Mr. Fiske tells us, on the very next page, "it always works by death." We might compare it to a physician who went about "rectifying" diseases by cutting the throats of his patients. Such drastic surgery might doubtless improve the