Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/606

588 her authority to prove and Philosophy her power to prophesy." This has a most magisterial and academic sound; but oh! will somebody please to say what it means? The oracles of old were often of doubtful import; the trouble with them was that they admitted of too many interpretations. But the trouble with the oracle before us is that, to our finite comprehension, it does not admit of any interpretation. How can induction be applied to a process? Induction is itself a process. Again, how can the application of induction to a process (admitting the thing possible) constitute the reversal of an order? Should the process be applied to the induction instead? What, we fancy, Dr. Porter meant to say was, that a certain process, which he tries to describe, reverses the order and denies the criteria, etc., not that the application of induction to the process has that result. But who should be able to say what he means in clear and unmistakable language if not an ex-President of Yale? The fact is, however, to return to the main question, that the criteria of science are not denied, nor is "Philosophy" robbed of any power she ever had to prophesy, by the hypothesis under consideration, which is constructed, as we have tried to show, strictly in accordance with established analogies. There are just two courses open to us: one is to assume, with each advance in the complexity of phenomena, the introduction of some new force wholly unlike and unconnected with those manifested in simpler phenomena; the other is to assume that all force is one, and that it is merely the progressive compounding of the simplest relations that yields the successively higher functions and products. Men of science in general incline to the second alternative rather than to the first. "In spite of our cautions," says Dr. Porter, "evolution will take another step upward, even though it plant its ladder in the clouds and lean it against the sky." How are we to explain such daring perversity on the part of "evolution"? Could it be that Dr. Porter's cautions are not understood? There are phrases and sentences in the pages before us which really suggest an excuse for evolution on this score. What, for example, does this mean: "The unfeigned gratitude in the presence of others, or their displeasure, is soon fixed in the brain reactions"? If we thought the context would throw any light on this remarkable utterance we would quote a certain amount of it; but we have carefully scrutinized it ourselves without getting any help. Dr. Porter is here assailing the evolutionary view of ethics, but that he adequately understands it is not very evident, in spite of the profuse use he makes of technical phrases. We find no reference in his argument to the development of social morality through domestic—to the origination of morality, according to Herbert Spencer, who is perhaps as authoritative an exponent of evolution as could be named, through the care for progeny. If Dr. Porter had really wished to do justice to this part of his subject, he should certainly have taken full account of the line of argument followed out in the "Data of Ethics."