Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/608

590 tyranny in government, uncertainty in science, with a denial of immortality and a disbelief in the personality of man and of God." Here we distinctly join issue. Evolution, as taught by Herbert Spencer, does nothing to weaken the fundamental distinction between subject and object, between mind and matter. If Spencer teaches that both these aspects of existence may, or rather must, find their union and identification in the Unknowable Cause, he does no more and no less than the Christian, who believes that God is the author both of the visible world and of the human spirit. Evolution gives material laws for human thought, only in so far as it shows the dependence of each higher plane of life on those below it; but, inasmuch as it also shows the reaction of the higher on the lower, it does as much for the establishment of liberty as for the demonstration of necessity. As to involving caprice in morality, that is precisely what it does not do, but what theological systems, referring the criterion of right and wrong to a personal will, always have done and always will do. The proof is simple and conclusive. Wherever morality has disengaged itself from theology, there it has shown a tendency to develop along the same lines. Wherever it has been complicated with theology, there it has always been more or less incalculable and capricious; we may add, more or less perverted and debased. As to tyranny in government the thing is almost too preposterous to discus—s every child knows that the days when evolution would have been treated as a damnable heresy, to be extirpated by fire and sword, and when a spiritual philosophy was supreme, were precisely the days of the most odious political tyranny; and that to-day, step by step with the advance of the philosophy Dr. Porter so much detests, political administration is becoming milder and more equitable. "Uncertainty in science"—what are the proofs of it? Was there ever a time when science was surer in its methods, or more fruitful in its results, than it is to-day? What did the spiritualistic philosophies of the past ever do for science except to embarrass it with arbitrary hypotheses, and to stand in the way of the recognition of the natural causes of phenomena? Did it help the understanding of disease to explain it as a chastisement for sin? Was the old doctrine of demoniac possession—so strongly countenanced, unfortunately, in the New Testament an aid toward the scientific treatment of insanity? Did the general belief in ghosts and devils help to rationalize men's thoughts? We think that answers should be given these questions before we are asked to accept the statement that the doctrine of evolution will lead to "uncertainty in science." The fact is, that the hold which evolution has to-day upon the scientific world is due principally, as Dr. Dallinger observes, to its proved utility in a great many different fields of scientific investigation. The man of science, we may be sure, will not be slow to discard it, when he finds it beginning to lead him astray and vitiate his scientific labors.