Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/761

Rh present meeting. But, in order to illustrate this subject of method more fully, I will refer to Darwin, whose name has become synonymous with progressive development and natural selection, which we had thought had died out with Lamarck fifty years ago. In Darwin we have one of those philosophers whose great knowledge of animal and vegetable life is only transcended by his imagination. In fact, he is to be regarded more as a metaphysician with a highly-wrought imagination than as a scientist, although a man having a most wonderful knowledge of the facts of natural history. In England and America we find scientific men of the profoundest intellects differing completely in regard to his logic, analogies, and deductions; and in Germany and France the same thing—in the former of these countries some speculators saying that "his theory is our starting-point," and in France many of her best scientific men not ranking the labors of Darwin with those of pure science. Darwin takes up the law of life, and runs it into progressive development. In doing this, he seems to me to increase the embarrassment which surrounds us on looking into the mysteries of creation. He is not satisfied to leave the laws of life where he finds them, or to pursue their study by logical and inductive reasoning. His method of reasoning will not allow him to remain at rest; he must be moving onward in his unification of the universe. He started with the lower order of animals, and brought them through their various stages of progressive development until he supposed he had touched the confines of man; he then seems to have recoiled, and hesitated to pass the boundary which separated man from the lower order of animals; but he saw that all his previous logic was bad if he stopped there, so man was made from the ape (with which no one can find fault, if the descent be legitimate). This stubborn logic pushes him still further, and he must find some connecting link between that most remarkable property of the human face called expression; so his ingenuity has given us a very curious and readable treatise on that subject. Yet still another step must be taken in this linking together man and the lower order of animals; it is in connection with language; and before long it is not unreasonable to expect another production from that most wonderful and ingenious intellect on the connection between the language of man and the brute creation.

Let us see for a moment what this reasoning from analogy would lead us to. The chemist has as much right to revel in the imaginary formation of sodium from potassium, or iodine and bromine from chlorine, by a process of development, and eall it science, as for the naturalist to revel in many of his wild speculations, or for the physicist who studies the stellar space to imagine it permeated by mind as well as light—mind such as has formed the poet, the statesman, or the philosopher. Yet any chemist who would quit his method of investigation, of marking every foot of his advance by some indelible imprint, and go back to the speculations of Albertus Magnus, Roger