Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/167

Rh hold fast alone to that which is verifiable, it is little more than a clever rhetorical flourish.

His argument in a nut-shell is this: There are three kingdoms—the inorganic, the organic, and the spiritual—each atop of the other,and carrying the same law into higher regions. There may be other kingdoms, he says, higher in the scale than the spiritual, or the kingdom of God, of which we as yet know nothing. But of these three we do know, and with these we have to deal. The law of evolution works in each one of these kingdoms up to a certain point, when there is a break and miracle, or an outside power steps in. There is no passage from the inorganic to the organic without a miracle, and no passage from the natural to the spiritual without a miracle. Evolution worked in the nebulous matter till the worlds were formed and ready for life: to introduce that life, God did directly step in by a creative act. This done, evolution went to work again and carried forward the process until the series of sentient beings was crowned by man. Then evolution came to the end of its tether again; to reach the spiritual kingdom the intervention of a miraculous power was again required. A man can no more become a Christian by his own will or act than the inorganic can become the organic. He can not—the thing is simply impossible; and our author brings Scriptural texts to support his position. This leads him into good old-fashioned Calvinism, and good old-fashioned Clavinism he advocates and seeks to clinch with his scientific hammer. Indeed, his aim is to lend the great authority of science to this all but outgrown creed, and he evidently flatters himself that he has established the truth of it beyond all question. The reader soon perceives that the spiritual world of which he is all the while talking is not the spiritual world of the rest of mankind—the world of spirit as opposed to that of matter, the world of mind and consciousness of which all men are more or less partakers by virtue of their humanity—but the spiritual world as interpreted by a certain Christian sect, a very limited and a very recent affair, of which the mass of mankind have never even heard, and in which the sages and prophets of antiquity have no part nor lot. The curious and astonishing thing about the argument is, not the bringing forward and the insisting upon this kind of a spiritual world, for theology has long ago made us familiar with this claim, but the bringing of it forward in the name of science and substituting it for the spiritual world which science really recognizes. In following his argument one constantly feels the ground disappearing beneath him, or before him. His spiritual kingdom does not belong to the same order of fact as the other two: it is not a link, or a step in a natural series, but a domain by itself entirely apart from human reason or experience. In clapping it on top of the physical universe in the way it has been done here, and claiming that its position there is logical or scientific, is to do violence to common sense. Its position there is forced and arbitrary.