Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/40

30 have mastered their terminology. See, for instance, his very futile and pointless criticism of the term "noumenon," as used by Mr. Spencer. Upon almost every page of his book we are made to feel that he has never really breathed the same air as the writers whose names he so continually repeats, and with whose works he professes so minute an acquaintance. He knows them simply as a counsel knows the opposite party in a suit—some one of whom he never heard before he got his instructions from his client or client's attorney, and of whom he does not want to hear any more after the trial is over.

We have tried to do justice to the extreme originality of this writer's methods, but without marked success. The patent laws of most countries, we believe, refuse to grant exclusive rights in connection with mere processes. A man can get a patent for a new kind of spade, but not for a new way of handling an old spade, supposing such were discoverable. Well, all we have been able to perceive in the somewhat heavy volume before us is a process, which may indeed strike the author as original with himself, but which strikes us as exceedingly familiar, and as being within very easy reach of any one whose knowledge and reasoning faculties are in a sufficiently undeveloped state to permit him to use it. It seems to consist in saying, as often as the evolutionist points to anything as exhibiting marks of relationship with anything else: "Oh, no! God made that exactly so, by a special act of creation, for wise purposes of his own." Sometimes Mr. Curtis feels sure he can indicate the purposes, and then of course the argument moves triumphantly on; at other times he acknowledges the purposes to be hidden, and then he falls back, with calm and pious assurance, on the fundamental principle that the Creator, being infinite in wisdom, must have had an infinitely wise end in view in everything that can be traced to his hand.

"All correct reasoning," says our author, "on the subject of man's descent as an animal begins, I presume, with the postulate of an Infinite Creator, having under his power all the elements and forms of matter, organized and unorganized, animate and inanimate." This declaration gives the key-note of the work, and it perhaps also affords a measure of its philosophical value. To all who are conversant with the use of philosophical terms, it will be evident that the author has but an imperfect idea of what is commonly meant by a "postulate." He means by it a principle which he intends to apply to the interpretation of all facts; others mean by it a principle, the non-recognition of which would render all inquiry impossible. The difference is obvious and important. In the ordinary and legitimate sense of the word "postulate," the existence of an infinite Creator can not possibly be a postulate. It may be considered either as a fact or as a theory. If it is a fact, it does not need to be postulated—it is enough to appeal to it; if it is a theory, you can not postulate it without giving it more authority than, as a theory, it ought to have. What we have to do with