Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/427

Rh for David and his pebbles, but whose strutting and boasting one of those pebbles brought to a sudden end. The duke is not a man of huge physical stature—quite the reverse people say who have seen him; but he is armed in a panoply of multifarious knowledge, he is practiced in the use of controversial weapons, and he has the truculent tone befitting one who constitutes himself the champion of reactionary ideas, and who hopes to make bluster do to a large extent the work of argument. After assailing Prof. Huxley, and with him nearly the whole body of modern men of science, in the geological field at least, on the absurd ground that they had conspired to smother a certain new theory of the origin of coral-reefs, simply because it differed from the one promulgated by Darwin, he turns his attention to Mr. Herbert Spencer, whom he represents as having made, in his "Factors of Organic Evolution," a "great confession" as to the inadequacy of the Darwinian view of the origin of species, and whom he further charges with a persistent effort to degrade philosophy to the lowest possible level. Upon both points the Philistine champion is simply as unjust to Mr. Spencer as it is possible for him to be, and this we propose to briefly show. We invite our readers, however, to turn to the pages of "The Popular Science Monthly" for verification of what we have here to say; for at different times we have published all the more important parts of the controversies now in question, including the Duke of Argyll's article, "A Great Confession," in our number for May, and Mr. Spencer's "Counter Criticism" in that for June.

To make "a great confession" must mean—if it means anything—to acknowledge some serious error on one's own part. To assert the deficiencies of another man's theories is not to make a great confession or any confession. Now, Mr. Spencer's work on "The Factors of Organic Evolution," far from being a confession of error on his own part, was an attempt to fix attention upon a view of his own which he holds now, as he has done for many years, to be of much importance as a complement to the Darwinian doctrine of the origin of species. If some one who had strongly asserted the all-sufficiency of the principle of natural selection, independently of the action of the principle contended for by Mr. Spencer, that, namely, of the inheritance of functionally produced modifications of structure, had come round to Mr. Spencer's view and published a treatise similar in scope and object to his on "The Factors of Organic Evolution," that might have been called a confession. Whether it would have been a "great" one or not would have depended on the writer's rank in the world of thought and the extent to which his previous views had affected scientific opinion generally. In Mr. Spencer's case there was no "confession" at all: on the contrary, there was the reaffirmation of a special view of his own, and a re-enforcement of it by additional arguments.

Had our Scotch Goliath admitted the force of Mr. Spencer's arguments, in so far as they tend to show the insufficiency of the principle of natural selection, pure and simple, to account for the origin of species, it might have been possible to explain his calling Mr. Spencer's recent work "a great confession" by assuming that, in his polemical haste and fury, he saw nothing in "The Factors of Organic Evolution" save a criticism—and a powerful one—on the doctrine of natural selection by the most distinguished of contemporary evolutionists. But, far from this being the case, the champion will not admit that there is any force in Mr. Spencer's arguments, but likens them to "some bit of Bumbledom setting up for Home Rule, some parochial vestry claiming independence of a universal empire." Where, then, does he find the "great confession"? How can arguments to which all force