Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/428

414 is denied be twisted into a "confession" damaging to any scientific doctrine whatsoever?

The only "confession" Mr. Spencer makes is one which he would have made at any time during the last twenty years, and that is to the effect that his phrase, "the survival of the fittest," is susceptible of being understood in a wrong sense, if not to the same extent, at least in the same general way, as Mr. Darwin's phrase, "natural selection." This confession, however, his Grace of Argyll does not gloat over. It is at this point that he accuses Mr. Spencer of trying to rob philosophy of all dignifying elements. Mr. Spencer feels that to use language asserting or implying conscious purpose or direction when there is no evidence of anything of the kind beyond the vaguest analogy, is undesirable, and, if needlessly done, wrong. His Grace holds, on the contrary, that any suggestion of design which we discover in Nature should be treasured up and made the most of for purposes of edification. "There are," he says, "as it were, a thousand retinæ (in our brains), each set to receive its own special impressions from the external world. They are all needed, but they are not all of equal dignity. Some catch the lesser and others catch the higher lights of Nature; some reflect mere numerical order or mechanical arrangement, while others are occupied with the causes and the reasons or purposes of these." This is all very nice, but a cautious person will remember that when we ascend to "causes and purposes and reasons" we do so by virtue of a faculty totally different from mere perception—a faculty of the highest possible value when its operations can be checked and its conclusions verified, but of very doubtful value when it expatiates in regions where check and verification are impossible. A hypothetical retina or facet in the brain might conceivably reflect facts or phenomena of an external order; but how another similar mirror in that organ could "reflect" a subjective explanation of the same facts we fail to understand. We fear there is no retina or facet in our brain that can help us in this particular difficulty. The theory of design in Nature, the duke tells us, is "a higher intellectual perception." From our point of view it is not a perception of any kind; it is a synthetical judgment, as fully liable to error as any other synthetical judgment, and one that labors under the special disability of being incapable of verification.

The fact is, that it is not Mr. Spencer who degrades philosophy; it is those who seek to impose their own petty conceptions upon a universe that must ever transcend human thought. Mr. Spencer does not pretend to be able to think the thoughts of God. Men have pretended and claimed to do this in past times—to know the why and wherefore of the Divine actions both in Nature and in human history. But Mr. Spencer has advanced far enough to see that to represent the ultimate power in Nature as having acted thus and thus because, to our apprehension, such a mode of action might plausibly explain the facts, is at once foolish and irreverent. The Duke of Argyll professes to know that a certain uncouth animal living in Madagascar was fitted by the Deity with ears, teeth, a probe-like finger, and a peculiar claw, all for the purpose of enabling it to feed on the larvae concealed in certain trees. Mr. Spencer only professes to know that an animal of this form does live on larvae, but he does not say that he has discovered in the construction and habits of the creature a revelation of Divine purpose. He refrains from such a judgment, both from a sense of the inadequacy of human faculties for discovering purposes higher than human, and because he knows by actual experience that an appearance of order and purpose is often the necessary result of purely mechanical causes. Witness, as Mr. Spencer says, the arrangement of the pebbles on Chesil beach. Mr. Spencer