Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/71

Rh Whatever other value may attach, to an attempt so ambitious, it is at least attended with this advantage, that it leads Mr. Herbert Spencer to follow up the path of "further consideration" into the phrases and formulæ of the Darwinian hypothesis. And he does so with memorable results. What he himself always aims at is to obliterate the separating lines between the organic and the inorganic, and to reduce all the phenomena of life to the terms of such purely physical agencies as the mechanical forces, or as light, heat, and chemical affinity, etc. In this quest he finds the Darwinian phrases in his way. Accordingly, although himself the author and inventor of the most popular among them, he turns upon them a fire of most destructive criticism. He allows them to be, or to have been, "convenient and indeed needful" in the conduct of discussion, but he condemns them as "liable to mislead us by veiling the actual agencies" in organic evolution. That very objection which has always been made against all phrases involving the idea of creation—that they are metaphorical—is now unsparingly applied to Darwin's own phrase "natural selection." Its "implications" are pronounced to be "misleading." The analogies it points at are indeed definite enough, but unfortunately the "definiteness is of a wrong kind." "The tacitly implied 'nature' which selects, is not an embodied agency analogous to the man who selects artificially." This cuts down to the very root of the famous formula, and to that very element in it which has most widely commended it to popular recognition and acceptance. But this is not all. Mr. Herbert Spencer goes, if possible, still deeper down, and digs up the last vestige of foundation for the vast but rambling edifice which has been erected on a phrase. The special boast of its worshipers has always been that it represented and embodied that great reform which removed the processes of organic evolution once and forever from the dominion of deceptive metaphor, and founded them for the first time on true physical causation. But now Mr. Herbert Spencer will have none of this. The whole of this pretension goes by the board. He pronounces upon it this emphatic condemnation: "The words natural selection do not express a cause in the physical sense." It is a mere "convenient figure of speech." But even this is not enough to satisfy Mr. Spencer in his destructive criticism. He goes himself into the confessional. He had done what he could to amend Darwin's phrase. He had "sought to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms," and in this search he was led to "survival