Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/74

64 catch the accents of confession saying: "We have been shutting our eyes to the deepest truth, keeping them open only to others which were comparatively superficial. We have been trying to conceal this by the invention of misleading phrases—full of loose analogies, of vague and deceptive generalities."

Most unfortunately, however, the special peculiarity of Mr. Spencer's introspection appears to be that it is the lower intellectual faculties which are calling the higher to account. The merit of Darwin's phrase lay in its elasticity—in its large elements of metaphor taken from the phenomena of mind. Mr. Spencer's phrase had been carefully framed, he tells us, to get rid of these. His great endeavor was to employ in the interpretation of Nature only those faculties which see material things and the physical forces. Those other faculties which see the adjustments of these to purpose—to the building up of structures yet being imperfect, and to the discharge of functions yet lying in the future—it was his desire to exclude or silence. This was his aim, but he now sees that he has failed. In spite of him the higher intellectual perceptions have claimed admittance, and have actually entered. He now calls on the humbler faculties to challenge this intrusion, and to assert, their exclusive right to occupy the field. The "survival of the fittest" had been constructed to be their fortress. But the very stones of which it is built—the very words by which the structure is composed—are themselves permeated with the insidious elements which they were intended to resist. The "survival of the fittest" is a mere redoubt open at the back, or a fort which can be entered at all points from an access underground. And so, like a skillful general, Mr. Spencer has ordered a complete evacuation of the works.

But in giving up this famous phrase Mr. Spencer does not give up his purpose—which, indeed, is one of the main purposes of his philosophy—namely, to build up sentences and wordy structures which shall eliminate, as far as it is possible to do so, all those aspects of natural phenomena which are human, that is to say, those aspects which reflect at all an intellectual order analogous with or related to our own. "I have elaborated this criticism," he says, "with the intention of emphasizing the need for studying the changes which have gone on, and are ever going on, in organic bodies from an exclusively physical point of view." And so, new formulæ are constructed to explain, and to illustrate how this is to be done. "Survival" suggesting the "human view" of life and death, must be dismissed. How, then, are they to be described? They are "certain sets of phenomena." Their true physical character is "simply groups of