Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/77

Rh only, who had at least no dogma on this subject to bind him—it is Mr. Spencer himself who continually breaks down in the attempt, far more completely than he now admits he failed in the "survival of the fittest" The human element involved or suggested in the idea of fitness is nothing to the humanity, or "anthropocentricity," of the expressions into which he slips, perhaps unawares, when he is face to face with those requisites of language which arise out of the facts of observation, and out of the necessities of thought. Thus in the midst of an elaborate attempt to explain in purely chemical and physical aspects the composition and attributes of protein, or protoplasm—assumed to be the fundamental substance of all organisms—he breaks out into the following sentence, charged with teleological phraseology: "So that while the composite atoms of which organic tissues are built up possess that low molecular mobility fitting them for plastic purposes, it results from the extreme molecular mobilities of their constituents, that the waste products of vital activity escape as fast as they are formed." Now, what is the value of sentences such as this? As an explanation, or anything approaching to an explanation, of the wondrous alchemies of organic life, and especially of the digestive processes—of the appropriation, assimilation, and elimination of external matter—this sentence is poor and thin indeed. But whatever strength it has is entirely due to its recognition of the fact that not only the organism as a whole, but the very materials of which it is "built up," are all essentially adaptations which are in the nature of "purposes," being indeed contrivances of the most complicated kinds for the discharge of functions of a very special character.

What, then, is the great reform which these new papers are intended to effect in our conception of the factors in organic evolution? The popular and accepted idea of them has been largely founded on the language of Darwin and of Mr. Spencer himself. But that language has been deceptive. The needed reform consists in the more complete expulsion of every element that is "anthropocentric." In order to interpret Nature we must stand outside ourselves. The eye with which we look upon her phenomena must be cut off, as it were, from the brain behind it. The correspondences which we see, or think we see, between the system of things outside of us and the system of things inside of us, which is the structure of our own intelligence, are to be discarded. This is the luminous conception of the new philosophy. Science has hitherto been conceived to be the reduction of natural phenomena to an intelligible order. But the reformed idea is now to be that our own intelligence is