Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/78

68 the one abounding fountain of error and deception. It is not merely to be disciplined and corrected, but it is to be eliminated. It is to be hounded off and shouted down.

It is very clear what all this must end in. The demand made upon us in its literal fullness is impossible and absurd. We can not stand outside ourselves. We can not look with eyes other than our own. We can not think except with the faculties of our own intellectual nature. It is impossible, and, if it were possible, it would be absurd. We are ourselves a part of nature—born in it, and born of it. The analogies which the disciplined intellect sees in external nature are therefore not presumably false, but presumably true, or at the least substantially representative of the truth.

But the new veto on anthropocentric thought, although helpless to expel it, is quite competent to cripple and degrade it. It can not exclude our own faculties; but it may select and favor the lowest, the humblest, the most elementary, the most blunt, the least perceptive. It may silence the highest, the acutest, the most penetrating, the most intuitive, those most in harmony with the highest energies in the world around us. All this the new doctrine may do, and does.

Accordingly, the very first instance given to us of the new philosophy is a striking illustration of its effects. It fixes the attention on mere outward and external things. It seeks for the first and best explanation of organic beings in the mere mechanical effects of their surroundings. The physical forces which act upon them from outside—the water or the air that bathes them—the impacts of ethereal undulations in the form of light, the vibrations of matter in contact with them in the form of heat—these are conceived of as the agencies principally concerned. The analogies suggested are of the rudest kind. Old cannon-balls rust in concentric flakes. Rocks weather into such forms as rocking stones. But the grand illustration is taken from the pebbles of the Chesil beach. These are to introduce us to the true physical conception of the wonderful phenomena of organic life. May not the unity of the vertebrate skeleton, through an immense variety of creatures, be typified by the roundness and smoothness common to the stones rolled along the southern beaches of England from Devonshire to Weymouth? The diversities of those creatures, again, however multitudinous in character, may they not all be pictured as analogous with the varying sizes into which water sifts and sorts the sizes of rolled stones?

But presently we see in another form the work of "natural