Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/81

Rh But he adds that "the impossibility of separating them compels us to disregard the distinction between them." This is a most lame excuse for the careless—and still worse excuse for the studied—use of ambiguous language which confounds the deepest distinctions in nature. It can not be admitted. All reasonings on nature would be hopeless unless we could separate in thought many things which are always conjoined in action; and this excuse is all the more to be rejected when the alleged impossibility of separation is used to cover an almost exclusive stress upon that one of the two kinds of action which is confessedly by far the feeblest, and of least account in the resulting work.

It seems to me, further, that there is another fatal fault in this attempt of Mr. Spencer to reform the language, and clear up the ideas of biological science. Besides the method of habitually using words so abstract as to be of necessity ambiguous—besides the further method of habitually expelling from definite words the only senses which give them value—Mr. Spencer often resorts, and does so conspicuously in this paper, to the scholastic plan of laying down purely verbal propositions and then arguing deductively from them as if they represented axiomatic truth. By the schoolmen this method was often legitimately applied to subjects which in their own nature admitted of its use, because those subjects were not physical but purely moral or religious, and in which consequently much depended on the clear expression of admitted principles of abstract truth. I will not venture to say that such verbal propositions embodying abstract ideas have absolutely no place in physical science. We know as a matter of fact that they have led some great men to the first conception of a good many physical truths; and it is a curious fact that Dr. Joule, who in our own day has been the first to establish the idea of the doctrine of the conservation of energy by proving through rigorous experiment the mechanical equivalent of heat, has said that "we might reason a priori that the absolute destruction of living force can not possibly take place because it is manifestly absurd to suppose that the powers with which God has endowed matter can be destroyed, any more than they can be created, by man's agency."

Believing as I do in the inseparable unity which binds us to all the verities of nature, I should be the last to proscribe the careful use of our own abstract conceptions. But it is quite certain and is now universally admitted that the methods of Thomas Aquinas in his "Summa" are full of danger when they