Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/82

72 are used in physical investigation. Yet as regards at least the tone of dogma and authority, and also as regards the method of reasoning, we have from Mr. Spencer in this paper the following wonderful specimen of scholastic teaching on the profoundest questions of organic structure: "At first protoplasm could have no proclivities to one or other arrangement of parts; unless indeed a purely mechanical proclivity toward a spherical form when suspended in a liquid. At the outset it must have been passive. In respect of its passivity, primitive organic matter must have been like inorganic matter. No such thing as spontaneous variation could have occurred in it; for variation implies some habitual course of change from which it is a divergence, and is therefore excluded where there is no habitual course of change." What possible knowledge can Mr. Spencer possess of "primitive organic matter"? What possible grounds can he have for assertions as to what it must have been, and what it must have done? Surely this is scholasticism with a vengeance; its words, its assumptions, and its claims of logical necessity being all equally hazy, inconclusive, and absolutely antagonistic to the spirit of true physical science.

There is a passing sentence in one of Darwin's works which will often recur to the memory of those who have observed it. Speaking of the teleological or theological methods of describing nature, he says that these can be made to explain anything. At first sight this may seem a strange objection to any intelligible method—that it is too widely applicable. But Darwin's meaning is in its own sphere as true as it is important. An explanation which is good for everything in general, is good for nothing in particular. Explanations which are indiscriminate can hardly be also special and distinguishing. In their very generality they may be true, but the truth must be as general as the terms in which it is expressed. Thus the common phrase which we are in the habit of applying to the wonderful adaptations of organic life when we call them "provisions of nature," is a phrase of this kind. It satisfies certain faculties of the mind, and these the highest, but it affords no satisfaction at all to those other faculties which ask not why, but how, these adaptations are effected. It is an explanation applicable to all adaptations equally, and to no one of them specially. It takes no notice whatever of the question. How? It does not concern itself at all with physical causes.

Darwin saw this clearly of such methods of explanation. But he did not See that precisely the same objection lies against his own. The great group of ideas metaphorically involved in his phrase of natural selection, and not successfully eliminated in