Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/342

330 all arranged for human benefit—the Sun to rule the day, the Moon to rule the night, animals and plants provided for food, and the seasons beneficently adjusted to men's welfare. It is the anthropocentric view. But the anthropocentric view does not appear acceptable to one who contemplates things without foregone conclusions. When he learns that millions upon millions of years passed during which the Earth was peopled only by inferior brutes, and that even now three-fifths of its surface are occupied by an ocean-basin carpeted with low creatures which live in darkness, utterly useless to man and only lately known to him; and when he learns that of the remaining two-fifths, vast Arctic and Antarctic regions, and vast desert areas, are practically uninhabitable, while immense portions of the remainder, fever-breeding and swarming with insect pests, are unfit for comfortable existence; he does not recognize much adjustment to the wants of mankind. When he discovers that the human body is the habitat of thirty different species of parasites, which inflict in many cases great tortures; or, still worse, when he thinks of the numerous kinds of microbes, some producing ever-present diseases and consequent mortality, and others producing frightful epidemics, like the plague and the black death, carrying off hundreds of thousands or millions, he sees little ground for assuming that the order of Nature is devised to suit our needs and satisfactions. The truth which the facts force upon him is not that the surrounding world has been arranged to fit the physical nature of man, but that, conversely, the physical nature of man has been molded to fit the surrounding world; and that, by implication, the Theory of Things, justified by the evidence, may not be one which satisfies men's moral needs and yields them emotional satisfactions, but, conversely, is most likely one to which they have to mold their mental wants as well as they can. The opposite assumption, tacitly made by Mr. Balfour, obviously tends to vitiate his general argument.

I have sometimes contended, half in jest, half in earnest, that, having but a given endowment of any mental faculty, its possessor can not use it largely for one purpose without partially disabling it for other purposes; and that, conversely, great economy in one direction of expenditure makes possible an excess in some other direction. It seems to me that, in his manifestations of doubt and faith, Mr. Balfour affords some support to this hypothesis. Of his extreme economy of belief here is an illustration.

After first quoting from me the sentence:—"To ask whether science is substantially true is much like asking whether the sun gives light"; he goes on:—"It is, I admit, very much like it. But then, on Mr. Spencer's principles, does the sun give light? After