Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/848

826 but Dr. Abbott does not think respect for Bacon compels him to father Macbeth and Julius Caesar upon the author of the Novum Organum. Nobody has a greater respect for Darwin than I have; but I do not think that that respect compels me to credit Darwin with having originated the ideas due to Lamarck and to Herbert Spencer. Nay, more; I have so deep a respect for the work Darwin actually performed that I consider it quite unnecessary to filch from others in order to enrich him. He can well do without such disloyal friends. Indeed, it is Mr. Samuel Butler's peculiar belief that Darwin did so attempt to filch on his own account. I can not agree with Mr. Butler that the honestest and most candid of our biological thinkers ever made any such endeavor himself; nor can I believe one honors him by making it for him.

If I were to sum up the positions of these two great thinkers, Darwin and Spencer, the experimentalist and the generalizer, the observer and the philosopher, in a single paragraph each, I should be tempted to do it in somewhat the following fashion:

Darwin came at a moment when human thought was trembling on the verge of a new flight toward undiscovered regions. Kant and Laplace and Murchison and Lyell had already applied the evolutionary idea to the genesis of suns and systems, of continents and mountains. Lamarck had already suggested the notton that similar conceptions might be equally applied to the genesis of plant and animal species. But, as I have put it elsewhere, what was needed was a solution of the difficulty of adaptation which should help the lame dog of Lamarckian evolutionism over the organic stile, so leaving the mind free to apply the evolutionary method to psychology, and to what Mr. Spencer has well called the supraorganic sciences. For that office Darwin presented himself at the exact right moment—a deeply learned and well-equipped biological scholar, a minute specialist as compared with Spencer, a broad generalist as compared with the botanists, entomologists, and ornithologists of his time. He filled the gap. As regards thinkers, he gave them a key which helped them to understand organic evolution; as regards the world at large, he supplied them with a codex which convinced them at once of its historical truth.

Herbert Spencer is a philosopher of a wider range. All knowledge is his province. A believer in organic evolution before Darwin published his epoch-making work, he accepted at once Darwin's useful idea, and incorporated it as a minor part in its fitting place in his own system. But that system itself, alike in its conception and its inception, was both independent of and anterior to Darwin's first pronouncement. It certainly covered a vast world of thought which Darwin never even attempted to enter. To Herbert Spencer, Darwin was even as Kant, Laplace, and Lyell