Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/426

414 ; and, on the other hand, when Mr. Spencer seeks out the word "equilibration" to express adjustment of structure to function, he is indignant at him for not using the language of intention. He declares the word to be "laboriously barbarous and incompetent in its meaning," and altogether a "hideous creation." It always comes round to this in the end that the duke is entirely right and his opponents entirely wrong; and if that gratifying conclusion can not be proved, why, then it is assumed. We wonder "whether the critic could not possibly make a personal application of the following judicious observation which we find in his article: "It is one of the infirmities of the human mind that, when it is thoroughly possessed by one idea, it not only sees everything in the light of that idea, but can see nothing that does not lend itself to support the dominant conception." This is precisely the duke's case: he sees nothing that does not to his mind seem to support his dominant conception; and yet, strange to say, after delivering himself of the apothegm, the only application he can make of it is to "the Darwinian school." If ever there was a case in which one might whisper, "De te fabula narratur," this seems to be one.

On the subject of rudimentary organs Mr. Spencer's critic indulges in much special pleading. He says we can never be sure "whether these represent organs which have degenerated or organs which are waiting to be completed." Few naturalists, we think, would agree to this. But why should any organ "wait to be completed," unless its completion is dependent on some prolonged natural process? And if a natural process can complete an organ, why might not a natural process have created its first beginnings? The duke seems to us to do here something more illegitimate than anything he charges on the Darwinian school. Confronted with the fact that organs are developed by a series of actions and reactions, of increments and adaptations, each one of which has its place in the chain of physical antecedents and consequents, he deliberately uses the expression "waiting to be completed" for the purpose of creating the impression that natural processes count for nothing, but that the "completion" depends on some kind of divine fiat. If the organs in question are in reality being completed by small improvements in adaptation from generation to generation which, no doubt, the duke believes is it honest to speak of them as "waiting to be completed"? We do not speak of a tree "waiting" to grow when it is growing, or of fruit "waiting" to ripen when it is ripening.

Finally, the duke says that a philosophy which is neutral "on the most fundamental of all questions respecting the interpretation of the universe"—the question, namely, "whether the physical forces are the masters or the servants of that house in which we live"—"can not properly be said to be a philosophy at all." It seems to us, on the contrary, that it is just because Mr. Spencer leaves that question unanswered, and shows that it must remain unanswered at least in any sense that would satisfy the Duke of Argyll—that his system may claim to be a philosophy. His real answer to the question, as we conceive, would be that the physical forces are alternately servants and masters. They are servants as ministering to our mental operations and masters as determining their limits. The powers of mind are servants as being everywhere conditioned by the laws of matter, and they are masters as