Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/576

558 We certainly can not refuse all sympathy to people who make it a principle to enjoy good health. Of course, if they were thoroughly consistent, they might do mischief in direct proportion to their numbers. A "Christian Science" school board who did not believe in ventilating or adequately warming school rooms, holding that it made no difference whether the children breathed pure air or air laden with carbon dioxide and ptomaines, or whether or not they were exposed to chills and draughts, would be about as mischievous a body of men as could well be imagined. If "Christian Science" in the house means an indifference to the ordinary physical safeguards of health, it will quickly make a very evil repute for itself. But, as we have already said, we do not anticipate these results. Having undertaken to avoid and to cure diseases by "thinking truth," we believe our friends of the new persuasion will think enough truth to get what benefit is to be got from cleanliness, fresh air, and wholesome food—and that will be quite a quantity.

publish on another page a letter from a correspondent who thinks that much injustice is done to Emerson in the remarks we quoted in our December number from Mr. J. J. Chapman's recent volume of essays. What Mr. Chapman said was, in effect, that Emerson had not placed himself in line with the modern doctrine of evolution—that he was probably "the last great writer to look at life from a stationary standpoint." Mrs. Alexander says in reply that Emerson was an evolutionist before Darwin, having learned the doctrine from Goethe and made it a fundamental principle of his philosophy. No one

who has read Mr. Chapman's essay could think for a moment that there was any intention on his part to deal ungenerously or unfairly with the great writer of whom America is so justly proud; nor would many readers be disposed to question his competence to pronounce a sound judgment upon his subject. There must, therefore, it seems to us, be some way of reconciling the verdict of Mr. Chapman with the claims set forth in our correspondent's letter.

The true statement of the case doubtless is that Emerson received the doctrine of evolution—so far as he received it—as a poet. He welcomed the conception of a gradual unfolding of the universe, and a gradually higher development of life; but it dwelt in his mind rather as a poetical imagination than as a scientific theory. The consequence was that he was still able to speak in the old absolute manner of many things which the man of science can only discuss from a relative standpoint. When, for example, Emerson says, "All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being in which they lie—an immensity not possessed and that can not be possessed"—he may be uttering the sentence of a divine philosophy, or the deep intuition of a poet; but he is not speaking the language of science, nor evincing any sense of the restrictions which science might place on such expressions of opinion. Certainly he is not at the standpoint of evolution; and it is very hard to believe that the views he announces could in