Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/361

Rh earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail like the other foxes."

Huxley denied that he was disposed to rank himself either as a fatalist, a materialist or an atheist. "Not among fatalists, for I take the conception of necessity to have a logical, and not a physical, foundation; not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers."

The late Duke of Argyll, in his interesting work on 'The Philosophy of Belief,' makes a very curious attack on Huxley's consistency. He observes that scientific writers use "forms of expression as well as individual words, all of which are literally charged with teleological meaning. Men even who would rather avoid such language if they could, but who are intent on giving the most complete and expressive description they can of the natural facts before them, find it wholly impossible to discharge this duty by any other means. Let us take as an example the work of describing organic structures in the science of biology. The standard treatise of Huxley on the 'Elements of Comparative Anatomy,' affords a remarkable example of this necessity, and of its results. . ..

"How unreasonable it is to set aside, or to explain away, the full meaning of such words as 'apparatuses' and 'plans,' comes out strongly when we analyze the preconceived assumptions which are supposed to be incompatible with the admission of it. . ..

"To continue the use of words because we are conscious that we cannot do without them, and then to regret or neglect any of their implications, is the highest crime we can commit against the only faculties which enable us to grasp the realities of the world." Is not this, however, to fall into the error of some Greek philosophers, and to regard language, not only as a means of communication, but as an instrument of research. We all speak of sunrise and sunset, but it is no proof that the sun goes round the earth. The Duke himself says elsewhere:

"We speak of time as if it were an active agent in doing this, that and the other. Yet we are quite conscious, when we choose to think of it, that when we speak of time in this sense, we are really thinking and speaking, not of time itself, but of the various physical forces which operate slowly and continuously in, or during, time. Apart from these forces, time does nothing."

This is, it seems to me, a complete reply to his own attack on Huxley's supposed inconsistency.

Theologians often seem to speak as if it were possible to believe something which one cannot understand, as if the belief were a matter