Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/248

236 of species scientifically dealt with in a philosophical system. Understanding philosophy as the Germans do, and being wedded to their a priori system, they have habitually sneered at "English philosophy," and therefore pay little attention to its new books. Again, they are greatly given to titles of all orders, political, social, scientific. Every man is jealous of his distinctions—they glory in their "jewels five words long," as they have been called. Hence they think nothing of a man without scientific titles, and it is beyond their imagination that any one should refuse them. Mr. Spencer was, therefore, without due passports to German consideration. But against the fact that Schmidt has ignored him, we may put the fact that the translation of "First Principles" into German was made at the instigation of Darwin's chief German disciple, Haeckel, and was made by his assistant, Dr. Vetter.

Mr. Darwin is made out to be untheological by an exquisite bit of logic. It is true that he appeals to supernaturalism for the starting-point of his doctrine, and gives exactly the same account of it that theology has always offered, speaking of "life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one." But Mr. Darwin's science is saved by the charitable imputation that he used these words in a sort of Pickwickian or poetical sense, and was willing to conciliate the theologians by "a slight difference of style" in referring to the origin of life. But when to an extensive series of expository works, treating of the course of Nature by rigorous scientific method, Mr. Spencer prefixes an essay of a hundred and odd pages, to clear away religious difficulties and protect himself from the imputation of materialism, which was sure to be made against his scientific labors, there is neither kindly feeling to see the propriety of such a course, nor even a sense of justice to recognize the fact; but the whole system is declared to be theological in origin and character, because, forsooth, the author put theology aside at the outset of his undertaking.

We here touch upon the main source of misunderstanding of Mr. Spencer's system. The preliminary part which treats of religion is necessarily metaphysical. But Mr. Spencer does not regard religion as an illusion, nor metaphysics as necessarily futile. He holds that the order of the universe is not without its cause, although the nature of that cause is a mystery past finding out, and from the very nature of intelligence must forever transcend the human understanding. The infinite source of things is usually called God, and there are many who hold that man can have a knowledge of God as of other things; Mr. Spencer declines to use the current term; and, to mark his own sense of humility toward that infinite cause or power of which all phenomena are manifestations, he prefers employing the term The Unknowable. What is represented by it is not a negation or a nothing, but the most exalted object of religious feeling, though beyond the grasp and analysis of intellect. Having defined his ground in this preliminary dissertation, and shown that science deals with the phenomenal, while religion relates to that which transcends the phenomenal, so that there can be no radical or fundamental conflict between them, he then proceeds to his great work of organizing the highest and most certain knowledge attainable of the phenomenal universe into a system of philosophy. That system must be judged intrinsically, or on its own merits, as a coherent and consistent body of demonstrable and verifiable truth; yet his critics, from unscrupulous motives—resenting his assumption in undertaking so immense a task, or from incapacity—getting swamped among the factors of a great discussion, have a habit of