LOUIS AGASSIZ AND GEORGE BERKELEY 331 



even if he knows nothing about absolute necessity, nothing about 

 arbitrary liberty; and is quite content to leave to Milton's fiends 

 the discussion of " Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute." 

 This itself seems to me a great gain, and a prodigious conserva- 

 tion of energy, worth no little hard work. 



May not one who is convinced with Berkeley that nature is a 

 language, find reason to doubt whether he has correctly and fully 

 understood what he has heard, or whether he will be able to under- 

 stand what he may still hear ? 



While the Darwinian, like every other thoughtful student, 

 admits that the adjustments of living things to the external world 

 are useful, he asks whether, quite apart from all question of pur- 

 pose or intention, these beneficial adjustments may not themselves 

 be part of the mechanism of nature. He asks whether man may 

 not have survived because he fits nature, and whether another line 

 might not have survived if nature had been different. 



As he knows no reason in the nature of things why all should 

 not come to an end this instant, he is unable to discover any assur- 

 ance of stability in nature itself; and if he is to find any such 

 assurance anywhere, how is he helped by the assertion that "in 

 the government of the world physical agents, or mechanical, or 

 secondary causes, or instruments, are necessary," either to assist 

 the governed or for anything else ? 



May not the Darwinian ask whether our confidence in the 

 stability of nature may not be equivalent to, and whether it can 

 ever exceed, our confidence in the continuity of life? 



"That a thing should be really perceived by my senses, and 

 at the same time not really exist, is to me a plain contradiction," 

 says Berkeley, "since I cannot prescind or abstract, even in 

 thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived. 

 I might as well doubt of my own being as of the being of those 

 things I see and feel." 



" If a man should give me arguments that I do not see," 

 says Holmes, quoting from Johnson, "though I could not answer 

 them, should I believe I do not see ? " 



May not one who cannot doubt the reality of the things he 

 sees and feels, ask whether all the things he sees and feels tell 

 him what to expect, or how to govern himself and direct his 



