826 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



but Dr. Abbott does not think respect for Bacon compels him to 

 father Macbeth and Julius Caesar upon the author of the Novum 

 Organum. Nobody has a greater respect for Darwin than I have ; 

 but I do not think that that respect compels me to credit Darwin 

 with having originated the ideas due to Lamarck and to Herbert 

 Spencer. Nay, more ; I have so deep a respect for the work Dar- 

 win actually performed that I consider it quite imnecessary to 

 filch from others in order to enrich him. He can well do without 

 such disloyal friends. Indeed, it is Mr. Samuel Butler's peculiar 

 belief that Darwin did so attempt to filch on his own account. I 

 can not agree with Mr. Butler that the honestest and most candid 

 of our biological thinkers ever made any such endeavor himself ; 

 nor can I believe one honors him by making it for him. 



If I were to sum up the positions of these two great thinkers, 

 Darwin and Spencer, the experimentalist and the generalizer, the 

 observer and the philosopher, in a single paragraph each, I should 

 be tempted to do it in somewhat the following fashion : 



Darwin came at a moment when human thought was trem- 

 bling on the verge of a new flight toward undiscovered regions. 

 Kant and Laplace and Murchison and Lyell had already applied 

 the evolutionary idea to the genesis of suns and systems, of 

 continents and mountains. Lamarck had already suggested the 

 notton that similar conceptions might be equally applied to the 

 genesis of plant and animal species. But, as I have put it else- 

 where, what was needed was a solution of the difficulty of adapta- 

 tion which should help the lame dog of Lamarckiah evolutionism 

 over the organic stile, so leaving the mind free to apply the evo- 

 lutionary method to psychology, and to what Mr. Spencer has well 

 called the supraorganic sciences. For that office Darwin pre- 

 sented himself at the exact right moment a deeply learned and 

 well-equipped biological scholar, a minute specialist as compared 

 with Spencer, a broad generalist as compared with the botanists, 

 entomologists, and ornithologists of his time. He filled the gap. 

 As regards thinkers, he gave them a key which helped them to 

 understand organic evolution ; as regards the world at large, he 

 supplied them with a codex which convinced them at once of its 

 historical truth. 



Herbert Spencer is a philosopher of a wider range. All knowl- 

 edge is his province. A believer in organic evolution before Dar- 

 win published his epoch-making work, he accepted at once Dar- 

 win's useful idea, and incorporated it as a minor part in its fitting 

 place in his own system. But that system itself, alike in its con- 

 ception and its inception, was both independent of and anterior 

 to Darwin's first pronouncement. It certainly covered a vast 

 world of thought which Darwin never even attempted to enter. 

 To Herbert Spencer, Darwin was even as Kant, Laplace, and Lyell 



