24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ral solution had failed, but its only logical alternative, a natural solu- 

 tion, or the thorough investigation of the subject on principles of 

 causation, was not adopted or urged. The geologists occupied them- 

 selves in extending observations and accumulating facts rather than 

 in working out any comprehensive scientific or philosophical principles 

 from the new point of view. The result was a kind of tacit com- 

 promise between the contending parties the theologians conceding 

 the vast antiquity of the earth, and the geologists conceding preter- 

 natural intervention in the regular on-working of the scheme ; so that, 

 in place of one mighty miracle of creation occurring a few thousand 

 years ago, there was substituted the idea of hundreds of thousands 

 of separate miracles of special creation scattered all along the geo- 

 logical ages, to account for the phenomena of terrestrial life. Two 

 systems of agencies natural and supernatural were thus invoked to 

 explain the production of effects. What it now concerns us to note is, 

 that the subject had not yet been brought into the domain of science. 

 One portion of it was still held to be above Nature, and therefore in- 

 accessible to rational inquiry ; while that part of the problem which 

 was withheld from science was really the key to the whole situation. 

 Under the new view, the question of the origin of living forms, or of 

 the action of natural agencies in their production, was as completely 

 barred to science as it had formerly been under the literal Mosaic 

 interpretation ; and, as questions of origin were thus virtually inter- 

 dicted, the old traditional opinions regarding the genesis of the pres- 

 ent constitution of things remained in full force. 



It is in relation to this great crisis in the course of advancing 

 thought that Herbert Spencerls to be regarded. Like many others, he 

 assumed, at the outset, that the study of the whole phenomenal sphere 

 of Nature belongs to science ; but he may claim the honor of being the 

 first to discern the full significance of the new intellectual position. 

 It had been proved that a vast course of orderly changes in the past 

 has led up to the present, and is leading on to the future : Mr. Spencer 

 saw that it was of transcendent moment that the laws of these changes 

 be determined. If natural agencies have been at work in vast peri- 

 ods of time to bring about the present condition of things, he perceived 

 that a new set of problems of immense range and importance is open 

 to inquiry, the effect of which must be to work an extensive revolution 

 of ideas. It was apparent to him that the hitherto forbidden question 

 as to how things have originated had at length come to be the supreme 

 question. When the conception that the present order had been called 

 into being at once and in all its completeness was found to be no lon- 

 ger defensible, it was claimed that it makes no difference how it origi- 

 nated that the existing system is the same whatever may have been 

 its source. Mr. Spencer saw, on the contrary, that the question how 

 things have been caused is fundamental ; and that we can have no 

 real understanding of what they are, without first knowing how they 



