EX-PRESIDENT PORTER ON EVOLUTION. 587 



bryonic life may be interpreted as a kind of " logical growth " or 

 the development of a plan. The difficulty with this interpretation, 

 again, is that it is merely formal and means nothing. If a Diviue plan 

 is to be invoked on every occasion as the explanation of whatever is 

 obscure, all rational inquiry is at an end. God is not bound to give 

 reasons. His ways are past finding out. Nature's ways, on the other 

 hand, do lend themselves to progressive interpretation. There are 

 ultimate questions that always elude us, but we can learn through 

 experience and observation to connect cause and effect, antecedent 

 and consequent. It is upon this line that the scientific investigators 

 of the day are working ; and not a day passes without bearing wit- 

 ness to the fruitfulness of their methods. This is the reason why, 

 among scientific workers, an hypothesis that lends itself to verifica- 

 tion, that deals with the actual and real, is always preferred to one 

 that supplies a formula and nothing more. 



We pass over, as containing little or nothing that is relevant to the 

 subject of evolution, Dr. Porter's discussion of the doctrine of the 

 conservation of energy. The next section of the lecture deals with 

 the theory that the phenomena of life may be highly specialized and 

 complicated forms of mechanical (molecular) action. " To put for- 

 ward such a theory," says Dr. Porter, " is to hypostatize an agency or 

 an agent of the vaguest and most nebulous character, and to claim for 

 it all the attributes of things or agents that are known to exist under 

 the severest tests of observation and experiment." We wish Dr. 

 Porter would explain how it is possible to hypostatize an agent of the 

 most nebulous character and yet assign to it a most definite character. 

 The theory under consideration simply proceeds upon the principle 

 that to simplify or explain you must generalize that is to say, you 

 must find the means of expressing the special in terms of the general. 

 The phenomena of life are highly special phenomena, and we are nat- 

 urally led to wish to see them in wider relations. To rest in the spe- 

 cial is to rest in nescience ; and the awakened human mind does not 

 consent to that. The widest relations of all are those which we call 

 mechanical ; the natural tendency of thought, therefore, is toward the 

 belief that it is through the compounding and recompounding of these, 

 in ways and regions at present far beyond our ken, that matter acquires 

 its higher and more specialized functions. We see in the human body 

 what a mere aggregation of cells may become ; we see in human society 

 what a mere aggregation of individuals may become ; and it is impos- 

 sible that Science should not seek her equilibrium in some theory of 

 the essential unity of all forms of matter and all modes of force. We 

 must, however, quote a powerful sentence which in the lecture before 

 us immediately follows (page 15) the words last quoted : " To apply in- 

 duction to a process which ought to begin with analogy and end with 

 fact, but which begins with a surmise and ends with a dogma, is to 

 reverse the order and to deny the criteria which have given Science 



