768 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



logically compelled to ascribe to the All-Good the personal authorship 

 of crimes ; for, of course, it could signify nothing to the question of 

 agency, if no new spring of action was interposed, how long the chain 

 of mere instrumentalities might be. He was right in asserting moral 

 causation, which is given us by consciousness, and without which the 

 moral world would be a chaos. His fallacy lay in the assumption that 

 moral causation was the same as physical. What has been inappro- 

 priately called free-will may be roughly defined as the difference given 

 us by consciousness between moral and physical causation. Though it 

 is the most certain, as well as the most momentous, fact of our being, 

 we shall probably never succeed in precisely formulating it by any 

 phrase that we can devise, even supposing it to be fixed, and not to be 

 increasing, with our ascent from a lower to a higher, from a more 

 material to a more spiritual life. 



Though not a declared automatist, however, Mr. Spencer is, by 

 virtue of his general philosophy, a necessarian. He holds that evolu- 

 tion, which is the order of the universe, " consists in a change from an 

 indefinite coherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, 

 through continuous differentiations and integrations." The universe 

 may well have heaved a sigh of relief when, through the cerebration 

 of an eminent thinker, it had been delivered of this account of itself. 

 Yet it must be a curious universe if this is its secret. As the Yankee 

 said of the enormously rich church with a very scanty congregation, 

 " it must be doing the smallest business on the largest capital of any 

 concern in this State." Man, the insect, aims at producing things which 

 we feel to be noble, and which, according to the measure of his span, 

 will endure ; but the power of the universe does nothing but turn the 

 homogeneous into the heterogeneous and back again through the same 

 tread-mill round of differentiations and integrations, every round end- 

 ing in the same fatal " equilibration " and total wreck of all the results 

 of the process. The higher the fruits, the more senseless the destruc- 

 tion. What set the homogeneous moving in the first instance and 

 made it become the heterogeneous ? This would be the question which 

 we should have to ask if the law were tendered as a physical explana- 

 tion of the origin of the world. Why, we might also ask, is the co- 

 herent to be called the heterogeneous, and the incoherent the homo- 

 geneous ? Might not the terms as well be reversed ? * But it is 

 enough here to say that the theory is mechanical necessarianism, and 

 that as such it is scarcely reconcilable, in a scientific point of view, 

 with the high strain of ordinary morality and the passionate denunci- 



* We have always suspected that with regard to the sociological portion of Mr. Spen- 

 cer's theory of evolution, and perhaps even with regard to the whole theory, a very con- 

 siderable part had been played by our old friend the division of labor. Adam Smith 

 knew the bounds of his discovery, if discovery it could be called. Though the employ- 

 ments of men diverge and multiply, the unifying influences of civilization generally on 

 the members of a community are greater than the diversifying influences'. 



