SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 



559 



any way be harmonized with, say, 

 Mr. Spencer's Principles of Psychol- 

 ogy. Or take such a passage as the 

 following: "All the facts of the 

 animal economy— sex, nutriment, 

 gestation, birth, growth— are sym- 

 bols of the passage of the world into 

 the soul of man, to suffer there a 

 change and reappear a new and 

 higher fact. He uses forms accord- 

 ing to the life, and not according to 

 the form. This is true science. The 

 poet alone knows astronomy, chem- 

 istry, vegetation, and animation, for 

 he does not stop at these facts, but 

 employs them as signs. He knows 

 why the plain or meadow of space 

 was strewn with those flowers we 

 call suns and moons and stars ; why 

 the great deep is adorned with ani- 

 mals, with men, and gods ; for in 

 every word he speaks he rides on 

 them as the horses of thought." 

 Now, we should be sorry to crumple 

 one leaf in the laurel wreath of the 

 poet ; but is there much sense in 

 saying that he is our only astron- 

 omer, or that he could inform us 

 why suns and planets were disposed 

 through space so as to make the 

 forms we see ? We do not think 

 Goethe held these ideas ; if he did, 

 they were certainly not part of his 

 evolution philosophy. The doctrine 

 of evolution is not at war, we trust, 

 with poetic inspiration ; but if it 

 teaches anything, it teaches that the 

 world is full of infinite detail, and 

 that without a certain mastery of 

 details general views are apt to be 



more showy than solid. It also 

 brings home to the mind very forci- 

 bly that one can only be sure of 

 carefully verified facts, and, even of 

 these, ought not to be too sure. It 

 teaches that time and place and cir- 

 cumstance are, for all practical pur- 

 poses, of the essence of the things 

 we have to consider ; that nothing 

 is just what it would be if different- 

 ly conditioned. There is nothing of 

 which Emerson discourses with so 

 much positiveness as the soul, an 

 entity of which the serious evolu- 

 tionist can only speak with all possi- 

 ble reserve. The evolutionist labors 

 to construct a psychology ; but 

 Emerson has a psychology ready- 

 made, and scatters its affirmations 

 with a liberal hand through every 

 chapter of his writings. That these 

 are stimulating in a high degree to 

 well-disposed minds we should be 

 sorry to deny. They are a source, 

 which for many long years will 

 not run dry, of high thoughts and 

 noble aspirations. No one has more 

 worthily or loftily discoursed of the 

 value of life than has the New Eng- 

 land philosopher ; and for this the 

 world owes him a permanent debt 

 of gratitude. But he was not an 

 evolutionist in the modern sense — 

 that is, in the scientific sense. If, as 

 Mr. Chapman says, he was the last 

 great writer to look at life from 

 a stationary standpoint, then we 

 can only add that the old philoso- 

 phy had a golden sunset in his 

 pages. 



^jcietxtiftjc %iUvntuxz. 



SPECIAL BOOKS. 



There are a great many different ways of conceiving the science of 

 society, and until the study of the subject is more advanced than it is as 

 yet, it would be rash to set up any one method as superior to all others. 

 All that can reasonably be asked is that the subject should be approached 



