SPENCER AND THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 3 



of ages behind us ; and that such vague vestiges of our race as 

 have been handed down to us in sacred book and popular legend 

 are as nothing compared with that tremendous mass of human 

 experiences which will never find their historian. Worse than all, 

 turning full upon the doctrine of special manufacture, she opened 

 up the grand geologic record, and read thence, as from the pages 

 of a mighty volume, the long, stupendous story of those vast 

 cosmic changes which, through aeons of unreckoned time, have 

 slowly molded and fashioned the world into the condition in 

 which we find it to-day. 



That these revelations were of the most vital interest to all 

 thinking men needs hardly be said; nor is it necessary here to 

 dwell on the feverish panic of the theologians, who hurried into 

 the field with all their heavy artillery, prominent amid which was 

 the great-gun argument, which had already done yeoman service 

 on many another such occasion, that the very existence of Chris- 

 tianity was bound up with the story of creation as narrated in the 

 first chapters of the Hebrew Scriptures.* What is here of 

 moment is to notice the general effect of the new discoveries upon 

 the scientific mind. That effect was at the outset almost entirely 

 a negative one. The old theories had been destroyed, but as yet 

 there was nothing to take their place ; the theological interpre- 

 tation of the world's history was seen to be absurdly insufficient 

 and unreasonable, but for the time being no scientific interpreta- 

 tion in lieu thereof appeared to be forthcoming. Hence followed 

 a kind of intellectual interregnum, during which everything was 

 vague, shifting, tentative. Meanwhile, however, things were not 

 by any means standing still. The unceasing activity of inves- 

 tigators in the special sciences resulted in vast accumulations 

 of well-established facts, and thus yielded the materials in the 

 absence of which nothing of real or permanent value could have 

 been accomplished. And at the same time (largely, indeed, as a 

 consequence of this extension upon all sides of the scientific 

 domain) there was ever growing and deepening a conception of 

 unbroken causation in cosmic changes, of the universality of law, 

 and the unity of Nature and of natural processes a conception 

 in no small degree led up to by such discoveries as those of the 

 undulatory theory of light and heat, and of the correlation of all 

 the forces known to exact science. Thus, in spite of the tempo- 

 rary suspense and hesitation, no time was being lost. As we can 

 now see, the way was being slowly prepared for a great scientific 

 generalization a generalization which, overthrowing all the old 



* How fierce and obstinate was the opposition offered to the doctrine of evolution from 

 this standpoint, we of the present day find it no easy matter to imagine. Even such a 

 man as Hugh Miller went so far as to declare that acceptance of evolution meant nullifica- 

 tion of the central truths of Christianity. 



