42 



THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MOXTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



There is an odd instance of this confusion of 

 thought at the close of Prof. Huxley's paper, 

 which still more oddly Lord Blachford, who is so 

 strict in his logic, cites with approval. " Has a 

 stone a future life," says Prof. Huxley, "because 

 the wavelets it may cause in the sea persist 

 through space and time ? " Well ! has a stone a 

 life at all ? because, if it has no present life, I 

 cannot see why it should have a future life. How 

 is any reasoning about the inorganic world to help 

 us here in reasoning about the organic world ? 

 Prof. Huxley and Lord Blachford might as well 

 ask if a stone is capable of civilization because I 

 said that man was. I think that man is wholly 

 different from a stone ; and from a fiddle ; and 

 even from a dog; and that to say that a man 

 cannot exert any influence on other men after his 

 death, because a dog cannot, or because a fiddle, 

 or because a stone cannot, may be to reproduce 

 with rather needless affectation the verbal quib- 

 bles and pitfalls which Socrates and the sophists 

 prepared for each other in some wordy sympo- 

 sium of old. 



Lastly, Prof. Huxley seems to think that he 

 has disposed of me altogether, so soon as he can 

 point to a sympathy between theologians and 

 myself. I trust there are great affinity and great 

 sympathy between us ; and pray let him not think 

 that I am in the least ashamed of that common 

 ground. Positivism has quite as much sympathy 

 with the genuine theologian as it has with the 

 scientific specialist. The former may be working 

 on a wrong intellectual basis, and often it may 

 be by most perverted methods ; but, in the best 

 types, he has a high social aim and a great moral 

 cause to maintain among men. The latter is 

 usually right in his intellectual basis as far as it 

 goes ; but it does not go very far, and in the 

 great moral cause of the spiritual destinies of men 

 he is often content with utter indifference and 

 simple nihilism. Mere raving at priestcraft, and 

 beadles, and outward investments, is indeed a 

 poor solution of the mighty problems of the hu- 

 man soul and of social organization. And the 

 instinct of the mass of mankind will long reject a 

 biology which has nothing for these but a sneer. 

 It will not do for Prof, nuxley to say that he is 

 only a poor biologist and careth for none of these 

 things. His biology, however, " includes man 

 and all his ways and works." Besides, he is a 

 leader in Israel ; he has preached an entire vol- 

 ume of " Lay Sermons ; " and he has waged many 

 a war with theologians and philosophers on reli- 

 gious and philosophic problems. "What, if I may 

 ask him, are his own religion and his own philoso- 



phy ? He says that he knows no scientific men 

 who " neglect all philosophical and religious syn- 

 thesis." In that he is fortunate in his circle of 

 acquaintance. But since he is so earnest in ask- 

 ing me questions, let me ask him to tell the world 

 what is his own synthesis of philosophy, what is 

 his own idea of religion ? He can laugh at the 

 worship" of priests and positivists : whom, or 

 what, does he worship ? If he dislikes the word 

 soul, does he think man has anything that can be 

 called a spiritual nature ? If he derides my idea 

 of a future life, does he think that there is any- 

 thing which can be said of a man, when his car- 

 cass is laid beneath the sod, beyond a simple final 

 vale ? 



P. S. — And now space fails me to reply to the 

 appeals of so many critics. I cannot enter with 

 Mr. Roden Noel on that great question of the ma- 

 terialization of the spirits of the dead ; I know 

 not whether we shall be " made one with the great 

 Elohim, or angels of Nature, or if we shall grovel 

 in dead material bodily life." I know nothing of 

 this high matter: I do not comprehend this lan- 

 guage. Nor can I add anything to what I have 

 said on that sense of personality which Lord Sel- 

 borne and Canon Barry so eloquently press on 

 me. To me that sense of personality is a thing 

 of somewhat slow growth, resulting from our en- 

 tire nervous organization and our composite men- 

 tal constitution. It seems to me that we can 

 often trace it building up and trace it again decay- 

 ing away. We feel ourselves to be men, because 

 we have human bodies and human minds. Is 

 that not enough ? Has the baby of an hour this 

 sense of personality ? Are you sure that a dog 

 or an elephant has not got it ? Then has the 

 baby no soul ; has the dog a soul ? Do you know 

 more of your neighbor, apart from inference, than 

 you know of the dog ? Again, I cannot enter 

 upon Mr. Greg's beautiful reflections, save to 

 point cut how largely he supports me. He shows, 

 I think with masterly logic, how difficult it is to 

 fit this new notion of a glorified activity on to the 

 old orthodoxy of beatific ecstasy. Canon Barry re- 

 minds us how this orthodoxy involved the resur- 

 rection of the body, and the same difficulty has 

 driven Mr. Roden Noel to suggest that the mate- 

 rial world itself may be the debris of the just I 

 made perfect. But Dr. Ward, as might be ex- I 

 pected, falls back on the beatific ecstasy as con- I 

 ceived by the mystics of the thirteenth century. I 

 No word here about moral activity and the social | 

 converse, as in the Elysian fields, imagined by I 

 philosophers of less orthodox severity. 



