60 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



their reason governs their words ; but it often 

 happens that words have power to react upon 

 reason." Aristotle said that "Nature abhors a 

 vacuum," and the phrase stood in the place of 

 pneumatic science for wellnigh two thousand 

 years. Some of our modern philosophers have 

 said " Evolution, Natural Selection, Survival of 

 the Fittest," etc. ; and the phrases are so much 

 to the taste of many, both of those who under- 

 stand them and those who do not, that they will 

 probably represent, and obstruct the progress of, 

 true biological science for an indefinite time. 



The contradictions, however, between science 

 and philosophy, are not only natural but inevi- 

 table, if we consider that exact science is chiefly 

 a product of modern times, and represents the 

 results of long-continued and patient labor and 

 investigation ; while what is presented to us as 

 philosophy is borrowed wholesale from a period 

 more than twenty centuries past, when physical 

 science was not, in any proper sense of the term, 

 and when natural phenomena were quite second- 

 ary in importance to the teaching of men. 



In that very amusing and suggestive child's 

 book, " Alice through the Looking-Glass," there 

 is a nightmare kind of vision of a headlong race 

 between Alice and the " Red Queen " to " reach 

 the eighth square," in which, after long running, 

 so fast that the wind whistled in poor Alice's 

 ears and almost " blew the hair off her head," 

 they find themselves in exactly the same place 

 whence they seemed to start, it appearing from 

 the Red Queen's explanation that in her country 

 " it takes all the running you can do to keep in 

 the same place." Some of our modern philos- 

 ophers have beaten these runners all to nothing; 

 for, in their breathless race for the eighth square 

 of popularity and paradox, they have run so very 

 fast that they have landed themselves, high and 

 dry, about two thousand years backward in the 

 philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. 



It scarcely requires noting, that philosophy is 

 neither better nor worse for being old, providing 

 that it fulfills its raison d'etre ; but from this posi- 

 tion there follows one curious result, viz., that phi- 

 losophy, instead of being the final interpreter of 

 science, is entirely independent of it; hence the 

 contradictions alluded to ; hence, also, the utter 

 poverty and barrenness of a philosophy so con- 

 stituted. 



Pereant, qui. ante nos nostra dixerunt. When 

 the learned and modest Dr. Buchner announced i 

 as one of the grandest of modern discoveries, as 

 yet only known to himself and a very few elect, 

 that matter could neither be created nor de- 



stroyed,' he forgot, or perhaps had never known, 

 that this position had been the common and un- 

 disputed property of the world ever since the 

 days of Parmenides of Elea. When Prof. Clif- 

 ford says that the universe consists " of atoms and 

 ether, and that there is no room in it for ghosts," a 

 he only modernizes the saying of Democritus, 

 that " nothing exists but atoms and empty space ; 

 all else is only opinion." 3 When Prof. Tyn- 

 dall sees in matter " the promise and potency of 

 all terrestrial life,'* 4 he only sees what all the 

 early atomists before Anaxagoras saw, or thought 

 they saw. When Prof. Huxley makes the note- 

 worthy discovery that the eye was not made 

 " for the purpose of enabling the animal pos- 

 sessing it to see," 5 he was at least supported by 

 the ancient authority of Epicurus, who held that 

 the eye was not made for seeing, nor the ear for 

 hearing, but that having been developed by chance, 

 the soul could not help using them for these pur- 

 poses. 6 Finally, when Mr. Darwin propounded 

 the doctrine of natural selection, he did little more 

 than reproduce, with striking similarity of phrase, 

 the ideas enunciated by Empedocles 7 above two 

 thousand years ago. 



But modern materialists and evolutionists 

 claim to have proved what the ancients only con- 

 jectured. " The naturalist," says Dr. Buchner, 

 "proves that there are no other forces in Na- 

 ture besides the physical, chemical, :md mechan- 

 ical." Once for all, it cannot be too clearly 

 understood that this claim is utterly without foun- 

 dation. No vestige of what can fairly be con- 

 sidered proof of the doctrines of materialism 

 and evolution has ever been offered. Now, as 

 two thousand years ago, they rest only upon ar- 

 bitrary assumption and conjecture. And as to 

 this, it may be permitted to make one passing 

 protest. It seems somewhat hard on those who 

 seek truth for its own sake, wherever it is to be 

 found, to be so urgently, even clamorously, called 

 upon, under heavy and mysterious penalties, to 

 believe in a certain doctrine, apparently for no 

 other reason than that it is unsupported by evi- 



i " Force and Matter," chapter ii. 



2 Fortnightly Review, December, 1874, p. 734. 



5 See Larige's "History of Materialism," chapter i. 



4 " Belfast Address." 



5 " Critiques and Addresses." p. 305. 



« See Enfield's " History of Philosophy," p, 273. 



» " What Darwin, relying upon a wide extent oi 

 positive knowledge, has achieved for our generation, 

 Empedocles offered to the thinkers of antiquity— the 

 simple and penetrating thought that adaptations pre- 

 ponderate in Nature, just because it is their nature to 

 perpetuate themselves, while what fails has long since 

 perished."— Lange, op. cit., p. 33. 



