EVOLUTION AND MIND. 359 



ity was pi-esented the beginning of the transit was observed before 

 sunset, and the end after sunrise. There were also stations at Kola, 

 Yakutsk in Siberia, Peking, Manila, Batavia, Hudson's Bay, St. Peters- 

 burg, St. Joseph in California, and many other places. In all there 

 were no less than 74 observing-stations, whereof 50 were in Europe. 



The reader need hardly be reminded that the determination of the 

 sun's distance which was until lately in use in our text-books of as- 

 tronomy was based on the observations made during the transit of 

 Venus in 1769. Nevertheless it has been shown that those observa- 

 tions, rightly interpreted, give a determination of the sun's distance 

 according well with those which have been obtained by the best mod- 

 ern methods, whether these have depended on observations of the sun 

 himself, or the moon, or Mars or, lastly, of the swift flight of light. 



EVOLUTION AND MIND. 1 



By C. B. EADCLIFFE, M. D., F. E. C. P. 



WITH Mr. Herbert Spencer I have much sympathy, and yet I can 

 not be content to stay at the end at which he arrives and stays. 

 I thoroughly sympathize in his belief that all true philosophical reason- 

 ing has its end in unity that there are abundant proofs of this unity 

 in matter and spirit, in things visible and things invisible that the 

 truths of science and religion find reconciliation in this unity. I reject, 

 as he does, a purely spiritualistic view of things no less than a purely 

 materialistic view. But I cannot agree with him in believing in in- 

 definite evolution. Nor can I agree with him in believing that life 

 and mind are to be interpreted in terms of matter, motion, and force, 

 even though this interpretation be taken as only symbolizing pro- 

 visionally arbitrary aspects of an Unknown Reality ; and least of all 

 can I agree with him in believing that the principle of unity, underly- 

 ing matter and spirit alike, is merely an Unknown Cause, the Un- 

 knowable, a Power without limits of either time or space, of which the 

 nature ever remains inconceivable. Much, no doubt, is of necessity 

 unknowable, but I would not place the limits of thought where Mr. 

 Spencer would place them. On the contrary, I would hold that there 

 is nothing unreasonable in widening these limits so as to bring within 

 them an actual God, even the God of the Scriptures, and that by so 

 doing a much more reasonable realization of unity is to be found than 

 that which can be found in an Unknown Reality. I would hold, in- 

 deed, that the nature of the Unknowable is to be encroached upon in 

 this way, and to this extent, by the power of the reason, and also that 



1 Part of lecture delivered before the Royal College of Physician- 6 , March, 1873. 



