PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON TEE WAR-PATH. 79 i 



tory of the vertebrate skeleton, and especially of the vertebrate 

 shall, as the development of a "plan." This is the word he has 

 selected, and which he uses over and over again. A plan we 

 must repeat is not a mere pattern, which may arise by accident ; 

 it is a construction of which all the leading component elements 

 are parts of one general conception having reference to a future. 

 Such a plan, he tells us, canjDe traced and identified in all skulls, 

 from the skull of a pike to the cranium of a man. The immense 

 differences which mask this unity of plan are due to successive 

 adaptive modifications, with which, in all their wide extent, the 

 original plan was destined from the very first to work in har- 

 mony. 



These are grand conceptions. They are scientific conceptions 

 in the highest sense of that word, because they bring phenomena 

 into harmonious relations with the highest faculties of the human 

 mind. They are the conceptions which confer all its dignity and 

 interest on geology, and on the affiliated sciences of paleontology 

 and comparative anatomy. Although in one sense highly ideal, 

 and in the best sense metaphysical, they are yet strictly literal, 

 and absolutely true to fact. Hence Prof. Huxley most truly as- 

 serts that the doctrine of " all bony skulls being organized upon a 

 common plan " is a simple generalization of the observed facts of 

 cranial structure.* It is curious that many of those who use these 

 conceptions for the purposes of description immediately turn 

 round and repudiate them for the purposes of philosophy. But 

 the language which embodies them can only be useful for the 

 purposes of explanation by reason of the similitudes which they 

 involve between our own mental operations and those which are 

 obvious in nature. Yet these very similitudes and intellectual 

 homologies are most distasteful to the agnostic school ; and very 

 often, even in the mere work of description, every device is re- 

 sorted to to keep them out of sight. Thus some movements of 

 the nervous and muscular apparatus in animals which involve 

 the most complicated adjustments are constantly spoken of as 

 mere " reflex action " as if they could be compared with the mere 

 reflection or bending back of light from water, or of sound 

 from a wall. So again " differentiation " is perpetually used to 

 describe the processes of preparation by which the building up of 

 special organs is accomplished just as if these wonderful pro- 

 cesses could be described by a word which is equally applicable 

 to the processes of corruption and decay. There is no disloyalty 

 to truth so insidious as that which leads us to sin in this way 

 against our own intellectual integrity. What our mind sees, we 

 must confess to at our peril. It may have been a brave thing in 



* Comparative Anatomy, p. 278. 



