A GREAT CONFESSION. 71 



But he adds that " the impossibility of separating them compels 

 us to disregard the distinction between them." This is a most 

 lame excuse for the careless — and still worse excuse for the 

 studied — use of ambiguous language which confounds the deep- 

 est distinctions in nature. It can not be admitted. All reason- 

 ings on nature would be hopeless unless we could separate in 

 thought many things which are always conjoined in action ; and 

 this excuse is all the more to be rejected when the alleged im- 

 possibility of separation is used to cover an almost exclusive 

 stress upon that one of the two kinds of action which is confess- 

 edly by far the feeblest, and of least account in the resulting 

 work. 



It seems to me, further, that there is another fatal fault in 

 this attempt of Mr. Spencer to reform the language, and clear 

 up the ideas of biological science. Besides the method of habitu- 

 ally using words so abstract as to be of necessity ambiguous — 

 besides the further method of habitually expelling from definite 

 words the only senses which give them value — Mr. Spencer often 

 resorts, and does so conspicuously in this paper, to the scholastic 

 plan of laying down purely verbal propositions and then argu- 

 ing deductively from them as if they represented axiomatic 

 truth. By the schoolmen this method was often legitimately 

 applied to subjects which in their own nature admitted of its 

 use, because those subjects were not physical but purely moral 

 or religious, and in which consequently much depended on the 

 clear expression of admitted principles of abstract truth. I will 

 not venture to say that such verbal propositions embodying ab- 

 stract ideas have absolutely no place in physical science. We 

 know as a matter of fact that they have led some great men to 

 the first conception of a good many physical truths ; and it is a 

 curious fact that Dr. Joule, who in our own day has been the first 

 to establish the idea of the doctrine of the conservaj:ion of energy 

 by proving through rigorous experiment the mechanical equiva- 

 lent of heat, has said that " we might reason a iwiori that the ab- 

 solute destruction of living force can not possibly take place be- 

 cause it is manifestly absurd to suppose that the powers with 

 which God has endowed matter can be destroyed, any more than 

 they can be created, by man's agency." * 



Believing as I do in the inseparable unity which binds us to 

 all the verities of nature, I should be the last to proscribe the 

 careful use of our own abstract conceptions. But it is quite 

 certain and is now universally admitted that the methods of 

 Thomas Aquinas in his " Summa " are full of danger when they 



* In a lecture delivered at Manchester, April 28, 1847. See " Strictures on the Ser- 

 mon," etc., by B. St. J. B. Joule, J. P., a pamphlet published 1887 (J. Hey wood, Man- 

 chester). 



