68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the one abounding fountain of error and deception. It is not 

 merely to be disciplined and corrected, but it is to be eliminated. 

 It is to be hounded off and shouted down. 



It is very clear what all this must end in. The demand made 

 upon us in its literal fullness is impossible and absurd. We can 

 not stand outside ourselves. We can not look with eyes other 

 than our own. We can not think except with the faculties of 

 our own intellectual nature. It is impossible, and, if it were pos- 

 sible, it would be absurd. We are ourselves a part of nature — 

 born in it, and born of it. The analogies which the disciplined 

 intellect sees in external nature are therefore not presumably 

 false, but presumably true, or at the least substantially repre- 

 sentative of the truth. 



But the new veto on anthropocentric thought, although help- 

 less to expel it, is quite competent to cripple and degrade it. It 

 can not exclude our own faculties ; but it may select and favor 

 the lowest, the humblest, the most elementary, the most blunt, 

 the least perceptive. It may silence the highest, the acutest, the 

 most penetrating, the most intuitive, those most in harmony 

 with the highest energies in the world around us. All this the 

 new doctrine may do, and does. 



Accordingly, the very first instance given to us of the new 

 philosophy is a striking illustration of its effects. It fixes the 

 attention on mere outward and external things. It seeks for the 

 first and best explanation of organic beings in the mere mechan- 

 ical effects of their surroundings. The physical forces which 

 act upon them from outside — the water or the air that bathes 

 them — the impacts of ethereal undulations in the form of light, 

 the vibrations of matter in contact with them in the form of 

 heat — these are conceived of as the agencies principally con- 

 cerned. The analogies suggested are of the rudest kind. Old 

 cannon-balls rust in concentric flakes. Rocks weather into such 

 forms as rocking stones.* But the grand illustration is taken 

 from the pebbles of the Chesil beach, f These are to introduce 

 us to the true physical conception of the wonderful phenomena 

 of organic life. May not the unity of the vertebrate skeleton, 

 through an immense variety of creatures, be typified by the 

 roundness and smoothness common to the stones rolled along 

 the southern beaches of England from Devonshire to Wey- 

 mouth ? The diversities of those creatures, again, however 

 multitudinous in character, may they not all be pictured as 

 analogous with the varying sizes into which water sifts and 

 sorts the sizes of rolled stones ? 



But presently we see in another form the work of " natural 



* Page YSS. (" Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxix, p. 60.) 

 f Page 752. (" Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxix, p. 57.) 



