A GREAT CONFESSION. 67 



win only, who had at least no dogma on this subject to bind him 

 — it is Mr. Spencer himself who continually breaks down in the 

 attempt, far more completely than he now admits he failed in 

 the " survival of the fittest/' The human element involved or 

 suggested in the idea of fitness is nothing to the humanity, or 

 " anthropocentricity," of the expressions into which he slips, 

 perhaps unawares, when he is face to face with those requisites 

 of language which arise out of the facts of observation, and out 

 of the necessities of thought. Thus in the midst of an elaborate 

 attempt to explain in purely chemical and physical aspects the 

 composition and attributes of protein, or protoplasm — assumed 

 to be the fundamental substance of all organisms — he breaks out 

 into the following sentence, charged with teleological phrase- 

 ology : " So that while the composite atoms of which organic 

 tissues are built up possess that low molecular mobility fitting 

 them for plastic purposes, it results from the extreme molecular 

 mobilities of their constituents, that the waste products of vital 

 activity escape as fast as they are formed." * Now, what is the 

 value of sentences such as this ? As an explanation, or any- 

 thing approaching to an explanation, of the wondrous alchemies 

 of organic life, and especially of the digestive processes — of the 

 appropriation, assimilation, and elimination of external matter 

 — this sentence is poor and thin indeed. But whatever strength 

 it has is entirely due to its recognition of the fact that not only 

 the organism as a whole, but the very materials of which it is 

 " built up," are all essentially adaptations which are in the 

 nature of "purposes," being indeed contrivances of the most 

 complicated kinds for the discharge of functions of a very spe- 

 cial character. 



What, then, is the great reform which these new papers are 

 intended to effect in our conception of the factors in organic 

 evolution ? The popular and accepted idea of th^m has been 

 largely founded on the language of Darwin and of Mr. Spencer 

 himself. But that language has been deceptive. The needed 

 reform consists in the more complete expulsion of every element 

 that is " anthropocentric." In order to interpret Nature we 

 must stand outside ourselves. The eye with which we look 

 upon her phenomena must be cut off, as it were, from the brain 

 behind it. The correspondences which we see, or think we see, 

 between the system of things outside of us and the system of 

 things inside of us, which is the structure of our own intelli- 

 gence, are to be discarded. This is the luminous conception of 

 the new philosophy. Science has hitherto been conceived to be 

 the reduction of natural phenomena to an intelligible order. 

 But the reformed idea is now to be that our own intelligence is 



* " Principles of Biology," vol. i, p. 24. 



