A GREAT CONFESSION. 61 



Whatever other value may attach, to an attempt so ambi- 

 tious, it is at least attended with this advantage, that it leads 

 Mr. Herbert Spencer to follow up the path of " further considera- 

 tion " into the phrases and f ormulse of the Darwinian hypothesis. 

 And he does so with memorable results. What he himself 

 always aims at is to obliterate the separating lines between the 

 organic and the inorganic, and to reduce all the phenomena of 

 life to the terms of such purely physical agencies as the me- 

 chanical forces, or as light, heat, and chemical affinity, etc. In 

 this quest he finds the Darwinian phrases in his way. Accord- 

 ingly, although himself the author and inventor of the most 

 popular among them, he turns upon them a fire of most destruc- 

 tive criticism. He allows them to be, or to have been, " con- 

 venient and indeed needful " * in the conduct of discussion, but 

 he condemns them as " liable to mislead us by veiling the actual 

 agencies " in organic evolution. That very objection which has 

 always been made against all phrases involving the idea of 

 creation — that they are metaphorical — is now unsparingly ap- 

 plied to Darwin's own phrase " natural selection." Its " impli- 

 cations " are pronounced to be " misleading." The analogies it 

 points at are indeed definite enough, but unfortunately the 

 " definiteness is of a wrong kind." " The tacitly imi)lied ' na- 

 ture ' which selects, is not an embodied agency analogous to the 

 man who selects artificially." This cuts down to the very root 

 of the famous formula, and to that very element in it which has 

 most widely commended it to popular recognition and accept- 

 ance. But this is not all. Mr. Herbert Spencer goes, if possible, 

 still deeper down, and digs up the last vestige of foundation for 

 the vast but rambling edifice which has been erected on a phrase. 

 The special boast of its worshipers has always been that it 

 represented and embodied that great reform which removed the 

 processes of organic evolution once and forever" from the do- 

 minion of deceptive metaphor, and founded them for the first 

 time on true physical causation. But now Mr. Herbert Spen- 

 cer will have none of this. The whole of this pretension goes 

 by the board. He pronounces upon it this emphatic condem- 

 nation : " The words natural selection do not express a cause 

 in the physical sense." f It is a mere " convenient figure of 

 speech." X 



But even this is not enough to satisfy Mr. Spencer in his 

 destructive criticism. He goes himself into the confessional. 

 He had done what he could to amend Darwin's phrase. He had 

 " sought to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than 

 metaphorical terms," and in this search he was led to " survival 



* Page '749. (" Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxix, p. 55.) f Ibid. 



X Page 750. ("Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxix, p. 55.) 



