150 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A COUNTER CRITICISM. 



By HEKBEET SPENCER. 



WHILE I do not concur in sundry of the statements and 

 conclusions contained in the article entitled "A Great 

 Confession/' contributed by the Duke of Argyll to the last num- 

 ber of this Review,* yet I am obliged to him for having raised 

 afresh the question discussed in it. Though the injunction 

 " Rest and be thankful," is one for which in many spheres much 

 may be said — especially in the political, where undue restless- 

 ness is proving very mischievous — yet rest and be thankful is an 

 injunction out of place in science. Unhappily, while politicians 

 have not duly regarded it, it appears to have been taken to heart 

 too much by naturalists ; in so far, at least, as concerns the ques- 

 tion of the origin of species. 



The new biological othodoxy behaves just as the old biologi- 

 cal orthodoxy did. In the days before Darwin, those who occu- 

 pied themselves with the phenomena of life passed by with 

 unobservant eyes the multitudinous facts which point to an evo- 

 lutionary origin for plants and animals ; and they turned deaf 

 ears to those who insisted upon the significance of these facts. 

 Now that they have come to believe in this evolutionary origin, 

 and have at the same time accepted the hypothesis that natural 

 selection has been the sole cause of the evolution, they are simi- 

 larly unobservant of the multitudinous facts which can not ra- 

 tionally be ascribed to that cause ; and turn deaf ears to those 

 who would draw their attention to them. The attitude is the 

 same ; it is only the creed which has changed. 



But, as above implied, though the protest of the Duke of 

 Argyll against this attitude is quite justifiable, it seems to me 

 that many of his statements cannot be sustained. Some of these 

 concern me personally, and others are of impersonal concern. I 

 propose to deal with them in the order in which they occur. 



On page 144 f the Duke of Argyll quotes me as omitting " for 

 the present any consideration of a factor which may be distin- 

 guished as primordial " ; and he represents me as implying by 

 this 'Hhat Darwin's ultimate conception of some primordial 

 * breathing of the breath of life ' is a conception which can only 

 be omitted 'for the present.' Even had there been no other 

 obvious interpretation, it would have been a somewhat rash as- 

 sumption that this was my meaning when referring to an omit- 



* See "Popular Science Monthly" for May, 1888, 

 f " Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxxiii, p. 67. 



