344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Flourens thouglit lie liad found a triumpliant argument against 

 materialism when lie concluded that the brain was a simple and 

 not a multiple organ, the unity of the brain appearing to him to 

 be the proof and the security of the unity of the self. If his argu- 

 hient had been sound, the spiritual doctrine would to-day have 

 been condemned by its own acknowledgment, for it now seems 

 certain that the brain is not a simple but a composite organ. 



This kind of independence is generally conceded to all the 

 other sciences which are recognized and have had a long existence. 

 Thus, we do not require political economy to establish the prin- 

 ciple of duty, or history to prove the existence of a Providence. 

 There is or there is not a Providence ; but the historian knows 

 nothing about it. There is or there is not a principle of duty ; but 

 the economist, as an economist, has no cognizance of it. "We often 

 even regard as culpable doctrines which make morals intervene 

 in political economy, such as the socialist doctrines which aim to 

 impose devotion and fraternity upon economical transactions. 

 We admit that the law of competition is cruel, but we do not 

 wish as economists to introduce a law of charity to correct it. 

 That is a matter of morals, not of political economy. It is by 

 observing such precise distinctions that political economy has 

 succeeded in constituting itself as a science, This independence 

 is useful not to political economy only, but to morals as well, 

 which has no interest in seeing its peculiar principle confounded 

 with the peculiar principle of the former science, which is mere 

 utility. 

 , The same is the case with history as related to theodicy. 

 Surely, if there is a Providence, it should manifest itself in the 

 series of human events. But no historian of the present, not even 

 the most pious and most Christian, would think of bringing the 

 name and action of God into his history. We explain all histor- 

 ical events by second and profane causes, often also by material 

 or geographical conditions, as when the whole history of England 

 is accounted for by the fact that it is an island. The intervention 

 of gross passions is brought in ; sometimes fortuitous encounters 

 or physical needs are invoked ; as when the invasions of the bar- 

 barians are accounted for by the necessity of their finding food. 

 No historian would say to-day, in a book on the " origins " of 

 France, that God urged the barbarians on, as Salvien did in his 

 "De Gubernatione Dei." One might have religious scruples 

 against pronouncing the name of God in the minor events of his- 

 tory ; against saying, for example, that God desired that the Abbd 

 Dubois should be nominated a cardinal, or that Du Barry should 

 enter the bedchamber of the king. What would such a historian 

 reply to a critic who should object to him : " You never pronounce 

 the name of God ; you never speak of Providence ; your science is 



