466 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



combinations in endless series. There was groaning enough to be sure, 

 by the way, but who can tell us, as a sober fact, that this groaning was 

 an expression of Nature's effort to produce man, or that Nature is capa- 

 ble of any " effort," as we understand the word ? Let us not mix up 

 our poetry with our science. If we wish to think of Nature as groan- 

 ing and travailing, we are at liberty to do so ; but let us remember that 

 in indulging such a conception we are poetizing, not adhering to scien- 

 tific facts. " We are not dealing," says our author, " with vague gen- 

 eral notions of development, but with the scientific Darwinian theory." 

 All right, belay ! Keep the sails just in that trim, and we shall get to 

 some port of scientific truth, provided always the strict Darwinian 

 theory is itself based on truth. As far as I am aware, Darwin himself 

 had not caught sight, up to the time of his death, of any groaning and 

 travailing of Nature over the work of producing the human soul. 



There are a great many phrases and suggestions throughout the 

 volume before us, besides those already noted, which might be quoted 

 as showing the intention of the writer to make a kind of Darwinian 

 philosophy d Vusage des families. My space, however, is so nearly 

 exhausted that I must pass over all but one of these. On page 117 

 we read that *'the greatest philosopher of modern times, the master 

 and teacher of all who shall study the process of evolution for many 

 a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is not the product of a 

 collocation of material particles, but is, in the deepest sense, a divine 

 effluence." This I do not hesitate to say is a misrepresentation, invol- 

 untary, no doubt, of Mr. Spencer's position. If there is any mean- 

 ing in language, it makes Mr. Spencer ascribe a special divinity to 

 ;mind. Mr. Spencer, however, does nothing of the kind ; he holds that 

 there is one unknowable, unconditioned being, and that this manifests 

 itself in the two conditioned forms of mind and matter. The mate- 

 rial particles, therefore, can claim, according to his system of thought, 

 just as much divinity of origin as the mind or soul itself. The word 

 "divine," moreover, is not a word to the use of which Mr. Spencer is 

 prone, and I could not readily turn to any passage in which he em- 

 ploys it to express any idea of his own. He speaks in his recent arti- 

 cles of " an Infinite and Eternal Energy " ; but of the mind, in par- 

 ticular, as " a divine effluence," he does not speak. To say, therefore, 

 so positively that Mr. Spencer regards the mind as " in the deepest 

 sense a divine effluence," and that in distinction to the body, is 

 not fair, to say the least, to the distinguished philosopher to the 

 exposition of whose views Mr. Fiske has devoted his own most 

 serious labors. 



The conclusion of the whole matter appears to be this, that there is 

 nothing to be gained by trying to read old theology into new science. 

 It may be, as Mr. Fiske affirms, that the foundations of Christian the- 

 ology have not been shaken — no one needs to be dogmatic on that 

 point — but, as theology is a matter of revelation and science a matter 



