682 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



that I can check my sight of you by touching you, the retort would 

 be that I am equally transgressing the limits of fact ; for what I am 

 really conscious of is, not that you are there, but that the nerves of 

 my hand have undergone a change. All we hear, and see, and touch, 

 and taste, and smell, are, it would be urged, mere variations of our 

 own condition, beyond which, even to the extent of a hair's breadth, 

 we cannot go. That any thing answering to our impressions exists 

 outside of ourselves is not a fact^ but an inference^ to which all valid- 

 ity would be denied by an idealist like Berkeley, or by a skeptic like 

 Hume. Mr. Spencer takes another line. With him, as with the un- 

 educated man, there is no doubt or question as to the existence of an 

 external world. But he differs from the uneducated, who think that 

 the world really is what consciousness represents it to be. Our states 

 of consciousness are mere symbols of an outside entity which produces 

 them and determines the order of their succession, but the real nature 

 of which we can never know.^ In fact, the whole process of evolution 

 is the manifestation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the intel- 

 lect of man. As little in our day as in the days of Job, can man, by 

 searching, find this Power out. Considered fundamentally, it is by 

 the operation of an insoluble mystery that life is evolved, species 

 differentiated, and mind unfolded from their prepotent elements in 

 the immeasurable past. There is, you will observe, no very rank 

 materialism here. 



The strength of the doctrine of evolution consists, not in an experi- 

 mental demonstration (for the subject is hardly accessible to this mode 

 of proof), but in its general harmony with the method of Nature as 

 hitherto known. From contrast, moreover, it derives enormous rela- 

 tive strength. On the one side we have a theory (if it could with any 

 propriety be so called) derived, as were the theories referred to at the 

 beginning of this address, not from the study of iN'ature, but from the 

 observation of men — a theory which converts the Power whose gar- 

 ment is seen in the visible universe into an Artificer, fashioned after 

 the human model, and acting by broken efforts as man is seen to act. 

 On the other side we have the conception that all we see around us, 



^ In a paper, at once popular and profound, entitled " Recent Progress in the Theory 

 of Yision," contained in the volume of lectures by Helmholtz published by Longmans, 

 this symbolism of our states of consciousness is also dwelt upon. The impressions of 

 sense are the mere signs of external things. In this paper Helmholtz contends strongly 

 against the view that the consciousness of space is inborn ; and he evidently doubts the 

 power of the chick to pick up grains of corn without some preliminary lessons. On this 

 point, he says, further experiments are needed. Such experiments have been since made 

 by Mr. Spalding, aided, I believe, in some of his observations by the accomplished and 

 deeply-lamented Lady Amberley ; and they seem to prove conclusively that the chick 

 does not need a single moment's tuition to teach it to stand, run, govern the muscles of 

 its eyes, and peck. Helmholtz, however, is contending against the notion of preestab- 

 lished harmony : and I am not aware of his views as to the organization of experiences of 

 race or breed. 



