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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



wife, the gentle " Aliette." The latter 

 had left him one child, a daughter; and 

 retiring to the country for a few days 

 to visit this child, he learns from an 

 old servant, then on her death-bed, the 

 whole story of the poisoning of his first 

 wife by the woman whom he had made 

 his second. He learned, also, that the 

 thing had been so managed as to make 

 him appear, in the eyes of the dying 

 Aliette, an accomplice in the horrible 

 crime. Conscience-stricken and over- 

 whelmed with remorse, he rushes to 

 Paris and succeeds in banishing the 

 murderess from society and from the 

 country. He himself shortly after dies 

 broken-hearted, but not before he has 

 abandoned his worldly philosophy and 

 embraced the religion of " Aliette " — 

 Roman Catholicism. Such is the nar- 

 rative as constructed from the inner 

 consciousness of M. Octave Feuillet. 

 The moral is obvious — that the Ro- 

 man Catholic faith is the only bulwark 

 against immorality and the disintegra- 

 tion of society. Substantially the same 

 lesson is that which Air. Mullock has 

 been trying to teach, and which Mr. W. 

 S. Lilly enforces in his recent "Fort- 

 nightly Review " article on " Material- 

 ism and Morality." 



Now, it strikes ns that all this mo- 

 mentarily fashionable writing is con- 

 ceived in a very idle strain. What the 

 world wants is not a succession of jere- 

 miads over the effects likely to be pro- 

 duced by the prevalence of certain 

 opinions, but a demonstration of the 

 truth in regard to those opinions. If 

 the theories of Darwin are false, let 

 their falsity be exhibited. If Mr. Spen- 

 cer's wider scheme of evolution is illu- 

 sive, let its illusiveness be proved. 

 The press is as free for the opponents 

 of these great thinkers as for their ad- 

 herents. The platform is open to them; 

 the pulpit as yet is theirs almost exclu- 

 sively. They can have nothing, there- 

 fore, to complain of as to the condi- 

 tions of the controversy ; and yet in all 

 their utterances we may detect a cer- 

 tain note of dissatisfaction, as if, some- 



how or other, the verdict were unjustly 

 going against them. The verdict, how- 

 ever, will follow the evidence; and the 

 world will not accept as evidence against 

 a scientific theory the mere assertion 

 that its moral effects are injurious. 

 That assertion itself would have to be 

 proved far otherwise than through the 

 easily constructed mechanism of a novel 

 with its puppet figures moving hither 

 and thither at the will of the manipula- 

 tor. To the earnest mind of the old 

 Roman poet Lucretius the free, un- 

 trammeled study of Nature was the 

 chief preservative against evil thoughts 

 and practices ; and how easy it would 

 be for a skillful writer, adopting this 

 hypothesis, to write a novel in which 

 all the conditions and consequences of 

 M. Feuillet's narrative would be re- 

 versed ! No, there is no argument in 

 this kind of thing. Evolution, as a 

 system of thought, has not gained 

 ground by the aid of the novelist, and 

 it is not going to succumb to a novel- 

 ist's attacks. It has gained ground be- 

 cause it has explained many things pre- 

 viously inexplicable and has shed light 

 into every department of Nature and of 

 thought. It can not, therefore, be dis- 

 possessed of the ground it has gained 

 till a stronger than it appears, some 

 view or theory that will explain more 

 things than it can explain, and shed 

 more light upon the problems of exist- 

 ence than it can shed. The whole 

 question lies here in a nutshell. The 

 thinking world is not fatally or irrevo- 

 cably bound to the formula) of Darwin 

 and Spencer; it adheres to them only 

 for the service they render, and is pre- 

 pared to lay them aside so soon as any 

 superior generalizations are brought 

 forward. 



Supposing, however, that we admit 

 that the moral results of the introduc- 

 tion of the new philosophy are not satis- 

 factory ; supposing it to be true that 

 men, in their new-found liberty from 

 certain external sanctions, are showing 

 a great want of self-control and an in- 

 difference to all moral aims — what are 



