SCIENCE AND ITS ACCUSERS. 369 



whole it seems a more natural, and indeed beneficial arrangement, 

 that the " strong and clever " should dominate the weak and stu- 

 pid, than that the weak and stupid should dominate the strong 

 and clever. We doubt whether Nature will wait for the approval 

 of the Darwinian or of any one else before giving, as a general 

 thing, the race to the swift, the battle to the strong, and wages to 

 the man who can earn them. 



The Darwinian is accused by the Belgian philosopher of hold- 

 ing that " charity and pretended justice interfere very wrongly " 

 when they seek to prevent stronger races and individuals from 

 usurping the place of weaker ones. The Darwinian takes up no 

 such absurd position. He is an observer of nature, we can not 

 too often repeat, and not a lawgiver. As an observer of nature 

 he perceives that physical strength divorced from intellectual 

 strength is ineffectual, and, in the struggle for life, hardly to be 

 distinguished from weakness. He observes further that intellect- 

 ual acuteness divorced from moral sentiment overreaches itself, 

 and becomes a kind of stupidity. From multiplied observations 

 of this nature he forms a truer idea, probably, than any mere 

 a priori reasoner as to the forces which rule the world now, and 

 as to those which will be chiefly dominant in the future. . He is 

 not opposed to any charity that, in his judgment, tends to make 

 men better ; but he could not be a man of any sense if he were 

 not opposed to much that calls itself charity. As to justice, he 

 sees in it the exjjression of a social force, which has its origin in 

 the fact that society is an organism, the general life of which 

 reacts upon any abnormal manifestations in special members or 

 organs. Far from its being true that justice " stands in the way 

 of the application of natural laws," justice may be said to be a 

 striking illustration of the great natural law or axiom that the 

 whole is greater than the part. To abandon justice would be to 

 place all social order at the mercy of individual caprice ; in other 

 words, it would be the suicide of society. 



We are next treated to an imaginative sketch of what the 

 world would be like in the absence of all religion : " There is no 

 God and no immutable type of truth and justice." Just how the 

 persuasion that there is no God is going to take possession of 

 mankind is not explained, whether through the utter breaking 

 down of the evidence upon which the doctrine of a Divine Being 

 has heretofore been believed in, or through some further progress 

 of philosophical speculation. One is tempted to ask, however, 

 what the critic really wants. Are there certain doctrines which 

 he wishes to shield from criticism ? If so, why not say so dis- 

 tinctly ? Why not say in plain terms that mankind has, in some 

 way difficult to explain, got possession of certain opinions or con- 

 victions of inestimable value, but which can no more bear exami- 



VOL. XXXIV. — 24 



