198 A Physicist on Evohdion. 



over " is spoken of, and when these processes are associated with 

 " the modification of an organism by its environment," the same 

 parallehsm, without contact, or even approach to contact, is imphed. 

 There is no fusion possible between the two classes of facts — no 

 motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without logical 

 rupture from the one to the other. 



Further, the doctrine of evolution derives man, in his totality, 

 from the interaction of organiwrn and environment through count- 

 less ages past. The human understanding, for example — the faculty 

 which Mr. Spencer has turned so skilfully round upon its own 

 antecedents— is itself a result of the play between organism and 

 environment through cosmic ranges of time. Never surely did pre- 

 Bcription plead so irresistible a claim. But then it comes to pass 

 that, over and above his understanding, there are many other things 

 appertaining to man whose prescriptive rights are quite as strong 

 as that of the understanding itself. It is a result, for example, of 

 the play of organism and environment that sugar is sweet and that 

 aloes are bitter, that the smell of henbane differs from the per- 

 fume of a rose. Such facts of consciousness (for which, by the way, 

 no adequate reason has ever yet been rendered) are quite as old as 

 the understanding itself; and many other things can boast an 

 equally ancient origin. Mr. Spencer at one place refers to that 

 most powerful of passions — the amatory passion — as one which, 

 when it fii'st occurs, is antecedent to all relative experience what- 

 ever ; and we may pass its claim as being at least as ancient and as 

 vahd as that of the understanding itself. Then there are such 

 things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of awe, 

 reverence, wonder — and not alone the sexual love just referred to, 

 but the love of the beautiful, physical, and moral, in nature, poetry, 

 and art. There is also that deep-set feeling which, since the earliest 

 dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all history, incor- 

 porated itself in the religions of the world. You who have escaped 

 from these religions in the high-and-dry light of the understanding 

 may deride them ; but in so doing you deride accidents of form 

 merely, and fail to touch the immovable basis of the religious senti- 

 ment in the emotional nature of man. To yield this sentiment 

 reasonable satisfaction is the problem of problems at the present 

 hour. And grotesque in relation to scientific culture as many of 

 the religions of the world have been and are— dangerous, nay, de- 

 structive, to the dearest privileges of freemen as some of them un- 

 doubtedly have been, and would, if they could, be again — it will be 

 wise to recognize them as the forms of force, mischievous, if per- 

 mitted to intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds 

 no command, but capable of being guided by liberal thought to 

 noble issues in the region of emotion, which is its proper sphere. 

 It is vain to oppose this force with a view to its extirpation. What 



