24 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



would be bound to copy nature more closely, and 

 sacrifice the good of the individual to the good of 

 the species. This is 'the inevitable, and some- 

 times the avowed, tendency of natural science, 

 as distinguished from morals and religion. For 

 morals and religion set an increasingly high value 

 on the individual personal life, while the movement 

 of what we call " nature " seems to be towards the 

 good of the whole at the cost of the parts. This 

 explains the fact of the strange alliance of the 

 modern science of nature with pantheism, and 

 the reappearance in Professor Weismann's theory 

 of what we are familiar with in Spinoza. The 

 individual life, we are told, is nothing but the 

 mortal vehicle of the immortal germ-plasm. " Life," 

 says Professor Weismann, "is continuous, and 

 not periodically interrupted ; ever since its first 

 appearance upon the earth in the lowest organisms 

 it has continued without break ; the forms in which 

 it is manifested have alone undergone change." 

 So. Spinoza speaks of the individual as " a mode of 

 the universal substance," and individual lives as 

 waves in the sea, "shapes which perpetually die 

 away and have no being." Here pantheism and 

 materialism are at one. For it makes no difference 

 whether it is an eternal "matter" of which the 

 individual is the transient shape, or an eternal 

 " spirit " of which for a little while he is the organ. 

 We do not by this mean to imply that natural 



