32 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART i 



other reasons for making the appeal to biology ; it 

 stands for this in Comte. And therefore this appeal 

 in Comte is not a scientific statement of fact, but rather 

 a rudimentary and defective form of the moral judg- 

 ment, valuable, no doubt, but valuable upon the 

 principle which makes the one-eyed man king of the 

 blind. 



NOTE A. On " Natural Law in ike Spiritual World " 



[The appeal to biology has been traced in a different 

 quarter, in the lamented Henry Drummond's first and 

 brilliantly successful book, Natural Law in the Spiritual 

 World. This book was criticised in a pamphlet under 

 the name of Biological Religion, by one less widely 

 known, but not less deeply loved in life or lamented 

 in death, Dr. Finlayson. 1 Drummond of course appeals 

 to the sharp modern doctrine of biogenesis, with its 

 denial of all forms of spontaneous generation or xeno- 

 genesis ; with its assertion of life from life, and like 

 from like. It is certainly curious that an age which 

 has taken stock so heavily in evolutionary speculations 

 and the very men of science who were pioneers in 

 evolution and popularisers of its results should also 

 have reaffirmed, on the ground of fresh experiments, a 

 view of life closely associated with creationist doctrines. 

 Drummond, for one, appeals in his early work to bio- 

 logical science, because he is a theological creationist. 

 His analogy is somewhat wire-drawn ; his biology is of 

 the simplest, rarely going beyond the single point 

 named ; when it does go further, as in discussing 

 Degeneration or Parasitism, still extremely simple, 

 and not very consistent with the foundation doctrine 



1 The late minister of Rusholme Congregational Church, Manchester. 



