582 APPENDIX. 



critic, after quoting the formula of Evolution, says: — " This 

 may he all true, hut it seems at hest rather the blank form for 

 a universe than anything corresponding to the actual world 

 about us." On which the comment may be that one who had 

 studied celestial mechanics as much as the reviewer has studied 

 the general course of transformations, might similarly have 

 remarked that the formula — " bodies attract one another di- 

 rectly as their masses and inversely as the squares of their 

 distances," was at best but a blank form for solar systems and 

 sidereal clusters. With this parenthetical comment I pass 

 to the fact above hinted, that Mr. Matthew Arnold obviously 

 coincides with the reviewer's estimate of the formula. In 

 Chapter V. of his work God and the Bible, when preparing 

 the way for a criticism on German theologians as losing them- 

 selves in words, he quotes a sa} T ing from Homer. This he in- 

 troduces by remarking that it " is not at all a grand one. We 

 are almost ashamed to quote it to readers who may have come 

 fresh from the last number of the North American Review, 

 and from the great sentence there quoted as summing up Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution: — ' Evolution is &c/ 

 Homer's poor little saying comes not in such formidable shape. 

 It is only this: — Wide is the range of words! words may make 

 this ivay or that way." And then he proceeds with his re- 

 flections upon German logomachies. All of which makes it 

 manifest that, going out of his way, as he does, to quote this 

 formula from the North Anwrican Review, he intends tacitly 

 to indicate his agreement in the reviewer's estimate of it. 



That these two men of letters, like the two mathematicians, 

 are unable to frame ideas answering to the words in which 

 evolution at large is expressed, seems manifest. In all four 

 the verbal symbols used call up either no images, or images 

 of the vaguest kinds, which, grouped together, form but the 

 most shadowy thoughts. If, now, we ask what is the common 

 trait in the education and pursuits of all four, we see it to be 

 lack of familiarity with those complex processes of change 

 which the concrete sciences bring before us. The men of 

 letters, in their early days dieted on grammars and lexicons, 

 and in their later days occupied with belles lettres, Biography, 

 and a History made up mainly of personalities, are by their 

 education and course of life left almost without scientific ideas 

 of a definite kind. The universality of physical causation — 

 the interpretation of all things in terms of a never-ceasing 

 redistribution of matter and motion, is naturally to them an 



