8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



master of them that know " ; and will borrow from the other twin 

 luminary of the mediaeval Church, St. Augustine, that most apt of all 

 mottoes for a really " Catholic " philosopher, " The Christian claims 

 as his Master's own possession every broken fragment of truth, wher- 

 ever it may be found." In the firm conviction, then, that in Mr. Spen- 

 cer's works much truth — not in detached fragments merely, but in 

 large, coherent masses — is to be found, the present writer hopes to 

 show how little there is to repudiate, how much to accept and to be 

 sincerely grateful for, in his masterly speculations : 



1. First of all, Mr. Spencer led us in his interesting article* to 

 take a retrospective view of religion, in its origin and history. Nat- 

 urally, he does not approach the question in the old-fashioned way. 

 His purpose is not dogmatic, but analytic. That lovely JSaggada, 

 therefore, or religious story whereby, for babes and philosophers 

 alike, the wonderful genius which constructed the Jewish Scriptures 

 has projected, once for all, upon a plane surface (as it were) a pict- 

 ure of the origin of all things — this our man of science properly 

 passes by ; and he proceeds to inquire how precisely the beginnings of 

 things, and especially of religion, may be conceived. And since, in 

 these days, we have all of us " evolution " upon the brain, it was not 

 to be expected that any other line of thought should be attempted. 

 Indeed, it may be fairly conceded that, amid our modern scientific 

 environment, no other method of inquiry is just at present possible. 

 We belong to our own age. And while other ages have taken grand 

 truths en bloc and have deftly hammered them out into finer shapes 

 for practical use, the special delight and the crowning glory of our 

 own age consist rather in a power of tracking things backward. Hence 

 a hundred books of (so-called) " origins " issue annually from the press. 

 Of course, no origin is ever really described, simply because there is 

 no such thing in nature as " an origin." If there were, at that point 

 all hunt upon the traces of evolution would abruptly come to an end ; 

 whereas, by the usual scientific hypothesis, evolution knows neither 

 beginning nor end. By " origins," therefore, can only be meant arbi- 

 trary points a little way back, marked (as children or jockeys set up a 

 starting-post) for commencing the inquiry. Indeed, it is very easy to 

 imagine some imperturbable savage — say, a Zooloo of ]S"atal or an Eng- 

 lish school-boy — asking the most reprehensible questions as to what 

 happened before the " origin " began. Such a critic would be sure to 

 express a languid wonder, for instance, as to how the primeval star- 

 mist got there ; or he would casually inquire whence the antediluvian 

 thunder-bolt, which introduced vegetable life upon this globe, procured 

 its vegetation ; or he would ask why Mr. Spencer's aboriginal divine, 

 roused from his post-prandial nightmare, should have selected a 

 " ghost," out of the confused kaleidoscope of his dreams, as the recipi- 

 ent of divine honors, l^ay, as was long ago suggested by a much 

 * "Religious Retrospect and Prospect," "Popular Science Monthly," January^ 1884. 



