94 Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. 



the requisite data, and which must therefore be regarded as 

 ultimate for each individual, it is, nevertheless, open to us 

 to inquire into the emotional antecedents of this organized 

 moral sense as indicated in ancestral types of physical life. 

 The inquiry will result in the conviction that the moral 

 sense is not ultimate, but derivative, and that it has been 

 built up out of slowly organized experiences of pleasures 

 and pains." 



Says Dr. Edmund Montgomery, learned in all the schools 

 of philosophic thought : " Philosophy, after twenty-four 

 centuries of most diversified trials, had failed to discover 

 the ways of knowledge. In no manner could it be ade- 

 quately extracted from reason, and just as little could it be 

 fully derived from the senses. Nor had any compromise at 

 all succeeded. Nativism and empiricism remained funda- 

 mentally irreconcilable. Suddenly, however, light began to 

 pierce the hitherto immovable darkness. It was Mr. Her- 

 bert Spencer who caught one of those rare revealing glimpses 

 that initiate a new epoch in the history of thought. He 

 saw that the evolution hypothesis furnishes a solution of 

 the controversy between the disciples of Locke and Kant. 

 To us younger thinkers, into whose serious meditations 

 Darwinism entered from the beginning as a potent solvent 

 of many an ancient mystery, this reconciliation of trans- 

 cendentalism and experientialism may have consistently 

 presented itself as an evident corollary from the laws of 

 heredity. But what an achievement for a solitary thinker, 

 aided by no other light than the penetration of his own 

 genius, before Darwinism was current, to discover this 

 deeply hidden secret of nature, which with one stroke dis- 

 closed the true relation of innate and acquired faculties, an 

 enigma over which so many generations of philosophers had 

 pondered in vain ! " 



Du Bois-Reymond disputes the priority of this foreshadow- 

 ing insight. In his lecture on The Physiology of Exercise he 

 says : " With Mr. Herbert Spencer meeting me in the same 

 thought, which I believe, however, I have more sharply 

 grasped, I deduced on a former occasion how, in such trans- 

 missibility of educationally derived aptitude, possibly lies 

 the reconciliation of the great antithesis of the theory of 

 knowledge of the empirical and the innate views." 



I am not able to judge as to the justice of Du Bois-Rey- 

 mond's claim, but evidently he had no clear conception of 

 the subject such as alone could have enabled him to make 



