Ttie Evolution of Optics. 285 



ABSTRACT OF THE DISCUSSION. 



DR. GEORGE M. GOULD : 



The excellent lecture of my friend Dr. Alleman is so complete that 

 we who follow can find but little to add. I can not let the present 

 opportunity pass, however, without protesting a little against my 

 friend's passive assent to mechanical and materialistic explanations. 



To the belief in evolution I heartily subscribe. But I am also a 

 believer in logic and the laws of thought ; a firm believer in never 

 going into captivity to a popular craze, or Zeitgeist, or disbelieving 

 what I see and know, even though all the Darwins and Spencers and 

 Lubbocks of the world should tell me it is not so. My friend quotes, 

 with apparent consent, the explanation of the origin of the eye as due 

 to certain opaque particles of pigment deposited in certain parts of 

 the skin purely accidentally, is the sous-entendu inference which 

 would arrest and absorb light, and that if this rudimental accidental 

 eye should perchance be attended by an adjacent depression of the 

 skin, these cells would be better protected the protection being 

 again a little matter of pure mechanical chance. Now, so far as the 

 origin of the organ of vision or of any organ is concerned, people are 

 fast beginning to suspect the utterly asinine quality of such explana- 

 tions. If you take up the works of a large class of science-plebifica- 

 tors you will find instances, like the above, of how a little learning 

 may make one mad. I found, in a popular little book of one such, 

 the other day, the amazing, imperturbable, impertinent saying that 

 chemistry had shown that there is no essential difference between the 

 organic and inorganic, and that the sensitiveness of protoplasm ex- 

 plains all biological phenomena. Of course, if one have poise, self- 

 possession, eyes of his own, a logical mind, he soon comes to see the 

 fallacy of the modern popular unscientific science of the day, as illus- 

 trated in this outrageous nonsense. The sad thing is, that many peo- 

 ple take such explanations and the animus of such explanations on 

 trust, and drift into materialism the absurdest of all creeds, as Hux- 

 ley says. Young people should be taught that the covert and assumed 

 mechanicalism of these pseudo-explanations is not only unjustified by 

 good science or by good scientists, but is a crude eighteenth-century 

 infidelity masking in a nineteenth-century science-cloak. I have not 

 the faintest objection to materialism, mechanicalism, or atheism, if the 

 facts of life warrant them or if they are true. The fact is, they are 



