Prof. Le Conte as a Philosopher. 227 



tie affects our idealism, our theism, or our views with regard 

 to the moral problem, as does any other generalization of sci- 

 ence, for example, the law of gravitation. All such general- 

 izations, to be sure, unify experience, and in so far eliminate 

 the possibility of special providence. The evolutionist must 

 therefore indeed say: If there is a God, he is in very much 

 more intimate relation to nature and to man than is supposed 

 in popular anthropomorphic conceptions of deity; if there is a 

 free and immortal soul, none the less, the body, with which 

 the soul is in some mysterious way united, must appear sim- 

 ply as one particular physical fact, having its place in a world 

 of such facts completely unified by the conception of evolu- 

 tion. 



There is, however. Professor Le Conte held, an inner as 

 well as an outer aspect of experience; there are feelings, 

 thoughts, volitions, as well as stocks and stones, matter and 

 motion. No one has ever succeeded, or, he added, ever will 

 succeed, in showing how the material evolves into the mental, 

 how motion in matter — even nervous matter — can be trans- 

 muted into thought. There is an impassable gulf fixed be- 

 tween these two orders of experience.* Has, then, evolution 

 nothing to say with regard to this inner aspect of experience? 

 Yes. When psychology becomes comparative psychology we 

 are able to trace a separate evolutional process in the mental 

 series that is precisely analogous to the evolutional process in 

 the physical series. Thus we are led to believe that "the 

 spirit of man was developed out of the aninia or conscious 

 principle of animals, and that this, again, was developed out 

 of the lower forms of life- force, and this in its turn out of the 

 chemical and physical forces of Nature, and that at a certain 

 stage in this gradual development, viz., with man, it acquired 

 the property of immortality. "f And Professor Le Conte was 

 fond of picturing, iu characteristically striking imagery, the 

 manner in which the evolutional process may be conceived as 



♦"Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought," pp. 290 ff. 

 top. cit., p, 205. 



