248 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ra. h 



present day one of the fundamental doctrines of biology. 

 Other instances are at hand, which Prof. Huxley has not 

 cited. For example, Comte condemned as vain and useless 

 all inquiries into the origin of the human race, although, with 

 an inconsistency not unusual with him, he was a warm 

 advocate of that nebular hypothesis which seeks to account 

 for the origin of the solar system. As these two orders of 

 inquiry are philosophically precisely on a level with each 

 other, the former being indeed the one for which we have now 

 the more abundant material, the attempted distinction is proof 

 of the vagueness with which Comte conceived the limits of 

 philosophic inquiry. 1 But what shall we say when we find 

 him asserting the impossibility of a science of stellar astro- 

 nomy ? He tells us that we have not even the first datum 

 for such a science, and in all probability shall never obtain 

 that datum. Until we have ascertained the distance, and cal- 



1 It is interesting to note that disciples of Comte are still to be found, so 

 incapable of realizing that the arbitrary dicta of their master did not consti- 

 tute the final utterance of human science, that they oppose the Doctrine of 

 Evolution upon no other ground than the assumed incapacity of the human 

 mind for dealing with origins ! In a discussion held in New York some two 

 years since on the subject of " Darwinism," a certain disciple of Comte 

 observed that it was useless for man to pretend to know how he originated, 

 when he could not ascertain the origin of anything ! Nevertheless, since we 

 do find ourselves able to point out the origin of many things, from a myth 

 or a social observance to a freshet or the fall of an avalanche, it appears 

 that our Comtist was playing upon words after the scholastic or Platonic 

 fashion, and confounding proximate "origin," which is a subject for science, 

 with ultimate "origin," which must be relegated to metaphysics. Had 

 Comte carried out this principle consistently, he would never have written 

 his Philosophy of History, since the explanation of the social phenomena 

 existing in any age is the determination of their mode of origin from the 

 social phenomena of the preceding age. But if with the aid of historic 

 data we may go back three thousand years, there is no reason why, with the 

 aid of geologic, astronomic, and chemical data, we should not go back, if 

 necessary, a thousand billion years, and investigate the origin of the earth 

 from the solar nebula, or the origin of life from aggregations of colloidal 

 matter. In either case, the problem is one, not of ultimate origin, but of 

 evolution. In neither case do we seek to account for the origin of the matter 

 and motion which constitute the phenomenal universe, but only to discover 

 a formula -which shall express the common characteristics of certain observed 

 orinfelred redistributions of the matter and motion already existing. The 

 latter attempt is as clearly within the limits of a scientific philosophy as the 

 former is clearly beyond them. 



