90 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



two or three immediately following ours, with which 

 alone science and philosophy, on their practical sides, are 

 concerned. There are, indeed, many and strong reasons 

 to conclude, even on the principles of Herbert Spencer's 

 own philosophy, that the organs which have reference 

 to the continuance of the species will never become 

 rudimentary through disuse, whatever others have become 

 or may yet become so in the course of man's strange 

 metamorphoses. There is every reason to think that the 

 instincts relating severally to the preservation of the indi- 

 vidual and of the species, as they are the first and strongest, 

 as they are at the bottom of the universal life, so they 

 will continue in nearly undiminished force to the end of 

 man's career. M.an will remain an animal with appetites 

 and desires, as well as with affections and a conscience, 

 and the former fact must be accepted and made the best 

 of by the mass of men who can accept it, as well as by 

 economists and philosophers who so much deplore it. 

 Any reduction of the sensual side of our nature that is 

 possible or desirable, must be looked for in a different 

 direction from that indicated by Spencer, or Mill, or 

 Schopenhauer. Meantime, the fact itself of the war 

 between the flesh and the spirit, between the body and 

 the soul, is not without its utility. It is a part of our 

 probation, which disciplines the character like all proba- 

 tion, as it has its wider and deeper uses in the aims and 

 total economy of Nature, even in the promotion and 

 spread of civilization, according to Spencer himself. But 

 so much at least is certain : that it will long continue, in 

 spite of the prescriptions of all the philosophers from 

 Buddha to Schopenhauer, and of all political economists 

 from Malthus to Mill, to cure or to mitigate it. And it 

 will continue notwithstanding the promises of evolution, 

 which, even under the most favourable circumstances, 



