1 92 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART m 



we may suppose that a designing and combining 

 force, external to themselves, crushes them together 

 into a unity. But such a philosophy is liable to be 

 charged with dualism. And not without reason; it 

 is quite as mechanical, in its own way, as the logic of 

 science. Here once more two elements, which as the 

 Germans say "belong together," are made to fall 

 asunder. The material elements or forces, and the 

 law of their combination, are assigned to different 

 quarters. Nature has no tendency in itself towards 

 life ; a Deistic God outside of nature forces His 

 thought of life upon alien materials, as the human 

 sculptor forces the design of his brain upon the mar- 

 ble, which was fused in nature's laboratory without 

 any reference to the needs of artist or artizan. Hence 

 also it is clear why a system of idealism, which tries 

 to show that all things are related together, and esr 

 pecially that design and materials belong to each 

 other, becomes suspected of pantheism. There is 

 undoubtedly a pantheistic strain in it. Are we sure 

 that there is not a pantheistic strain in the truth and 

 nature of things ? 



It is not any form of teleology, but, on the con- 

 trary, the purely and characteristically analytic pro- 

 cedure of science, that we seem to find in Darwin. 

 With him, natural selection is a biological hypothesis. 

 He proposes to account for all the different living 

 species from a few given elements (i) organisms, 

 multitudinous in number but simple in kind, distinct 

 from each other, hostile, competing for the prize of 

 survival; (2) an environment in which life is possible; 

 (3) heredity ; (4) variability. The first three factors 

 sum up in the result (a) struggle ; and all four fac- 



