58 A Century of Science 



responsibility. Some doubt has recently been ex- 

 pressed whether Mr. Spencer would admit the force 

 of this argument. It has been urged by Mr. S. H. 

 Wilder, in two able papers published in the " New 

 York Daily Tribune," June 13 and July 4, 1890, 

 that the use of this argument marks a radical 

 divergence on my part from Mr. Spencer's own 

 position. 



It is true that in several passages of " First Prin- 

 ciples " there are statements which either imply or 

 distinctly assert that motion can be transformed 

 into feeling and thought, e. g. : " Those modes of 

 the Unknowable which we call heat, light, chemi- 

 cal affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each 

 other, and into those modes of the Unknowable 

 which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought ; 

 these, in their turns, being directly or indirectly re- 

 transformable into the original shapes ; " l and again, 

 it is said "to be a necessary deduction from the 

 law of correlation that what exists in consciousness 

 under the form of feeling is transformable into 

 an equivalent of mechanical motion," etc. 2 Now, 

 if this, as literally interpreted, be Mr. Spencer's 

 deliberate opinion, I entirely dissent from it. To 

 speak of quantitative equivalence between a unit 



1 First Principles, second edition, 1867, p. 217. 



2 Id. p. 558. 



