32 THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : 



Biology and Zoology Evolution included can only be " explained " by 

 their dependence on self-hood both in plants and animals ; that Political 

 Economy and the Social Sciences (which deal with men as individual 

 selves) must, to be understood aright, be studied in the light of those 

 great ethical principles and enthusiasms, which to a certain extent over- 

 ride the individual self; and that, finally, Ethics, or the study of moral 

 problems, is only comprehensible when the student has become aware of a 

 region beyond Ethics, into which questions of morality and immorality, 

 of right and wrong, do not and cannot enter? 



Of this reversal of the ordinary scientific method Ruskin has given a 

 great and signal instance in his treatment of Political Economy ; it re- 

 mains, perhaps, for others to follow his example in the other branches 

 of Science. ' 



With regard to the absolute datum question we have seen that Science 

 has two alternatives before it either to be merely intellectual and to seek 

 for its start-point in some quite external (and imaginary) thing like the 

 Atom, or to be divine and to seek for its absolute in the innermost re- 

 cesses of humanity. We have two similar alternatives in the doctrine of 

 Evolution, which looks either to one end of the scale or the other for its 

 interpretation either to the amoeba or to the man to something it 

 knows next to nothing of, or to that which it knows most of. Goethe, 

 when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, conceived the idea of leaf meta- 

 morphosis, which he afterwards enunciated in the now accepted doctrine 

 that all parts of a plant seed-vessel, pistil, stamens, petals, sepals, stalk, 

 &c. may be regarded as modifications of a leaf or leaves. In this veiw 

 the distinctions between the parts are effaced, and we have only one part 

 instead of many but the question is " what is that part ? " It is of course 

 arbitrary to call it a leaf, for since it is continually varying it is at one time 

 a leaf, at another a stalk, and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth. What 

 then is it ? For the moment we are baffled. 



So with the doctrine of Evolution as applied to the whole organic 

 kingdom up to man. Like the doctrine of leaf-metamorphosis it obliter- 

 ates distinctions. Geoffrey St. Hilaire proposed to show the French Acad- 

 emy that a Cephalopod could be assimilated to a Vertebrate by supposing 

 the latter bent backwards and walking on its hands and feet. There is a 

 continuous variation from the mollusc to the man all the lines of dis- 



1 Thus the study of Geometry would be primarily an education of the eye, and the mind's 

 eye, to the perception of geometrical forms and facts, the judgment of angles, &c. and 

 secondarily only a process of deductive reasoning a body of empirical knowledge 

 strengthened and tied together by bands of logic ; the study of Natural History would be 

 primarily an affectionate intimacy with the habits of animals and plants, and classification 

 would be treated as a secondary matter and as a help to the former ; Physiology would 

 be studied in the first place by the method of Health the pure body becoming grad- 

 ually transparent with all its organs to the eye of the mind and dissection would be used 

 to corroborate and correct the results thus attained ; and so on. 



