NOVEMBEK 2, 1883.] 



SCIENCE. 



603 



Were not tliis confusion of statement typi- 

 cal, we shoulil not insist upon it. But through- 

 out the book one finds, if not always such 

 flat contradictions, still a certain slipperiness 

 and uncertainty about nearly evor\' general 

 doctrine that the author chooses to express, 

 on all but the most concrete matters of fact. 

 If he says a thing, you know not when or 

 how soon he will withdraw it, wholly, or bit by 

 bit. He thinks, for instance, that the belief 

 in the vanity of all things, or pessimism, is a 

 ' malady of self-consciousness,' a sign of men- 

 tal decay ;' but he adds, that the ' central truth 

 of all religions ' is a conviction of the utter van- 

 ity of all things, and himself seems in great 

 measure a pessimist. Pure Christianity teaches 

 the noblest virtues, — those, for instance, of 

 self-sucrifiee ; but the only test of virtue is 

 the experience and common sense of mankind ; 

 and these teach us that pure Christianity, put 

 in practice without stint, would render societj- 

 impossible, since society' depends upon con- 

 flicts and selfishness even now. The noblest 

 virtues are therefore those that are rejected 

 when tlie only test of %'irtue is applied. And 

 so we are led on. 



The same tendency appears in the very style 

 of the book. When the author has a definite 

 opinion, he likes to conceal it from you under 

 manifold cloaks of language. He dislikes 

 Spencer's doctrine, that organic evolution is 

 ' progressive adaptation to the environment.' 

 This, he says, is too vague and one-sided a 

 statement. His own statement avoids aU 

 vagueness b}- saying that (p. 137) "an organ- 

 ism and its medium, when they have reached 

 a certain fitness of one to the other and hit 

 upon the happy concurrence of conditions, 

 combine, so to speak, to make a new start, 

 the initial step of a more complex organism ; " 

 that is, the organism evolves by evolution, and 

 the evolution is caused by just those condi- 

 tions that bring it to pass. Our author ex- 

 pands this thought, which he intends as an 

 important complement to the doctrine of natu- 

 ral selection, over quite a number of pages. 

 But that, in the famous words of the Duchess 

 in Alice's Adventures, is not half so bad as 

 our author can do if he tries. Religion he de- 

 fines (on p. 208) as ' the deep fusing feeling 

 of human solidarity.' Certain beliefs com- 

 mon among men arc described (p. 198) as 

 " the imaginative interpretations of an instinct 

 springing into consciousness from the upward 

 striving impulse which, immanent in man as 

 part and crown of organic nature, ever throbs 

 in his heart as the inspiration of hope." Thus 

 our author knows of an instinct that springs 



from an impulse, which impulse is immanent 

 in a crown, and at the same time strives up- 

 wards, and throbs in a heart as an inspiration. 

 All this means, not mere carelessness of style, 

 but a more serious error, else we should not 

 have mentioned it here. It means haziness 

 of thought ; it means that our author can 

 write many words in succession without know- 

 ing, in any adequate way, what tliey mean. 



Our author's fashion of discussing things of 

 which he is ignorant receives a crowning illus- 

 tration in his last chapter ; and, remote as 

 the topic is from the main subject, we must 

 mention this illustration here, because such 

 matters are important to an3- student who is 

 seeking a trustworthy guide. In this last 

 chapter Dr. Jlaudsle.y has much to say of 

 certain modern tendencies that he considers 

 unhealthy. Of these, one is the excessive 

 display of grief for the dead, which he thinks 

 is growing among us. " Nobody of the least 

 note dies but we are told with clamor of grief 

 . . . that the most amiable . . . the best of 

 men has been taken from us." But nobod\-, 

 s.iys Dr. Maudsley, is worth all this. " Coin- 

 trast this modern incontinence of emotion 

 with the calm, chaste, and manlj- simplicity 

 of Homer ; as we observe it, for example, 

 in his description of the death of Achilles." 

 Then follows a page of blank verse, which, of 

 course, is offered to us as somebody's trans- 

 lation of the cited passage from Homer. Now, 

 Dr. Maudsley was not obliged to sa}^ an^- thing 

 about Homer, much less to quote him. He 

 has gone out of his way to tell us, with an air 

 of easily carried learning, what ' we see ' in 

 Homer. When a man thus pretends to quote 

 the father of song, whose poems arc at hand 

 in all sorts of translations in any library, and 

 to (juote him especially for the sake of illus- 

 trating a certain important point, a reader 

 supposes, of course, that the quotation will at 

 least be a fairly accurate expression of some- 

 thing that Homer said. But, in fact, nothing 

 resembling the passage quoted is to be found 

 anywhere in Homer. These verses are not 

 even so much as a remote imitation of any 

 thing Homeric that l)cars upon Achilles. We 

 ourselves are unable to identify them, but their 

 tone is distinctly very modern ; and we have 

 little doubt that their author is now alive, or 

 has very recently died.' But this is not all. 

 To complete the blunder, Dr. Maudsley, in 



' 'A classical frioiid, to whom wc Fubmlttril Dr. Mnudslry's 

 quotntion after we hud written the above, assures us that the pas- 

 sage nearest to tliis one in ancient poetry is the deaUi of Achilles 

 as described in Quintus Smjrnaeus III., and that Quinlus's de- 

 scription it«elf diUers in so many important points from that of 

 l>r. Maudslcy's Homer as to make the latter not even a fairimila- 

 lion of any ancient model. 



