SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VIII. No. 208. 



homogeneity, even if it were present at the 

 beginning. 



There are homogeneous solutions of sugar 

 and homogeneous sohitions of brine, and 

 no one without experience of similar facts 

 has any way to tell what potencies are 

 latent in a solution except by finding out. 

 While we find no reason to suppose a 

 homogeneous saturated solution has any 

 power to initiate anything, we cannot 

 think of it as inert. It is, as it were, alive 

 with energj', and its inactivity is due to the 

 exact balancing of all its powers. It is pre- 

 pared to spring into energetic action the in- 

 stant the bonds that chain it are broken by 

 something that disturbs the balance and 

 sets its forces free. 



So, too, the primajval homogeneity of the 

 evolutionist is imagined as instinct with 

 world-producing energy, ready to evolve 

 stars and systems and worlds and oceans 

 and continents and living things and men, 

 and all that is ' in the round ocean, and the 

 living air, and the blue sky, and in the 

 mind of man,' the instant it is set free; and 

 so on to the end, which will come when all 

 the energy has worked itself out in motion, 

 and all the matter has found rest in stable 

 equilibrium. 



Unless he who worships this idol of the 

 theater is prepared to assert that there is 

 only one kind of indefinite incoherent 

 homogeneity, and unless he knows, in 

 some way of which men of science are ig- 

 norant, what sort of homogeneous solution 

 our universe was at the beginning, the only 

 way for him to learn what potencies are 

 latent in it is to find out by studying their 

 products. It is hard to see how he can de- 

 duce anything whatever from his necessary 

 law of universal progress except what he 

 discovers. If his premises are admitted, 

 all he can deduce from them regarding our 

 subject is that, if he finds natural selection, 

 the potency of natural selection was latent 

 in his solution. 



The philosophy of evolution is of no 

 more use as a substitute for science than 

 any other system of philosophy, although 

 it is, no doubt, not only the latest, but the 

 most consistent with our knowledge of na- 

 ture, and although it may, for all I know 

 to the contrary, be true. All this fails to 

 give it any value as a short cut to natural 

 knowledge. 



The true believer may say, however, that 

 while our finite, imperfect minds may be 

 unable to deduce anything from homogene- 

 ity, in the absence of knowledge drawn 

 from experience, the outcome of the process 

 must nevertheless be determinate. As it 

 has all come out of the primaeval homo- 

 geneity, he says this must have contained 

 it all potentially. 



I am no philosopher, but this does not 

 seem obvious or necessary to me. Nature, 

 as we know it, consists in the main of per- 

 mutations and combinations. ' I do not 

 know,' is one thing, and ' I do know not,' is 

 another, even if some fail to discriminate. 



"It is easy to perceive that the prodig- 

 ious variety which appears, both in the 

 works of nature and in the acts of men, and 

 which constitutes the greatest part of the 

 beauty of the universe, is owing to the mul- 

 titude of different ways in which its several 

 parts are mixed with or placed near each 

 other." 



When we say three dice can be thrown 

 in only two hundred and sixteen waj'S, 

 all we mean is that we cannot throw them 

 in any other way. We cannot throw 

 three zeroes, or three sevens, in any way 

 with ordinary dice without changing the 

 marks ; but we cannot attribute to the dice 

 any latent capacity for being thrown in any 

 way, or any capacity to do anything what- 

 ever as dice, even after we have been in- 

 formed by Haeckel that ' the real maker of 

 the organic world is, in all probability, a 

 tetrahedron.' * 



* ' Jlonism, ' pp. 27, 28. 



