December 23, 1898.] 



SCIENGE. 



889 



air itself is one vast librarj', iu whose pages 

 are forever written all that man has said or 

 even whispered. There, in their mutable 

 but unerring characters, mixed with the 

 earliest as well as the latest sighs of mor- 

 tality, stand forever recorded vows unre- 

 deemed, promises iinfulfilled, perpetuating 

 in the united movements of each particle 

 the testimony of man's changeful will."* 



So far as we know, nothing that has ever 

 been can be as if it had not been ; and we 

 seem to have good ground for believing that 

 every portion of the material universe con- 

 tains a record of every change that has 

 taken place in all its parts, and also for be- 

 lieving that there is no limit to the power 

 of minds like ours to read and interpret 

 this record. Every new experience also 

 shows that our expectation that the future 

 will, on the whole, be like the past is rea- 

 sonable. In these facts science finds a basis 

 broad enough and firm enough for all our 

 needs ; for to this extent the data of science 

 are latent in the physical univei-se, even if 

 the future is, in part, to be what man and 

 other living things make it. 



If these evolutionists who hold that all 

 nature is determinate and necessary are 

 right, mind would seem to be useless. It 

 may, for all I know to the contrary, be true 

 that when I perform an action because my 

 reason approves it neither the performance 

 of the action nor the approval of my reason 

 is anything more than exhaustive knowl- 

 edge of the mechanism of my brain might 

 have led one to expect ; and if it follows that 

 my action is necessary, and must take place, 

 whether my reason approve it or not, reason 

 would seem to be useless ; but I cannot see 

 why this should follow, for I fail to see how 

 or why proof that my reason is mechanical 

 and no more than might have been expected 

 from my structure should be inconsistent 

 with mj^ confidence in its value, since I 



* Quoted by Jevons, 'Principles of Science,' p. 

 758. 



cannot conceive how this proof could show 

 that it is necessary, or predetermined, or 

 useless. 



I know the value of my reason by what 

 seems to me the best of all evidence. If it 

 were proved useless I should be quite ready 

 to believe; but the improbability of this opin- 

 ion seems to me so much like impossibility 

 that I must ask for proof which is corre- 

 spondingly conclusive ; for I most assuredly 

 refuse to give any weight to the ' faith ' of 

 pious evolutionists, and I must insist on my 

 right to demand more evidence if more is 

 to be had, for I cannot accept the mind of 

 the evolutionist as a measure of nature. 



Living things are continually bringing 

 about rearrangements of matter and motion 

 which would never, so far as I can see, 

 have come about without them, and many 

 of the things which they thus bring about 

 are useful to the beings which bring them 

 about. The earth would be very different 

 in many respects if man had never inhab- 

 ited it, and the effects of his activity will 

 last as long as matter, whatever may be his 

 fate. His influence upon the earth would 

 have been verj' different if the plants of Car- 

 boniferous times had not stored up solar 

 energy and worked their changes iu matter 

 millions of years ago. If the dodo, and the 

 great auk, and the halicore, and the Ameri- 

 can bison, could tell their story they would 

 bear witness that man is a factor in the 

 order of nature. 



They who are discontented with reason- 

 able or ' moral ' certainty, and tell us they 

 want absolute certaintj^, must find this sort 

 of certainty if they can and where they 

 can, but their words seem strange to the 

 zoologist. He knows that the rocks are full 

 of the remains of organisms which passed 

 out of existence because they were born in 

 evil times, when the adjustments to the 

 order of nature, which had served the pur- 

 poses of their ancestors for millions of years, 

 ceased to hold good. 



