MR. HERBERT SPENCER. 29. 



thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed 

 to respect ; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, 

 us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of force 

 or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing. 

 This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ 

 small is our meat and drink ; it attends each minutest 

 and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and 

 diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, 

 and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as 

 life and death. 



Claude Bernard says, " Bien ne nait, rien ne se crde, 

 tout se continue. La nature ne nous offre le spectacle 

 dJ'aumine creation, elle est d'une dternelle continuation ; " * 

 but surely he is insisting upon one side of the truth 

 only, to the neglect of another which is just as real, 

 and just as important ; he might have said, " Bien ne 

 se continue, tout Tiait, tout se cr^e. La nature ne nous 

 offre le spectacle d'aucune continuation. Mle est d'une 

 Sternelle creation ; " for change is no less patent a fact 

 than continuity, and, indeed, the two stand or fall 

 together. True, discontinuity, where development is 

 normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the 

 difference between looking at distances on a small 

 instead of a large map ; we cannot have even the 

 smallest change without a small partial corresponding 

 discontinuity; on a small scale — too small, indeed,, 

 for us to cognise — these breaks in continuity, each 

 one of which must, so far as our understanding goes, 

 rank as 9. creation, are as essential a factor of the 



* Quoted by M. Vianna De Lima in his "Expose Sommaire," &o., 

 p. 6. Paris, Delagrave, 1886. 



