

REPLIES TO THE QUARTERLY REVIEWERS. 545 



" is no inere question of speculative interest, but is one of the highest 

 practical importance." I join him, too, in the belief that " calamitous 

 social and political changes" may be the outcome of a mistaken phi- 

 losophy. Moreover, writing as he does under the conviction that 

 there can be no standard of right and wrong save one derived from a 

 Revelation interpreted by an Infallible Authority, I can conceive the 

 alarm with which he regards so radically-opposed a system. Though 

 I could have wished that the sense of justice he generally displays 

 had prevented him from ignoring the evidence I have above given, I 

 can understand how, from his point of view, the Doctrine of Evolu- 

 tion, as I understand it, " seems absolutely fatal to every germ of 

 morality," and " entirely negatives every form of religion." But I 

 am unable to understand that modified doctrine of Evolution which 

 the reviewer proposes as an alternative. For, little as the reader 

 would anticipate it after these expressions of profound dissent, the 

 reviewer displays such an amount of agreement as to suggest that the 

 system he is criticising might be converted, " rapidly and without vio- 

 lence, into an * allotropic state,' in which its conspicuous characters 

 would be startlingly diverse from those that it exhibits at present." 

 May I, using a different figure, suggest a different transformation, 

 having a subjective instead of an objective character? As, in a stereo- 

 scope, the two views, representing diverse aspects, often yield at first 

 a jumble of conflicting impressions, but after a time suddenly combine 

 into a single whole which stands out quite clearly, so, may it not be 

 that the seemingly-inconsistent Idealism and Realism dwelt on by the 

 reviewer, as well as the other seemingly-fundamental incongruities he 

 is struck by, will, under more persistent contemplation, unite as com- 

 plementary sides of the same thing ? 



My excuse, for devoting so much space to a criticism of so entirely 

 different a kind as that contained in the British Quarterly Review for 

 October, must be that, under the circumstances, I cannot let it pass 

 unnoticed without seeming to admit its validity. 



Saying that my books should be dealt with by specialists, and 

 tacitly announcing himself as an expert in Physics, the reviewer takes 

 me to task both for errors in the statement of physical principles and 

 for erroneous- reasoning in physics. That he discovers no mistakes I 

 do not say. It would be marvelous if, in such a multitude of propo- 

 sitions, averaging a dozen per page, I had made all criticism-proof. 

 Several are inadvertencies which I should have been obliged to the 

 reviewer for pointing out as such, but which he prefers to instance as 

 proving my ignorance. In other cases, taking advantage of an 'imper- 

 fection of statement, he proceeds to instruct me about matters which 

 either the context, or passages in the same volume, show to be quite 

 familiar to me. Here is a sample of his criticisms belonging to this 

 class : 



vol. iv. — 35 



