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true of all the forms of knowledge from the lowest to the 
highest. It must be pre-eminently true of the highest as yet 
attained by man, the knowledge which is science and which 
gives science. 
Should this view of the matter strike any of our readers as 
singular and strained, it must be because they have not 
reflected on the reach and import of this theory of evolution 
when it is applied to the function of knowledge. The function 
itself, as we know it in our experience, is so totally unlike any- 
thing of this sort that we cannot believe that any theory can 
teach so defective a conception of its nature as the one we have 
described. Or it may be we carry the convictions which we 
derive from our conscious exercise of the act of knowledge over 
into our interpretations of the consequences which any theory 
would logically involve. It must also be confessed that the 
language and representations of much if not of most of our 
English psychology give more or less sanction to those views 
of knowledge which the physiological metaphysics have only 
carried to an extreme in one direction, which they somehow 
have thought to correct in the other by introducing from the 
world of life the more elevating conceptions of development. 
It is notorious that the drift of English psychology since the 
time of Hobbes has set very strongly in the direction of the 
passivity of the mind. The well-known fact that in sense- 
perception physical agents or objects must act upon the sense- 
organs and the sensorium, in order that the material world may 
be known and the prominence given to the operations of the 
passive memory and imagination in the cerebral and associa- 
tional schools, have sanctioned these gross misconceptions of the 
nature of knowledge itself. These in turn have prepared the 
way for theories which conceive the act either as an effect pro- 
duced by the object known upon the knowing mind — in this 
reversing the order of nature and of experience, or represent 
it as a function in which the object and mind coact, the result 
being the outcome of their conspiring energies, as when the 
ball follows the diagonal between two impulses at right angles 
to one another, or as oxygen and hydrogen are developed by 
union into water. The leading evolutionists who venture any 
opinions on psychology do not hesitate to avow the grossest 
explanations of the mental processes which are matters of the 
commonest experience. Both Mr. Spencer and Mr. Huxley 
go so far as to accept the doctrine of Hume that the processes 
of knowledge are best expressed by Hume’s impressions and 
ideas,” and seem to be sublimely unconscious that anybody 
who presumes to be a philosopher can hesitate to accept these 
as the last words upon the subject. These gross misconcep- 
