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ordinary animal. So that we cannot include under the one phrase *‘the 
Doctrine of Evolution ” so many different theories. Neither do I at all 
believe that any doctrine of evolution has become the universally-accepted 
doctrine. Perhaps we all, in a certain sense, believe in evolution ; that 
creation has been a process of successive stages, and that a great deal that 
looks like development has been in the creative plan from the beginning. 
The Rev. Prebendary Irons, D.D. — I havelistened to Mr. Ground’s paper with 
unmixed pleasure. The points that have been objected to by one or two pre- 
ceding me do not seem to me to touch the main course of the argument at all. 
I fully went with the first speaker in saying that the estimate formed of Mr. 
Herbert Spencer was somewhat exaggerated, and yet I have to acknowledge 
the great admiration I enterta.in of Spencer’s style, and acuteness and power of 
analysis ; and I do not think we gain anything by depreciating our opponents. 
There is a sentence in the paper which slightly expresses what I mean on 
this subject. It is quite at the beginning, where the lecturer says there 
may be a spiritual element added to the other elements of the Spencerian 
philosophy without disturbing its main features. I hope it is so. In the 
last century, we know, the doctrines of Locke were wholly pre-eminent. Every 
one adhered to them ; and they have left us a terrible legacy. Locke’s teaching 
that there was nothing whatever in the intellect that was not first of all in the 
senses, — though corrected by Coleridge’s adding that there was the intellect 
itself, — was still a great calamity for the philosophical world. It tinctured 
the whole line of thought in this country and in France. Up to this 
day we have in consequence of the Lockeian philosophy lost our hold of the 
a priori to a large extent. As has been stated on former occasions in this 
room, we shall have to go through a great deal of hard thinking and powerful 
semi-infidelity before we shall get rid of the mischief that has been done by the 
suppression of the a ^priori in the philosophical thought of England. You 
will find, however, throughout Herbert Spencer’s works that they take it for 
granted that there is an a priori. He does not at any time realty ignore 
it, and this may be thought to encourage the hope that some day he will 
think as we do. Passing now to the higher subject sketched in the paper before 
us, it is not to be doubted that Mr. Herbert Spencer acknowledges mind 
to be an entirely distinct being from matter ; and yet he says we can only 
speak of mind in terms of matter, while on the other hand we can only speak 
of matter in terms of mind. Who is it — this we — we ask, that is doing all 
this ? Spencer seems to admit the ego — the personal being — that very self 
who is able to handle both mind and matter, and to deal with them in its 
imperious way, using its own instruments to some extent as it will. It is 
this third element that I want Mr. Spencer to make something of. If he 
will only bring out his conscious self, and show what the Person is, which 
surely after aU demands our study, he might soon move on from that 
personality to the acknowledgment of a personal Deity ; and then to 
the rest of those doctrines of a higher philosophy which he now 
and then hints at, but never yet has fully explained. I am sorry that 
he stands where he does, yet I think it is right he should think out and 
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