300 
“Annual 
Trips a Co- 
rollary of 
Persistent 
Force.’* 
consequence of them, and not an independent cause, which 
Mr. Spencer wants. And, as for any of those rhythmical 
motions being “ inevitable corollaries from the persistence of 
force," just let him give us what he conceives to be a mathe- 
matical deduction of them from that alone ; and I remind him 
again that their being consistent with it is worth nothing, 
because all truths are consistent with each other, but they do 
not therefore all prove each other. 
It would be more tedious than useful to go through Mr. 
Spencer's descriptions of his other self-acting functionaries 
named above. In every case his mode of argument is the 
same as I have described already. The Multiplication of 
Effects is illustrated by the fact that “classes who before 
could not afford it now take annual trips to the sea ; visit 
their distant relations ; make tours," and so on (455) ; and 
then he says that “for symmetry's sake it is proper briefly 
to point out " — that is, to say — “ that the Multiplication of 
Effects is also a corollary of the " correlation or conservation 
of forces. He might as well say the multiplication table is. 
It does not need twenty-eight pages to prove that effects 
accumulate by multiplication, which is all that these pages 
practically come to; nor are we much nearer the solution of 
the problem of the prime cause of all things by being told 
such things as that. Indeed in that very chapter we learn 
the disappointing news that, after all these wonderful phrases 
and new names for old processes, we are as far off as ever from 
any solution of that problem. For he says, at p. 444, that 
“we are still in the dark respecting those mysterious pro- 
perties which make the germ, when subject to fit influences, 
undergo the special changes beginning (and continuing) 
these transformations." And also, at p. 217, that “ they are not 
profounder mysteries than the transformation of physical 
forces into each other" ; which actually is the one “self-evident 
truth or meaning " of persistence or conservation of force. 
Perhaps Mr. Spencer, or one of his admirers who think they 
understand his Philosophy, will condescend to explain some 
day how profound mysteries of experience can be necessary 
results and corollaries of a self-evident truth, which was 
itself only discovered by a long course of experimental in- 
vestigation ; and then how all knowledge is unified by telling 
us that all these things are unfathomable, and that the 
philosopher is hopelessly in the dark about them. 
Tempting as it is to go on with the exposure of such mis- 
chievous and absurd 'paradogmatism, of which more may 
be seen in the Edinburgh Review, I will confine myself to 
