WHEN the history of modern thought comes to be written in the future, nothing will appear more remarkable to the student of these times than the great divergence, or rather the irreconcilable antagonism, between the utterances of philosophy and the revelations of exact science. That philosophy should transcend science, that it should be something more than a summary of results, is too evident even to require admission; that it should be in absolute contradiction to these results, that it should set aside or distort the most familiar facts, the best established data of science, will scarcely be claimed by its most ardent votaries. Is this the case?

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What is philosophy? It is the systematisation of the conceptions furnished by science. As science is the systematisa

Prof. Tyndall's Birmingham Address, to which this is a reply, appeared in the ECLECTIC for January, 1878.-ED.

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVIII., No. I

tion of the various generalities reached through particulars, so philosophy is the systematisation of the generalities of generalities. In other words, science furnishes the knowledge, and philosophy the doctrine.' What is truth? It is the correspondence between the order of ideas and the order of phenomena, so that the one becomes a reflection of the other-the movement of thought following the movement of things.' For practical purposes, nothing more clear or comprehensive can be required than these definitions, which are given by Mr. Lewes in the preface to his History of Philosophy.

The knowledge referred to is defined as arising from the indisputable conclusions of experience; and the domain of philosophy is thus limited-Whilst theology claims to furnish a system of religious conceptions, and science to furnish conceptions of the order of the

I

world, philosophy, detaching their widest conceptions from both, furnishes a doctrine which contains an explanation of the world and of human destiny.'

In furnishing this explanation, has our modern philosophy been subject to these limitations? Has she been content to generalise the indisputable conclusions of experience'? Or has she wildly plunged into the ocean of reckless conjecture, and with worse than Procrustean intolerance lopped, stretched, and mutilated the well-known facts of science, in the vain attempt to adapt them to the exigencies of a foregone conclusion? A glance at the diverging views taken by philosophy and science in the domain of biology will answer these questions.

What does science teach us as to the origin of life and living organisms? Professor Tyndall, in the January number of this Review, demonstrates in the most forcible, clear, and logical manner that life does not appear without the operation of antecedent life.' Philosophy, on the same authority, tells us that there is no difference in kind between organic and inorganic nature, that the sun is the source of life, and that if solar light and heat can be produced by the impact of dead matter, and if from the light and heat thus produced we can derive the energies which we have been accustomed to call vital, it indubitably follows that vital energy may have an approximately mechanical origin.' And we are assured that nature is constant and uniform in her operations, and that life in all its forms has arisen by an unbroken evolution and through the instrumentality of what are called natural causes.' t

With respect to the infinitely varied forms of animals and vegetables, science tells us that neither by observation nor by experiment has the phenomenon of transition from one species to another been witnessed, and that therefore the 'indisputable conclusion of experience' is that the physiological characters of species are absolutely constant. Philosophy 'generalises' this statement by setting it aside altogether, teaching us that these characters are plastic, that species are not fixed, but always becoming some

* Fragments of Science, p. 460. + Ibid. p. 507.

thing else, and that all living beings have been derived from one or a few original forms of the simplest kind.

As to the highest study of the philosopher, the nature and origin of man, science teaches us that whilst he approaches the higher animals in many details of his organisation, his essential nature is entirely apart from theirs; that he possesses faculties and endowments of which no germ or trace is found even in the highest brutes, which differ not in degree only but in kind from theirs—that between them and him there is a vast chasm,' a 'practically infinite divergence, a gulf bridged over by no known living or extinct forms, the boundaries of which cannot be approximated even in thought. Philosophy tells us that man is but the latest term in an unbroken evolution (!) from the nebular haze until now-an evolution effected without 'the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes 'tthe direct descendant of a catarhine ape.

*

Why do so many amongst us believe in these things, that have neither truth nor verisimilitude to recommend them, that are supported by no phenomena in nature, and are opposed to all the known facts of science? Why do we give ourselves over, bound mind, soul, and conscience, to accept anything that is told us with sufficient confidence and iteration? Why cannot we look sometimes with our own eyes, and not always accept the testimony of others? When we are told, ex cathedra, that the mystery and miracle of vitality' consists in the compounding in the organic world of forces belonging equally to the inorganic,' it is surely competent to us to inquire further about this compounding, viz., what forces are compounded, what amounts of each, and what resemblance to vital force we can produce by any such artificial compounding. If, in reply to this, we can get nothing but vague generalities as to what might possibly occur under unknown conditions, it might be wise at least to suspend our judgment, in this as in the other innumerable instances where our philosophy (so called) is at issue with science.

*Prof. Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, p. 103. ↑ Ibid. p. 108.

But in truth we are victims to the art of phrasing. Men believe,' says Bacon, that their reason governs their words; but it often happens that words have power to react upon reason.' Aristotle said that Nature abhors a vacuum,' and the phrase stood in the place of pneumatic science for well nigh two thousand years. Some of our modern philosophers have said Evolution, Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest,' &c.; and the phrases are so much to the taste of many, both of those who understand them and those who do not, that they will probably represent, and obstruct the progress of, true biological science for an indefinite time.

The contradictions, however, between science and philosophy, are not only natural but inevitable, if we consider that exact science is chiefly a product of modern times, and represents the results of long-continued and patient labor and investigation; whilst what is presented to us as philosophy is borrowed wholesale from a period more than twenty centuries past, when physical science was not, in any proper sense of the term, and when natural phenomena were quite secondary in importance to the teaching of men.

In that very amusing and suggestive child's book, Alice through the LookingGlass, there is a nightmare kind of vision of a headlong race between Alice and the Red Queen' to reach the eighth square,' in which, after long running, so fast that the wind whistled in poor Alice's ears and almost blew the hair off her head,' they find themselves in exactly the same place whence they seemed to start, it appearing from the Red Queen's explanation that in her country' it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. Some of our modern philosophers have beaten these runners all to nothing; for in their breathless race for the eighth square of popularity and paradox, they have run so very fast that they have landed themselves, high and dry, about two thousand years backwards in the philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus.

It scarcely requires noting, that philosophy is neither better nor worse for being old, providing that it fulfils its raison d'être; but from this position there follows one curious result, viz., that phi

losophy, instead of being the final interpreter of science, is entirely independent of it; hence the contradictions alluded to; hence also the utter poverty and barrenness of a philosophy so constituted.

Pereant, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. When the learned and modest Dr. Büchner announced as one of the grandest of modern discoveries, as yet only known to himself and a very few elect, that matter could neither be created nor destroyed,* he forgot, or perhaps had never known, that this position had been the common and undisputed property of the world ever since the days of Parmenides of Elea. When Professor Clifford says that the universe consists' of atoms and ether, and that there is no room in it for ghosts,' he only modernises the saying of Democritus, that nothing exists but atoms and empty space; all else is only opinion.' When Professor Tyndall sees in matter the promise and potency of all terrestrial life,' § he only sees what all the early atomists before Anaxagoras saw, or thought they saw. When Professor Huxley makes the noteworthy discovery that the eye was not made for the purpose of enabling the animal possessing it to see,' || he was at least supported by the ancient authority of Epicurus, who held that the eye was not made for seeing, nor the ear for hearing, but that having been developed by chance, the soul could not help using them for these purposes. Finally, when Mr. Darwin propounded the doctrine of natural selection, he did little more than reproduce, with striking similarity of phrase, the ideas enunciated by Empedocles above two thousand years ago.

**

cients only conjectured. The naturalist,' says Dr. Büchner, 'proves that there are no other forces in nature beside the physical, chemical, and mechanical.' Once for all, it cannot be too clearly understood that this claim is utterly without foundation. No vestige of what can fairly be considered proof of the doctrines of materialism and evolution has ever been offered. Now, as two thousand years ago, they rest only upon arbitrary assumption and conjecture. And as to this, it may be permitted to make one passing protest. It seems somewhat hard on those who seek truth for its own sake, wherever it is to be found, to be so urgently, even clamorously, called upon, under heavy and mysterious penalties, to believe in a certain doctrine, apparently for no other reason than that it is unsupported by evidence and insusceptible of demonstration. As As Mr. Lewes observes concerning metaphysic, it is not verifiable, therefore not refutable.' Credo quia impossibile est. Nothing can surpass the credulity of some modern philosophers. The speculations of Empedocles were sufficiently justifiable; they dealt vaguely only with the infinite possibilities of mechanical events:'t but in these latter days, when inductive reasoning of the sternest kind is supposed to be indispensable in science, it seems almost too monstrous to be believed, that the entire science of organic ontology should be based upon a principle, or rather a phrase, which receives illustration from no one solitary fact or observation in the entire domain of natural history or paleontology.‡

*

By the latest conclusions of the doctrines of evolution, the important questions concerning man's origin, nature, and destiny are supposed to be finally and definitively answered. As to his origin, he is proximately the lineal descendant of some extinct ape; generally

*History of Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 749. + See Lange, op. cit. p. 13.

We have certainly heard recently a good deal about the pedigree of the horse as furnishing a complete demonstration of the truth of the doctrine of evolution. It is not possible at present to enter upon this subject, further than to say that, however much one may admire, one can scarcely envy the contented state of mind that can be satisfied with such demonstration as this.

he is the result of the interaction of organism and environment through countless ages past'*-the latest link in an unbroken chain of mechanical development from cosmic gas to the protogenes, from the protogenes to our wormy ancestors,' t from these to the ascidian, and thence to the anthropoid apes-Q.E.D. The destiny of the race is not established with absolute certainty; it may dwindle to insignificance, like the gigantic reptiles of the sandstone epoch, or it may disappear altogether, to be replaced by some unknown and higher order of intelligence. The destiny of the individual, however, is obviously to be decomposed into carbonic acid, water, and ammonia

to be resolved into the infinite azure,' and to be known no more-to have no more future personal existence than a consumed candle.

Assuming these positions, our knowledge of man's nature and of his relations to the universe and his immediate environment follows naturally, logically, and of necessity. From mechanical interactions nothing can result but mechanical forces or energies. Man, being the product of mechanical force, can only represent a unit in the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and shall be, the sum of existence.' ‡ In fine, he is a machine, an automaton, with no more real control over his actions than has the planet over its motion around the sun, with no more responsibility, for good or for evil, than a steam-engine or a galvanic battery.

But at this point an objector, startled by the enormity of the conclusion to which he has been led by an apparently scientific train of argument, may say: 'We all know that this is not true; therefore there is something wrong in your premises or your conclusions. We know that we can exercise a choice between two or more lines of conduct, that we are not always and irresistibly impelled by our organic tendencies or by surrounding circumstances. We know further that we can elect to act in direct opposition to these by a determined effort

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of the will; and that we can make this effort from what is called motive, because such an act is what we call right, and such another is what we call wrong. All this we know with a certainty that does not appertain to any of our convictions otherwise derived. We should distrust every evidence of sense rather than this fundamental intuition; and we are ready to put this conviction to any test that you can suggest.' To which the philosopher replies In a certain sense all this is true; for instance, the united voice of this assembly could not persuade me that I have not, at this moment, the power to lift my arm if I wish to do so. But what about the origin of the wish ?"* Your will, as you call it, is but the symbol of the last position before action of certain molecules, which point to a certain course of conduct, just for the same reason that the hands of a clock point to the given hour, viz., because the clock was wound up and constructed to do this; and "my physical and intellectual textures were woven for me, not by me." It is then evident that there is no thoroughfare in this direction; nevertheless, the last word has not yet been said, as will shortly appear.

The history of this question is deserving of a moment's attention. About two hundred and fifty years ago, when physiology as a science of accurate observation could scarcely be said to exist, Descartes, an illustrious mathematician and an original metaphysical thinker, enunciated certain loose opinions as to the 'souls' of animals, in following out which he came to the conclusion that brutes had neither the capacity of thinking nor feeling; that they did not eat because they were hungry, or evince signs of pain because they were hurt, or pursue their prey because they saw it, or perceived it by any sense; but that all their actions were automatic, merely those of a cunningly constructed machine, and were attended by neither perception nor sensation.

The method' of Descartes was essentially subjective, and deductive, when not mathematical. He did not so much observe nature, and carefully analyse the

* Science and Man,' in Fortnightly Review, November 1877, p. 609.

Ibid.

phenomena, as attempt to deduce those phenomena from the a priori requirements of his own consciousness. Thus to define the idea of God, and hence to construct the world-not to contemplate the world, and thence infer the existence of God-was the route he pursued.'* It seems to have been the same in his biological speculations. He started from a foregone conclusion as to what the animal spirits arising in the heart' ought to do under undefined circumstances; and thence he inferred the nature of animal life. As might be supposed, all this was of no scientific value; and, indeed, neither his contemporaries nor his immediate followers laid any stress upon this part of his philosophy. For the most part, it is omitted from the notices of his life and works; or, if alluded to, it was considered in the light of an eccentricity of genius. Most probably, however, Descartes was only solemnly amusing himself with one of those subtle dialectic exercises which before his time were in such favor with the schools, just as the gravest mathematicians will occasionally demonstrate the impossible results that may be obtained from the manipulation of some algebraic quantities.†

Be this as it may, it would appear that some years ago Professor Huxley had taken these lucubrations au grand sérieux, and made them the text of sundry addresses, whereby the 'weathercock heads among us' (I borrow his own phrase) have been much exercised. Weathercock heads indeed, that can be blown about by such feeble winds of doctrine as Evolution, Automatism, and Natural Selection! In 1869, the learned Professor wrote thus :—

As the ages lengthen the borders of physicism increase. . . . Even theology in her however she may talk. Anthropomorphism purer forms has ceased to be anthropomorphic,

has taken stand in its last fortress-man him

self. But science closely invests the walls, and philosophers gird themselves for battle upon the last and greatest of all speculative free volitional or truly anthropomorphic eleproblems-Does human nature possess any ment, or is it only the cunningest of all nature's clocks? Some, among whom I count