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.

4

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,' the 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.

But modern materialists and evolutionists claim to have proved what the an

*Force and Matter, chap. ii.

734.

Fortnightly Review, December, 1874, p.

See Lange's History of Materialism, chap. i.
Belfast Address.

Critiques and Addresses, p. 305.

See Enfield's History of Philosophy, p. 273. **What Darwin, relying upon a wide extent of positive knowledge, has achieved for our generation, Empedokles offered to the thinkers of antiquity-the simple and penetrating thought that adaptations preponderate in nature, just because it is their nature to perpetuate themselves, while what fails has long since perished.'—Lange, op. cit. p. 33.