will not fail to respect. Mr. Bain,1 after speaking of the general importance of truth, adds, 'We are not surprised if an element of such importance as a means should be often regarded as an absolute end to be pursued irrespective of consequences'; and Mr. Mill, in his essay on the utility of religion, proceeds throughout on the principle that truth is valuable only for its utility. As to the general utility of truth, there can of course be no question, any more than that the love of it ought to be an all-powerful sentiment. But I go further than this, and in common with all those who accept the theistic postulate, can logically, as well as heartily, affirm, however perplexing may be the aspect of the universe, that it must yet be good, and that the most complete knowledge of truth must be desirable for mankind. In conclusion I would venture to urge that Professor Tyndall's teaching, the tendencies of which may, I believe, be so justly deprecated, largely reposes on the denial of the distinctness between diverse physical powers or activities, on the strength of their quantitative equivalence, and on the presentation of force (or energy) as a persistent real substance, which eternally ebbs and flows through a world of sensible phenomena (amongst which phenomena we ourselves are ranged), while the ebbing and flowing substance is represented as really constituting that which we mistakenly consider our consciousness, our reason, and our will. Such teaching is but a supreme application of the doctrine of the persistence and transformation of force (or energy) which, as expressing the quantitative equivalence of activities, is indeed an important truth, but which in the sense too often apprehended, I cannot but deem a misleading superstition. It is a superstition which cannot be too soon 1 Mental and Moral Science, p. 106. See also pp. 359 and 444. eliminated through the careful selection by physicists of expressions which do not go beyond, or inculcate more than, those facts for which we have indisputable scientific evidence. The result of such selection would be the introduction into common speech of phrases and expressions consistent with true ideas about nature and the quantitative equivalence of its activities, and the elimination of other phrases and expressions which imply false ideas and beliefs, such as the idea of and the belief in the existence of one persistent and self-transforming universal and substantial force. LIKENESSES; OR, PHILOSOPHICAL ANATOMY. To say of any man that he does not know a hand from a foot' is to state that his power of estimating difference is defective in an extreme degree, and this statement also seems to imply that such defect is even more remarkable than would be its opposite-namely, a failure in apprehending the likeness which exists between those two parts. Indeed, to pass from a recognition of such unlikeness to an apprehension of such likeness-or, as it is called, 'Homology' is to make a step in advance. Our appreciation and comprehension of the world around us is but a continued repetition, on an ever-widening scale, of similar successive processes of analysis and synthesis. In each branch of science, along with our keener and keener perception of differences, we come to perceive more and more recondite relations of agreement. The telescope and the microscope, the chemical laboratory and the dissecting-room, at first enable us to detect more and more hidden differences in sidereal masses, in animal tissues, in atomic relations, and nerve distributions. Yet, afterwards, the very same agencies enable us to discover facts which tend to harmonise in corresponding unities the previously discovered diversities of nerve distribution, of chemical relation, of histological condition, and (by spectrum analysis) of sidereal constitution. In however many directions the human mind sends forth its energy upon surrounding nature, its activity brings just so many vistas of agreement underlying difference before its ken. Indeed, as Mr. Lewes says,1 with, perhaps, some exaggeration of expression: 'Science is in no respect a plain transcript of reality. . . . but . . . an ideal construction in which the manifold relations of reals are taken up and assimilated by the mind, and there transformed into relations of ideas, so that the world of sense is changed into the world of thought.' And again he declares: 2 What we call laws of nature are not objective existences, but subjective abstractions.' We say these expressions are somewhat exaggerated, because that which is the product of the 'manifold relations of reals' must have some real foundation and some objective validity in the eyes of those who admit, as it seems Mr. G. H. Lewes does not, the real and known existence of an external world of more than mere feelings. Any one who admits such existence must also admit that the various ideal entities which are ultimately justified to reason as true ideals have their foundation in their agreement with real objective existence, 'truth' being a relation between 'Being' and an Intellect.' The various groups into which animals and plants have been divided are of this nature-i.e. are ideal entities with an objective basis. Classes, orders, families, genera, and species exist as such only in a mind. Objectively, there is nothing but individual animals and plants. Nevertheless, the different biological groups also exist objectively in those facts of structure which various individual animals and plants present, and which serve for the definitions of such different groups. What Mr. Lewes says of certain other abstractions applies here with perfect correctness: 'They are realities in the sense of being drawn from real concretes; but they are not realities existing apart from their concretes 1 Problems of Life and Mind, vol. i. p. 342. 3 Op. cit., p. 281. otherwise than in our conception; and to seek their objective sub-stratum, we must seek the concrete objects of which they are the symbols.' Natural classification, indeed, though formed by the mind, does not depend on the mind. It is not arbitrary, but is governed by the external realities of things. It is not that we choose to separate bats and whales from birds and fishes respectively, and put them both in the same class as that which contains also the lion and the antelope. We are compelled, by the multitudinous facts of animal structure, so to separate and so to class them. Moreover, such zoological classification is only possible because different animals are found to have like parts (parts alike as to their relations of position to other parts) which can be compared and contrasted, and can, by the agreements and differences they present, furnish us with the determining and limiting characters of the different natural groups. As it is with respect to the various groups of animals and plants, so it is with respect to the parts and organs which together compose each individual animal or plant. As the human mind surveys these parts and organs in different lights, it finds different series of unlikenesses and likenesses, extending along that line of thought which it elects to follow. Here again, however, the resulting groups of likenesses cannot be freely and arbitrarily established, but must follow objective reality. It is thus that fanciful notions which do not respond to the realities of things, have to succumb and give place to conceptions which do harmonise with such realities. Every bird and beast, every fish and insect, is formed of a complex aggregation of parts which are grouped together into an harmonious interdependency and have a multitude of relations, amongst themselves, of different kinds. The mind detects a certain number of these relations as it contemplates the various component parts of any individual |