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conception of the universe, as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box, would be proved to demonstration. It would be proved from the side of mind by considerations derivable from automatic and unconscious action where mind ex hypothesi was not, but where action went on as well or better without it than with it; it would be proved from the side of body by what they would doubtless call the "most careful and exhaustive" examination of the body itself by the aid of appliances more ample than had ever before been within the reach of man.

This was all very well, but for its success one thing was a sine qua non-I mean the dislodgment must be thorough; the key must be got clean of even the smallest trace of blood, for unless this could be done all the argument went to the profit not of the mechanism, with which, for some reason or other, they were so much enamoured, but of the soul and design, the ideas which of all others were most distasteful to them. They shut their eyes to this for a long time, but in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of an absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along which they were travelling would never lead them to it. They were driving life up into a corner, but they were not eliminating it, and, moreover, at the very moment of their thinking they had hedged it in and could throw their salt upon it, it flew mockingly over their heads and perched upon the place of all others where they were most scandalized to see it-I mean upon machines in use. So they retired sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed.

Some months subsequent to the completion of the foregoing chapter, and indeed just as this book is on the point of leaving my hands, there appears in Nature1 a letter from the Duke of Argyll, which shows that he too is impressed with the conviction expressed above-I mean that the real object our men of science have lately had in view has been the getting rid of mind from among the causes of evolution. The Duke says:

1 12th August 1886.

"The violence with which false interpretations were put upon this theory (natural selection) and a function was assigned to it which it could never fulfil, will some day be recognized as one of the least creditable episodes in the history of science. With a curious perversity it was the weakest elements in the theory which were seized upon as the most valuable, particularly the part assigned to blind chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued not for its scientific truth,-for it could pretend to none,but because of its assumed bearing upon another field of thought and the weapon it afforded for expelling mind from the causes of evolution."

The Duke, speaking of Mr. Herbert Spencer's two articles in the Nineteenth Century for April and May 1886, to which I have already called attention, continues:

"In these two articles we have for the first time an avowed and definite declaration against some of the leading ideas on which the mechanical philosophy depends; and yet the caution, and almost timidity, with which a man so eminent approaches the announcement of conclusions of the most self-evident truth is a most curious proof of the reign of terror which has come to be established."

Against this I must protest; the Duke cannot seriously maintain that the main scope and purpose of Mr. Herbert Spencer's articles is new. Their substance has been before us in Mr. Spencer's own writings for some two-and-twenty years, in the course of which Mr. Spencer has been followed by Professor Mivart, the Rev. J. J. Murphy, the Duke of Argyll himself, and many other writers of less note. When the Duke talks about the establishment of a scientific reign of terror, I confess I regard such an exaggeration with something like impatience. Any one who has known his own mind and has had the courage of his opinions has been able to say whatever he wanted to say with as little let or hindrance during the last twenty years, as during any other period in the history of literature. Of course, if a man will keep blurting out unpopular truths without considering whose toes he may or may not be treading on, he will make 123

enemies some of whom will doubtless be able to give effect to their displeasure; but that is part of the game. It is hardly possible for any one to oppose the fallacy involved in the Charles-Darwinian theory of natural selection more persistently and unsparingly than I have done myself from the year 1877 onwards; naturally I have at times been very angrily attacked in consequence, and as a matter of business have made myself as unpleasant as I could in my rejoinders, but I cannot remember anything having been ever attempted against me which could cause fear in any ordinarily constituted person. If, then, the Duke of Argyll is right in saying that Mr. Spencer has shown a caution almost amounting to timidity in attacking Mr. Darwin's theory, either Mr. Spencer must be a singularly timid person, or there must be some cause for his timidity which is not immediately obvious. If terror reigns anywhere among scientific men, I should say it reigned among those who have staked imprudently on Mr. Darwin's reputation as a philosopher. I may add that the discovery of the Duke's impression that there exists a scientific reign of terror, explains a good deal in his writings which it has not been easy to understand hitherto.

As regards the theory of natural selection, the Duke says: "From the first discussions which arose on this subject, I have ventured to maintain that . . . the phrase 'natural selection' represented no true physical cause, still less the complete set of causes requisite to account for the orderly procession of organic forms in Nature; that in so far as it assumed variations to arise by accident it was not only essentially faulty and incomplete, but fundamentally erroneous; in short, that its only value lay in the convenience with which it groups under one form of words, highly charged with metaphor, an immense variety of causes, some purely mental, some purely vital, and others purely physical or mechanical."

T

O SUM UP THE CONCLUSIONS HITHERTO arrived at. Our philosophers have made the mistake of forgetting that they cannot carry the rough-and-ready language of common sense into precincts within which politeness and philosophy are supreme. Common sense sees life and death as distinct states having nothing in common, and hence in all respects the antitheses of one another; so that with common sense there should be no degrees of livingness, but if a thing is alive at all it is as much alive as the most living of us, and if dead at all it is stone dead in every part of it. Our philosophers have exercised too little consideration in retaining this view of the matter. They say that an amoeba is as much a living being as a man is, and do not allow that a well-grown, highly educated man in robust health is more living than an idiot cripple. They say he differs from the cripple in many important respects, but not in degree of livingness. Yet, as we have seen already, even common sense by using the word "dying " admits degrees of life; that is to say, it admits a more and a less; those, then, for whom the superficial aspects of things are insufficient should surely find no difficulty in admitting that the degrees are more numerous than is dreamed of in the somewhat limited philosophy which common sense alone knows. Livingness depends on range of power, versatility, wealth of body and mind-how often, indeed, do we not see people taking a new lease of life when they have come into money even at an advanced age; it varies as these vary, beginning with things that, though they have mind enough for an outsider to swear by, can hardly be said to have yet found it out themselves, and advancing to those that know their own minds as fully as anything in this world does so. The more a thing knows its own mind the more living it becomes, for life viewed both in the individual and in the general as the outcome of accumulated developments, is one long process of specializing consciousness and sensation; that is to say, of getting to know one's own mind more and more fully upon a greater and greater variety of subjects. On this

I hope to touch more fully in another book; in the meantime I would repeat that the error of our philosophers consists in not having borne in mind that when they quitted the ground on which common sense can claim authority, they should have reconsidered everything that common sense had taught them.

The votaries of common sense make the same mistake as philosophers do, but they make it in another way. Philosophers try to make the language of common sense serve for purposes of philosophy, forgetting that they are in another world, in which another tongue is current; common sense people, on the other hand, every now and then attempt to deal with matters alien to the routine of daily life. The boundaries between the two kingdoms being very badly defined, it is only by giving them a wide berth and being so philosophical as almost to deny that there is any either life or death at all, or else so full of common sense as to refuse to see one part of the body as less living than another, that we can hope to steer clear of doubt, inconsistency, and contradiction in terms in almost every other word we utter. We cannot serve the God of philosophy and the Mammon of common sense at one and the same time, and yet it would almost seem as though the making the best that can be made of both these worlds were the whole duty of organism.

It is easy to understand how the error of philosophers arose, for, slaves of habit as we all are, we are more especially slaves when the habit is one that has not been found troublesome. There is no denying that it saves trouble to have things either one thing or the other, and indeed for all the common purposes of life if a thing is either alive or dead the small supplementary residue of the opposite state should be neglected as too small to be observable. If it is good to eat we have no difficulty in knowing when it is dead enough to be eaten; if not good to eat, but valuable for its skin, we know when it is dead enough to be skinned with impunity; if it is a man, we know when he has presented enough of the phenomena of death to allow of our burying him and administering his estate; in fact, I cannot call to mind any

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