There is a breezy freshness about these tales, which will make the book a welcome addition to young people's libraries. It is safe to predict for it an enviable success. In the next edition there ought to be an index, and we wish the author need not feel it necessary to be so sparing with his own notes and comments. His brief Introduction is so charming, from its weight of sense and beauty of expression, that one would gladly hear more from the author himself. It is to be hoped that the book lately published is the forerunner of many.
August, 1890.
XII
GUESSING AT HALF AND MULTIPLYING BY TWO
"The small philosopher is a great character in New England. His fundamental rule of logical procedure is to guess at the half and multiply by two. [Applause.]"[31] It is [in 1880] only two or three years since the philosopher from whom this text is quoted was himself a great character in New England, inasmuch as he could give a lecture once every week, in one of the largest halls of New England's principal city, and could entertain his audience of two or three thousand people with discussions of the most vast and abstruse themes of science and metaphysics. The success with which he entertained his audience is carefully chronicled for us in the volumes made up from the reports of his lectures, in which parenthetical notes of "laughter," "applause," or "sensation" occur as frequently as in ordinary newspaper reports of stump speeches or humorous convivial harangues. As a social phenomenon this career of the Rev. Joseph Cook possesses considerable interest,—enough, at any rate, to justify a brief inquiry as to his "fundamental rule of procedure."
Among the wise and witty sayings of the ancients with which our children are puzzled and edified in the first dozen pages of the Greek Reader, there is a caustic remark attributed to Phokion, on the occasion of being very loudly applauded by the populace. "Dear me," said the old statesman, "can it be that I have been making a fool of myself?" So, when three thousand people are made to laugh and clap their hands over statements about the origin of species or the anatomy of the nervous system, the first impulse of any scientific inquirer of ordinary sagacity and experience is to ask in what meretricious fashion these sober topics can have been treated, in order to have produced such a result. The inference may be cynical, but is none the less likely to be sound. In the present case, one does not need to read far in the published reports of these lectures to see that the fundamental rule of procedure is something very different from any of the rules by which truth is wooed and won by scientific inquirers. Among Mill's comprehensive canons of logical method one might search in vain for a specimen of the method employed by Mr. Cook. Of the temper of mind, indeed, in which scientific inquiries are conducted, he has no more conception than Laura Bridgman could have of Pompeian red or a chord of the minor ninth. The process of holding one's judgment in suspense over a complicated problem, of patiently gathering and weighing the evidence on either side, of subjecting one's own first-formed hypotheses to repeated verification, of clearly comprehending and fairly stating opposing views, of setting forth one's conclusions at last, guardedly and with a distinct consciousness of the conditions under which they are tenable,—all this sort of thing is quite foreign to Mr. Cook's nature.
To him a scientific thesis is simply a statement over which it is possible to get up a fight. The gamecock is his totem; to him the bones of the vertebrate subkingdom are only so many bones of contention, and the sponge is interesting chiefly as an emblem which is never, on any account, to be thrown up. He talks accordingly of scientific men lying in wait for Mr. Darwin, ready to pounce on him like a tiger on its prey; he is very fond of exhibiting what he calls the "strategic point" of a scientific book or theory; and altogether his attitude is bellicose to a degree that is as unbecoming in a preacher of the gospel as it is out of place in a discussion of scientific questions. His favourite method of dealing with a scientific writer is to quote from him all sorts of detached statements and inferences, and, without the slightest regard to the writer's general system of opinions or habits of thought, to praise or vituperate the detached statements according to some principle which it is not always easy for the reader to discover, but which has always doubtless some reference to their supposed bearings upon the peculiar kind of orthodoxy of which Mr. Cook appears as the champion. There are some writers whom he thinks it necessary always to scold or vilify, no matter what they say. If they happen to say something which ought to be quite satisfactory to any reasonable person of "orthodox" opinions, Mr. Cook either accuses them of insincerity or represents them as making "concessions."
This last device, I am sorry to be obliged to add, is not an uncommon one with theological controversialists, when their zeal runs away with them. When a man makes a statement which expresses his deepest convictions, there is no easier way of seeming to knock away the platform on which he stands than to quote his statement, and describe it as something which he has reluctantly "conceded." In dealing with the principal writers on evolution, Mr. Cook is continually found resorting to this cheap device. For example, when Professor Tyndall declares that "if a right-hand spiral movement of the particles of the brain could be shown to occur in love, and a left-hand spiral movement in hate, we should be as far off as ever from understanding the connection of this physical motion with the spiritual manifestations,"—when Professor Tyndall declares this, he simply asserts what is a cardinal proposition with the group of English philosophers to which he belongs. With Professor Huxley, as well as with Mr. Spencer, it is a fundamental proposition that psychical phenomena cannot possibly be interpreted in terms of matter and motion, and this proposition they have at various times set forth and defended. In the chapter on Matter and Spirit, in my work on "Cosmic Philosophy," I have fully expounded this point, and have further illustrated it in "The Unseen World." With the conclusions there set forth the remark of Professor Tyndall thoroughly agrees, and it does so because all these expressions of opinion and all these arguments are part and parcel of a coherent system of anti-materialistic thought adopted[32] by the English school of evolutionists. Yet when Mr. Cook quotes Professor Tyndall's remark, he does it in this wise: "It is notorious that even Tyndall concedes," etc., etc.