the Israelitish hyperbole, the sands upon the sea-shore.” So, also, Mr. Lewes, in his Philosophy of Aristotle, writes: “The fundamental ideas of modern science are as transcendental as any of the axioms in ancient philosophy.” With such admissions from the leading men of the modern school, how can scientists contend that they limit their acceptance of truth to those facts which experience proves, and that, using a strict induction, they build their laws and systems on these alone? It is evident that they make freer use of hypotheses than did the scholastics. Nor does it avail them to attempt the distinction suggested by Mr. Lewes between metaphysical and metempirical knowledge. The aim of this distinction is to relieve scientism from the charges brought against metaphysical doctrines on the ground that, as they transcend the senses, they necessarily elude the grasp of the human mind. Now, the metempirical knowledge of Mr. Lewes is just as elusive of our grasp, since it does not come within the scope of the senses; and all the objections, however unfounded, which these scholars have alleged against metaphysics and the science of the immaterial, hold good against any knowledge which is not the direct outcome of the senses. Surely the new doctrine of the correlation and conservation of force pertains to the supersensible order fully as much as the doctrine of a spiritual soul. Nay, it deals in the obscure and transcendental more, a great deal, than the scholastic doctrine of first matter and substantial form. The advocates of this theory have adopted a nomenclature which repeats the very errors on account of which modern scholastics have rejected the peripatetic doctrine of
matter and form. They identify all things under the title of force, and deem motion, light, heat, and electricity as so many modes of force constantly interchanging. They thus confound identity with distinction, and ignore the nature of change. Every change supposes a term from which, a term into which, and the subject of both; now, those who identify all force deny the subject of change, for that from which becomes into which in all its essentials, so that heat becomes light, and yet does not, according to the neo-terminologists, lose its identity. We have therefore the anomaly of a thing remaining the same and becoming something else at the same time. All this confusion arises from the ignorance of metaphysics in which modern men of science glory. They declare light to be a force, and no two of them are agreed as to the meaning of the word. They declare that all forces are correlated, and nowhere do we find given by them the meaning of the term relation. Now, the scholastics give no fewer than six different modes of relation, and the modern school has not given us even a definition of one. And yet these are the contemners of metaphysics and scholasticism, the men who aspire to be leaders of thought. They raise their structure on a basis of supposition, and declaim against the credulity of those who admit aught but facts of the sensible order. Their science is confused because of the vagueness of their speech and its great lack of fixity. Herbert Spencer
discourses with more learning than lucidity concerning those great problems which the church solved centuries ago, and which she has so formulated by the aid of a fixed and coherent vocabulary that mere children can see her meaning. Mr. Spencer defines evolution to be “a change from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations.” This certainly pertains to the supersensible order, and in more senses than one. No wonder that such utterances are made the butt of witticisms. Thus, the Rev. Mr. Kirkman, in his Philosophy without Assumption, amusingly parodies the above definition of Herbert Spencer: “Evolution is a change from a nohowish untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in-general-talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous somethingelseifications and sticktogetherations.”
And as for mistakes, commend us to science. Every new edition of Darwin contains corrections of previous errors, and Huxley has quite recently modified his views on evolution. But this is freedom of thought, just as a consistent and abiding belief which precludes the possibility of change or error is denominated by these same neoterists superstition and reaction. Mr. Bixby has well exhibited the fluctuations and errors of modern science—which is about all he has satisfactorily accomplished—in his Similarities of Physical and Religious Knowledge.
[184] Similarities of Physical and Religious Knowledge. By James Thompson Bixby. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.
LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.
FROM THE FRENCH.
March 21, 1869.