NEW PUBLICATIONS.
THE PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY. By Herbert Spencer. New York: Appleton & Co. 1866, Vol. I. 12mo. Pp. 475.
We have omitted the long list of works of which Herbert Spencer is the author, works of rare ability in their way, but essentially false in the philosophical principles on which they are based. Mr. Herbert Spencer is naturally one of the ablest men in Great Britain, far superior to the much praised Buckle, and equalled, if not surpassed by John Stuart Mill, now member of Parliament. We have heretofore considered him as belonging to the positivist school of philosophy, founded by Auguste Comte, and the ablest man of that school; able, and less absurd than even M. Littré. But in a note in the work before us he disclaims all affiliation with Positivism, declares that he does not accept M. Comte's system, and says that the general principles in which he agrees with that singular man, he has drawn not from him, but from sources common to them both. This we can easily believe, for in the little we have had the patience to read of M. Comte's unreadable works we have found nothing original with him but his dryness, dulness, and wearisomeness, in which if he is not original, he is at least superior to most men. Yet we have not been able to detect any essential difference of doctrine or principle between the Frenchman and the Englishman, and to us who are not positivists, M. Comte, M. Littré, George H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Miss Evans, and Harriet Martineau belong to one and the same school.
It is but simple justice to Herbert Spencer to say that he writes in strong, manly, and for the most part classical English, and has made himself master of the best philosophical style that we have met with in any English or American writer. He understands, as far as a man can with his principles, the philosophy of the English tongue, and writes it with the freedom and ease of a master, though not always with perfect purity. He must have been a hard student, and evidently is a most laborious thinker and industrious writer. But here ends, we are sorry to say, our commendation. It is the misfortune, perversity, or folly of Herbert Spencer to spend his life in attempting to obtain or at least to explain effects without causes, properties without substance, and phenomena without noumena or being. In his Principles of Philosophy, he divides the real and unreal into the knowable and the unknowable, without explaining, however, how the human mind knows there is an unknowable; and to the unknowable he relegates the principles, origin, and causes of things; that is, in plain English, the principles, origin, and causes of things, are unreal at least to us, and are not only unknown, but absolutely unknowable, and should be banished as subjects of investigation, inquiry, or thought. Hence the knowable, that to which all science is restricted, includes only phenomena, that is to say, the sensible or material world.
Biology, which is the subject of the volume before us, is the science of life, but on the author's principles, is necessarily confined to the statement, description, and classification of facts, or phenomena of organic as distinguished from inorganic matter. He can admit on his philosophy no vital principle, but must explain the vital phenomena without it, by a combination, brought about nobody knows how, of chemical, mechanical and electric changes, forces, action, and reaction--as if there can be changes, forces, action, or reaction where there is no relation of cause and effect! But after all his labor, and it is immense, to show what chemical, mechanical, and electric changes and combinations, binary, tertiary, etc., are observed in a living subject, he explains nothing; for life, while it lasts, is neither mechanical, chemical, nor electrical, but to a certain extent resists and counteracts all these forces, and the human body falls completely under their dominion only when it has ceased to be a living body, when by chemical action it is decomposed, and returns to the several elements from which it was formed. Mr. Spencer describes very scientifically the entire [{426}] process of assimilation; but what is that living power within that assimilates the food we eat and converts it into chyle, blood, and flesh and bone? You see here a principle operating of which no element is found in mechanics, chemistry or electricity, or any possible combination of them. The muscles of my arms and shoulder may operate on mechanical principles in raising my arm when I will to raise it; but on what mechanical, chemical, or electric principles do I will to raise it? That I will to raise it, and in willing to do so perform an immaterial act, I know better than you know that "percussion produces detonation in sulphide of nitrogen," or that "explosion is a property of nitro-mannite," or "of nitroglycerine."
The simple fact is that the physical sciences are all good and useful in their place, and for purposes to which they are fitted; but they are all secondary sciences, and without principles higher than themselves to give dialectic validity to their inductions, they are no sciences at all. There is no approach to the science of life in Herbert Spencer's Biology; there is only a painfully elaborate statement of the principal external facts which usually accompany it and depend on it. Indeed, we had the impression that our most advanced physiologists, while admitting in their place chemical and electric forces as necessary to the phenomena of organic life, had abandoned the attempt to expound the science of physiology on chemical, electric or mechanical principles, or any possible combination of them. Even Dr. Draper, if he makes no great use of it in his physiology, recognizes a vital principle, even an immaterial soul, in man. We had also the impression that the medical profession were abandoning the chemical theory of medicine, so fashionable a few years ago. We may be wrong, but as far as we have been able to keep pace with modern science, Mr. Spencer is a quarter of a century behind his age.
The chapter on genesis, generation, multiplication, or reproduction, is as unscientific as it is unchristian. We merely note that the author insists on metagenesis as well as parthenogenesis, that is, that the offspring may differ in kind from the parents, and that there are virgin, or rather, sexless mothers. Some years ago, in conversing with a scientific friend, I ventured to deny this alleged fact, on the strength of the theological and scriptural doctrine that every kind produces its like. He laughed in my face, and brought forward certain well-known facts in the reproduction of the aphid or cabbage-louse. I assured him that if he would take the pains to observe more closely he would find that his metagenesis and parthenogenesis are only different stages in the entire process of the reproduction of the aphid. Of course he did not believe a word of it; but a few days afterwards he came and informed me that he had seen his friend. Dr. Burnham of Boston, a naturalist of rare sagacity, who told him that naturalists were wrong in asserting metagenesis in the case of aphides. "I have," said he, "been making my observations for some years on these little organisms, and I find that what we have taken for metagenesis is only the different stages in the process of reproduction, for I have discovered the young aphid properly formed and enveloped in the so-called virgin or sexless mother." The naturalist is dead, but his friend, my informant, is living.
We have no space to enter into any detailed review of this very elaborate volume. It contains many curious materials of science, but the author rejects creation, generation, formation, and emanation, and adopts that of evolution. Life is evolved from various elements which are reducible to gases, and, upon the whole, he gives us a gaseous sort of life. His theory seems to be that of Topsy, who declared she didn't come, but growed. We cannot perceive that Mr. Herbert Spencer has made any serious advance on Topsy. The universe is evolution, and evolution is growth, and he must say of himself with Topsy, "I didn't come, I growed." At any rate, he must be classed with those old philosophers who evolved all things from matter, some from fire, some from air, and some from water, and made all things born from change or corruption; or rather, with Epicurus, who evolved all from the fortuitous motion, changes, and combination of atoms. Those old philosophers were unjustly ridiculed by Hermias, or our recent philosophers have less science than they imagine. Verily, there is nothing new under the sun, and false science only traverses a narrow [{427}] circle, constantly coming round to the absurdities of its starting point. Yet Herbert Spencer's book has profited us. It has made us feel more deeply than ever the utter impotence of the greatest man to explain anything in nature, without recognizing God and creation.