Mr. Spencer, in his work on Biology, asserts that life results from the mechanical, chemical, and electrical arrangement of the particles of matter. If this were so, it would, on the author’s own principles, explain nothing. It would be only saying that a certain group of phenomena is accompanied by another group, which we call life, but not that there is any causal relation between them. That the supposed arrangement of the particles of matter originates the life Mr. Spencer cannot assert without the intuition of cause and causes he either denies or banishes to the unknowable. Analytical chemistry resolves, we are told, the diamond into certain gases; but is synthetic chemistry able to recombine the gases so as to produce a diamond? Professor Huxley finds, he thinks, the physical basis of life in protoplasm. Protoplasm is not itself life, according to him, but its basis. How does he know, since he denies causality, that life is or can be developed from protoplasm? Protoplasm, chemically analyzed, is resolved into certain well-known gases; but it is admitted that synthetic chemistry is unable to recombine them and reproduce protoplasm. Evidently, as in the case of the diamond, there is in the production of protoplasm some element which even analytic chemistry fails to detect. No synthetic chemistry can obtain the protoplasm from protein, and there is no instance in which life, feeling, thought and reason, are known, or can be proved, to result from dead matter, or from any possible combinations of matter, motion, and force. If it could so result, the fact could not be
proved, and would remain for ever in the unknowable.
The new philosophy resolves all the cosmic phenomena into the concentration and diffusion of the unknowable elements called matter, motion, and force. The quantities of these elements remain always the same, but they are in a state of constant evolution, and all the cosmic phenomena result from this evolution, and are simply changes or transformations of the same force. Now, the evolution either has had a beginning or it has not. If it has not, we must assume an infinite series of evolutions, or concentrations and diffusions; but an infinite series is absurd, and the author himself denies it. Then it must have had a beginning; but no phenomenon can begin to exist without a cause independent of the phenomenon, or the causatum. But the author denies the cause in denying the origin of the cosmos in creation, or its production by a supercosmic creator. We are sadly at loss, then, to conceive how he contrives, consistently with his new system, to assert either the law of evolution, or even evolution itself. Will he tell us how he does it?
We need not follow the author through the alleged facts and illustrations by which he seeks to explain and sustain his system of evolution; because evolution is not assertable on his own principles, nor is it provable aliunde by any possible deductions or inductions of science. So far from being science, it is not even an admissible hypothesis; because it contradicts and refutes itself. Mr. Spencer has attempted to construct a system of philosophy or explication of the cosmic phenomena, and the law of their production or transformation, without recurrence to any metaphysical principles, and from physical principles alone, or by the generalization
of the physical phenomena as they appear to the human consciousness in space and time, and has necessarily failed; because the physical principles themselves, and consequently the physical phenomena, are inexplicable and inconceivable even, without the principles discarded as metaphysical. The author’s whole theory of evolution depends on the assumed fact of the indestructibility of matter, the continuity of motion, and the persistence of force, not one of which can be asserted without the ideal intuition of being, substance, and cause, all three metaphysical principles, and as such relegated by the author to the region of the unknowable. The indestructibility of matter can be deduced or induced from no possible observation of sensible phenomena. The continuity of motion or the persistence of force is no fact of consciousness. Mr. Spencer himself says, to science or the explication of phenomena, the present must be linked with the past and with the future, and hence he argues the indestructibility of matter, the continuity of motion, and the persistence of force; but not one of them is a fact of consciousness. Consciousness is the recognition of one’s self as subject in the present act of thought, and looks neither before nor after, takes cognizance neither of the past nor of the future, and consequently of no link connecting them with the present. Indestructibility, continuity, persistence, all of which imply cognitions of the past and future, are not and cannot be facts of consciousness, which is cognition only of the present. Matter and motion, the author says, are derivative, derived from force, which alone is primitive. The indestructibility of matter and the continuity of motion depend, then, solely on the persistence of force, and are apprehensible, therefore, only in apprehending
that persistence; but that persistence is not a fact of consciousness. How, then, can it be asserted, unless force is, and is apprehended as, a persistent substance? But substance is unknowable.
The author adopts the method of the physicists, the so-called inductive method, and proceeds from particular phenomena to induce by generalization their law; but no induction is valid that is not made by virtue of a general principle, which is not itself inferable from the phenomenal, and must be given and held by the mind before any induction is possible. This is the condemnation of the method of the physicists, for, from phenomena alone, only phenomena can be obtained. A method without principles is null, and leads only to nullity. The author does not understand that the reason why the cosmic phenomena are not cogitable without the assumption of the cosmic reality underlying them, is because the mind intuitively apprehends them as dependent on something which they are not, and at the same time, and in the same intellectual act, intuitively apprehends a reality beyond them, which by its causative act produces and sustains them. He is wrong in declaring that the something real is unknowable; it may be incomprehensible, but, as we have seen, it must be cognizable, or nothing is cognizable.
That the men who follow in the physical sciences the physical or, as they say, the inductive method, inducing general conclusions from particular facts or phenomena, have really advanced those sciences, and by their untiring labors and exhaustless patience achieved all but miracles in the application of science to the mechanical and productive arts from which trade and industry have so largely profited, we by no means deny;
but they have done so because the mind, in their investigations and inductions, has all along had the intuition of the ideal principle which legitimates their generalizations, that of being or substance, and its creative or causative act, but of which they take no heed, or to which they do not advert; as St. Augustine says, the mind really has cognition of God in the idea of the perfect, but does not ordinarily advert to the fact. They suppose they obtain the law they assert by logical inference from the phenomena, because they do not observe that the mind has intuition of the causative or creative act, which is the ideal principle of the induction. The mind is superior to their philosophy, and they reason far better than they explain their reasoning. We may apply to them the advice Lord Mansfield gave to a man of good sense and sound judgment, but of little legal knowledge, who had been recently appointed a judge in one of the British colonies: “Give your decisions,” said his lordship, “without fear or hesitation; but don’t attempt to give your reasons.” So long as they confine themselves to the proper field of scientific investigation, they are safe enough; but let them come out of that field and attempt to explain the philosophy or the principles of their physical science, and they are pretty sure to make sad work of it. Ne sutor ultra crepidam.
Mr. Spencer protests against being regarded as an atheist, for he denies the self-existence of the universe, and neither affirms nor denies the existence of God. But atheist means simply no-theist, and, if he does not assert that God is, he certainly is an atheist. It is not necessary, in order to be an atheist, to make a positive denial of God. His disciple, Professor John Fiske, who has been lecturing on the cosmic philosophy