A beginning is inevitable to a philosophy of material evolution. Then ‘in the beginning’ what? How in the zero, in which there were no ‘concrete forms’ and no ‘preceding histories,’ did the first movement towards the plenished arch of heaven and the fruitful earth arise? Concentration and diffusion, it is affirmed, are universally observed physical processes. The latest science in tracing back the genealogies of various objects finds that ‘their components were once in diffused states, and, pursuing their histories forwards, finds diffused states will be again assumed by them.’[6] Clearly, then, ‘matter’ is assumed to exist at the ‘beginning.’ It certainly may have had a ‘preceding history;’ and to ignore this is to come, at the outset, perilously near to a philosophy ‘that stands self-convicted of inadequacy.’
A diffused state of matter is, it thus appears, the earliest point of the beginning that physical evolution can descry. This is the nebular hypothesis of Laplace; without doubt a majestic theory, but a theory still. Science has welcomed it to work with; and it explains, or aids in the interpretation of, much; but, that it should be taken so for granted as to be considered a demonstrated or even undisputed and established fact of modern science, we may be permitted to doubt; and it must have had a ‘preceding history.’ It takes us to a point in measureless past duration, where all that is now concrete matter is assumed to have been in a gaseous state. It is not even contended that it is an original condition. Such an almost infinite mass of nebulous matter must have been due, if existent, to heat, and to heat of an intensity that defies our range of conception.
But whence did such heat come? ‘Heat’ is demonstrated to us now as a rhythmic ‘mode of motion;’ one of the phenomena of nature to be accounted for. Verily, heat is a phenomenon with a ‘preceding history,’ and yet at the outset its presence is assumed in the cosmic cloud.
But, further complexity still, how does heat act in this primordial nebula? If heat is a ‘mode of motion,’ by what were the heat vibrations wrought? You must have then, for the phenomenon of heat, what is indispensable to the physical theory of it now:—the inconceivable but indispensable ether of modern physics. But how came the ether in, and beyond, the cosmic cloud? It is an ‘existence,’ manifestly; more, it is ‘matter;’ but matter that transcends the range of the action of gravity; it is without weight, and differentiated from all matter that we know in a manner that thought cannot follow.
How did this ‘existence’ pass from the imperceptible to the perceptible? and by its own requirement should not a complete philosophy furnish its past history?
Let us come more closely into contact with the actual formula of this philosophy. ‘Evolution,’ says Spencer, ‘is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.’[7]
Here, then, are the factors of the potential universe. By definition they are the sole structural essentials. Beyond them nothing should be asked, required, or assumed. What are these irreducible factors of the formula? ‘Matter’ and ‘motion.’ But we have clearly seen that we are cognizant of matter as such only by its ‘modes of motion’. It is these for which evolution has to account. ‘Matter’ denuded of the qualities by which we now are cognizant of it, can be no other than dimensions without qualities, spatial presence undiscoverable by sense.
On the other hand, pure motion, motion by itself, is impossible to thought. Motion is only known as an affection of matter. ‘It becomes manifest,’ says Spencer, ‘that our experience of force is that out of which our idea of matter is built’.[8] But, in the terms of the formula, force can be nothing but matter affected by motion. What, then, was this primary matter on which motion first acted, and before motion had by various ‘modes’ produced in it a single quality? No answer is possible; but, nevertheless, as the philosophy unfolds itself we find that ‘we need not refrain ... from dealing with matter as made up of extended and resistant atoms,’[9] and henceforth we are led to consider the cosmic nebula as not only homogeneous, but as being, in its homogeneity, atomic.
No lover of physical and chemical science can do other than profoundly admire the atomic theory of modern physics. But there is no sound physicist or chemist but is sufficiently alive to its difficulties to know that in every form in which it has been presented, it is, to say no more, tentative and hypothetic. In Mr. Spencer’s philosophy it becomes a fundamental fact of the beginning. But the existence of atoms being granted, how did they arise? ‘If you ask the materialist,’ says Professor Tyndall, ‘whence is this matter ... who or what divided it into molecules ... he has no answer.’[10] So that here, in spite of the claim made, no philosophy can be ‘complete;’ and even the doctrine of an eternally automatic evolution is philosophically inadequate.
But these atoms of the primordial haze are ‘resistant;’ such a quality can only result from a special affection of matter by motion; whence came or how arose such an affection of matter? Its existence in the atoms of the nebula inevitably implies ‘preceding history,’ but it is not given; and this pregnant atomic haze is, so far as we can see, without colour, without chemical affinity or reaction, without light, electricity, or magnetism, and devoid of all cohesion.