like John Hookham Frere's Aristophanic Birds,
If we'll listen and hear,
To make perfectly clear
how creation took place without a conscious Creator. All their fancied solutions of this hopeless puzzle have one feature in common—a family likeness which the wickedest wit finds it difficult to caricature. There is a note to Frere and Canning's 'Loves of the Triangles' which the reader will be grateful to me for transcribing here, the more frequently he may have laughed at it already, laughing now all the more, and laughing heartily at it now though he may never have before.
It begins by tracing the genesis or original formation of Space to a single point, in the same manner as the elder Darwin had, in his 'Zoonomia,' traced the whole organized universe to his six Filaments. It represents this primeval Point or Pinctum saliens of the universe, after 'evolving itself by its own energies, to have moved forwards in a right line ad infinitum till it grew tired.' Whereupon, 'the right line which it had generated would begin to put itself in motion in a lateral direction, describing an area of infinite extent. This area, as soon as it became conscious of its own existence, would begin to ascend or descend, according as its specific weight might determine, forming an immense solid space filled with vacuum, and capable of containing the present existing universe.'
Thus slow progressive points protract the line,
As pendant spiders spin the filmy twine:
Thus lengthened lines impetuous sweeping round,
Spread the wide plane, and mark its circling bound;
Thus planes, their substance with their motion grown,
Form the huge cube, the cylinder, the cone.
It then proceeds as follows:—
'Space being thus obtained, and presenting a suitable nidus or receptacle for the generation of chaotic matter, an immense deposit of it would gradually be accumulated; after which the filament of fire being produced in the chaotic mass by an idiosyncrasy or self-formed habit analogous to fermentation, explosion would take place, suns would be shot from the central chaos, planets from suns, and satellites from planets. In this state of things, the filament of organization would begin to exert itself in those independent masses which, in proportion to their bulk, exposed the greatest surface to the action of light and heat. This filament, after an infinite series of ages, would begin to ramify, and its viviparous offspring would diversify their forms and habits so as to accommodate themselves to the various incunabula which nature had prepared for them. Upon this view of things, it seems highly probable that the first effort of Nature terminated in the production of vegetables, and that these being abandoned to their own energies, by degrees detached themselves from the surface of the earth, and supplied themselves with wings and feet, according as their different propensities determined them in favour of aerial or terrestrial existence. Others, by an inherent disposition to society and civilisation, and by a stronger effort of volition, would become men. These in time would restrict themselves to the use of their hind feet; their tails would gradually rub off by sitting in their caves or huts as soon as they arrived at a domesticated state; they would invent language and the use of fire, with our present and hitherto imperfect system of society. In the meantime, the Fuci and Algæ, with the Corallines and Madrepores, would transform themselves into fish, and gradually populate all the submarine portions of the globe.'[44]
Although the writers of this delicious drollery seem to have had Dr. Erasmus Darwin only in view, they could not, we thus see, parody his peculiar crotchets without hitting off not less neatly some of the corresponding extravagances of both earlier and later expounders of Nature. Nature is a phrase which, greatly to the confusion of those who so employ it, is habitually used simultaneously in two quite opposite senses, so as to denote at the same time both the agency in virtue of whose action the universe exists, and likewise the universe itself which results from that action. Nature, in either signification, becomes to a great extent interpretable when the agency so designated is credited with sufficient sense to foresee and to intend the results of its own action. On that condition, although among the many unsolved problems she may continue to present there will be some evidently lying beyond the limits of human comprehension, there will be none running counter to human reason. Except on that condition, the universe is not simply uninterpretable, it is a bewildering assemblage of irreconcilable certainties. Philosophy's choice lies between such patent truisms as that there can be no force but living force, no vis but vis vivida, no vis inertiæ otherwise than metaphorically, and such blatant falsisms as that inertness and exertion may coincide, unintelligence generate intelligence, agency of whatsoever sort produce, merely by its own act, and merely out of its own essence, other agency capable of higher action than its own. Philosophy, when with these sets of alternatives before her she deliberately chooses the latter, becomes Scientific Atheism, all the varieties of which have one point in common, resembling each other in their proneness to rush upon and embrace demonstrable impossibilities for the sake of avoiding a few things hard to be understood. One variety, however, the Comtist, far exceeds all the rest in the lengths to which it is carried by this propensity.
IV.
If, in speaking as I am about to do of Comtism, I commit—heedless of Mr. Lewes' solemn warning—the grave offence of speaking confidently about a writer whom I have never read, I may at least plead in extenuation of my fault, that, although my knowledge of that writer be confessedly merely an echo of what others have said of him, those others, at any rate, far from being his antagonists, are two of the most ardent of his not undiscriminating admirers. It is from Mr. Mill[45] and from Mr. Lewes[46] himself that I have derived the notions of Comtist philosophy that suggest to me the following notes.