WHEN the history of modern thought comes to be written in the future, nothing will appear more remarkable to the student of these times than the great divergence, or rather the irreconcilable antagonism, between the utterances of philosophy and the revelations of exact science. That philosophy should transcend science, that it should be something more than a summary of results, is too evident even to require admission; that it should be in absolute contradiction to these results, that it should set aside or distort the most familiar facts, the best established data of science, will scarcely be claimed by its most ardent votaries. Is this the case?

What is philosophy? It is the systematisation of the conceptions furnished by science. As science is the systematisa

* Prof. Tyndall's Birmingham Address, to which this is a reply, appeared in the ECLECTIC for January, 1878.-ED.

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVIII., No. I

Old Series Complete in 63 vols.

tion of the various generalities reached through particulars, so philosophy is the systematisation of the generalities of generalities. In other words, science furnishes the knowledge, and philosophy the doctrine.' What is truth? It is the correspondence between the order of ideas and the order of phenomena, so that the one becomes a reflection of the other-the movement of thought following the movement of things.' For practical purposes, nothing more clear or comprehensive can be required than these definitions, which are given by Mr. Lewes in the preface to his History of Philosophy.

The knowledge referred to is defined as arising from the indisputable conclusions of experience; and the domain of philosophy is thus limited-Whilst theology claims to furnish a system of religious conceptions, and science to furnish conceptions of the order of the

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world, philosophy, detaching their widest conceptions from both, furnishes a doctrine which contains an explanation of the world and of human destiny.'

In furnishing this explanation, has our modern philosophy been subject to these limitations? Has she been content to generalise the indisputable conclusions of experience'? Or has she wildly plunged into the ocean of reckless conjecture, and with worse than Procrustean intolerance lopped, stretched, and mutilated the well-known facts of science, in the vain attempt to adapt them to the exigencies of a foregone conclusion? A glance at the diverging views taken by philosophy and science in the domain of biology will answer these questions.

What does science teach us as to the origin of life and living organisms? Professor Tyndall, in the January number of this Review, demonstrates in the most forcible, clear, and logical manner that life does not appear without the operation of antecedent life.' Philosophy, on the same authority, tells us that there is no difference in kind between organic and inorganic nature, that the sun is the source of life, and that if solar light and heat can be produced by the impact of dead matter, and if from the light and heat thus produced we can derive the energies which we have been accustomed to call vital, it indubitably follows that vital energy may have an approximately mechanical origin.'* And we are assured that nature is constant and uniform in her operations, and that 'life in all its forms has arisen by an unbroken evolution and through the instrumentality of what are called natural causes.' t

With respect to the infinitely varied forms of animals and vegetables, science tells us that neither by observation nor by experiment has the phenomenon of transition from one species to another been witnessed, and that therefore the 'indisputable conclusion of experience' is that the physiological characters of species are absolutely constant. Philosophy 'generalises' this statement by setting it aside altogether, teaching us that these characters are plastic, that species are not fixed, but always becoming some

*Fragments of Science, p. 460. + Ibid. p. 507.

thing else, and that all living beings have been derived from one or a few original forms of the simplest kind.

As to the highest study of the philosopher, the nature and origin of man, science teaches us that whilst he approaches the higher animals in many details of his organisation, his essential nature is entirely apart from theirs; that he possesses faculties and endowments of which no germ or trace is found even in the highest brutes, which differ not in degree only but in kind from theirs—that between them and him there is a vast chasm,' a 'practically infinite divergence, a gulf bridged over by no known living or extinct forms, the boundaries of which cannot be approximated even in thought. Philosophy tells us that man is but the latest term in an unbroken evolution (!) from the nebular haze until now-an evolution effected without the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes' †— the direct descendant of a catarhine ape.

Why do so many amongst us believe in these things, that have neither truth nor verisimilitude to recommend them, that are supported by no phenomena in nature, and are opposed to all the known facts of science? Why do we give ourselves over, bound mind, soul, and conscience, to accept anything that is told us with sufficient confidence and iteration? Why cannot we look sometimes with our own eyes, and not always accept the testimony of others? When we are told, ex cathedra, that the 'mystery and miracle of vitality' consists in the compounding in the organic world of forces belonging equally to the inorganic,' it is surely competent to us to inquire further about this compounding, viz., what forces are compounded, what amounts of each, and what resemblance to vital force we can produce by any such artificial compounding. If, in reply to this, we can get nothing but vague generalities as to what might possibly occur under unknown conditions, it might be wise at least to suspend our judgment, in this as in the other innumerable instances where our philosophy (so called) is at issue with science.

*Prof. Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, p. 103. + Ibid. p. 108.