Page:The knickerbocker (IA knickerbocker00agne).pdf/87

'Discussions,' in the classical, radical idea of the word, is a very appropriate denomination of the chapters of 'Universal Progress' striking asunder. It is fitting, because the author dissects all things, and finds the law of development in the ever and universally becoming of the heterogeneous out of the homogeneous, or reversed, the transition, or evolution rather, of homogencity into heterogencity. It is also fitting, because Mr. Spencer has unwanted analytic power, whilst in synthetic he is quite equal.

A profound thinker and rare observer, he accumulates facts, bidding science and history lay them at his feet, or at the beck of his brain, and then selects, arranges, and makes them utter his own thoughts, confirm his own high generalization.

He is lucid, consecutive, forceful, and it does one good, intellectually at least, to read him. No one pretending to philosophy can afford not to read him; no one can fail to be profited by reading him. Merely as a treasury of facts, and of the relativity of knowledges, the book were valuable; and as a dissertation and a genuine philosophy of progress, it is invaluable.

Having said thus much, it is not to be presumed that we assent to all his reasonings, or to his law of progress as definitely established on a scientific or unanswerable basis.

The author has taken pains, with some success, to disabuse himself of the charge of Positivism, so popular now with scientificists. In so far as that is supposed to be the equivalent of Comteism, he has exonerated himself quite; yet the tendency of his reasonings, in some of his chapters, is towards the general notion of Positivism.

Although he does not discard the idea of a personal God, the Creator, and perhaps, though undesignedly, lays the foundation for a stronger positive theological structure, yet, in carrying out his theory of evolution, he uses language adapted to throw grave doubt on the inspiration of the Bible and the wonted interpretation of the Genesis, or the Cosmogony. 'Must we receive,' he asks, 'the old Hebrew idea that God takes clay and moulds a new creature?' the interrogation hero being figurative and equivalent to a strong negation.

In chapter ninth, from which the quotation is made, the author represents the idea of 'special creations,' as of animals and man, as 'having no fact to support it,' and as not at all conceivable; the notion of man's evolution, in process of time, from the simplest monad, is only ludicrous to the uneducated, and the opposite belief inexcusable in the physiologist or the man of science; for 'if a single cell,' from the semen, 'may become a man in twenty years, a cell may, in the course of millions of years, give origin to the human race. The two processes are generically the same.' It would, moreover, be 'next to an insult to ask a leading geologist or physiologist whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the Creation.'

In all this reasoning there is the rejection of the fact of the revelation of the Mosaic account of creation, because it is said to have no fact to support it, and there is, certainly, the doctrine of evolution, even of man, out of original cells, without any creative power beyond that of making these original cells or monads, if even that, by a personal power. It is clearly intimated, also, that this man-monad probably required millions of years to develop itself, under