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_APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limiter

LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltp.
TORONTO

APHORISMS

REFLECTIONS

ay MICAS

LIBRARY

From the Works of
Lin

hab. HURLEY

Selected by
HENRIETTA A. HUXLEY

MACMILLAN AND CO.,, LIMITED
mi. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1908

RicHARD CLay AND Sons, LimITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

First Edition, 1907.
Reprinted, 1908. ~

H)

PREFACE

Although a man by his works and personality
shall have made his mark upon the age he lives in,
yet when he has passed away and his influence
with him, the next generation, and still more the
succeeding one, will know little of this work, of his
ideals and of the goal he strove to win, although for
the student his scientific work may always live.

Thomas Henry Huxley may come to be re-
membered by the public merely as the man who held
that we were descended from the ape, or as the
apostle of Darwinism, or as the man who worsted
Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford.

To prevent such limitation, and to afford more
intimate and valuable reasons for remembrance of
this man of science and lover of his fellow-men, I
have gathered together passages, on widely differ-

vi PREFACE

ing themes, from the nine volumes of his ‘‘ Essays,”
from his “Scientific Memoirs” and his ‘‘ Letters,”
to be published in a small volume, complete in itself
and of a size that can be carried in the pocket.

Some of the passages were picked out for their
philosophy, some for their moral guidances, some
for their scientific exposition of natural facts, or
for their insight into social questions; others for
their charms of imagination or genial humour, and
many—not the least—for their pure beauty of lucid
English writing.

In so much wealth of material it was difficult to
restrict the gathering.

My great wish is that this small book, by the
easy method of its contents, may attract the atten-
tion of those persons who are yet unacquainted
with my husband’s writings ; of the men and women
of leisure, who, although they may have heard of
the ‘‘ Essays,” do not care to work their way through
the nine volumes ; of others who would like to read
them, but who have either no time to do so or coin
wherewith to buy them. More especially do I hope
that these selections may attract the attention of the
working man, whose cause my husband so ardently
espoused, and to whom he was the first to reveal,
by his free lectures, the loveliness of Nature,
the many rainbow-coloured rays of science, and to

PREFACE vii

show forth to his listeners how all these glorious
rays unite in the one pure white light of holy
truth

I am most grateful to our son Leonard Huxley
for weeding out the overgrowth of my extracts,
for indexing the text of the book and seeing
it through the press for me.

HopESLEA, EASTBOURNE,
June 29th, 1907.

APHORISMS anp REFLECTIONS

I

There is no alleviation for the sufferings of man-
kind except veracity of thought and of action, and
the resolute facing of the world as it is when the
garment of make-believe by which pious hands
have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.

II

Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural
wants, has found the ideas which can alone still
spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in
desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been
driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the
foundations of a new morality.

III

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely
refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For
him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith
the one unpardonable sin.

IV

The man of science has learned to believe in
justification, not by faith, but by verification.

G B

2 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

Vv

No delusion is greater than the notion that
method and industry can make up for lack of mother-
wit, either in science or in practical life.

VI

Nothing great in science has ever been done by
men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine
afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.

VII

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every
other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom
in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or
two of them.

VIII

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assump-
tion one sometimes meets with, that physics has one
method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

IX

Anyone who is practically acquainted with scienti-
fic work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond
fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has
studied the history of science knows that almost
every great step therein has been made by the
“anticipation of Nature.”

x

There are three great products of our time. . . . One
of these is that doctrine concerning the constitution of

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 3

matter which, for want of a better name, I will call
‘‘ molecular” ; the second is the doctrine of the con-
servation of energy; the third is the doctrine of
evolution.

XI

M. Comte’s philosophy, in practice, might be
compendiously described as Catholicism = znus
Christianity.

XII

Fact I know ; and Law I know ; but what is this
Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind’s
throwing P

XIII

We live in a world which is full of misery and
ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us
is to try to make the little corner he can influence
somewhat less miserable and somewhat less igno-
rant than it was before he entered it.

XIV

The man of science, who, forgetting the limits of
philosophical inquiry, slides from these formule and
symbols into what is commonly understood by
materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level
with the mathematician, who should mistake the x’s
and y’s with which he works his problems for real
entities—and with this further disadvantage, as
compared with the mathematician, that the blunders
of the latter are of no practical consequence, while
the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse
the energies and destroy the beauty of a life.

B 2

4 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

XV

There are some men who are counted great
because they represent the actuality of their own
age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was
Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said,
“‘he expressed everybody’s thoughts better than
anybody.” But there are other men who attain great-
ness because they embody the potentiality of their
own day, and magically reflect the future. They
express the thoughts which will be everybody’s two
or three centuries after them. Such an one was
Descartes.

XVI

“Learn what is true, in order to do what is
right,” is the summing up of the whole duty of man,
for all who are unable to satisfy their mental hunger
with the east wind of authority.

XVII

When I say that Descartes consecrated doubt, you
must remember that it was that sort of doubt which
Goethe has called ‘‘the active scepticism, whose
whole aim is to conquer itself”; and not that other
sort which is born of flippancy and ignorance, and
whose aim is only to perpetuate itself, as an excuse
for idleness and indifference.

XVIII

What, then, iscertain? ... . Why, the fact that the
thought, the present consciousness, exists. Our
thoughts may be delusive, but they cannot be
fictitious. As thoughts, they are real and existent,
and the cleverest deceiver cannot make them
otherwise.

fey

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 5

XIX

Thought is existence. More than that, so far as
we are concerned, existence is thought, all our con-
ceptions of existence being some kind or other of
thought.

xX

It is enough forall the practical purposes of human
existence if we find that our trust in the representa-
tions of consciousness is verified by results; and
that, by their help, we are enabled ‘‘to walk sure-
footedly in this life.”

XXI

It is because the body is a machine that education
is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a
superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the
natural organisation of the body; so that acts,
which at first required a conscious effort, eventually
became unconscious and mechanical.

XXII

I protest that if some great Power would agree to
make me always think what is true and do what is
right, on condition of being turned into a sort of
clock and wound up every morning before I got
out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

XXIII

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to
do right ; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to
part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will
take it of me.

6 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

XXIV

Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure
among the powers that are eternal, will do her work
and be blessed.

XXV

There is assuredly no more effectual method of
clearing up one’sown mind on any subject than’ by
talking it over, so to speak, with men of real power
and grasp, who have considered it from a totally
different point of view.

XXVI

The parallax of time helps us to the true position
of a conception, as the parallax of space helps us to
that of a star.

XXVII

[If animals are conscious automata with souls]
the soul stands related to the body as the bell of a
clock to the works, and consciousness answers
to He sound which the bell gives out when it is
struck.

XXVIII

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools
and the beacons of wise men.

XXIX
The only question which any wise man can ask

himself, and which any honest man will ask himself,
is whether a doctrine is true or false,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 7

XXX

Of all the senseless babble I have ever had
occasion to read, the demonstrations of these phi-
losophers who undertake to tell us all about the
nature of God would be the worst, if they were not
surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the
eae who try to prove that there is no

od.

XXXI

That which is to be lamented, I fancy, is not that
society should: do its utmost to help capacity to
ascend from the lower strata to the higier, but that
it has no machinery by which to facilitate the
ew of incapacity from the higher strata to the
ower.

XXXII

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else,
is powerless against truth.

XXXIII

Misery is a match that never goes out.

XXXIV

Genius as an explosive power beats gunpowder
hollow ; and if knowledge, which should give that
power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not
small that the rocket will simply run amuck among
friends and foes.

XXXV

Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty,
and self-respect, are the qualities which make a

8 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

real gentleman, or lady, as distinguished from the
veneered article which commonly goes by that
name.

XXXVI

The higher the state of civilisation, the more
completely do the actions of one member of the
social body influence all the rest, and the less
possible is it for any one man to do a wrong thing
without interfering, more or less, with the freedom
of all his fellow-citizens.

XXXVII

I take it that the good of mankind means the
attainment, by every man, of all the happiness
which he can enjoy without diminishing the happi-
ness of his fellow men.

XXXVIII

Education promotes peace by teaching men the
realities of life and the obligations which are
involved in the very existence of society ; it promotes
intellectual development, not only by training the
individual intellect, but by sifting out from the
masses of ordinary or inferior capacities, those
who are competent to increase the general wel-
fare by occupying higher positions; and, lastly,
it promotes morality and refinement, by teaching
men to discipline themselves, and by leading them
to see that the highest, as it is the only permanent,
content is to be attained, not by grovelling in the
rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continual
striving towards those high peaks, where, resting
in eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but
bright ideal of the highest Good—‘‘a cloud by day,
a pillar of fire by night.”

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 9

XXXIX

Missionaries, whether of philosophy or of religion,
rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall
in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow
thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-
horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the
still larger multitude, who do not prefess to think
pee, but are quite certain they want a great

eal.

XL

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like,
Witless will serve his brother.

XLI

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of
practical politics—none in which there is more need
of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose
when the waves rise high.

XLII

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or
have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly
baseless fiction.

XLIII

For the welfare of society, as for that of individual
men, it is surely essential that there should be a
statute of limitations in respect of the consequences
of wrong-doing.

XLIV

“‘Musst immer thun wie neu geboren”’ is the best
of all maxims for the guidance of the life of States,
no less than of individuals,

10 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

XLV

The population question is the real riddle of the
sphinx, to which no political Cedipus has as yet
found the answer. In view of the ravages of the
terrible monster, over-multiplication, all other riddles
sink into insignificance.

XLVI

The ‘‘Law of Nature” is not a command to do,
or to refrain from doing, anything. It contains, in
reality, nothing but a statement of that which a
given being tends to do under the circumstances of
its existence; and which, in the case of a living
and sensitive being, it is necessitated to do, if it is
to escape certain kinds of disability, pain, and
ultimate dissolution.

XLVII

Probably none of the political delusions which
have sprung from the ‘‘natural rights” doctrine has
been more mischievous than the assertion that all
men have a natural right to freedom, and that those
who willingly submit to any restriction of this
freedom, beyond the point determined by the deduc-
tions of a frioré philosophers, deserve the title of
slave. But to my mind, this delusion is incomprehen-
sible except as the result of the error of confounding
natural with moral rights.

XLVIII

The very existence of society depends on the
fact that every member of it tacitly admits that
he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and
that he admits the claim of the polity of which
he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his
master,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 11

XLIX

Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a
time to take one’s own way at all hazards.

L

Individualism, pushed to anarchy, in the family is
as ill-founded theoretically and as mischievous practi-
cally as it is in the State; while extreme regiment-
ation is a certain means of either destroying self-
reliance or of maddening to rebellion.

LI

A man in his development runs for a little while
parallel with, though never passing through, the
form of the meanest worm, then travels for a space
beside the fish, then journeys along with the bird and
the reptile for his fellow travellers ; and only at last,
after a brief companionship with the highest of the
four-footed and four-handed world, rises into the
dignity of pure manhood.

Lil

Not only does every animal live at the expense of
some other animal or plant, but the very plants are at
Cee oe The individuals of a species are like the
crew of a foundered ship, and none but good swim-
mers have a chance of reaching the land.

LIII

When we know that living things are formed
of the same elements as the inorganic world, that
they act and react upon it, bound by a thousand ties

12 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

of natural piety, is it probable, nay is it possible,
that they, and they alone, should have no order in
their seeming disorder, no unity in their seeming
multiplicity, should suffer no explanation by the
discovery of some central and sublime law of mutual
connection ?

LIV

The student of Nature wonders the more and is
astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes
with her operations ; but of all the perennial miracles
she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy
of admiration is the development of a plant or of an
animal from its embryo.

LV

Matter and force are the two names of the one
artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.

LVI

There is not throughout Nature a law of wider
application than this, that a body impelled by two
forces takes the direction of their resultant.

LVII

Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of
thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

LVIITI

Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers
after truth, from the days of Galileo until now,
whose lives have been embittered and their good
name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters ?

rv)

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 13

Who shall count the host of weaker men whose
sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to
harmonise impossibilities—whose life has been
wasted in the attempt to force the generous new
wine of Science into the old bottles of Judaism,
compelled by the outcry of the same strong party?

LIX

When Astronomy was young ‘‘the morning stars
sang together for joy,” and the planets were guided
in their courses by celestial hands. Now, the
harmony of the stars has resolved itself into
gravitation according to the inverse squares of the
distances, and the orbits of the planets are deducible
from the laws of the forces which allow a schoolboy’s
stone to break a window.

LX

The lightning was the angel of the Lord ; but it
has pleased Providence, in these modern times, that
science should make it the humble messenger of man,
and we know that every flash that shimmers about
the horizon on a summer’s evening is determined by
ascertainable conditions, and that its direction and
brightness might, if our knowledge of these were
great enough, have been calculated.

LXI

Why should the souls [of philosophers] be deeply
vexed? The majesty of Fact is on their side, and the
elemental forces of Nature are working for them.
Not a star comes to the meridian at its calculated
time but testifies to the justice of their methods—
their beliefs are ‘‘one with the falling rain and with
the growing corn.” By doubt they are established,
and open inquiry is their bosom friend.

14 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

LXII

Harmonious order governing eternally continuous
progress—the web and woof of matter and force
interweaving by slow degrees, without a broken
thread, that veil which lies between us and the
Infinite—that universe which alone we know or can
know ; such is the picture which science draws of
the world, and in proportion as any part of that
picture is in unison with the rest, so may we feel
sure that it is rightly painted.

LXIII

Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of
men, with his mere natural epphances, to separate all
the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a
shower of rain will effect the same object in ten
minutes.

LXIV

Elijah’s great question, ‘‘ Will you serve God or
BaalP Choose ye,” is uttered audibly enough in the
ears of every one of us as we come to manhood.
Let every man who tries to answer it seriously ask
himself whether he can be satisfied with the Baal of
authority, and with all the good things his worshippers
are promised in this world and the next. If he can,
let him, if he be so inclined, amuse himself with such
scientific implements as authority tells him are safe
and will not cut his fingers; but let him not imagine
he is, or can be, both a true son of the Church and a
loyal soldier of science.

LXV

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness VV
to truth.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 15

LXVI

If the blind acceptance of authority appears to
him in its true colours, as mere private judgment 27
excelsis, and if he have the courage to stand alone,
face to face with the abyss of the eternal and
unknowable, let him be content, once for all, not
only to renounce the good things promised by
“‘Infallibility,” but even to bear the bad things
which it prophesies ; content to follow reason and
fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever
they may lead, in the sure faith that a hell of honest
men wili, to him, be more endurable than a paradise
full of angelic shams.

LXVII

History warns us that it is the customary fate
of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as
superstitions.

LXVIII1

The struggle for existence holds as much in the
intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a
species of thinking, and its right to exist is
coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by
its rivals.

LXIX

The scientific spirit is of more value than its
products, and irrationally held truths may be more
harmful than reasoned errors.

LXX

Every belief is the product of two factors: the
first is the state of the mind to which the evidence in
favour of that belief is presented ; and the second
is the logical cogency of the evidence itself.

16 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

LXXI

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

LXXII

The method of scientific investigation is nothing
Sut the expression of the necessary mode of working
of the human mind. It is simply the mode in which
all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise
and exact.

LXXIII

There are men (and I think Priestley was one of
them) to whom the satisfaction of throwing down a
triumphant fallacy is as great as that which attends
the discovery of a new truth; who feel better
satisfied with the government of the world, when
they have been helping Providence by knocking an
imposture on the head ; and who care even more for
freedom of thought than for mere advance of
knowledge. These men are the Carnots who
organise victory for truth, and they are, at least, as
important as the generals who visibly fight her battles
in the field.

LXXIV

Material advancement has its share in moral and
intellectual progress. Becky Sharp’s acute remark
that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand
a year, has its application to nations ; and it is futile
to expect a hungry and squalid population to be
anything but violent and gross.

LXXV

_If the twentieth century is to be better than the
nineteenth, it will be because there are among us

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 17

men who walk in Priestley’s footsteps. But whether
Priestley’s lot be theirs, and a future generation, in
justice and in gratitude, set up their statues; or
whether their names and fame are blotted out from
remembrance, their work will live as long as time
endures. To all eternity, the sum of truth and right
will have been increased by their means; to all
eternity, falsehood and injustice will be the weaker
because they have lived.

LXXVI

Science is, I believe, nothing but ¢razned and
organised common sense, differing from the latter only
as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its
methods differ from those of common sense only so
far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from
the manner in which a savage wields his club.

LXXVII

The vast results obtained by Science are won by
no mystical faculties, by no mental processes, other
than those which are practised by every one of us, in
the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective
policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made
by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that
by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of
Montmartre from fragments of their bones,

LXXVIII

There is no side of the human mind which physio-
logical study leaves uncultivated. Connected by
innumerable ties with abstract science, Physiology is
yet in the most intimate relation with humanity ; ; and
by teaching us that law and order, and a definite
scheme of development, regulate even the strangest

(e

18 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

and wildest manifestations of individual life, she
prepares the student to look for a goal even amidst
the erratic wanderings of mankind, and to believe
that history offers something more than an enter-
taining chaos—a journal of a toilsome, tragi-comic
march nowhither.

LXXIX

I cannot but think that he who finds a certain
proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in
the life of the very worms, will bear his own share
with more courage and submission ; and will, at any
rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable
theories of the Divine government, which would have
us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake, —to
be corrected by and by. On the other hand, the
predominance of happiness among living things—
their lavish beauty—the secret and wonderful
harmony which pervades them all, from the highest
to the lowest, are equally striking refutations of that
modern Manichean doctrine, which exhibits the world
as a slave-mill, worked with many tears, for mere
utilitarian ends.

LXXX

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his
country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery
filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of
which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach
him something of natural history, and you place in
his hands a catalogue of those which are worth
turning round. Surely our innocent pleasures are
not so abundant in this life that we can afford to
despise this or any other source of them. We should
fear being banished for our neglect to that limbo
where the great Florentine tells us are those who,
during this life, ‘‘ wept when they might be joyful.”

a

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 19

LXXXI

No slavery can be abolished without a double
emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom
more than the freed-man.

LXXXII

Compare the average artisan and the average
country squire, and it may be doubted if you will find
a pin to choose between the two in point of ignorance,
class feeling, or prejudice. It is true that the
ignorance is of a different sort—that the class feeling
is in favour of a different class—and that the prejudice
has a distinct savour of wrong-headedness in each
case—but it is questionable if the one is either a bit
better, or a bit worse, than the other. The old
protectionist theory is the doctrine of trades unions as

applied by the squires, and the modern trades unionism
is the doctrine of the squires applied by the artisans.
Why should we be worse off under one régzvve than

under the other P

LXXXIII

The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one
of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected
with us, do depend upon our knowing something
of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and
complicated than chess. Itisa game which has been
payee for untold ages, every man and woman of us

eing one of the two players in a game of his or her
own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the
phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are
what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the
other side is hidden fromus. We know that his play
is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to
our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes
the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man
who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with

Guz

20 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

that sort of overflowing generosity with which the
strong shows delight in strength. And one who
plays ill is checkmated—without haste, but without
remorse.

LXXXIV

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the
laws of Nature, under which name I include not
merely things and their forces, but men and their
ways ; and the fashioning of the affections and of
the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in
harmony with those laws.

LXXXV

Toevery one of us the world was onceas fresh and
new as to Adam. And then, long before we were
susceptible of any other mode of instruction, Nature
took us in hand, and every minute of waking life
brought its educational influence, shaping our actions
into rough accordance with Nature’s laws, so that
we- might not be ended untimely by too gross
disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of
education as past for any one, be he as old as he may.
For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the
first day, and as full of untold noveities for him who
has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still contin-
uing her patient education of us in that great
university, the universe, of which we are all members
—Nature having no Test-Acts.

LXXXVI

Those who take honours in Nature’s university,
who learn the laws which govern men and things
and obey them, are the really great and successful
men in this worid. The great mass of mankind are

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 21

the ‘‘ Poll,” who pick up just enough to get through
without much discredit. Those who won't learn at
all are plucked ; and then you can’t come up again.
Nature’s pluck means extermination.

LXXXVII

Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobe-
dience—incapacity meets with the same punishment
as crime. Nature’s discipline is not even a word and
a blow, and the blow first ; but the blow without the
word. It is left to you to find out why your ears
are boxed.

LXXXVIII

All artificial education ought to be an anticipation
of natural education.

LXXXIX

That man, I think, has had a liberal education
who has been so trained in youth that his body is
the ready servant of his will, and does with ease
and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it
is capable of ; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic
engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in
smooth working order ; ready, like a steam engine,
to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the
gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind ;
whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great
and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of
her operations ; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full
of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to
come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a
tender conscience; who has learned to love all
beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all
vileness, and to respect others as himself,

22 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

XC
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the
other woes of mankind, is wisdom.

XCi

Next to being right in this world, the best of all
things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because
you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing
about between right and wrong, vibrating and
fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are
absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong,
you must, some of these days, have the extreme
good fortune of knocking your head against a fact,
and that sets you all straight again.

XCII

No man ever understands Shakespeare until he is
old, though the youngest may admire him, the
reason being that he satisfies the artistic instinct of
the youngest and harmonises with the ripest and
richest experience of the oldest.

XCIII
It is not a question whether one order of study
or another should predominate. It is a question
of what topics of education you shall select which
will combine all the needful elements in such due
proportion as to give the greatest amount of food,
support, and encouragement to those faculties which
enable us to appreciate truth, and to profit by
those sources of innocent happiness which are
open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that
which is bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep
clear of the multitude of pitfalls and dangers which
beset those who break through the natural or
moral laws.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 23

XCIV

Writing is a form of drawing; therefore if you
give the same attention and trouble to drawing as you
do to writing, depend upon it, there is nobody who
cannot be made to draw, more or less well. .... Ido
not say for one moment you would make an artistic
draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow.

.. Youcan teach simple drawing, and you will
finditan implement of learning of extreme value. I do
not think its value can be exaggerated, because it
gives you the means of training the young in
attention and accuracy, which are the two things in
which all mankind are more deficient than in any
other mental quality whatever.

XCV

If a man cannot get literary culture of the highest
kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare,
and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to
mention only a few of our illustrious writers—I
say, if he cannot get it out of those writers, he
cannot get it out of anything ; and I would assuredly
devote a very large portion of the time of every
English child to the careful study of the models of
English writing of such varied and wonderful kind
as we possess, and, what is still more important
and still more neglected, the habit of using that
language with precision, with force, and with
art.

XCVI

I fancy we are almost the only nation in the world
who seem to think that composition comes by nature.
The French attend to their own language, the
Germans study theirs ; but Englishmen do not seem
to think it is worth their while.

24 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

XCVII

Many of the faults and mistakes of the ancient
philosophers are traceable to the fact that they knew
no language but their own, and were often led into
confusing the symbol with the thought which it
embodied.

XCVIII

If the time given to education permits, add Latin
and German. Latin, because it is the key to nearly
one-half of English and to all the Romance lan-
guages ; and German, because it is the key to almost
all the remainder of English, and helps you to
understand a race from whom most of us have
sprung, and who have a character and a literature
of a fateful force in the history of the world, such
as probably has been allotted to those of no other
people, except the Jews, the Greeks, and ourselves.

XCIX

In an ideal University, . . .. the force of living
example should fire the student with a noble am-
bition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to
follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields
of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should
be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that
fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession
than much learning ; a nobler gift than the power
of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and
nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is
greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the
heart of morality.

ce

Do what you can to do what you ought, and leave
hoping and fearing alone.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 25

cI

On the face of the matter, it is absurd to ask
whether it is more important to know the limits of
one’s powers; or the ends for which they ought to
be exerted; or the conditions under which they
must be exerted. One may as well inquire which of
theterms of a Rule of Three sum one ought to know
in order to get a trustworthy result. Practical life
is such a sum, in which your duty multiplied into
your capacity, and divided by your circumstances,
gives you the fourth term in the proportion, which is
your deserts, with great accuracy.

CII

Books are the money of Literature, but only the
counters of Science.

CIII

Medicine was the foster-mother of Chemistry,
because it has to do with the preparation of drugs
and the detection of poisons; of Botany, because it
enabled the physician to recognise medicinal herbs; of
Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, because the
man who studied Human Anatomy and Physiology
for purely medical purposes was led to extend his
studies to the rest of the animal world.

CIV

A thorough study of Human Physiology is,
in itself, an education broader and more com-
prehensive than much that passes under that name.
There is no side of the intellect which it does not call
into play, no region of human knowledge into which
either its roots, or its branches, do not extend ; like
the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds,

26 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

its waves wash the shores of the two worlds of
matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow from
both ; through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the
keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if such there be,
from the one to the other; far away from that
North-west Passage of mere speculation, in which
so many brave souls have been hopelessly frozen

up.

CV

You know that among the Bees, it depends on the
kind of cell in which the egg is deposited, and the
quantity and quality of food which is supplied to the
grub, whether it shall turn out a busy little worker
or a big idle queen. And, in the human hive, the
cells of the endowed larve are always tending to
enlarge, and their food to improve, until we get
queens, beautiful to behold, but which gather no
honey and build no comb.

CVI

Examination, like fire, is a goodservant, but a bad
master ; and there seems to me to be some danger of its
becoming our master. I by no means stand alone in
this opinion. Experienced friends of mine do not
hesitate to say that students whose career they
watch appear to them to become deteriorated by the
constant effort to pass this or that examination, just
as we hear of men’s brains becoming affected by the
daily necessity of catching a train. They work to
pass, not to know; and outraged Science takes
her revenge. They do pass, and they don’t know.

CVII

A man’s worst difficulties begin when he is able to
do as he likes.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 27

CVIII

There is but one right, and the possibilities of
wrong are infinite.

CIX

It is given to few to add to the store of knowledge,
to strike new springs of thought, or to shape new
forms of beauty. But so sure as it is that men live
not by bread, but by ideas, so sure is it that the
future of the world lies in the hands of those who are
able to carry the interpretation of nature a step
further than their predecessors.

Cx

Size isnot grandeur, and territory does not make a
nation.

CXI

Whatever practical people may say, this world
is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and
very often by the wildest and most hypothetical
ideas. It is amatter of the very greatest importance
that our theories of things, and even of things that
seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should
be as far as possible true, and as far as possible
removed from error.

CxXIi

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense
clarified.

CXIII

You may read any quantity of books, and you may
be almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you

28 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

don’t have, atthe back of your minds, the change for
words in definite images which can only be acquired
through the operation of your observing faculties on
the phenomena of nature.

CXIV

The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous
thing is, to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If
knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that
itis other than a very valuable possession, however
infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little
knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has
so much as to be out of danger?

CXV

Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more
than twice their weight of cleverness.

CXVI

The body is a machine of the nature of an army.
.... Ofthis army each cell is a soldier, an organ
a brigade, the central nervous system headquarters
and field telegraph, the alimentary and circulatory
system the commissariat. Losses are made good by
recruits born in camp, and the life of the individual is
a campaign, conducted successfully for a number
of years, but with certain defeat in the long run.

CXVII

So far as the laws of conduct are determined by
the intellect, I apprehend that they belong to science,
and to that part of science which is called morality.
But the engagement of the affections in favour of that

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 29

particular kind of conduct which we call good, seems
to me to be something quite beyond merescience. And
I cannot but think that it, together with the awe and
reverence, which have no kinship with base fear, but
arise whenever one tries to pierce below the surface
of things, whether they be material or spiritual, con-
stitutes all that has any unchangeable reality in
religion.

CXVIII

Just as I think it would be a mistake to con-
found the science, morality, with the affection,
religion ; so do I conceive it to be a most lamentable
and mischievous error, that the science, theology, is
so confounded in the minds of many—indeea, I might
say, of the majority of men.

CXIX

My belief is, that no human being, and no
society composed of human beings, ever did, or ever
will, come to much, unless their conduct was
eoeerued and guided by the love of some ethical
ideal.

CXX

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is
the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to
do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or
not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned ;
and, however early a man’s training begins, it is
probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

CXXI

The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.
What men need is, as much knowledge as they can

30 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

assimilate and organise into a basis for action ; give
them more and it may become injurious. One knows
people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested
learning as others are from over-fulness of meat and
drink,

CXXII

There is no mode of exercising the faculty of
observation and the faculty of accurate reproduction
of that which is observed, no discipline which so
readily tests error in these matters, as drawing
properly taught. And by that I do not mean artistic
drawing ; I mean figuring natural objects. I do not
wish to exaggerate, but I declare to you that, in my
judgment, the child who has been taught to make an
accurate elevation, plan and section of a pint pot has
had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and
hand.

CXXIII

Accuracy is the foundation of everything else.

CXXIV

Anybody who knows his business in science can
make anything subservient to that purpose. You
know it was said of Dean Swift that he could write
an admirable poem upon a broomstick, and the man
who has a real knowledge of science can make the
commonest object in the world subservient to an
introduction to the principles and greater truths o/
natural knowledge.

CXXV

My experience of the world is that things left to
themselves don’t get right.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 31

CXXVI

I remember somewhere reading of an interview
between the poet Southey and a good Quaker.
Southey was a man of marvellous powers of work.
He had a habit of dividing his time into little parts
each of which was filled up, and he told the Quaker
what he did in this hour and that, and so on through
the day until far intothe night. The Quaker listened,
and at the close said, ‘‘ Well, but, friend Southey,
when dost thee think P”

CXXVII

The knowledge which is absolutely requisite in
dealing with young children is the knowledge you
possess, as you would know your own business,
and which you can just turn about as if you were
explaining to a boy a matter of everyday life.

CXXVIII

You may develop the intellectual side of people as
far as you like, and you may confer upon them all the
skill that training and instruction can give; but, if
there is not, underneath all that outside form and
superficial polish, the firm fibre of healthy manhood
and earnest desire to do well, your labour is absolutely
in vain.

CXXIX

Our sole chance of succeeding in a competition,
which must constantly become more and more severe,
is that our people shall not only have the knowledge
and the skill which are required, but that they shall
have the will and the energy and the honesty, without
which neither knowledge nor skill can be of any
permanent avail.

32 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CXXX

It is a great many years since, at the outset of my
career, I had to think seriously what life had to offer
that was worth having. I came to the conclusion
that the chief good, for me, was freedom to learn,
think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I
have acted on that conviction, and have availed
myself of the ‘‘rara temporum felicitas ubi sentire
quz velis, et quz sentias dicere licet,” which is now
enjoyable, to the best of my ability ; and though
strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should
probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with
the results of the line of action I have adopted.

CXXXI

The scientific imagination always restrains itself
within the limits of probability.

CXXXII

It is a ‘‘law of nature,” verifiable by everyday
experience, that our already formed convictions, our
strong desires, our intent occupation with particular
ideas, modify our mental operations to a most mar-
vellous extent, and produce enduring changes in the
direction and in the intensity of our intellectual and
moral activities.

CXXXIII

Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as
effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce,
by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly
distinguishable from monomania.

ee

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 33

CXXXI1V

Demoniac possession is mythical ; but the faculty of
being possessed, more or less completely, by an idea is
probably the fundamental condition of what is called
genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist,
or the man of science. One calls it faith, another
calls it inspiration, a third calls it insight; but the
“intending of the mind,” to borrow Newton’s well-
known phrase, the concentration of all the rays of
intellectual energy on some one point, until it glows
and colours the whole cast of thought with its
peculiar light, is common to all.

CXXXV

Whatever happens, science may bide her time in
patience and in confidence.

CXXXVI

The only people, scientific or other, who never
make mistakes are those who do nothing.

CXXXVII

The most considerable difference I note among
men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but
in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable
lapses.

CXXXVIII

Quite apart from deliberate and conscious fraud
(which is a rarer thing than is often supposed), people
whose mythopeeic faculty is once stirred are capable
of saying the thing that is not, and of acting as they
should not, to an extent which is hardly imaginable

D

34 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

by persons who are not so easily affected by the
contagion of blind faith, There is no falsity so
gross that honest men and, still more, virtuous
women, anxious to promote a good cause, will
not lend themselves to it without any clear con-
sciousness of the moral bearings of what they are
doing.

CXXXIX

This modern reproduction of the ancient prophet,
with his ‘‘ Thus saith the Lord,” ‘‘ This is the work
of the Lord,” steeped in supernaturalism and glory-
ing in blind faith, is the mental antipodes of the
philosopher, founded in naturalism and a fanatic for
evidence, to whom these affirmations inevitably sug-
gest the previous question: ‘‘ How do you know that
the Lord saithit?” ‘‘ How do you know that the
Lord doeth it?” and who is compelled to demand
that rational ground for belief, without which, to
the man of science, assent is merely an immoral
pretence.

And it is this rational ground of belief which
the writers of the Gospels, no less than Paul, and
Eginhard, and Fox, so little dream of offering that
they would regard the demand for it as a kind of
blasphemy.

CXL

To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in
intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as
to object to live one’s life, with due thought for the
morrow, because no man can be sure he will be alive
an hour hence.

CXLI

I verily believe that the great good which has
been effected in the world by Christianity has been
largely counteracted by the pestilent doctrine on

> "SS ey Ses

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 35

which all the Churches have insisted, that honest
disbelief in their more or less astonishing creeds
is a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye,
deserving and involving the same future retribution
as murder and robbery. If we could only see, in one
view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the lies,
the slaughter, the violations of every obligation of
humanity, which have flowed from this source along
the course of the history of Christian nations, our
worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the
vision.

CXLII

Agnostioism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method,
the essence of which lies in the rigorous application
of a single principle. That principle is of great
antiquity ; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the
writer who said, ‘‘ Try all things, hold fast by that
which is good ” ; it is the foundation of the Reforma-
tion, which simply illustrated the axiom that every
man should be able to give a reason for the faith
that is in him ; it is the great principle of Descartes ;
it is the fundamental axiom of modern science.
Positively the principle may be expressed: In
matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as
it will take you, without regard to any other con-
sideration. And negatively: In matters of the
intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain
which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That
I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep
whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look
the universe in the face, whatever the future may
have in store for him.

CXLIII

The best men of the best epochs are simply those
who make the fewest blunders and commit the
fewest sins.

D2

36 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CXLIV

That one should rejoice in the good man, forgive
the bad man, and pity and help all men to the best of
one’s ability, is surely indisputable. It is the glory
of Judaism and of Christianity to have proclaimed
this truth, through all their aberrations. But the
worship of a God who needs forgiveness and help,
and deserves pity every hour of his existence, is no
better than that of any other voluntarily selected
fetish. The Emperor Julian’s project was hopeful
in comparison with the prospects of the Comtist
Anthropolatry.

CXLV

The Cleric asserts that it is morally wrong not to
believe certain propositions, whatever the results of
a strict scientific investigation of the evidence of
these propositions. He tells us ‘‘ that religious error
is, in itself, of an immoral nature.” He declares
that he has prejudged certain conclusions, and looks
upon those who show cause for arrest of judgment
as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily follows that,
for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertain-
ment of truth, is the highest aim of mental life.
And, on careful analysis of the nature of this faith,
it will too often be found to be, not the mystic pro-
cess of unity with the Divine, understood by the
religious enthusiast ; but that’ which the candid
simplicity of a Sunday scholar once defined it to be.
es Faith, ” said this unconscious plagiarist of Tertul-
lian, ‘‘is the power of saying you believe things
which are incredible.”

CXLVI

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief
political and social theories, of the modern world

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 37

have grown out of those of Greece and Rome—not
by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental
teachings of early Christianity, to which science,
art, and any serious occupation with the things of
this world, were alike despicable.

CXLVII

All that is best in the ethics of the modern
world, in so far as it has not grown out of Greek
thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the direct develop-
ment of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of
legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so
merciful, so tender to the weak and poor, as the
Jewish law ; and, if the Gospels are to be trusted,
Jesus of Nazareth himself declared that he taught
nothing but that which lay implicitly, or explicitly,
in the religious and ethical system of his people.

CXLVIII

The first-recorded judicial murder of a scientific
thinker was compassed and effected, not by a despot,
nor by priests, but was brought about by eloquent
demagogues, to whom, of all men, thorough search-
ings of the intellect are most dangerous and therefore
most hateful.

CXLIX

Platonic philosophy is probably the grandest
example of the unscientific use of the imagination
extant ; and it would be hard to estimate the amount
of detriment to clear thinking effected, directly and
indirectly, by the theory of ideas, on the one hand,
and by the unfortunate doctrine of the baseness of
matter, on the other.

38 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CL

The development of exact natural knowledge in
all its vast range, from physics to history and
criticism, is the consequence of the working out,
in this province, of the resolution to ‘‘take nothing
for truth without clear knowledge that it is such” ;
to consider all beliefs open to criticism; to regard
the value of authority as neither greater nor less
than as much as it can prove itself to be worth.
The modern spirit is not the spirit ‘which always
denies,” delighting only in destruction ; still less is
it that which builds castles in the air rather than
not construct; it is that spirit which works and
will work ‘‘ without haste and without rest,” gather-
ing harvest after harvest of truth into its barns
and devouring error with unquenchable fire.

CLI

In truth, the laboratory is the fore-court of the
temple of philosophy ; and whoso has not offered
sacrifices and undergone purification there has little
chance of admission into the sanctuary.

CLII

The memorable service renderea to the cause
of sound thinking by Descartes consisted in this:
that he laid the foundation of modern philosophical
criticism by his inquiry into the nature of certainty

CLIII

There is no question in the mind of anyone
acquainted with the facts that, so far as observation
and experiment can take us, the structure and the
functions of the nervous system are fundamentally,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 39

the same in an ape, or ina dog, andina man. And
the suggestion that we must stop at the exact point
at which direct proof fails us, and refuse to believe
that the similarity which extends so far stretches
yet further, is no better than a quibble. Robinson
Crusoe did not feel bound to conclude, from the
single human footprint which he saw in the sand,
that the maker of the impression had only one

leg.

CLIV

Descartes, as we have seen, illustrates what he
means by an innate idea, by the analogy of hereditary
diseases or hereditary mental peculiarities, such as
generosity. On the other hand, hereditary mental
tendencies may justly be termed instincts ; and still
more appropriately might those special proclivities,
which constitute what we call genius, come into the
same category.

CLV

The child who is impelled to draw as soon as it
can hold a pencil; the Mozart who breaks out into
music as early ; the boy Bidder who worked out the
most complicated sums without learning arithmetic ;
the boy Pascal who evolved Euclid out of his own
consciousness : all these may be said to have been
impelled by instinct, as much as are the beaver and
the bee. And the man of genius is distinct in kind
from the man of cleverness, by reason of the working
within him of strong innate tendencies—which
cultivation may improve, but which it can no
more create than horticulture can make thistles
bear figs. The analogy between a musical instru-

40 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

ment and the mind holds good here also. Art and
industry may get much music, of a sort, ont of a
penny whistle; but, when all is done, it has no
chance against an organ. The innate musical
potentialities of the two are infinitely different.

CLVI

It is notorious that, to the unthinking mass of
mankind, nine-tenths of the facts of life do not
suggest the relation of cause and effect; and they
practically deny the existence of any such relation
by attributing them to chance. Few gamblers but
would stare if they were told that the falling of a
die on a particular face is as much the effect of a
definite cause as the fact of its falling ; it is a proverb
that ‘‘the wind bloweth where it listeth” ; and even
thoughtful men usually receive with surprise the
suggestion, that the form of the crest of every wave
that breaks, wind-driven, on the sea-shore, and the
direction of every particle of foam that flies before
the gale, are the exact effects of definite causes ;
and, as such, must be capable of being determined,
deductively, from the laws of motion and the pro-
perties of air and water. So again, there are large
numbers of highly intelligent persons who rather
pride themselves on their fixed belief that our
volitions have no cause; or that the will causes
itself, which is either the same thing, or a contra-
diction in terms,

CLVII

To say that an idea is necessary is simply to
affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary ; and
the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any
belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no
proof, of its truth,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 41

CLVIII

It is remarkable that Hume does not refer to the
sentimental arguments for the immortality of the
soul which are so much in vogue at the present day ;
and which are based upon our desire for a longer
conscious existence than that which nature appears
to have allotted to us. Perhaps he did not think
them worth notice. For indeed it is not a little
strange, that our strong desire that a certain occur-
rence should happen should be put forward as
evidence that it will happen. If my intense desire
to see the friend, from whom I have parted, does
not bring him from the other side of the world, or
take me thither; if the mother’s agonised prayer
that her child should live has not prevented him
from dying; experience certainly affords no pre-
sumption that the strong desire to be alive after
death, which we call the aspiration after immortality,
is any more likely to be gratified. As Hume truly
says, ‘‘All doctrines are to be suspected which
are favoured by our passions”; and the doctrine,
that we are immortal because we should extremely
like to be So, contains the quintessence of suspicious-
ness.

CLIX

If every man possessed everything he wanted,
and no one had the power to interfere with such
possession ; or if no man desired that which could
damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part
to play in the universe.

CLX

_To fail in justice, or in benevolence, is to be
displeased with one’s self. But happiness is impos-
sible without inward self-approval ; and, hence, every

42 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

man who has any regard to his own happiness and
welfare, will find his best reward in the practice of
every moral duty.

CLXI

Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent; but the man is
to be envied to whom her ways seem in anywise
playful. And though she may not talk much about
suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic
may be accounted for on the principle ¢a va sans
dire.

CLXII

If mankind cannot be engaged in practices “full
of austerity and rigour,” by the love of righteousness
and the fear of evil, without seeking for other com-
pensation than that which flows from the gratifica-
tion of such love and the consciousness of escape
from debasement, they are ina bad case. For they
will assuredly find that virtue presents no very close
likeness to the sportive leader of the joyous hours in
Hume’s rosy picture; but that she is an awful
Goddess, whose ministers are the Furies, and whose
highest reward is peace.

CLXIII

Under its theological aspect, morality is obedience
to the will of God ; and the ground for such obedi-
ence is two-fold: either we ought to obey God
because He will punish us if we disobey Him, which
is an argument based on the utility of obedience; or
our obedience ought to flow from our love towards
God, which is an argument based on pure feeling
and for which no reason can be given. For, if any
man should say that he takes no pleasure in the
contemplation of the ideal of perfect holiness, or,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 43

in other words, that he does not love God, the
attempt to argue him into acquiring that pleasure
would be as hopeless as the endeavour to persuade
Peter Bell of the ‘‘ witchery of the soft blue sky.”

CLXIV

In whichever way we look at the matter, morality
is based on feeling, not on reason; though reason
alone is competent to trace out the effects of our
actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is
founded on the love of one’s neighbour ; and good-
ness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the
laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon
instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less
“innate” and ‘‘necessary” than they are. Some
people cannot by any means be got to understand
the first book of Euclid; but the truths of mathe-
matics are no less necessary and binding on the
great mass of mankind. Some there are who
cannot feel the difference between the ‘‘ Sonata
Appassionata” and “Cherry Ripe” ; or between a
grave-stone-cutter’s cherub and the Apollo Belvidere ;
but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged.
While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy,
are incapable of a sense of duty ; but neither does
their existence affect the foundations of morality.
Such pathological deviations from true manhood are
merely the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world
of consciousness; and the anatomist of the mind
leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body
would ignore abnormal specimens.

And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons
and Raffaelles, in whom the innate faculty for science
or art seems to need but a touch to spring into full
vigour, and through whom the human race obtains
new possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions
of beauty : so there have been men of moral genius,
to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of moral

44 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have
attained: though, happily for them, they can feel
the beauty of a vision, which lay beyond the reach
of their dull imaginations, and count life well spent
in speping some faint image of it in the actual
wor.

CLXV

The horror of ‘‘ Materialism ” which weighs upon
the minds of so many excellent people appears to
depend, in part, upon the purely accidental connexion
of some forms of materialistic philosophy with ethical
and religious tenets by which they are repelled ; and,
partly, on the survival of a very ancient superstition
concerning the nature of matter.

This superstition, for the tenacious vitality of
which the idealistic philosophers who are, more or
less, disciples of Plato and the theologians who have
been influenced by them, are responsible, assumes
that matter is something, not merely inert and
perishable, but essentially base and evil-natured, if
not actively antagonistic to, at least a negative dead-
weight upon, the good.

CLXVI

Judging by contemporary literature, there are
numbers of highly cultivated and indeed superior
persons to whom the material world is altogether
contemptible ; who can see nothing in a handful of
garden soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the passive
and the corruptible.

To modern science, these assumptions are as much
out of date as the equally venerable errors, that the
sun goes round the earth every four-and- -twenty
hours, or that water is an elementary body. The
handful of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of
busy workers; the rusty nail is an aggregation of

,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 45

millions of particles, moving with inconceivable
velocity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect
measure ; harmonic with like performances through-
out the solar system. If there is good ground for
any conclusion, there is such for the belief that the
substance of these particles has existed and will
exist, that the energy which stirs them has persisted
and will persist, without assignable limit, either in
the past or the future. Surely, as Heracleitus said
of his kitchen with its pots and pans, ‘‘ Here also
are the gods.” Little as we have, even yet, learned
of the material universe, that little makes for the
belief that it is a system of unbroken order and
perfect symmetry, of which the form incessantly
changes, while the substance and the energy are
imperishable.

CLXVII

Of all the dangerous mental habits, that which
schoolboys call ‘‘ cocksureness” is probably the most
perilous ; and the inestimable value of metaphysical
discipline is that it furnishes an effectual counter-
poise to this evil proclivity. Whoso has mastered
the elements of philosophy knows that the attribute
of unquestionable certainty appertains only to the
existence of a state of consciousness so long as it
exists ; all other beliefs are mere probabilities of a
higher or lower order. Sound metaphysic is an
amulet which renders its possessor proof alike
against the poison of superstition and the counter-
poison of shallow negation; by showing that the
affirmations of the former and the denials of the
latter alike deal with matters about which, for lack
a ib ara nothing can be either affirmed or

enied.

CLXVIII

If the question is asked, What then do we know
about matter and motion? there is but one reply pos-
sible. All that we know about motion is that it isa

46 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

name for certain changes in the relations of our visual,
tactile, and muscular sensations ; and all that we know
about matter is that it is the hypothetical substance
of physical phenomena, the assumption of the
existence of which is as pure a piece of meta-
physical speculation as is that of the existence of the
substance of mind.

Our sensations, our pleasures, our pains, and the
relations of these, make up the sum total of the
elements of positive, unquestionable knowledge.
We call a large section of these sensations and their
relations matter and motion ; the rest we term mind
and thinking ; and experience shows that there is a
certain constant order of succession between some
of the former and some of the latter.

This is all that just metaphysical criticism leaves
of the idols set up by the spurious metaphysics of
vulgar common sense. It is consistent either with
pure Materialism, or with pure Idealism, but it is
neither. For the Idealist, not content with declaring
the truth that our knowledge is limited to facts of
consciousness, affirms the wholly unprovable pro-
position that nothing exists beyond these and the
substance of mind. And, on the other hand, the
Materialist, holding by the truth that, for anything
that appears to the contrary, material phenomena
are the causes of mental phenomena, asserts his
unprovable. dogma, that material phenomena and
the substance of matter are the sole primary exist-
ences. Strike out the propositions about which
neither controversialist does or can know anything,
and there is nothing left for them to quarrel about.
Make a desert of the Unknowable, and the divine
Astrea of philosophic peace will commence her
blessed reign.

CLXIX

“‘Magnaest veritas et prevalebit!” Truth is great,
certainly, but, considering her greatness, it is curious
what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 47

CLXX

To my observation, human nature has not sensibly
changed through the last thirty years. I doubt not
that there are truths as plainly obvious and as
generally denied, as those contained in “‘ Man’s
Place in Nature,” now awaiting enunciation. If
there is a young man of the present generation, who
has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself
that they are truths, let him come out with them,
without troubling his head about the barking of the
dogs of St. Ernulphus, ‘‘ Veritas preevalebit ”—some
day ; and, even if she does not prevail in his time, he
himself will be all the better and the wiser for having
tried to help her. And let him recoilect that such
great reward is full payment for all his labour and
pains.

CLXXI

Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe
processes of modern investigations, commonly
enough fade away into mere dreams: but it is
singular how often the dream turns out to have been
a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid
foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist : the
Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a
western world: and though the quaint forms of
Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the
realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly
than they in essential structure, and yetas thoroughly
brutal as the goat’s or horse’s half of the mythical
compound, are now not only known, but notorious.

CLXXII

It is a truth of very wide, if not of universal,
application, that every living creature commences its

48 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

existence under a form different from, and simpler
than, that which it eventually attains.

The oak is a more complex thing than the little
rudimentary plant contained in the acorn; the
caterpillar is more complex than the egg; the
butterfly than the caterpillar; and each of these
beings, in passing from its rudimentary to its perfect
condition, runs through a series of changes, the sum
of which is called its development. In the higher
animals these changes are extremely complicated ;
but, within the last half century, the labours of such
men as Von Baer, Rathke, Reichert, Bischoff, and
Remak, have almost completely unravelled them, so
that the successive stages of development which are
exhibited by a dog, for example, are now as well
known to the embryologist as are the steps of the
metamorphosis of the silk-worm moth to the school-
boy. It will be useful to consider with attention the
nature and the order of the stages of canine develop-
ment, as an example of the process in the higher
animals generally.

CLXXIII

Exactly in those respects in which the de-
veloping Man differs from the Dog, he resembles
the ape, which, like man, has a spheroidal yelk-sac
and a discoidal, sometimes partially lobed, placenta.
So that it is only quite in the later stages of develop-
ment that the young human being presents marked
differences from the young ape, while the latter
departs as much from the dog in its development, as
the man does.

Startling as the last assertion may appear to be, it
is demonstrably true, and it alone appears to me
sufficient to place beyond all doubt the structural
unity of man with the rest of the animal world, and
more particularly and closely with the apes.

Thus, identical in the physical processes by which

WAN»

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 49

he originates—identical in the early stages of his
formation—identical in the mode of his nutrition
before and after birth, with the animals which lie
immediately below him in the scale—Man, if his
adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs,
exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness
oforganisation. Heresembles them as they resemble
one another—he differs from them as they differ from
one another.

CLXXIV

If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to
take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted
window.

CLXXV

Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so
extraordinary a series of gradations as this |—leading
us insensibly from the crown and summit of the
animal creation down to creatures, from which there
is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and
least intelligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as
if nature herself had foreseen the arrogance of man,
and with Roman severity had provided that his
intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into
prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror
that he is but dust.

CLXXVI

If Man be separated by no greater structural
barrier from the brutes than they are from one
another—then it seems to follow that if any process
of physical causation can be discovered by which the
genera and families of ordinary animals have been
produced, that process of causation is amply sufficient
to account for the origin of Man.

1 This alludes to a foregoing enumeration of the seven families of
PRIMATES headed by the ANTHROPINI containing man alone,

E

50 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CLXXVII

The whole analogy of natural operations fur-
nishes so complete and crushing an argument
against the intervention of any but what are termed
secondary causes, in the production of all the

henomena of the universe; ; that, in view of the
intimate relations between Man and the rest of the
living world, and between the forces exerted by the
latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for
doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature’s
great progression, from the formless to the formed—
from the inorganic to the organic—from blind force to
conscious intellect and will.

CLXXVIII

Science has fulfilled her function when she has
ascertained and enunciated truth.

CLXXIX

Thoughtful men, once escaped from the blind-
ing influences of traditional prejudice, will find in
the lowly stock whence Man has sprung the best
evidence of the splendour of his capacities ; and will
discern in his long progress through the Past a
reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a
nobler Future. .

And after passion and prejudice have died away,
the same result will attend the teachings of the
naturalist respecting that great Alps and Andes of
the living world—Man. Our reverence for the
nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the
knowledge that Man is, in substance and in structure,
one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the
marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational
speech, whereby, in the secular period of his

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 51

existence, he has slowly accumulated and organised
the experience which is almost wholly lost with the
cessation of every individual lifein other animals ; so
that, now, he stands raised upon it as on a mountain
top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and
transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting,
here and there, a ray from the infinite source of
truth.

CLXXX

Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of
Anthropology, the great science which unravels the
complexities of human structure; traces out the
relations of man to other animals ; studies all that is
especially human in the mode in which man’s complex
functions are performed; and searches after the
conditions whicn have determined his presence in the
world. And Anthropology is a section of Zoology,
which again is the animal half of Biology—the
science of life and living things.

Such is the position of ethnology, such are the
objects of the ethnologist. The paths or methods, by
following which he may hope to reach his goal, are
diverse. He may work at man from the point of
view of the pure zoologist, and investigate the
anatomical and physiological peculiarities of Negroes,
Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would inquire
into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,—
‘‘ persistent modifications ” of man’s almost universal
companion. Or he may seek aid from researches
into the most human manifestation of humanity—
Language ; and assuming that what is true of speech
is true of the speaker—a hypothesis as questionable
in science as it is in ordinary life—he may apply to
mankind themselves the conclusions drawn from a
searching analysis of their words and grammatical
forms.

Or, the ethnologist may turn to the study of the
practical life of men; and relying upon the inherent

E 2

52 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

conservatism and small inventiveness of untutored
mankind, he may hope to discover in manners and
customs, or in weapons, dwellings, and other handi-
work, a clue to the origin of the resemblances and
differences of nations. Or, he may resort to that
kind of evidence which is yielded by History proper,
and consists of the beliefs of men concerning past
events, embodied in traditional, or in written,
testimony. Or, when that thread breaks, Arche-
ology, which is the interpretation of the unrecorded
remains of man’s works, belonging to the epoch
since the world has reached its present condition,
may still guide him. And, when even the dim light
of archeology fades, there yet remains Palzon-
tology, which, in these latter years, has brought to
daylight once more the exuvia of ancient populations,
whose world was not our world, who have been
buried in river beds immemorially dry, or carried by
the rush of waters into caves, inaccessible to inunda-
tion since the dawn of tradition.

CLXXXI

The rapid increase of natural knowledge, which
is the chief characteristic of our age, is effected in
various ways. The main army of science moves to
the conquest of new worlds slowly and surely,
nor ever cedes an inch of the territory gained. But
the advance is covered and facilitated by the ceaseless
activity of clouds of light troops provided with a
weapon—always efficient, if not always an arm of
precision—the scientific imagination. It is the
business of these ev/fan/s perdus of science to make
raids into the realm of ignorance wherever they
see, or think they see, a chance; and cheerfully to
accept defeat, or it may be annihilation, as the reward
of error. Unfortunately the public, which watches
the progress of the campaign, too often mistakes a
dashing incursion of the Uhlans for a forward

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 53

movement of the main body ; fondly imagining that
the strategic movement to the rear, which oc-
casionally follows, indicates a battle lost by science.
And it must be confessed that the error is too often
justified by the effects of the irrepressible tendency
which men of science share with all other sorts of
men known to me, to be impatient of that most
wholesome state of mind—suspended judgment ; to
assume the objective truth of speculations which,
from the nature of the evidence in their favour,
can have no claim to be more than working hypo-
theses.

The history of the ‘‘Aryan question” affords a
striking illustration of these general remarks.

CLXXXII

Language is rooted half in the bodily and half in
the mental nature of man. The vocal sounds which
form the raw materials of language could not be
produced without a peculiar conformation of the
organs of speech ; the enunciation of duly accented
syllables would be impossible without the nicest co-
ordination of the action of the muscles which move
these organs ; and such co-ordination depends on the
mechanism of certain portions of the nervous system.
It is therefore conceivable that the structure of this
highly complex speaking apparatus should determine
a man’s linguistic potentiality ; that is to say, should
enable him to use a language of one class and not of
another. It is further conceivable that a particular
linguistic potentiality should be inherited and become
as good a race mark as any other. As a matter of
fact, it is not proven that the linguistic potentialities
of all men are the same.

CLXXXIII

Community of language is no proof of unity of
race, is not even presumptive evidence of racial

54 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS
®

identity. All that it does prove is that, at some
time or other, free and prolonged intercourse has
taken place between the speakers of the same
language.

CLKXXXIV

The capacity of the population of Europe for
independent progress while in the copper and early
bronze stage—the ‘‘ palwo-metallic” stage, as it
might be called—appears to me to be demonstrated
in a remarkable manner by the remains of their
architecture. From the crannog to the elaborate
pile-dwelling, and from the rudest enclosure to the
complex fortification of the terramare, there is an
advance which is obviously a native product. So
with the sepulchral constructions ; the stone cist, with
or without a preservative or memorial cairn, grows
into the chambered graves lodged in tumuli; into
such megalithic edifices as the dromic vaults of
Maes How and New Grange; to culminate in the
finished masonry of the tombs of Mycene, constructed
on exactly the same plan. Can anyone look at the
varied series of forms which lie between the
primitive five or six flat stones fitted together into a
mere box, and such a building as Maes How, and
yet imagine that the latter is the result of foreign
tuition? But the men who built Maes How, without
metal tools, could certainly have built the so-called
‘‘treasure-house” of Mycene, with them.

CLXXXV

Reckoned by centuries, the remoteness of the
quaternary, or pleistocene, age from our own is
immense, and it is difficult to form an adequate
notion of its duration. Undoubtedly there is an
abysmal difference between the Neanderthaloid race
and the comely living specimens of the blond long-

‘

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 55

heads with whom we arefamiliar. But the abyss of
time between the period at which North Europe was
first covered with ice, when savages pursued
mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp
stones in central France, and the present day, ever
widens as we learn more about the events which
bridge it. And, if the differences between the
Neanderthaloid men and ourselves could be divided
into as many parts as that time contains centuries,
the progress from part to part would: probably be
almost imperceptible.

CLXXXVI

I have not been one of those fortunate persons
who are able to regard a popular lecture as a
mere ors d’euvre, unworthy of being ranked among
the serious efforts of a philosopher ; and who keep
their fame as scientific hierophants unsullied by
attempts—at least of the successful sort—to be
understanded of the people.

On the contrary, I found that the task of putting the
truths learned in the field, the laboratory and the
museum, into language which, without bating a jot of
scientific accuracy shall be generally intelligible, taxed
such scientific and literary faculty as I possessed to
the uttermost ; indeed my experience has furnished me
with no better corrective of the tendency to schol-
astic pedantry which besets all those who are
absorbed in pursuits remote from the common ways
of men, and become habituated to think and speak
in the technical dialect of their own little world, as if
there were no other.

If the popular lecture thus, as I believe, finds one
moiety of its justification in the self-discipline of the
lecturer, it surely finds the other half in its effect on
the auditory. For though various sadly comical
experiences of the results of my own efforts have
led me to entertain a very moderate estimate of the

56 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

purely intellectual value of lectures ; though I venture
to doubt if more than one in ten of an average
audience carries away an accurate notion of what
the speaker has been driving at; yet is that not
equally true of the oratory of the hustings, of the
House of Commons, and even of the pulpit ?

Yet the children of this world are wise in their
generation; and both the politician and the priest
are justified by results. The living voice has an
influence over human action altogether independent
of the intellectual worth of that which it utters.
Many years ago, I was a guest at a great City
dinner. A famous orator, endowed with a voice of
rare flexibility and power; a born actor, ranging
with ease through every part, from refined comedy
to tragic unction, was called upon to reply to a
toast. The orator was a very busy man, a charming
conversationalist and by no means despised a good
dinner ; and, I imagine, rose without having given
a thought to what he was going to say. The
rhythmic roll of sound was admirable, the gestures
perfect, the earnestness impressive; nothing was
lacking save sense and, occasionally, grammar.
When the speaker sat down the applause was
terrific and one of my neighbours was _ especially
enthusiastic. So when he had quieted down, I
asked him what the orator had said. And he could
not tell me.

That sagacious person John Wesley is reported
to have replied to some one who questioned the pro-
priety of his adaptation of sacred words to extremely
secular airs, that he did not see why the Devil should
be left in possession of all the best tunes. And I
do not see why science should not turn to account
the peculiarities of human nature thus exploited by
other agencies: all the more because science, by the
nature of its being, cannot desire to stir the passions,
or profit by the weaknesses, of human nature. The
most zealous of popular lecturers can aim at nothing
more than the awakening of a sympathy for abstract

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 57

truth, in those who do not really follow his argu-
ments ; and of a desire to know more and better in
the few who do.

At the same time it must be admitted that the
popularisation of science, whether by lecture or
essay, has its drawbacks. Success in this depart-
ment has its perils for those who succeed. The
‘‘people who fail” take their revenge, as we have
recently had occasion to observe, by ignoring all
the rest of a man’s work and glibly labelling him a
mere populariser. If the falsehood were not too
glaring, they would say the same of Faraday and
Helmholtz and Kelvin.

CLXXXVII

Of the affliction caused by persons who think that
what they have picked up from popular exposition
qualifies them for discussing the great problems of
science, it may be said, as the Radical toast said of
the power of the Crown in bygone days, that it
“(has increased, is increasing, and ought to be
diminished.” The oddities of ‘‘English as she is
spoke” might be abundantly paralleled by those
of ‘‘ Science as she is misunderstood ” in the sermon,
the novel, and the leading article; and a collection
of the grotesque travesties of scientific conceptions,
in the shape of essays on such trifles as ‘‘ the Nature
of Life” and the “Origin of All Things,” which
reach me, from time to time, might well be bound
up with them.

CLXXXVIII

The essay on Geological Reform unfortunately
brought me, I will not say into collision, but into
a position of critical remonstrance with regard
to some charges of physical heterodoxy, brought
by my distinguished friend Lord Kelvin, against
British Geology. As President of the Geological

58 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

Society of London at that time (1869), I thought
I might venture to plead that we were not such
heretics as we seemed to be; and that, even if we
were, recantation would not affect the question of
evolution.

I am glad to see that Lord Kelvin has just
reprinted his reply to my plea, and I refer the
reader to it. I shall not presume to question any-
thing, that on such ripe consideration, Lord Kelvin
has to say upon the physical problems involved.
But I may remark that no one can have asserted
more strongly than I have done, the necessity
of looking to physics and mathematics, for help
in regard to the earliest history of the globe.

And I take the opportunity of repeating the
opinion that, whether what we call geological
time has the lower limit assigned to it by Lord
Kelvin, or the higher assumed by other philosophers ;
whether the germs of all living things have originated
in the globe itself, or whether they have been
imported on, or in, meteorites from without, the
problem of the origin of those successive Faun
and Flore of the earth, the existence of which is
fully demonstrated by palzontology, remains exactly
where it was.

For I think it will be admitted, that the germs
brought to us by meteorites, if any, were not ova
of elephants, nor of crocodiles ; not cocoa-nuts nor
acorns; not even eggs of shell-fish and corals;
but only those of the lowest forms of animal and
vegetable life. Therefore, since it is proved that,
from a very remote epoch of geological time, the
earth has been peopled by a continual succession
of the higher forms of animals and plants, these
either must have been created, or they have arisen
by evolution. And in respect of certain groups of
animals, the well-established facts of paleontology
leave no rational doubt that they arose by the latter
method.

In the second place, there are no data what-

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 59

ever, which justify the biologist in assigning any,
even approximately definite, period of time, either
long or short, to the evolution of one species from
another by the process of variation and selection.
In the eSsay on Geological Contemporaneity and
Persistent Types of Life 1 have taken pains to
prove that the change of animals has gone on
at very different rates in different groups of living
beings; that some types have persisted with little
change from the palzozoic epoch till now, while
others have changed rapidly within the limits
of an epoch, In 1862 (see Coll. Ess. viii. pp. 303, 304) in
1863 (vol. ii., p. 461) and again in 1864 (267d., pp. 89-92)
I argued, not as a matter of speculation, but from
paleontological facts, the bearing of which I believe,
up to that time, had not been shown, that any
adequate hypothesis of the causes of evolution must
be consistent with progression, stationariness and
retrogression, of the same type at different epochs ;
of different types in the same epoch; and that
Darwin’s hypothesis fulfilled these conditions.

According to that hypothesis, two factors are at
work, variation and selection. Next to nothing is
known of the causes of the former process ; nothing
whatever of the time required for the production
of a certain amount of deviation from the existing
type. And, as respects selection, which operates
by extinguishing all but a small minority of
variations, we have not the slightest means of
estimating the rapidity with which it does its work.
All that we are justified in saying is that the rate
at which it takes place may vary almost indefinitely.
If the famous paint-roct of Florida, which kills
white pigs but not black ones, were abundant
and certain in its action, black pigs might be
substituted for white in the course of two or
three years. If, on the other hand, it was rare
and uncertain in action, the white pigs might linger
on for centuries.

60 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CLXXXIX

A great chapter of the history of the world is
written in the chalk. Few passages in the history
of man can be supported by such an ovérwhelm-
ing mass of direct and indirect evidence as that
which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the
history of the globe, which I hope to enable you
to read, with your own eyes, to-night. Let me
add, that few chapters of human history have a
more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh
my words well when I assert, that the man who
should know the true history of the bit of chalk
which every carpenter carries about in his
breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other
history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge
out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and
therefore a better, conception of this wonderful
universe, and of man’s relation to it, than the
most learned student who is deep-read in the
records of humanity and ignorant of those of
Nature.

CXC

The examination of a transparent slice gives a
good notion of the manner in which the components
of the chalk are arranged, and of their relative pro-
portions. But, by rubbing up some chalk with a
brush in water and then pouring off the milky fluid,
so as to obtain sediments of different degrees of fine-
ness, the granules and the minute rounded bodies
may be pretty well separated from one another, and
submitted to microscopic examination, either as
opaque or as transparent objects. By combining the
views obtained in these various methods, each of
the rounded bodies may be proved to bea beautifully-
constructed calcareous fabric, made up of a number
of chambers, communicating freely with one another.
The chambered bodies are of various forms. One of
the commonest is something like a badly-grown

Py

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 61

raspberry, being formed of a number of nearly
globular chambers of different sizes congregated
together. It is called G/odigerina, and some speci-
mens of chalk consist of little else than Glodigerine
and granules. Let us fix our attention upon the
Globigerina. It is the spoor of the game we are
tracking. If wecanlearn what it is and what are
the conditions of its existence, we shall see our way
to the origin and past history of the chalk.

CXCI

It so happens that calcareous skeletons, exactly
similar to the Glodigerin@ of the chalk, are being
formed, at the present nioment, by minute living
creatures, which flourish in multitudes, literaily
more numerous than the sands of the sea-shore, over
a large extent of that part of the earth’s surface
which is covered by the ocean.

The history of the discovery of these living
Globigerine, and of the part which they play in rock
building, is singular enough. It is a discovery
which, like others cf no less scientific importance,
has arisen, incidentally, out of work devoted to very
different and exceedingly practical interests. When
men first took to the sea, they speedily learned to
look out for shoals and rocks; and the more the
burthen of their ships increased, the more impera-
tively necessary it became for sailors to ascertain
with precision the depth of the waters they traversed.
Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and
sounding line; and, ultimately, marine-surveying,
which is the recording of the form of coasts and of
the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the sounding-
lead, upon charts.

CXCII

Lieut. Brooke, of the American Navy, some years
ago invented a most ingenious machine, by which

62 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

a considerable portion of the superficial laye1
of the sea-bottom can be scooped out and brought up
from any depth to which the lead descends. In 1853,
Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the bottom of the
North Atlantic, between Newfoundland and the
Azores, at a depth of more than 10,000 feet, or two
miles, by the help of this sounding apparatus. The
specimens were sent for examination to Ehrenberg
of Berlin, and to Bailey of West Point, and those
able microscopists found that this deep-sea mud was
almost entirely composed of the skeletons of living
organisms—the greater proportion of these being
just like the G/obigerine already known to occur in
the chalk.

Thus far, the work had been carried on simply in
the interests of science, but Lieut. Brooke’s method
of sounding acquired a high commercial value, when
the enterprise of laying down the telegraph-cable
between this country and the United States was
undertaken. For it became a matter of immense
importance to know, not only the depth of the sea
over the whole line along which the cable was to be
laid, but the exact nature of the bottom, so as to
guard against chances of cutting or fraying the
strands of that costly rope. The Admiralty conse-
quently ordered Captain Dayman, an old friend and
shipmate of mine, to ascertain the depth over the
whole line of the cable, and to bring back specimens
of the bottom. In former days, such a command as
this might have sounded very much like one of the
impossible things which the young Prince in the
Fairy Tales is ordered to do before he can obtain
the hand of the Princess. However, in the months
of June and July, 1857, my friend performed the task
assigned to him with great expedition and precision,
without, so far as I know, having met with any
reward of that kind. The specimens of Atlantic mud
which he procured were sent to me to be examined
and reported upon.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 63

CXCIII

The result of all these operations is, that we know
the contours and the nature of the surface-soil
covered by the North Atlantic for a distance of 1,700
miles from east to west, as well as we know that of
any part of the dry land. It isa prodigious plain—
one of the widest and most even plains in the world.
If the sea were drained off, you might drive a
waggon ali the way from Valentia, on the west
coast of Ireland, to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland.
And, except upon one sharp incline about 200 miles
from Valentia, I am not quite sure that it would
even be necessary to put the skid on, so gentle are
the ascents and descents upon that long route.
From Valentia the road would lie down-hill for
about 200 miles to the point at which the bottom is
now covered by 1,700 fathoms of sea-water. Then
would come the central plain, more than a thousand
miles wide, the inequalities of the surface of which
would be hardly perceptible, though the depth of
water upon it now varies from 10,000 to 15,000 feet ;
and there are places in which Mont Blanc might be
sunk without showing its peak above water. Beyond
this, the ascent on the American side commences,
and gradually leads, for about 300 miles, to the
Newfoundland shore.

CXCIV

When we consider that the remains of more than
three thousand distinct species of aquatic animals
have been discovered among the fossils of the chalk,
that the great majority of them are of such forms as
are now met with only in the sea, and that there is
no reason to believe that any one of them inhabited
fresh water—the collateral evidence that the chalk
represents an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great
force as the proof derived from the nature of the
chalk itself. I think you will now allow that I

64 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

did not overstate my case when I asserted that we
have as strong grounds for believing that all the
vast area of dry land, at present occupied by the
chalk, was once at the bottom of the sea, as we have
for any matter of history whatever ; while there is
no justification for any other belief.

No less certain it is that the time during which the
countries we now call south-east England, France,
Germany, Poland, Russia, Egypt, rabid, Syria,
were more or less completely covered by a deep sea,
was of considerable duration. We have already
seen that the chalk is, in places, more than a thou-
sand feet thick. I think you will agree with me
that it must have taken some time for the skeletons
of animalcules of a hundredth of an inch in diameter
to heap up such a mass as that.

CXCV

If the decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin ;
the attachment, growth to maturity, and decay
of the Cranza; and the subsequent attachment and
growth of the coralline, took a year (which is a low
estimate enough), the accumulation of the inch of
chalk must have taken more than a year: and the
deposit of a thousand feet of chalk must, conse-
quently, have taken more than twelve thousand
years.

CXCVI

There is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at
Cromer, and whoso runs may readit. It tells us,
with an authority which cannot be impeached, that
the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up,
and remained dry land, until it was covered with
forest, stocked with the great game the spoils of
which have rejoiced your geologists. How long it
remained in that condition cannot be said ; but ‘‘the

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 65

whirligie of time brought its revenges” in those
days as in these. That dry land, with the bones
and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants,
hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry
leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the
bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge
masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such
as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north,
paddled about where birds had twittered among the
topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long this state
of things endured we know not, but at length it
came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hard-
ened into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew
once more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the
reindeer and the elephant ; and at length what we
call the history of England dawned.

CXCVII

Direct proof may be given that some parts of the
land of the northern hemisphere are at this moment
insensibly rising and others insensibly sinking ; and
there is indirect, but perfectly satisfactory, proof,
that an enormous area now covered by the Pacific
has been deepened thousands of feet, since the pre-
sent inhabitants of that sea came into existence.
Thus there is not a shadow of areason for believing
that the physical changes of the globe, in past times,
have been effected by other than natural causes.

CXCVIII

A smail beginning has led us to a great ending.
If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we
started into the hot but obscure flame of burning
hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It
seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no

F

66 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

false image of what has been the result of our
subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise
brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous,
and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the
remote past, have brought within our ken some
stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the
shifting ‘‘ without haste, but without rest” of the
land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms
assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing
but the natural product of the forces originally
possessed by the substance of the universe.

CXCIX

In certain parts of the sea bottom in the immediate
vicinity of the British Islands, as in the Clyde
district, among the Hebrides, in the Moray Firth,
and in the German Ocean, there are depressed are,
forming a kind of submarine valleys, the centres of
which are from 80 to 100 fathoms, or more, deep.
These depressions are inhabited by assemblages of
marine animals, which differ from those found over
the adjacent and shallower region, and resemble
those which are met with much farther north, on the
Norwegian coast. Forbes called these Scandinavian
detachments ‘‘ Northern outliers.”

How did these isolated patches of a northern
population get into these deep places? To explain
the mystery, Forbes called to mind the fact that, in
the epoch which immediately preceded the present,
the climate was much colder (whence the name of
‘* elacial epoch” applied to it); and that the shells
which are found fossil, or sub-fossil, in deposits of
that age are precisely such as are now to be met
with only in the Scandinavian, or still more Arctic,
regions. Undoubtedly, during the glacial epoch,
the genera! population of our seas had, universally,
the northern aspect which is now presented only

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 67

by the ‘‘northern outliers” ; just as the vegetation
of the land, down to the sea-level, had the northern
character which is, at present, exhibited only by the
plants which live on the tops of our mountains.
But, as the glacial epoch passed away, and the
present climatal conditions were developed, the
northern plants were able to maintain themselves
only on the bleak heights, on which southern forms
couid not compete with them. And, in like manner,
Forbes suggested that, after the glacial epoch, the
northern animals then inhabiting the sea became
restricted to the deeps in which they could hold
their own against invaders from the south, better
fitted than they to flourish in the warmer waters of
the shallows. Thus depth in the sea corresponded
a ve effect upon distribution to height on the
and.

CC

Among the scientific instructions for the voyage!
drawn up by a committee of the Royal Society,
there is a remarkable letter from Von Humboldt
to Lord Minto, then First Lord of the Admiralty,
in which, among other things, he dwells upon
the significance of the researches into the micro-
scopic composition of rocks, and the discovery
of the great share which microscopic organisms
take in the formation of the crust of the earth at
the present day, made by Ehrenberg in the years
1836-39. Ehrenberg, in fact, had shown that the
extensive beds of ‘‘rotten-stone” or ‘‘ Tripoli”
which occur in various parts of the world, and
notably at Bilin in Bohemia, consisted of accumu-
lations of the silicious cases and skeletons of
Diatomacee, sponges, and Radiolaria ; he had proved
that similar deposits were being formed by Dzaéo-
macee, in the pools of the Thiergarten in Berlin and

1 Of the Challenger.
F2

68 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

elsewhere, and had pointed out that, if it were
commercially worth while, rotten-stone might be
manufactured by a process of diatom-culture. Ob-
servations conducted at Cuxhaven, in 1839, had
revealed the existence, at the surface of the waters
of the Baltic, of living Diatoms and Aadiolaria
of the same species as those which, in a fossil
state, constitute extensive rocks of tertiary age at
Caltanisetta, Zante, and Oran, on the shores of the
Mediterranean.

Moreover, in the fresh-water rotten-stone beds
of Bilin, Ehrenberg had traced out the metamor-
phosis, effected apparently by the action of perco-
lating water, of the primitively loose and friable
deposit of organized particles, in which the silex
exists in the hydrated or soluble condition. The
silex, in fact, undergoes solution and slow redepo-
sition, until, in ultimate result, the excessively fine-
grained sand, each particle of which is a skeleton,
becomes converted into a dense opaline stone, with
only here and there an indication of an organism.

From the consideration of these facts, Ehrenberg,
as early as the year 1839, had arrived at the con-
clusion that rocks, altogether similar to those which
constitute a large part of the crust of the earth,
must be forming, at the present day, at the bottom
of the sea; and he threw out the suggestion that
even where no trace of organic structure is to be
found in the older rocks, it may have been lost by
metamorphosis.

CE

It is highly creditable to the ingenuity of our
ancestors that the peculiar property of fermented
liquids, in virtue of which they ‘‘make glad the
heart of man,” seems to have been known in the
remotest periods of which we have any record. All

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 69

savages take to alcoholic fluids as if they were to
the manner born. Our Vedic forefathers intoxicated
themselves with the juice of the ‘‘soma”; Noah,
by a not unnatural reaction against a superfluity of
water, appears to have taken the earliest practicable
opportunity of qualifying that which he was obliged
to drink ; and the ghosts of the ancient Egyptians
were solaced by pictures of banquets in which the
wine-cup passes round, graven on the walls of their
tombs. A knowledge of the process of fermentation,
therefore, was in all probability possessed by the
prehistoric populations of the globe; and it must
have become a matter of great interest even to
primzvai wine-bibbers to study the methods by
which fermented liquids could be surely manufactured.
No doubt it was soon discovered that the most
certain, as well as the most expeditious, way of
making a sweet juice ferment was to add to it a
little of the scum, or lees, of another fermenting
juice. And it can hardly be questioned that this
singular excitation of fermentation in one fluid, by a
sort of infection, or inoculation, of a little ferment
taken from some other fluid, together with the
strange swelling, foaming, and hissing of the
fermented substance, must have always attracted
attention from the more thoughtful. Nevertheless,
the commencement of the scientific analysis of the
phenomena dates from a period not earlier than the
first half of the seventeenth century.

At this time, Van Helmont made a first step, by
pointing out that the peculiar hissing and bubbling
of a fermented liquid is due, not to the evolution of
common air (which he, as the inventor of the term
“gas,” calls ‘‘gas ventosum”), but to that of a
peculiar kind of air such as is occasionally met with
in caves, mines, and wells, and which he calls “‘ gas
sylvestre.”

But a century elapsed before the nature of this
‘‘ gas sylvestre,” or, as it was afterwards called,
“fixed air,” was clearly determined, and it was

70 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

found to be identical with that deadly ‘‘ choke-
damp” by which the lives of those who descend into
old wells, or mines, or brewers’ vats, are sometimes
suddenly ended; and with the poisonous aériform
fluid which is produced by the combustion of charcoal,
and now goes by the name of carbonic acid gas.

During the same time it gradually became evident
that the presence of sugar was essential to the
production of alcohol and the evolution of carbonic
acid gas, which are the two great and conspicuous
products of fermentation. And finally, in 1787, the
Italian chemist, Fabroni, made the capital discovery
that the yeast ferment, the presence of which is
necessary to fermentation, is what he termed a
‘* vegeto-animal” substance ; that is, a body which
gives off ammoniacal salts when it is burned, and is,
in other ways, similar to the gluten of plants and
the albumen and casein of animals.

CCII

The living club-mosses are, for the most part,
insignificant and creeping herbs, which, superficially,
very closely resemble true mosses, and none of them
reach more than two or three feet in height. But,
in their essential structure, they very closely resemble
the earliest Lepidodendroid trees of the coal: their
stems and leaves are similar; so are their cones ;
and no less like are the sporangia and spores ; while
even in their size, the spores of the Lefidodendron and
those of the existing Lycopodium, or club-moss, very
closely approach one another.

Thus, the singular conclusion is forced upon us,
that the greater and the smaller sacs of the ‘‘ Better-
Bed” and other coals, in which the primitive structure
is well preserved, are simply the sporangia and
spores of certain plants, many of which were closely
allied to the existing club-mosses, And if, as I

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 71

believe, it can be demonstrated that ordinary coal is
nothing but ‘saccular ” coal which has undergone
a certain amount of that alteration which, if con-
tinued, would convert it into anthracite ; then, the
conclusion is obvious, that the great mass of the coal
we burn is the result of the accumulation of the
spores and spore-cases of plants, other parts of which
have furnished the carbonized stems and the mineral
charcoal, or have left their impressions on the surfaces
of the layer.

ccIII

The position of the beds which constitute the coal-
measures ‘is infinitely diverse. Sometimes they are
tilted up vertically, sometimes they are horizontal,
sometimes curved into great basins ; sometimes they
come to the surface, sometimes they are covered up
by thousands of feet of rock. But, whatever their
present position, there is abundant and conclusive
evidence that every under-clay was once a surface
soil. Not only do carbonized root-fibres frequently
abound in these under-clays ; but the stools of trees,
the trunks of which are broken off and confounded
with the bed of coal, have been repeatedly found
passing into radiating roots, still embedded in the
under-clay. Onmany parts of the coast of England,
what are commonly known as ‘‘ submarine forests ”
are to be seen at low water. They consist, for the
most part, of short stools of oak, beech, and fir-trees,
still fixed by their long roots in the bed of blue clay in
which they originally grew. If one of these sub-
marine forest beds should be gradually depressed and
covered up by new deposits, it would present just
the same characters as an under-clay of the coal, if
the Sigillaria and Lepidodendron of the ancient world
were substituted for the oak, or the beech, of our
own times.

In a tropical forest, at the present day, the trunks

72 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

of fallen trees, and the stools of such trees as may
have been broken by the violence of storms, remain
entire for but a short time. Contrary to what might
be expected, the dense wood of the tree decays, and
suffers from the ravages of insects, more swiftly
than the bark. And the traveller, setting his foot on
a prostrate trunk finds that it is a mere shell, which
breaks under his weight, and lands his foot amidst the
insects, or the reptiles, which have sought food or
refuge within.

CCIV

The coal accumulated upon the area covered by
one of the great forests of the carboniferous epoch
would, in course of time, have been wasted away by
the small, but constant, wear and tear of rain and
streams, had the land which supported it remained at
the same level, or been gradually raised to a greater
elevation. And, no doubt, as much coal as now
exists has been destroyed, after its formation, in this
way.

ccVv
‘

Once more, an invariably-recurring lesson of
geological history, at whatever point its study is
taken up: the lesson of the almost infinite slowness
of the modification of living forms. The lines of the
pedigrees of living things break off almost before
they begin to converge.

CCVI

Yet another curious consideration. Let us suppose
that one of the stupid, salamander-like Labyrinth-
odonts, which pottered, with much belly and
little leg, like Falstaff in his old age, among the
coal-forests, could have had thinking power enough
in his small brain to reflect upon the showers of

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 73

spores which kept on falling through years and
centuries, while perhaps not one in ten million
fulfilled its apparent purpose, and reproduced the
organism which gave it birth: surely he might have
been excused for moralizing upon the thoughtless and
wanton extravagance which Nature displayed in her
operations.

But we have the advantage over our shovel-
headed predecessor—or possibly ancestor—and can
perceive that a certain vein of thrift runs through this
apparent prodigality. Nature is never in a hurry,
and seems to have had always before her eyes the
adage, ‘‘Keep a thing long enough, and you will
find a use for it.” She has kept her beds of coal
many millions of years without being able to find
much use for them ; she has sent them down beneath
the sea, and the sea-beasts could make nothing of
them ; she has raised them up into dry land, and laid
the black veins bare, and still, for ages and ages,
there was no living thing on the face of the earth
that could see any sort of value in them ; and it was
only the other day, so to speak, that she turned a
new creature out of her workshop, who by degrees
acquired sufficient wits to make a fire, and then
to discover that the black rock would burn.

I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when
Julius Cesar was good enough to deal with Britain as
we have dealt with New Zealand, the primeval
Briton, blue with cold and woad, may have known
that the strange black stone, of which he found lumps
here and there in his wanderings, would burn, and so
help to warm his body and cook his food. Saxon,
Dane, and Norman swarmed into the land. The
English people grew into a powerful nation, and
Nature still waited for a full return of the capital she
had invested in the ancient club-mosses. The
eighteenth century arrived, and with it James Watt.
The brain of that man was the spore out of which
was developed the modern steam-engine, and all the
prodigious trees and branches of modern industry

74 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

which have grown out of this. But coal is as much
an essential condition of this growth and development
as carbonic acid is for that of a club-moss. Want-
ing coal, we could not have smelted the iron needed
to make our engines, nor have worked our engines
when we had got them. But take away the
engines, and the great towns of Yorkshire and
Lancashire vanish like adream. Manufactures give
place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men
can aye where now ten thousand are amply sup-
orted.

i Thus, all this abundant wealth of money and of
vivid life is Nature’s interest upon her investment in
club-mosses, and the like, so long ago. But what
becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding this
interest? Heat comes out of it, light comes out of
it ; and if we covld gather together all that goes up
the chimney, and all that remains in the grate of a
thoroughly-burnt coal-fire, we should find ourselves
in possession of a quantity of carbonic acid, water,
ammonia, and mineral matters, exactly equal in
weight to the coal. But these are the very matters
with which Nature supplied the club-mosses which
made the coal. She is paid back principal and
interest at the same time; and she straightway
invests the carbonic acid, the water, and the ammonia
in new forms of life, feeding with them the plants
thatnow live. Thrifty Nature! Surely no prodigal,
but most notable of housekeepers !

CCVII

Here, then, is a capital fact. The movements of
the lobster are due to muscular contractility. But
why does a muscle contract at one time and not at
another? Why does one whole group of muscles
contract when the lobster wishes to extend his tail,
and another group when he desires to bend itr
What is it originates, directs, and controls the motive
" power P

Experiment, the great instrument for the ascer-

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 75

tainment of truth in physical science, answers this
question for us. In the head of the lobster there lies
a small mass of that peculiar tissue which is known
as nervous substance. Cords of similar matter
connect this brain of the lobster, directly or indirectly,
with the muscles. Now, if these communicating
cords are cut, the brain remaining entire, the power
of exerting what we call voluntary motion in the
parts below the section is destroyed; and, on the
other hand, if, the cords remaining entire, the brain
mass be destroyed, the same voluntary mobility is
equally lost. Whence the inevitable conclusion is,
that the power of originating these motions resides
in the brain and is propagated along the nervous
cords.

In the higher animals the phenomena which attend
this transmission have been investigated, and the
exertion of the peculiar energy which resides in the
nerves has been found to be accompanied by a
disturbance of the electrical state of their molecules.

If we could exactly estimate the signification of
this disturbance ; if we could obtain the value of
a given exertion of nerve force by determining the
quantity of electricity, or of heat, of which it is
the equivalent; if we could ascertain upon what
arrangement, or other condition of the molecules of
matter, the manifestation of the nervous and
muscular energies depends (and doubtless science
will some day or other ascertain these points),
physiologists would have attained their ultimate
goal in this direction; they would have determined
the relation of the motive force of animals to the
other forms of force found in nature; and if the
same process had been successfully performed for
all the operations which are carried on in, and by,
the animal frame, physiology would be perfect, and
the facts of morphology and distribution would be
deducible from the laws which physiologists had
established, combined with those determining the
condition of the surrounding universe,

76 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCVIII

The object of lectures is, in the first place, to
awaken the attention and excite the enthusiasm
of the student ; and this, I am sure, may be effected
to a far greater extent by the oral discourse and
by the personal influence of a respected teacher
than in any other way. Secondly, lectures have
the double use of guiding the student to the salient
points of a subject, and at the same time forcing
him to attend to the whole of it, and not merely
to that part which takes his fancy. And lastly,
lectures afford the student the opportunity of
seeking explanations of those difficulties which
will, and indeed ought to, arise in the course of
his studies.

CCIX

What books shall I read? is a question con-
stantly put by the student to the teacher. My
reply usually is, ‘‘None: write your notes out
carefully and fully; strive to understand them
thoroughly ; come to me for the explanation of
anything you cannot understand; and I would
rather you did not distract your mind by reading.”
A properly composed course of lectures ought to
contain fully as much matter as a student can
assimilate in the time occupied by its delivery;
and the teacher should always recollect that his
business is to feed and not to cram the intellect.
Indeed, I believe that a student who gains from
a course of lectures the simple habit of concen-
trating his attention upon a definitely limited series
of facts, until they are thoroughly mastered, has
made a step of immeasurable importance.

CCX

However good lectures may be, and however
extensive the course of reading by which they

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 77

are followed up, they are but accessories to the
great instrument of scientific teaching—demon-
stration. If I insist unweariedly, nay fanatically,
upon the importance of physical science as an
educational agent, it is because the study of any
branch of science, if properly conducted, appears
to me to fill up avoid left by all other means of
education. I have the greatest respect and love
for literature ; nothing would grieve me more than
to see literary training other than a very prominent
branch of education : indeed, I wish that real literary
discipline were far more attended to than it is; but
I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that there is a
vast difference between men who have had a purely
literary, and those who have had a sound scientific,
training

CEXI

In the world of letters, learning and knowledge
are one, and books are the source of both ; whereas
in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are
distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is
the source of the latter.

CCXII

All that literature has to bestow may be obtained
by reading and by practical exercise in writing
and in speaking; but I do not exaggerate when
I say that none of the best gifts of science are to
be won by these means. On the contrary, the
great benefit which a scientific education bestows,
whether as training or as knowledge, is dependent
upon the extent to which the mind of the student
is brought into immediate contact with facts—
upon the degree to which he learns the habit of

78 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

appealing directly to Nature, and of acquiring through
his senses concrete images of those properties of
things, which are, and always will be, but approxi-
matively expressed in human language. Our way
of looking at Nature, and of speaking about her,
varies from year to year; but a fact once seen,
a relation of cause and effect, once demonstratively
apprehended, are possessions which neither change
nor pass away, but, on the contrary, form fixed
centres, about which other truths aggregate by
natural affinity.

Therefore, the great business of the scientific
teacher is, to imprint the fundamental, irrefragable
facts of his science, not only by words upon the
mind, but by sensible impressions upon the eye,
and ear, and touch of the student, in so complete
amanner, that every term used, or law enunciated,
should afterwards call up vivid images of the
particular structural, or other, facts which furnished
the demonstration of the law, or the illustration
of the term,

CCXIII

What is the purpose of primary intellectual
education? I apprehend that its first object is to
train the young in the use of those tools where-
with men extract knowledge from the ever-shifting
succession of phenomena which pass before their
eyes ; and that its second object is to inform them
of the fundamental laws which have been found
by experience to govern the course of things, so
that they may not be turned out into the world
naked, defenceless, and a prey to the events they
might control.

A boy is taught to read his own and other
languages, in order that he may have access to

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 79

- infinitely wider stores of knowledge than could

ever be opened to him by oral intercourse with his
fellow men; he learns to write, that his means of
communication with the rest of mankind may be
indefinitely enlarged, and that he may record and
store up the knowledge he acquires. He is taught
elementary mathematics, that he may understand
all those relations of number and form, upon which
the transactions of men, associated in complicated
societies, are built, and that he may have some
practice in deductive reasoning.

All these operations of reading, writing, and
ciphering are intellectual tools, whose use should,
before all things, be learned, and learned tho-
roughly; so that the youth may be enabled to
make his life that which it ought to be, a con-
tinual progress in learning and in wisdom.

CCXIV

In addition, primary education endeavours to
fit a boy out with a certain equipment of positive
knowledge. He is taught the great laws of mor-
ality ; the religion of his sect ; so much history and
geography as will tell him where the great countries
of the world are, what they are, and how they have
become what they are.

But if I regard it closely, a curious reflection
arises. I suppose that, fifteen hundred years ago,
the child of any well-to-do Roman citizen was
taught just these same things ; reading and writing
in his own, and, perhaps, the Greek tongue; the
elements of mathematics; and the religion, moral-
ity, history, and geography current in his time.
Furthermore, I do not think I err in affirming that,
if such a Christian Roman boy, who had finished
his education, could be transplanted into one of our
public schools, and pass through its course of

80 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

instruction, he would not meet with a single ©
unfamiliar line of thought ; amidst all the new facts
he would have to learn, not one would suggest a
different mode of regarding the universe from that
current in his own time.

And yet surely there is some great difference
between the civilisation of the fourth century and
that of the nineteenth, and still more between the
intellectual habits and tone of thought of that day
and this ?

And what has made this difference? I answer
fearlessly—The prodigious development of physical
science within the last two centuries.

CCXV

Modern civilisation rests upon physical science ;
take away her gifts to our own country, and our

osition among the leading nations of the world
is gone to-morrow ; for it is physical science only
that makes intelligence and moral energy stronger
than brute force

CCXVI

The whole of modern thought is steeped in
science; it has made its way into the works of
our best poets, and even the mere man of letters,
who affects to ignore and despise science, is un-
consciously impregnated with her spirit, and in-
debted for his best products to her methods. I
believe that the greatest intellectual revolution
mankind has yet seen is now slowly taking place
by her agency. She is teaching the world that
the ultimate court of appeal is observation and
experiment, and not authority; she is teaching it
to estimate the value of evidence; she is creating
a firm and living faith in the existence of immut-
able moral and physical laws, perfect obedience to
which is the highest possible aim of an intelligent
being.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 81

But of all this your old stereotyped system of
education takes no note. Physical science, its
methods, its problems, and its difficulties, will meet
the poorest boy at every turn, and yet we educate
him in such a manner that he shall enter the world
as ignorant of the existence of the methods and
facts of science as the day he was born. The
modern world is full of artillery; and we turn out
our children to do battle in it, equipped with the
shield and sword of an ancient gladiator.

CCXVII

Posterity will cry shame on us if we do not remedy
this deplorable state of things. Nay, if we live
twenty years longer, our own consciences will cry
shame on us.

It is my firm conviction that the only way to
remedy it is to make the elements of physical science
an integral part of primary education. I have
endeavoured to show you how that may be done for
that branch of science which it is my business to pur-
sue; and I can but add, that I should look upon the day
when every schoolmaster throughout this land was a
centre of genuine, however rudimentary, scientific
knowledge as an epoch in the history of the country.

But let me entreat you to remember my last words.
Addressing myself to you, as teachers, I would say,
mere book learning in physical science is asham and
a delusion—what you teach, unless you wish to be
impostors, that you must first know; and real
knowledge in science means personal acquaintance
with the facts, be they few or many.

CCXVIII

The first distinct enunciation of the hypothesis
that all living matter has sprung from pre-existing
living matter came from a contemporary, though a
junior, of Harvey, a native of that country, fertile in

G

82 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

men great in all departinents of human activity,
which was to intellectual Europe, in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, what Germany is in the
nineteenth. It was in Italy, and from Italian
teachers, that Harvey received the most important
part of his scientific education. And it wasa student
trained in the same schools, Francesco Redi—a man
of the widest knowledge and most versatile abilities,
distinguished alike as scholar, poet, physician and,
naturalist—who, just twohundredand two years ago,!
published his ‘‘ Esperienze intorno alla Generazione
deg!’ Insetti,” and gave to the world the idea, the
growth of which it is my purpose to trace. Redi’s
book went through five editions in twenty years ;
and the extreme simplicity of his experiments, and the
clearness of his arguments, gained for his views and
for their consequences, almost universal acceptance.
Redi did not trouble himself much with specu-
lative considerations, but attacked particular cases
of what was supposed to be ‘‘ spontaneous genera-
tion” experimentally. Here are dead animals, or
pieces of meat, says he; I expose them to the air in
hot weather, and in a few days they swarm with
maggots. You tell me that these are generated
in the dead flesh ; but if I put similar bodies, while
quite fresh, into a jar, and tie some fine gauze over
the top of the jar, not a maggot makes its appearance,
while the dead substances, nevertheless, putrefy just
in the same way as before. It is obvious, therefore,
that the maggots are not generated by the corruption
of the meat; and that the cause of their formation
must be a something which is kept away by gauze.
But gauze will not keep away aériform bodies, or
fluids. This something must therefore, exist
in the form of solid particles too big to get
through the gauze. Nor is one long left in doubt
what these solid particles are; for the blow-flies,
attracted by the odour of the meat, swarm round the
vessel, and, urged by a powerful but in this case
1 These words were written in 1870.

ks
he

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 83

misleading instinct, lay eggs out of which maggots

are immediately hatched, upon the gauze. The

conclusion, therefore, is unavoidable ; the maggots

are not generated by the meat, but the eggs which

aS rise to them are brought through the air by the
ies.

These experiments seem almost childishly simple,
and one wonders how it was that no one ever thought
of them before. Simple as they are, however, they are
worthy of the most careful study, for every piece of ex-
perimental work since done, inregard to this subject,
has been shaped upon the riodel furnished by the
Italian philosopher. As the results of his experi-
ments were the same, however varied the nature of
the materials he used, it is not wonderful that there
arose in Redi’s mind a presumption that, in all such
cases of the seeming production of life from dead
matter, the real explanation was the introduction
of living germs from without into that dead matter.
And thus the hypothesis that living matter always
arises by the agency of pre-existing living matter,
took definite shape ; and had, henceforward, a right
to be considered and a claim to be refuted, in each
particular case, before the production of living
matter in any other way could be admitted by care-
ful reasoners. It will be necessary for me to refer to
this hypothesis so frequently, that, to save circum-
locution, I shall call it the hypothesis of Azogeneszs ;
and I shall term the contrary doctrine—that living
matter may be produced by not living matter—the
hypothesis of Adcogenesis.

In the seventeenth century, as I have said, the
latter was the dominant view, sanctioned alike by
antiquity and by authority ; and it is interesting to
observe that Redi did not escape the customary tax
upon a discoverer of having to defend himself against
the charge of impugning the authority of the Scrip-
tures ; for his adversaries declared that the generation
of bees from the carcase of a dead lion is affirmed,
in the Book of Judges, to have been the origin of

G2

84 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

the famous riddle with which Samson perplexed the
Philistines: —

** Out of the eater came forth meat,
And out of the strong came forth sweetness ”’

CCXIX

The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a
beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

CCXX

It remains yet in the order of logic, though not of
history, to show that among these solid destructible
particles there really do exist germs capable of
giving rise to the development of living forms in
suitable menstrua. This piece of work was done by
M. Pasteur in those beautiful researches which will
ever render his name famous ; and which, in spite of
all attacks upon them, appear to me now, as they
did seven years ago, to be models of accurate
experimentation and logical reasoning. He strained
air through cotton-wool, and found, as Schroeder
and Dusch had done, that it contained nothing com-
petent to give rise to the development of life in
fluids highly fitted for that purpose. But the
important further links in the chain of evidence
added by Pasteur are three. In the first place he
subjected to microscopic examination the cotton-
wool which had served as strainer, and found that
sundry bodies clearly recognisable as germs were
among the solid particles strained off. Secondly,
he proved that these germs were competent to give
rise to living forms by simply sowing them in a

solution fitted for their development. And, thirdly,
he showed that the incapacity of air strained through
cotton-wool to give rise to life was not due to any
occult change effected in the constituents of the air by
the wool, by proving that the cotton-wool might be

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 85

dispensed with altogether, and perfectly free access
left between the exterior air and that in the experi-
mental flask. Ifthe neck of the flask is drawn out
into a tube and bent downwards; and if, after
the contained fluid has been carefully boiled, the
tube is heated sufficiently to destroy any germs
which may be present in the air which enters
as the fluid cools, the apparatus may be left to itself
for any time and no life will appear in the fluid.
The reason is plain. Although there is free com-
munication between the atmosphere laden with
germs and the germless air in the flask, contact
between the two takes place only in the tube; and
as the germs cannot fall upwards, and there are no
currents, they never reach the interior of the flask.
But if the tube be broken short off where it proceeds
from the flask, and free access be thus given to
germs falling vertically out of the air, the fluid,
which has remained clear and desert for months,
becomes, in a few days, turbid and full of life.

CCXXI

In autumn it is not uncommon to see flies
motionless upon a window-pane, with a sort of
magic circle, in white, drawn round them. On
microscopic examination, the magic circle is found
to consist of innumerable spores, which have been
thrown off in all directions by a minute fungus
called Fmpusa musce, the spore-forming filaments
of which stand out like a pile of velvet from the
body of the fly. These spore-forming filaments
are connected with others which fill the interior
of the fly’s body like so much fine wool, having
eaten away and destroyed the creature’s viscera.
This is the full-grown condition of the Ampusa.
If traced back to its earliest stages, in flies which
are still active, and to all appearance healthy, it
is found to exist in the form of minute corpuscles

86 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

which float in the blood of the fly. These multiply
and lengthen into filaments, at the expense of
the fly’s substance; and when they have at last
killed the patient, they grow out of its body and
give off spores. Healthy flies shut up with
diseased ones catch this mortal disease, and perish
like the others. A most competent observer, M.
Cohn, who studied the development of the Ampusa
very carefully, was utterly unable to discover in
what manner the smallest germs of the ZAypusa
got into the fly. The spores could not be made
to give rise to such germs by cultivation ; nor were
such germs discoverable in the air, or in the food
of the fly. It looked exceedingly like a case of
Abiogenesis, or, at any rate, of Kenogenesis; and
it is only quite recently that the real course of events
has been made out. It has been ascertained that
when one of the spores falls upon the body of a
fly, it begins to germinate, and sends out a process
which bores its way through the fly’s skin; this,
having reached the interior cavities of its body,
gives off the minute floating corpuscles which are
the earliest stage of the Ampusa. The disease
is ‘‘contagious,” because a healthy fly coming
in contact with a diseased one, from which the
spore-bearing filaments protrude, is pretty sure
to carry off a spore or two. It is ‘‘ infectious”
because the spores become scattered about all
sorts of matter in the neighbourhood of the slain flies.

Silkworms are liable to many diseases; and,
even before 1853, a peculiar epizootic, frequently
accompanied by the appearance of dark spots upon
the skin (whence the name of ‘‘ Pébrine” which
it has received), had been noted for its mortality.
But in the years following 1853 this malady broke
out with such extreme violence, that, in 1858, the
silk-crop was reduced to a third of the amount
which it had reached in 1853; and, up till within
the last year or two, it has never attained half the
yield of 1853. This means not only that the great

*

a” . ae

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 87

number of people engaged in silk growing are
some thirty millions sterling poorer than they might
have been ; it means not only that high prices have
had to be paid for imported silkworm eggs, and
that, after investing his money in them, in paying
for mulberry-leaves and for attendance, the culti-
vator has constantly seen his silkworms perish and
himself plunged in ruin ; but it means that the looms
of Lyons have lacked employment, and that, for
years, enforced idleness and misery have been the
portion of a vast population which, in former days,
was industrious and well-to-do.

In reading the Report made by M. de Quatrefages
in 1859, it is exceedingly interesting to observe that
his elaborate study of the Pébrine forced the convic-
tion upon his mind that, in its mode of occurrence
and propagation, the disease of the silkworm is, in
every respect, comparable to the cholera among
mankind. But it differs from the cholera, and so
far is a more formidable malady, in being hereditary,
and in being, under some circumstances, contagious
as well as infectious.

The Italian naturalist, Filippi, discovered in the
blood of the silkworms affected by this strange
disorder a multitude of cylindrical corpuscles, each
about zj5;th of an inch long. These have been
carefully studied by Lebert, and named by him
Panhistophyton ; for the reason that in subjects in
which the disease is strongly developed, the cor-
puscles swarm in every tissue and organ of the
body, and even pass into the undeveloped eggs of
the female moth. But are these corpuscles causes,
or mere concomitants, of the disease? Some natura-
lists took one view and some another; and it was
not until the French Government, alarmed by the
continued ravages of the malady, and the inefficiency
of the remedies which had been suggested, des-
patched M. Pasteur to study it, that the question
received its final settlement; at a great sacrifice,
not only of the time and peace of mind of that

88 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

eminent philosopher, but, I regret to have to add,
of his health.

But the sacrifice has not been in vain. It is now
certain that this devastating, cholera-like Pébrine
is the effect of the growth and multiplication of
the Panhistophyton in the silkworm. It is contagious
and infectious, because the corpuscles of the Paz-
histophyton pass away from the bodies of the diseased
caterpillars, directly or indirectly, to the alimentary
canal of healthy silkworms in their neighbourhood ;
it is hereditary because the corpuscles enter into
the eggs while they are being formed, and con-
sequently are carried within them when they are
laid ; and for this reason, also, it presents the very
singular peculiarity of being inherited only on the
mother’s side. There is not a single one of all the
apparently capricious and unaccountable phenomena
presented by the Pébrine, but has received its
explanation from the fact that the disease is the
result of the presence of the microscopic organism,
Panhistophyion,

CCXXII

I commenced this Address by asking you to
follow me in an attempt to trace the path which
has been followed by a scientific idea, in its long
and slow progress from the position of a probable
hypothesis to that of an established law of nature.
Our survey has not taken us into pe attractive
regions ; it has lain, chiefly, in a land flowing with
the abominable, and peopled with mere grubs and
mouldiness. And it may be imagined with what
smiles and shrugs, practical and serious contempo-
raries of Redi and of Spallanzani may have commented
on the waste of their high abilities in toiling at the
solution of problems which, though curious enough
in themselves, could be of no conceivable utility to
mankind,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 89

Nevertheless, you will have observed that before
we had travelled very far upon our road, there
appeared, on the right hand and on the left, fields
laden with a harvest of golden grain, immediately
convertible into those things which the most solidly
practical men will admit to have value—viz., money
and life.

The direct loss to France caused by the Pébrine
in seventeen years cannot be estimated at less than
fifty millions sterling ; and if we add to this what
Redi’s idea, in Pasteur’s hands, has done for the
wine-grower and for the vinegar-maker, and try to
capitalise its value, we shall find that it will goa
long way towards repairing the money losses caused
by the frightful and calamitous war of this autumn
(1870). And as to the equivalent of Redi’s thought in
life, how can we overestimate the value of that know-
ledge of the nature of epidemic and epizootic diseases,
and consequently of the means of checking, or
eradicating them, the dawn of which has assuredly
commenced P

Looking back no further than ten years, it is
possible to select three (1863, 1864, and 1869) in
which the total number of deaths from _scarlet-
fever alone amounted to ninety thousand. That
is the return of killed, the maimed and disabled
being left out of sight. Why, it is to be hoped
that the list of killed in the present bloodiest of
all wars will not amount to more than this! But
the facts which I have placed before you must
leave the least sanguine without a doubt that the
nature and the causes of this scourge will, one day,
be as weil understood as those of the Pebrine are
now; and that the long-suffered massacre of our
innocents will come to an end.

And thus mankind will have one more admoni-
tion that ‘‘the people perish for lack of know-
ledge”; and that the alleviation of the miseries,
and the promotion of the welfare, of men must
be sought, by those who will not lose their pains,

90 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

in that diligent, patient, loving study of all the
multitudinous aspects of Nature, the results of which
constitute exact knowledge, or Science.

CCXXITI

I find three, more or less contradictory, systems
of geological thought, each of which might fairly
enough claim these appellations, standing side by
side in Britain. I shall call one of them Cata-
strophism, another Uniformitarianism, the third
Evolutionism ; and I shall try briefly to sketch the
characters of each, that you may say whether the
classification is, or is not, exhaustive.

By Catastrophism I mean any form of geological
speculation which, in order to account for the
phenomena of geology, supposes the operation of
forces different in their nature, or immeasurably
different in power, from those which we at present
see in action in the universe.

The Mosaic cosmogony is, in this sense, cata-
strophic, because it assumes the operation of extra-
natural power. The doctrine of violent upheavals,
débécles, and cataclysms in general, is catastrophic,
so far as it assumes that these were brought about
by causes which have now no parallel. There was
a time when catastrophism might, pre-eminently,
have claimed the title of ‘‘ British popular geology ” ;
and assuredly it has yet many adherents, and reckons
among its supporters some of the most honoured
members of this Society.

By Uniformitarianism I mean especially the
teaching of Hutton and of Lyell.

That great though incomplete work, ‘‘ The
Theory of the Earth,” seems to me to be one of the
most remarkable contributions to geology which is
recorded in the annals of the science. So far as the

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS o1

not-living world is concerned, uniformitarianism lies
there, not only in germ, but in blossom and fruit.

If one asks how it is that Hutton was led to
entertain views so far in advance of those prevalent
in his time, in some respects ; while, in others, they
seem almost curiously limited, the answer appears
to me to be plain.

Hutton was in advance of the geological specula-
tion of his time, because, in the first place, he had
amassed a vast store of knowledge of the facts
of geology, gathered by personal observation in
travels of considerable extent ; and because, in the
second place, he was thoroughly trained in the
physical and chemical science of his day, and thus
possessed, as much as any one in his time could
possess it, the knowledge which is requisite for the
just interpretation of geological phenomena, and the
habit of thought which fits a man for scientific
inquiry.

It is to this thorough scientific training that I
ascribe Hutton’s steady and persistent refusal to
look to other causes than those now in operation
for the explanation of geological phenomena.

The internal heat of the earth, the elevation and
depression of its crust, its belchings forth of vapours,
ashes, and lava, are its activities, in as strict a sense
as are warmth and the movements and products of
respiration the activities of an animal. The pheno-
mena of the seasons, of the trade winds, of the Gulf-
stream, are as much the results of the reaction
between these inner activities and outward forces
as are the budding of the leaves in spring and their
falling in autumn the effects of the interaction
between the organisation of a plant and the solar
light and heat. And, as the study of the activities
of the living being is called its physiology, so are
these phenomena the subject-matter of an analogous
telluric physiology, to which we sometimes give the
name of meteorology, sometimes that of physical
geography, sometimes that of geology. Again, the

92 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

earth has a place in space and in time, and relations
to other bodies in both these respects, which con-
stitute its distribution. This subject is usually left
to the astronomer; but a knowledge of its broad
outlines seems to me to be an essential constituent of
the stock of geological ideas.

CCXXIV

All that can be ascertained concerning the
structure, succession of conditions, actions, and
position in space of the earth, is the matter of fact
of its natural history. But, as in biology, there
remains the matter of reasoning from these facts to
their causes, which is just as much science as the
other, and indeed more; and this constitutes geo-
logical ztiology.

CCXXV

I suppose that it would be very easy to pick holes
in the details of Kant’s speculations, whether cosmo-
logical, or specially telluric, in their application.
But for all that, he seems to me to have been the
first person to frame a complete system of geological
speculation by founding the doctrine of evolution.

I have said that the three schools of geological
speculation which I have termed Catastrophism,
Uniformitarianism, and Evolutionism, are commonly
supposed to be antagonistic to one another; and I
presume it will have become obvious that in my
belief, the last is destined to swallow up the other
two. But it is proper to remark that each of
the latter has kept alive the tradition of precious
truths.

To my mind there appears to be no sort of
necessary theoretical antagonism between Cata-
strophism and Uniformitarianism. On the contrary,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 93

it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be part
and parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my
case by analogy. The working of a clock is a
model of uniform action ; good time-keeping means
uniformity of action. But the striking of the clock
is essentially a catastrophe ; the hammer might be
made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on
a deluge of water; and, by proper arrangement,
the clock, instead of marking the hours, might
strike at all sorts of irregular periods, never twice
alike, in the intervals, force, or number of its blows.
Nevertheless, all these irregular, and apparently
lawless, catastrophes would be the result of an
absolutely uniformitarian action ; and we might have
two schools of clock-theorists, one studying the
hammer and the other the pendulum.

CCXXVI

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of
exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff of
any degree of fineness ; but, nevertheless, what you
get out depends upon what you put in; and as the
grandest mili in the world will not extract wheat-
flour from peascods, so pages of formule will not
get a definite result out of loose data.

CCXXVII

The motive of the drama of human life is the neces-
sity, laid upon every man who comes into the world,
of discovering the mean between self-assertion and
self-restraint suited to his character and his circum-
stances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the
drama lies in this: that the problem set before us is

94 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

one the elements of which can be but imperfectly
known, and of which even an approximately right
solution rarely presents itself, until that stern critic,
aged experience, has been furnished with ample
justification for venting his sarcastic humour upon
the irreparable blunders we have already made.

CCXXVIII

That which endures is not one or another associa-
tion of living forms, but the process of which the
cosmos is the product, and of which these are among
the transitory expressions. And in the living world,
one of the most characteristic features of this cosmic
process is the struggle for existence, the competition
of each with all, the result of which is the selection,
that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on
the whole, are best adapted to the conditions which
at any period obtain; and which are therefore, in
that respect, and only in that respect, the fittest.
The acme reached by the cosmic process in the
vegetation of the downs is seen in the turf, with its
weed and gorse. Under the conditions, they have
come out of the struggle victorious ; and, by surviv-
ing, have proved that they are the fittest to survive.

CCXXIX

As a natural process, of the same character as the
development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from
its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other
kinds of supernatural intervention. As the expres-
sion of a fixed order, every stage of which is the
effect of causes operating according to definite rules,
the conception of evolution no less excludes that of
chance. It is very desirable to remember that evolu-
tion is not an explanation of the cosmic process, but

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 95

merely a generalized statement of the method and
results of that process. And, further, that, if there
is proof that the cosmic process was set going by any
agent, then that agent will be the creator of it and
of all its products, although, supernatural interven-
tion may remain strictly excluded from its further
course.

CCXXX

All plants and animals exhibit the tendency to vary,
the causes of which have yet to be ascertained ; it
is the tendency of the conditions of life, at any given
time, while favouring the existence of the variations
best adapted to them, to oppose that of the rest and
thus to exercise selection ; and all living things tend
to multiply without limit, while the means of support
are limited ; the obvious cause of which is the pro-
duction of offspring more numerous than their pro-
genitors, but with equal expectation of life in the
actuarial sense. Without the first tendency there
could be no evolution. Without the second, there
would be no good reason why one variation should
disappear and another take its place ; that is to say,
there would be no selection. Without the third, the
struggle for existence, the agent of the selective
process in the state of nature, would vanish.

CCXXXI

The faith which is born of knowledge finds its
object in an eternal order, bringing forth ceaseless
change, through endless time, in endless space; the
manifestations of the cosmic energy alternating
between phases of potentiality and phases of ex-
plication.

96 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCXXXII

With all their enormous differences in natural
endowment, men agree in one thing, and that is their
innate desire to enjoy the pleasures and escape the
pains of life ; and, in short, to do nothing but that
which it pleases them to do, without the least refer-
ence to the welfare of the society into which they are
born. That is their inheritance (the reality at the
bottom of the doctrine of original sin) from the long
series of ancestors, human and semi-human and
brutal, in whom the strength of this innate tendency
to self-assertion was the condition of victory in the
struggle for existence. That is the reason of the
aviditas vite—the insatiable hunger for enjoyment—
of all mankind, which is one of the essential con-
ditions of success in the war with the state of nature
outside ; and yet the sure agent of the destruction of
society if allowed free play within.

CCXXXIII

The check upon this free play of self-assertion, or
natural liberty, which is the necessary condition for
the origin of human society, is the product of organic
necessities of a different kind from those upon which
the constitution of the hive depends. One of these
is the mutual affection of parent and offspring, inten-
sified by the long infancy of the human species.
But the most important is the tendency, so strongly
developed in man, to reproduce in himself actions and
feelings similar to, or correlated with, those of other
men. Man is the most consummate of all mimics in
the animal world; none but himself can draw or
model ; none comes near him in the scope, variety,
and exactness of vocal imitation; none is such a
master of gesture; while he seems to be impelled

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 97

thus to imitate for the pure pleasure of it. And there is
no such another emotional chameleon. By a purely
reflex operation of the mind, we take the hue of
passion of those who are about us, or, it may be, the
complementary colour. It is not by any conscious
‘‘ putting one’s self in the place” of a joyful or a suffer-
ing person that the state of mind we call sympathy
usually arises ; indeed, it is often contrary to one’s
sense of right, and in spite of one’s will, that ‘‘ fellow-
feeling makes us wondrous kind,” or the reverse.
However complete may be the indifference to public
opinion, in a cool, intellectual view, of the traditional
sage, it has not yet been my fortune to meet with
any actual sage who took its hostile manifestations
with entire equanimity. Indeed, I doubt if the
philosopher lives, or ever has lived, who could know
himself to be heartily despised by a street boy with-
out some irritation. And, though one cannot justify
Haman for wishing to hang Mordecai on sucha very
high gibbet, yet, really, the consciousness of the
Vizier of Ahasuerus, as he went in and out of the
gate, that this obscure Jew had no respect for him,
must have been very annoying.

It is needful only to look around us, to see that
the greatest restrainer of the anti-social tendencies
of men is fear, not of the law, but of the opinion of
their fellows. The conventions of honour bind men
who break legal, moral, and religious bonds ; and,
while people endure the extremity of physical pain
rather than part with life, shame drives the weakest
to suicide.

Every forward step of social progress brings men
into closer relations with their fellows, and increases
the importance of the pleasures and pains derived
from sympathy. We judge the acts of others by
our own sympathies, and we judge our own acts
by the sympathies of others, every day and all
day long, from childhood upwards, until associations,
as indissoluble as those of language, are formed
between certain acts and the feelings of approbation

i

98 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

or disapprobation. It becomes impossible to imagine
some acts without disapprobation, or others without
approbation of the actor, whether he be one’s self
or anyone else. We come to think in the acquired
dialect of morals. An artificial personality, the

‘man within,” as Adam Smith calls conscience,
is built up beside the natural personality. He is the
watchman of society, charged to restrain the anti-
social tendencies of the natural man within the
limits required by social welfare.

CCXXXIV

I have termed this evolution of the feelings out
of which the primitive bonds of human society are
so largely forged, into the organized and personified
sympathy we call conscience, the ethical process.
So far as it tends to make any human society more
efficient in the struggle for existence with the state
of nature, or with other societies, it works in har-
monious contrast with the cosmic process. But
it is none the less true that, since law and morals
are restraints upon the struggle for existence between
men in society, the ethical process is in opposition
to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends
to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for
success in that struggle.

CCXXXV

Moralists of all ages and of all faiths, attending
only to the relations of men towards one another
in an ideal society, have agreed upon the ** golden
tule,” ‘“Do as you would be done by.” In other

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 99

words, let sympathy be your guide; put yourself
in the place of the man towards whom your action
is directed; and do to him what you would like to
have done to yourself under the circumstances.
However much one may admire the generosity of
such a rule of conduct ; however confident one may
be that average men may be thoroughly depended
upon not to carry it out to its full logical con-
sequences ; it is nevertheless desirable to recognise
the fact that these consequences are incompatible
with the existence of a civil state, under any circum-
stances of this world which have obtained, or,
so far as one can see, are likely to come to
pass.

For I imagine there can be no doubt that the
great desire of every wrongdoer is to escape from
the painful consequences of his actions. If I put
myself in the place of the man who has robbed me,
I find that I am possessed by an exceeding desire
not to be fined or imprisoned; if in that of the
man who has smitten me on one cheek, I contem-
plate with satisfaction the absence of any worse
result than the turning of the other cheek for like
treatment. Strictly observed, the ‘‘golden rule”
involves the negation of law by the refusal to put it
in motion against law-breakers; and, as regards
the external relations of a polity, it is the refusal
to continue the struggle for existence. It can be
obeyed, even partially, only under the protection of
a society which repudiates it. Without such
shelter the followers of the ‘golden rule” may
indulge in hopes of heaven, but they must reckon
with the certainty that other people will be masters
of the earth.

What would become of the garden if the gar-
dener treated all the weeds and siugs and birds
and trespassers as he would like to be treated if
he were in their place ?

1o0 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCXXXVI

In a large proportion of cases, crime and pauper-
ism have nothing to do with heredity; but are
the consequence, partly, of circumstances and,
partly, of the possession of qualities, which, under
different conditions of life, might have excited
esteem and even admiration. It was a shrewd
man of the world who, in discussing sewage
problems, remarked that dirt is riches in the wrong
place; and that sound aphorism has moral appli-
cations. The benevolence and open-handed gener-
osity which adorn a rich man may make a pauper
of a poor one; the energy and courage to which
the successful soldier owes his rise, the cool and
daring subtlety to which the great financier owes
his fortune, may very easily, under unfavourable
conditions, lead their possessors to the gallows,
or to the hulks. Moreover, it is fairly probable
that the children of a “failure” will receive from
their other parent just that little modification of
character which makes all the difference. I some-
times wonder whether people, who talk so freely
about extirpating the unfit, ever dispassionately
consider their own history. Surely, one must be
very ‘‘fit” indeed not to know of an occasion,
or perhaps two, in one’s life, when it would have
been only too easy to qualify for a place among
the ‘‘ unfit.”

CCXXXVILI

In the struggle for the means of enjoyment, the
qualities which ensure success are energy, industry,
intellectual capacity, tenacity of purpose, and, at
least as much sympathy as is necessary to make a
man understand the feelings of his fellows. Were
there none of those artificial arrangements by which
fools and knaves are kept at the top of society

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS tor

instead of sinking to their natural place at the bottom,
the struggle for the means of enjoyment would
ensure a constant circulation of the human units of
the social compound, from the bottom to the top and
from the top to the bottom. The survivors of the
contest, those who continued to form the great bulk
of the polity, would not be those “ fittest” who got
to the very top, but the great body of the moderately
“fit,” whose numbers and superior propagative
power enable them always to swamp the exception-
ally endowed minority.

I think it must be obvious to every one that,
whether we consider the internal or the external
interests of society, it is desirable they should be in
the hands of those who are endowed with the
largest share of energy, of industry, of intellectual
capacity, of tenacity of purpose, while they are not
devoid of sympathetic humanity ; and, in so far as
the struggle for the means of enjoyment tends to
place such men in possession of wealth and influ-
ence, it is a process which tends to the good of
society. But the process, as we have seen, has
no real resemblance to that which adapts living
beings to current conditions in the state of nature;
nor any to the artificial selection of the horticul-
turist.

CCXXXVIII

Even should the whole human race be absorbed in
one vast polity, within which ‘absolute political jus-
tice” reigns, the struggle for existence with the state
of nature outside it, and the tendency tothe returnof the
struggle within, in consequence of over-multiplication,
will remain ; and, unless men’s inheritance from the
ancestors who fought a good fight in the state of
nature, their dose of original sin, is rooted out by
some method at present unrevealed, at any rate to
disbelievers in supernaturalism, every child born into
the world will still bring with him the instinct of

102 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

unlimited self-assertion. He will have to learn the
lesson of self-restraint and renunciation. But the
practice of self-restraint and renunciation is not
happiness, though it may be something much
better.

That man, as a ‘‘ political animal,” is susceptible of
a vast amount of improvement, by education, by
instruction, and by the application of his intelligence
to the adaptation of the conditions of life to his
higher needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt.
But, so long as he remains liable to error, intellec-
tual or moral; so long as he is compelled to be
perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces,
whose ends are not his ends, without and within
himself ; so long as he is haunted by inexpugnable
memories and hopeless aspirations ; so long as the
recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him
to acknowledge his incapacity to penetrate the
mystery of existence; the prospect of attaining
untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even
remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to
me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was
dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And
there have been many of them.

That which lies before the human race is a con-
stant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition
to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an
organized polity; in which, and by which, man
may develop a worthy civilization, capable of main-
taining and constantly improving itself, until the
evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon
its downward course that the cosmic process resumes
its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature
prevails over the surface of our planet.

CCXXXIX

From very low forms up to the highest—in the
animal no less than in the vegetable kingdom—

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 103

the process of life presents the same appearance of
cyclical evolution. Nay, we have but to cast our
eyes over the rest of the world and cyclical change
presents itself on all sides. It meets us in the water
that flows to the sea and returns to the springs ; in
the heavenly bodies that wax and wane, go and
return to their places ; in the inexorable sequence of
the ages of man’s life; in that successive rise,
apogee, and fall of dynasties and of states which
is the most prominent topic of civil history.

CCXL

As no man fording a swift stream can dip his foot
twice into the same water, so no man can, with
exactness, affirm of anything in the sensible world
that itis. As he utters the words, nay, as he thinks
them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the
present has become the past; the ‘‘is” should be
“‘was.” And the more we learn of the nature of
things, the more evident is it that what we call rest
is only unperceived activity ; that seeming peace is
silent but strenuous battle. In every part, at every
moment, the state of the cosmos is the expression of
a transitory adjustment of contending forces; a
scene of strife, in which all the combatants fall in
turn. What is true of each part is true of the
whole. Natural knowledge tends more and more to
the conclusion that ‘‘all the choir of heaven and
furniture of the earth” are the transitory forms of
parcels of cosmic substance wending along the road of
evolution, from nebulous potentiality, through end-
less growths of sun and planet and satellite ;
through all varieties of matter; through infinite
diversities of life and thought; possibly, through
modes of being of which we neither have a concep-
tion, nor are competent to form any, back to the
indefinable latency from which they arose. Thus

106 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

the most obvious attribute of the cosmos is its
impermanence. It assumes the aspect not so much
of a permanent entity as of a changeful process, in
which naught endures save the flow of energy and
the rational order which pervades it.

CCXLI

Man, the animal, in fact, has worked his way to
the headship of the sentient world, and has become
the superb animal which he is in virtue of his
success in the struggle for existence. The conditions
having been of a certain order, man’s organization
has adjusted itself to them better than that of his
competitors in the cosmic strife. In the case of
mankind, the self-assertion, the unscrupulous seizing
upon all that can be grasped, the tenacious holding
of all that can be kept, which constitute the essence
of the struggle for existence, have answered. For
his successful progress, throughout the savage state,
man has been largely indebted to those qualities
which he shares with the ape and the tiger ; his
exceptional physical organization ; his cunning, his
sociability, his curiosity, and his imitativeness ;
his ruthiess and ferocious destructiveness when
his anger is roused by opposition.

But, in proportion as men have passed from
anarchy to social organization, and in proportion
as civilization has grown in worth, these deeply
ingrained serviceable qualities have become defects.
After the manner of successful persons, civilized
man would gladly kick down the ladder by which
he has climbed. He would be only too pleased to
see ‘‘the ape and tiger die.” But they decline to
suit his convenience ; and the unwelcome intrusion
of these boon companions of his hot youth into the
ranged existence of civil life adds pains and griefs,
innumerable and immeasurably great, to those which

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 105

the cosmic process necessarily brings on the mere
animal. In fact, civilized man brands al! these ape
and tiger promptings with the name of sins; he
punishes many of the acts which flow from them as
crimes ; and, in extreme cases, he does his best to
put an end to the survival of the fittest of former
days by axe and rope.

CCXLII

In Hindostan, as in Ionia, a period of relatively
high and tolerably stable civilization had succeeded
long ages of semi-barbarism and struggle. Out of
wealth and security had come leisure and refinement,
and, close at their heels, had followed the malady of
thought. To the struggle for bare existence, which
never ends, though it may be alleviated and partially
disguised for a fortunate few, succeeded the struggle
to make existence intelligible and to bring the order
of things into harmony with the moral sense of man,
which also never ends, but, for the thinking few,
becomes keener with every increase of knowledge
and with every step towards the realization of a
worthy ideal of life.

Two thousand five hundred years ago the value
of civilization was as apparent as it is now ; then,
as now, it was obvious.that only in the garden of an
orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is
capable of bearing be produced. But it had also
become evident that the blessings of culture were
not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn into
a hothouse. The stimulation of the senses, the
pampering of the emotions, endlessly multiplied the
sources of pleasure. The constant widening of
the intellectual field indefinitely extended the range
of that especially human faculty of looking before
and after, which adds to the fleeting present those
old and new worlds of the past and the future,

106 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

wherein men dwell the more the higher their culture.
But that very sharpening of the sense and that
subtle refinement of emotion, which brought such a
wealth of pleasures, were fatally attended by a
proportional enlargement of the capacity for suffer-
ing; and the divine faculty of imagination, while
it created new heavens and new earths, provided
them with the corresponding hells of futile regret
for the past and morbid anxiety for the future.

CCXLIII

One of the oldest and most important elements
in such systems is the conception of justice. Society
is impossible unless those who are associated agree
to observe certain rules of conduct towards one
another; its stability depends on the steadiness
with which they abide by that agreement; and, so
far as they waver, that mutual trust which is the
bond of society is weakened or destroyed. Wolves
could not hunt in packs except for the real, though
unexpressed, understanding that they should not
attack one another during the chase. The most
rudimentary polity is a pack of men living under the
like tacit, or expressed, understanding ; and having
made the very important advance upon wolf society,
that they agree to use the force of the whole body
against individuals who violate it and in favour of
those who observe it. This observance of a common
understanding, with the consequent distribution of
punishments and rewards according to accepted
rules, received the name of justice, while the contrary
was called injustice. Early ethics did not take
much note of the animus of the violator of the rules.
But civilization could not advance far without the
establishment of a capital distinction between the
case of involuntary and that of wilful misdeed ;
between a merely wrong action and a guilty one,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 107

And, with increasing refinement of moral apprecia-
tion, the problem of desert, which arises out of this
distinction, acquired more and more theoretical and
practical importance. If life must be given for life,
yet it was recognized that the unintentional slayer
did not altogether deserve death ; and, by a sort of
compromise between the public and the private
conception of justice, a sanctuary was provided in
which he might take refuge from the avenger of
blood. .

The idea of justice thus underwent a gradual
sublimation from punishment and reward according
to acts, to punishment and reward according to
desert; or, in other words, according to motive.
Righteousness, that is, action from right motive,
not only became synonymous with justice, but the
positive constituent of innocence and the very heart
of goodness.

CCXLIV

Everyday experience familiarizes us with the facts
which are grouped under the name of heredity.
Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his
parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More
particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain
way, which we call ‘‘ character,” is often to be
traced through a long series of progenitors and
collaterals. So we may justly say that this
‘‘character ”—this moral and intellectual essence of a
man—does veritably pass over from one fleshy taber-
nacle to another, and does really transmigrate from
generation to generation. In the new-born infant
the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is
little more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very
early, these become actualities ; from childhood to age
they manifest themselves in dulness or brightness,
weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness ;

108 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

and with each feature modified by confluence with
another character, if by nothing else, the character
passes on to its incarnation in new bodies.

CCXLV

Only one rule of conduct could be based upon the
remarkable theory of which I have endeavoured to
give a reasoned outline. It was folly to continue to
exist when an overplus of pain was certain ; and the
probabilities in favour of the increase of misery with
the prolongation of existence, were so overwhelming.
Slaying the body only made matters worse ; there
was nothing for it but to slay the soul by the voluntary
arrest of all its activities. Property, social ties,
family affections, common companionship, must be
abendoned ; the most natural appetites, even that for
food, must be suppressed, or at least minimized ;
until all that remained of a man was the impassive,
extenuated, mendicant monk, self-hypnotised into
cataleptic trances, which the deluded mystic took for
foretastes of the final union with Brahma.

CCXLVI

If the cosmos is the effect of an immanent,
omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent cause, the ex-
istence in it of real evil, still less of necessarily
inherent evil, is plainly inadmissible. Yet the
universal experience of mankind testified then, as
now, that, whether we look within us or without us,
evil stares us in the face on all sides ; that if anything
is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are realities.

It would be a new thing in history if a przorz philo-
sophers were daunted by the factious opposition of
experience ; and the Stoics were the last men to

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 109

allow themselves to be beaten by mere facts. ‘‘ Give
me a doctrine and I will find the reasons for it,” said
Chrysippus. So they perfected, if they did not invent,
that ingenious and plausible form of pleading, the
Theodicy ; for the purpose of showing firstly, that
there is no such thing as evil ; secondly, that if there
is, it is the necessary correlate of good ; and, more-
over, that it is either due to our own fault, or inflicted
for our benefit.

CCXLVII

Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one’s eyes
to good than to evil. Pain and sorrow knock at our
doors more loudly than pleasure and happiness ; and
the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily
effaced.

CCXLVIII

In the language of the Stoa, ‘‘ Nature” was a word
of many meanings. There was the ‘‘ Nature” of the
cosmos, andthe ‘‘ Nature” of man. In the latter, the
animal ‘‘ nature,” which man shares witha moiety of
the living part of the cosmos, was distinguished from
a higher “nature.” Even in this higher nature there
were grades of rank. The logical faculty is an
instrument which may be turned to account for any
purpose. The passions and the emotions are so
closely tied to the lower nature that they may be
considered to be pathological, rather than normal,
phenomena. The one supreme, hegemonic, faculty,
which constitutes the essential ‘‘nature” of man, is
most nearly represented by that which, in the
language of a later philosophy, has been called the
pure reason. It is this ‘‘ nature” which holds up the

110 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute sub-
mission of the will to its behests. It is this which
commands all men to love one another, to return good
for evil, to regard one another as fellow-citizens of
one great state. Indeed, seeing that the progress
towards perfection of a civilised state, or polity,
depends on the obedience of its members to these
commands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure
reason the ‘‘political” nature. Unfortunately, the
sense of the adjective has undergone so much modi-
fication that the application of it to that which com-
mands the sacrifice of self to the common good would
now sound almost grotesque.

CCXLIX

The majority of us, I apprehend, profess neither
pessimism nor optimism. We hold that the world
is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably
might be; and, as most of us have reason, now and
again, to discover that it can be. Those who have
failed to experience the joys that make life worth
living are, probably, in as small a minority as those
who have never known the griefs that rob existence
of its savour and turn its richest fruits into mere
dust and ashes.

CCL

There is another fallacy which appears to me to
pervade the so-called ‘‘ ethics of evolution.” It is
the notion that because, on the whole, animals and
plants have advanced in perfection of organization by
means of the struggle for existence and the con-
sequent ‘‘survival of the fittest” ; therefore men in
society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same
process to help them towards perfection. I suspect

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 111

that this fallacy has arisen out of the unfortunate
ambiguity of the phrase ‘“‘survival of the fittest.”
“Fittest” has a connotation of ‘‘ best” ; and about
“‘best” there hangs a moral flavour. In cosmic
nature, however, what is ‘fittest ” dépends upon the
conditions, Long since, I ventured to point out that
if our hemisphere were to cool again, the survival of
the fittest might bring about, in the vegetable king-
dom, a population of more and more stunted and
humbler and humbler organisms, until the “ fittest”
that survived might be nothing but lichens, diatoms,
and such microscopic organisms as those which give
red snow its colour; while, if it became hotter, the
pleasant valleys of the Thames and Isis might be
uninhabitable by any animated beings save those
that flourish in atropicaljungle. They, as the fittest,
the best adapted to the changed conditions, would
survive.

CCLI

The practice of that which is ethically best—what
we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of
conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that
which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for
existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it
demands self-restraint ; in place of thrusting aside,
or treading down, all competitors, it requires that
the individual shall not merely respect, but shall
help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so
much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting
of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates
tne gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands
that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the
advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt
to those who have laboziously constructed it; and
shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric
in which he has been permitted to live. Laws and

112 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the
cosmic process and reminding the individual of his
duty to the community, to the protection and
influence of which he owes, if not existence itself,
at least the life of something better than a brutal
savage.

CCLII

The theory of evolution encourages no millennial
anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe
has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the
summit will be reached and the downward route
will be commenced. The most daring imagination
will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the
power and the intelligence of man can ever arrest
the procession of the great year.

Moreover, the cosmic nature born with us and,
to a large extent, necessary for our maintenance,
is the outcome of millions of years of severe train-
ing, and it would be folly to imagine that a few
centuries will suffice to subdue its masterfulness
to purely ethical ends. Ethical nature may count
upon having to reckon witha tenacious and powerful
enemy as long as the world lasts. But, on the
other hand, I see no limit to the extent to which
intelligence and will, guided by sound principles
of investigation, and organized in common effort,
may modify the conditions of existence, for a period
longer than that now covered by history. And
much may be done to change the nature of man
himself. The intelligence which has converted the
brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of
the flock ought to be able to do something towards
curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized
men,

But if we may permit ourselves a larger hope of
abatement of the essential evil of the world than

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 113

was possible to those who, in the infancy of exact
knowledge, faced the problem of existence more
than a score of centuries ago, I deem it an essen-
tial condition of the realization of that hope that
we should cast aside the notion that the escape
from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life.

CCLIII

We have long since emerged from the heroic
childhood of our race, when good and evil could
be met with the same ‘‘frolic welcome”; the
attempts to escape from evil, whether Indian or
Greek, have ended in flight from the battle-field ;
it remains to us to throw aside the youthful over-
confidence and the no less youthful discourage-
ment of nonage. We are grown men, and must
play the man

strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,

cherishing the good that falls in our way, and
bearing the evil, in and around us, with stout
hearts set on diminishing it. So far, we all may
strive in one faith towards one hope:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

.-.. but something ere the end,
Some work of noble ncte may yet be done.

CCLIV

I do not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed
because I have all my life enjoyed a keen perception
of the beauty offered us by nature and by art. Now

I

114 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

physical science may and probably will, some day,
enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical
concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture
of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture
will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond
the physical world; and, even in the mental world,
something superadded to mere sensation. I do
not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin
the orang, but in the esthetic province, as in
that of the intellect, I am afraid he is nowhere.
I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilder-
ness of leaves where I could see nothing; but I
am tolerably confident that he has never been
awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious
gloom, as of a temple devoted to the earthgods,
of the tropical forests which he inhabits. Vet
I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-
legged friend, as he sits meditatively munching
his durian fruit, has something behind that sad
Socratic face of his which is utterly ‘‘beyond the
bounds of physical science.” Physical science may
know all about his clutching the fruit and munching
it and digesting it, and how the physical titillation
of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic
cells of the gray matter of his brain. But the
feelings of sweetness and of satisfaction which,
for a moment, hang out their signal lights in his
melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds
of physics as is the ‘‘fine frenzy” of a human
rhapsodist.

CCI.V

When I was a mere boy, with a_ perverse
tendency to think when I ought to have been
playing, my mind was greatly exercised by this
formidable problem, What would become of things
if they lost their qualities? As the qualities had

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 115

no objective existence, and the thing without
qualities was nothing, the solid world seemed
whittled away—to my great horror. As I grew
older, and learned to use the terms ‘‘ matter” and
“force,” the boyish problem was revived, mwxutato
nomine. On the one hand, the notion of matter
without force seemed to resolve the world into a
set of geometrical ghosts, too dead even to jabber.
On the other hand, Boscovich’s hypothesis, by
which matter was resolved into centres of force,
was very attractive. But when one tried to think
it out, what in the world became of force con-
sidered as an objective entity? Force, even the
most materialistic of philosophers will agree with
the most idealistic, is nothing but a name for the
cause of motion. And if, with Boscovich, I resolved
things into centres of force, then matter vanished
altogether and left immaterial entities in its place.
One might as well frankly accept Idealism and have
done with it.

CCLVI

Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of
the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people,
is for a man to presume to go about unlabelled,
The world regards such a person as the police do
an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. I
could find no label that would suit me, so, in my
desire to range myself and be respectable, I in-
vented one; and, as the chief thing I was sure of
was that I did not knowa great many things that
the -ists and the -ites about me professed to be
familiar with, I called myself an Agnostic. Surely
no denomination could be more modest or more
appropriate; and I cannot imagine why I should
be every now and then haled out of my refuge
and declared sometimes to be a Materialist, some-

I 2

116 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

times an Atheist, sometimes a Positivist, and
sometimes, alas and alack, a cowardly or reaction-
ary Obscurantist.

CCLVII

Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the free-
dom of the will. In the only sense in which the
word freedom is intelligible to me—that is to say,
the absence of any restraint upon doing what one
likes within certain limits—physical science certainly
gives no more ground for doubting it than the
common sense of mankind does. And if physical
science, in strengthening our belief in the universality
of causa‘ion and abolishing chance as an absurdity,
leads to the conclusion of determinism, it does no
more than follow the track of consistent and logical
thinkers in philosophy and in theology, before it
existed or was thought of. Whoever accepts the
universality of the law of causation as a dogma of
philosophy, denies the existence of uncaused pheno-
mena. And the essence of that which is improperly
called the freewill doctrine is that occasionally, at
any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say,
net caused at all; for to cause oneself one must
have anteceded oneself—which is, to say the least of
it, difficult to imagine.

CCLVIII

If the diseases of society consist in the weak-
ness of its faith in the existence of the God of the
theologians, in a future state, and in uncaused
volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is
to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 117

bickerings about things of which they know
nothing have been the prime cause and continual
sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the
Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable.

Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance
of these high matters. She lights the fire, sweeps
the house, and provides the dinner ; and is rewarded
by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to
low and material interests. But inher garret she has
fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews
who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order
which pervades the seeming disorder of the world ;
the great drama of evolution, with its full share of
pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness
and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes ; and she
learns, in her heart of hearts, the lesson, that the
foundation of morality is to have done, once and for
all, with lying ; to give up pretending to believe that
for which there is no evidence, and repeating unin-
telligible propositions about things beyond the
possibilities of knowledge.

She knows that the safety of morality lies neither
in the adoption of this or that philosophical specula-
tion, or this or that theological creed, but in a real
and living belief in that fixed order of nature which
sends social disorganisation upon the track of
immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease
after physical trespasses. And of that firm and
lively faith it is her high mission to be the
priestess.

CCLIX

The first act of a new-born child isto draw a deep
breath. In fact, it will never draw a deeper, inas-
much as the passages and chambers of the lungs,
once distended with air, do not empty themselves
again; it is only a fraction of their contents which

118 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

passes in and out with the flow and the ebb of the
respiratory tide. Mechanically, this act of drawing
breath, or inspiration, is of the same nature as that
by which the handles of a bellows are separated,
in order to fill the bellows with air; and, in like
manner, it involves that expenditure of energy
which we call exertion, or work, or labour. It is,
therefore, no mere metaphor to say that man is
destined to a life of toil: the work of respiration
which began with his first breath ends only with his
last ; nor does one born in the purple get off with a
lighter task than the child who first sees light under
a hedge.

How is it that the new-born infant is enabled to
perform this first instalment of the sentence of life-
long labour which no man may escape? Whatever
else a child may be, in respect of this particular
question, it is a complicated piece of mechanism,
built up out of materials supplied by its mother ; and
in the course of such building-up, provided with a set
of motors—the muscles. Each of these muscles
contains a stock of substance capable of yielding
energy under certain conditions, one of which is a
change of state in the nerve-fibres connected with it.
The powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of
substance capable of yielding energy in consequence
of a change of state in the mechanism of the lock,
which intervenes between the finger of the man who
pulls the trigger and the cartridge. If that change
is brought about, the potential energy of the powder
passes suddenly into actual energy, and does the
work of propelling the bullet. The powder, there-
fore, may be appropriately called work-s¢uff, not only
because it is stuff which is easily made to yield work
in the physical sense, but because a good deal of
work in the economical sense has contributed to its
production. Labour was necessary to collect,
transport, and purify the raw sulphur and saltpetre ;
to cut wood and convert it into powdered charcoal ;
to mix these ingredients in the right proportions ; to

ee

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 119

give the mixture the proper grain, and so on. The
powder once formed part of the stock, or capital, of
a powder-maker : and it is not only certain natural
bodies which are collected and stored in the gun-
powder, but the labour bestowed on the operations
mentioned may be figuratively said to be incorporated
in it.

CCLX

In principle, the work-stuff stored in the muscles
of the new-born child is comparable to that stored
in the gun-barrel. The infant is launched into
altogether new surroundings; and these operate
through the mechanism of the nervous machinery,
with the result that the potential energy of some
of the work-stuff in the muscles which bring about
inspiration is suddenly converted into actual energy ;
and this, operating through the mechanism of the
respiratory apparatus, gives rise to an act of inspira-
tion. As the bullet is propelled by the ‘‘ going off”
of the powder, as it might be said that the ribs are
raised and the midriff depressed by the “‘ going off”
of certain portions of muscular work-stuff. This
work-stuff is part of a stock or capital of that
commodity stored up in the child’s organism
before birth, at the expense of the mother; and the
mother has made good her expenditure by drawing
upon the capital of food-stuffs which furnished her
daily maintenance.

Under these circumstances, it does not appear to
me to be open to doubt that the primary act of
outward labour in the series which necessarily
accompany the life of man is dependent upon the
pre-existence of a stock of material which is not
only of use to him, but which is disposed in such a
manner as to be utilisable with facility. And I
further imagine that the propriety of the application
of the term ‘‘ capital” to this stock of useful sub-

120 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

stance cannot be justly called in question ; inasmuch
as it is easy to prove that the essential constituents
of the work-stuff accumulated in the child’s
muscles have merely been transferred from the store
of food-stuffs, which everybody admits to be capital,
by means of the maternal organism to that of the
child, in which they are again deposited to await
use. Every subsequent act of labour, in like manner,
involves an equivalent consumption of the child’s
store of work-stuff—its vital capital ; and one of the
main objects of the process of breathing is to get rid
of some of the effects of that consumption. It follows,
then, that, even if no other than the respiratory
work were going on in the organism, the capital of
work-stuff, which the child brought with it into the
world, must sooner or later be used up, and the
movements of breathing must come to an end;
just as the see-saw of the piston of a steam-engine
stops when the coal in the fireplace has burnt away.

Milk, however, is a stock of materials which
essentially consists of savings from the food-stuffs
supplied to the mother. And these savings are in
such a physical and chemical condition that the
organism of the child can easily convert them into
work-stuff. That is to say, by borrowing directly
from the vital capital of the mother, indirectly from
the store in the natural bodies accessible to her, it
can make good the loss of its own. The operation
of borrowing, however, involves further work ;
that is, the labour of sucking, which is a mechanical
operation of much the same nature as breathing.
The child thus pays for the capital it borrows in
labour ; but as the value in work-stuff of the milk
obtained is very far greater than the value of that
labour, estimated by the consumption of work-stuff
it involves, the operation yields a large profit to the
infant. The overplus of food-stuff suffices to
increase the child’s capital of work-stuff; and to

supply not oniy the materials for the enlargement of |

the ‘buildings and machinery” which is expressed

ne

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 121

by the child’s growth, but also the energy required
to put all these materials together, and to carry them
to their proper places. Thus, throughout the years
of infancy, and so long thereafter as the youth or
man is not thrown unon his own resources, he lives
by consuming the vital capital provided by others.

CELXI

Let us now suppose the child come to man’s estate
in the condition of a wandering savage, dependent
for his food upon what he can pick up or catch, after
the fashion of the Australian aborigines. It is plain
that the place of mother, as the supplier of vital
capital, is now taken by the fruits, seeds, and roots
of plants and by various kinds of animals... .. .
The savage, like the child, borrows the capital he
needs, and, at any rate, intentionally, does nothing
towards repayment ; it would plainly be an improper
use of the word ‘‘ produce” to say that his labour
in hunting for the roots, or the fruits, or the eggs,
or the grubs and snakes, which he finds and eats,
“produces” or contributes to ‘‘ produce” them.
The same thing is true of more advanced tribes,
who are still merely hunters, such as the Esquimaux.
They may expend more labour and skill; but it is
spent in destruction.

CCLXII

When we find set forth as an ‘‘absolute” truth
the statement that the essential factors in economic
production are land, capital and labour—when this
is offered as an axiom whence all sorts of other
important truths may be deduced—it is needful
to remember that the assertion is true only with

122 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

a qualification. Undoubtedly ‘‘vital capital” is
essential; for, as we have seen, no human work
can be done unless it exists, not even that internal
work of the body which is necessary to passive
life. But, with respect to labour (that is, human
labour) I hope to have left no doubt on the reader’s
mind that, in regard to production, the importance
of human labour may be so small as to be almost a
vanishing quantity.

CCLXIII

The one thing needful for economic production
is the green plant, as the sole producer of vital
capital from natural inorganic bodies. Men might
exist without labour (in the ordinary sense) and
without land; without plants they must inevitably
perish.

CCLXIV

Since no amount of labour can produce an ounce
of food-stuff beyond the maximum producible by a
limited number of plants, under the most favourable
circumstances in regard to those conditions which
are not affected by labour, it follows that, if the
number of men to be fed increases indefinitely, a
time must come when some will have to starve.
That is the essence of the so-called Malthusian
doctrine; and it is a truth which, to my mind, is
as plain as the general proposition that a quantity
which constantly increases will, some time or other,
ae any greater quantity the amount of which
is fixed.

CCLXV

‘‘Virtually” is apt to cover more intellectual sins
than ‘‘ charity” does moral delicts.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 123

CCLXVI

The notion that the value of a thing bears any
necessary relation to the amount of labour (average
or otherwise) bestowed upon it, is a fallacy which
needs no further refutation than it has already
received. The average amount of labour bestowed
upon warming-pans confers no value upon them
in the eyes of a Gold-Coast negro; nor would an
Esquimaux give a slice of blubber for the most
elaborate of ice-machines.

CCLXVII

Who has ever imagined that wealth which, in the
hands of an employer, is capital, ceases to be capital
if it is in the hands of a labourer? Suppose a work-
man to be paid thirty shillings on Saturday evening
for six days’ labour, that thirty shillings comes out
of the employer’s capital, and receives the name of
‘‘wages” simply because it is exchanged for labour.
In the workman’s pocket, as he goes home, it is a
part of his capital, in exactly the same sense as, half
an hour before, it was part of the employer’s capital ;
he is a capitalist just as much as if he were a
Rothschild.

CCLXVIII

I think it may be not too much to say that, of all
the political delusions which are current in this queer
world, the very stupidest are those which assume

124 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

that labour and capital are necessarily antagonistic ;
that all capital is produced by labour and therefore,
by natural right, is the property of the labourer ; that
the possessor of capital is a robber who preys on the
workman and appropriates to himself that which he
has had no share in producing.

On the contrary, capital and labour are necessarily,
close allies ; capital is never a product of human
labour alone ; it exists apart from human labour ; it
is the necessary antecedent of labour ; and it furnishes
the materials on which labour is employed. The
only indispensable form of capital—vital capital—
cannot be produced by human labour. All that man
can dois to favour its formation by the real producers.
There is no intrinsic relation between the amount of
labour bestowed on an article and its value in ex- ~
change. The claim of labour to the total result of
operations which are rendered possible only by capital
is simply an a friori iniquity.

CCLXIX

The vast and varied procession of events, which we
call Nature, affords a sublime spectacle and an inex-
haustible wealth of attractive problems to the
speculative observer. If we confine our attention
to that aspect which engages the attention of
the intellect, nature appears a beautiful and
harmonious whole, the incarnation of a faultless
logical process, from certain premisses in the past
to an inevitable conclusion in the future. But if it be
regarded from a less elevated, though more human,
point of view ; if our moral sympathies are allowed
to influence our judgment, and we permit ourselves
to criticize our great mother as we criticize one

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 125

another; then our verdict, at least so far as
sentient nature is concerned, can hardly be so
favourable.

In sober truth, to those who have made a study of
the phenomena of life as they are exhibited by the
higher forms of the animal world, the optimistic
dogma, that this is the best of all possible worlds,
will seem little better than a libel upon possibility.
It is really only another instance to be added to the
many extant, of the audacity of a przov7 speculators
who, having created God in their own image, find
no difficulty in assuming that the Almighty must
have been actuated by the same motives as them-
selves. They are quite sure that, had any other
course been practicable, He would no more have
made infinite suffering a necessary ingredient of His
handiwork than a respectable philosopher would have
done the like.

But even the modified optimism of the time-
honoured thesis of physico-theology, that the sentient
world is, on the whole, regulated by principles of
benevolence, does but ill stand the test of impartial
confrontation with the facts of the case. No doubt
it is quite true that sentient nature affords hosts of
examples of subtle contrivances directed towards the
production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain; and
it may be proper to say that these are evidences of
benevolence. But if so, why is it not equally proper
to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no
less necessary result of which is the production of
pain, that they are evidences of malevolence ?

If avast amount of that which, in a piece of human
workmanship, we should call skill, is visible in those

arts of the organization of a deer to which it owes
-its ability to escape from beasts of prey, there is at
least equal skill displayed in that bodily mechanism
of the wolf which enables him to track, and sooner
or later to bring down, the deer. Viewed under the
dry light of science, deer and wolf are alike admir-
able ; and, if both were non-sentient automata, there

126 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

would be nothing to qualify our admiration of the
action of the one on the other. But the fact that the
deer suffers, while the wolf inflicts suffering, engages
our moral sympathies. We should call men like the
deer innocent and good, men such as the wolf
malignant and bad; we should call those who
defended the deer and aided him to escape brave and
compassionate, and those who helped the wolf in his
bloody work base and cruel. Surely, if we transfer
these judgments to nature outside the world of man
at all, we must do so impartially. In that case, the
goodness of the right hand which helps the deer,
and wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the
wolf, will neutralize one another: and the course of
nature will appear to be neither moral nor immoral,
but non-moral.

This conclusion is thrust upon us by analogous
facts in every part of the sentient world; yet, inas-
much as it not only jars upon prevalent prejudices,
but arouses the natural dislike to that which is
painful, much ingenuity has been exercised in devis-
ing an escape from it.

CCLXX

From the point of view of the moralist the animal
world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s
show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and
set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest,
and the cunningest live to fight another day. The
spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as
no quarter is given. He must admit that the skill
and training displayed are wonderful. But he must
shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less
enduring suffering is the meed of both vanquished
and victor. And since the great game is going on
in every corner of the world, thousands of times a

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 127

minute ; since, were our ears sharp enough, we need
not descend to the gates of hell to hear—

sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai.
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle

—it seems to follow that, if this world is governed
by benevolence, it must be a different sort of benevo-
lence from that of John Howard.

CCLXXI

This may not be the best of all possible worlds,
but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant non-
sense. A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing
good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth,
who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his
irritation in pessimistic moanings ; but there can be
no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that
mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly
well with vastly less happiness and far more misery
than find their way into the lives of nine people out
of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an
attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression,
for one hour in every twenty-four—a supposition
which many tolerably vigorous people know, to their
cost, is not extravagant—the burden of life would have
been immensely increased without much practical
hindrance to its general course. Men with any
manhood in them find life quite worth living under
worse conditions than these.

CCLXXII

There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which
renders the hypothesis that the course of sentient

128 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

nature is dictated by malevolence quite untenable.
A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the
purest and the best, are superfluities, bits of good
which are to all appearance unnecessary as induce-
ments to live, and are, so to speak, thrown into the
bargain of life. To those who experience them, few
delights can be more entrancing than such as are
afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts, and
especially by music ; but they are products of, rather
than factors in, evolution, and it is probable that
they are known, in any considerable degree, to but
a very small proportion of mankind.

CCLXXIII

The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be
that, if Ormuzd has not had his way in this
world, neither has Ahriman. Pessimism is as little
consonant with the facts of sentient existence as
optimism. If we desire to represent the course of
nature in terms of human thought, and assume that
it was intended to be that which it is, we must say
that its governing principle is intellectual and not
moral; that it is a materialized logical process,
accompanied by pleasures and pains, the incidence
of which, in the majority of cases, has not the
slightest reference to moral desert. That the rain
falls alike upon the just and the unjust, and that
those upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were no
worse than their neighbours, seem to be Oriental
modes of expressing the same conclusion.

CCLXXIV

In the strict sense of the word ‘‘ nature,” it denotes
the sum of the phenomenal world, of that which has

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 129

been, and is, and will be; and society, like art, is
therefore a part of nature. But it is convenient to
distinguish those parts of nature in which man plays
the part of immediate cause, as something apart ;
and therefore, society, like art, is usefully to be
considered as distinct from nature. It is the more
desirable, and even necessary, to make this distinc-
tion, since society differs from nature in having a
definite moral object; whence it comes about that
the course shaped by the ethical man—the member
of society or citizen—necessarily runs counter to that
which the non-ethical man—the primitive savage,
or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom—
tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle
for existence to the bitter end, like any other animal ;
the former devotes his best energies to the object of
setting limits to the struggle.

CCLXXV

The first men who substituted the state of
mutual peace for that of mutual war, whatever the
motive which impelled them to take that step,
created society. But, in establishing peace, they
obviously put a limit upon the struggle for existence.
Between the members of that society, at any rate,
it was not to be pursued @ outrance. And of all the
successive shapes which society has taken, that
most nearly approaches perfection in which the war
of individual against individual is most strictly
limited. The primitive savage, tutored by Istar,
appropriated whatever took his fancy, and killed
whosoever opposed him, if he could. On the
contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his
freedom of action to a sphere in which he does not
interfere with the freedom of others ; he seeks the
common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as
an essential part of his own welfare. Peace is both

K

130 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

end and means with him; and he founds his life on
amore or less complete self-restraint, which is the
negation of the unlimited struggle for existence.
He tries to escape from his place in the animal
kingdom, founded on the free development of the
pepe of non-moral evolution, and to establish a
ingdom of Man, governed upon the principle of
moral evolution. For society not only has a moral
end, but in its perfection, social life, is embodied
morality.

CCLXXVI

I was once talking with a very eminent physician’
about the ws medicatrix nature. ‘' Stuff!” said he;
‘“‘nine times out of ten nature does not want to
cure the man: she wants to put him in his coffin.”

CCLXXVII

Let us look athome. For seventy years peace
and industry have had their way among us with
less interruption and under more favourable con-
ditions than in any other country on the face
of the earth. The wealth of Croesus was nothing
to that which we have accumulated, and our
prosperity has filled the world with envy. But
eee did not forget Croesus: has she forgotten
us

CCLXXVIII

Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be
less satisfactory than the position in which we find

1 The late Sir W. Gull.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 131

ourselves. In a real, though incomplete, degree
we have attained the condition of peace which is
the main object of social organization; and, for
argument’s sake, it may be assumed that we desire
nothing but that which is in itself innocent and
praiseworthy—namely, the enjoyment of the fruits
of honest industry. And lo! in spite of ourselves,
we are in reality engaged in an internecine struggle
for existence with our presumably no less peaceful
and well-meaning neighbours. We seek peace and
we do not ensue. it. The moral nature in us asks
for no more than is compatible with the general
good ; the non-moral nature proclaims and acts upon
that fine old Scottish family motto, ‘‘Thou shalt
starve ere I want.” Let us be under no illusions,
then, So long as unlimited multiplication goes on,
no social organization which has ever been devised,
or is likely to be devised, no fiddle-faddling with
the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from
the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction
within itself, in its intensest form, of that struggle
for existence the limitation of which is the object
of society. And however shocking to the moral
sense this eternal competition of man against man
and of nation against nation may be; however
revolting may be the accumulation of misery at
the negative pole of society, in contrast with that
of monstrous wealth at the positive pole; this state
of things must abide, and grow continually worse,
so long as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is
the true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation
which does not solve it will sooner or later be
devoured by the monster itself has generated.

7 CCLXR1TX:

It would be folly to entertain any ill-feeling
towards those neighbours and rivals who, like

K 2

132 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

ourselves, are slaves of Istar; but if somebody is
to be starved, the modern world has no Oracle of
Delphi to which the nations can appeal for an
indication of the victim. It is open to us to try
our fortune; and, if we avoid impending fate,
there will be a certain ground for believing that
we are the right people to escape. Securus judicat
orbts.

To this end, it is well to look into the necessary
conditions of our salvation by works. They are
two, one plain to all the world and hardly needing
insistence ; the other seemingly not so plain, since
too often it has been theoretically and practically
left out of sight. The obvious condition is that
our produce shall be better than that of others.
There is only one reason why our goods should be
preferred to those of our rivals—our customers must
find them better at the price. That means that
we must use more knowledge, skill, and industry
in producing them, without a proportionate increase
in the cost of production; and, as the price of
labour constitutes a large element in that cost,
the rate of wages must be restricted within certain
limits. It is perfectly true that cheap production
and cheap labour are by no means synonymous ;
but it is also true that wages cannot increase
beyond a certain proportion without destroying
cheapness. Cheapness, then, with, as part and
parcel of cheapness, a moderate price of labour,
is essential to our success as competitors in the
markets of the world.

The second condition is really quite as plainly
indispensable as the first, if one thinks seriously
about the matter. It is social stability. Society
is stable when the wants of its members obtain
as much satisfaction as, life being what it is,
common sense and experience show may be reason-
ably expected. Mankind, in general, care very
little for forms of government or ideal considerations
of any sort; and nothing really stirs the great

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 133

multitude to break with custom and incur the
manifest perils of revolt except the belief that
misery in this world, or damnation in the next, or
both, are threatened by the continuance of the
state of things in which they have been brought
up. But when they do attain that conviction,
society becomes as unstable as a package of dyna-
mite, and a very small matter will produce the
explosion which sends it back to the chaos of
savagery.

CCLXXX

Intelligence, knowledge, and skill are undoubtedly
conditions of success; but of what avail are they
likely to be unless they are backed up by honesty,
energy, goodwill, and all the physical and moral
faculties that go to the making of manhood, and
unless they are stimulated by hope of such reward
as men may fairly look to? And what dweller in
the slough of want, dwarfed in body and soul,
demoralized, hopeless, can reasonably be expected
to possess these qualities ?

CCLXXXI

I am as strongly convinced as the most pronounced
individualist can be, that it is desirable that every
man should be free to act in every way which does
not limit the corresponding freedom of his fellow-
man. But I fail to connect that great induction of
political science with the practical corollary which is
frequently drawn from it: that the State—that is,
the people in their corporate capacity—has no
business to meddle with anything but the administra-
tion of justice and external defence. It appears to

134 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

me that the amount of freedom which incorporate
society may fitly leave to its members is not a fixed
quantity, to be determined a /rior? by deduction from
the fiction called ‘‘ natural rights”; but that it must
be determined by, and vary with, circumstances. I
conceive it to be demonstrable that the higher and
the more complex the organization of the social
body, the more closely is the life of each member
bound up with that of the whole; and the larger
becomes the category of acts which cease to be
merely self-regarding, and which interfere with the
freedom of others more or less seriously.

If a squatter, living ten miles away from any
neighbour, chooses to burn his house down to get
rid of vermin, there may be no necessity (in the
absence of insurance offices) that the law should
interfere with his freedom of action; his act can
hurt nobody but himself. But, if the dweller in a
street chooses to do the same thing, the State very
properly makes such a proceeding a crime, and
punishes it as such. He does meddle with his
neighbour’s freedom, and that seriously. So it
might, perhaps, be a tenable doctrine, that it would
be needless, and even tyrannous, to make education
compulsory in a sparse agricultural population, living
in abundance on the, produce of its own soil ; but,
in a densely populated manufacturing country,
struggling for existence with competitors, ever
ignorant person tends to become a burden upon, and,
so far, an infringer of the liberty of, his fellows, and
an obstacle to their success. Under such circum-
stances an education rate is, in fact, a war tax,
levied for purposes of defence.

CCLXXXII

That State action always has been more or less
misdirected, and always will be so, is, I believe,

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 135

perfectly true. But I am not aware that it is more
true of the action of men in their corporate capacity
than it is of the doings of individuals. The wisest
and most dispassionate man in existence, merely
wishing to go from one stile in a field to the opposite,
will not walk quite straight—he is always going a
little wrong, and always correcting himself; and I
can only congratulate the individualist who is able
to say that his general course of life has been of a
less undulatory character. To abolish State action,
because its direction is never more than approxi-
mately correct, appears to me to be much the same
thing as abolishing the man at the wheel altogether,
because, do what he will, the ship yaws more or
less. ‘*Why should I be robbed of my property to
pay for teaching another man’s children?” is an
individualist question, which is not unfrequently put
as if it settled the whole business. Perhaps it does,
but I find difficulties in seeing why it should. The
parish in which I live makes me pay my share for
the paving and lighting of a great many streets that
I never pass through; and I might plead that I am
robbed to smooth the way and lighten the darkness
of other people. But I am afraid the parochial
authorities would not let me off on this plea; and I
must confess I do not see why they should.

CCLXXXIII

I cannot speak of my own knowledge, but I have
every reason to believe that I came into this world a
smail reddish person, certainly without a gold spoon
in my mouth, and in fact with no discernible abstract
or concrete ‘‘ rights” or property of any description.
If a foot was not set upon me at once, as a squalling
nuisance, it was either the natural affection of those
about me, which I certainly had done nothing to
deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before

136 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

my birth, was painfully built up by the society into
which I intruded, that prevented that catastrophe.
If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from
the vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am
not aware that I did anything to deserve those
advantages. And, if I possess anything now, it
strikes me that, though I may have fairly earned
my day’s wages for my day’s work, and may justly
call them my property—yet, without that organiza-
tion of society, created out of the toil and blood of
long generations before my time, I should probably
have had nothing but a flint axe and an indifferent
hut to call my own ; and even those would be mine
only so long as no stranger savage came my way.

So that if society, having, quite gratuitously, done
all these things for me, asks me in turn to do
something towards its preservation—even if that
something is to contribute to the teaching of other
men’s children—I really, in spite of all my individua-
list learnings, feel rather ashamed to say no. And,
if I were not ashamed, I cannot say that I think
that society would be dealing unjustly with me in
converting the moral obligation into a legal one.
There is a manifest unfairness in letting all the
burden be borne by the willing horse.

CCLXXXIV

It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the
fact that efficient teachers of science ane of techno-
logy are not to be made by the processes in vogue
at ordinary training colleges. The memory loaded
with mere bookwork is not the thing wanted—is, in
fact, rather worse than useless—in the teacher of
scientific subjects. It is absolutely essential that his
mind should be full of knowledge and not of mere
learning, and that what he knows should have
been learned in the laboratory rather than in the
library.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 137

CCLXXXV

The attempt to form a just conception of the value
of work done in any department of human knowledge,
and of its significance as an indication of the intel-
lectual and moral qualities of which it was the pro-
duct, is an undertaking which must always be beset
with difficulties, and may easily end in making the
limitations of the appraiser more obvious than the true
worth of that which he appraises. For the judgment
of a contemporary is liable to be obscured by intel-
lectual incompatibilities and warped by personal
antagonisms ; while the critic of a later generation,
though he may escape the influence of these sources of
error, is often ignorant, or forgetful, of the conditions
under which the labours of his predecessors have been
carried on. He is prone to lose sight of the fact that
without their clearing of the ground and rough-
hewing of the foundation-stones, the stately edifice
of later builders could not have been erected.

CCLXXXVI

The vulgar antithesis of fact and theory is founded
on a misconception of the nature of scientific theory,
which is, or ought to be, no more than the expression
offact in a general form. Whatever goes beyond
such expression is hypothesis ; and hypotheses are
notends, but means. They should be regarded as
instruments by which new lines of inquiry are
indicated; or by the aid of which a provisional
coherency and intelligibility may be given to
seemingly disconnected groups of phenomena. The
most useful of servants to the man of science, they
are the worst of masters. And when the establish-
ment of the hypothesis becomes the end, and fact is
alluded to only so far as it suits the ‘‘ Idee,” science
has no longer anything to do with the business.

138 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCLXXXVII

Scientific observation tell us that living birds form
a group or class of animals, through which a certain
form of skeleton runs ; and that this kind of skeleton
differs in certain well-defined characters from that of
mammals. On the other hand, if anyone utterly
ignorant of osteology, but endowed with the artistic
sense of form, were set before a bird skeleton anda
mammalian skeleton, he would at once see that the
two were similar and yet different. Very likely he
would be unable to give clear expression to his just
sense of the differences and resemblances; perhaps
he would make great mistakes in detail if he tried.
Nevertheless, he would be able to draw from memory
a couple of sketches, in which all the salient points of
likeness and unlikeness would be reproduced with
sufficient accuracy. The mere osteologist, however
accurately he might put the resemblances and
differences into words, if he lacked the artistic
visualising faculty, might be hopelessly incompetent
to perform any such feat ; lost in details, it might not
even occur to him that it was possible ; or, still more
probably, the habit of looking for differences might
impair the perception of resemblances.

Under these circumstances, the artist might be
led to higher and broader views, and thus be more
useful to the progress of science than the osteo-
logical expert. Not that the former attains the
higher truth by a different method ; for the way of
reaching truth is one and indivisible. Whether he
knows it or not, the artist has made a generalization
from two sets of facts, which is perfectly scientific
in form ; and trustworthy so far as it rests upon the
direct perception of similarities and dissimilarities.
The only peculiarity of the artistic application of
scientific method lies in the artist’s power of visual-
izing the result of his mental processes, of embodying
the facts of resemblance in a visible ‘‘type,” and of
showing the manner in which the differences may

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 139

be represented as modifications of that type; he
does, in fact, instinctively, what an architect, who
desires to demonstrate the community of plan in
certain ancient temples, does by the methodical
construction of plans, sections, and elevations, the
comparison of which will furnish him with the
“type” of such temples.

Thus, what I may term the artistic fashion of
dealing with anatomy is not only perfectly legitimate,
but has been of great utility. The harm of it does
not begin until the attempt is made to get more out
of this visual projection of thought than it contains ;
until the origin of the notion of ‘‘type” is forgotten
and the speculative philosopher deludes himself with
the supposition that the generalization suggested by
fact is an ‘‘Idea” of the Pure Reason, with which
fact must, somehow or other, be made to agree.

CCLXXXVIII

Flowers are the primers of the morphologist ; those
who run may read in them uniformity of type amidst
endless diversity, singleness of plan with complex
multiplicity of detail, As a musician might say,
every natural group of flowering plants is a sort
of visible fugue, wandering about a central theme
which is never forsaken, however it may, momen-
tarily, cease to be apparent.

CCLXXXIX

Like all the really great men of literature, Goethe
added some of the qualities of the man of science to
those of the artist, especially the habit of careful

140 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

and patient observation of Nature. The great poet
was no mere book-learned speculator. His acquaint-
ance with mineralogy, geology, botany and osteology,
the fruit of long and wide studies, would have
sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate
in those days, if only he could have pleaded ignorance
of everything else. Unfortunately for Goethe’s
credit with his scientific contemporaries, and, con-
sequently, for the attention attracted by his work,
he did not come forward as a man of science until
the public had ranged him among the men of liter-
ature. And when the little men have thus classified
a big man, they consider that the last word has
been said about him; it appears to the thought
hardly decent on his part if he venture to stray
beyond the speciality they have assigned to him.
It does not seem to occur to them that a clear
intellect is an engine capable of supplying power
to all sorts of mental factories ; nor to admit that,
as Goethe somewhere pathetically remarks, a man
may have a right to live for himself as well as
for the public; to follow the line of work that
happens to interest him, rather than that which
interests them.

On the face of the matter it is not obvious that
the brilliant poet had less chance of doing good
service in natural science than the dullest of dissectors
and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured
to indicate, there was considerable reason, a hundred
years ago, for thinking that an infusion of the
artistic way of looking at things might tend to
revivify the somewhat mummified body of technical
zoology and botany. Great ideas were floating
about ; the artistic apprehension was needed to give
these airy nothings a local habitation and a name ; to
convert vague suppositions into definite hypotheses.
And I apprehend that it was just this service which
Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the inter-
maxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on the
metamorphoses of plants.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 141

CCXC

All this is mere justice to Goethe ; but, as it is the
unpleasant duty of the historian to do justice upon,
as well as to, great men, it behoves me to add that
the germs of the worst faults of later speculative
morphologists are no less visible in his writings than
their great merits. In the artist-philosopher there
was, at best, a good deal more artist than philo-
sopher ; and when Goethe ventured into the regions
which belong to pure science, this excess of a virtue
had all the consequences of a vice. ‘‘ Trennen und
zahlen lag nicht in meiner Natur,” says he ; but the
mental operations of which “ analysis and numera-
tion” are partial expressions are indispensable for
every step of progress beyond happy glimpses, even
in morphology ; while, in physiology and in physics,
failure in the most exact performance of these
operations involves sheer disaster, as indeed Goethe
was afforded abundant opportunity of learning. Yet
he never understood the sharp lessons he received,
and put down to malice, or prejudice, the ill-reception
of his unfortunate attempts to deal with purely
physical problems.

CCXCI

There was never any lack of the scientific
imagination about the great anatomist; and the
charge of indifference to general ideas, Sometimes
brought against him, is stupidly unjust. But Cuvier
was one of those happily endowed persons in whom
genius never parts company with common-sense ;
and whose perception of the importance of sound
method is so great that they look at even a truth,
hit upon by those who pursue an essentially vicious
method, with the sort of feeling with which an

142 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

honest trader regards the winnings of a gambler.
They hold it better to remain poor than obtain riches
by the road that, as a rule, leads to ruin.

CCXCII

The irony of history is nowhere more apparent
than in science. Here we see the men, over whose
minds the coming events of the world of biology
cast their shadows, doing their best to spoil their
case in stating it; while the man who represented
sound scientific method is doing his best to stay
the inevitable progress of thought and bolster up
antiquated traditions. The progress of knowledge
during the last seventy years enables us to see that
neither Geoffroy, nor Cuvier, was altogether right
nor altogether wrong ; and that they were meant
to hunt in couples instead of pulling against. one
another. Science has need of servants of very
different qualifications; of artistic constructors no
less than of men of business ; of people to design
her palaces and of others to see that the materials
are sound and well-fitted together ; of some to spur
investigators, and of others to keep their heads cool.
The only would-be servants, who are entirely
unprofitable, are those who do not take the trouble
to interrogate Nature, but imagine vain things about
her ; and spin, from their inner consciousness, webs,
as exquisitely symmetrical as those of the most
geometrical of spiders, but alas! as easily torn to
pieces by some inconsidered bluebottle of a fact.

CCXCIII

There is always a Cape Horn in one’s life that one
either weathers or wrecks one’s self on.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 143

CCXCIV

A Local Museum should be exactly what its name
implies, viz., ‘‘ Local” —illustrating local Geology,
local Botany, local Zoology, and local Archzology.

Such a museum, if residents who are interested in
these sciences take proper pains, may be brought to
a great degree of perfection and be unique of its
kind. It will tell both natives and strangers exactly
what they want to know, and possess great
scientific interest and importance. Whereas the
ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand,
Hindoo idols, sharks’ teeth, mangy monkeys,
scorpions, and conch shells—who shall describe the
weary inutility of it? Itis really worse than nothing,
because it leads the unwary to look for the objects of
science elsewhere than under their noses. What
they want to know is that their ‘‘ America is here,”
as Wilhelm Meister has it.

CCXCV

A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly
that which he knows, and that which he believes,
will always enlist the good-will and the respect,
however much he may fail in winning the assent, of
his fellow men

; CCXCVI
Science and literature are not two things, but two
sides of one thing.
CCXCVII
I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man.

I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other
hand, I have no means of disproving it.

144 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

Ihave no a friori objections to the doctrine. No
man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature
can trouble himself about a /%or7 difficulties. Give
me such evidence as would justify me in believing
anything else, and I will believe that. Why should
Inot? Itis not half so wonderful as the conserva-
tion of force, or the indestructibility of matter.

Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in
the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about
any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness.
But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me
that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say and
to feel, ‘‘I believe such and such to be true.” All
the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of
existence cling about that act. The universe is
one and the same throughout; and if the condition
of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of
anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously
refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on
sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great
mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on
other terms.

CCXCVIII

I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing
apart from the phenomena of my life. When I try
to form such a conception I discover that, as
Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatize a
word, and it alters nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose
the universe to be nothing but a manifestation of my
personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than
I was before.

CCXCIX

1 do not know whether the animals persist after
they disappear or not. I do not even know whether
the infinite difference between us and them may not

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 15

be compensated by ¢ez persistence and my cessation
after apparent death, just as the humble bulb of an
annual lives, whilst the glorious flowers it has put
forth die away.

ccc

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm
themselves to fact, not to try and make facts
harmonize with my aspirations.

CCCI

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and
strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in
the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will
of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be
prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow
humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature
leads, or you shall learn nothing. Ihave only begun
to learn content and peace of mind since I have
resolved at all risks to do this.

CCCITI

There are, however, other arguments commonly
brought forward in favour of the immortality of man,
which are to my mind not only delusive but mischiev-
ous. The one is the notion that the moral govern-
ment of the world is imperfect without a system of
future rewards and punishments. The other is:
that such a system is indispensable to practical
morality. I believe that both these dogmas are very
mischievous lies.

With respect to the first, I am no optimist, but I
have the firmest belief that the Divine Government
(if we may use such a phrase to express the sum of

L

146 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

the ‘‘ customs of matter”) is wholly just. The more
I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say
nothing of my own), the more obvious it is to me
that the wicked does 7o/ flourish nor is the righteous
punished. But for this to be clear we must bear in
mind what almost all forget, that the rewards of life
are contingent upon obedience to the whole law—
physical as well as moral—and that moral obedience
will not atone for physical sin, or vice versa.

cccill

The ledger of the Almighty is strictly kept, and
every one of us has the balance of his operations
paid over to him at the end of every minute of his
existence.

Life cannot exist without a certain conformity to
the surrounding universe—that conformity involves a
certain amount of happiness in excess of pain. In
short, as we live we are paid for living.

CCCIV

It is to be recollected in view of the apparent dis-
crepancy between men’s acts and their rewards that
Nature is juster than we. She takes into account
what a man brings with him into the world, which
human justice cannot do. If I, born a bloodthirsty
and savage brute, inheriting these qualities from
others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang
me, but I shall not be visited with the horrible
remorse which would be my real punishment if, my
nature being higher, I had done the same thing.

CCCV

The absolute justice of the system of things is as
clear to me as any scientific fact. The gravitation of

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 147

sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the
sun, and more so—for experimental proof of the fact
is within reach of us all—nay, is before us all in our
own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it.

CCcCVI

Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensa-
tion, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and
punishments out of this life leads men to a ruinous
ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards
and punishments are here.

CCCVII

If the expectation of hell hereafter can keep me
from evil-doing, surely a fortiori the certainty of hell
now will do sor Ifa man could be firmly impressed
with the belief that stealing damaged him as much as
swallowing arsenic would do(and it does), would not
the dissuasive force of that belief be greater than that
of any based on mere future expectations ?

CCCVIII

As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the
other day, with my mind bent on anything but dis-
putation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his
duty, the words, ‘‘If the dead rise not again, let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” I cannot tell
you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had
neither wife nor child, or he must have known that
his alternative involved a blasphemy against all that
was best and noblest in human nature. I could have
laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to
face with irreparable loss, because I have given back
to the source from whence it came, the cause of a

2

148 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

great happiness, still retaining through all my life the
blessings which have sprung and will spring from
that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and,
howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes
know better, and if you shoot their young the poor
brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately
- seek distraction in a gorge.

CCCIX

He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty
distinctly, and force of character to do it ; which of
us dare ask for a higher summary of his life than that ?
For such a man there can be no fear in facing the
great unknown, his life has been one long experience
of the substantial justice of the laws by which this
world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them
still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.

CCCcx

Whether astronomy and geology can or cannot be
made to agree with the statements as to the matters
of fact laid down in Genesis—whether the Gospels
are historically true or not—are matters of compara-
tively small moment in the face of the impassable
gulf between the anthropomorphism (however refined)
of theology and the passionless impersonality of the
unknown and unknowable which science shows
everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena.

CCCXI

I am too much a believer in Butler and in the great
principle of the ‘‘Analogy” that ‘‘there is no
absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel
it by a greater absurdity of Nature” (it is not

~~.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 149 ©

commonly stated in this way), to have any difficulties
about miracles. I have never had the least sympathy
with the @ friori reasons against orthodoxy, and I
have by nature and disposition the greatest possible
antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school.

CCCXII

This universe is, I conceive, like toa great game
being played out, and we poor mortals are allowed
to take a hand. By great good fortune the wiser
among us have made out some few of the rules of the
game, as at present played. Wecall them ‘‘ Laws
of Nature,” and honour them because we find that if
we obey them we win something forour pains. The
cards are our theories and hypotheses, the tricks our
experimental verifications. But what sane man
would endeavour to solve this problem: given the
rules of a game and the winnings, to find whether
the cards are made of pasteboard or gold-leafP Yet
the problem of the metaphysicians is to my mind no
saner.

CCCXIII

I have not the smallest sentimental sympathy with
the negro; don’t believe in him at all, in short. But
it is clear to me that slavery means, for the white
man, bad political economy; bad social morality ;
bad internal political organisation, and a bad influence
upon free labour and freedom all over the world.

CCCXIV

At the present time the important question for
England is not the duration of her coal, but the due
comprehension of the truths of science, and the labours
of her scientific men.

150 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCCXV
It is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than
to go right in chains.

CCCXVI

A good book is comparable to a piece of meat, and
fools are as flies who swarm to it, each for the
purpose of depositing and hatching his own particular
maggot of an idea.

CCCXVII

Children work a greater metamorphosis in men
than any other condition of life. They ripen one
wonderfully and make life ten times better worth
having than it was.

CCCXVIII

Teach a child what is wise, that is *oralely.
Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is
religion |

CCCXIX

People may talk about intellectual teaching, but
what we principally want is the moral teaching.

CCCXX

Weare in the midst of a gigantic movement greater
than that which preceded and produced the Reforma-
tion, and really only the continuation of that move-
ment. But there is nothing new in the ideas which
lie at the bottom of the movement, nor is any recon-
cilement possible between free thought and traditional
authority. One or other will have to succumb after
a struggle of unknown duration, which will have as

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 151

side issues vast political and social troubles. I have
no more doubt that free thought will win in the long
run than I have that I sit here writing to you, or that
this free thought will organize itself into a coherent
system, embracing human life and the world as one
harmonious whole. But this organization will be the
work of generations of men, and those who further
it most will be those who teach men to rest in no lie,
and to rest in no verbal delusions.

CCCXXI

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the
consequences. No good is ever done in this world
by hesitation.

CCCXXII

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up
for all its folly and injustice by being damnably
sentimental.

CCCXXIII

Without seeing any reason to believe that women
are, on the average, so strong physically, intellec-
tually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to
the fact that many women are much better endowed
in all these respects than many men, and I am at a
loss to understand on what grounds of justice or
public policy a career which is open to the weakest
and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly
closed to women of vigour and capacity.

CCCXXIV

We have heard a great deal lately about the
physical disabilities of women. Some of these

152 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

alleged impediments, no doubt, are really inherent
in their organization, but nine-tenths of them are
artificial—the products of their modes of life. I
believe that nothing would tend so effectually to
get rid of these creations of idleness, weariness,
and that ‘‘over stimulation of the emotions” which,
in plainer-spoken days, used to be called wantonness,
than a fair share of healthy work, directed towards
a definite object, combined with an equally fair share
of healthy play, during the years of adolescence ;
and those who are best acquainted with the acquire-
ments of an average medical practitioner will find
it hardest to believe that the attempt to reach that
standard is like to prove exhausting to an ordinarily
intelligent and well-educated young woman.

CCCXXV

The only good that I can see in the demonstration
of the truth of ‘‘Spiritualism” is to furnish an
additional argument against suicide. Better live a
crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk
twaddle by 2 ‘‘medium” hired at a guinea a
Séance,

CCCXXVI

I ask myself—suppose you knew that by inflicting
prolonged pain on 100 rabbits you could discover a
way to the extirpation of leprosy, or consumption,
or locomotor ataxy, or of suicidal melancholia among
human beings, dare you refuse to inflict that pain?
Now I am quite unable to say that I dare. That
sort of daring would seem to me to be extreme moral
cowardice, to involve gross inconsistency.

For the advantage and protection of society, we
all agree to inflict pain upon man—pain of the most
prolonged and acute character—in our prisons, and
on our battlefields. If England were invaded, we

"“*.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 153

should have no hesitation about inflicting the maxi-
mum of suffering upon our invaders for no other
object than our own good.

But if the good of society and of a nation is a
sufficient plea for inflicting pain on men, I think it
may suffice us for experimenting on rabbits or dogs.

At the same time, I think that a heavy moral
responsibility rests on those who perform experi-
ments of the second kind.

The wanton infliction of pain on man or beast is
a crime; pity is that so many of those who (as I
think rightly) hold this view, seem to forget that
the criminality lies in the wantonness and not in
the act of inflicting pain fcr se.

CCCXXVII

The one condition of success, your sole safeguard,
is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the
individual citizen. Education cannot give these, but
it can cherish them and bring them to the front in
whatever station of society they are to be found,
and the universities ought to be and may be, the
fortresses of the higher life of the nation.

CCCXXVIII

As a matter of fact, men sin, and the consequences
of their sins affect endless generations of their pro-
geny. Men are tempted, men are punished for the
sins of others without merit or demerit of their own ;
and they are tormented for their evil deeds as long
as their consciousness lasts.

CCCXXIX

I find that as a matter of experience, erroneous
beliefs are punished, and right beliefs are rewarded

154 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

—though very often the erroneous belief is based
upon a more conscientious study of the facts than
the right belief.

CCCXXX

If we are to assume that anybody has designedly
set this wonderful universe going, it is perfectly
clear to me that he is no more entirely benevolent
and just in any intelligible sense of the words, than
that he is malevolent and unjust. Infinite benevolence
need not have invented pain and sorrow at all—
infinite malevolence would very easily have deprived
us of the large measure of content and happiness
that falls to our lot. After all, Butler’s ‘‘ Analogy”
is unassailable, and there is nothing in theological
dogmas more contradictory to our moral sense, than
is to be found in the facts of nature. From which,
however, the Bishop’s conclusion that the dogmas
are true doesn’t follow.

CCCXXXI

It a pees to me that if every person who is
engaged in an industry had access to instruction in
the scientific principles on which that industry is
based ; in the mode of applying these principles to
practice ; in the actual use of the means and appli-
ances employed ; in the language of the people who
know as much about the matter as we do ourselves ;
and lastly, in the art of keeping accounts, Technical ©
ome would have done all that can be required
of it.

CCCXXXII

_ Though under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not
impossible that over-instruction may be worse.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 155

CCCXXXIII

There are two things I really care about—one is
the progress of scientific thought, and the other is
the bettering of the condition of the masses of the
people by bettering them in the way of lifting them-
selves out of the misery which has hitherto been the
lot of the majority of them. Posthumous fame is
not particularly attractive to me, but, if I am to be
remembered at all, I would rather it should be as
‘Ca man who did his best to help the people” than
by other title.

CCCXXXIV

I am of opinion that our Indian Empire is a curse
tous. But so long as we make up our minds to
hold it, we must also make up our minds to do those
things which are needful to hold it effectually, and
in the long-run it will be found that so doing is real
justice both for ourselves, our subject population,
and the Afghans themselves.

CCCXXXV

The great thing in the world is not so much to
seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

CCCXXXVi

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind
the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure
that it is truth.

CCCXXXVII

Your astonishment atthe tenacity of life of fallacies,
permit me to say, is shockingly unphysiological.
They, like other low organisms, are independent of

156 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

brains, and only wriggle the more, the more they are
smitten on the place where the brains ought to be.

CCCXXXVIII

I don’t know what you think about anniversaries.
I like them, being always minded to drink my cup
of life to the bottom, and take my chance of the
sweets and bitters.

CCCXXXIX

Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past
middle life—the jamming common-sense down the
throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.

CCCXL

Life is like walking along a crowded street—there
always seem to be fewer obstacles to getting along
on the opposite pavement—and yet, if one crosses
over, matters are rarely mended.

CCCXLI

The great thing one has to wish for as time goes
on is vigour as long as one lives, and death as soon
as vigour flags.

CCCXLII

Whether motion disintegrates or integrates is, I
apprehend, a question of conditions. A whirlpool in
a stream may remain in the same spot for any
imaginable time. Yet it is the effect of the motion
of the particles of the water in that spot which
continually integrate themselves into the whirlpool
and disintegrate themselves from it. The whirlpool

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 157

is permanent while the conditions last, though its
constituents incessantly change. Living bodies are
just such whirlpools. Matter sets into them in the
shape of food,—sets out of them in the shape of
waste products. Their individuality lies in the
constant maintenance of a characteristic form, not
in the preservation of material identity.

CCCXLIII

Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine
powers to the abstractions ‘‘ Force,” ‘‘ Gravity,”
“* Vitality,” which our own brains have created. I
do not know anything about ‘‘inert” things in
nature. If we reduce the world to matter and
motion, the matter is not ‘‘inert,” inasmuch as the
same amount of motion affects different kinds of
matter in different ways. To go back to my own
illustration. The fabric of the watch is not inert,
every particle of it is in violent and rapid motion,
and the winding-up simply perturbs the whole
infinitely complicated system in a particular fashion.
Equilibrium means death, because life is a succession
of changes, while a changing equilibrium is a con-
tradiction in terms. I am not at all clear that a
living being is comparable to a machine running
down. On this side of the question the whirlpool
affords a better parallel than the watch. If you dam
the stream above or below, the whirlpool dies ; just
as the living being does if you cut off its food, or
choke it with its own waste products. And if you
alter the sides or bottom of the stream you may kill
the whirlpool, just as you kill the animal by inter-
fering with its structure. Heat and oxidation asa
source of heat appear to supply energy to the living
machine, the molecular structure of the germ furnish-
ing the ‘‘sides and bottom of the stream,” that is,
determining the results which the energy supplied
shall produce.

158 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCCXLIV

I believe that history might be, and ought to be,
taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning
of it as a process of evolution—intelligible to the
young.

CCCXLV

Government by average opinion is merely a
circuitous method of going to the devil; those
who profess to lead but in fact slavishly follow this
average opinion are simply the fastest runners and
the loudest squeakers of the herd which is rushing
blindly down to its destruction.

CCCXLVI

It’s very sad to lose your child just when he was
beginning to bind himself to you, and I don’t know
that it is much consolation to reflect that the longer
he had wound himself up in your heart-strings the
worse the tear would have been, which seems to
have been inevitable sooner or later. One does not
weigh and measure these things while grief is fresh,
and in my experience a deep plunge into the waters
of sorrow is the hopefullest way of getting through
them on to one’s daily road of life again. No one
can help another very much in these crises of life ;
but love and sympathy count for something.

CCCXLVII

There is amazingly little evidence of ‘‘ reverential
care for unoffending creation” in the arrangements
of nature, that I can discover. If our ears were
sharp enough to hear all the cries of pain that are
uttered in the earth by men and beasts, we should be
deafened by one continuous scream !

And yet the wealth of superfluous loveliness in the
world condemns pessimism. It is a hopeless riddle.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 159

CCCXLVIII

A man who has only half as much food as he
needs is indubitably starved, even though his short
pavers consist of ortolans and are served upon gold
plate.

CCCXLIX

Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in
spending it wisely.

CCCL

We men of science, at any rate, hold ourselves
morally bound to ‘“‘try all things and hold fast to
that which is good” ; and among public benefactors,
we reckon him who explodes old error, as next in
rank to him who discovers new truth.

CCCLI

Whatever Linnzus may say, man is not a rational
animal—especially in his parental capacity.

CCCLII

The inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter
of history is just as much a question of pure science
as the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of a matter
of geology, and the value of evidence in the two
cases must be tested in the same way. If anyone
tells me that the evidence of the existence of man in
the miocene epoch is as good as that upon which I
frequently act every day of my life, I reply that this
is quite true, but that it is no sort of reason for
believing in the existence of miocene man.

Surely no one but a born fool can fail to be aware
that we constantly, and in very grave conjunctions,
are obliged to act upon extremely bad evidence, and

160 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

that very often we suffer all sorts of penalties in
consequence. And surely one must be something
worse than a born fool to pretend that such decision
under the pressure of the enigmas of life ought to
have the smallest influence in those judgments
which are made with due and sufficient deliberation,

CCCLIII

1. The Church founded by Jesus has xo¢ made its
way ; has zot permeated the world—but ad become
extinct in the country of its birth—as Nazarenism
and Ebionism.

2. The Church that did make its way and coal-
esced with the State in the 4th century had no more
to do with the Church founded by Jesus than Ultra-
montanism has with Quakerism. It is Alexandrian
Judaism and Neoplatonistic mystagogy, and as
much of the old idolatry and demonology as could
be got in under new or old names.

. Paul has said that the Law was schoolmaster
to Christ with more truth than he knew. Through-
out the Empire the synagogues had their cloud of
Gentile hangers-on—those who “‘ feared God ”—and
who were fully prepared to accept a Christianity,
which was merely an expurgated Judaism and the
belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

The Christian ‘‘ Sodalitia” were not merely
religious bodies, but friendly societies, burial
societies, and guilds. They hung together for all
purposes—the mob hated them as it now hates the
Jews in Eastern Europe, because they were more
frugal, more industrious, and lived better lives than
their neighbours, while they stuck together like
Scotchmen.

If these things are so—and I appeal to your
knowledge of history that they are so—what has
the success of Christianity to do with the truth or
falsehood of the story of Jesus?

ie)

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 161

CCCLIV

It is Baur’s great merit to have seen that the key
to the problem of Christianity lies in the Epistle to
the Galatians. No doubt he and his followers rather
overdid the thing, but that is always the way with
those who take upa new idea.

CCCLV

If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants
of any kind, he had better turn to hand work—it is
an indication on Nature’s part that she did not mean
him to be a head worker.

CCCLVI

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational
grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational
attempts to justify our instincts.

CCCLVII

Even the best of modern civilisations appears to
me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither
embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the
merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express my
opinion that, if there is no hope of a large improve-
ment of the condition of the greater part of the
human family; if it is true that the increase of
knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over
Nature which is its consequence, and the wealth
which follows upon that dominion, are to make no
difference in the extent and the intensity of Want,
with its concomitant physical and moral degradation,
among the masses of the people, I should hail the
advent of some kindly comet, which would sweep
the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation.

M

162 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

What profits it to the human Prometheus that he
has stolen the fire of heaven to be his servant, and
that the spirits of the earth and of the air obey him,
if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his
bi aaa and keep him on the brink of destruc-
tion

CCCLVIII

No induction, however broad its basis, can confer
certainty—in the strict sense of the word. The
experience of the whole human race through in-
numerable years has shown that stones unsupported
fall to the ground, but that does not make it certain
that any day next week unsupported stones will not
move the other way. All that it does justify is the
very strong expectation, which hitherto has been in-
variably verified, that they will do just the contrary.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man—
namely, that at any given moment the feeling which
he has exists.

All other so-called certainties are beliefs of greater
or less intensity.

CCCLIX

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That
is an article of exclusively human manufacture—and
very much to our credit.

CCCLX

There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside
a few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet
reflection—except the sense of having worked accord-
ing to one’s capacity and light, to make things clear
and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. That
was the lesson I learned from Carlyle’s books when
I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 163

You may make more of failing to get money, and
of succeeding in getting abuse—until such time in
your life (if you are teachable) you have ceased to
care much about either.

CCCLXI

The doctrine of the conservation of energy tells
neither one way nor the other [on the doctrine of
immortality]. Energy is the cause of movement of
body, z.c. things having mass. States of conscious-
ness have no mass, even if they can be conceded ,to
be movable. Therefore even if they are caused by
molecular movements, they would not in any way
affect the store of energy.

Physical causation need not be the only kind of
causation, and when Cabanis said that thought was
a function of the brain, in the same way as bile
secretion is a function of the liver, he blundered
philosophically. Bile is a product of the transforma-
tion of material energy. But in the mathematical
sense of the word ‘‘function,” thought may be a
function of the brain. That is to say, it may arise
one when certain physical particles take on a certain
order.

By way of a coarse analogy, consider a parallel-
sided piece of glass through which light passes. It
forms no picture. Shape it so as to be a bi-convex,
and a picture appears in its focus.

Is not the formation of the picture a ‘‘ function”
of the piece of glass thus shaped?

So, from your own point of view, suppose a mind-
stuff—adéyos—a noumenal cosmic light such as is
shadowed in the fourth gospel. The brain of a dog
will convert it into one set of phenomenal pictures,
and the brain of a man into another. But in both
cases the result is the consequence of the way in
which the respective brains perform their ‘‘func-
tion.”

M 2

1644 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCCLXII

The actions we call sinful are as much the conse-
quence of the order of nature as those we call
virtuous. They are part and parcel of the struggle
for existence through which all living things have
passed, and they have become sins because man
alone seeks a higher life in voluntary association.

Therefore the instrument has never been marred ;
on the contrary, we are trying to get music out of
harps, sacbuts, and psalteries, which never were in
tune and seemingly never will be.

.

CCCLXIII

I have always been, am, and propose to remain a
mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to my-
self is to say, this and this I have learned ; thus and
thus have I learned it: go thou and learn better ; but
do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for
your own laziness if you elect to take, on my
authority, conclusions, the value of which you ought
to have tested for yourself.

CCCLXIV

There is endless backwoodsman’s work yet to be
done. If ‘‘those also serve who only stand and
wait,” still more do those who sweep and cleanse ;
and if any man elect to give his strength to the
weeder’s and scavenger’s occupation, I remain of the
opinion that his service should be counted acceptable,
and that no one has a right to ask more of him than
faithful performance of the duties he has undertaken.
I venture to count it an improbable suggestion that
any such person—a man, let us say, who has well-
nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and has

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 165

graduated in all the faculties of human relationships ;
who has taken his share in all the deep joys and
deeper anxieties which cling about them ; who has
felt the burden of young lives entrusted to his care,
and has stood alone with his dead before the abyss
of the eternal—has never had a thought beyond
negative criticism. It seems to me incredible that
such an one can have done his day’s work, always
with a light heart, with no sense of responsibility,
no terror of that which may appear when the
factitious veil of Isis—the thick web of fiction man
has woven round nature—is stripped off.

CCCLXV

If the doctrine of a Providence is to be taken as
the expression, in a way ‘‘to be understanded of the
people,” of the total exclusion of chance from a place
even in the most insignificant corner of Nature, if it
means the strong conviction that the cosmic process
is rational, and the faith that, throughout all dura-
tion, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I
not only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the
most important of ail truths. As it is of more con-
sequence for a citizen to know the law than to be
personally acquainted with the features of those who
will surely carry it into effect, so this very positive
doctrine of Providence, in the sense defined, seems to
me far more important than all the theorems of
speculative theology. If, further, the doctrine is
held to imply that, in some indefinitely remote past
aeon, the cosmic process was set going by some
entity possessed of intelligence and foresight, similar
to our own in kind, however superior in degree,
if, consequently, it is held that every event, not
merely in our planetary speck, but in untold millions
of other worlds, was foreknown before these worlds
were, scientific thought, so far as I know anything
about it, has nothing to say about that hypothesis.

166 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

It is, in fact, an anthropomorphic rendering of the
doctrine of evolution.

It may be’so, but the evidence accessible to us is,
to my mind, wholly insufficient to warrant either
a positive or a negative conclusion.

CCCLXVI

It may be well to remember that the highest
level of moral aspiration recorded in history was
reached by a few ancient Jews—Micah, Isaiah,
and the rest—who took no count whatever of what
might or what might not happen to them after death.
It is not obvious to me why the same point should
not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.

CCCLXVII

Belief in majorities is not rooted in my breast, and
if all the world were against me the fact might warn
me to revise and criticise my opinions, but would not
in itself supply a ghost of a reason for forsaking them.
For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a
millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the
sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom
the world has turned, and will turn, because they
minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful
realities which it shudders to look at.

CCCLXVIII

Moral duty consists in the observance of those rules
of conduct which contribute to the welfare of society,
and by implication, of the individuals who compose it.

The end of society is peace and mutual protection,
so that the individual may reach the fullest and
highest life attainable by man. Therules of conduct

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 167

by which this end is to be attained are discoverable
—like the other so-called laws of Nature—by ob-
servation and experiment, and only in that way.

Some thousands of years of such experience have
led to the generalisations, that stealing and murder,
for example, are inconsistent with the ends of society.
There is no more doubt that they are so than that
unsupported stones tend to fall. The man who
steals or murders, breaks his implied contract with
society, and forfeits all protection. He becomes an
outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature.
Criminal law indicates the ways which have proved
most convenient for dealing with him.

All this would be true if men had no ‘‘ moral sense”
at all, just as there are rules of perspective which
must be strictly observed by a draughtsman, and are
quite independent of his having any artistic sense.

CCCLXIX

The moral sense is a very complex affair—de-
pendent in part upon associations of pleasure and
pain, approbation and disapprobation formed by
education in early youth, but in part also on an
innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how
originated need not be discussed), which is possessed
by some people in great strength, while some are
totally devoid of it—just as some children draw, or
are enchanted by music while mere infants, while
others do not know ‘‘Cherry Ripe” from ‘Rule
Britannia,” nor can represent the form of the simplest
thing to the end of their lives.

Now for this last sort of people there is no reason
. why they should discharge any moral duty, except
from fear of punishment in all its grades, from mere
disapprobation to hanging, and the duty of society is
to see that they live under: wholesome fear of such
punishment short, sharp, and decisive.

For the people with a keen innate sense of moral

168 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

beauty there is no need of any other motive. What
they want is knowledge of the things they may do
and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is to
be attained. Good people so often forget this that
some of them occasionally require hanging almost as
much as the bad.

If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be
(under due limitations) obeyed ; why the few who
are steered by it move the mass in whom it is weak ?
I can only reply by putting another question—Why
do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong—
Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less
endowed multitude away? But they do, and always
will. People who overlook that fact attend neither
to history nor to what goes on about them.

Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent,
kindly man. I have great respect for him. The
force of genial common-sense respectability could no
further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of
all this, and yet one understands how he came to
move the world of his day, and Franklin did not.

CCCLXX

As to whether we can fulfil the moral law, I
should say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly
incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there
are men born physically cripples, and intellectually
idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and
idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punish-
ment. For these people there is nothing but shutting
up, or extirpation.

CCCLXXI

The cardinal fact in the University questions
appears to me to be this: that the student to whose
wants the medieval University was adjusted,
looked to the past and sought book-learning, while

™“s

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 169

the modern looks to the future and seeks the know-
ledge of things.

The medieval view was that all knowledge worth
having was explicitly or implicitly contained in
various ancient writings ; in the Scriptures, in the
writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the
Christian Fathers. Whatever apparent novelty
they put forward, was professedly obtained by
deduction from ancient data.

The modern knows that the only source of real
knowledge lies in the application of scientific methods
of enquiry tothe ascertainment of the facts of existence ;
that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than the
ascertained, and that the chief business of the
teacher is not so much to make scholars as to train
pioneers.

From this point of view, the University occupies a
position altogether independent of that of the coping-
stone of schools for general education, combined
with technical schools of Theology, Law, and
Medicine. It is not primarily an institution for
testing the work of schoolmasters, or for ascertain-
ing the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers,
or doctors.

It is an institution in which a man who claims to
devote himself to Science or Art, should be able to
find some one who can teach him what is already
known, and train him in the methods of knowing
more.

CCCLXXII

The besetting sin of able men is impatience
of contradiction and of criticism. Even those who
do their best to resist the temptation, yield to it
almost unconsciously and become the tools of
toadies and flatterers. ‘‘ Authorities,” ‘‘ disciples,”
and ‘‘schools” are the curse of science; and do
more to interfere with the work of the scientific
spirit than all its enemies.

170 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCCLXXIII

People never will recollect, that mere learning and
mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while
energy and intellectual grip, the things that are
inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.

CCCLXXIV

In my opinion a man’s first duty is to find a way
of supporting himself, thereby relieving other people
of the necessity of supporting him. Moreover, the
learning to do work of practical value in the world,
in an exact and careful manner, is of itself a very
important education, the effects of which make them-
selves felt in all other pursuits. The habit of doing
that which you do not care about when you would
much rather be doing something else, is invalu-
able.

CCCLXXV

Success in any scientific career requires an
unusual equipment of capacity, industry and energy.
If you possess that equipment you will find leisure
enough after your daily commercial work is over,
to make an opening in the scientific ranks for your-
self. If you do not, you had better stick to com-
merce.

Nothing is less to be desired than the fate of a
young man, who, as the Scotch proverb says, in
‘trying to make a spoon spoils a horn,’ and becomes
a mere hanger-on in literature or in science, when he
might have been a useful and a valuable member of
Society in other occupations.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 171

CCCLXXVI

Playing Providence is a game at which one is very
apt to burn one’s fingers.

CCCLXXVII

I conceive that the leading characteristic of the
nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the
scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientfic
methods of investigation to all the problems with
which the human mind is occupied, and the cor-
relative rejection of traditional beliefs which have
proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.

CCCLXXVIII

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not
even a promise of a Messiah.

CCCLXXIX

I have not the slightest doubt about the magni-
tude of the evils which accrue from the steady.
increase of European armaments; but I think
that this regrettable fact is merely the superficial
expression of social forces, the operation of which
cannot be sensibly affected by agreements between
Governments.

In my opinion it is a delusion to attribute the
growth of armaments to the ‘‘exactions of mili-
tarism.” The ‘‘exactions of industrialism,” gen-
erated by international commercial competition,
may, I believe, claim a much larger share in
prompting that growth. Add to this the French
thirst for revenge, the most just determination of the

172 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

German and Italian peoples to assert their national
unity; the Russian Panslavonic fanaticism and
desire for free access to the western seas; the
Papacy steadily fishing in the troubled waters for
the means of recovering its lost (I hope for ever
lost) temporal possessions and spiritual supremacy ;
the ‘‘ sick man,” kept alive only because each of his
doctors is afraid of the other becoming his heir.

When I think of the intensity of the perrirbiny
agencies which arise out of these and other condi-
tions of modern European society, I confess that the
attempt to counteract them by asking Governments
to agree to a maximum military expenditure, does
not appear to me to be worth making ; indeed I think
it might do harm by leading people to suppose that
the desires of Governments are the chief agents in
determining whether peace or war shall obtain in
Europe.

CCCLXXX

I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run.
Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly
but surely destroy their fortifications. And the im-
portance of scientific method in modern practical life
—always growing and increasing—is the guarantee
for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper
and lower classes, the former of whom especially are
the strength of the priests.

CCCLXXXI

There is such a thing as a science of social life,
for which, if the term had not been so helplessly
degraded, Politics is the proper name.

Men are beings of a certain constitution, who,
under certain conditions, will as surely tend to act in
certain ways as stones will tend to fall if you leave

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 173

them unsupported. The laws of their nature are as
invariable as the laws of gravitation, only the
applications to particular cases offer worse problems
than the case of the three bodies.

The Political Economists have gone the right
way to work—the way that the physical philosopher
follows in all complex affairs—by tracing out the
effects of one great cause of human action, the
desire of wealth, supposing it to be unchecked.

If they, or other people, have forgotten that there
are other potent causes of action which may interfere
with this, it is no fault of scientific method but only
their own stupidity.

Hydrostatics is not a ‘‘ dismal science,” because
water does not always seek the lowest level—e.z.
from a bottle turned upside down, if there is a cork
in the neck !

There is much need that somebody should do for
what is vaguely called ‘‘Ethics” just what the
Political Economists have done. Settle the question
of what will be done under the unchecked action of
certain motives, and leave the problem of ‘“‘ ought”
for subsequent consideration.

For, whatever they ought to do, it is quite certain
the majority of men will act as if the attainment of
certain positive and negative pleasures were the end
of action.

We want a science of ‘‘Eubiotics” to tell us
exactly what will happen if human beings are
exclusively actuated by the desire of well-being in
the ordinary sense. Of course the utilitarians have
laid the foundations of such a science, with the
result that the nicknamer of genius called this
branch of science ‘‘pig philosophy,” making just
the same blunder as when he called political economy
‘dismal science.”

‘‘Moderate well-being” may be no more the
worthiest end of life than wealth. But if it is the
best to be had in this queer world—it may be worth
trying for.

174 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS

CCCLXXXII

Those who wish to attain to some clear and
definite solution of the great problems which Mr.
Darwin was the first person to set before us in later
times must base themselves upon the facts which are
stated in his great work, and, still more, must
pursue their inquiries by the methods of which he
was so brilliant an exemplar throughout the whole
of his life. You must have his sagacity, his untiring
search after the knowledge of fact, his readiness
always to give up a preconceived opinion to that
which was demonstrably true, before you can hope
to carry his doctrines to their ultimate issue ; and
whether the particular form in which he has put
them before us may be such as is finally destined to
survive or not is more, I venture to think, than any-
body is capable at this present moment of saying.
But this one thing is perfectly certain—that it is only
by pursuing his methods, by that wonderful single-
mindedness, devotion to truth, readiness to sacrifice
all things for the advance of definite knowledge,
that we can hope to come any nearer than we are at
present to the truths which he struggled to attain.

CCCLXXXIII

Dean Stanley told me he thought being made a
bishop destroyed a man’s moral courage. I am
inclined to think that the practice of the methods of
political leaders destroys their intellect for all serious
purposes.

CCCLXXXIV

It is one of the most saddening things in life
that, try as we may, we can never be certain of
making people happy, whereas we can almost
always be certain of making them unhappy.

APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 175

CCCLXXXV

Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture
of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness and camel-
malice—with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly
like the apple in the posset, and when they can
me exactly as they please, they are very hard to

rive.

INDEXES

— >

INDEX I

REFERENCES OF QUOTATIONS TO THEIR SOURCES

C. E. = Collected Essays. I. Method and Results.
II. Darwiniana.
III. Science and Education.
IV. Science and Hebrew Tradition.
V. Science and Christian Tradition.
VI. Hume, with Helps to the Study
of Berkeley.
VII. Man’s Place in Nature.
VIII. Discourses, Biological and Geo-
logical.
IX. Evolution and Ethics, and other
Essays.
S. M.= Scientific Memoirs.
L. L. = Life and Letters, three volume edition.

NO. IN TEXT. VOL. PAGE NO. IN TEXT. VOL. PAGE
I ae PaO: Bs. 14-16 XXVI 7 Cheha zos
II ; 55 hy Sir XOGVAN tees Airs: i. 242
lll Fp 13) 40 KRW LUT ess on 7 i. 244
IV 5 Be iy, 4x SEXIER lee nos = i. 244
Vv ; 1 40 ROG ees or a3 i. 245
VI ce _ i. 56 SOCK rs aoe 5 i. 254
VII 5 A “F eS 7 RENO cee oF i. 255
VINE) «00 5 “A Is 60, XXII». ca a i. 256
IX 5 34 oe i 62 XXXIV ... see a i. 256
x : mc 1, 66 XOEKV) (as ane ne 1. 257
XI F 5 - TELS SEX ces ae - i. 261
pail cho. Ae i, 161 XXXVII... ae ae i, 281
XIII 5 Th ioe XXXVIII aa a i. 289
XEVe le c Me mh toh KRKLK ss ise 3 i, 291
XV a0 q ne i. 167 x cee ace ~ i. 309
SGVKe ass ko GE i. 168 AY pac ie A i323
XVII ove ac 3 i. 170 Sat cap oa ne 1. 313
XVIII aes op i. 172 Rdaatt ee we i. 319
XE ae “er a iy 172 MICLVi css ah - 1) Le
xx se an i, 178 TOUR ate ore 55 i. 328
Fog en : np i. 188 OVE ees are i. 349
XXII 5 i. 192 Satine oe ass o i. 355
XXIIl a i. 193 XLVIII ... veg . i. 368
XXIV Fy, i. 198 BOOD.e Bog ze an i. 426
XXV 3 i. 202 L ae + 5 i, 426

180 INDEX I

NO. IN TEXT. VOL. PAGE NO. IN TEXT. VOL, PAGE
LI &. Sr Can Awe 5 cI sc Sy (OAT A ites 583)
Lil ase ie sy ne SES cu Ses a a hh cre
HGR a aeey as % wu 0g cnn | Ae as) gy, |
Icy Yeas ae on ii, 29 Giv™ 7? ae scot) psa CALI
LV ane mee Ss Min dz cv 5S Pe ay, meat h ey ays
EVilery ss cosa yates ii, 32 rota Ge a Pee Panis) Oris:
UIT nt er ene ese CUI mr 23) Gea en eee
EVIL ~ ss. nee dae il, 52 Ce tide ae oes igs) Meee
TIS ok Pe li, 53 telorg Mee veo) gg) RU a
Lx aes ae He Oe | Pacey ss Se esi

ESE ess aS s Me 59 XE Pin ee or ey

Cx ws “a ES ji. 59 GXID | “ae A =

NTE pees aes +3 il. 76 Cx; oe re

EXIV) s.- ae es li. 149 Cxiyy &. a =

Vy See wet a li. 149 CXVe ko ass 5

EXVE (sc mS . li, 150 CXVI Vv: an i

XVII ..s ae a ii. 229 Gxvir 2. Hc

WXVIIL on ane _ ii. 229 CXVIGa«s = “

aime ee zee PS ii. 229 CNIS Gos oh By

TK AE ie ES ii. 230 Cc es <i Ae

sp ogt lant wat ” li. 252 CxXxD ea a a

GCXXIT ads fp ii. 363 CXR ck mat =

XI as ae ayo) le er Geert. coat ea

LXXIV ... a eee ac, XXIV ns, sae ae

EXXV se Ppt 8 Sree Gxxvi ta. ae i

GEKVIs ne an es CXXVIR at -

LXXVII... vs Se CXXVII... sk -

LXXVIII a. a AE Ie] CXXVIIE ie ay

LYXIX 2s. a ‘30 Sill oe CxxIx, ts A

OKIE! ap ~ Ss) alee OS Gxxacae na -

EXXXD s- A Site LR CXR os af AS

1p. 0.9 0 a ny Se, es CXXXII,.. ‘os “1

LXXXIII Bes es) oe CXXXIUI wes a

LXXXIV Hc aye An CXXXIV ay e55

TCV a ree mts Se a) RGSEacy ay. i

LXXXVI “ ie MILO CXXXVI Ses a

LXXXVII ave ae) ) Shi, COs CXXXVII i Fy

LXXXVIII 33s aay eee CXXXVIII eae

LXXXIX nee Sh cities Bo CXXXIX ees aS

xc ae Aa cere hey iene Cx tee cate bese

CLG lees ee a ae anya || hen eee 285 a

KCIN) cis Aa ayn eG CxEIr =: & Ay

KENT "B a5) LIC CXEnT s. oh >

XCLV © oe AS 55) Als 83 Genre: wits oD

> (5\\h = MEER Pa 33 VIN el sa ee = os

XCVI-“..¢ Bae ite ts CXL =. an “1

KCVITs as. wee gg) 7 | Weevarres Sat tp

XCVIII ... ces 53) AK ones CXLVIII ni as

KCI aes So ay) Ale oda emer aay US

c ec van 9 wi. 207 cL at qos Hs

NO. IN TEXT.

cLI aes
CLII see
CLIT
CLIV oe
CLV oes
CLVI o
CLVIT «...
CLVIII ...
CLIX...
CLX one
CLXI ...
CLXII ...
CLXIII ...
CLXIV ...
CLXV
CLXVI ...
CLXVII1...
CLXVIIL
CLXIX ...
CLXxX ...
CLXXI ...
CLXXII1...
CLXXIII
CLXXIV...
CLXXV ...
CLXXVI...
CLXXVII
CLXXVIII
CLXXIX
CLXXxX...
CLXXxI
CLXXXIIL
CLXXXIII
CLXXXIV
CLXXXV
CLXXXVI
CLXXXVIL
CLXXXVIII
CLXXXIX
cCxc eee
CxcrI...
CXCII ...
CXCIII ...
CXCIV ...
CXCV ...
CXCVI ...
CXCVII ...
CXCVIII...
CXCIX ...
cc wee

INDEX I

VOL, PAGE
GR, vis 6x
a) vie 65
Mie
pe Reon REE
33 Wien erg2
3 Wie 343
» Vie 144
4) Sib V2eH
29 | Neb 2S
Soh Ni235
” Vile 237
ee VI 237,
te) SvienK=30
3 vi 239
7 460i. «284
uvieezos
>» Vi. 308
sie ars
>) Vii. p. ix
>» Vii. P. x1
Swlic I
37 Vil. 8x
oy Wiles 92
9» Vil. 138
oe Vile 546
pa Wale r46
5 Rat Ge
ey Cabin asp
” vil. 154
Nes 210
3) Vile 271
vil. 275
» Vil. 280
Nate) Bie
» Vil. 328
zen SD
yy Vill. p. Vili
2?

”

”

3”)

23

”

”

”

”

”

”
”
»

NO. IN TEXT.

ccl

CccIt aoe
CCIII
CCIV

CCV

CCVI
CccVII
CCVIII
CCIX asx
CCX ose
CCXI ose
CCXII ...
CCXIIE ...
CCXIV
CCXV
CCXVI
CCXVII ...
CCXVIILI...
CCXIX
CCXX
CCXXI ...
CCXXI1 ...
CCXXIII
CCXXIV...
CCXXV ...
CCXXVI...
CCXXVII
CCXXVIII
CCXXIX...
CCXXX....
CCXXXI...
CCXXXII
CCXXXIII
CCXXXIV
CCXXXV
CCXXXVI
CCXXXVII
CCXXXVIII
CCXXXIX
CCXL
CCXLI ...
CCXLII ...
CCXLIII...
CCXLIV...
CCXLV ...
CCXLVI...
CCXLVII
CCXLVIII
CCXLIX..,
CCL aoe

181

VOL. PAGE
pent a Bre) VAN mcd.
aa VIL
$9 «Villa AT,
oe abt) anes,
3 Vill, 158
9) Vill. 159
9) Vill. 213
3) Ville, 257
»> Vili, 218
3 6 Vi, 28
53. Vili, (235
» Vili, 219
9» Vili. 224
iy vill, (228
9 Vili, 226
» Vili. 226
oy | eVAlieneooy
kha Zee:
>» Vill, 244
» Vili. 249
3, Vili. 262
5 Vill. 269
5) Willy 306
» Vill, 318
os NGKE Go
» Vill, 333
= ix. p. 1x
Se <oeee
a ix. 6
A ss
55 ix. 8
< ix. 27
- ix. 28
oc 1X. 30
»” ix. 31
Hee pels
” 1X. 41
2) Ake 4g
a be
5°, ee
” 1x. 51
” 1X. 54
nn ix. 56
ee IX OE
” ix. 64
” x. 71
33,1 aR NETS
” 1X. 74
33 ix, 78
ar ix. 80

182 INDEX I

NO. IN TEXT. VOL. PAGE | NO. IN TEXT. VOL. PAGE i
GCLE ies FAY GA Digi eng ie GGL W Faw . LL. LL 3t60e
sei, A Bt 5; Weak, 85h || CCCILE ER 66 » J 316 3
CCLHE. <.. pl 295) OAKS | (GO ull /CECUIEEE. ise >» 327
CCLIV .: es Ay eS LE CCCIVies: 2¥. 5 i. 317 :
CCEVIF ce Re eg eS CCEV es ate » i 317
CGEVI -<:. Ee sae GEGVI ©-5 a » i 317
CCLVII ... +. 99 | 2X.) 4 CCCVII ... eee ” 1. 317
CCLVIII ... oes ao) SEKeds CCCVIII ... oes 55 ee if
CELIX. ces hs j30 AX= FAT ECOG ae ae np i. 326
GEEK) exe so gp, aXe. 220) || (CCC BE. Me, Aye ats M
(Sea oss Sa ey SEE GCEXI... Sr » L 347
CCUXIL <.. = St CCCXII :.. ae =F i. 350
CELE ... gg, xen 59) | (CCEXU... aes » i 363
ceiving | ee are) ||) IeCextvinyy ce mes i
CCLXV ... Meme aCe (eece aes ec es SF os
CCEXVE ... as 55 Ake eye CCCXVI ... an 3) ls eae |
CCLXVII... ee $y iXat exO2 CCCXVII... oe $5 i. 440
CCLXVIII - 5) ake 286 CCCXVIII ee » i. Goan
CCEXIX: «5. oss »» 1X. 195 CCGXIX..s eae » ii. 42m
CCLXX .;. cise 35, ERE XOO CCCXX >. ea >» io. ID
CGGEXT... An 33, 1x. 20% CCCXXE..: ~ >» iw. Tu
CCLXXII ot »» 1X. 202 CCCXXII =a 5 Alea Hy
CCLXXUII ei 5, 1x. 202 CCCXXIII ava » i. 40m
CCLXXIV es yy) J1Xs “202 CCCXXIV ee » i. <400e
CELXXY:.. aie yy | ike 204 CCCXXV... nee 9 «lL AR
CCLXXVI nod 53 1AXe | (207 CCCXXVI ass >) aL) ee
CCLXXVII ee 5, ks 8200) BL CCGRKVIE tee 3 «il 20mm
CCLXXVIII Sour yt MeLKsy bax CCCXXVIII ae » iL 205)
CCLXXIX Ae 3) ike (era 7] TecexrxEx ae » w 2100
COLMK re. she 5) Ika 1226 CCCXXX... ve » Le 2G
CCLXXXI ace i cry) CCCXXXI ne 39 leg
CCLXXXII “ 3) 1X. 229 CCCXXXII se 59 ee
CCLXXXIUI ee 33 ik. 2go! ||| 1eCGxacwrr Bee 5s) Als (222
CCLXXXIV = Beye icy CCCXXXIV ast 55) eae
CCLXXXV ... S. M. iv. 658 CCCXXXV wee >» WwW 200m
CCLXXXVI fe yy Va G68" “CCOERVT ie >» i. 2660
CCLXXXVII... 4, Iv. 664 CCCXXXVIE a. a lk (29g ;
CCLXXXVIII ... 4, iv. 666 CCCKXKVII | sc erie, cel
CCLXXXIX ee hares CCCXXXIX we +3 Abe
CEXC™ |... cenit) yeni. aeRO COCKE tee = 3 dake Bey
GEXCr) |. sid thet MLW OOO) CECXET::s oe >» ii 350 ae
GCGXCI ..- ae sea, (27/2) CCCXLII... ae ee as
CCXCIII ... ene be ie Sey CCCXLII ae Bets. itt
CCXCIV ... us oso We eLOO CCCXLIV ah 1 «(lke OE
CCXCY ..; ase is i. 285 CCCXLV... ae 5 iW 44a
CCXCVI1 ... 5s 4 35 i. 310 CCCXLVI ms 9») le ag
CCXCVII... oe oui VeTnS eard CCCXLVII oe 1 Ab ase
CCXCVIII se a 1 OSEs CCCXLVIII es aoe Pats. 4
CCXCEX <.. wee + L) 3x5 CCCXLIX sce 53) - AR

ccc “or aoe 5 1. 310 CCCL ... nr jp) alle GER

ofa

die

NO. IN TEXT.

CCCLI ...
CCCLII
CCCLIII ...
CCCLIV ...
CCCLV ...
CCCLVI ...
CCCLVII...
CCCLVIII
CCCLIX ...
CCCLX ...
CCCLX1 ...
CCCLXII...
CCCLXIII
CCCLXIV
CCCLXV...
CCCLXVI
CCCLXVII
CCCLXVIII

VOL.

INDEX I

PAGE

L. L, iii.

”
”
”
”
9
”
9
”
”
”
”
”
23
”
”
2

ili.
iii.
iil.
ill.
lil.
iil.
iil.
iil.
i.

45

92
T15
118
121
142
145
162
172
172
1QI
192
216
217
218
221
222
223

NO. IN TEXT.
CCCLXIX
CCCLXx...
CCCLXXI
CCCLXXII
CCCLXXIII
CCCLXXIV
CCCLXXV
CCCLXXVI
CCCLXXVII
CCCLXXVIII
CCCLXXIX
CCCLXXX
CCCLXXXI
CCCLXXxII
CCCLXXXIII
CCCLXXXIV
CCCLXXXV

VOL.
L. L

”
”
”
”
”
”
”
be)
”
”
”
”
”?
”
”
”

183

PAGE

223
224
230
238
243
245
245
311
322
322
323
339
337
345
256

395
401

oS

INDEX II

SUBJECT INDEX

ABIOGENESIS, defined, CCXVIII, CCXX, CCXX!

Able men, besetting sin of, CCCLXXII

Abstractions, CCCXLII

Accuracy, CXXUI

Agnosticism defined, CxLII 5 CG

— origin of the term, CCLVI

Aim of life, cxx1, CCCXXXV

Alcohol and brain work, CCCLV

Analogies, scope of, CLIII

Analogy, Butler's, CCCXI, CCCXXX

Animals, mind in, CLIII

—— immortality, CCxcIx

Anniversaries, CCCXXXVIII

Ant, white, scientific method compared to, CCCLXXxX

Anthropomorphism, cccx

Antiquity of man, CLXXXII

Architecture, prehistoric, CLXX XII

Armaments, cause of modern, CCCLXXIX

Arrogance, a check to, CLXXV

Art: the teaching of drawing, XCIV

— and Christianity, CXLVI

Aryan question, CLXXXI

Ascent of man, LI, CLXXIX

Aspiration and immortality, CLV1I1

— and fact, ccc

Atheism, CCCXI

Atlantic Ocean, comparison with physiology, Cv

—— bed of, cLxXxII

Authority, 111, XIII, XIV, LXIV, LXVI, LXVII, CL

a worthless, CLXxIV; its struggle with freethought, cccxx
cccLxxil (cf Scepticism)

Automata and the soul, xxII

Automatic virtue, XXII

Average opinion, government by, CCCXL”

186 INDEX II

BACKWOODSMAN’S work in science is acceptable, CCCLXIV
Baur, merits of as a critic, CCCLIV

Beauty, the sense of, CCLIV

Becky Sharp, LxxIv

Bees, comparison with, cv

Being, impermanence of, CCXL

— the ultimate, CcLV

Belief, the bases of, Lxx

— and morality, CLXI, CXLV, CCXCVII

— and rational grounds for, CxxxIx 3 cf CCCLVI
— consequences of right and wrong, CCCXxIx
Benevolence in nature, CCLXIxX, CCCXXxX

Best men, the, CXLII

Biblical criticism, the key to, CCCLIV

Biogenesis, defined, Ccxvill, CCXX, CCXXI
Bishops and moral courage, CCCLXXXIII

Body, compared to an Army, CXVI

—— — toa loaded gun, CCLIx

Book-learning, Cx1II, CCXVII

—— sought by the ancient University, CCCI.xx1
Books, cit

— good, and fools, cccxvi

Brahma and the rule of life, ccxLv

Brain work and stimulants, cccLV

Brutes, mental analogies with, CLim

Butler’s Analogy, CCCx1, CCCXxx

CABANIS, CCCLXI

Cant and shams, CCCLX

Capacity and incapacity, XxxI

Cape Horn of life, the, ccxcuI

Capital, vital, ccLIx, CCLXII

— lately wages, CCLXVII

—— supposed antagonism to labour, CCLXVIII
Capitalist nature, CCVvI

Carlyle, the lesson of, cccLx

Catholicism snus Christianity, x1
Causation, its universality, CLVI

Causes, natural, vast effects of, cxcvII
secondary, CLXXXVII

Certainty lies in thought, xvii, XIx, CLII
— absolute, the only, cccivim ; not given by induction, CcCLviII
— limits of, CLxviI

Chalk, the significance of, CLXxxIx

—— antiquity of, cxcv1

—— deep sea origin of, cxciv

—— parentage of, cxc

—— present day formation of, CxcI

— rate of formation, cxcv

— the lesson of, CxcvilI

a*a

INDEX II

Chance, CLVI

Character and heredity, CCxLIV
Chessplayer, the hidden, Lxxx1t; c/ Game
Child, death of a, CCCXLVI; cf CCCLXIV
Children, influence of, cccxvi, CccLtI
Christianity and Creeds, CxLI, CXLIV

—— and the intellectual world, cxLvr

—— its success alleged as proof of the story of Jesus, CccLIIr
primitive and later, CccLiir

Church, the primitive and later, cccLur
Cinderella, the role of science, CcLv1II
Civilisation and suffering, ccxLI1, CCCLVII
Class-feeling, high and low, Lxxx1
Classical education, CcxIv

Clearness of thought, xxv

Clericalism and science, LVIII

Cleverness, CXv

—— is of small intrinsic value, CCCLXx1II
Coal and clubmosses, CCII

—— less important than education, CCCxIV
—— the preservation of, CcIv, CCVI
Cocksureness, CLXVII

Comet, a kindly, cccLvir

Commerce and science, CLXXIII

Common facts and great principles, CxxIV
Common sense and science, LXXv1} and truth, cx1i
Comte, XI, CXLIV

Conduct, laws of, how discoverable, CcCLxvIII
Conscience and sympathy, CCXXxIII
Consequences, logical, xxvuII

Conservation of energy and immortality, CCCLXI
Cosmic process and ethical process, CCLI
Creation and evolution, CCXxIx

Creeds, LXxI

— disbelief in as a sin, CXLI, CXLV

Crime and heredity, CCxxxvI

Crowded street, life is like a, CCCXL

Culture and English literature, xcv
Cultured idleness, cv

Cuvier and common sense, CCXCI

Cyclical evolution, ccxxxIx

DANTE, LXXx

Darwin, his work and methods, ccCLxXXxII

Death of a child, cccxLv1; cf CCCLXIV

Deep sea soundings, CXCII

— —— glacial survivors in, CxcIx

Demagogues caused Socrates’ death, CXLVIII
Demonstration, the essence of modern teaching, ccrx
Descartes, XV, XVII

187

188 INDEX II

Descartes, his chief service, CLII, CLIV
Determinants of mental and moral activities, CxxxII
Development, CLxxII

Disciples not sought for, CCCLXIII

—— the curse of science, CCCLXxI

Dismal science, the, CCCLXxxI

Do as you would be done by, ccxxxv

Dogmatism, the nemesis of, CCLv1II

Doubt (cf% scepticism), xvi1; ci Unbelief and Creeds
Drawing, the teaching of, xciv

—— as a discipline, Cxx1I

Duty, xu, xvi

— and happiness, CLXx, CLXI

— a man’s first, CCCLXXIV

ECONOMICAL PROBLEM, in physiological terms, CCLIx

Economy, true, CCCXLIXx

Education, mechanical basis of, xx1

— a liberal, LxxxIx

—— ancient and modern, ccxv (¢f ccxm)

— and conflict of studies, xc111

—— and examinations, cv!

—— and fine buildings, L

—— by nature, LXxxv, LXxxvi; compared with artificial education

LXXXVIII

— classical, the same for ancient Rome and modern England,
CCXIV

defined, LxxxIv

—— effects of, xxxvuII

—— English, and culture, xcv

— English untaught, xcv1

— foreign languages in, xcvII

—— Latin and German in, xcvut

— more important than coal, cccx1r

—— of the young, knowledge requisite for, Cxxv1

—— technical, cccxxx1

—— the, of practical work, CCCLxxIV

—— the purpose of primary, CCXII

Eginhard, cxxx1x

Emotional chameleon (man), CCXXXIII

Empusa musce, CCxXI

End of life, the great, CxxI, CCCXXXV

English literature and culture, xcv

—— untaught, xcv1

Equality, xL, xLu

Error (cf Mistakes), CxxxvI

—— advantage of consistent, xcI

—— acknowledgment of, CxxxVII

— and faith, cxxxvi

— old, the explosion of, ccc.

INDEX II

Error, religious, CXLI, CXLV
Eternal order, the, CCXxxI
Ethical ideals necessary, Cx1x
Ethical process, the, CCXxxIV

—— and cosmic process, CCLI
— and the survival of the fittest, ccL

Ethics, modern, and old Israel, cxtvi
Ethnology, methods and results of, cLxxx
Eubiotics, CCCLXXxxI

Evidence, judgment, and action, cccLiI

Evil,

the existence of, CCXLVI
the insistence of, CCXLVII

Evolution and man, CLXxxvI

and the millennium, ccLi

cyclical, CCXxXxIx

described, CcxxIx

formulated by Kant, ccxxv

in history, CCCXLIV

slowness of, CCV

variation and selection are the bases of, CCxxx

Examinations, CvI
Existence and thought, xvii, xIx
Expectation and verification, CCCLVIII

Fact and hypothesis, 1x, ccx1x

and aspiration, ccc
and theory, CCLXxXVI

Faith, blind, effects of, CxxxvIII, CXXXIx

Fall,

moral aspect of, CXLI, CXLV
which is born of knowledge, CcxxxI
doctrine of the, baseless, cccLx1I

Fallacies, the destruction of, Lx xt

their tenacity of life, ccCxxXXVII

Fame, posthumous, CCCxxxIII, cf. CCCLXIII
Feeling and morality, CLx1II, CLXIV
Ferments, the first knowledge of, cct
Florida paint-root, CLXXXVIII

Fly and silkworm disease, CCxxI
Fools and common-sense, CCCXXXIX
Force, CCCXLIII

Foreign languages, value of, xcviI
Forests, records of ancient, CCIII
Forms, the permanence of, CCxXXxVIII
Fox, George, CxxxIx

Frankness, reception of honest, CCxCV
Fraud, unconscious, CxXXXVIII
Freedom,-xx1II

dangers of, Cvir

its struggle with tradition, cccxx
of the will, ccLvir

of thought, cxxx

190 INDEX II i

Freedom, to go wrong in, cccxv

Fugue, Nature’s great, CCLXxXxVIII

Function of the brain, thought as a, CCcCLx1
Future of the world, c1x

— retribution, ccci, ccci1, cccIv, cccv
—— —— dangers of the doctrine, cccv1, cccvir

Ga.atians, Epistle to, the key to Christianity, cccLiv

Game, life compared to a, LXxxIII3 ¢f GCCXxII

Genius, XXXIV, CLIV, CLV

—— a faculty for ‘‘ possession,” CXXXIV

as motherwit, v

Gentleman, qualities of a, xxxv

Geological theories, ccxx1 ; reconciliation of, cCxxv

—— fact and theory, ccxxiv

—— time, CLxxxvilI

Glacial survivors in the deep sea, CLXxviI

God and no God, xxx

—— the love of, cLx1

Goethe and science, CcLxxxIx

defects of his scientific qualities, ccxc

Golden rule, the, ccxxxv

Good of mankind, xxxvir

Graduates in all the faculties of human relationships have thoughts
beyond negative criticism, CCCLXIV

Greatness, xv

— national, cx

Guide to life, xx

Hasit, an invaluable, cccLxxIv

Haman and Modecai, ccxxxu1

Happiness and moral duty, c_x

—— is in excess of pain, ccc

—— we are never certain of conferring it on others, CCCLXXxIV

Henslow, character of, cccix

Heredity and crime, ccxxxv1

and character, CCxLIv

Heresies (cf Authority), -xvir

Hesitation, no good done by, cccxx1

Historical truth a matter of science, CCCLII ‘
History and physiology, -xxvuI

— possible new teaching of, cccxLiv

Human nature, no recent change in, CLxx

Humanity, religion of, cxLiv

Hume, civur |
Hutton, ccxxur

Hypothesis and fact, 1x, Ccx1x

IDEAL, necessity of ethical, cx1x .
Idealism and materialism, CLxviII

“>

INDEX II IgI

Ideas, men live by, cIx, CxI

—— innate, CLIV

—— necessary, CLVII

—— struggle for existence among, LxvIII

Idleness, cultured, in society, cv

Idolatry, intellectual, cccxLm1

Ignorance, how treated by nature, Lxxxvir

Imagination, scientific, CxxxI, CLXXXI

— unscientific, cxLIx

Immortality, aspirations after, CLviir

—— and conservation of energy, CCCLXI

— and grief, cccvi1I

—-— and probability, ccxevir

—— animal, ccxcix

— disregarded by the highest ancient moral aspiration,
CCCLXVI

Impermanence of being, ccxL

Incapacity, XXXI, LXXXVII

Indian Empire, a curse, CCCXxxIV

—— how to hold it, 76.

Individual and society, xLvitI, LI

—— his debt to society, ccLxxx1II

— not infallible, ccLxxxir

— worth, the safeguard of society, cccxxvii

Individualism, xLix, L

— limits of, ccLxxx1

Induction, does not confer absolute certainty, cccLvmI

Industrialism and militarism, cccLxx1x

Inert matter, CCCLXxIII

Innate ideas, CLIv, CLV.

Innocent pleasure of advancing years, CCCXXXIX

Instinct, CLIV, CLV

Intellectual instruction, merely, cxxvit ; less needful than moral,
CCCXIX

—— matters, reason the guide in, CxLir

—— uncertainty, CxL

—— world and Christianity, cxLv1

Intoxication, mental, cxxx111

Trony of history in science, ccxc

Israel and modern ethics, CxLv1r

Italy, intellectual position of, ccxvim

Jesus, the story of; its truth or falsehood as based on the success
of Christianity, cccLi1

Jews, persecution of, in Eastern Europe, compared to that of early
Christians, CCcLII

Judaism, old and modern ethics of, CxLv11

Julian, the Kmperor, cxLiv

Justice satisfied, cLrx

— and desert, CCxLIII

— of nature, CccII, CCcIv, CccVv

192 INDEX II

Kant and evolution,ccxxv

Kelvin, Lord, CLxxxvilI

Knowledge, a little, CxIv

— and faith, CCxxxI

— of teachers, CXXVII

—— the people perish for want of, ccxx1I

Laporatory, the forecourt to the temple of philosophy, CLI

Labour, vital, dependent on vital capital, ccLIx

— and value, CCLXVI

— savage, a borrowing from nature, CCLXI

— supposed antagonism to capital, CCLXVIII

Language and racemarks, CLXXXII, CLXXXIII

Latin, xcvi

Law of nature, XLVI, LIII, LVI, CCCXIT

— the, as schoolmaster to Christ, CCcL1l

Learning inferior to character, CCCLXXIII

Leaving things to themselves, Cxxv

Lectures, value of, ccvi1, CcIx, CCX

—— dangers of, CLXxxXvII

—— popular, CLXxxVI

Ledger of the Almighty, cccrir

Lessons, the first and last of, cxx

“ Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die,’’ CCCVIII

Life guided by verification, xx

a rule of, c

asa game of chess, LXXXIII; ¢/ CCCXII

asarule of three sum, CI

is worth living, even on hard terms, CCLXXI

its great end, CXxI, CCCXXXV

its uncertainty, CXL

like a crowded street, CCCXL

—— like a whirlpool, cccxim, cccxit: less like a machine running
down, 76.

the best thing it offers, cxxx, CCCLX

the Cape Horn of, ccxcitt

the cup of, cccxxxvill

the mother of the rocks, cc

the tragic thread of, ccxxviI

— one of the most saddening things in, CCCLXXxIV

Literature and science, ccxcvi; hangers on in, CCCLXXV

—— the money of, cir

Literatures, the four great, xcvII

Lobster, Ccv1I

Logical consequences, XXVIII

HITT

LIT

Mayjoririgs and opinion, CCCLXxv1I
Malevolence in nature, CCLXIx, CCCXXX
Malthusian doctrine, the, CCLxIV

Man, structural unity of, with animals CLXx1II

"v

a,

INDEX II

Man, a queer animal, CCCLXXxv

antiquity of, CLxxxXv

ascent of, LI, CLXXIX

not a rational animal, CCcLr

the mimic, CCXxXXUI

and the common process of evolution, CLXXVI

Man’s arrogance, a check to, CLXXV
Mankind, the good of, xxxvit
Material prosperity, value of, LXXIV

world, dignity of, CLXV, CLXVI

Materialism, XIV

and idealism, CLXvHI
the horror of, Ci.xv

Mathematical mill, the, ccxxv1
Matter and force, Lv

dignity of, CLxv, CLXV1
Inert, CCCXLIII
its existence a metaphysical assumption, GXLVIn

Means and ends, political, cccxxxIv

Mechanism and education, xx!

Medicine the foster-mother of the sciences, C1II
Mental and moral activities, determinants of, Cxxx1I

analogies with the brutes, CLL
intoxication, CXXXIII

Messiah, science has none, CCCLXXVIII
Metaphysics and matter, CL.XVIII

and the limits of certainty, CLXVII
the problem of, CcCx1I

Method of science, vir

spread of, CCCLXXVII

Middle-age, chief pleasure of, CCCXXXIx
Militarism and industrialism, CCCLX XIX
Millennium, the, and evolution, ccLiu
Ministers to the world’s weaknesses, CCCLXVII
Miracle of nature, LIV

Miracles, no a grzori objection to, CCCxI
Misery, Xxx1I

Missionaries, XX xIx

Mistakes, cxxxvi; c/. Error

and acknowledgment of them, CXxXxVII, CXL!

Modern teaching, essence of, CCIx
Moral activities, determinants of, CxXxII

aspects of faith, CXXXVIII, CXXXIX, CXLI, CXLV
cripples and idiots, CCCLxx

conditions of success, CCLXXxX

— duty defined, cccLxviII

law, how far it can be fulfilled, cccLxx

laws true, even if moral sense non- existent, CCCLXVIII

193

purpose, no sign of, in nature, CCCLIX ; of human origin, 72.
sanction, how far based on pure feeling, CLXIU, CLXIV

sense, CCCLXIX
teaching more needful than intellectual, cccxrx

a)

194 INDEX II

Morality and religion, cxvir; cf CLXxm, CLxIV; distinguished.
CCCXVIII

—— is embodied in society, CCLXxv

Mordecai and Haman, CCXxXIII

Mother wit (cé Genius). v ; c% CLIV, CLV

Motion, integrating or disintegrating, CCCXLII

Museums, local, ccxciv

Myth and science, LIx

Names, idolatry of, CCCXLII

National greatness, Cx

Native talent, CLV

Natural causes, great effects of, CxCvII

— History and Life’s Picture Gallery, Lxxx a
knowledge and truth, cL; a forecourt to philosophy, CLr
—— rights, XLvl

Nature, laws of, XLVI, LIII, LVI, CCCXII

as opposed to society, CCLXXIV

benevolence and malevolence in, CCLXIX, CCLXXII, CCCXLVIL
deafening cries of pain in, CCCXLVII

— defined, CCXLVIII

— giadiatorial aspect of, ccLxx

—— her great Fugue, CCLXXXVIII

—— her vis medicatrix, CCLXXVI

is non-moral, CCLXXIII, CCCLVILI

—— justice of, ccci1, CCCIV, CCCV

justifies neither optimism nor pessimism, CCLXXIII, CCCXXX
matter and force, LV

no reverential care for unoffending creation, CCCXLVII
perennial miracle of, 1.1Vv .
selection by, LXIII

self-surrender to, CCCI

the bonus in her account, CCLXXII, CCCXLVII

the capitalist, ccv

the educator, LXXXV, LXXXVI, LXXXVII

the unity of, CLXXVII

treatment of ignorance by, LXXXVII

war of, Li

Necessity, XII, CLVIL

Negative criticism is not all after a full life, cccr-x1v
Negro, no sentimental sympathy with, CCCXIII

effect of slavery, 7.

Nerve force, the equivalent of, ccvi

Nineteenth century, leading characteristic of, CCCLXxvII

WITTE

OLD AGE, the best hope for, CCCXLI

Optimism and pessimism, CCXLIX, CCLXIX, CCLXXI, CCLXXII,
CCLXXII, CCCXxXx

Oratory, CCLXXXVI

Order, the eternal, CCxXxxI

Original sin, CCXxXxU, CCXLI

INDEX II

Orthodoxy, Lv; c/ Creeds, Clericalism, Ecclesiasticism
Over-instruction, CCCXxXxXII

PatIn, LXXIx

—— and wisdom, xc

—— inevitable, ccLi

is less than happiness, ccc1t

Paint-root, CILXXXVIII

Palace, substituted for a University, 1

Papacy, temporal claims of, a disturbing force, CCCLXxIx
Parallax of time, XXvI

Parents not always rational animals, CccLI
Pasteur, CCxX, CCXXI, CCXXII

Paul, St.. Cxxx1x

Pauperism, the vulture of, cccLvir

Peace, the state of, breeds a new state of strife, CCLX XVI
—- not dependent on governments, CCCLXxXIXx
Pebrine, CCxXxI, CCXXII

** Pecca Fortiter,” xct

People, the, perish for want of knowledge, ccxxi11
to better their condition, a chief aim, CCCXXXIII
Permanence of forms, the, CCXxvIII

Personal aims, CCCLXIII

Personality, CCXCVvIII

Pessimism, CCXLIx ; c/ Optimism

Philosophy, xiv, Lx13; cé Science

the laboratory is the forecourt to, CLI

—— political, xLiv

Physiology, its interest in human life, Lxxvut
— compared to the Atlantic, civ

— applied to Political Economy, CCLIx, CcLx
Picture Gallery of Life, xxx

** Pig philosophy,” CCCLXxxI

Pigs, ‘‘ selected’’ by the paint-root, CLXxxVvUI
Plants, green, the real producers, CCLXIII, CCLXIV
Plato and the unscientific imagination, CxLIx
Pleasure of middle age, the chief, CcCcxxxIx
Political philosopby, xLiv

economists, their method, CCCLXxxI
Politicians, intellect of, CCCLXXXIII

Politics, the sea of, xL

—— proper name for Social Science, CCCLxxxI
Popular Lectures and Popular Science, CLxXxxvi
dangers of, CLXxXxvII

Population question, XLV

Positivism (ff. Comte), x1, CxLIv

** Possession’ and genius, CxXxxIVv

Practical work, educative value of, CCCLXxIV
Prehistoric architecture, CLXXXIV

Present day formation of chalk, cxc1 ; of rocks, cci
Priestley, LXXIlI, LXXV

195

196 INDEX II

Priests and scientific method, cccr.xxx
Primary education, ccxur

Principles, great, can be illustrated by the commonest facts, CxxIv"

Producer, the sole, ccLxut

Production, the chief factor in, ccix1
Prometheus, the human, cccLv11
Prophets and rational belief, cxxxix
Prosperity (material) and morals, Lxxiv
Protection and Trades Unions, Lxxx
Providence, doctrine of, cccLxv
playing at, CCCLXxvI

Public opinion, influence of, ccxxxur
Punishment, future, ccc

Quantity and quality, ex
Queen bees in the human hive, cv

RATIONAL animal, man is not, CccLr

grounds for belief, cxxxrx; are often irrational attempts
justify instincts, CccLv1

Reason the guide in intellectual matters, cxtir

Redi, ccxviir

Religion and morality, cxvit ; distinguished, cccxvin

and theology, cxvm

Religious error, CXL1, CXLV

Remorse, Ccciv

Renascence, the new, CCCxx

Resolution, cccxx1

Retribution, future, cccir

moral and physical, 7é., 111, 1v, v

—- is here, cccvi

—— certainty of present, cccvi

—— of sin, CCCXxvIII

—— of beliefs, cccxxix

Right and wrong, cvut; to go right in chains, cccxv

Rights, natural, xtvir

Robinson Crusoe, his inferences, CLUI

Rocks, the offspring of life, cc

—— present day formation of, ccr

Rule of life, c

of three sum, and life, c1

SANCTION, the moral, and feeling, CLXx1I1, CLXIV
Scepticism (cf Doubt and Authority), 11, xvi, CL
Schools of thought, cccLx111

a curse to science, CCCLXXII

Science, xxiv

and aspiration, 1

—— and belief, 1v

— and Christianity, cxiv1

— and clericalism, tv

to

INDEX II 197

Science and commerce, cxci1
and common sense, I.XXVI, CXII
and investigation, XXII
and literature, ccxcv1
and myth, Lrx, Lx
and philosophy, LXI
and the priests, CCCLXxx
as Cinderella, ccLvut
can afford to wait, CXXXV
counters of, CIT
fostered by medicine, cit
function of, CLXXVIII
Geethe’s work i In, CCLXXXIX, CCXC
growth of, CCCLXXVII
hangers on in, 26.
has many prophets but no Messiah, cccLxxvui
irony of history in, ccxci
limits of, x1v
method of, VIII, LXXVII
motto of, CccL
picture it draws of the world, vx1i
popularisation of, CLXxxvI
spirit of, LXIx, CL, CCCLXXVII
success in, CCCLXXV
. —— tragedy of, ccx1x
Scientific imagination, Cxxx1, CxL1x; and the Aryan question, .
CLXXXI
—— idea, growth and efficacy of, ccxxir
Secondary causes, CLXXXVII
Selection, social, xxx1; the basis of evolution, ccxxx; may be
rapid, CLXxXxviII
Self-surrender to nature, ccc1)
Shakespeare, Xci1
Shams, ccc.x
Silkworm disease, ccxx1
Sin gravitates to sorrow, CCCV
—— lasting punishment of, cccxxvim
origin of, CCCLXII
Size and greatness, cx
Skill, a greater than, cxx1x
Slavery, the double emancipation, Lxxx1
effects of, CCCXIII
Slowness of evolution, ccv
Social selection, xxx1; cf CCXxXVv
life is embodied morality, CCLXXV
—— science, CCCLXxxI; nicknamed ‘‘ Dismal,” 78. ; value of its.
method, 70.*
tendency, the, CCxxxuI
Socially unfit, the, ccxxxvi
Society, complexity of, XXXVI
—— a limitation of the struggle for existence, CCLxxv

| |

Pee

Lol

98 INDEX II

Society and individualism, xLIx, L, CCCLXVIII

—— and the individual, x-vu1

as opposed to nature, CCLXXIV

conditions of its stability, Cc1.xxIx

internal struggle, CCxxxvil ; permanence of, CCXXXVIil

moral conditions of success, CCLXXx

population question, XLV

statute of limitations needed in, xLu1I

the end of, cCCLXvIII

—— the individual's debt to, ccLxxxulI

Socrates put to death by the demagogues, CxLv1

Sorrow, inevitable, ccLu

—— deep plunge into, CCCxXLvI

Soul in automata, xxvii

Soundings, deep sea, CxciI

Southey and the Quaker, CXXVI

Spallanzani, ccxx1I

Sphinx, the true riddle of the, ccLxxvilI

Spiritualism, its only use if true, cccxxv

Stanley, Dean, on being made a bishop, CccLxxx1

Starvation on ortolans, CCCXLVII

Starve, who shall first? CCLxXxIx

State not infallible, ccLxxx1

Stimulants and brain work, CCCLV

Structural unity of men and animals, CLxxiI ’

Struggle for existence, among ideas, Lxvi1; modified within
society, CCXxxvil; but permanent, ccxxxvil1; limited by
society, CCLXXV

—— and original sin, ccxxxu, CCXLI

—— the serious, CCLII

twofold, in civilisation, CCXLU

Studies, the conflict of, xc111

Success, moral conditions of, CcLxxx1, CCCXxXVvI

Suffering and wisdom, xc

— and civilisation, CCxLI

—— and virtue, CLXxI

Survival of the fittest, and ethical process, ccr

Sweepers and cleansers, the work of, CCCLXIV

Sympathy and conscience, CCXXxXIII

—— asa rule of life, ccxxxv

TUT

TEACHERS, knowledge of, cxxvit

training of, CCLXXXIV

Teaching, essence of modern, ccxt, ccxit, ccxv (cf. Education)
and the things that are inborn, CCCLXXIII

Technical education, CCCXxxI

Theology and religion, cxv11

Theories, three great modern, x

Theory and fact, CCLXxxvI

Things in themselves, CCLV

Thinking, time for, cxxv1

;
>
rs

INDEX II

Thought, xvitt, x1x

as a function of the Sette CCCLXI

— freedom of, cxxx

struggle for existence in, LXVIII

Time and truth, xxxII

Trades Unions and Protection, LxxxII

Traditional authority, its struggle with free thought, cccxx

Traditions and realities, CLxx1

rejection of, CCCLXXVII

Tragic thread of life, ccxxvir

Truth (cf. Authority, Veracity), xxrx, XXXII, LXV, CCCXxX

— and common sense, CXII

and error, XCI

and its reward, CLxx

and the function of science, CLXXVIII

and types, CCLXXXVII

seeker, VI

the search for, CL, CLxIx

the spread of, CCCXxxvI

Try all things and hold fast to that which is good, the
of science, CCCL

Types and truth, CCLXxxviI

TT

UNBELIEF in creeds, CXLI, CXLV
Uncertainty, intellectual, cxL
Under-instruction, CcCxxx

Unfit, the, ccxxxv1

Unhappiness, too easy to confer, CCCLXxXIV
Universe compared to a great game, CCCXII
University of Nature, LXxxvI

— an ideal, xcix

— a palace substituted for, L

— ancient and modern, CCCLxxt
Utilitarians, founders of the science of Eubiotics, CccCLXxxi
— their nickname, 26.

VaLvueE and labour, CCLxv1

Variation, the basis of evolution, CLXxXXVIII, CCXxx
Veracity, 1, xcix 3 cf Error, Mistakes, esp. CXXXVH
Verification the guide of life, xx

—— and expectation, CCCLVIII

* Virtually,” CCLxv

Virtue, automatic, xx1I

and austerity, CLXII

— on £10,000 a year, LXXIV

the ways of, CLxr

Vis medicatrix naturze, CCLXXVI

Vitality, CCCxXLiI1

Viviseciion, CCCxxvI

Voice, power of the human, CLxxxvI

199

motto

200 INDEX II

WacEs received are capital possessed, CCLXVII
Want, see Wealth

War of Nature, Li

Wealth and Nemesis, CCLXXVII

a want, CCCLVII

Wesley, John, CLXxXxv1

Whirlpool, life compared to, CCCXLII, CCCXLIIT
Will, freedom of the, CCLVII

Wisdom in many counsellors, vil

and suffering, XC

Women, their powers compared to those of men, CCCXXII
medical education of, CCCxXX1V

—— physical disabilities and occupation, CCCXXIV
Wonk, valuation of a man’s, CCLXXXV

effect on women, CCCXXIV

World, future of the, crx

—— judgments of the, CcCxXxII

____ ninisters to the weaknesses of the, CCCLXXVII
Wrong, infinite possibilities of, cvii

R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BREAD ST. HILL, E.C.,;
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

| Ku
Ss Dost