BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. BY JOSEPH COOK. BIOLOGY. With Preludes on Current Events. Three Colored Illustrations. 12mo. Sixteenth thousand $1.50 TRANSCENDENTALISM. With Preludes on Current Events. 12mo. Eleventh thousand 1-50 ORTHODOXY. With Preludes on Current Events. Sixth thousand . . 1.50 CONSCIENCE. With Preludes on Current Events. (Just ready.) . . . 1.50 HEREDITY. With Preludes on Current Events. (Just ready.) . . . 1.50 MARRIAGE. With Preludes on Current Events. (In press.) .... 1.50 " I do not know of any work on Conscience in which the true theory of ethics is so clearly and forcibly presented, together with the logical inferences from it in support of the (Treat truths of religion. The review of the whimsical and shallow speculations of Matthew Arnold ia especially able and satisfactory ." — Professor Francis Bowen, Harvard Univer- sity. '•These Lectures arc crowded BO full of knowledge, of thought, of argument, illumined with such passages of eloquence an J power, spiced so frequently with deep-cutting though good-natured irony, that I could make no abstract from them without utterly mutilating them." — Rev. Dr. Thomas HiU, ex- President of Harvard University, in Christian Register. "Joseph Cook is a phenomenon to be accounted for. No other American orator has done what he has done, or any thing like it ; and, prior to the experiment, no voice would have been bold enough to predict its success." — Hev. Professor A. P. Peaoody of Harvard University. " Mr. Cook is a specialist. His work, as it now stands, represents fairly the very latest and best researches." — George M. Heard, 31. D., of Kew York. "By far the most satisfactory of recent discussions in this field, both in method and execution." — Professor Borden P. Bonnie of Boston University. " Mr. Cook is a great master of analysis. He shows singular justness of view in his manner of treating the most difficult and perplexing themes. — Princeton Review. "The Lectures are remarkably eloquent, vigorous, and powerful." — R. Payne Smith, Dean of Canterbury. " They are wonderful specimens of shrewd, clear, and vigorous thinking." — Rev. Dr. Angus, the College, RegrnCs Park, "These are very wonderful Lectures." — Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. "Traversing a very wide field, cutting right across the territories of rival specialists, the work on Biology contains not one important scientific misstatement, either of fact or theory." — Jiibliotheca Sacra. " Vigorous and suggestive. Interesting from the glimpses they give of the present phases of speculation in what is emphatically the most thoughtful community m the United States." — London Spectator. " I admired the rhetorical power with which, before a large mixed audience, the speaker knew how to handle the difficult topic of biology, and to cause the teaching of German philosophers and theologians to be respected." — Professor i>cl,oberlein, of GMingen Uni- versity. " Ilis object is the foundation of a new and true metaphysics resting on a biological basis, that is the proof of the truth of philosophical theism, and of the fundamental ideas of Christianity. These intentions he carries out with a full, and occasionally with a too full, application of his eminent oratorical talent, and with great sagacity and thorough knowledge of the leading works in physiology for the last thirty years." — Professor Ulrici, University of Halle, Germany. HOUGHTON, OSGOOD & CO., Publishers. BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. HEREDITY, WITH PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. BY JOSEPH COOK. U\ Haai 6' a-yye ' avdpuv evyevrj aireipeiv reava. — EURIPIDES. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. StoersUie press, 1879. COPYRIGHT, 1879, BY JOSEPH COOK. /!// rights reserved. S07198 Franklin Press: Stereotyped and Printed by Rand, Avery, <5r* Co., Boston. INTKODUCTION, THE object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholar- ship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Religion and Science. They were begun in the Meionaon in 1875; and the. audiences, gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to need to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1876, and thence to Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the win- ter of 1876-77, and in that of 1877-78. The audiences contained large numbers of ministers, teachers, and other educated men. The thirty-five lectures given in 1876-77 were reported in the Boston Daily Advertiser, by Mr. J. E. Bacon, stenographer ; and most of them were republished in full in New York and Lon- don. They are contained in the first, second, and third volumes of "Boston Monday Lectures," entitled "Biology," "Transcen- dentalism," and "Orthodoxy." The lectures on Biology oppose the materialistic, 'and not the theistic, theory of evolution. The lectures on Transcendentalism and Orthodoxy contain a discussion of the views of Theodore Parker. The thirty lectures given in 1877-78 were reported by Mr. Bacon, for the Advertiser, and republished in full in New York and Lon- don. They are contained in the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of " Boston Monday Lectures," entitled " Conscience," "Heredity," and "Marriage." In the present volume some of the salient points are : — 1. An historical study of ancient Greece as illustrating the capacity of the race to produce great men rapidly (Lecture I.). 2. A defence of Aristotle's definition of life as "the cause of form in organisms," and of the author's definition of life as " the v VI INTRODUCTION. power which directs the movements of germinal matter" (Lec- tures II., III., IV., and VI.). 3. A discussion of the necessary inferences to be drawn from the facts that a structuring power must exist before tissues can be structured, and that life is the cause of organization, and organi- zation not the cause of life (Lectures II. , III., IV., and VI.). 4. A defence of the fundamental and necessary beliefs of the soul as originating from the nature of the structuring power existing previously to organization, and therefore as independent of experience (Lecture III.). 5. A consideration of the necessary beliefs of conscience as originating in the nature of this same structuring power, and as, therefore, independent of organization and experience (Lectures III. and V.). 6. A reply to several materialistic positions of Maudsley, Dar- win, and Spencer, concerning the causes of the unlikeness of forms in organisms (Lectures II., IV., and VI.). 7. The theory of Lotze as to the union of soul and body and the twofold identity of parent and offspring (Lecture VII.). 8. The author's theory on the same points (Lecture VIII.). 9. The laws of direct, reversional, collateral, co-equal, pre- marital, pre-natal, and initial heredity (Lecture IX.). 10. A discussion of the perfectibility of the race through the application of the laws of hereditary descent (Lecture X.). The committee having charge of the Boston Monday Lectures for the coming year consists of the following gentlemen: — His Excellency A. H. RICE, Governor Prof. EDWARDS A. PARK, D.D., An- of Massachusetts. dover Theological Seminary. Hon. WILLIAM CLAFLIN, Ex-Governor Right Rev. BISHOP PADDOCK. of Massachusetts. Prof. E. N. HORSFORD. Prof. E. P. GOULD, Newton Theologi- Hon. ALPHEUS HARDY. cal Institution. Rev. J. L. WITHHOW, D.D. Rev. WILLIAM M. BAKER, D.D. A. BHONSON ALCOTT. Rev. WILLIAM F. WARKEN, D.D., Bos- RUSSELL STURGIS, Jr. Urn University. Right Rev. BISHOP FOSTER. Prof. L. T. TOWNSEND, Boston Univer- REUBEX CROOKE. slty. SAMUEL JOHNSON. E. M. McPHEHSON. WILLIAM B. MERRILL. ROBERT GILCHRIST. Prof. B. P. BOWNB. Prof. GEORGE Z. GRAY, D.D., Episco- M. R. DEMING, Secretary. pal Theological School, Cambridge. B. W. WILLIAMS, Financial Agent. HENRY F. DURANT, Chairman. CONTENTS. LECTURES. PAGE I. HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE . . 10 II. MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT 36 III. NECESSARY BELIEFS INHERENT IN THE PLAN OF THE SOUL 63 IV. DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS 95 V. DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE .... 127 VI. WHAT CAUSES UNLIKENESS IN ORGANISMS? . . 148 VII. LOTZE ON THE UNION OF SOUL AND BODY ... 178 VIII. THE TWOFOLD IDENTITY OF PARENT AND OFF- SPRING 203 IX. SEVEN PRINCIPAL LAWS OF HEREDITY .... 230 X. THE DESCENT OF BAD TRAITS AND GOOD . . . 254 PRELUDES. PAGE I. SCHOOLS FOR THE AMERICAN INDIAN 3 II. THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POETRY 29 HE. AN AMERICAN-ANGLICAN ALLIANCE 55 IV. Is DEATH DISEMBODIMENT? 85 V. SCHOBERLEIN ON IMMORTALITY 113 VI. FINANCIAL HERESIES IN THE UNITED STATES . . 141 VH. AGRICULTURAL COLONIZATION OF THE UNEM- PLOYED 169 VIII. SCEPTICISM IN COLLEGES 193 IX. THE ELBERFELD PLAN OF POOR-RELIEF .... 219 X. THE LESSER AND THE GREATER EASTERN QUES- TION . , 24T PUBLISHEKS' NOTE. IN the careful reports of Mr. Cook's Lectures printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, were included by the stenographer sundry expressions (applause, &c.) indicat- ing the immediate and varying impressions with which the Lectures were received. Though these reports have been thoroughly revised by the author, the publishers have thought it advisable to retain these expressions. Mr. Cook's audiences included, in large numbers, representa- tives of the broadest scholarship, the profoundest philoso- phy, the acutest scientific research, and generally of the finest intellectual culture, of Boston and New England ; and it has seemed admissible to allow the larger assembly to which these Lectures are now addressed to know how they were received by such audiences as those to which they were originally delivered. I. HEKEDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GKEECE. THE NINETY-FIRST LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 10. "Erl 6ioTi /3e ARISTOTLE : Politics, iii. 8. "Wohl dem, der seiner Voter gern gedenkt, Der froh von ihren Thaten, ihrer Grosse Den Horer unterhalt, und still sich freuend Ans Ende dieser schonen Reihe sich Geschlossen sieht ! Denn es erzeugt nicht gleich Ein Haus den Halbgott noch das Ungeheuer; Erst eine Reihe Boser oder Guter Bringt endlich das Entsetzen, bringt die Freude Der Welt hervor. GOETHE: Iphigenia in Tauris, i. 3. HEEEDITY. i. HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. PEELUDE ON CTJKKENT EVENTS. WHICH is the cheaper, to fight the American In- dians, or to civilize them ? Which is financially the wiser, savage butchery used against savages, treach- ery employed against treachery, Indian agents worse than the savages themselves to match these deci- mated tribes ; or a policy of justice, a style of action now recommended by two administrations at least, although first inaugurated when William Penn, with a sound heart and wise head, sailed up the Dela- ware? [Applause.] Only a few drops of Quaker blood were ever shed by an Indian. The heathenish, electrically infernal creature which we call a savage does treat us much as we treat him. We have 60,- 000 Cherokees who are civilized and quiet, and they cost us almost nothing; but we have 10,000 wild 3 4 HEREDITY. Apaches, and the government pays yearly to the army that takes care of them $2,000,000. We spend now about $5,000,000 a year in gifts to the Indians, or in the support of soldiers to keep them in order. Offi- cial statistics published . lately show that the Indian war in Florida cost $50,000,000 ; the Sioux war of 1852 and 1854, $40,000,000 ; the Oregon Indian war of 1854 and 1855, $10,000,000 ; the Cheyenne war of 1864 and 1865, $35,000,000 ; the Indian war of 1860 with the Sioux, over $10,000,000 ; the war of 1867 with the Cheyennes, $40,000,000. Gen. Sherman says that the cost of caring for the Indians of New Mexi- co by the army, from 1846 to 1860, was $100,000,- 000. Thus the fact stands out beyond all contro- versy, that, for the past forty years, the military operations of the nation against the Indians have cost on the average $12,000,000 annually. Do you say that, after all, the Indian is dying out? The President of the United States reminds us that the American savage is not on the verge of evanes- cence. The statistics that I have before me, from official sources, assert that in 1864 the number of schools among the Indians was only 89, and in 1873 it was 2,600. In 1864 the number of scholars among the Indians in the United States was 261 ; ten years later it was 9,000. In 1864 the number of acres farmed by the Indians was only 1,800 ; in 1873 it was 297,000. In 1864 the number of bushels of wheat raised by the Indians in the United States was 44,000 ; ten years later, 288,000. The value of their animals in 1864 was $4,000,000; in 1873 it was $8,900,000. HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 5 The truth is, that the closest observers understand very well that the poor Indian, who has been on the point of vanishing, has made up his mind not to vanish'! If a just policy could prevail, if the advice given by the honored executive of this nation to the Indian chiefs a few months ago at the White House could be followed, we should find the " figures astounding us ten years hence more than they do now, by indicating an increase of more than ninety per cent in the number of acres farmed by people who once were savages or half-breeds. There is a popular misapprehension on the point of the decadence of the Indian race. -It is true that they are unwilling to cultivate the land ; it is certain that they are haughty at the hoe-handle : but when we walk among their wigwams, and contrast what we see there to-day with their condition ten years ago, a few marvellous facts must fix our attention. Let us pace to and fro in this encampment far away on the Red Lake agency in Minnesota. The Indians at the agency number 1,100, and the reser- vation contains 3,000,000 acres of land. What have these Indians done in a year? I am reciting an official report; and I find that these 1,100 Indians, or, putting out the very young and the very aged, say about 1,000 persons that can handle an agricul- tural implement, have raised 7,000 bushels of corn, an excess of 1,000 bushels over any preceding year ; 2,000 bushels of potatoes, and 430 bushels of other vegetables ; have cut 250 tons of hay ; made 5,000 pounds of maple-sugar — I wish I were there ! — 6 HEEEDITY. gathered 600 bushels of berries ; caught 750 pounds of fish, all of them probably as beautiful as any ever taken in the Adirondacks ; and have captured $14,- 000 worth of furs, and made 1,000 yards of matting. One thousand people, 7,000 bushels of corn ; that is seven bushels apiece : $14,000 worth of furs ; four- teen dollars the result of the trapping of each man. It is evident that they have done better at trap- ping than at most other things ; but have you farmers on these desolate stretches and pine barrens between Cape Cod and Mount Wachusett done better with your agricultural products ? Have many in the fat- ness of the Mohawk Valley, or the Mississippi, done better? No doubt this is a favorable specimen of the action of the Indians on a reservation. But we transfer this audience to the Lake Superior agency in Wisconsin. We find the Indians extremely anxious to have their reservation improved. They express themselves as willing to do without clothing and blankets, if they can have a schoolhouse and teacher. One of them has built a house himself, and furnished it as white men's houses are furnished. He has a bedstead, cups and saucers, plates, knives, forks, and spoons, and a No. 8 cook-stove. What does this indicate ? " He brushes his hat o' mornings : What should that bode? " Much Ado about Nothing, act iii. sc. 2. Should not an abundance of encouragement be given to such enthusiasm ? There is undoubtedly a change HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 7 when we compare the present time with ten years ago. Here is an officer whose language we shall do well to weigh verbatim : " Two things were notice- able : first, the cleanly appearance of all the Indians. I saw no sights from which to turn with disgust, as upon former visits ; and I could not but remark this change. Three years ago, when I first visited these bands, I found them dirty, ragged and filthy, lazy and ignorant," in a degree beyond any thing I had ever imagined. Their blankets, clothing, and hair were perfectly alive with vermin ; and they had the woodlands covered with birch-bark wigwams. To- day I found them generally dressed in civilized cos- tume, their hair combed, and their faces and clean white shirts showing that some one has taught them the use of soap and water." First chapter of the gospel ! " The absence of the birch-bark wigwam assures me that many have taken advantage of the teachings of Mr. and Mrs. Holt, and built houses in which to live and entertain their friends." But Mr. and Mrs. Holt wished to institute a manual-labor boarding-school, and what was their only trouble? There was nothing in their pockets, because you put nothing there. They desired to establish a dis- trict school on that agency. The little building they possessed, they had to close early in June, because of the lack of funds. But all through the Indian reservations we find the desire for little churches and little schools, especially manual-labor boarding- schools, increasing. A significant Indian scene lately occurred at Wash- 8 HEKEDITY. ington. " Build us a big cabin for our children, and teach our young people as you do your own," said a large group of not wholly barbaric chiefs to Presi- dent Hayes at the White House. " Give us wagons with four wheels. Send us priests," was their phrase ; " and we, little by little, will learn to use the land, now that our hunting-grounds are gone." In order to impress their sincerity upon the Executive and this nation, they went away, and meditated two days upon the answer they should make to the advice of the president, and finally threw off their savage robes, — the costume which indicates, with the In- dian, the victories he has obtained, a kind of heraldry, of which, of course, he is as proud as ever noblemen were of theirs in the Old World, — and then these poor children of the wilderness returned to the White House in civilized costume, and before the gaze of the nation made speeches through the mouths of their shrewdest men, clamorous for wagons, school- houses, and churches. [Applause.] We find the better class of the savages desiring these institutions ; and the report that comes back in case after case is simply, " Schools shut : no funds." In hurried America, luxurious and plenteous in its products of all sorts, there is not penuriousness, but there is carelessness. It is difficult to attract public attention to these themes. If a little opportunity here, in presence of scholars, is given to put the trumpet to the lips, you must pardon me for employ- ing it. There is not only great need, but very great necessity indeed, of following up our governmental HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 9 aid by private effort. There has been a pride in the Anglo-Saxon race, ever since parliament was found- ed, in doing things without the support of the king. We do not, like the Communists, depend on the gov- ernment to pay our taxes and protect us at the same time. The government never fleeced us, and we do not ask the government to do every thing. We -have depended altogether too much on Congress to take ' care of these savage tribes. Undoubtedly two ad- ministrations have done well ; but we must supple- ment governmental activity by aiding the best agen- cies of the religious denominations. Whatever carries the schoolhouse, the agricultural implements, the church, the teacher, to the Indian reservations, ought to have behind it a breath of- public sentiment, vigorous as any north or south wind that ever pinched us in winter or blessed us in summer. We must carry to the red men the hearts of Boston and of New York, and piece out the hearts of some Indian agents who are not saints. [Ap- plause.] It has been suspected that Professor Marsh of Yale College told the truth lately concerning Red Cloud. I beg your pardon; I did not intend to discuss politics here; but it is a suspicion of some in Boston, that poor beef was sold to the Indians, and that Red Cloud had really a murky cloud of just complaint behind him. Secretary Schurz has recently affirmed (Dec. 2), in an official document, that, in his opinion, the present machinery of the Indian service is not sufficient for the prevention or dis- covery of abuses and fraudulent practices. The 10 HEREDITY. attempt to bring thievish Indian agents to justice, he says, "is very like catching birds with a brass band." Poorly paid and miserably dishonest officials have fleeced the Indians, and counteracted the effect of our schools. The agent is there, the missionary is there, your teacher is there ; and, if there cannot be funds enough put into the hands of those who are teaching and preaching, we may be sure that the agents who wish to fleece the Indians will in some way obtain funds enough — not, of course, from the Indians, but by taking the supplies that come to them through the general government. For one, I greatly admire the Indian- policy of our honored Executive as expressed in his address to the Indian chiefs a few days ago. If you do not, I shall make no apology for being political so far to-day as to say that better sense has not often been uttered to the savages than President Hayes urged upon those chiefs a few days ago in the East Room of the Capi- tol at Washington. [Applause.] But that sense needs cents behind it. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. It were a felicity, if, in opening the topic of Hereditary Descent, this audience could assemble on the Acropolis, and with the eyes of history and science gaze abroad from the Parthenon upon the transfigured landscape of ancient Attica. Let us suppose ourselves standing in the Parthenon, behind the pillars in whose shadows once fell the footsteps of Pericles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, and Demos- HEKEDITABY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 11 thenes. Yonder on the slope of the brown pasture is the semicircular enclosure called the Pnyx, where the audiences of Demosthenes and Pericles were accustomed to assemble in the open air to listen to the yet unequalled orations, which, next to the dia- logues of Plato and the loftiest Greek dramas, were the best product of Athens in her supreme hour. Among the groves of the Cephissus within sight are the gardens up and down which Plato walked many a year, and in which all of us, according to our cul- ture, have in thouglit more or less often paced to and fro. There was the Academy. This is a modern word. On the other little Athenian stream, the Ilis- sus, stood Aristotle's Lyceum. That term is singu- larly familiar in the latest civilization. At one corner of the Acropolis we have a slope running down to- ward the south-east sun ; and in it is scooped a semicircle, partly in the earth, partly in the rock, uncovered in 1862 by Hofbaurath Strack's German shovels. Here is the spot where the auditors of jEschylus and Sophocles sat when they listened to the sublime dramas which were the true pulpit of ancient Greece. Some of the chairs there have on them carving so perfect that you find a lion's claw still savagely sharp, although sculptured when the Scots and Picts yet harassed the barbaric British isle. We look next on the spot where Socrates is said to have drunk the poison, and to have gazed toward the sunset when he told his weeping disciples that they might bury him after his death if they could catch him. Here is a scarped ridge of reddish- 12 HEEEDITY. gray rock, historically loftier, perhaps, than any other Athenian summit, and certainly more easily visible through the dun smokes of distance than any of its companion heights. We call it Mars Hill; and on it was made a speech which eighteen centuries have heard, and to which eighteen more will listen. This audacious address in the presence of a city filled with temples of gods in marble, and underneath the shadow of Minerva and the Acropolis, face .to the face with the immemorial customs of polytheism, asserted the existence of one personal God, omnipo- tent, omnipresent, and in conscience tangible. To- ward the west the.white sacred road to Eleusis passes over the low, thinly-wooded heights of Daphne. Parnes yonder juts sternly into the northern sky, with a few streaks of vapor clinging to his gnarled and barren sides. In the east is Hymettus, and in the north-east Pentelicus ; beyond it Marathon ; and in the opposite direction gleam the straits of Salamis. What has all this to do with hereditary descent? 1. This ancient Attica opened her arms to emi- grants from Phoenicia, Egypt, Asia Minor, and all the teeming shores of the Mediterranean. 2. The social life of Athens in the classical age was such that only very able men could take any pleasure in it ; and no other city on the globe offered equal attractions to such men. 3. Able emigrants were attracted to a city giving exceptional privileges to the able, and only to the able. 4. Thus arose a system of partly unconscious selec- tion. (See GALTON, Hereditary G-enius.') HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 13 The structure of the Athenian law courts obliged every accused citizen to defend himself by a speech before a jury, and thus made oratory indispensable to success in any prominent career. An Athenian jury often contained five hundred men. Every free citizen needed as much to know how to make a speech as how to bear arms. George Grote says that the Athenian law which required every accused citizen to defend himselt before juries made it as necessary for rhetoric to be taught to the free man as for strategy in war to be learned by the military por- tion of the population. You remember that Socrates defended himself before the jury-court which tried him. It was a political and social necessity for Athens to have teachers of rhetoric, logic, and poli- tics. Great schools sprang up in rhetoric ; and the free men, who were obliged to know how to speak in public for themselves, made good audiences for the orators and poets and philosophers. Little by little, as there were good hearers, there came to be good speakers. "It is the audience that makes the ora- tor," Demosthenes used to say. The free men had little on their hands but their civil duties. They were aristocrats. There was a great population of slaves ; and of course we abhor Athenian customs in this particular. But unless a man had ability, as well as a certain amount of wealth, it was difficult for him to hold a position in ancient Athens. He dropped easily into the artisan class. Emigrants were called in, but they were sifted as fast as they came. All of the average, and the lower than aver- 14 HEREDITY. age rank in ability, were likely to drift into the artisan class. The upper order contained a great mass of exceedingly able individuals. Perhaps there never has been such a development of genius as oc- curred after this unconscious natural selection began in the unrolling of Athenian history. 5. In two centuries, or from 500 to 300 B.C., the Greek race produced the following illustrious per- sons, twenty-eight in number : — These were statesmen and commanders — Milti- ades, Leonidas, Themistocles, — mother an alien, — Aristides, Cimon, Epaminondas, Phocion, Pericles. These were philosophers and men of science — Pythagoras, Socrates, Hippocrates, Euclid, Plato, Aristotle. These were poets — Anacreon, u3Sschylus, Pindar, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes. These were architects, sculptors, and artists — Apelles, Phidias, and Praxiteles. These were historians — Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon. These were orators — JEscbines and Demosthenes. 6. Almost without exception these twenty-eight men were either born, nurtured, or educated, in At- tica ; and they all, without exception, owed inspira- tion to her. 7. But take Attica alone, and we find that in a single century she produced fourteen of these twenty-eight illustrious men. 8. Attica contained, in the best days of Greece, a population of only about ninety thousand free per- HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 15 sons. She had forty thousand resident aliens, and a laboring and artisan population of four hundred thousand slaves. Little Attica physically resembles Eastern Massa- chusetts. It is a desolate stretch of pine barrens. The agricultural class never could have been numer- ous there. Wherever you irrigate the soil, however, it has almost a tropical fatness ; and undoubtedly the rich banks of the Cephissus, which to-day remind you of the shores of the Nile, were originally much more widely spread into the brown dun of the gen- eral landscape around Athens than they are to-day. Wherever there is no irrigation, a vigorous sunlight comes down, and burns up, not the grasses merely, but the orchards and almost the pines. The stalwart evergreen, which in Norway grows half as high as the magnificent monument yonder on Bunker Hill, is stunted in Attica until in most cases it is a shrub. Only in the gorges, where its roots are watered by springs, does it attain a natural size. This barren little territory had in it, in the century from 530 to 430 B.O;, ninety thousand free persons, not enough to make a city of respectable size. These were native and free born, or had obtained full rights, if emigrants. Scholars are very well agreed as to these statistics. Elaborate investigation has been applied to the topic, and we do not need at present to go carefully into the proof that this was the population of ancient Attica. 9. The population of any country renews itself about three times a century. 16 HEREDITY. 10. Suppose, therefore, that we have in the great century of Athenian history two hundred and sev- enty thousand free-born persons, — that is,- three times the ninety thousand. Of these there would be one hundred and thirty-five thousand and ninety males. Of these one-half, or sixty-seven thousand five hundred, would survive the age of twenty-six, and one-third the age of fifty. 11. There was, therefore, in free Attica, in her best century, one illustrious man to every four thousand eight hundred and twenty-two above the age of twenty-six, or say one to every five thousand of mature men. There is the fact. This is what the human race can do. That one to every five thousand of mature Greek men in Attica was illustrious, is an absolutely indisputable circumstance, on which, standing here with the audience upon the Acropolis, I desire you to fasten your attention as a headlight in the per- haps tortuous labyrinth of our discussion as to the natural laws of descent. Galton in his work on Hereditary Genius (American edition, p. 341) makes several mistakes in dates, but, from a narrower in- duction, arrives at this same result, — that one in five thousand of mature men of the great age of Athens was in such a sense distinguished that to this hour we are proud to make these men our teachers in philosophy, oratory, poetry, and art. The sug- gestive course of thought pursued by Galton is freely used in this discussion, and is credited to him ; but so many changes in the way of enlargement and cor- HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 17 rection have here been made in his propositions, that he is not represented by this lecture. Compare this average with that of any nation of Europe since the classic age of Athens. Where is the man in modern Europe that we shall put beside Socrates? Where are the men in England who are fit to stand side by side with Aristotle and Plato? Where is the name in art that can match that of Phidias? I am not underrating modern times, but I beg you to consider the stretch of duration since Greece fell. We have had twenty centuries, and Greece had less time than has elapsed since our fathers' feet pressed Plymouth Rock. ' The narrow territory of Attica produced fourteen illustri- ous men in less time than has now gone by since the battle of Bunker Hill. Greece gave birth in two centuries to the marvels of human attainment and endowment represented by these twenty-eight names. 12. In two thousand years all Europe has not brought forth an equal number of men as illustrious as twenty-eight Greeks were who appeared within two hundred years. In twenty centuries the whole world has hardly produced as many important addi- tions to the roll of honor among leaders of thought and action as Greece made in six generations. 13. Estimated according to the rules of science, the average ability of the Greek race was greatly higher than that of the modern English and Ameri- can. Galton and other British writers assert that it was as much higher than that of the loftiest race on 18 HEREDITY. the globe to-day, as the ability of that proudest race is higher than that of the African. Perhaps if we place Bacon by the side of Plato, and Michael Angelo by the side of Phidias, our esti- mates will produce no great debate. But when we have mentioned Sliakspeare and Milton, when we have taken into view five or six statesmen, we very soon find that we are running outside the range of two hundred years. Take the two thousand years since Greece fell, sum up all the brilliant stars in the historic firmament of those twenty centuries, and there is no more light in all that wide heaven than in the single Greek constellation of Orion, or in the compact Athenian Pleiades,, which blaze close about us as we stand here on the Acropolis. [Applause.] It will be remembered that the average free-born citizens of Athens could listen to the orations of Demosthenes, and immediately vote at the close of them. We have these orations written out by him- self; and Rufus Choate used to say that there is not an audience in the United States, except the judges and lawyers of the Supreme Court, that could bear such condensation of matter. Some one has remarked that you cannot strike a word out of Milton with a trip-hammer. It may be said of the orations of Demosthenes, that the most powerful impact of iron and brass will not strike out a single stone from the rhetorical monument he has raised to himself, and not to himself only, but to the audiences who could follow him with delight. Athenian citizens had been so trained in public debate, and had so educated HEREDITARY DESCENT IK ANCIENT GREECE. 19 themselves to defend their own causes before the law courts, that they were not only pleased, but de- manded, to be addressed in the style exemplified in these marvellous oratorical compositions. Contrast that ability of the average Athenian free population with that of our leisured and propertied class ! Look into the libraries of our wealthier citizens ! Go into the mansions and club-rooms and lyceum-halls of people who, in Athens, would have been free-born ! Have we an Athenian intellectual taste ? Are we as keen, even in the modern Athens, as men were on these slopes around the Acropolis on which we stand? Remember that in the ancient days there were no newspapers. Demosthenes' orations were often not only editorials, but telegraphic despatches. When Cicero appeared before the people in the Roman forum, and said of the conspirator Catiline, "Abiit, excesit, evasit, erupit" ("He has gone, he has es- caped, he has broken forth"), that was news. Now, what if there had appeared that morning an editorial in the Roman Times, Tribune, or Advertiser, giving the same incident? Cicero, no doubt, would have been shorn of many of his thunderbolts. The news- paper wa's not a rival of the platform in classic days, nor was the book to such an extent as it is now. Therefore the orator was inspirited as he is not in modern times. There never will come a day, perhaps, when oratory will have again such power as it had in Athens, and once at Rome. Look into the average book-stalls, and especially into our railway collections of rubbish, and into popular, or Congressional, or 20 HEREDITY. any other assemblies as large and frequent as those addressed by Demosthenes from the Athenian Bema. We find ourselves, although free men, not quite Athenian, even in New England. 14. Athenian greatness declined for several rea- sons : — Morality grew lax. Marriage was unfashionable and avoided. Many of the most ambitious and accomplished women were evil, and so childless. Luxury brought in physical vices. The -mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogenous class. (GALTON, Hereditary G-enius, p. 343.) Is it possible that any one has suspected that I have led you up the Acropolis in order to seek there for some volcanic rift breathing forth the more than Tartarean blackness of the sulphur smoke of free love, or of the leprous dreams of a philosophy which thinks that sound ideas concerning hereditary descent are its exclusive property ? Have you supposed that I have come to this temple of the gods to forget Athenian history? Do you think that we have climbed up the heights of this glorious age of Greece to find that the cause of the strange sublimities that salute us here is disloyalty to natural law? Over the Acropolis and over Boston, over Plymouth Rock and over Mars Hill, over the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle, and over every poet's walk, every philosopher's study, every preacher's kneeling figure in modern days, bend the same meridians of HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 21 natural law ! [Applause.] We shall find history in the ancient day faithful to the latest voice of science as uttered even by Spencer in the modern day; that is, to monogamy. No doubt political oppression hastened the deteri- oration of the Greek race ; for, after Athens became a Roman town, she did not attract great men. Of course she continued to be a teacher. She taught her own conqueror ; and we have abundant evidence that the power of her glorious race continued for a while. But there was lacking in it the purity which belonged to the great era. The noblest age of Rome came -out of monogamy. The old Etrurians believed in the family. The stalwart men who founded the city of the Seven Hills obtained their stalwartness, as every man has since, by obedience to natural law. We find that when Athenian greatness declined, mar- riage was being given up, absolutely indescribable vices were permeating the luxurious society of the wealthier age of Athens, and with looseness of life came in the various forms of intellectual effeminacy. Rottenness is the mother of littleness. The pygmy is always born of disloyalty to natural law. [Ap- plause.] Athenian society became such that men who were not possessed of high endowments could succeed in it ; and thus the natural selection ceased, and the brilliancy of Greece in history declined. 15. Although we have but two centuries of Greek experience, that little arc exhibits the possible results of obedience to the natural laws of hereditary de- scent, and shows of .what the human race is capable. 22 HEREDITY. 16. If we could raise the average standard of civil- ization one grade, in both its moral and its intellec- tual departments, extraordinary changes would occur. The cause of events is to be found very largely in the thought of a few illustrious men. 17. Natural law is now what it always has been. 18. Standing here on the Acropolis, we have the right, therefore, to proclaim on the authority of his- tory and science, that once, by purity and power at their best, the number of illustrious men born has been one in five thousand, and that it can be this again through the operation of the same unvarying causes. Do you doubt this ? and are you more or less scep- tical concerning the operation of the law of heredi- tary descent in modern and even in ancient days ? Who was Aristotle ? He was the founder of the Peripatetic school. He has been the teacher of twenty-two centuries. Who was his father? Nico- machus, a friend and physician to Amyntas II., king of Macedonia. He was the author of works on medicine and science. We have lost his manu- scripts; but the father of Aristotle was a man of extraordinary ability and remarkable culture. Who was Aristotle's grandson ? Nicomachus again. — the name recurs, — and, according to Cicero, this grand- son was the author of the book we call the Nicoma- chian ethics, — a work generally attributed to Aris- totle. Who was Aristotle's cousin? Callisthenes, the philosopher who accompanied Alexander the Great to the East. The mother of that Callisthenes was Hero, a near relative of Aristotle. HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 23 Who was JEschylus ? He was the leader of all Greek poets, and perhaps superior to Sophocles, and even to Euripides. He was not only king of poets, but renowned as a warrior. Who was his brother ? Cyneegeirus, who fought side by side with ^Eschylus at Marathon. On this Acropolis there was once a painting commemorating these two brothers for their action on that battle-field. Who was his second brother? Ameinas, who commenced the attack on the Persian ships at Salamis. Who was his nephew ? Philocles, who was victorious in a poetic combat with Sophocles. Who were other nephews? Euphorion and Bion, who were four times victorious in poetic contests, and founded a tragic school which lasted one hundred and twenty-five years. Who was Cromwell ? The first American. Who was his first cousin? Hampden the patriot, — the second American. You do well to remember these names with gratitude ; for Macaulay says that Hamp- den and Cromwell were once on shipboard in Eng- land with the intention of coming to America for life. Cromwell, Hampden, and Milton were the first Americans. The first cousin of Cromwell was Hamp- den the patriot; another cousin once removed was Edmund Waller the poet. The son Henry behaved with gallantry in the army. Who was William Pitt ? A man who gave Eng- land dignity in the four quarters of the globe. Who was his son? The man who throttled Napoleon between 1783 and 1801, and 1804 and 1806, as pre- mier of a power whose drum-beat was heard in all 24 HEREDITY. the zones. Among his relatives were Lady Hester Stanhope, George Grenville, and Lord Grenville, who himself was premier. Who was Lord Macaulay ? His grandfather was a Scottish minister of Inverary, who was mentioned by Johnson in his account of his trip to the Hebrides. His father was Zachary, an abolitionist, who began a war which had its completion in the American civil contest. [Applause.] Zachary Macaulay was, in many respects, a greater man than his son. Bal- anced, deeply philosophical, a massive soul, he went to the coast of Africa, he bore persecution there, and he bore it for a while with Wilberforce in England, in order to carry past its breaking that earliest slowly- rising wave of anti-slavery, of which we now hear the retreating murmurs, half a million corpses borne floating within its green breast. Who was his uncle? Colin Macaulay, a general, a right-hand man of the Duke of Wellington in his Indian campaigns. Who was another uncle? Aulay Macaulay, a distin- guished controversialist. Who was his first cousin? John Heyrick, head master of Repton, a renowned scholar. Who was his nephew? George Trevelyan, a member of parliament and junior lord of the treas- ury, and author of " Cawnpore." Assembled here upon the Acropolis, look about upon all the summits of intellectual, moral, and so- cial development, and you will find a sun rising behind them, — a truth to which the ages have as yet hardly listened, — that blood means God. Behind many clouds there brightens slowly in the rear of HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 25 these summits in Attica, in Germany, in France, in England, a meek, soft, overawing dawn splendor, prophetic of new eras. We think we stand already upon the heights of illumination concerning natural law. There is a day beneath the horizon, and only its faintest upstretching auroras are yet visible in the present human knowledge and observance of the laws of hereditary descent. [Applause.] n. MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITAKF DESCENT. THE NINETY-SECOND LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 17. Quel monstre est-ce, que cette goutte de semence, de qnoy nous sommes produits, porte en soy les impressions, non de la forme corporelle settlement, mais des pensements de nos peres. — MONTAIGNE. From the hand of Him that loves her ere she sees the day, the soul comes like a babe. Springing from her blessed Maker, she quickly turns to that which yields her joy. — DANTE: Purga- torio, xvi. 84. II. MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. » THERE is an Eternal Power that makes for right- eousness ; there is also an Eternal Power, not our- selves, that makes for beauty, and this is the only- unerring critic of poetry. What is to be the future •of American literature? Ask the Supreme Powers, rather than the Boston critics ! How long are our best productions to express the heart of the ages? Ask the Court and the Throne, and not New York or Cambridge or Concord ! It is turning out, here in America, that only those who live near the Throne can be enthroned. We reverence permanently only the authors who live near the Court. Probably Thanatopsis is the earliest American poem that will be remembered five hundred years hence ; but that production is not yet seventy years old. This is the seventieth birthday of Whittier, and he is older than American poetical literature. Our New England prose and poetry think much of themselves, and the world thinks much of them ; but what do the Su- preme Powers think of American literature ? Their opinion ought to be ours. 29 30 HEREDITY. Undoubtedly the American literature of the future will be largely influenced by our past ; and so we ought to thank Providence that in the first two hundred years of our development we have not had a Byron, great or small, and that no Sardanapalus rules our cities of the .soul as yet. Now that woman has come into literature, it may be hoped that Eng- lish poetry, in spite of a Swinburne now and then, is permanently purified ; and we are English. " The American," Lowell says, "is the Englishman re- enforced." All English literature up to Milton is the hereditary personal property of Americans as much as of Britons. Our poetry has native roots not only in Shakspeare and Chaucer, but also in Virgil and Homer. On the spiritual map Boston is nearer Athens than is any capital of Europe. When a Schliemann uncovers at Mycenae one of the heroes of the Iliad, American Hellenism stands at the tomb with bated breath. A shiver of glad- ness runs through all articulate speaking men, when Homer is found to be not a myth, but a person in whom even a Gladstone can believe as a reality. The roots of the literature of America, however, are watered from a very peculiar atmosphere ; and it may well be that the coloring of our poetry in the future will take something of breadth from our dem- ocratic development. It is a strange thing, that one of the English schools of criticism finds the best American poetry in the savage prose halloo of a Whitman. His barbaric, literary war-whoop, a few think distinctively American. If the breath of it MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 31 could be modulated somewhat, if the patriotism in it could be retained, and adequate respect for the canons of both taste and morals infused into it, no one would object to the distinctively American traits in his uncouth anthems. Two oceans, and many rivers and lakes and moun- tain-ranges, have yet to lift up their voices in Ameri- can song. We have still to learn what the great Sierras can do for literature, and what the Yosemite can say to our poets. On the barren shore of New England our harp has been struck in presence of the Atlantic and of historic memories. England is in sight from Boston, but not from the Yosemite. America catches the proper key-note for her harp only when she takes her seat on the ridge of the continent, — the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, — and listens to those coming ages of which the noise as yet is but an obscure rustle. She has reasons for believing that ultimately American audiences will be as large as all the rest of the world. She sits on the heights of the Sierras, and remembers that she has eleven million square miles of arable land in North and South America, while all Europe, Asia, and Africa together have only ten million square miles through which the plough can be profitably passed. Although less than half the size of the Old World, this conti- nent, as scholars assure us, can maintain a larger population than the Old. The Rocky Mountains and the Andes, as a central line among the inhab- itants of the crowded age of the planet, are likely to be the heights from which ultimately the greatest 32 HEREDITY. assemblages of men may be addressed. I look toward the sunset for the Parnassus of the future. The chief notes of the American harp may yet be struck in sight of the Pacific. As dwellers in a land which Hegel loved to call the continent of the future, we may well patronize that which is distinc- tively national. If we have ever had a national lyrist laureate, has that poet not been he whose spirit, like a flame of Hebrew fire, moved before us in the dark days of the anti-slavery contest, and more effectively, I think, than any other one poetic light, guided us across the sands and through the waters to the promised land ? [Applause.] There are three circles of leaders of thought : those who are in the universities, and teach what has already been established; cultivated men outside the universities, and who are pioneers often ; and then, above these two ranks, we have the prophets, or those singers who are near the Throne. If on this continent the poet is to be pointed out who more deeply than any other has caught the tone of the Court in things ethical, — I will not say in those sesthetical, for in those, too, the Court has a fashion of its own which it is a merit to copy, — that poet is John Greenleaf Whittier. Germany thinks he has the deepest heart among American singers, and compares his religious lyrics to Luther's. It was once my fortune to hear Whittier say, " How uncouth much of my literary work is, compared with that of the great poet of the Charles ! I have never been able to satisfy myself in art. It was often MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 33 necessary for me to write hastily to meet public events." Most touching is it to hear a soul all naph- tha and fire berate itself for aesthetic deficiencies. We shall pardon any poet much in the rhythms of his verse if the rhythms of his heart are in perfect accord with those of the great melodies of the Court. He who speaks before the Throne is adequately ap- proved, if the King crowns him. [Applause.] American and all other literature will undoubtedly take coloring from science of many kinds. It is not improper for us to remind ourselves that some of our leaders of research in its merely physical departments are urging us to make more and more of the revela- tions of the microscope and scalpel when we open our mouths to sing. Tyndall has had an aspiration, perhaps the deepest in his life outside of his career as a physicist, to be the prose-poet of nature. " The position of science," he says, "is already assured, but I think the poet also will have a great part to play in the future of the world. To him it is given, for a long time to come, to fill those shores which the recession of the theologic tide has left exposed; to him, when he rightly understands his mission, and does not flinch from the tonic discipline which it assuredly demands, we have a right to look for that heightening and brightening of life which so many of us need. He ought to be the interpreter of that Power which as Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, has hitherto filled and strengthened the human heart." (Frag- ments of Science, p. 106.) What if the scientific tide itself is a theologic one? What if every scientific fact has a religious side? 34 HEREDITY. When we have poetry which can fly with all the constellations of the sky of culture, and utter to the music which the morning stars sang together the deepest truths of physical and ethical science, we shall no longer have national poems merely. God will give them a great future }7et, no doubt. But the supreme poetry of time to come is not to be national, but international. We are to have harps struck, I hope, that will rise into the region of universal laws in things ethical and physical, and proclaim what all men will be glad to transmute into life, not only on the Andes and the Rocky Mountains, but at the feet of the Himalayas, and under the shadows of the hills of China. It is the will of God, apparently, that men should all have fair chances. The poet of fair chances is the poet of the future. Wherever a human heart beats, there the chords of American literature are likely to be listened to, provided they are struck according to the new key-note of our own demo- cratic heart. There is much more ground for hope that American poetry may obtain a cosmopolitan hearing than that any other poetry on the globe will do so. The drift of history for one hundred years has been toward freedom politically. More and more, as time unrolls, it is to be hoped that the Throne and the Court in all their fashions are to be reverenced in the spirit of theocratic equality among men. The poets of loyalty to all the fash- ions of the Court are those who will be crowned by the Court. MATJDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 35 The forests grow out of the air much more than from the soil. Spiritual atmospheres, and not our external literary fashions, build poems. When we see in the short turf of the upland pastures the fil- tering threads of rain-water in the summer shower, we know that they come out of the sky, and that they nourish the roots of the mighty pines. So with the poetic forests that lift their sable, resounding spires of evergreen into the heavens, and cast their brown sheddings upon the scented gloom of sacred study and emotion beneath them. They are the chil- dren of the air. Great poetry has always been the offspring of deep ethical convictions. The mood which produces poetry of permanent power has thus far in history been closely connected with the reli- gious spirit. Natural scenery is not the important matter for poets, but the scenery of high belief is. It America is to be a Sahara, if a sirocco of doubt is to wither her olives, if we are really to be so frightened when sectarists sneer at illiberality, as to fear to call God, God, and to say that it is wrong to steal, then there will be no pine-forests, however per- fect the soil. It is the air, it is empyrean thought, it is emotions rained out of the azure, which nourish the deep heart of aesthetics. More and more our American civilization will need to build itself out of the rains and dews, and therefore more and more out of its ethical, scientific thought, if the harp of America is to be heard around the world. A new Muse is set before the ages. The Court has many quite settled standards, ethical, aesthetic, social; and 36 HEREDITY. only he who speaks in the tones of the Court can be heard far and long. I sing to her who sits in white, The brightest of earth's latest light ; Her throne an entire jasper stone Where earth and heaven meet in one ; End of the future's vistas vast, Best birth of ages, — best and last, In knowledge ripe, in virtue whole ; Ideal of perfected soul. Far sits her form now, — ages far, Her holy face seems yet a star ; But, as the ages to her run, The star enlargeth to a sun. She beckons me, and I am awed ; She is my Muse ; she is like God. Her look doth Time with God infuse God, God, God is the only Muse. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. If chemical combinations account for living tis- sues, what accounts for the chemical combinations? [Applause.] Let science never cease to make petitioning signals at all doors where the law of cause and effect puts up bells and knockers. To him that knocketh in the name of that law, it shall be opened. Again and again we are told by materialistic science, that some doors are not to be approached ; that some laws are incomprehensible ; that it is absolutely beyond the MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 37 capacity of the human mind to understand the cause of certain changes which result from the action of bioplasmic matter or germinal points. Adhere un- relentingly to clear ideas. If chemical combinations cause the formation of living tissues, it is very sure that something has caused the chemical combina- tions. Have they caused themselves ? Face to face with the facts of biology, dare you adopt the dicer's theory of the universe ? Life or mechanism — which? is the question in debate concerning living tissues. We have many specious, glittering pleas made in support of the mechanical theory of life. In reply, the opponents of materialism bring into court the living tissues themselves. They exhibit the results of the latest exact research into the difference between the living and the lifeless forms of matter. They spread out in biological charts the resplendent certainties, which illustrate the laws of the growth of all living things [referring to charts on the platform]. Aristotle defined life as " the cause of form in or- ganisms." Herbert Spencer defines it as " the defi- nite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external co-existences and sequences." I prefer Aris- totle's definition. It has been a part of the audacity of this platform, to define life in connection with physical organisms, as the power which co-ordinates the movements of germinal matter. Permit me to recur to that definition in replying to Maudsley's pretence, and that of Spencer, and of the whole school of ma- 88 HEREDITY. terialistic, as distinguished from theistic, evolution- ists, — namely, that axioms, intuitions, necessary be- liefs, self-evident truths, are themselves only the result of our habits ; an outcome of inheritance through physiological causes, brought into activity as the race and its animal progenitors have been, age after age, boxed about by their environment from the jelly-speck up. There has been one conscience in this world such that the ages have felt that its laws reveal the very nature of things. " Development," as Newman Smyth remarks, " must account not only for man, but for the Son of man." The conscience, which was the author of Christianity, must have been the result of development, if materialistic theories are correct. The moral sense, we are told, is only the sequel of an accumulation of nerve-tracks in the brain. We cannot say that our fundamental beliefs would not be different if our environment had been so. The central propositions, or necessary beliefs, on which all scientific discussion has relied up to our day, are now themselves to be brought into question in the name of hereditary descent. Stuart Mill used to affirm that there may be worlds in which two and two do not make four. Even the mathematical axi- oms he would explain as the result of operations of the laws of association. Herbert Spencer, however, thinks it very wild to account for our necessary beliefs by individual experience merely. It is now pretty generally conceded, that what we take in from our finger-tips and other senses will not, by the laws MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 39 of association merely, account for our primary be- liefs in self-evident truths, and especially not for our convictions that certain propositions hold good be- yond the range of experience. It is asserted, how- ever, that, if our individual experience will not thus account for our necessary beliefs, that of our ances- tors will. We have not had a trial long enough to account for our certainty that every change must have a cause, and that two straight lines cannot enclose a space ; but our race has had a trial suffi- ciently long for that purpose. We are giving up, in the conflict with the materialistic and with the associational school in philosophy, any very elaborate attacks upon the theory that all our necessary beliefs come from individual experience. Faint and few are the soldiers that stand in the line of the defence of that proposition at the present day. But many, and bold, and exceedingly hopeful are those who would account for our necessary beliefs by hereditary descent, that is, by the experience of the race, not only since we became men, but during all that time when we were being lifted by the law of develop- ment from inorganic matter. Allow me to give a general reply to this precious theory that our necessary beliefs are derived from the experience of our ancestors, and then to descend little by little into detail. If all my necessary beliefs, intuitions, first principles, come from experience, either of myself or of my race, then my convic- tions ought not to outrun the range of the expe- rience either of myself or of my race. You cannot 40 HEREDITY. logically put more into your conclusions than you have in your premises ; but it is beyond all contro- versy that the experience of myself and of the race has been finite. A little while ago there was no life on the planet. That principle of life which has cul- minated in me has not had experience beyond the North Star. But we have some convictions that have a far wider range than the circuit of the polar light. Stuart Mill does not deny that we are bound to believe, or incited by our organism to have confi- dence, that every change must have a cause beyond the North Star, as well as on the earth. We feel very sure that two straight lines cannot enclose a space in the sun any more than they can on Beacon Hill. We have entire confidence that sin in the Pleiades, just as here, can be the quality of only voluntary action. We believe that necessary truths, self-evident propositions, hold good for all time and all space. With no sense that we are doing any thing audacious, we sweep self-evident truths through the whole extent of the infinities and the eternities, and feel as sure of their truth beyond the range of our experience as we are inside the range. Thus far there is no dispute. All that the materi- alistic school says in reply is, that convictions which outrun experience are illusions. Goethe said, and it is the keenest speech Mephistopheles ever made, "Whom God deceives is well deceived." It is as- sumed that our convictions, which outrun experience, are the result of illusions, represent no outward re- ality, might have been different had our environment MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 41 been different ; and thus we are thrown into unrest as to self-evident truth itself. If this unrest is justi- fiable, then what we thought to be adamant under our feet, is rocking on a deck afloat. We are not sure that every change must have a cause. It is assumed by some, that all we can assert is that every change has a cause, — not that it must have. By others it is supposed simply that every change with- in our field of vision has an antecedent which we call a cause ; but we are not allowed by that school to assert that there is any efficient connection be- tween what is called the cause and the effect. It is our duty to ourselves to test these unnatural theories by clear ideas. We are not bound in this assembly to any school in philosophy. We have here but one fundamental tenet : the clear first, the clear midst, the clear last, and, in the clear, the true. We care not what school goes up or down: we care for clear ideas. [Applause.] Let us study some part of the uniform experience of the race, and see whether it has taught us any proposition which we cannot reverse in imagination. I suppose the sun has always risen in the east. My ancestors probably never saw it rise in the west ; and by my ancestors I mean the polyps. If the sun ever has risen in the west, no record of the fact has been preserved ; the colossal circumstance has made no impression on human history. We may, I think, fairly suppose that the sun has always risen in the east. There has been a uniform experience of the race, from the first, of sun-risings and star-risings in that quarter of the 42 HEREDITY. heavens. Well, it turns out that it is Very natural for us to look for the sun in the east, but is it impos- ble for us to imagine that the sun might rise in the west? Not at all. It is perfectly possible for me to imagine that to-morrow morning the orb of day might come up from behind the pines of the Rocky Moun- tains instead of from beneath the watery shoulder of the planet visible from this Massachusetts coast. I can imagine such a geological convulsion as might reverse the motion of the earth, and give us a new order of celestial phenomena, in spite of the perfect uniformity of our experience as a race in regard to these celestial movements. But, now, can I imagine it possible that two straight lines can enclose a space ? Not at all. The moment I understand what two straight lines mean, I see that they cannot enclose a space. It is impossible even to imagine the annihilation of space or time, or that things that are equal to the same thing are not equal to each other, or that a whole is less than a part. But my race has had as uniform an experience as to the sun rising in the east as it has had concerning these axiomatic propositions. It is possible, however, to imagine that the sun might rise in the west, and not possible to imagine that a part is as great as a whole. There is an inconceivability in regard to the latter proposition which does not exist in regard to the other. My ancestors have had no greater num- ber of instances of experience of the whole being greater than a part than they have had instances of experience as to the heavenly bodies rising in the MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 43 east. Four thousand heavenly bodies, visible to the naked eye, rise in the east every day. Experience has been just as uniform about the sunrise as it has been about any mathematical axioms; but you can, in thought, reverse the motion of the sun, and you cannot reverse, even in thought, a mathematical axiom. (See Boston Monday Lectures on Transcendentalism, pp. 12-25.) Those are self-evident truths of which the opposites are not conceivable. They reach beyond all experience ; for we feel sure that they are true beyond the North Star and in all the constellations. They were true in all past time, and will be in all time to come. Now, if the uniform experience of ourselves and ancestors is the origin of both these classes of convictions in our minds, why is there such a difference in the way the mind acts when we bring it face to face with the conceivable and the incon- ceivable as to each class ? There are propositions of which the opposite is utterly inconceivable. They reach beyond the range of experience infinitely in time and in space. Experience cannot account for what goes beyond experience. The universal, self-evi- dent truths of the intellect and conscience, therefore, cannot be deduced logically from the finite experiences either of the individual or of his ancestors. [Ap- plause.] To descend now to detail, let me emphasize a few of the differences between living and lifeless matter : — 1. Living beings retain their identity in spite of the constant change in the particles that compose 44 HEREDITY. their organisms. Inorganic masses lose their identity with the change of their particles. Plymouth Rock is composed of atoms of granite ; and if you wash away all these atoms, and little by little substitute others for them, when you have effected a change of physical identity, Plymouth Rock is no longer Plymouth Rock. But here is Webster, who stands on Plymouth Rock to make an oration ; and there is not in his brain, or in any part of his living tissues, a single atom that was there seven years previously, or perhaps not a single one that was there twenty months ago. But Webster is Webster in spite of the frequent loss of his physical identity. Your living being retains its identity in spite of the change of its particles ; your dead mat- ter does not ; and here is one hint of the breadth of the colossal chasm between living and lifeless forms of matter. [Applause.] 2. In living matter the component atoms are in a state of unstable equilibrium, which chemical and physical forces are constantly endeavoring to overset. In lifeless matter these forces reduce the atoms to a condition of stable equilibrium. The tissues of all living things, when exposed to chemical forces alone, tend to revert to the condi- tion of inorganic matter. When life departs from the body, chemical laws reduce the organism to dust. This shows how unstable is the combination produced by the bioplasts, and how inadequate chem- ical forces are to account for the power which in life prevents that equilibrium from being overset. (See MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 45 BOWNE, Professor, The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, pp. 95-106.) 3. Organic matter grows ; inorganic matter does not. The former increases by selective assimilation, the latter by accretion. What is added to the one gains no new properties : what is added to the other takes on new powers. When I roll my snowball in the snow, what is added is snow after it is added. When Plymouth Rock is rolled in the sand, the particles which are taken up acquire no new properties. But, when new matter is added to living tissues, it takes on new properties. It is as different from the old as life is from death. Gases, food of various kinds, are absorbed by the bioplasts, and changed into germinal matter which has a power of weaving all the tissues of the body. Such new properties are given it, that we have in one place a nerve, in another a muscle, in another a tendon, in another a cellular integument. This action is altogether different from that of inor- ganic matter, and implies a power higher than chemi- cal, and co-ordinating all these activities. 4. Established science teaches that the molecular atoms are always the same. They change their com- binations, but not their individual qualities. Clerk Maxwell has written a famous essay on molecular atoms ; there has been elaborate investi- gation of this topic by many physicists, and it is now generally conceded that the ultimate particles of matter never change their shape or their proper- ties. It follows that you cannot draw life out of 46 HEEEDITY. these molecular atoms at the end of any process unless you put it in at the beginning. 5. Here are the atoms ; they do not change their qualities, but only their combinations. Very well, then : if you will allow me to use an algebraical symbol, we know that in the combination of atoms a is always a, and not a plus b or a minus 5. What- ever combination a molecular atom enters into, it is always itself, and not itself plus something or minus something. Unless life is involved in the molecular atoms of inert matter, you will not evolve it out of their combination. Spencer admits this, and so brings forward the theory, in his biology, of " com- pound molecular units," whatever that may mean. Compound units! UE pluribus unum" indeed ! A man cannot be in the American Union if he is in none of its States. 6. Living tissues are co-ordinated according to definite plans. 7. As every change must have an adequate cause, we are compelled to infer the existence of a co-ordi- nating force behind the action of the bioplasts in each organism. 8. That force is the cause of form in organisms. 9. It has as many types as there are types of or- ganisms, vegetable and animal. 10. We do not find in chemistry the co-ordinating power which is the cause of form in organisms. But incontrovertibly there is a power which co-ordinates the action of these germinal points, for they are co-ordinated. MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 47 11. As the co-ordinating power which is the cause of form in organisms cannot be found in matter, it must be looked for outside of matter. Like any- other cause, its nature must be judged of from its effects. Any man who has stood face to face with the re- sults of microscopical research in the last twenty years will, I think, be very slow to adopt any other than Aristotle's definition of life. Perfectly parallel with that definition is the one given here. 12. Life is the immaterial co-ordinating power be- hind the movements of germinal matter. That definition having been defended by me at great length previously, I shall now use our former conclusions. From the point of view reached in thir- teen lectures on Biology (see vol. i. of the Boston Monday Lectures), I must begin — and I can only begin to-day — a reply to Maudsley. 1. Germinal matter, or bioplasm, increases in quan- tity as living tissues grow. Once every living thing was but a single naked mass of bioplasm. 2. With the increase of quantity there is an in- crease of the force in the germinal matter. Your naked, throbbing mass of bioplasm takes on a wall, and divides and subdivides, and weaves the walls of its cells into tendon and nerve and muscle, and coils these around each other, according to a predetermined plan. One-fifth of the bulk of the mature organism is made up of germinal matter. One bioplast develops into many. 3. This increase is derived from the assimilation of inorganic matter. 48 HEKEDTTY. The individual cell takes in nutrient matter from without, transforms it into living matter, and throws it off as formed matter. You remember that there are but three lands of matter in living tissues,— nutrient matter, living matter, and formed matter. The inorganic is changed into the germinal ; the ger- minal throws off the formed ; and, as your bioplast divides and subdivides, no doubt the matter which it weaves into these various structures is derived from the inorganic world. 4. Maudsley asks how we know that the movements of germinal matter, which are sustained by inorganic matter, did not originate in inorganic matter. He says, " Admitting that vital transforming mat- ter is at first derived from vital structure, it is evident that the external force and matter transformed does, in turn, become transforming force — that is, vital. And, if that takes place after the vital process has once commenced, is it, it may be asked, extravagant to sup- pose that a similar transformation might at some period have commenced the process, and may ever be doing so? The fact that in growth and development, life is con- tinually increasing from a transformation of physical and chemical forces is," after all, in favor of the pre- sumption that it may at first have so originated. And the advocate of this view may turn upon his opponent, and demand of him how he, with a due regard to the axiom that force is not self-generatory, and to the fact that living matter does increase from the size of a little cell to the magnitude of a human body, accounts for the continual production of trans- MAUDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 49 forming power ? A definite quantity only could have been derived from the mother structure, and that must have been exhausted at an early period of growth. The obvious refuge of the vitalist is to the facts that it is impossible now to evolve life arti- ficially out of any combination of physical and chemi- cal forces, and that such a transformation is never witnessed save under the conditions of vitality." (Body and Mind, English edition, p. 169.) Probably Maudsley's is the acutest question that English materialism has ever asked. For one, I agree most cordially with Professor Bowne of Bos- ton University, in his work on "The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer," when he says (p. 104) that " this is the best thing the correlationists have said yet, and it is the best that can be said." Wishing the whole force of this argument to be appreciated, I have cited Maudsley at length, and am anxious that he should be read, not only in his new edition of his "Physiology of Mind," 1877, but in his essays on " Body and Mind," 1873. The latter work contains a suggestive paper on " Conscience and Organization." Maudsley is not to be disputed when he says that the germinal points absorb inorganic matter, and that they transform it into other bioplasts and the various tissues. As their power evidently grows by acqui- sition of power from inorganic matter, who knows but that it commenced so ? That is, who knows but that spontaneous generation may be a fact, or that there is any co-ordinating power behind these rhyth- mically moving co-ordinated germinal points ? That 50 HEREDITY. is the objection ; and that, I suppose, is the Malakoff of English materialism. 5. My reply is that when I define life strictly as the 'co-ordinating power governing the movements of germinal matter, I do not know that this power is increased by the multiplication of the bioplasts. The power of co-ordination is the subtlest power in life ; and this power resides in the original germ; and we do not know that it is increased by the growth of the living subject. I admit that chemical forces are drawn into the labyrinth of activity in the living tissues, but not that the co-ordinating power behind the bioplasts is in- creased. Very evidently that power is not changed, for the plan of an organism is the same from first to last, through its whole growth. We do not know that the weaver is any more skilful when the web is half woven than when he has merely set the web, and first begins to throw the shuttle. There is an increase in the amount of power mani- fested by the organism ; but there is no increase in the co-ordinating power, which is what materialism never accounts for. The weaver has just as much co-ordinating power when the web is arranged for the first stroke of the shuttle as he has after it is woven, and the finished product is held up in its glory before admiring eyes. The co-ordinating power is what I call life ; and in the germ of your eagle, your man, your lion, your swallow, that co-ordinating power has a law such MATJDSLEY ON HEREDITARY DESCENT. 51 that there cannot come out of the germ of the lion a swallow, nor out of the germ of the swallow a lion. Every thing under the law of hereditary descent breeds true to its kind. I do not see that there is the slightest evidence that this co-ordinating power is increased. The reply to Maudsley is, therefore, contained in that definition of life upon which I have just insisted. Give me, as a statement of what life means, this phrase, the co-ordinating power which directs the movements of germinal matter, and I will defy Maudsley to prove that the co-ordinating power is increased by the growth of organisms ; for just as much of it is needed in these first strokes as in the last, and one would think a good deal more. [Ap- plause.] Very great conclusions follow from defining life as the co-ordinating power directing the movements of germinal matter : — 6. The first law of hereditary descent is, that every living thing reproduces its own kind, and no other kind. 7. The co-ordinating power which we call life lies behind this law of hereditary descent. 8. A cause must precede its effect. 9. The co-ordinating power which is the cause of form in organisms must exist before the organization which it causes. Even Hackel and Huxley hold that life is the cause of organization, and not organization of life. 10. Transmitted co-ordinating power, therefore, does not depend on a physical environment for its 52 HEREDITY. existence or its habits of action, by which it always breeds true to its kind. 11. The transmitted co-ordinating power is, there- fore, a capacity not dependent on experience. 12. But this transmitted original co-ordinating power in man contains the plan of his soul as well as of his body. 13. That plan has peculiarities which in man bring into existence the intuitions and self-evident truths, or what are called innate or connate ideas. 14. The self-evident truths, the intuitions, the laws of the necessary beliefs, including those of conscience, are, therefore, not the result of experience, but origi- nal parts of the transmitted co-ordinating power in man, and independent of the co-ordinated organism. [Applause.] III. NECESSARY BELIEFS INHERENT IN THE PLAN OF THE SOUL, THE NINETY-THIRD LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 24. Nihil est in intellect!!, quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus. — LEIBNITZ: Nouveaux Essais. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home. WOKDSWORTH : Ode on Immortality. III. NECESSARY BELIEFS INHERENT IN THE PLAN OF THE SOUL. PKELUDE ON CUKBENT EVENTS. IN the possible, I do not say in the probable, future, there lies, at a distance of not more than three centuries, an alliance, not a union, of Great Britain, the United States, Australia, India, belting the globe, and possessed of power to strike a uni- versal peace through half the continents and all the seas. The disbanding of large standing armies among English-speaking peoples would be one majestic end attainable by this majestic means. Great Britain alone now virtually rules the waves. Except in India, an alliance of the English-speaking peoples of the world could be attacked only from the sea. But the 'fleets of an American- Anglican commercial league might easily govern the oceans. Such an alliance was deliberately proposed not long ago in a speech before the Union League Club of New York, by Mr. Forster, a member of Parlia- ment, and Mr. Gladstone's prospective successor as 65 56 HEREDITY. leader of the liberal party in English politics. (See report in Tribune of Dec. 15, 1874.) The haughty and cautious British press emphatically praised the scheme as practicable, and to England desirable. Even so conservative a paper as the London Spec- tator says that such an alliance would, for geo- graphical reasons, be utterly beyond attack from any first-class power, unless China should ever be- come one; and that, except in India, it could be attacked only by fleets which eighty millions of men, always foremost in naval warfare or maritime enter- prise, could with no great or exhausting effort brush away from the seas. It would be open to such a league, without dangerous interventions, to secure permanent peace among nearly half mankind. Dream though it may be, this possible future naturally rises before our thoughts in the jubilant Christmas season, the first occurrence of which Milton describes in words which, God grant, may yet be true of time to come: — " No war or battle's sound Was heard, the world around ; The idle spear and shield were high uphung ; The hooked chariot stood Unstained by hostile blood ; The trumpet spake not to the armed throng ; And kings sat still with awful eye, As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was by." Hymn to the Nativity. What would be some of the rules of such an alli- ance, Anglo-American and Australian, if the nations should ever be wise enough to enter upon its organ- NECESSARY BELIEFS. 57 ization ? Perhaps they would first agree not to enter into war with each other without trying arbitration as a remedy. Already a precedent has been set at Geneva in a famous arbitration trial, such that it would be very difficult now for English-speaking nations to accept war with each other without trying arbitration first as a method of settlement. At Geneva was spun by Clotho a thread which Lachesis twists, and Atropos seems unlikely soon to sever. " Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist ! and Atropos, sever 1 Strong is Death, and strong is Sin, But only God endures forever." LOWELL. Would free trade be the rule as to commercial intercourse? That is a difficult question, and one not to be brought up earliest in the formation of any Anglo-American alliance. But perhaps, after decid- ing that arbitration is to be tried before we make war with each other, we should agree that arbitra- tion is to be offered to every nation that purposes to make war on us. Our example in favor of this measure might strike peace through many a minor kingdom. The make-weight of the political in- fluence of an Anglo-Saxon alliance, thrown into the scale of bloody war, would often be enough to bring contending peoples of no great size to peace. Per- haps uniform standards of weight and measure and money would be adopted throughout such a league. Possibly patent-laws would cover the whole territory of the alliance ; perhaps copyright would. Of course 58 HEREDITY. international law, which already begins to be codi- fied, would advance to new details and enlarged honor. After these earlier and smaller strands should have been tied, there might come a day when the question would be raised, whether all ports of this alliance should not be open to free trade. Having once adopted arbitration as an international law, shall Great Britain and the United States treat each other as enemies in trade, although friends in poli- tics ? There is much to be said against free trade ; but probably an English-speaking alliance would at last drift into it. What inspiritment would come to commerce with free trade among all English-speak- ing peoples in the whole world ! [Applause.] What encouragement would come to all friends of peace if commerce were to be made a missionary for peace, not only in England, but in Australia, and in America as well ! If the Anglo-American alliance of the possible future were to become, in the inter- ests of commerce, a missionary of peace in all seas, it surely would be the same in all continents. Our ocean lines of transit are now so connected with the railways and telegraphs, that an alliance able to manage the seas would also need to assert its power over many large lines of railway transit ; and so, little by little, commerce, after managing the water, would manage the land in the interest of peace. How much power would there be behind such an alliance? What would be the strength of its numbers ? We have in Great Britain forty millions NECESSARY BELIEFS. 59 of people, and in the United States more than forty millions. Here in Canada and British America are four millions, and in the West Indies and Guiana another million and more. Then we have in Austra- lasia two and a half millions belonging to the British Empire. We have in the scattered Eastern posses- sions of Great Britain more than three millions of people. We have in Africa one million and a half who are ruled by Queen Victoria, and in India two hundred and forty millions of whom she is the em- press. What, now, if all these scattered millions should be united ? we should have about three hun- dred and twenty-five millions in an Anglo-American alliance, or very nearly a quarter of the population of the world. At another centennial of our country and of the British Empire, more than a quarter would be inside this possible league. The Sandwich Is- lands would probably join such an alliance. Would progressive Japan do so? Would Egypt? Would Greece ? The Pacific would be to an alliance of all Eng- lish-speaking peoples only what the Mediterranean was to the Roman Empire. Such a league might finally adopt the supreme measure of defending itself as a unit in case of at- tack. That would be, perhaps, the last thing arrived at, after free trade had cemented us. But give me these four regulations, — no war without arbitration between English-speaking peoples ; arbitration to be offered to every nation that attacks such a league ; common laws as to patents, copyrights, and money ; 60 HEREDITY. and, lastly, free trade, — • and I, in spite of Washing- ton's remarks about the danger of entangling alli- ances, dare predict that the time will ultimately come when the English-speaking league will defend any one part of itself by the force of all its parts. What good would this accomplish? It would make the nearly complete disbanding of standing armies safe in all English-speaking nations. It would reduce the size of armies on the Continent of Europe, although Germany and France might not belong to such an alli- ance. One part of the force of Germany is kept up because of the power of Great Britain. Not only is France her neighbor, but England is also ; and Ger- many, although not given to making war, is given to such preparations for war as to make peace advisable to all her neighbors. The portion of the alliance openest to attack from the land would be in India. The league could be attacked from Russia better than from any other quarter. But/om three hundred and twenty-five millions of people, let them say that they will have peace with each other, and, all history for it, they will ultimately have peace with the world. [Applause.] Your Charles Sumner stood here years ago, and made a speech for peace ; but it was his stern for- tune to pass through life a sentinel on the edge of the most terrific civil conflict the world ever saw, except one, — the Thirty Years' War. He had far forecast, and regarded our battles as only a police movement for the execution of the laws. He did not admit that his peace principles were fundamen- NECESSARY BELIEFS. 61 tally compromised by any thing he did in support of the Union during our civil conflict. It was the dream of many cultivated men in Boston and Cam- bridge twenty-five years ago, that we had come to an era in which wars were to be unpopular with cul- ture throughout the world. It is the dream of many men of culture yet, that such an era is ahead of us. Our great commissions for the discussion of inter- national law, and for the arrangement of common rules in commerce, are full of hope to-day, although 'most of their members are lawyers and dry men of the world, that self-interest will ultimately prevent war between people of the English-speaking class. Is it altogether too early for us to look upon our Peace Societies as timely organizations? Are they not a promise to which at this season we may well listen as to a bugle calling us from afar, and hav- ing in it more hope than was in the bugles heard at Lucknow ? " England and America," wrote Carlyle to Dickens in 1845, " are properly not two nations, but one ; inseparable by any human power or diplo- macy; being already united by Heaven's Act of Parliament and nature and practical intercourse ; indivisible brother elements of the same great SAX- ONDOM, to which in all honorable ways be long life." When Charles Sumner's oration for peace was made, not a few circles of culture were inclined to think that Tennyson sang something authoritative when he said, — " I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be, 62 HEREDITY. Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled, In the parliament of man, the federation of the world." Locksley Hall. You say that these words are outgrown ; but a late poetess, whom England loves to call Shakspeare's daughter, was to the very last hour of her life in- clined to the same opinions. It ill becomes us dull people, when a Mrs. Browning sings ahead of us, not to see her spirit from the Unseen beckoning England and America and the ages to the final realization of her own ideal: — " Rise : prefigure the grand solution Of earth's municipal insular schisms — Statesmen, draping self-love's conclusions In cheap vernacular patriotisms. Bring us the higher example : release us Into the larger coming time. No more Jew or Greek then — taunting Nor taunted : no more England nor France, But one confederate brotherhood, planting One flag only, to mark the advance, Upward and onward, of all humanity. " National voices, distinct yet dependent, Ensphering each other as swallow does swallow, With circles still widening and ever ascendent In multiform life to united progression. These shall remain. " Each Christian nation shall take upon her The law of the Christian man in vast : The crown of the getter shall fall to the donor, And last shall be first, and first shall be last, And to love best shall still be to reign unsurpassed." Italy and the World. NECESSARY BELIEFS. 63 THE LECTURE. When we hear the noise of the falling water, or the hiss of the steam which drives a loom, we do not confuse the power of these agents with that of the weaver. The unintelligent forces of the waterfall or the steam are contrasted with the weaver, much as the blind chemical and physical forces at work in living organisms are contrasted with life. You know that the steam and the water cause the movements of the loom, and yet that the weaver co-ordinates those movements. The rude, sightless forces of the waterfall and of the steam may be essential ; but they do not construct the machinery which they move, and there can be no weaving until there is a loom. Even after the appropriate mechanism has been brought into existence, you must have the weaver to co-ordi- nate its activities. He does not put forth all the force there is in the loom, but he co-ordinates it all. Surely there is a distinction between co-ordinating, and causing the movements of germinal matter. Sometimes the weaver makes the loom, and moves it, too. In this life, chemical and physical forces play through the organism ; but when we drop the natural, and acquire a spiritual body, perhaps the change is analogous to that which occurs when a weaver, whose loom has been moved by a waterfall or steam, dispenses with their aid, and sets the loom in motion by his own force. In the defence of the authority of the necessary beliefs, or axiomatic truths of the intellect and con- 64 HEREDITY. science, against the pretences of materialism, what are some of the uses which can be made of a just and verifiable definition of life ? 1. Correctly defined, life in physical organisms is the power which co-ordinates the movements of germinal matter. 2. This definition is not intended to apply to dis- embodied life, nor to the Divine Existence. It is a definition, not of life merely, but of life in physical organisms. 3. It is identical with Aristotle's definition of life as the cause of form in organisms. 4. Co-ordination, the greatest marvel in the struc- ture of living tissues, is, by this definition, put in the foreground. 5. But the co-ordination of the movements of germinal matter or bioplasm only is mentioned, for no other form of matter in living tissues has the power of movement. Inorganic matter does not move, formed matter does not move, except as each is moved by the bio- plasts. To account for the changes in the position of the former, we must therefore fasten our attention on the movements of the latter. The defect of Spen- cer's, and of many other attempted definitions of life in physical organisms, is that such life is not spoken of as connected always with germinal mat- ter. Spencer is justly criticised by Drysdale for not confining the range of his definition to this peculiar kind of matter called bioplasm. (DRYS- DALE, Protoplasmic Theory of Life, London, 1874, p. NECESSARY BELIEFS. 65 176.) It is now conceded even by Huxley that life exists only in the matter of the bioplasts. Where life came from, he says, we do not know; but we do know, that, so far as human observation has extended, life has been found only in connection with bioplasm. Therefore, in the definition of life in physical organ- ism, bioplasm must be prominently mentioned. Why not say that life in physical organisms is the power which co-ordinates the movements of the bio- plasts? Because there are individual animalcules which have life, and yet consist apparently not of many bioplasts, but of a single naked throbbing mass of this germinal matter. When such an ani- mal wishes to digest its food, it sometimes thrusts the nutriment 'into its side, making a stomach there, which absorbs the pabulum ; and then the debris is removed, and the animal is whole again. This pro- cedure evidently involves a co-ordination of move- ments ; and we say that the action by which such an animalcule digests its food is not the result of chemi- cal and mechanical forces merely, but of life which directs them, or of a power which co-ordinates the throbbing of that single mass of bioplasm of which the animalcule may consist. There is a co-ordination there such that a process essential to the preservation of the animal is carried through triumphantly ; and the chemical and physical forces, as we have seen in previous lectures, do not account for that co-ordi- nation. Something must account for it ; and that something we call life. The power is there, for we see its effects. But when we rise to the more com- 66 HEREDITY. plex organisms, the fact of co-ordination stands out before us with blazing vividness. We have co-ordi- nation upon co-ordination, wheel within wheel; and the cause of the co-ordination we call life. 6. The definition does not assert that life causes the movements of the germinal points or bioplasts, but only that it co-ordinates those movements. 7. It does not deny that chemical and physical forces may act through the bioplasts, but only that these forces can account for the co-ordination of their action, or for the origination and preservation of form in organisms. What follows from this definition? It is my conviction, that, in discussing the nature of life, our faces are turned toward a land in which, sooner or later, most important discoveries are to be made. My feeling is that the debate between atheists and theists is to be settled in the country of which we now stand on the edges in biology. So far as there is a debate concerning fundamental truth, so far as the great questions concerning neces- sary beliefs are drawn into dispute, they are to be settled here, partly by biological and partly by metaphysical knowledge. The great Scottish-Amer- ican metaphysician, President McCosh of Princeton, has spent a life in opposing the associational school in philosophy. His various defences of the funda- mental truths, intuitions, axioms, and necessary be- liefs, are the best that have been made in the English language, and from the metaphysical side of research, since the death of Sir William Hamilton. (See NECESSARY BELIEFS. 67 MILL'S reply to McCosh, in the third edition of his Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy ; and the reply to Mill, in the appendix to McCosn's Defence of Fundamental Truth, pp. 435-470.) He said to me the other evening, what he has often said publicly, and what I therefore venture to quote : " The asso- ciatiorial school is disappearing. It soon will have disappeared entirely. Schopenhauer and Hartmann, too, will disappear. Hermann Lotze will not. It is wise to keep now in the foreground the physiological part of philosophy, for that is the battle-field of the future." The defence of fundamental truth upon which I am venturing here is based upon physiologi- cal considerations quite as much as upon metaphysi- cal. It is, in short, to stand upon that definition of life which I hope was defended adequately in thir- teen lectures which have already been given here on Biology. Since there is nothing so good as eyesight for the quenching of doubt on all biological questions, I beg leave to suggest to those who are not deficient in leisure, that one of the best objects they can buy, in these days of costly Christmas presents, is an efficient microscope. There is more and more use of the microscope by all students of philosophy. Some- times serious interests are subserved even by the amateur study of biology. You can in the few evenings at your disposal, in a couple of years, make yourselves competent to read the very best special- ists in biological science. Until you read them, and learn how to test their processes and to obtain 68 HEEEDITY. knowledge at first hand, you may find your minds full of unrest on all these great physiological and philosophical themes. Until you can approach in- telligently the supreme authorities among the spe- cialists on these topics, you may be easily misled by second-rate materialistic writers ; and, therefore, I advise you, as a guide in biological reading, to make an adequate personal study of living tissues. Perhaps it is not improper for me to hint that I fol- low my own advice, as it seems to be taken for granted by certain critics of the bravely anonymous species that this is not the fact. This city has the credit of having produced the best microscope in America, a kind of freak of science and fortune, a one seventy- fifth objective, and one that perhaps could not now be produced again. Photographs taken Try this in- strument I have lately seen commended most highly in the Paris Journal de Micographie (number for November, 1877). That microscope is at the service of this audience ; and I hope to bring to you testi- mony from it again and again in the course of the next few months, as I did last winter in the lectures on Biology. Some time, when the noon can be darkened in this room, I am to give you its work actually in progress on a screen here, so that we shall obtain the facts at first hand. It has been hinted here, that Butler and Agassiz are perhaps correct in assuming that the argument for man's immortality, by striking against the possi- bility of the immortality of instinct, is not wrecked, but glorified. For saying precisely what Bishop But- NECESSARY BELIEFS. 69 ler has said (Analogy, part i. chap, i.), I have lately been sharply assailed by some one who fights under a mask, indeed, but who from the beginning to the end of his article points out not a single error of biological fact in a discussion which he blames you for applauding ignorantly. [Applause.] When this house is as full as it is to-day, there are in it, among the fifteen hundred or two thou- sand persons present, and representing all shades of opinion, at least three or five hundred liberally educated men who know what they are about ; and I repel indignantly all the scapegrace scribble of anonymous writers, whether in the newspaper or quarterly press, against an audience which has been drawn together now for more than two years on the busiest hour of the busiest day of the week, sim- ply by large and complicated themes, and not by the speaker. You have come here to listen to very imperfect discussions of very important themes ; and, although I am not a native of New England, I dare affirm that there is not on this continent another city that would send out for as long a period and at such an hour an audience as large as this to study problems as complicated as those that have come before you. [Applause.] My opinions are not worth a rush; but the general agreement of five or eight hundred or a thousand scholarly per- sons is a sign of the times. You blame me for having allowed a renowned publishing firm, whose judgment in matters of taste is not often ques- tioned, to preserve, in the first editions of the lee- 70 HEREDITY. tures delivered here, a slight record, made not by me, but by the stenographer, of what this audience has said. Thomas Carlyle made a speech at Edin- burgh, a Lord Rector's inaugural address, before scholars and the people at large. He sits down to edit his works in a costly final edition for posthu- mous circulation. He left in all the audience said. (See CAKLYLE'S collected works, vol. xi. pp. 295- 334.) It would have been my preference, as a mat- ter of taste, to have left out what this audience said ; but it is so peculiar an audience that it was thought the examples of Carlyle and Phillips — for Phillips's speeches are edited in the same way, hisses and all recorded, as they have been here — were worth fol- lowing. Had I been hissed here as often as Phillips was in the days of the anti-slavery contest, I should have thought those remarks of the audience quite as worthy of preservation as the others; and, if any have thought that the audience has expressed it- self partially, please let the other side be heard here, and it shall be recorded. [Applause.] I have not the honor of a personal acquaintance with fifty per- sons in this audience. It appears to be thought that I have paid people for coming here, and ap- proving what may happen to be said on this plat- form. There are no officers in this church, and no creed either, except clearness. I am entirely free, I suppose, from bondage here, except to the law of the survival of the fittest. [Applause.] You come here for reasons best known to yourselves, and as- suredly you are perfectly independent of this plat- NECESSARY BELIEFS. 71 form. The public understands these facts. What you have said, if you please, has gone very much further than any .thing I have said. Pardon me for this digression, but let me affirm that there was not a little of consideration of the matter before it was decided that what you said should be preserved in any record of the proceedings here. I repeat, that, as a matter of taste, I should have been willing to have left it out ; but, as a matter of influence, and as a means of tiding readers through dry discussion, I was willing to leave it in, after the precedents of Phillips and Carlyle. I hold that my opinions are not worth noticing, but that the general agreement, week after week, month after month, and year after year, of an audience as peculiar as this, is a sign of the times ; and I find that those who are most opposed to what you have said, and to its being recorded, are those who are most opposed to the opinions you have approved. [Applause.] If we are convinced that life has been correctly defined, we can now go on to make inferences from that definition, of the most commanding interest. 1. Matter is co-ordinated in living tissues. 2. Some adequate force co-ordinates matter in liv- ing tissues. 3. The co-ordinating force must exist before it can act. 4. It must act before it can co-ordinate the matter contained in the tissues. 5. The co-ordinating force, therefore, exists and acts before the organism which it co-ordinates. 72 HEREDITY. Excuse the shortness of the steps I take in the ele- mentary stages of this argument. It is very neces- sary, occasionally, in following out the links of a course of thought, to use propositions that seem self- evident. The strength of an argument is in the self- evident propositions which it contains. Using often here the form of statement which the logicians call a catena, I shall be allowed, for the sake of brevity and clearness, to develop argument by the use of ordinal numbers for cardinal points. 6. The co-ordinating force directing the movements of germinal matter is defined as life. 7. Life, therefore, is the cause of organization, and not organization the cause of life. 8. As the cause must go before the effect, life exists and acts before the organization which it causes. 9. It exists and acts on a plan. 10. In each different type of physical organism, it < exists and acts on a different plan. 11. Every living being breeds true to its kind. We now approach wholly new matter in the shape of inferences from propositions already elaborately discussed here. 12. In the transmission of the co-ordinating force called life, the force remains unchanged in the type of its action. . Of course I am not forgetting the slight exceptions to this law, or variation in heredity; but, to speak roundly, the great rule of hereditary descent is that like breeds like. NECESSARY BELIEFS. 73 13. The different types of organisms are implicitly contained in the co-ordinating force of their several germs. 14. The different physical organs are in the plan of this co-ordinating force. 15. The different spiritual faculties, including the conscience in the case of man, are implicitly pro- vided for in the plan on which the co-ordinating force acts. 16. Among the faculties of the soul provided for in the plan which antedates the germ of the -body, are the perceptions of self-evident truths, both intel- lectual and moral. 17. The necessary beliefs of the intellect and con- science are therefore in the original plan of the soul. 18. They are brought into activity by experience. The loom is worthless unless it has something to weave. When I affirm that the necessary beliefs are connate, I do not assert that they effect any thing for philosophy before we come into contact with the exterior world, and with our own inner world. We must have something to weave, before we can pro- duce a web. But, in spite of all that, the web is not the loom ; neither did the web or waterfall or steam produce the loom. 19. As original parts of the co-ordinating power in- volved in the origination and transmission of life, the necessary beliefs of the intellect and conscience are as independent of the structure and environment of the co-ordinated organism as a cause is of its effect. 20. As original parts of the co-ordinating power 74 HEREDITY. called life, they are as independent of the habits or experience of the co-ordinated organism as the loom is independent of the water and of the steam which throws it into action, or of the plan of the web. 21. As provided for in the original peculiarities of the transmitted co-ordinating power in man, and as in- dependent of their own effects, the necessary beliefs can- not be invalidated by the pretence that they depend on our environment, and would have been different had our experience been different. Consider the marvel of a tropical forest. Charles Kingsley, with powers of description rarely matched, pictures for us the High Woods he entered on a day of which you will read the record in his fascinating book, " At Last," a prose poem from its opening to its close. Palms of twenty species towered above his head there under the torrid noon ; and around them ran vines of hundreds of kinds, fattening in the tropi- cal sunlight. Minor shrubs sprang up, filling all the interstices of the woods. Ripened fruits, which we gather and prize as rarities, were dropping through the scented silence. On the ground he looked for refuse, but found none. He searched for the debris of fallen trunks, but that was no longer visible ; for such is the vigor of tropical growths, that this refuse of the woods is sucked up at once into the enlarging tissues of the vegetation standing in the soil. There are no rotting leaves and trunks in a great tropical forest. The matter contained in such sheddings is absorbed swiftly into the fatness of the vegetation, NECESSARY BELIEFS. 75 which grows so rapidly that you may almost hear its progress. Above you are fifty kinds of birds: around you, as many kinds of animals ; a million kinds of life of all sorts, — insects, birds, animals, trees, plants. And now you know, my friends, per- fectly well, that every seed in that tangle of the trop- ics produces its like. There is, in all the collision of tendencies in that marvel of intricate forces with power striking upon power, no jostling of a pre- determined plan off its grooves. Your palm always breeds a palm, your parrot a parrot, your ape an ape, and your invisible insect one like itself. There is no shrub so lowly, there is no animal so lordly, as to be free from the power of the law by which like breeds like. The co-ordination of all these -forms proceeds from some adequate cause. Wherever an organic form is produced, we find that in the origin of it there are forces at work which land on the mystic bioplasmic shore with a constitution. Our fathers, off the coast of Massachusetts, assembled in the cabin of " The Mayflower," and, before they landed, drew up a civil compact. They put foot on Plymouth Rock by no. means carelessly. They landed on the American coast with a plan. Just so, in this tropical forest, although there are a million coasts and a mil- lion boats drawing near them, every boat has a plan. In the cabin of every ship that is to touch that mys- tic strand of the tropics, we have a council and- a compact drawn up. Certain it is, that, among the million Plymouth Rocks on which the co-ordinating powers of the germs land, there is not one pressed by 76 HEREDITY. a careless foot. Everywhere the co-ordinating powers land on the bioplasmic shore, each with a constitu- tion drawn up beforehand in the cabin of its May- flower. [Applause.] The constitution of a germ is a compact which cannot be lightly changed. We see that there must be conflicts in the tropical forest. There are the Norse palms and the Puritan pines. Here are the Dutch and the Norwegians ; here are all tribes of men represented by the different classes of vegeta- tion. They collide ; they are all under the law of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest ; but they adhere to their types. These com- pacts, arranged in the cabins of the Mayflowers, are respected in spite of all jostlings of forces off their grooves. Indeed, there is no jostling of a force off its grooves, unless after ages and ages of slight vari- ation. I am not denying the law of variation in asserting roundly the law of heredity in sameness. The plan is there as the bioplasmic boats land ; and we may defy all science to deny the assertion that every thing there is in the form of the palm is in the plan that was arranged in the cabin of the Mayflower of the palm before the boat of the palm touched the coast. Every thing there is in the plan of the par- rot was in the thought of the occupants of the May- flower of the parrot before it landed. There is a constitution brought to the Plymouth Rock of every germ. In that constitution, I hold that we have a plan, not only of the form of the body, but of the faculties and intuitive beliefs of the soul. [Ap- plause.] NECESSARY BELIEFS. 77 Go back, however, to the time when, as some say, the types of all germs were only four in number. Darwin has never committed himself to materialistic evolution. He has always asserted that the first living germs were brought into existence by the Creator of all things. But now, if you put into these first germs a constitution that will develop on one line into vertebrates, on another into radiates, on another into articulates, and on another into mol- lusks, you have four fundamental forms of life, as Agassiz taught. Even when you reduce these Plym- outh Rocks to four, you do not reduce the number of words in your constitutions at all. In the four constitutions of the vertebrates, articulates, radiates, and mollusks, are contained implicitly all the provis- ions which your millions and millions of constitu- tions, developed from the four, contain explicitly. These four constitutions might be reduced to one, and yet contain no fewer syllables. In the mystic constitution of your original germinal matter you have the sum of all the provisions of the multitu- dinous constitutions developed from it, to show, that, when God landed on the bioplasmic shore which he had himself created, he landed with a plan. [Ap- plause.] There was in the cabin of the May- flower which preceded the first germinal matter, a compact drawn up, and in it were the possibilities of all divergences from the first life, or the syllables describing all the multitudinously interlaced forms of vegetation and animal existence in this tropical forest. Whatever there is wonderful in develop- 78 HEREDITY. ment was in the original source of the developing process ; so that I am justified in asserting that the reduction of all the constitutions or types of life to four, or even of the four to one, is no reduction of the marvel of the original compact in the cabin of God's heart. If matter is inert, we know that it does not move itself ; and assuredly it is getting to be time for us to give up the theory that matter is not matter and can move itself, now that Tyndall has done so. Look into his Birmingham address, and you will find Tyn- dall saying that if matter has two sides, — a physical and a spiritual, — we must account for the two sides, and that it is just as hard to account for the two sides as it is to adopt the hypothesis that matter does not originate force. (See TYNDALL'S Birmingham address in " Fortnightly Review," December, 1877.) The doctrine of the lectures given on this platform is what is usually called "ideal realism," — scholars will allow me to use the technical phrase, — the doc- trine of Germany at this moment in her academic philosophy, not in her unacademic. Separate always the two great schools of recent German philosophy, — the academic and the non-academic. The New York Tribune lately did not know who Hermann Lotze is, but it appears that Professor Wundt of Heidelberg does. (See WTJKDT'S essay on German philosophy, in "Mind," October, 1877.) If any of you will read a series of articles by Lotze, that are to appear in " The Contemporary Review," or the references to him in the new quarterly called NECESSARY BELIEFS. 79 " Mind," or the translation of Mikrokrosmus, which is to be given to the world soon, as I hear, by a scholar of our Cambridge, you will be able to make in English an acquaintance with this man. Proba- bly the Tribune does not read the " Zeitschrift f iir Philosophic," published at Halle. This is the fore- most philosophical journal of its class in the world, and is full of the work of Lotze and of his school in modern German thought. It is unfortunate and unnatural that the literary editor of " The Tribune," who has the public reputation of having been a friend of Theodore Parker, should appear to have no out- look in philosophy beyond the Straits of Dover, or at least none any later than those misleading glimpses which Parker caught. If this able and honored newspaper knows nothing of Hermann Lotze, it is so much the worse, not for him, but for one depart- ment of the New York Tribune. The doctrine of established philosophy in Germany is ideal realism, and that is all that I am asserting. Matter has no capacity to originate force or motion. It may transmit it, but it does not originate it ; -and so the power of co-ordinating tissues, or of producing life, does not belong to it. Besides matter, there is but one other thing in the universe, — mind; and so behind the movements of matter there must be mind. Although mind may be co-extensive with matter, the identity of mind and matter cannot be asserted by any one who loves clear ideas. Therefore the co-ordinating power, the constitution drawn up in the cabin of the Mayflower, is to be attributed to mind. 80 HEREDITY. Has this discussion a practical bearing ? I can go to twenty universities in the world, and find young men asserting that one thing is just as divine as another. Wrong is as natural as right, and what- ever is natural is divine. The moral intuitions of which the ethical teachers say so much are only one part of nature ; the worst passions are another part ; and what gives one portion of nature authority over another? The bad man is brought forth by the Supreme Powers, and the good man is; and, to a consistent materialism, the one is just as divine as the other. If I go to Tyndall and Hackel, they say that the one is no more responsible than the other, and that the will is never free. How are we to jus- tify any thing like clearness of thought in ethical philosophy, unless we can justify these fundamental beliefs which materialism itself takes for granted, but with which it plays fast and loose? These percep- tions of primitive axioms are something not depend- ing on any thing outside of us, but are original capacities of the constitution of the soul, and would have been the same, no matter what our experience had been. When a doctrine works badly, I hold that it is scientifically discredited as out of harmony with the nature of things ; and this doctrine that the fundamental beliefs are useless, or uncertain sources of knowledge, works disastrously in the long range. I do not mention these evil effects of denying self-evi- dent truths as proof that our necessary beliefs are au- thoritative ; but I use these effects to illustrate the fact that there are practical issues involved of the most NECESSARY BELIEFS. 81 transcendent consequence in the justification of fun- damental truth. All we can say concerning con- science is undermined for some, by a certain philoso- phy of hereditary descent, which asserts that even the moral perceptions of self-evident ethical truth are solely the result of habit, and might have been dif- ferent had our ancestors had a different environment. The intuitions represent no outward reality. We may as well, in the fog of our philosophy, when we know but very little, follow impulse, and forget en- tirely all that is said on this topic of the self-evident intellectual and moral truths. 22. The necessary beliefs, or perceptions of self- evident truths, therefore, are a part of the original revelation given to the soul by its Author, in the very plan according to which it exists and acts. 23. As such, the necessary beliefs of the intellect and conscience are the supreme and final tests of truth, or the unassailable guaranty of all mathemati- cal and ethical axioms. 24. An adequate defence of fundamental truth, therefore, is made by the establishment of a proper definition of life. [Applause.] IV. DARWIN'S THEOEY OF PANGENESIS. THE NINETY-FOURTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 31. Partout ou se manifeste le mouveinent physiologique par lequel 1'organisation commence, un principe spirituel est immediateinent present. — LOTZE: Psycholoyie, ed. Penjon. It is strictly and philosophically true in nature and reason, that there is no such thing as chance. — SAMUEL CLAKKB. IV. DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. AN ancient wall around the city of Gottingen has been converted into a broad and lofty embankment, and crowned with lime-trees ; and under them runs a wide, smooth walk, on which the professors and stu- dents of that university city are often found pacing to and fro. There has been established lately in Great Britain a magazine called "The Nineteenth Century ; " and it has signalized its entrance upon the field of periodical literature by what it calls a modern symposium, or published interchange of views among men of opposing schools in physical and religious science, on the topic of the immortality of the soul. So thoroughly permeated are the discus- sions of many English theologians with tremor in the presence of the passing fashions of thought in the British materialistic philosophical school, that I shall venture to ask you, in considering what the English symposium has said, to place that gathering of learned men face to face with their German peers. Let a 85 86 HEREDITY. new symposium be called on these walks of Gottin- gen, under the lime-trees. Of course we must invite to the assembly the ten men prominent in the English symposium : Mr. R. H. Hutton, Professor Huxley, Lord Blachford, the Hon. Roden Noel, Lord Selborne, Canon Barry, Mr. W. R. Greg, the Rev. Baldwin Brown, Dr. W. G. Ward, and Mr. Frederick Harrison. Let us invite out of the theological faculties of benighted Germany, Professor Schoberlein from Gb't- tingen University, an accomplished and tested teacher of systematic theology. He has had a high position in the faculty at Gottingen for almost a quarter of a century, and probably, therefore, must teach mediae- val views. From just beyond this wall of Gottingen, on which the nightingales sing, invite out of the brown mansion yonder, among the orchards, Her- mann Lotze. Let us take also, from the same city and university, the renowned defender of the doctrine of the atonement, Reitschl, whose recent book on the Vicarious Sacrifice any one must study who wishes to be abreast of modern thought on that theme. Then from Halle let us invite Julius Miiller and Kostlin and Ulrici. The first of these three is often called the ablest of living theologians; and the last, as you know, is the editor of the " Zeit- schrift fiir Philosophic," the foremost philosophical magazine in the world. Let us take from Leip- sic Kahnis and Luthardt, and especially Delitzsch, who has written a work on Biblical Psychology, a topic running close to the theme of the English DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 87 symposium. From Berlin let us invite a scholar who is often called the ablest German theologian, and who in 1873 was a delegate to the Evangelical Alliance at New York, Professor Dorner, a man so far behind the times as to be trusted yet in the lead- ing university of the world to represent the foremost chair of a department hallowed by the great names of Schliermacher, Trendelenburg, and Neander. These twenty men, ten British and ten German, are pacing up and down on the Gottingen walks ; and we inexpert people listen. Frederick Harrison, an English essayist and positivist, speaks first. This is his language : — " My original propositions may be stated thus : — " 1. Philosophy as a whole — I do not say specially biological science — has established a functional rela- tion to exist between every fact of thinking, willing, or feeling, on the one side, and some molecular change in the body on the other side. " 2. This relation is simply one of correspondence between moral and physical facts, not one of assimi- lation. The moral fact does not become a physical fact, is not adequately explained by it, and must be mainly studied as a moral fact, by methods applicable to morals, — not as a physical fact, by methods appli- cable to physics. " 3. The correspondences specially discovered by biological science, between man's mind and his body, must always be kept in view. They are an indispen- sable, inseparable, but subordinate part of moral philosophy. 88 HEREDITY. " 4. We do not diminish the supreme place of the spiritual facts in life and in philosophy by admitting these spiritual facts to have a relation with molecular and organic facts in the human organism; provided that we never forget how small and dependent is the part which the study of the molecular and organic phenomena must play in moral and social science. " 5. Those whose minds have been trained in the modern philosophy of law cannot understand what is meant by sensation, thought, and energy existing without any basis of molecular change ; and to talk to them of sensation, thought, and energy continuing in the absence of any molecules whatever, is precisely such a contradiction in terms as^ to suppose that civilization will continue in the absence of any men whatever. " 6. Yet man is so constituted, as a social being, that the energies which he puts out in life mould the minds, characters, and habits of his fellow-men ; so that each man's life is, in effect, indefinitely pro- longed in human society. This is a phenomenon quite peculiar to man and to human society, and of course depends on there being men in active associa- tion with each other. " 7. Lastly, as a corollary, it may be useful to retain the words ' soul v and * future life ' for their associations ; provided we make it clear that we mean by soul the combined faculties of the living organism, and by future life the subjective effect of each man's objective life on the actual lives of his fellow-men." (Nineteenth Century.} DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 89 Translating into the ordinary speech of mortals this first outburst of wisdom, we find it to mean that there can be no existence of. the soul apart from the body. Science has proved that there is a molecular tremor connected with all thought, emotion, and choice ; and if death is really our total disembodi- ment, then, for a man who holds that there must be a tremor of some form of matter connected with choice, thought, and emotion, there is no proof of immortality. This essayist is probably of opinion that religious science teaches that death is not only an unfettering of the soul, but a real and total dis- embodiment of it in every sense. Posthumous influ- ence is all the immortality in which he can believe. , Let now the German symposium speak. This me- diaeval teacher of systematic theology, Professor Schoberlein of Gottingen University, on his own field, his native heather, opens his lips ; and this is the first thing we hear from him. I give you exactly his language, out of a volume he published at Heidel- berg in 1872, called " Die Geheimisse des Glaubens," a work of reputation as excellent as that of its author in German theology: "God has destined soul and body to exist in eternal unity with each other. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. Bodilessness implies a hinderance in free self-reserva- tion. The highest perfection of the future, no less than of the present life, calls for the corporeity of the soul." (See Professor LA CROIX'S translation of Schoberlein, Meth. Quar. Rev., October, 1877, p. 687.) 90 HEREDITY. This essayist, Harrison, looks astounded. The nightingales on the Gottingen wall continue to sing. " The soul," says Schoberlein, " appropriates from the outer world the materials suitable for its body. The formation of the body is not a result of mere chemical affinities between different elements of mat- ter, but it is a vital process ; it proceeds from the animate principle. The soul assumes to itself such elements as adequately express its life and wants. It itself, and not chemical affinities, is the organizing principle." (Ibid, p. 687.) Look into the faces of Julius Miiller and Dorner, and Delitzsch and Lotze, and especially into the contenance of Ulrici, and you find no marked signs of dissent. There is general agreement with what Professor Schoberlein says. Lotze for a quarter of a century has opposed the mechanical theory of life. Ulrici has defended more than once, in the name of biological science, the theory that the soul has an ethereal enswathment from which it is not separated at death. To these scholars the separation of the soul from the flesh is its unfettering, but not its disembodiment- Frederick Harrison seems to be smitten with a new idea. But he is of opinion that this is not Christianity. He speaks again : " For my part, I hold Christianity to be what is taught in average churches and chapels to the millions of professing Christians. It is a very serious fact when philo- sophical defenders of religion begin by repudiating that which is taught in average pulpits." (Nine- teenth Century?) DABWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 91 He, therefore, 'would establish for philosophical science inside the range of theology, a rule that he would not admit in the range of philosophical science as connected with biology. Am I to take every average physiological scribbler on the globe as authority in biology? In a field of investigation which was nowhere elaborately studied previously to 1860, am I to adopt the av- erage views even of magazine-writers, infallible as the more brilliant periodicals claim to be ? No : we are to look to experts in biology for our facts. And so, in our interpretation of the Scriptures, we are to look to experts. We are to take the agreement of rival experts in the field of theological science as supreme authority, just as we take the agreement of rival experts in the field of biological science as final assurance of accuracy. When Frederick Harrison accuses this learned group of Germans of not follow- ing the scientific method employed by physical re- search, Ulrici replies that for twenty-five years he has been teaching the applications of that method to the relations of religion and science, and that if we are to • be sternly true to the law of cause and effect we must infer the existence of some substance in which our sense of identity inheres. Ulrici affirms that it is stern, exact inference from the surety of our per- sistent sense of identity, that there is something to which that sense belongs. There cannot be any seeing, unless there is something that sees. There cannot be feeling, unless there is something that feels. Now, we have a persistent sense of identity ; 92 HEKEDITY. we have a percipience of identity, and there must be a perceiver of identity. As this percipience is constant, the perceiver must be a unit from year to year, although the body changes all its atoms every few years. If Ulrici and Schb'berlein and Lotze, with the general assent of their compeers, do not seem sound to certain omniscient writers for quar- terly reviews on our self -illumined New England shore, which has led the world in philosophy, and which needs no enlightenment from Halle, or Leipsic, or Gottingen, or Berlin; if Sir William Hamilton happens to have said, fifteen years before this new discussion came up, that such a theory is~not very important, — we of course shall dismiss it without any attention to dates in connection with Sir William Hamilton's opinion, or with Ulrici's and Lotze's and Schoberlein's words here on the wall of Gotting- en. But when we find five or six theological facul- ties teaching much the same view, we shall listen to Schb'berlein when he says further : "We must come to the standpoint of an ideal realism, which holds the middle path between a materialistic deification of nature on the one hand,, and a spiritualistic contempt of it on the other. Pre- cisely this is the standpoint of the Holy Scriptures. In every position we shall take, our conscious pur- pose will be, not to speculate without authority, but simply to educe into fuller expression that which appears to us as clearly involved in the Word of inspiration itself. "In the inorganic world we find matter and po- DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGEKESIS. 93 tency undistinguishable. Crystals, for example, are formed simply by the immediate action of the spirit. It is only in the plant that force rises to some sort of individuality. Here there is a vital unity which attracts to itself homogeneous elements, and thus gives to itself an outer form. Such force is life, and such form an organism. -At the next higher stage force becomes animal life. Here the central life has sensation, and is able to bring its organism into dif- ferent relations to the outer world. Such life, or force, we call soul : such a sensitive, movable, soul- subservient organism is a body. " The body is rooted with all the fibres of its being in the soul. Nay, the soul, on its nature-side, bears already within itself the essence, the potentiality, of a body ; and it needs only to draw to itself the proper elements from the outer world, in order that the germinally extant inner body actually posit itself as a crude outer body, even as the virtually extant tree, in the ungerminated seed, needs only to unfold its potency in order to become a real tree. " The body appears, therefore, as an integral ele- ment of human nature, both in this state of proba- tion, and in the future state of eternal perfection. "Jesus spiritualized his inner man, his soul, in its unity of spirit and of nature. Thus, also, he laid the foundation for the transfiguration, the ideal spiritualization, of his body, inasmuch as the essence of the visible body is grounded in the soul. This process was an inner hidden one. The hidden reality shone forth only in occasional gleams, — in those 94 HEREDITY. miracles of mastery over his body, and over nature, with which the Gospels abound. We emphasize sim- ply the identity of the risen with the buried body. The essence of his body remained the same : simply the mode of its existence was changed. A fleshly body has become a spiritual body, in which not only the free harmony of the soul with the inborn spirit stamps its harmony on the outer features, but, also, in which the material elements themselves are thor- oughly permeated and exalted by the spirituality of the person." Allow me to say that I was not aware that Scho- berlein had taught these doctrines, when, in recent lectures here, I defended similar propositions. It was, I confess, not known to me, until I made close research in the track of purely theological discussion, that an accredited teacher like Schoberlein had made this use of Ulrici's and Lotze's biological positions. But we continue to look into the faces of our Ger- man symposium, and find no important dissonances there. Schoberlein goes on, and illustrates, from all the facts of the life of our Lord, the power of the spiritual body over the physical. You are familiar with the line of thought. In Schoberlein's words, we are listening to suggestions precisely parallel to those presented here a few weeks ago (see Boston Monday Lectures on Conscience, pp. 43-84) : " The peculiar traits of spiritual beauty which occasionally beam out from the persons of ripened believers are actual reflexes of the transfigured corporeity which lies DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 95 potentially within them. The natural fleshly body is simply the receptacle, the womb, in which the new body is invisibly generated and qualified, up to the hour when, the crude flesh falling away, it shall pass into the heavenly state, and spring forth into its full beauty and actuality." The nightingale sings in the lime-trees on the Gottingen wall, and the curtain falls here; but an- other week we shall listen further to this symposium. At these accordant propositions from theological and biological teachers, Harrison begins to grow pale, and judges that it will be necessary for him to prove much more than he has done already, if he is to undermine the doctrine of immortality from the point of view of modern philosophy in its widest range. THE LECTURE. In the field of the battle of Waterloo there was a concealed ditch of Oheim, into which regiments in retreat, pushed on mercilessly by their companions and pursuers in the rear, were cast alive until .the gap was full, and then the hosts who were escaping from death passed across the chasm in safety on the bridge of their dead predecessors. The ditch of Oheim, in the battle of Waterloo between the theis- tic and materialistic forms of the theory of evolution, is hereditary descent. How are we to fill up the chasm between life in the parent and life in the child, and use only the narrow mechanical theory of the origin of living tissues and of the soul? Say what you please of the subtler forms of German ma- 96 HEKEDITY. terialism, which I am not now discussing, the Eng- lish forms are only other shapes of the old Lucre- tian atomic theory. At the last analysis, every me- chanical theory of life is only a redressed ghost of Lucretius. When candidly unmasked, nearly all that has been given to us from England in support of materialism exhibits the faded features of the Lucretian hypothesis. Many and many a theory has fallen in.to the ditch of Oheim in this battle. Lu- cretius himself lies there at the bottom, a corpse. Fifty proud systems of materialistic philosophy lie above it ; and now, writhing there on the very sum- mit, under the hoofs of the retreating hosts, lies Darwin's theory of pangenesis. [Applause.] What is Darwin's famous provisional hypothesis of pangenesis, and what are some of the replies to it ? First, let me give you an outline of the theory in language containing no technical terms ; next, let me state the theory in Darwin's own words ; and, after- ward, permit me to mention the more important of the objections which may be made to its fundamental propositions. Suppose that we have here a single naked mass of homogeneous bioplasm [drawing a figure like that of an amoeba upon the blackboard]. Let it be assumed that this piece of germinal matter is of one and the same substance in all its parts. It may be a living creature of one of the lowest types. If, now, this throbbing homogeneous bioplasm throws off from any part of its substance a portion of itself, the divided offspring will have qualities like those found in every DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 97 part of its parent. We know that it is a peculiarity of bioplasm to divide and subdivide itself. By a marvellous law of growth, the divided portions, when properly nourished, increase in size, and acquire all the qualities of their parent. A minute particle or gemmule thrown off from a single mass of homo- geneous bioplasm grows according to the laws which belong to its parent, and becomes a mass like that from which it dropped off. Physical identity be- tween the parent and the child is the groundwork of the explanation of the physical side of the law of heredity in sameness. . But now suppose that this animalcule, instead of being a single mass of bioplasm, consists of a more or less intricate structure. Let it be assumed that the upper and lower side differ, and that each of these has qualities distinct from those of the middle portion. If you are to account for the reproduction of that triplicate animal, you, according to Darwin's theory of pangenesis, must suppose a small mass of bioplasm thrown off from the lower section, another from the middle part, and another from the upper. Call the three portions of the animal 1, 2, and 3, and the gem- mules thrown off from these parts respectively A, B, and C [illustrating on blackboard]. A will have the qualities of the portion of the animal from which it comes ; that is, of 1. B will possess the qualities of 2, and C of 3. You have, in this crucial case of hereditary descent, the law of identity of substance in parent and gem- mule carried out in a threefold manner. There is 98 HEREDITY. identity between 1 and A, 2 and B, and 3 and C. The nourishing of the three gemmules will result, therefore, not in changing A into B, or B into C, or the reverse, but in changing A into a second 1, B into a second 2, C into a second 3. When, now, this result has been accomplished, how shall we account for the arrangement of the newly developed parts in the proper manner ? Every thing turns on their being collocated as 1, 2, and 3, and in no other order. Here comes into Darwin's theory, therefore, in spite of his theistic concessions as to the origin of the first germs, the great and vague materialistic word " affin- ity." When the gemmules have begun to be devel- oped, " elective affinities " start up between them, and they arrange themselves in the order exhibited by the parts of the original animal. We understand none too well how a single gemmule develops itself into a form like its parent. The permutations that may be rung on three numbers are very considerable ; but soon we shall see gemmules choosing the one right combination out of all permutations possible in billions and trillions of numbers. It is not abso- lutely inconceivable, however, that, when an animal has three separate parts, a gemmule from each part should, by its physical identity with the part from which it comes, inherit the property of developing into that part. But, on Darwin's implied theory of life, what causes these three parts to put themselves together in the proper way ? Were either gemmule to forget its place, we should have a singular animal in the progress of that development. In the hurling DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 99 about of all these gemmules, under merely chemical and physical forces, what keeps these three particles from ever getting out of place ? How much must be meant by elective affinities in Darwin's hypothesis? It can be called a theory only by courtesy. Materialism assures us that a co-ordinating power independent of matter is a dream, a poetic idea! Huxley says that "a mass of living protoplasm is simply a molecular machine of great complexity, the total results of the working of which, or its vital phenomena, depend, on the one hand, on its con- struction, and, on the other, upon the energy sup- plied to it ; and to speak of vitality as any thing but the name of a series of operations is as if one should talk of the horologity of a clock." (Encyc. Brit., art. "Biology.") Huxley is not a materialist, you say ; but I must judge men by their definitions, and, although there are many schools of materialism, I affirm that this definition of Huxley's represents one of the most dangerous materialistic schools; for it assumes that the forces at work in the formation of the organism are merely chemical and mechanical. There is no life, no co-ordinating power, behind the tissues. If, therefore, you build your theory of descent on the mechanical and chemical forces merely, you must rest the weight of your case on that word " affinity." There are elective affinities between the gemmules of the different parts of an organism ; and the result of these affinities is to put the germinal points to- gether in the right order, so that the resulting animal 100 HEREDITY. shall be brought into existence right side up. As- suredly, your affinities must be very peculiar forces. Can they be simply chemical and mechanical, and yet adequate to their work ? How is it that the gem- mules seem to be possessed of an inflexible purpose of coming together in the right form, so that the animal shall be built up 1, 2, 3, and not 3, 2, 1? What if the first number should drop into the mid- dle? Nothing but mechanical and chemical forces here, Huxley affirms ! Darwin refuses in his theory of pangenesis to employ any other word than " affin- ity." To talk about other forces would be like talking of the horologity of a clock! If the affinities which bring the gemmules together in the right order are merely chemical, they are forces of a kind chemistry knows nothing of any- where else. Here is a species of affinity that exists only in germinal matter. Even in that kind of matter, which to all human tests is chemically the same in many different kinds of germs, the plans of the affinities differ as endlessly as the types of life. If, now, you will multiply the three parts of this small organism, thus far used as an illustration* by a number representing the multitudinous parts in the most highly organized animal, and apply the same law of descent, you have Darwin's theory of pangenesis. We have here [drawing a figure on the blackboard], let us suppose, the outlines of some highly complex form of organism ; I care not what — the foot of a frog, or the palm of my hand. It is a mass of interlaced living tissues, and it is crossed in DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 101 every direction by forms differing from each other in outline, position, and activity. This colored biologi- cal chart (Plate III., Boston Monday Lectures on Biology*) is only too inadequate an illustration of the complexity of the weaving performed by the bio- plasts. We have as many different parts in one of these tissues as there ever were in lace-work, and multi- tudinously more. We know that. But Darwin says, that, just as every part of a small and simple organ- ism throws off a gemmule, so every part of a com- plex organism throws off its gemmule. That is, we have a gemmule from this corner [indicating on the blackboard], a gemmule from this, a gemmule from this, a gemmule from every one of these subdivided lines : a gemmule, in short, from every cell of this organism, — a complexity absolutely appalling to con- template, for the number of gemmules must be absolutely inconceivable. But, although they go out into the circulating fluids of the organism, al- though in the vegetable world they permeate all the sap in your lily of the valley, they are never- theless collected into the pollen of that flower. Every grain of that dust consists of aggregates of all these gemmules. Therefore, when a pollen-grain is subjected to the proper environment, the gemmules develop. They all have a number. There may be billions and trillions of them, but no particle for- gets its place. The dance of the gemmules is a labyrinth, compared with which all the movements, seen and unseen, of all the visible and invisible stars 102 HEREDITY. of heaven, is simplicity. But these points of matter, with nothing but chemical and physical forces be- hind them, as Hackel and Huxley would say, or with nothing but elective affinities behind them, as Darwin would say, never make a mistake in a single step. They come together, they arrange themselves, they build a germ that will produce the lily of the valley. They co-ordinate themselves so as to con- stitute a seed which you cannot develop into any thing but a lily of the valley if the gemmules come from the lily, and into nothing but a lion or a man if the gemmules have come from these organisms. Gemmules, it is supposed, will develop only in union with nascent cells like those from which they came. Here are three cells arranged in a series, and the second grows out of the first, and the third out of the second. When all these cells are developed, each drops out a gemmule. But the gemmule pro- duced by the second cell will not develop itself un- less it comes into union with a gemmule originated by the first cell and already started in its growth. The gemmule from the third cell must have a corre- sponding position in relation to the gemmule of the second, or it will not grow. Thus our elective affinities, the complexity of which has already as- tounded us, need to be raised to a yet more incon- ceivable height of complexity. We are bewildered under the demands of this theory. But the gem- mules are not bewildered. Elective affinity keeps their poor heads steady. Each gemmule bethinks itself of its duties, takes its proper place in the swirl DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 103 of atoms and forces, and, with no co-ordinating power outside of itself, goes unerringly to its destination. There is your theory of pangenesis complete. Let me now give you Darwin's own language : — " It is universally admitted that the cells or units of the body increase by self-division or proliferation, retaining the same nature, and that they ultimately become converted into the various tissues and sub- stances of the body. But, besides this means of increase, I assume that the units throw off minute granules, which are dispersed throughout the whole system ; that these, when supplied with proper nutri- ment, multiply by self-division, and are ultimately developed into units like those from which they were originally derived. These granules may be called gemmules. They are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms a new being ; but they are likewise capable of transmission in a dormant state to future generations, and may then be developed. Their development depends on their union with other partially developed or nascent cells, which precede them in the regular course of growth. Gemmules are supposed to be thrown off by every unit or cell, not only during the adult state, but during each stage of development of every organ- ism ; but not necessarily during the continued exist- ence of the same unit. Lastly, I assume that the gemmules in their dormant state have a mutual affin- ity for each other, leading to their aggregation into buds or into the sexual elements. Hence it is not the 104 HEREDITY. reproductive organs or buds which generate new organ- isms, but the units of which each individual is composed. These assumptions constitute the provisional hypoth- esis which I have called pangenesis." (Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii., chap, x., Ameri- can edition, pp. 369, 370.) Every unit or cell, during each stage of the devel- opment of every organism, throws off its gemmules. What smooth language for the multitudinous num- bers that must be thrown off ! Each stage may mean every three minutes, for a new stage is reached in some rapidly developing plants in every three times sixty seconds. "If one of the protozoa be formed, as it appears under the microscope, of a small mass of homoge- nous gelatinous matter, a minute particle or gemmule thrown off from any part, and nourished under favor- able circumstances, would reproduce the whole ; but, if the upper and lower surfaces were to differ in tex- ture from each other and from the central portion, then all three parts would have to throw off gem- mules, which when aggregated by mutual affinity would form either buds or the sexual elements, and would ultimately be developed into a similar organ- ism. Precisely the same view may be extended to one of the higher animals ; although in this case many thousand gemmules must be thrown off from the various parts of the body at each stage of devel- opment; these gemmules being developed in union with pre-existing nascent cells in due order of suc- cession." (Ibid, p. 371.) DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 105 What are some of the replies to be made to Dar- win's hypothesis of pangenesis ? 1. The hypothetical gemmules may pass every- where through the tissues of living organisms. They are inconceivably small. Charles Darwin calls Lionel Beale "a great author- ity." (Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii. p. 372.) I fear some Darwinians who read Beale are not candid enough to agree with their master in that opinion. But when Darwin cites Beale he is so frank as to say that this theory of pangenesis has been opposed most emphatically by Lionel Beale, and by Mivart, and by Professor Delphino of Florence, whose suggestions Darwin says he found very useful. This great authority, Lionel Beale, of whom we have heard here before to-day, admits that there may be masses of bioplasm too small to be seen with the highest powers of our present microscopes. The gemmules, however, on the theory of pangenesis, must be almost inconceivably smaller than those as- sumed particles of bioplasm, for every such particle in every stage of growth must throw off a gemmule ; and these gemmules from all the bioplasmic points of the body must be collected in a little shifting dust which we call the pollen of a plant. In your palm and your oak there are millions of bioplasmic points ; but, according to Darwin's theory, every unit, that is every cell, every bioplasmic point, in every stage of its growth, must throw off gemmules, and these must be collected together in the pollen. The gemmules must be inconceivably small, to be -contained in so 106 HEREDITY. narrow receptacles. They cannot be absolutely in- finite in numbers, however, for if so they could not be nourished. Darwin himself says that " excessive- ly minute and numerous as the gemmules are believed to be, an infinite number derived, during a long course of modification and descent, from each unit of each progenitor, could not be supported or nourished by the organism." (Animals and Plants under Domesti- cation, vol. ii. chap, x.,' American edition, p. 396.) Nevertheless they are so small as to be wholly invisi- ble to the microscope. That is an important point, for it makes the theory one which it is very difficult to disprove. The gemmules are objects of the imagina- tion. How are we to disprove their existence ? You may imagine the gemmules floating in the blood, and permeating tissues which the blood cannot penetrate. If you are of those who establish their theories by supposing that what cannot be disproved is proved, then you may prove the existence of these gemmules. Nobody can easily disprove the existence of physical masses which the best microscope cannot perceive. It is all a matter of imagination — the existence of the gemmules ; and will be, probably, for ages and ages yet, for no microscope pretends to see any thing as small as these gemmules must be. One thing, however, we do know, — that, if the pan- genetic gemmules are inconceivably small, they must pass everywhere through the living tissues. They easily permeate cell-walls. Therefore, in the vege- table kingdom, when the gemmules pass freely from cell to cell, we should suppose that a bud borne DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 107 by a graft would certainly be affected by the gem- mules arising in the root and body of the stock. Such is not the case in many instances. Pips from a pear grafted on a quince-stock will not give rise to a hybrid between a pear and a quince. The stone of a peach grafted on a plum-stalk will not grow into a tree whose stalk bears plums while the extremities of the branches bear peaches. The gemmules of the quince are thrown through the walls of the cells in the scion of the pear ; they circulate in its sap, and we should suppose that they would produce a hybrid. But they do not. We know they circulate in the scion, if they are as small as they must be according to this theory. But we cannot trace them by the effects the theory requires them to produce if they are there. We find no effects : therefore we suppose they are not there. [Applause.] 2. Pangenetic gemmules might pass everywhere. They can leave the body in the perspiration and the breath. There is no explanation in Mr. Darwin's theory for the presumed fact that they are all col- lected into buds, pollen, or any one similar receptacle. (See letter by LIONEL BEALE, in "Nature," May 11, 1871, p. 26.) It is assumed that every cell of every tissue throws off a gemmule in every stage of its development. Now, the gemmules are so small that they may be breathed away ; they may be perspired away. Your lily of the valley and your palm tossed in the winds may exude gemmules through all their pores. How 108 HEREDITY. happens it that the representatives of no one cell are ever exuded or breathed away in any case ? Gem- mules may go anywhere. But in spite of all the tossings of the tissues, in spite of all the activities of the tissues in organisms that are constantly in mo- tion, we find no one class of these gemmules lost. If, for instance, the gemmules that come from .the lenses in the eye were to be perspired away ; or if, as they circulate through the blood, they were to be breathed away, there would be no eye in the off- spring. Now, how is it that there is nothing lost out of this marvellously complex mass of gemmules, when they are so inconceivably minute that hunting for a needle in a haymow is plain business compared with looking for a gemmule ? This is the best form of the mechanical theory of life ; and, in the name of theories as wild as this, some of us are asked to give up our belief in the immortality of the soul. 3. The hypothesis makes no distinction between a unit of matter and the unit of force in a living organism. The individual type of life, or co-ordinating power in a germ or organism, -I call the unit of force in that germ or organism. A single, naked, bioplasmic mass is the unit of matter. Cells are not the true units of matter in an organism. If the gemmules are formed by the breaking-off of minute masses from the units of matter, or naked bioplasts, these will not arrange themselves unless the unit of force or co-ordinating power of life is behind them. It is vastly important, I think, to make a distinc- DARWIN'S THEORY OF PANGENESIS. 109 tion between the unit of matter and the unit of force in a living organism. The unit of matter, at the last analysis we can reach in unbraiding the living tis- sues, is the structureless naked bioplast. But we know that behind the throbbing, weaving bioplasts, there is a unit of force, co-ordinating their motion. As the plan on which they weave preserves its unity in all stages of development of the animal, we con- clude that the unit of force behind them preserves its unity. Take as many points as you please, there- fore, of these units of matter, and you cannot arrange them unless you have your co-ordinating power be- hind them j and, therefore, you gain nothing by your theory of elective affinities. 4. The hypothesis of pangenesis involves several untenable subsidiary hypotheses. Professor Delphino, the justice of whose attack is largely admitted by Darwin, points out eight subor- dinate hypotheses which- are required by the theory, and that several of them are not tenable. (See Sci- entific Opinion, Sept. 29, 1869, p. 366, and Professor ST. GEORGE MIVART, G-enesis of /Species, chap, x.) The gemmules must have -the power, in certain cases, of producing monstrosities ; that is, your elec- tive affinities must be capable of being thrown out of their grooves occasionally. The theory does not account for the fact that sometimes certain gemmules, although nourished like other gemmules, do not develop. A generation passes, and the traits of the parents are not in it. In the third generation the traits of the grandparents may 110 HEREDITY. re-appear. Why did the gemmules lie dormant so long? The hypothesis does not explain the inherited effects of the use and disuse of particular organs. " A horse," says Darwin himself, " is trained to cer- tain paces, and the colt inherits similar movements. Nothing in the whole circuit of physiology is more wonderful. How can the use or disuse of a particu- lar limb or of the brain affect a small aggregate of reproductive cells in such a manner that the being developed from them inherits the characters of either one or both parents ? Even an imperfect answer to this question would be satisfactory." (Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii. chap, x., American edition, p. 367.) 5. The theory of pangenesis explains every thing by the elective affinities of gemmules for each other, but leaves these elective affinities themselves unex- plained. 6. According to Darwin's own concessions, many facts in hereditary descent are wholly inexplicable by his hypothesis ; and his theory, " from presenting so many vulnerable points, is always in jeopardy." 7. The hypothesis is rejected by the foremost au- thorities in the microscopical investigation of living tissues. 8. The theory is not needed, as all the facts it is used to explain are accounted for by defining life as the power which co-ordinates the movements of germinal matter ; and by assuming, what all the facts prove, that this power is transmitted in heredi- tary descent. [Applause.] V. DAKWIN ON THE OKIGIN OF CONSCIENCE, THE NINETY-FIFTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, JAN. 7. I am striving hard to establish the sovereignty and self-exist- ent excellence of the Moral Law in popular argument, and to slay the Utility swine. — EMERSON, 1829. Est igitur hsec, judices, non scripta, sed nata lex, quam non didicirnus, accepimus, legimus, verum ex natura ipsa arripuimus, hausimus, expressimus ; ad quam non docti, sed facti, non instituti, sed imbuti sumus. — CICEBO : Oratio pro Mitone. V. DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CON- SCIENCE. PBELTIDE ON CUKKENT EVENTS. TWENTY learned men, ten English and ten Ger- man, assembled as a modern symposium, are walking up and down on the wall of Gottingen. Listening to their discussions, we find it impossible to under- stand their references to the complex whole of man's nature, unless we adopt Luther's division of the human being into three parts, body, soul, and spirit. We have been accustomed to speak of man as body and soul only, and to make no distinction between soul and spirit. We have used a twofold, but Delitzsch and Schoberlein employ a threefold, division of man's nature. When we recollect, how- ever, the Biblical language, we find that Luther had warrant for saying, as Delitzsch on the wall of Got- tingen quotes him, that the Scripture divides man into three parts : " God sanctify you through and through, that thus your whole spirit, soul, and body may be preserved blameless." Luther, in his exposi- tion of the Magnificat for the year 1521, says that 113 114 HEKEDITY. Moses made a tabernacle with three distinct com- partments. The first was called sanctum sanctorum, within which dwelt God, and there was a divine light therein ; the second was sanctum, within which stood a candlestick with seven lamps ; the third was called atrium, the court, and it was under the open heaven in the light of the sun. In the same figure a Christian man is depicted. His spirit is sanctum sanctorum, God's dwelling-place. His soul is sanc- tum: there are seven lights; that is, all kinds of understanding, discrimination, knowledge, and per- ception of bodily visible things. His body is atrium, which is manifest to every man, that it may be seen what he does and how he lives. Thus taught St. Augustine also, and many an accredited Biblical scholar before Luther. This Delitzsch who is speaking is a professor at Leipsic University, and has written a renowned work on Biblical Psychology. From beginning to end of it he introduces as authority nothing but the Scrip- tures, and he adopts this threefold division. By the spirit is meant the conscience, or that portion of human nature in which there is a light not of us, although in us. We have spoken of the conscience as containing something which is not of us, and we might have used the word spirit in the same sense. The soul is the link between spirit and body, and contains all the physical powers except the con- science. That triple division of man is Schoberlein's also ; but it would matter very little whether it were Schoberlein's or Delitzsch's, if it were not Biblical. DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 115 Ulrici, and many others of his school, who are given to the investigation of man from the light of merely natural science, adopt this threefold division as the outcome of their research from the point of view of mere reason. In previous listening to Ulrici and to Lotze, we have heard the former speak of a body of a physical sort ; then of a third somewhat, or ethereal enswathment of the spirit, a spiritual body; and, lastly, of spirit itself. Thus the three- fold division of man is adopted not only by the bio- logical, but by the theological teachers : by the former in the name of exact research under the mi- croscope and scalpel, and by the latter in the name of a careful dissection of Scriptural texts. It is a sign of the times here on the walls of Gottingen, when our Delitzsch, who has given himself to exe- getical study, reaches through Biblical proof-texts precisely the same idea of the threefold division of man at which Ulrici has arrived by the methods of mere reason. The English symposium has been accustomed to a narrow view. Frederick Harrison does not believe that there is in man any spiritual activity not con- nected with changes in the matter of his present physical body. He cannot imagine it possible that there is in man a soul having the power of existence apart from molecular change. Professor Huxley, although he will not assert in definite terms as much as Harrison has done, holds, nevertheless, that we are absolutely sure only of the existence in ourselves of two sets of phenomena, one physical, and the other 116 HEREDITY. mental or moral. He suspects that the physical may be shown to be antecedent to the moral, and that, as antecedents, they are properly to be regarded as the cause of the moral. At the last analysis, even Hux- ley is ready to attempt a physical explanation of moral phenomena. Harrison objects to that. He thinks the physical side is the unimportant one in man, if either side is unimportant ; but Huxley thinks the physical side the important one. They put rival emphasis on these different sides of the lower half of man, and do not appear to understand how different the outlook is the moment we rise to the German point of view, and make man to consist of three things instead of two. Here we have three wheels, — a large one, a small- er within the first, and a smallest within the second. Suppose that they touch each other by cogs. Of course, if they all mash into each other, when you roll the inner wheel you will roll the second, and in that act you will roll the outer. In the reverse direction, you may roll the outer, and you will roll the second, and so the inner wheel. Delitzsch and Schoberlein and their schools think of man as spirit, soul, and body. The spirit is the innermost thing in the holy of holies. The soul is something midway between spirit and body ; nevertheless it is subject to influences from both the soul and the body. In- fluences can go from the outside to the innermost of man, and from the innermost to the outermost. When a man is filled with lofty moral emotion, we find visible effects produced in his countenance. DAHWIN ON THE ORIGIN OP CONSCIENCE. 117 This is a perfectly demonstrable result, coming 'from the activity of what the Germans call the spirit within the man. The inner wheel can move the wheel into which it mashes, and that can move the outer. It is very evident that the two inner wheels may be taken out from the outermost wheel, and yet continue their action and interaction. If the second wheel had 'the power of assuming to itself an envel- ope, or outer wheel, it might in another state of existence do so, and the fundamental plan of the wheels not be changed at all. We are more and more drawn by German biological and theological research to this threefold division of man as explaining the union between spirit and matter. We are led to the idea that there may be a third somewhat, or spiritual body affected from without, and affected also from within, and acquiring power from its contact with the spirit to clothe itself even when the present phys- ical husk has been dropped off. It becomes us here to depend on a wealth of exact citation, for we must not misrepresent by the breadth of a hair either the German or the English positions. Delitzsch speaks with a face full of radiance : " The power of life, that inconvenient and yet indispensa- ble conception of exact investigation, is something exalted above the physical forces of attraction and repulsion : how much more, then, is the conscious soul, and still more the self-conscious spirit ! Force, life, soul, spirit, form an ascending climax." (Biblical Psychology, T. & T. Clark's Foreign Theol. Lib., p. 93.) " Samuel, who came up out of Hades, had, therefore, 118 HEREDITY. form and clothing as lie had had in this world ; and when, on the Mount, two men approached Jesus, the glorified appearing likewise, and spoke with him, the disciples immediately recognized them as Moses and Elias. They appeared, therefore, in an external form corresponding to their temporal history, and were, therefore, unmistakable. But this external form is a spiritual one. By virtue of an internal power, spirits give themselves external human form when they make themselves visible to whom they will. The external appearance is the immaterial product of their spiritual nature." (Ibid, p. 100.) " Are we at all to conclude thence, that the dead even before their resurrection, and without awaken- ing of their bodies, are not able to appear again? The appearance of Moses and Samuel proves the contrary. • " We believe that the spirits of the departed are in themselves not without a phenomenal bodily form. " The soul of the spirit, we say with Goschel, after the separation from its body is not wholly without a body : the inward body follows it. " The soul is the doxa of the spirit, immaterial, but similarly formed to the body, which the spirit through it ensouls. It is, as the outside of the spirit, so the inside of the body, which in every change of its ma- terial condition maintains it in identity with itself." (Ibid, pp. 502-504.) What am I reading ? The book of an erratic ? I am citing the renowned work entitled " A System of DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 119 Biblical Psychology," by Delitzsch, since 1867 pro- fessor of theology at Leipsic University; and this volume is translated in the very famous theological library issued by the Clarks of Edinburgh. It is a book crowned and recrowned through edition after edition. Huxley and Harrison look into the faces of Ulrici and Lotze, whom they recognize as men adequately informed concerning physical science, and are amazed that the broader German outlook leaves no opportu- nity for dissent, even from the side of physical re- search. Some of us who are not trained in this phi- losophy think that by this interpretation of nature and revelation the doctrine of the resurrection of the same body is imperilled. But Delitzsch speaks again, with the Scriptures open before him, and with reverent voice : " The restoration of the human body results when God the triune supplies to the soul from the then glorified world of nature, materials for the new formation of its body, similar to those of which its earthly body was formed, and with which, when the soul impresses upon them the form of its inner spiritual body, its spiritual nature may attain to full manifestation even in the external body." (Ibid, p. 537.) Delitzsch cites Schoberlein, and looks into the face of the great Gottingen professor for assent to these propositions. They sound very strange, and we shall have them denied by Schoberlein in the name of the- ological research, if they do really come into conflict with the accredited doctrines of the resurrection. 120 HEREDITY. But, instead of denying the position of Delitzsch, Schoberlein replies, with the Scriptures open before him, " The souls of the departed will be clothed with glorified bodies. There will be brought to the soul, out of the transfigured world, materials analo- gous to the substance of its previous body, and upon these materials the soul will then impress the traits of its germinate body, so as thus to attain to full ob- jective expression. In the case of those still living at the second coming of Christ, the process will be that of a simple transformation. Thus, even as Christ arose with the buried body, so such persons will then ap- pear in the ' same ' body which was laid in the grave. And this identity holds of the whole essence of the body, both its primary features and form, and also its substance. As to whether this identity of materials im- plies that of the chemical elements, or even the identity of the ultimate atoms, is a question which loses all sig- nificance, so soon as we reflect that these elements and atoms themselves are in turn composed of invisi- ble forces, and that, in order to become integral parts of an organism, they must be dissolved back into these forces, and then arise out of them under a new form." (See Professor LA CROIX, translation of Scho- berlein, Meth. Quar. Rev., October, 1877, p. 698.) Why, to these Germans matter is only visible force ! The body itself, and all other substance that we call matter, are a revelation of Almighty God. All matter as surely as all finite mind originated in him. As the azure sky, in which we see nothing, throws out from itself both the cloud and the light- DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 121 ning, so the unseen universe gives rise to the visible universe. We have invisible electricity in the air; we have invisible moisture there. The sky puts forth a fiat, and there is a cloud. It puts forth another fiat, and there is in the cloud electricity. So I suppose Almighty God evolves the seen universe of matter and the unseen of finite force from himself. It is not my belief that every thing was created from nothing, nor do the authors of " The Unseen Uni- verse," perhaps the most suggestive book lately pub- lished on these intricate themes, affirm that. My creed is the reverse of pantheistic. It is said that an eminent naturalist of orthodox opinions in religion has publicly proclaimed that- this platform teaches pantheism. *He might as well call Mr. Phillips an eminent pro-slavery orator. Scholars in this audi- ence are amused by such a charge. Whoever asserts the Divine Transcendency above Nature side by side with the Divine Immanency in Nature, and main- tains the Divine Personality, may emphasize, as Martineau and McCosh and a score of recent writers have done, the doctrine of the spiritual origin of force, and yet not fall into pantheism. If any naturalist does not know that fact, -his blunder- ing in philosophy is probably the result of his ab- sorption in his own specialty. [Applause.] We find, however, that these Germans are not to be frightened by the breadth of the Scriptural out- look. Our listening to Schb'berlein ought to be intense after Delitzsch has expressed agreement with him ; but we find Dorner and Julius Miiller, and 122 HEREDITY. Kahnis and Luthardt substantially agreeing with him. There is more than one hero in scholarship leaning with massive arm upon the discussions which have been put forward by Lotze and Schoberlein and Ulrici, on these overawing themes. If it be suggested that in the glorified universe there will be a restoration of other beings beside man, what shall we say ? We are not called on to say any thing in this German symposium, but Scho- berlein is. I am anxious to have you push him to the wall if you can. I am willing you should ask him definitely whether he thinks any other part of the present world besides man's body will ever have a transfiguration in the next world. Schoberlein is not reluctant to speak even on that perplexing but majestic theme. " Christ, by the spiritualization of his body, as taken out of the bosom of nature, has already consecrated nature itself to an ultimate transfiguration. On the basis of this beginning, therefore, will the Holy Ghost bring forth out of the bosom of the perishing world a new world, — not another, but the same world in a transfigured form, even as the raised body of Christ was not another, but the same in a transfigured condition. And nature, as thus renewed, will exist under the anti- thesis of heaven and earth, a 'new heaven and a new earth.' And the whole circle of natural objects will also come forth from death as integral parts of the new eternal state of things." Do you say this is not definite enough, and do you wish more perfect information concerning the trans- DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 123 figuring of forms of life not human ? In a passage vhich I have before me, Schoberlein asserts as his view that the new heavens and the new earth will be such as Agassiz anticipated. "As with nature in general, so with natural ob- jects in particular. There will be nothing desert or waste ; but the Divine breath will pervade all things. Vegetation will exist in ideal beauty. Greed and hostility will find no place in the animate realm ; the wolf will ' lie down with the lamb ' in unbroken peace. In general all primitive forms of existence will re-appear in ideal perfection. Man will enjoy nature through all of his senses. The paradise that existed before will be restored after redemption. " We are sown in weakness, but we ' rise in power.' There will be no alternation of work and rest, of vigor and weariness ; but we shall subsist in ever-full vigor and enthusiasm. " Whereas in this life we consist of the three ele- ments, — body, soul, and spirit, — which may even be separated from each other, in the heavenly life the body and soul will be so pervaded with spirit that the entire human being will present but one unitary spiritual life. " When all is thus transfigured, then pure beauty will reign. Heaven is the true home of beauty. For the essence of beauty consists in this — that the life of the soul beams perfectly forth from the body, and that the body thereby sheds a halo of glory back upon the soul. All true art is a groping after heaven- ly ideals, and all art-works are anticipations of future 124 HEREDITY. spiritual realities. Bui in the * yon-side ' each human being will be a living art-work, and the life of com- munion among the saints will be an eternal evolution of holy art-life. " Wherever the soul may will to be, there it will be able to be. Hence the body will not be a prison, but, on the contrary, a free home, for the soul. " The body will be the perfect servant of the soul : hence it will be capable of instantly following, and keeping pace with, all the outgoings of imagination and thought. The law of love, whereby we live in those on whom we fix our heart, will be perfectly re- flected in the body. The indwelling of soul in soul will be also an indwelling of body in body. And in this each will find his due place — so that, even as the church of Christ here forms but one body with many members, thus also, hereafter saved humanity will form but one organic body, whereof we shall all be members, each in his place. And of this organic whole, the head, the focal point, the sun, will be Christ himself. As our souls will eternally live of his life, so our bodies will eternally shine in the radi- ance of his glorified body. " Our bodies are not mere caducous husks, to be thrown off when the soul is ripe. But nature arid the kingdom of God, the rational soul and the hu- man body, belong normally and essentially together.' When the one is transfigured, the other is transfig- ured. And when, at the goal of moral development, they are risen to integral unity, then they persist, through eternity, as intimately united as form and substance, light and color." DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 125 Frederick Harrison here has talked of the eternity of the tabor. Adopting the principles of the Nirvana of the Brahmins, he has affirmed that an eternity of conscious self-existence can be only torture. " A mystical and inane ecstasy," he says, " is an appropri- ate ideal for a paradise of negations, and this is the orthodox view ; but it is not a high view." (Nine- teenth Century, October, 1877.) But Schb'berlein, unabashed in the company of German learning, replies, "When the soul has reached its perfection in God it will need at once to enter upon a course of untrammelled holy activity, even as God, whose image it is, himself eternally ' works ; ' and to this creatural need of a field for work, the world of nature offers the requisite scope." Our disputants having paced through the whole night, the dawn now begins to cast its radiance on the wall of Gottingen. Above the low German mead- ows and in the trench at the foot of the wall lies a tracery of morning vapor. The summit of the wall is in sunlight. The lark is rising out of the fields. Our spirits are carried up by its flight to the inquiry whether we will adopt a higher or a lower philosophy, that is, wideness or narrowness of outlook. This comes to be the final question between the English and the German learned men. All they in this group who will not use the higher and the wider outlook which divides man in a threefold way agree to take physically a position symbolizing their attitude spir- itually. Frederick Harrison walks down into the trench under the fog. He is a positivist. He be- 126 HEREDITY. lieves in what he can touch. The only immortality for him is posthumous influence. But his doubt results from his narrowness of outlook. Long ago those who sit half way up the slope leading to the wall from the trench have outgrown that narrowness. They do not as yet divide man in a threefold way, but think that there are body and soul in man, and so are delivered from that style of mental unrest into the mist of which even William Greg must dip, as he takes his position. He knows not what to be- lieve. He is now in the vapor, and now in the sun- light. Professor Huxley must walk down too ; and, although the vapor will not wreathe his forehead, it will cover his feet, for the positivist and the material- istic evolutionist do not stand far apart. But Lord Blachford, Lord Selborne, Mr. Hutton, Canon Barry, and all the rest of this English group, three of them only excepted, stand here on the summit of the wall, with Lotze and Schoberlein and Ulrici and the other German scholars. They believe that man is three- fold, a*nd their breadth of outlook delivers them from the obscuring power of the vapor which -broods only over the trenches. The lark continues to sing. There comes falling through the ether a divine voice: Narrowness is the mother of unbelief. Ob- tain a broad outlook, would you agree with God in your philosophy, and be able to transmit God's own thought into life. [Applause.] DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 127 THE LECTURE. It has been well said that the question as to the origin of conscience has the same relation to modern philosophical discussion of religious truths that Bce- otia had to the geography of Greece. That province was the key to the whole land. It became, conse- quently, the very dancing-plot of Mars. We have had many a theory put to such straits in explaining the single syllable ought, as to assert with Bentham that, "if the use of the word is admissible at all, it ought to be banished from the vocabulary of morals." (Deontology, i. p. 32.) The distinction between the desirable and the dutiful is a fact, however. The desirable is merely the optional: the dutiful is the imperative. The most characteristic element in the latter can never be explained solely by the former. The theories which derive the dutiful from the de- sirable have, in all ages, had insuperable difficulties in discovering a basis for moral obligation. The upholders of utilitarianism have to this hour reached no real unanimity on this central point. Bentham went so far as to deny the existence of duty. " It is, in fact, very idle to talk about duties ; the word it- self has in it something disagreeable and repulsive." (Ibid, p. 10.) The angular, sharp, erratic Schopen- hauer suggests that conscience is composed of five elements, — fear of man, superstition, prejudice, van- ity, and custom. (Grund Probleme der Eihik, p. 196.) Even David Hume, however, could say that " those who have denied the reality of moral distinc- 1 28 HEREDITY. tions are to be ranked among the disingenuous dispu- tants ; nor is it conceivable that any human creature could ever seriously believe that all characters and actions were alike entitled to the affection and re- gard of every one." (Inquiry concerning the Prin- ciples of Morals, Essays, vol. ii. p. 223.) Profit a man may disdain, but duty has a commanding pres- ence. We can refuse to do our duty, but we are unable to deny its authority over us in right. De jure, conscience always rules,- although de facto it may not. All languages recognize the distinction between profit and duty, the desirable and the duti- ful, mere expediency and the right. These great phenomena in language must have a natural cause. They are facts. They are hard, unmistakable, endur- ing circumstances in human experience. The ques- tion as to the origin of conscience is not only a vastly more important one than the inquiry concerning the origin of species, but it is one that can be investi- gated by the scientific method almost as readily. I enter on the dancing-plot of Mars here for the first time. Many of you may have thought that I have evaded the topic of the origin of conscience. I post- poned it, in order that I might bear the whole brunt of its onset, after discussing the moral sense in de- tail. Having shown what conscience is, I now, with some profit, I hope, may raise the question, How did it originate ? It is evident that Darwin's hypothesis of heredi- tary descent, or pangenesis, requires in the gem- mules, innate powers or affinities that amount to DAE WIN ON THE OEIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 129 as great a mystery as what we call life. Even on his theory, however, conscience must have been in- volved in the original capacities of the first living matter out of which, according to Darwinism, all animal forms have been evolved. You may be an evolutionist of an extreme type, — I will not say of the extremest or materialistic sort, — and yet you may hold that conscience is in the constitution drawn up in the cabin of " The Mayflower " before the ship landed; and -I, for one, shall have no great quarrel with you, if that is the form of your evolutionistic philosophy. But Darwin has put forth a special the- ory of conscience. He has endeavored to show how the moral sense, as it exists in man, may have been developed exclusively from the faculties possessed by animals. He makes conscience only another name for the operation of the social instincts conjoined with the intellectual powers. Whenever an instinct is not satisfied, a feeling of unrest arises. If, for instance, the desire for food is not satisfied, we are left in unrest. Every instinct has a pleasure connected with its gratification, and a pain in the absence of its proper food. Just so the social instincts have pain behind them when they are not gratified. Darwin's central proposition in his discussion of the moral sense (Descent of Man, vol. i. chap, iii.) is* that he thinks it " in a high degree probable that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as 130 HEREDITY. well developed, as in man." Thus Darwin derives conscience from the combined operation of the social instincts and of the intellectual faculties. He makes remorse of conscience to be only the feeling of dis- satisfaction a man has when the social instincts are not satisfied. He would have us explain the feeling that we are to blame, by the fact that we are not satisfied in our social instincts. What are some of the more important objections to Darwin's theory of the origin of conscience ? 1. Darwin teaches that "man comes to feel, through habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persist- ent instincts." But in the same connection he affirms that " the wish for another man's property is perhaps as persistent a desire 'as any that can be named." (Descent of Man, American edition, vol. i. pp. 88, 89.) Two pages before the first of these sentences, I find the second one. The context shows that instinct and desire are used here as synonymes. Theft and rob- bery, therefore, if we are to be logical, are to be justified on the basis of Darwin's theory. To fol- low conscience is to obey our more persistent in- stincts ; but the wish for another man's property is perhaps as persistent an instinct as any that can be named. As Professor Calderwood of Edinburgh University has said : " Neither a good morality nor a doctrine of personal obligation can rest on this basis." (Handbook of Moral Philosophy, p. 147.) The strength of an instinct depends on two things, — the persistency of the desire it represents, and the vividness with which we recall the pains or pleas- DAKWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 131 ures arising from the desire. Hunger, for instance, is an imperative desire ; but, when satisfied, its pains cannot easily be recalled in memory. It has often been remarked, that our painful sensations are repro- duced in imagination less easily than our pleasurable. Now, this desire for another man's property, Darwin affirms, has in unsurpassed fulness the first part of strength ; namely, the persistence of the desire. It is, he says, "perhaps as persistent a desire as any that can be named." But there is another part of its strength, and that is the vividness with which we can recall the pains or pleasures arising from it. Darwin affirms, concerning that part of its power, only that "the satisfaction of actual possession is generally a weaker feeling than the desire of posses- sion." He thus implicitly admits that sometimes it is not a weaker feeling than the desire. Well, then, if sometimes it is not a weaker feeling than the desire, of course both parts of the strength sometimes belong to this impulse. If, therefore, the most persistent and strong instinct ought to be followed, as Darwin says, then sometimes our desire for another man's property ought to be followed. Darwin explicitly teaches that man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited habit, that it is best for him to obey his most persistent instincts. " The imperious word ' ought ' seems merely to imply the consciousness of the existence of a persistent instinct. We hardly use the word ' ought ' in a metaphorical sense when we say hounds ought to hunt, pointers ought to point, and retrievers to retrieve their game." (Ibid, p. 88.) 132 HEREDITY. Here, therefore, is an instructive example of a lack of metaphysical and philosophical training in a renowned naturalist. Again and again this fallacy has been pointed out. It is not brought forward here to-day for the first time. Many discussions have exhibited just this strange bewilderment in Darwin's reasoning. Undoubtedly this writer is an expert in observation. Darwin has a massive head in what the books call the observing faculties, but riot a very massive one in the philosophical faculties. I am using for the brain only that outline chart which Professor Ferrier's latest researches seem to justify. Darwin's books, however, are the best map of his own spirit; perfectly honest, candid as the noon, a mass of facts which are a mine for this whole gener- ation, and for all generations to come, within the field of biological research, and yet not remarkable for the philosophical traits prominent in the writings of a Hamilton, a Kant, or an Aristotle. Read Von Hartmann's late criticisms on the True and the False in Darwinism. (Journal of Specula- tive Philosophy, October, 1877, and January, 1878.) Read Virchow's recent reply to Hackel : " Only ten years ago, when a skull was found, perhaps in peat or in lake dwellings, or in some old cave, it was believed that wonderful marks of a wild and quite undeveloped state were seen in it. In- deed, we were then scenting monkey air. But this has died out more and more. The old troglodytes, lake inhabitants, and peat people turn out to be quite a respectable society. They have heads of DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 133 such a size, that many a person living would feel happy to possess one like them. . . . On the whole, we must really acknowledge that all fossil type of a lower human development is absolutely wanting. Indeed, if we take the total of all fossil men that have been found hitherto, and compare them with what the present offers, then we can maintain with certainty, that, amongst the present generation, there is a much larger number of relatively low-type indi- viduals than amongst the fossils hitherto known. . . . As a fact, we must positively acknowledge that there is always a s.harp limit between man and the ape. We cannot teach, we cannot designate it as a revelation of science, that man descends from the ape, or from any other animal" (Nature, Dec. 6, 1877, pp. 112, 113.) 2. If you will allow me to affirm that Darwin teaches, at the outset of his discussion of the moral sense, propositions that would undermine the whole doctrine of personal obligation, I shall have said enough to make you cautious in adopting that theory of the origin of conscience. 3. In Darwin's attempt to trace the development of conscience from purely animal instincts, ideas of morality drawn from other sources slip into the argu- ment. (See this criticism developed in NEWMAN SMYTH'S Religious Feeling, and in ST. GEORGE Mi- YART'S G-enesis of Species, and in various other writers.) • The atmosphere in which he conducts his experi- ment is full of germs of the moral sense. It has been 134 HEREDITY. well said that they who try to prove spontaneous generation to be a fact usually perform their experi- ments in an atmosphere saturated with the germs which they wish to develop. Darwin calls to his aid, in explaining the origin of the moral sense, a great number of floating moral germs. I have singled out twelve of these, and hard- ly need do more than name them in his language : — (1) "Highly developed mental faculties." That word mental is very vague. If by mind you mean the whole spiritual equipment of man, as you some- times do, it includes moral perception ; and so surrep- titiously, or at least unobserved, comes in the very idea of which Darwin would explain the origin. (2) " The feeling of dissatisfaction." That is an- other vague phrase. It might mean moral dissatis- faction. (3) " The power of language." (4) "The idea of the good of the community." A very vague phrase that never would pass without being challenged under the microscope of metaphysi- cal research. (5) " The power of public opinion." (6) "Obedience to the wishes and judgments of the community." (7) "Feelings of love and sympathy." These often mean much more than merely social instincts. (8) " Power of self-command." Of course there inheres in the very idea of self-command the idea of a distinction between motives. A clear choice among motives involves moral perception of the dif- DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 135 ferent character of motives, as good and bad; and so, under that phrase, " power of self-command," may easily come in the very idea of which the origin is to be explained. (9) " Appreciation of the justice of the judgments of his fellow-men." There Darwin has the great word "justice," but all languages recognize a dis- tinction between the just and the merely expedient. A perception of what is just in motives is an act of conscience. Darwin allows this atmospheric germ to drift into his experiment. Appreciation of justice ! Why, that is conscience, and that is the very thing you are about to develop here by spontaneous gener- ation. (10) " Appreciation of justice, independently of any pleasure or pain felt at the moment." All these phrases are Darwin's. This last is not a poor de- scription of one of the fundamental activities of con- science. Justice cannot be perceived at all without the power of perceiving the difference between right and wrong ; and to perceive that, without any regard to the pleasure or pain felt at the moment, is the key of what we call conscience. (11) "Avoidance of the reprobation of the one or many gods " in whom the individual believes. The sense of the Divine comes to us from con- science ; and that germ is more dangerous than any of the ten that have preceded it. But here comes one yet more dangerous. (11) " The fear of Divine punishment." Surely, if you will give me all these germs, if 136 HEREDITY. you will let them drift into my bottle in which I am required to produce, by spontaneous generation, con- science, I shall have no trouble with that experiment. [Applause.] These are phrases out of Darwin's famous chapter. If, by such an amount of carelessness in his experi- ment, you are not thrown into scientific unrest as to Darwin's theory concerning the origin of conscience, I shall say that you are accustomed to a loose appli- cation of the scientific method, worse than I have been taught, even under the mediaeval and mossy instruction of Andover. 4. What ancestors do not possess, offspring cannot J. ' 4*/ J. *S inherit. 5. The moral sense, therefore, cannot be inherited from a non-moral source. From my point of view these two propositions are the most important in the whole range of investiga- tion as to the origin of conscience. Our only safety in reasoning is to begin always with absolutely unde- niable propositions, and then to make only such inferences from them as are axiomatically clear. I think these two propositions are clear; and from them may be made inferences that undermine the foundations of every merely derivative theory of the origin of the moral sense. Darwin's hypothesis assumes that the moral sense is inherited from a non- moral source. His scheme of thought, therefore, makes the stream rise higher than its fountain, or involves the assertion that there can be an event without a sufficient cause. DAKWIN ON THE OKIGIN OF CONSCIENCE. 137 6. According to Darwin's theory, pain comes to conscience only when some persistent instinct is left unsatisfied, and therefore the essence of all conscien- tious action is simply the pleasurable. In natures badly organized, the vicious is often demanded by the most persistent instincts. The vicious, therefore, in these natures, is the conscientious in Darwin's sense ; but this reduces the theory to absurdity. 7. It follows from Darwin's definition, that the pleasurable, on the whole, is that which conscience justifies. Darwin's theory makes no adequate dis- tinction between the pleasurable, which is always only the optional, and the dutiful, which is always the imperative ; it does not explain the commanding force of the word " ought ; " it does not account for the axiom, " Fiat justitia ruat ccelum" let justice be done, though the heavens fall. 8. Darwin himself concedes that his chief source of doubt with respect to his own theory of con- science is that senseless customs, superstitions and tastes, such as the horror of the Hindoo for unclean food, ought, on his principle, to be transmitted, and they are not. One rule of science is to look into the misty places, which a theory will not explain, for new light. Wherever there are unexplored remainders we are likely to find new truths. Now, Darwin confesses that this vast range of senseless customs, supersti- tions and tastes, is not under the law of inheritance, and ought to be if his theory is correct. What if a man has been made so much better than a clod, that 138 HEREDITY. a good angel, stepping on him, leaves an imprint that is not easily washed out ; and a bad angel, leaving a bad imprint there, soon finds that the plan of human nature has re-acted against the impression thus made, and that a sense of justice has wiped out, as with a sweeping billow, the track of his hoof, and left the shore clean as God made it? You would judge, in that case, that the shape of the shore had been deter- mined by some other power than the impact either of good feet or of split hoofs. There is a plan in the sands. They are not sands ; they are a soul. [Ap- plause.] VI. UNLIKENESS IN ORGANISMS. THE NINETY-SIXTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, JAN. M. Deum te igitur scito esse: siquidem Deus est, qui viget, qui sentit, qui meminit, qui providet, qui tarn regit, et moderatur, et movet id corpus, cui prsepositus est, quam hunc mundum ille princeps Deus: et ut mundum ex quadam parte mortalem ipse Deus seternus, sic fragile corpus animus sempiternus movet. — CICERO: Somn. Scipionis. Meus agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet. — VIRGIL: liberal. There can- not possibly be passed any such regulation unless we forget the interests of wives and of these little ones who are not responsible for coming into the world. Surely liberalism will have no support to give to a law by which habitual intemperance incapacitates a man for the supporting of his family. There is, how- ever, a Power yonder which seems not to be gov- erned by sentiment like this ; which has made a law that every habitually intemperate man shall have his veins tortured, and shall have every nerve seized in red-hot pincers. That government is terribly in earnest. That is what it does. It does that every time. You know that. There is not a particle of doubt on this subject. There is not a scintilla of SEVEN PRINCIPAL LAWS OF HEREDITY. 239 unrest in men's minds on this whole topic. What do you suppose the government means? But now, what if it should be enacted in Massa- chusetts, in addition to both these other laws, that every habitually intemperate man shall transmit a diseased constitution to his offspring, arid that this injury to the health of the children shall endure to the third and fourth generation? Who would vote for such a regulation ? -Where is the man educated in Arnoldism, where is the man brought up on the platitudes of Spencerian Nescience, where is the person who thinks that, on the whole, whatever we do, the nature of things is on our side, where is the man that believes that it is safe to teach the people to rely on an opportunity for repentance after death, that would not exclaim with horror if a proposition were made to him to pass such a law : "Is thy ser- vant a dog, that he should do this thing ? " If Massa- chusetts should adopt such a law, and execute it every time, you would be sure of two things, at least : that she is terribly partisan, and that she is terribly in earnest. The Supreme Powers have enacted such a law, and executed it every time ; and they have not made an apology for six thousand years. [Ap- plause.] Evidently, the first thing to be said about this ter- rific earnestness of the Powers above is what has al- ready been hinted, — that the law of initial heredity belongs to virtue just as much as to vice. Suppose that when these laws were passed in Massachusetts, it should also be enacted that every man who lives a 240 HEREDITY. virtuous life, every man who fills his soul with the Divine Spirit, every man who by self-surrender to nat- ural laws puts their power on his side, shall be blessed above his anticipation, shall have good judgment given him when he did not possess it before, shall have health as a kind of perpetual intoxication, shall have the power to transmit to another generation better conditions than his own. You say that you would vote for such a law, but not for its opposite. Of course not. Man's vote is not asked for in the passage of natural laws. It is not to be supposed, that, because you would vote for what you call the kind regulations, you would vote for the stern ones. Not you ! Every thing must be callow and mucila- ginous in your government. The government of the universe is not callow at all. There is an Ebal yonder, and a Gerizim also. With you, however, there must be an upper, but not an under ; there must be a right hand, but not a left hand ; there must be a before, but not an after. But yonder different ideas pre- vail. The truth is that your regulations, the moment they were put in force, would become a curse, deep, multiplex, immeasurable. Who does not see that the terrific seriousness of the laws of hereditary descent, instead of being an injustice, is a proclamation to every man to institute a reform? Who does not see that the sternness of what is done on the left hand pushes humanity into the softness of the right hand ? Who does not see that God makes all his chastisements like the mother's tossing of her infant upon her knees ? This is for SEVEN PRINCIPAL LAWS OF HEREDITY. 241 the sake of health. He makes them to be like ob- stacles laid down in the path of a child learning to walk. A little clambering is an education. If, after all their allurement of promise and their threat of doom, there is at last no hope of reform, what do the laws of hereditary descent do ? They put an end to the earthly existence of the trans- gressor. When I meditate on the severity of the laws of hereditary descent, I am relieved by remem- bering that the earthly career of vice is short. Be- fore the eyes of exact observation in this world, the thoroughly vicious family is at last burned up. So much we know beyond a peradventure as to the fires of the universe. One of the greatest curses pro- nounced alike by the Scriptures and natural law upon evil is that it shall have no name long in the earth. You say that often evil dispositions are inherited through many generations. Sometimes people who are half vicious and half virtuous, if such expressions may be allowed, puzzle the world in families that live century after century. Yes ; in spite of the severity of the laws of hereditary descent, God gives every half-breed a chance. He suffers long with a man who has received burdens out of the ancestral spaces, and comes weighted into life. He gives him an op- portunity, and puts by his side these laws of hered- ity, reversional, collateral, pre-marital, pre-natal, and initial. Direct heredity does not choke him. Five other laws of heredity stand by him, if natural law is obeyed. Every human being has all the chances represented by the seven laws of hereditary descent. 242 HEREDITY. But when the Supreme Power sees that no chance is improved, then it allows the laws of heredity to shut down upon the transgressors, and they are re- moved from the earth. What good does that riddance or removal do ? It has been justly said that the ages are kept from being insane by the cradles and by death. If we could not get rid of disordered human organizations, what would happen to the centuries? Oliver Wendell Holmes remarks that most people think that any difficulty of a physical sort can be cured if a phy- sician is called early enough. "Yes," he replies, "but early enough would commonly be two hundred years in advance." Concerning the terrific earnest- ness of Nature, it is certain that she means well, even in her severities, and that we must treat her as we would a kind commonwealth. There is one service that the Supreme Powers are willing to do for us, and which I have not supposed human power to endeavor to effect in a parallel case. The Supreme Powers have a law, of the existence of which we have seen the proof here, that, whenever a man submits himself utterly to that divine force in him which we call conscience, a new set of affections shall be given him by a re-arrangement of his nature. A light will stream in through dome windows which before were curtained. There will come into the depths of his life a quickening and transforming power, utterly unobtainable except by total self-sur- render to conscience. The worst case of sane hered- ity is no exception to this law. Take a man who is SEVEN PRINCIPAL LAWS OF HEREDITY. 243 born like Nero, and let him surrender to conscience, and then those terrific steeds, which have dashed off the track with him, become coursers of fire on the line where God would have him drive. It is not a bad thing for a man to have a tempest in the lower half of his face, if only he has a hurricane in the upper half. [Applause.] X. THE DESCENT OF BAD TRAITS AND GOOD. THE ONE HUNDREDTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TBEMONT TEMPLE, FEB. 11. De male qusesitis gaudet non tertius hseres. — BEULOCHU Praxis Moralis. As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us, And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness. KEATS: Hyperion. X. THE DESCENT OF BAD TRAITS AND GOOD. PKELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. IT is becoming necessary for the whole world to understand Russia. The Bosphorus now flows into the Thames. A few prophets, among whom I do not rank myself, are audacious enough to predict that by and by the Thames will flow into the Bosphorus. Napoleon's famous saying, that the power which governs Constantinople may easily become mistress of Europe and Asia, has behind it, no doubt, a pier- cing military, sagacity in the study of strategic geo- graphical lines. The Thames is the water-front of the globe to-day ; but, if a power able to occupy the natural capacities of Constantinople were to possess the Bosphorus, who knows but that, little by little, that stream might become the water-front of Asia and Europe ? It has geographical advantages of the most marvellous sort. For one, I believe that the attraction of America will so influence European commerce, that the Tiber of the world, the central stream of the planet, will be the Atlantic, and not 247 248 HEIIEDITY. the Bosphorus. But I am willing to admit that the commercial front of Asia and of Europe may ulti- mately take up its position, not on the coasts of China or India, not on the shores of France or Eng- land, but on the waters of Constantinople. The lesser is becoming a greater question of the East. Whatever may be thought of details in the Eastern problem, no one can deny that it is likely to assume Asiatic proportions. Finally the bounda- ries of the English and the Russian possessions in Asia will touch each other. The petty states be- tween British India and the great Russian Empire will melt away. There is now between the two nothing that deserves to be called an independent territory. Already Russia is occupying a Chinese province on pretext that the Celestial Empire can- not keep order, and prevent her citizens from outra- ging Russians. She has occupied Saghalien close to Japan, and once belonging to the Japanese Empire. She appears to be outwitting England at this moment [applause] in one of the boldest games ever played in history for the possession of a position which she covets more than any other on the planet. [Ap- plause.] Americans are by no means outside the range of complications that may arise in Asia. Who is there here that is not proud of our American colleges at Beirut and on the Bosphorus ? Who does not know that if the tide of influence be turned from Europe toward Asia, instead of from Asia toward Europe, inside the domain of what has been called Turkey, THE DESCENT OF BAD TRAITS AND GOOD. 249 the hour has come for the American scholars at Beirut, and in Robert College on the Bosphorus, to arise and shine ? I know how Russia drove all mis- sionaries from her borders in 1846. If the slightest peril of extinction by Russia is to encompass Robert College at Constantinople, and the great American institutions at Beirut, there is no American scholar, to say nothing of American divines, there is no American patriot, that will not feel himself wounded in a cause greater than any American, English, or Russian interest. The time seems to have come for serious thought on this side of the Atlantic to ex- press itself vigorously against any repetition of the precedent of 1846, by which Russia drove all teach- ers of a faith other than her own outside of her bor- ders. [Applause.] 1878 is not 1846 ; and that fact must be recognized in the Russian calendar, as it is in the English and American. [Applause.] One thousand years ago, when, according to the testimony of Bryant, the Norse shallops were sailing up Massachusetts Bay, the Russians occupied only an insignificant province near the head-waters of the Dnieper. To-day they govern one-seventh part of the continental portion of the globe. What are the causes which have produced the expansion of Russia? A very difficult question ; and yet recent information given us by Wallace, and by our own statesman mis- sionary Hamlin, and by many official documents, may enable us to guess why Russia has expanded so rapidly. One of the causes accounting for her growth is agricultural necessity. Her peasants are not farm- 250 HEREDITY. ers of the scientific order. The soil becomes rapidly exhausted under their methods of tillage. High- farming is almost unknown on the prairie-lands of Russia. Consequently, as the population has grown, new stretches of territory have been called for ; and, as no great mountain-chains were in the way, expan- sion towards the sunrise was easy. Self-defence, too, has enlarged Russia. Attacked by marauding hordes along her southern border, she has often felt herself obliged to protect herself against Tartar provinces by their annexation. High political aims, however, have urged the expansion of Russia toward the west and the south. Her chief physical defi- ciency is a lack of seaports. It is commonplace to notice the fact that Russia wants the right of way by water into the Mediterranean ; but it is not quite commonplace, at least in England, to grant that she has justice on her side in this great politioal and commercial desire. As no one here is responsible for my opinions, perhaps you will allow me to say that a people who have lately manumitted their serfs, and who govern a stretch of territory extending from the Baltic to our Behrings Straits, a population of eighty-five millions, ought to be allowed their mari- time rights as well as their rights on the land., [Ap- plause.] Who supposes that giving the Russians the power to pass through the Dardanelles will give them entire control of Constantinople ? That city for a consid- erable period will need to be under very peculiar government, if Russia can send her iron-clads uride" THE DESCENT OF BAD TEAITS AND GOOD. 251 its roofs at will, and the rest of Europe is not to be thrown into tremor. But it is a matter of natural right, I suppose, that Russia, if under trustworthy bonds to keep the peace, — a great if! — should be admitted to the Levantine Sea. On that condition she should have what she has been seeking for hun- dreds of years, — the right of way into the open oceans of the globe. England seems unlikely to ob- ject to such a right of way on the part of Russia, provided her own right of way is not impeded. Will England have free course to India if Russia has free course through the Levantine Sea ? How many de- bates may arise concerning the Suez Canal? How far may Russia misuse her power, if able at last to attack England from both the sea and the land? Undoubtedly, were she to attack India only from the north, she would have many disadvantages. There is a great probability that if the Russian bear and the English lion should lock jaws in the fast- nesses of the Cashmere vale, the bear would go back to his icebergs, lame at least, if not cold! [Applause.] Were there an English-speaking alliance on the globe, and were the American eagle to watch any such conflict from a crag, looking down on these two rivals, I think the beasts would never meet. [Applause.] We need such moral influences brought to the support of the British Empire in the Christian purposes of the better portion of the English people, as shall keep down war in the interior of Asia, and so take the bloody heart out of this greater Eastern problem. 252 HEREDITY. Everybody, I think, will allow me to affirm that we have seen the beginning of the end of the Turk- ish power in Europe. Mohammedanism will decline so far as it has been a force on the sunset side of the Bosphorus. But now, unless great good judg- ment is employed, there can hardly be an avoidance of a collision, or certainly not of misunderstanding, between Great Britain and Russia in the heart of Asia. When that collision comes, or is threatened, can America do any thing toward bettering the con- ditions of the solution of the greater Eastern ques- tion ? If you will stand by your American mission- aries, you may do much toward casting light among the Mohammedan people who now lie as a wedge between Russia and India. If you will not shut your doors on the Pacific coast, you may do much toward sending out Christianity through returning China- men into the greatest empire of Asia. [Applause.] When the Chinese question comes before Congress, the repeal of the Buiiingame treaty, I hope, is not likely to be effected. America has some part to take in regard to the greater question of the East. Her work is to be performed in the Christian man- ner, by the spreading abroad of schools among the Asiatic populations, by shooting the slant javelins of the gospel's radiance into Chinese Tartary, into Thi- bet, into Persia, into Arabia, into Asia Minor, into Syria, and by not putting a tax on every Chinaman who comes here ! [Applause.] Let us have impar- tial police regulations both for the Chinese and the whizzing hoodlums of San Francisco. Let us apply THE DESCENT OF BAD TRAITS AND GOOD. 253 beneficent law in California to both white men and yellow men. [Applause.] The Chinaman divides all Americans into two classes, — the men who fleece him and those who would educate him. Let us put ourselves on the side of .those who would educate the reflux Chinese immigration ; a rill now, but likely to deepen and broaden, and to become a most valu- able means of evangelizing the Chinese Empire. It is more than important that America should not obtain a bad name in Asia. Let us remember that when the American scholar Van Dyke, at Beirut, sits down, and gives the Scriptures voice in an Ara- bic translation so perfect that native scholars of Da- mascus and Mecca say it resembles the Koran itself in purity of diction, — he is probably addressing more people than speak the English language. The Arabic, in its common and in its printed forms, taken together, is the language of a hundred mil- lions of people. I saw, when at Beirut, an extended list of books which have been translated by our scholars there into Arabic. Some of them were mathematical works, some of them medical, some of them astronomical, a great majority of them religious ; and I remember that as I held this list up under the shadow of Lebanon, and waved it to and fro in the hot wind that moved out of Egypt, I said to Dr. Van Dyke, " There is the best flag that America has raised abroad." Let us not dishonor that ensign. Let us permit no Russian or Asiatic power to dis- honor it. Lord Shaftesbury and Sir Stratford de Redcliffe affirm that the American missionaries are 254 HEKEDITY. the most remarkable men in the East, and the most essential, not only to its religious, but also to its social and political salvation. [Applause.] When I sailed through the -. "The Cincinnati Gazette" did the same; and a large number of newspapers throughout the country published extracts from them. In the course of the winter a few replies to certain statements in the lectures were made by Rev. Dr. James Freeman Clarke and other Unitarians, by Rev. Dr. Miner and other Univer- salist ministers. From February, 1876, most of the Boston Monday Lectures were republished in London by the firm of R. D. Dickinson, Farringdou Street. Individual lectures were republished in " The Christian "World Pulpit," and other theological serials of Great Britain. At the close of the course for 1876-77, in May, eighty lectures had been given, of which all from the forty-fifth had been published. In September, 1877, James R. Osgood'and Company issued " Biology, with Preludes on Current Events," a collection of thirteen Boston Monday Lectures. This volume, at the beginning of December, 1877, was in its twelfth edition. In November the same house issued another course of Mr. Cook's lectures, entitled " Transcendent talism," and announced still another course, entitled " Orthodoxy." Oct. 1, a course of ten lectures on " Conscience " was opened, and, Dec. 10, a course of ten on " Hereditary Descent." Full steno- graphic reports, revised by Mr. Cook, are now published in " The Boston Daily Advertiser," "The New- York Independent," "The Cincinnati Gazette," and " The New- York Advocate." Very num- erous other papers publish large extracts from them. At least a hundred thousand copies appear weekly. The lectures are regularly republished in London. It ought to be added, that since the close of his lectures in May, 1877, Mr. Cook has delivered several of them in New- York city, Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y., Princeton, N.J., and various other places; has also supplied various pulpits in Boston and other cities. Before a, critic passes any severe criticism on these lectures, he may wisely ask himself whether, without having a previously established reputation, he would be able for two years to interest congregations containing sometimes fifteen hundred hearers, of whom sometimes five hundred are liberally educated men, assembled in the midst of pressing engagements, and in the whirl of a great city; and whether, in addition to his Monday-noon exercises, he would lie able to super- intend the printing of three volumes of his lectures on abstruse and complicated themes, to- preach frequently on the sabbath, and occasionally to deliver sermons, each one of which is from one to two hours in length. BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. BIOLOGY. WITH PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. Three Colored Illustrations. 12mo. $1.50. CONTENTS. LECTURES. I. HUXLEY AND TYNDALL ON EVOLUTION. II. THE CONCESSIONS OF EVOLUTIONISTS. III. THE CONCESSIONS OF EVOLUTIONISTS. IV. THE MICKOSCOPE AND MATKKIALISM. V. LOTZE, BEALB, AND HUXLEY ON LIVING TISSUES. VI. LIFE OK MECHANISM — WHICH ? VII. DOES DEATH END ALL ? INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. VIII. DOES DEATH END ALL? THE NERVES AND THE Souii. IX. DOES DEATH END ALL ? Is INSTINCT IMMORTAL ? X. DOES DEATH END ALL ? BAIN'S MATERIALISM. XI. AUTOMATIC AND INFLUENTIAL NERVES. XII. EMERSON'S VIEWS ON IMMORTALITY. XIII. ULRICI ON THE SPIRITUAL BODY. PRELUDES. I. GIFT-ENTERPRISES IN POLITICS. II. SAFE POPULAR FREEDOM. III. DANIEL WEBSTER'S DEATH. IV. CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM. V. AUTHORITIES ON BIOLOGY. VI. BOSTON AND EDINBURGH. VII. THE GULF-CURRENT IN HISTORY. TRANSCENDENTALISM. WITH PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. 12mo. $1.50. CONTENTS. LECTURES. I. INTUITION, INSTINCT, EXPERIMENT, SYLLOGISM, AS TESTS OF TRUTH. II. TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND. III. THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. IV. CARICATURED DEFINITIONS IN RELIGIOUS SCIENCE. V. THEODORE PARKER ON THE GUILT OF SIN. BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. VI. FINAL PERMANENCE OF MORAL CHARACTER. VII. CAN A PERFECT BEING PERMIT EVIL? VIII. THE RELIGION REQUIRED BY THB NATURE OF THINGS. IX. THEODORE PARKER ON COMMUNION WITH GOD AS PERSONAL. X. THE TRINITY AND TRITHKISM. XI. FRAGMENTARINESS OF OUTLOOK UPON THE DIVINE NATUBB. PRELUDES. I. THE CHILDREN OF THE PERISHING POOR. II. THE FA.ILURE OF STRAUSS'S MYTHICAL THEORY. III. CHALSIERS'S REMEDY FOR THE EVILS OF CITIES. IV. MEXICANIZED POLITICS. V. YALE, HARVARD, AND BOSTON. VI. THE RIGHT DIRECTION OF THE RELIGIOUSLY IRRESOLUTB. VII. RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION. VIII. GEORGE WHITEFIELD IN BOSTON. IX. CIRCE'S CUP IN CITIES. X. CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM. XI. PLYMOUTH ROCK AS THE CORNER-STONE OF A FACTORY. CRITICAL ESTIMATES (AMERICAN). Rev. Prof. A. P. Peabody of Harvard University, in The Independent. Joseph Cook is a phenomenon to be accounted for. No other American orator has done what he has done, or any thing like it, and, prior to the experiment, no voice would have been bold enough to predict its success. We reviewed Mr. Cook's " Lectures on Biology " with unqualified praise. In the present volume we find tokens of the same genius, the same intensity of feeling, the same lightning flashes of impas- sioned eloquence, the same viselike hold on the rapt attention and absorbing interest of his hearers and readers. We are sure that we are unbiassed by the change of subject; for, though we dissent from some of the dogmas which the author recognizes in passing, there is hardly one of his consecutive trains of thought in which we are not in harmony with him, or one of his skirmishes in which our sympathies are not wholly on his side. Rev. Dr. Thomas Hill, Ex-President of Harvard University, in the Christian Register. The attempt of sundry critics to depreciate Mr. Cook's science, because he is a minister, is very ill judged. These Lectures are crowded so full of knowledge, of thought, of argument, illumined with such passages of eloquence and power, spiced so frequently with deep-cutting though good-natured irony, that I could make no abstract from them, without utterly mutilating them. The Princeton Review. Mr. Cook has already become famous; and these Lectures are among the chief works that have, and we may say justly, made him no. Their celebrity is due partly to the place and circumstances of BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. their delivery, but still more to their inherent power, without which no adventitious aids could have lifted them into the deserved promi- nence they have attained. . . . Mr. Cook is a great master of analy- sis. . . . The Lecture on the Atonement is generally just, able, and unanswerable. . . . We think, on the whole, that Mr. Cook shows • singular justness of view in his manner of treating the most difficult and perplexing themes, for example, God in Natural Law, and the Trinity. ' Springfield Republican. This new preacher of modern Orthodoxy delivered his Fifty-first Monday Lecture under the caption " Life or Mechanism — Which ? " this week in the Boston Park-street Church, which was crowded — even to the galleries, aisles, and pulpit-stairs — with an audience mostly composed of men, and representing, to a large degree, the culture and intellect of Boston and vicinity. This Monday Lecture- ship is now an established institution, and in its growing popularity will tax pretty severely the quality of Mr. Cook. He has so far, however, met the issue squarely, and shows no signs of emptiness or flagging. . . . Mr. Cook has in his favor a happy combination of per- sonal advantages, — a good presence, mental grasp, considerable per- sonal magnetism, logical alertness and acuteness; a habit of minute and precise analysis, with sufficient repetition of important details; a poetic and dramatic gift, lighting up what might else be dry and heavy with frequent flashes of wit and fancy, and literary and his- torical illustration ; a restless fervor, the outcome of an excess of physical nervousness, which, however, is never disconcerted; and withal, a fine mastery of good, copious Saxon English. Boston Daily Advertiser, At high noon on Monday, Tremont Temple was packed to suffo- cation and overflowing, although five thousand people were in the Tabernacle at the same hour. The Temple audience consisted chiefly of men, and was of distinguished quality, containing hun- dreds of persons well known in the learned professions. Wendell Phillips, Edward Everett Hale, Bronson Alcott, and many other citizens of eminence, sat on the platform. No better proof than the character of the audience could have been desired to show that Mr. Cook's popularity as a lecturer is not confined to the evangelical denominations. (Feb. 7.) It is not often that Boston people honor a public lecturer so much as to crowd to hear him at the noontide of a week-day; and when it does this month after month, the fact is proof positive that his sub- ject is one of engrossing interest. Mr. Cook, perhaps more than any gentleman in the lecture-field the past few years, has been so honored. (Feb. 14.) The Independent. We know of no man that is doing more to-day to show the rea- sonableness of Christianity, and the unreasonableness of unbelief; nor do we know of any one who is doing it with such admirable tolerance, yet dramatic intensity. George M. Beard, M.D., in the New- York Graphic. It is said that Mr. Cook misrepresents modern science. This criti- cism is made mostly by those who do not read all his books; or judge by the original reports at the beginning of the series, or by floating BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. fragments in the papers, or by general hearsay; or very likely by those who themselves know little of science, or at least, who are not versed on all sides of his subjects. His work, as it now stands, aftei many and careful revisions, represents fairly the present state of science on the subject of which he treats, — of the very latest and best researches. Indeed inquirers who will read all of his work, and not part of it, and who are sufficiently endowed with the scientific sense to separate the philosophical reasonings from the facts on which the reasonings are based, will find therein the clearest and most compact statements of the theories and difficulties of evolution, of the movements of bioplasm, and of physiological experiments on decapitated animals and on the electrical irritation of the brain, that appaar in popular literature. Professor John McCrady, in The Literary World. Mr. Cook's Lectures upon Biology have done good service in making known to a Boston audience the researches of such men as Lionel Beale in England, and the thoughts of such men as Hermann Lotze in Germany, besides the admissions and inconsistencies of the practical materialists, and a vahiable review of the whole state of the battle by an able and fearless theological observer like himself. The publication of these Lectures cannot fail" to be of service to the extra-scientiric world in general. The book well presents to out- siders a certain little-known stage of conservative scientific thought, which they cannot reach anywhere else in so accessible and compact a form. Its extremely popular form, though quite disturbing to the nervous equilibrium of a confirmed man of science, is, nevertheless, well fitted for those it aims to inform, — the great free, intelligent, and religious-minded public, who have not had their heads squeezed by specialistic boards and bandages into strange and fantastic models of approved scientific monstrosity; the people, in short, who have not made philosophical Flatheads of themselves for the sake of some narrow mole's track of scientific investigation known as a " specialty." This specialism, indeed, is aiming to destroy all freedom of thought and speech, and, by consequence, all philosophic thought whatsoever, by forbidding every man to express an opinion on any subject save his own specialty. It has all the narrow intolerance of Comte's Positivism; and I, for one, honor Mr. Cook for his courage in taking it by the beard, and defying it. I. heartily recommend his book to tl.e careful reading of. everybody who lias the interest of scientific conservative thought at heart. Such an one will, at the least, rise from its perusal with a conception of the existing state of the great battle between spirit and matter, very different from that which Mr. Huxley, with the voice of a dragon, lays down in his " Physical Basis of Life ; " and, instead of " matter and law devouring spirit and spontaneity," he will see how great cause there is for anticipating the opposite result. Indeed, the progress of science means, to my apprehension, the very opposite of all that Mr. Huxley contends for in that essay. Spirit and spontaneity are slowly indeed, but surely, advancin;» along a path which will end in their completely devouring matt"'1 and law. The reality of the universe will prove to be the spirit : the illusion of it, the matter ; while natural law will declare itself nothing more than the self-consistency of untrammelled spontaneity BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. Pmfessor Borden P. Boione of Boston University, in the Sunday Afternoon. In the chapters on the Theories of Life, these discussions are, in many respects, models of argument; and the descriptions of the facts under discussion are often unrivalled for both scientific exact- ness, and rhetorical adequacy of language. In the present state of the debate there is no better manual of the argument than the •work in hand. The emptiness of the mechanical explanatipn of l'.fe was never more clearly shown. Appletons' Journal. It may be said that the distinguishing and striking characteristic of Mr. Cook's work is, that he pours out the treasures of the latest German thought before audiences and readers whose ideas of 8( i- ence and philosophy have been moulded almost exclusively by that English school, which, as Taine says, tends naturally (by racial in- heritance) to materialistic views of life. Our knowledge of the author is confined to what we can obtain from his book; but this is amply sufficient to show that his intellectual equipment has been obtained in Germany, and is truly German in its comprehensiveness and pre- cision. . . . Aside from the rhetorical brilliancy of his style, and the aptness and fertility of his illustrations, Mr. Cook's method of ex- position is remarkably effective. By numbering his propositions, and stating them in the concisest possible phrase, he secures a clear- ness and intelligibility that are seldom so well maintained in a long and complicated argument; and the epigrammatic guise in which most of his principles and conclusions are presented impresses them with peculiar vividness upon the mind of the reader or hearer. The Eclectic Magazine. Mr. Cook's rhetorical and literary skill would obtain him a hear- ing on any subject he chose to discuss ; but it is very soon seen, that, beneath the glowing and almost too fervidly eloquent language, there is a force of logic, a breadth of intellectual culture, and a mastery of all the issues involved, such as are seldom exhibited by partici- pants on either side in the great controversy between religion and science. It may be said unqualifiedly that the pulpit has never brought such comprehensiveness and precision of knowledge, com- bined with such logical and literary skill, to the discussion of the questions raised by the supposed tendency of biological discovery. International Review. The lecture-form is retained, and the implied comments of the audience, as given by the reporters, are furnished us, — a feature which will strike readers favorably or otherwise, as their ideas are more or less severe on the composition and make-up of a book. For our part, we like this feature. The Advance (Chicago). The reasons given .for retaining the responses of the audienco, applause, &c., seem to us in this case satisfactory. .It is frequently as much a matter of significant interest to know how statements were received by such an audience as to know what the one indi- vidual said. This Boston Lectureship is altogether unique in 8 BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. tliw recent history of popular exposition of abstruse themes. Oue luis to go back to the time of Peter Abelard of the University ol Paris for a parallel to it. The Interior (Chicago}. These Lectures are full of hard thought and eloquent expres- sion. They dwell on the profoundest religious themes, and iu the most incisive way. The same power of analysis, sharpness and precision of statement, and gorgeous rhetoric, which characterized the volume on " Biology," are conspicuous here. In these two vol- umes Mr. Cook has given us the most forcible and readable of all modern defences of essential Christian truth against the scit'ntilio and philosophic heresies of the day. The Standard (Chicago). The incisive, trenchant style of Mr. Cook has, perhaps, no more admirable adaptation and application than to the demolition of the glittering but specious logic of materialistic philosophy. It is a pleasure to the intellect, as well as to the conscience, to follow Mr. Cook in his irresistible iconoclasm among the images of the theo- rists who substitute evolution for God in the grand process of cosmogony. Cincinnati Gazette. It must be admitted by the most captious critic, that Mr. Cook states his positions with wonderful grace and clearness, and that he fortifies what may appear most paradoxical by a remarkable array of illustration and argument. Boston Traveller. There is no denying the fact that Mr. Cook is a born orator. As a popular platform speaker, he has few rivals, and, broadly speaking, we might say no superiors. Boston Journal. These Discourses relate to the great problems of life most at issue between science and religion. They were received with eager inter- est when delivered; and, being republished in whole or in part by the American and English papers, they were, in effect, spoken to an audience on both sides of the sea. Mr. Cook's eloquent and pic- turesque style — which has in it a touch of Emerson and a touch of Carlyle, as well as qualities peculiarly its own — loses little by trans- ference from the platform to the printed page; and, indeed, the lat- ter form of presentation has its advantages, as being more conducive to the calm and leisure which subjects of so much importance require for their adequate consideration. New- York Christian Intelligencer. "We believe this book ought to stand and will stand among tli« very first of the Apologies of the last quarter of this century. The Christian Union. Mr. Cook is profoundly interested in his themes. Indeed, he never fails to be kindled into enthusiasm by their transcendent BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. Importance. He understands the reach of the physiological ques- tions which he discusses, and the philosophical problems which he essays to solve. His mind is penetrating and subtle. He delights in an argument, and is the last man to fear an antagonist. It would not be easy to decide whether he possesses the logical or the imagina- tive powers in excess. Illustrated Christian Weekly. "We enjoy tLe splendor of Mr. Cook's rhetoric and the brilliancy of his imagination, as in reading a poem. Church Journal (New York). His style is peculiar. It is clear, abounding in most expressive figure*, with perhaps a slight shading of Carlyleism. But we do not now recall a more forcible writer of the day. His blows at Parker- ism, Huxleyism, and Darwinism, come down with sledge-hammer force. He is no more declaimer. He speaks with the authority of a man who has studied and mastered his subject, and who has fairly dissected the fallacies which he so ably exposes. The Christian at Work. Mr. Cook has taken his place as one of the ablest controversial- ists of the day. His logic is remorseless. He lays every thing under tribute, and drives every nail home. Worcester Spy. As a thinker he has notable clearness and strength. His style is full of life and -vigor; and he has an admirable mastery of the power of expression; but these alone would not sufficiently ex- plain the great success of his Monday Lectures. The true explana- tion is, that he selected live questions for discussion, after having studied them, and taken pains to understand them thoroughly. Ho can meet the most perfectly furnished materialistic speculators on their own ground; is familiar with all the outs and ins of their methods of reasoning; and is able to match their knowledge of the studies and discoveries in physical science, which they use in support of the positions they endeavor to maintain. Hartford Courant. The volumes containing his metaphysical speculations and scien- tiflc treatment of the problem of religion sell like novels. Mr. Cook is not only a master of the art of putting things, but he is a wit. It Is wit none the less because it is used for a serious purpose. Presbyterian Banner. The folly of materialistic philosophers has only been exceeded by their arrogance ; and it is truly refreshing to find their inllated bubbles so completely punctured and dissipated by the keen thrusts of Mr. Cook's unanswerable logic. The Penn. Monthly (Philadelphia). His addresses have been well called prose poems. Nothing could seem less poetical to the eye than his numbered paragraphs. They 10 BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. look like a series of theses set up for the defiance of all comers. But ear and sense alike are captivated as we read, and we aie forced to recognize a master of English prose. Religious Herald (Richmond, Va.). No man in America is just now attracting more attention than Joseph Cook, and his Titanic blows are telling on the materialistic scepticism of the day. . . . He is clear, axiomatic, and irresistible through all his arguments, and, while always courteous to opponents, is often keenly satirical. The Theological Medium, Nashville, Tenn. His learning is immense, his faculty of order eminent, his imagi- nation very brilliant, and his logic strong and close. New Orleans Times, The Lectures are crowded with eloquent passages, telling satire, and keen, critical, and precise reasoning. San Francisco Evening Bulletin. The style is peculiarly vivid, presenting occasionally some of the characteristics of Carlyle. The book, in consequence of its scope and general attractiveness, is destined to become very popular. San Francisco Bancroft's Messenger. Possessed of & calm, critical, and methodical mind, Mr. Cook has constructed, from the material at his disposal, about a dozen of the most interesting essays that have yet appeared on the relation of religion and science. On almost every page of the volume, elo- quence leaves its mark. San Francisco Evening Post. Emotion, clearness, and sound sense are the weapons with which he produces conviction. The Congregational Quarterly. We can most heartily commend the work on Orthodoxy for its graphic power, for its bold and manly exhibitions of truth, for the carefulness in general of its distinctions, for the magnetic quality of its style, for its clear aim and direction; in short, for a portrayal of orthodoxy such as is reasonable and defensible. The Bibliotheca Sacra. There is no other work on biology, there is no other work on the- ology, with which this volume of lectures can well be compared. It is a book that no biologist, whether an originator or a mere middle- man in science, would ever have written. Traversing a very wide field, cutting right across the territories of rival specialists, it con- tains not one important scientific misstatement, either of fact or theory. Not only the propositions, but the dates, the references, the names, and the histories of scientific discoveries and speculations, are presented as they are found in the sources whence they ara taken, o: at least with only verbal and minor changes. BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. 11 CRITICAL ESTIMATES (FOREIGN). Rev. R. Payne Smith, Dean of Canterbury. The lectures are remarkably eloquent, vigorous, and powerful, anil no one could read them without great benefit. They deal with very important questions, and are a valuable contribution towards solv- ing many ol the difficulties which at this time trouble many minds. Rev. Dr. Angus, the College, Regent's Park. These Lectures discuss some of the most vital questions of theol- ogy, and examine the views or writings of Emerson, Theodore Parker, and others. They are creating a great sensation in Boston, where they have been delivered, and are wonderful specimens of shrewd, clear, and vigorous thinking. They are, moreover, largely illustrative, and have a line vein of poetry running through them. The Lectures on the Trinity are capitally written; and, though we are not prepared to accept all Mr. Cook's statements, the Lectures, as a whole, are admirable. A dozen such lectures have not been published for many a day. Rev. Alexander Raleigh, D.D., of London. The Lectures are in every way of a high order. They are profound and yet clear, extremely forcible in some of their parts, yet, I think, always fair, and as full of sympathy with what is properly and purely human as of reverence for what is undoubtedly divine. Rev. John Ker, D.D., of Glasgow. My conviction is, that they are specially fitted for the time, and likely above all to be useful to thoughtful minds engaged in seek- ing a footing amid the quicksands of doubt. There is a freshness, a power, and a felt sincerity, in the way in which they deal with the engrossing questions of our time, and, indeed, of all time, which should commend them to earnest spirits which feel that there must be a God and a soul, and some way of bringing them together, and which yet have got confused amid the negations of the dogmatic scepticism of our day. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Cook four years ago, when he was visiting Europe to make himself acquainted with different forms of thought, and I could see in him a power and resolution which foretold the mark he is now making on public opinion. Rev. C. n. Spurgeon. These are very wonderful Lectures. We bless God for raising up such a champion for his truth as Joseph Cook. Few could hunt down Theodore Parker, and all that race of misbelievers, as Mr. Cook has done. He has strong convictions, the courage of his con- victions, and force to support his courage. In reasoning, the infidel party have here met their match. "We know of no other man one- half so well qualified for the peculiar service of exploding the pro- 12 BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. tensions of modern science as this great preacher in whom Boston ia rejoicing. Some men shrink from this spiritual wild-boar hunting, but Mr. Cook is as happy in it as ho is expert. May his arm be strengthened by the Lord of hostsl London Quarterly Review. For searching philosophical analysis, for keen and merciless logic, for dogmatic assertion of eternal truth in the august name of science such as thrills the soul to its foundations, for widely diversified ;md most apt illustrations drawn from a wide field of reading and obser- vation, for true poetic feeling, for a pathos without any mixture of sentimentality, for candor, for moral elevation, and for noble loyalty to those great Christian verities which the author affirms and vindi- cates, these wonderful Lectures stand forth alone amidst the contem- porary literature of the class to which they belong. London Baptist Magazine. Mr. Cook's "Monday Lectures" have already become one of the most popular and useful institutions of America; and on this side the Atlantic we know of no author, either British or American, who is just now so widely read. Rev. A. Melville, Glasgow. It is because Mr. Cook refuses no real help that offers itself to him from any quarter, that he finds firm footing on the heights to which he climbs. His lectures present most valuable training for dealing with all such questions, from the fact that they take so wide a range, and combine so skilfully all departments of truth. — Intro- duction to Glasgow edition of Boston Monday Lectures. The British Quarterly Review. Mr. Cook is a man of wide reading, tenacious memory, acute discrimination, and great power of popular exposition. Nothing deters him. He plunges in medias res, however abstruse the specu- lation, and his vigor and fire carry all before them. He has intui- tive genius for pricking wind-bags, and for reducing over-sanguine and exaggerated hypotheses to their exact value. He has called a halt in many an impetuous march of science, and exposed a funda- mental fallacy in many a triumphant argument. The London Spectator. The incisiveness and raciness of their style make the lectures decidedly worthy of attention. The discussions of the permanence of moral character and the self-propagating power of sin are striking and forcible in no small degree. The lectures on the barrenness of ethics without a personal God, and on " Trinity and Tritheism," are full of true and elevating thoughts, and genuine and wholesome sentiment. %* For sale by all booksellers. Sent, postpaid, on receipt of the price, by the Publishers, HOUOHTON, OSGOOD & CO., Boston. PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY BF Cook, Joseph 341 Heredity C6