ceivability is no test at all of reality. A short memory must be a great convenience in argument like this.

As a rendering of the mental text, we cannot but think the inconceivability, which is charged upon the belief in creation and destruction, to be one of the many psychologic forgeries, which Mr. Spencer has substituted for the true reading. Inconceivability is an ambiguous term. Some statements violate the law of our reason; others transcend our reason. To the first class belong all violations of the law of contradiction, such as that a thing can be and not be at the same time. To the second class belong enquiries about the inner nature, and action of things, such as the questions: how does matter attract? what constitutes existence? The first class only are strictly inconceivable. Violating, as they do, the fundamental intuitions of the mind, as long as we have any faith in reason, we must believe these inconceivables to be impossibles. The second class is merely incomprehensible. How matter is constituted, how motion is transmitted, how force is exercised, these are not strictly inconceivable, but incomprehensible. We have not the data, if we have the faculties, for absolute enquiries like these. A denial based upon an inconceivable of the first class is founded upon mental power; one based upon an inconceivable of the second class is founded upon mental weakness. Because of what the mind is, we declare all that denies our mental intuitions to be inconceivable. Because of what it is not, we declare all that transcends our intuitions to be inconceivable; but one inconceivable represents an impossible, the other only an inexplainable. Now if we examine the alleged inconceivability of the creation, or destruction of matter, we shall see that it is really an incomprehensibility and nothing more. It does not violate, but transcends the laws of our thought. For who has such knowledge of the inmost nature of matter, that he can positively deny that the things seen were made from things not appearing? Who has so possessed himself of the central secret of material existence as to be sure that the solid globe may not disappear like the "baseless fabric of a vision, and leave not a wrack behind?" God can originate action, why can he not originate being? of causation, the mind has a very positive deliverance, but it

On the subject

has none on this question; it is simply transcendental to our faculties. All we can say is, we cannot comprehend how creation or destruction is possible, but that they may be we cannot deny. Yet Mr. Spencer uses this mental impotence as a sufficient test of objective reality. We cannot explain how a thing can be; hence it cannot be. Part I. loads the mind with opprobrium; Part II. constitutes it the measure, not merely of knowledge, but of existence. Part I. declares inconceivability worthless as a test of reality; Part II. makes it the best of proofs.

But leaving these contradictions to destroy each other, we pass to the central point of this system, and indeed the central point of all, that styles itself the "New Philosophy," the Correlation of Forces.

This doctrine necessarily holds the first place in every scheme of evolution; for, if it cannot be maintained, there must be irreducible breaks in the reasoning. If the physical forces refuse to correlate with the vital, there would be no possibility of passing from the tossing whirlpool of flame, or the waste theatre of rock and mud, which once constituted our earth, to organic existence. There would be an absolute necessity for some external power to introduce the new creation, or the inorganic would remain inorganic forever. In the same way, if the physical forces do not correlate with the mental, the evolutionist cannot pass, by a continuous chain of cause and effect, from the primitive cloud-bank to mind and its manifestations; and the scheme would be incomplete. But if, on the other hand, there should be such correlation, there would be a possibility of finding the present order of things potentially existent in the ancient nebula. The earth cooling down to organic limits, the physical forces in their restless hide-and-seek, might chance upon organic combinations; and thus life, and finally mind, would be started on their way. It is then of first importance to a philosophy, which aims to educe life, mind, poetry, science, Milton, Plato, Newton, Raphael, everybody, and everything from a condensing mist of matter, to make out this correlation. Let us see how the work is done.

In the proof of the correlation of the physical forces we note the same ridiculous confusion of force and motion, which is so

patent in all our works on this subject. Heat is a mode of force, and a mode of motion, at the same time. Motion produces magnetism; magnetism is motion; magnetism is force. The same is said of light and electricity; both are motions; both are forces. Yet the universal definition of force, is the hidden cause of motion or change. Force is cause, motion is effect. When pressed for a definition, there is no scientist, who would view them in any other relation. If it is true that heat, electricity, &c., are all modes of motion, then their correlation ought not to be termed a correlation of forces; but a correlation of motions. To use the cause and effect as interchangeable and identical, involves a most remarkable confusion of ideas. Yet Mr. Spencer is not alone in this error. We do not know a single scientist, who has maintained the proper distinction between force and motion. It would be easy to fill pages with quotations from the writings of the most prominent scientists, all illustrating the same confusion. The professional intellect is never to be trusted beyond the profession.

But admitting the correlation of physical forces, do these correlate with the vital forces? What is the proof that vitality is a function of material forces? Mr. Spencer says:

"Plant life is all directly or indirectly dependent on the heat and light of the sun-directly dependent in the immense majority of plants, and indirectly dependent in plants, which, as the fungi, flourish in the dark; since these, growing as they do at the expense of decaying organic matter, mediately draw their forces from the same original source. Each plant owes the carbon and hydrogen of which it mainly consists, to the carbonic acid and water contained in the surrounding air and earth. Carbonic acid and water must however be decomposed before their carbon and hydrogen can be assimilated. To overcome the powerful affinities which hold their elements together, requires the expenditure of force; and this force is supplied by the sun. In what matter the decomposition is effected, we do not know; but we know that when, under fit conditions, plants are exposed to the sun's rays, they give off oxygen, and accumulate carbon and hydrogen. In darkness this process ceases. * * * Thus the irresistible infer

*

ence is, that the force by which plants abstract the materials of

their tissues from surrounding inorganic compounds, the forces by which they grow and carry on their functions, are forces that previously existed as solar radiations."

"That animal life is immediately dependent on vegetable life is a familiar truth; and that, in the main, the processes of animal life are opposite to those of vegetable life is a truth long current among men of science. Chemically considered, vegetable life is chiefly a process of deoxidation, and animal life chiefly a process of oxidation: chiefly, we must say, because in so far as plants are expenders of force for the purpose of organization, they are oxidizers, (as is shown by the exhalation of carbonic acid during the night); and animals in some of their minor processes are probably deoxidizers. * * * And while the decomposition effected by the plant, is at the expense of certain forces emanating from the sun, which are employed in overcoming the affinities of carbon and hydrogen for the oxygen united with them; the recomposition effected by the animal, is at the profit of these forces, which are liberated during the combination of such elements. Thus the movements, internal and external, of the animal, are reappearances in new forms of a power absorbed by the plant under the shape of light and heat. Just as, in the manner above explained, the solar forces expended in raising vapor from the sea's surface, are given out again in the fall of rain and rivers to the same level, and in the accompanying transfer of solid matters; so, the solar forces that in the plant raised certain chemical elements to a condition of unstable equilibrium, are given out again in the actions of the animal during the fall of these elements to a condition of stable equilibrium " (p. 271–273).

To this general proof he adds: "The transformation of the unorganized contents of an egg into the organized chick, is altogether a question of heat: withhold heat, and the process does not commence; supply heat, and it goes on while the temperature is maintained, but ceases when the egg is allowed to cool. The developmental changes can be completed only by keeping the temperature with tolerable constancy at a definite height for a definite time; that is only by supplying a definite quantity of heat" (p. 273).

The gist of Mr. Spencer's argument is this. Without sunshine there can be no plant or animal life; hence sunshine and life are one. Without heat the chicken cannot be hatched; therefore heat and vitality are identical. Now surely it requires a great deal of faith to accept this argument as conclusive. At the most, it only proves the possibility of their identity; but it by no means establishes the fact. All that is really made out is, that light and heat are necessary conditions of vital action; but the conditions of the action and the power acting need not be the same. Bricks and mortar are conditions of the builder's activity, but they are not the builder. Now if the believer in vitality should choose to say that there is a constructive force in the body, which, while separate from the physical forces, does use those forces as its agents in construction and function, what is there in Mr. Spencer's argument to disprove it? There is not one word which makes against such a hypothesis; yet he moves on apparently without a suspicion that any more proof is desirable; and tells us on the strength of this fallacy that "whoever duly weighs the evidence will see that nothing but an overwhelming bias in favor of a preconceived theory can explain the non-acceptance" of the correlation of both vital and mental forces with the physical. But on looking at the subject with a critical eye it seems to us that "nothing short of an overwhelming bias in favor of a preconceived theory can explain its acceptance." Whoever has proved the correlation of the physical and the vital forces, Mr. Spencer has not.

But has any one proved it? Is there in any of the treatises on this subject anything which establishes the identity of the two? There is no end of assertion. Mr. Huxley tells us that protoplasm is the basis of life, and then says that life is the only known source of protoplasm. But since there is no life without protoplasm, and no protoplasm without life, the question of priority becomes the parallel of the famous inquiry, whether the hen produces the egg, or the egg the hen. It becomes necessary to break the circle somewhere, and he tells us that if we could have been present when the earth manifested extraordinary conditions, we might have seen protoplasm produced from the inorganic. This, and the further declaration, that there is no telling what chemistry may do yet,