5. It accords with the teaching of common sense without being bound down within its limits. 6. It establishes the distinction between reason and instinct, and between language and emotional expressions. 7. It takes cognizance of our highest perceptions, including those of truth, goodness, and beauty as such. 8. It supports and enforces moral teaching. 9. It harmonizes with the declarations of religion, both natural and revealed. 10. It asserts its own truth in affirming the validity of our primary intuitions. What, then, can be the motive for rejecting a philosophy which accords with the facts of experience, co-ordinates and explains them, and for accepting one so laboured yet so inadequate as the one here criticised? It is much to be feared that with many the objection lies in the last point but one enumerated by us in its favour. If so, the sting must lie in the fact of its harmony with religion. A passionate hatred of religion, however discreetly or astutely veiled, lies at the bottom of much of the popular metaphysical teaching now in vogue. ligion some the accept A belief in the necessary inconsistency of science with Dislike of re- religion is therefore persistently propagated amongst times induces the public by writings and lectures in which more ance of it. is implied than asserted. In such lectures attempts have again and again been made to strike theology through physical science, to blacken religion with coal-dust, or to pelt it with fragments of chalk, or to smother it with sub-atlantic mud, or to drown it in a sea of protoplasm. Delenda est. Carthago! No system is to be tolerated which will lead men to accept a personal God, moral responsibility, and a future state of rewards and punishments. Let these unwelcome truths be once eliminated, and no system is deemed undeserving of a candid, if not a sympathetic, consideration, and, cæteris paribus, that system which excludes them the most efficaciously becomes the most acceptable. The appeal here made, however, is not to religion but to reason, not to authority but to intelligence, not to any dogmatic system but to the pure, unadulterated, and unprejudiced human reason if haply anywhere it may be obtained for our use. By that we must be prepared to stand or fall. Conclusion. The consequences then which have been here put forward, merit, if they have been rightly represented, the attention of every man who becomes acquainted with them. Though such considerations, if taken alone, may be insufficient to determine the judgment, they may suffice. to accentuate propositions the truth of which has been established from other sources. Though inconclusive alone, their corroborative efficacy may well be considerable. This post ally called for. CHAPTER XIV. A POSTSCRIPT. This postscript is called for by an unamended republication by Professor Huxley of his criticism on the 'Genesis of Species,' of which he in part misapprehends, in part misrepresents the arguments. A Theist should anticipate a revelation. The Christian revelation asserts creation, but at the same time lays down principles which so harmonize with Evolution that no contradiction can arise in this respect between its doctrines and physical science. This harmony must be preordained.” WITH the preceding chapter the argument followed in this book comes to its natural close, but a circumstance, script speci- to be presently adverted to, seems to render it desirable to extend our survey one step further. We have gathered from Nature in the foregoing chapters the supreme lesson of the existence of a personal First Cause of infinite power and wisdom and absolute goodness. Beyond this, however, reason is unable to proceed unaided, though it shows us clearly that a revelation as to the nature of God, and concerning our relations with and duties towards Him, is what is to be à priori expected from a being of absolute goodness and power. This expectant • attitude is that which philosophy ought rationally to assume. The course, however, which modern philosophy has taken, Modern phi- though for a time seeming to tend towards the anticipation of revelation (one justifying an exattitude. pectant attitude towards it), has diverged remarkably in the opposite direction. Reason expects revelation. losophy has diverged from this The secular dispute between those who assert and those who deny that all our ideas are modified sensations and no more has undergone a strange transformation within the last. quarter of a century and with this transformation we witness a strange reaction. The ambiguity of Locke caused his system to be developed by Hume, through Berkeley, into scepticism, and by Condillac into unmitigated materialism. These results were the occasion of that Kantian resurrection hailed throughout the Continent as a philosophical system finally and triumphantly refuting the school of empiricism. They were also the occasion of the parallel movement in Great Britain of Reid and his followers-a movement less developed and less conspicuous than was the reaction under Kant on the European mainland. The event has shown, however, that sensationalism was scotched, not killed. In spite of Royer-Collard, Maine-deBiran, Jouffroy, and Cousin, the grossest sensationalism has reappeared in France through Auguste Comte. In Britain the successors of Reid-Sir William Hamilton, Mansel, and McCosh-have all been unsuccessful in exorcising the sensational spirit; and though Mr. John Stuart Mill (as almost a pure Lockian) may be regarded as an instance of philosophical "survival," yet Hume lives again in Huxley and in Lewes; and indeed (however they may differ as to subordinate questions) Messrs. Spencer, Bain, Mill, Comte, Huxley, and Lewes, unite in an essential and fundamental agreement with the great sceptic of Scotland. Thus, though fifty years ago the world of thought pronounced Hume for ever defeated by Kant, we find Hume once more in possession of the field; and even the extreme sensationalism of Condillac is justified, nay demonstrated to be inevitable truth, by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Indeed that author may, in a certain sense, be deemed the legitimate. descendant and representative of Locke, as understood by those who refuse to attribute to the term "reflexion," as used by him, a meaning which would stultify him as to his whole philosophical position. An inquiry into the causes of this untoward resurrection would be full of interest, but cannot, as too remote from the matter in hand, be here pursued. The mere existence, however, of such a revival would seem to demonstrate that the Professor of Königsburg did not dig deeply enough in his attempted process of eradication. and Evolu But Mr. Spencer, whose philosophy may be taken as Mr. Spencer the most complete expression of modern views, tion. is far from being a mere reviver of Hume, of Locke, or of any other philosopher. Indeed, he differs from Locke in admitting, in a certain sense," innate ideas," while he combats Hume with vigour and efficiency, and may not improbably quite repudiate the imputation of being a disciple of the philosopher last named. It is as the philosophical embodiment of modern physical science that Mr. Spencer is pre-eminently distinguished. Science has indeed made vast acquisitions since the time of Hume, and the stored-up accumulation of its facts contains materials calculated to affect powerfully the imagination of mankind. Now Mr. Spencer's philosophy is replete with conceptions and inferences derived from that accumulated treasure. It is by such scientific progress, by the indirect influences of physical science on philosophy, that this development of reactionary sensationalism must be explained. New issues have been joined, and the point of view having been shifted, controversies deemed closed have to be reconsidered. This reconsideration has become requisite, not through want of conclusiveness in the earlier replies to the argument as then conducted, but through the fresh lights now let in at apertures in dividing walls which then seemed of unbreachable solidity, and which give to old facts a quite new aspect. The dispute as to our possession of ideas and conceptions which no experience of any single life, however prolonged, can explain—the existence that is of an à priori element in our knowledge-may be considered to have ended in the nineteenth century with the triumphant refutation of those sensationalists who denied the existence of such an element. This refutation Mr. Spencer not only fully accepts as |