appealed to by Theists as rendering conclusive evidence on their side
than the eye, nor would they run much risk by allowing sentence to go
for or against them according as Mr. Darwin has or has not succeeded in
his attempt to explain that evidence away. Possibly he may disclaim
having made any attempt of the kind, and I must admit that it is less by
what he says than by what he leaves unsaid, that he lays himself open to
the charge. Indeed, in almost all he says on the subject, I myself
cordially agree, embracing even some of his views with less of
hesitation than he seems to have felt in putting them forward. He seems
to me, for instance, to have somewhat gratuitously admitted it to be
apparently 'in the highest degree absurd to suppose that the eye, with
all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different
distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the
correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed
by natural selection.' For since, as he proceeds unanswerably to argue,
'numerous gradations, from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect
and complex, each grade being useful to its possessor, can certainly be
shown to exist;' since, as certainly, slight variations of the eye do
occur, and are inherited, and since of these variations there cannot but
be some which are useful to the animal exhibiting them under changing
conditions of life, the difficulty of believing in the formation of a
perfect and complex eye by natural selection can be little else than a
prejudice of the imagination. He proceeds to indicate some probable
stages in the assumed process. Some of the lowest organisms, in which no
trace of nerves can be detected, are known to be sensible to light,
owing, probably, to the presence in the _sarcode_ of which they are
mainly composed, of certain elements which, in organisms somewhat higher
in the scale, become aggregated and developed into nerves specially
endowed with the same sensibility. An optic nerve thus formed,
surrounded by pigment cells, and covered by translucent skin, is the
simplest organ that can be called an eye, but it is an eye incapable of
distinct vision, and serving only to distinguish light from darkness. In
certain star-fishes, small depressions in the layer of pigment-cells
are filled with transparent gelatinous matter projecting with a convex
surface like a rudimentary cornea, and this, it has been suggested, may
serve, not only to form an image, but to concentrate the luminous rays.
In insects, the numerous facets in the cornea of their great compound
eyes have now been ascertained to form true lenses, the cones, moreover,
having been discovered to include curiously modified nervous filaments.
It is impossible not, in this series of changes, to perceive the
appearance of graduation, nor ought there to be much difficulty in
believing the apparent graduation to be real, when we consider how few
comparatively are the still living forms in which the changes cited have
been observed, and how far more numerous the extinct forms by which
intermediate changes may have been presented. If there be no
extravagance in supposing that natural selection may have occasioned
these early steps, neither is there any in supposing that, by continued
progress in the same direction, it may at length have fabricated the
most perfect optical instrument possessed by any member of the
_articulata_. And, if credited so far, why not still further? why not
with competence to form a man's or an eagle's eye? So far I am as
completely at one with Mr. Darwin in respect to the eye as in respect to
any other of the subjects taken by him for illustration. The fact is,
however, that in this, as in every similar instance, he has completely
evaded the real difficulties of the case. It is not a whit more
startling to be told that the most complex eye, with all the latest
improvements, than to be told that the earliest rudiment of an optic
nerve, may have been formed by the gradual accumulation of minute
differences. Only allow time enough for the requisite accumulation, and
neither operation is one whit more unintelligible than the other. The
difficulty, equally and utterly insuperable in both cases, is to
understand how the difference can have been undesigned. 'How a nerve
comes to be sensitive to light,' says Mr. Darwin, 'hardly concerns us
more than how life itself originated.' Perhaps not; nor, indeed, very
well could it, for the second question of the two is surely one of
almost unsurpassed concernment; but, at any rate, when either of the two
is asked, nothing can be more reprehensible than, by studiously ignoring
the only alternative reply, to leave it to be inferred that the nerve
made itself, or that life caused itself to live, that both are in short
examples of what Mr. Darwin strangely calls '_variation causing
alterations_.'[41] Let us briefly consider a few of the results supposed
to be attributable to this singular process. The eye, as every reader of
course knows, though here and there one perhaps may not be the worse for
being reminded, consists of four coats--the _sclerotic_, outermost and
strongest, which constitutes the white of the eye; the circular, tough,
and coloured, yet pellucid, _cornea_, in the centre of which is seen the
pupil; the _choroid_, full charged with black pigment, and lining the
sclerotic; the _retina_, an expansion of the optic nerve, lining in its
turn the choroid; of the _iris_, a flat membrane, dividing the eye into
two very unequally-sized chambers; of a lens termed the _crystalline_,
suspended in the posterior chamber immediately behind the iris; and of
two humours (also virtual lenses), whereof one, the _aqueous_, is
enclosed in the anterior chamber formed by the iris and the cornea,
while the other, the _vitreous_, fills the whole of the posterior
chamber save what is occupied by the crystalline lens. By what nice
interlacement of filaments the fibrous ring that margins the pupil, or
aperture through the iris, regulates the admission of light, contracting
or expanding, yet always preserving its circular form, according as the
brilliance is excessive or deficient; how the humours or lenses are
continually varying in figure and relative position so as to concentrate
every pencil of light admitted on that point exactly where the retina is
spread out to receive it; how, according as the object looked at is near
at hand or far off, certain muscles perform quite opposite services,
rendering the cornea more or less prominent, pushing the crystalline
lens forward or backward, and thereby lengthening or shortening the axis
of vision, so that, whether the rays enter divergently from a near
object, or parallel from a remote one, they equally fall into focus at
the same distance beyond, and equally form on the retina a picture of
the object from which they come, perhaps compressing a landscape of five
or six square leagues into a space of half an inch diameter, and anon
allowing the page of a book or a dinner-plate to occupy the entire field
of vision--to these and to any kindred marvels it would be superfluous
more than momentarily to refer. Suffice it to note how measureless the
superiority, as a mere piece of mechanism, of an average eye to the
finest of telescopes, and how just, nevertheless, is the
telescope-maker's claim to praise for skilful adaptation to the laws of
optics, when he has succeeded in a faint and feeble imitation of some
minor part of nature's visual apparatus. Yet nature's original and
infinitely more beautiful aptitudes we are forbidden to deem
adaptations, being required instead to regard them as self-produced, or,
at any rate, as having been undesigned. Now I unreservedly admit that,
among all conceivable forms, among the most exquisitely beautiful and
most usefully intricate and complex, there is not one which may not
possibly have been produced without aim or purpose by the mere
restlessness of elemental forces; the amount of probability of their
having been so produced being, however, according to the formula already
set forth in its proper place, as one to infinity multiplied more or
less frequently by itself. But what adequate superlative shall we invent
to express the credulity, the credulosity run mad, of those who, in a
matter of scientific belief, deliberately accept such odds. Observe how
at once extravagantly gratuitous and painfully elaborate such
credulosity is; how easily, on the one hand, all its ends could be
served by the simple expedient of supposing a superintending
intelligence; how, on the other, it compels ingenuity like Mr. Darwin's
to entrench itself behind a phrase of utterly unmeaning gibberish.
If you see a man moving slowly, with head down, over an extensive plain,
you may fairly suspect that he does not know where he is going, and
possibly does not mean to go anywhere in particular. But if you perceive
that on reaching a ditch he takes a leap over, you are quite sure that,
when leaping, he meant to get to the other side. To that extent his
saltatory movement is unequivocal evidence of design. It is perhaps to
escape the necessity of a similar inference that Mr. Darwin so
frequently quotes the proverb _Natura non facit saltum_; but, if so, he
leans on a broken reed--on a bit of proverbial philosophy as weak as the
weakest of Mr. Tupper's. That Nature does sometimes make a leap, and a
pretty long one, must be obvious to any visitor to the Museum of the
London College of Surgeons, who has examined the two-headed and
four-legged human foeti there preserved in spirits. It may be said
that these are leaps in the wrong direction. Be it so. Still, whoever
can leap backward can make an equal leap forward, and most people will
find the latter the easier feat of the two. The power, whatever it be,
that coupled together the Siamese Twins, and gave to those respected
brothers, the late William and Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, twelve
fingers and twelve toes apiece, would not have gone at all more out of
the way by doing, suddenly and at once, several of those things which
Mr. Darwin doubts not that it does slowly and by degrees--by single
acts, for instance, instead of by a succession of acts, aggregating into
the semblance of an optic nerve certain elements in the _sarcode_ of
certain low organisms, spreading out the nerve thus formed into a
network or retina, forming a number of separate pigment-cells into a
homogeneous cornea, and following up these first steps by others which,
how much soever more apparently complex, would cost comparatively little
after the earlier and simpler ones had been taken. Now let but the power
competent to do these things be credited with sense enough to be aware
of its competence, and it may then be regarded as not unlikely to have
done some of them on purpose. Whereupon, the genesis of the eye ceases
to be a mystery. All the appearances of contrivance that have resulted
from the operation find their obvious and complete explanation in the
assumption of a contriver, and all such hazy films as that of
variability producing variation cease to be capable of serving as
excuses for wilful blindness. And why should not the power in question
be so credited? Here is Mr. Darwin's solitary reason why. He doubts
whether the inference implied may not be 'presumptuous.' He apprehends
that we have no 'right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual
powers like those of a man.' Truly, of all suggested modes of marking
respect for creative power, that of assuming it to have worked
unintelligently is the most original.
The hypothesis offered by Mr. Darwin in explanation of the most perfect
of organic structures, is deemed by him to be equally explanatory of the
most marvellous of animal instincts. Parenthetically, here, never having
as yet met with a definition of instinct which I am able to accept as
satisfactory, I make bold to offer a description of my own. Instinct is
innate knowledge how to perform any useful actions, accompanied by a
tendency or propensity to perform those actions, but wholly
unaccompanied by knowledge of any purpose which they can serve. This is
pure instinct, an example whereof is afforded by the beaver, of which
animal I have somewhere read that one caught when newly born, and
brought up by itself in a room in its captor's house, proceeded after a
while to build up across the apartment the semblance of a dam, composed
of brushes, rugs, billets of wood, and other litter. Pure instinct
differs essentially, not in degree only, but in kind, from reason, which
is not knowledge, but an instrument for acquiring knowledge. Instinct,
however, is rarely if ever found pure, being apparently always
accompanied by more or less of reason. Even a polype makes some show of
reason by moving its _cilia_ in one mode when it desires to suck in
food, and in another when it merely wishes to move on; while it is
scarcely possible for an unprejudiced spectator to doubt of its being by
a rational deduction from experience that a dog knows that it will get
kicked if it presume to snatch at the meat on its master's plate,
instead of waiting for the scraps he may be pleased to throw to it when
he has done. Instinct by necessary implication involves habit; habit as
necessarily always more or less modifies structure; structural
modification always may be, and often is, inherited, carrying with it a
tendency to the habit out of which itself arose; therefore habit and
instinct are likewise heritable. Some instincts are originated
artificially. The reason why, on the very first opportunity, a young
pointer has been known to point at game, and a young sheep-dog to run
round, instead of at, a flock of sheep, is that some of their respective
ancestors had been carefully trained so to point and to wheel. These,
however, are exceptions to the general rule. Most instincts are of what
every one would call natural, and Mr. Darwin calls 'spontaneous' origin,
he explaining the meaning of the latter term to be that the slight
variations from a primordial type, the accumulation of which is
considered by him to constitute actual instinct, are 'variations
produced by the same unknown causes as those which produce slight
deviations of bodily structure.' But here I am once more compelled to
join issue with him. Of the causes which he styles unknown, I maintain
that we know at least thus much--either they are themselves intelligent
forces, or they are forces acting under intelligent direction; and in
support of this proposition I need not perhaps do more than show from
Mr. Darwin's example what infinitely harder things must be accepted by
those who decline to accept this.
Mr. Darwin, like every really truth-loving controversialist, far from
desiring to shroud, invites special attention to any seeming weaknesses
in his position; and, therefore, when contending that all the faculties
commonly classed as instincts, are exclusively due to natural selection,
of course takes care to particularise the cellmaking faculty of the hive
bee. And here, again, I gladly bear my humble testimony to the partial
success he has achieved. Although bound to protest against the claim set
up by him, on behalf of natural selection, to the entire credit of
producing the hive bee's most remarkable characteristic, I cannot but
think he has succeeded in removing all the apparent difficulties of
believing that natural selection's share may have been not less
important in that than in any other productive operation in which it
takes part.
In popular estimation the hive bee is a heaven-born mathematician which,
having been set the problem how to fill a given space with waxen cells
with the least loss of room and expenditure of material, arrives by
intuition and instantaneously at a solution which Newton himself was
ignorant of, and to which, but for his discovery of the fluxional
calculus, it would have been impossible for his follower, Maclaurin, to
attain. And, doubtless, it may excusably be deemed supernatural that the
insect should adopt off-hand precisely that six-sided figure, and
precisely that inclination of the angles of the same figure's pyramidal
roof or floor, which, only by very refined and recondite investigation,
can be scientifically shown to be those best fitted for the purpose. Mr.
Darwin has, however, adduced strong grounds for supposing the amazing
architectural skill thus displayed to have been acquired, not suddenly,
but by the same slow degrees as those which are so clearly traceable
throughout organic progress in general. At the lower end of a short
apiary series, he observed humble bees using their old cocoons for
honey pots, sometimes adding to them short tubes of wax, and likewise
making separate and very irregular cells entirely of wax. At the higher
end of the series, he saw hive bees making double layers of cells, each
cell an hexagonal prism with the basal ends of its six sides bevelled so
as to fit on to a pyramid formed of three rhombs, and each of the three
rhombs which compose the pyramidal base of a single cell on one side of
the comb entering into the composition of one of the three adjoining
cells on the opposite side. Intermediately, he found the Mexican
_meliponae domesticae_ depositing their honey in cells nearly spherical,
and of nearly equal sizes. 'These cells, although aggregated into a mass
otherwise irregular, are always at such a degree of nearness to each
other that they would have intersected or broken into each other if the
spheres had been completed. But this is never permitted, the bees
building perfectly flat walls of wax between the spheres which thus tend
to intersect. Hence, each cell consists of an outer spherical portion,
and of two, three, or more, perfectly flat surfaces, according as the
cell adjoins two, three, or more cells; and when one cell rests on three
others, as from the spheres being nearly of the same size is very
frequently and necessarily the case, the three flat surfaces are united
into a pyramid rudely resembling the three-sided pyramidal base of the
hive bee's cell, and necessarily enter, like the three rhombs of the
latter, into the construction of three adjoining cells.' Reflecting on
these remarkable gradations, it occurred to Mr. Darwin that if the
melipona were to make its spheres of precisely equal sizes, and to
arrange them symmetrically in double layers, and were further so to
dispose them as that the centre of each should be at the distance of
radius x [mathematical symbol 'square root']2 or radius x 1.41421 from the
centres of the six surrounding spheres in the same layer, and at the
same distance from the centres of the adjoining spheres in the other and
parallel layer--then 'if planes of intersection between the several
spheres on both layers were formed, there would result a double layer of
hexagonal prisms united together by pyramidal bases formed of three
rhombs; and the rhombs and the sides of the hexagonal prisms would have
every angle identically the same with the best measurements that have
been made of the cells of the hive bee.' Then, submitting this view to
Professor Miller of Cambridge, he had the gratification of being assured
by that distinguished geometer that it was strictly correct. Certainly a
very happy example of an ingenious conjecture verified by a species of
demonstration hardly inferior to the experimental. Certainly a very
valuable testimony to the soundness of all the main and really essential
principles of Darwinism. Good cause, certainly, is hereby shown for
believing that the cell-making faculty of the hive bee may be nothing
more than the aggregate of many minute and successive improvements upon
that of the melipona, and this, again, than a similar aggregate of
improvements on that of the humble bee; and for believing further that
hive bee and melipona may both be either descendants from the humble
bee, or joint-descendants with it from some still earlier common
progenitor. In order to believe this it suffices to believe that a bee
which at one period made, like the humble bee, cells very unequally
sized and irregularly rounded, came gradually, in the course of time, to
make them as nearly equal in size and as nearly spherical as those of
the melipona; and subsequently, during a further lapse of time, came to
arrange them at the same distances from each other, and in double
layers like those of the humble bee. To assume thus much requires no
inordinate stretch of faith; and thus much being assumed, it is seen at
once that the hive bee, requiring for its cells only about half as much
wax as the humble bee does, and consequently only about half as much
honey for the secretion of the requisite wax, would, in a struggle for
existence, leave the humble bee so little chance that in all probability
the two species would nowhere coexist, were it not for the special
resource derived by the humble bee from possession of a trunk long
enough to enter the nectaries of certain flowers, which the shorter
trunk of the hive bee is unable to tap. But though there be no
difficulty in assuming the improvements in question to have gradually
taken place, and to have become aggregated in the manner supposed, there
is, to my mind, an insuperable objection to supposing that successive
generations of bees should have successively adopted the improvements
without either having the sense to know what they were doing, or being
prompted by some superior intelligence that did know. I will not be so
superfluous as to exaggerate the difficulty. Passing over the earlier
stages of the process, and confining myself to one or two of the later,
I will content myself with showing how infinitesimally small, when
magnified to the utmost, are the chances in favour of these having been
passed through blindly. I will admit it to be possible that in a society
of purely meliponish habits, there might, in virtue of one or other of
those inscrutable causes classed under the general name of spontaneous
variation, arise some two or three individuals with an innate propensity
to make accurately spherical and equally sized cells; that these
individuals, if either males or fertile females, and not sterile
neuters, might help to generate others with the same propensity, these
again generating others, and so on, until the greater part or the whole
of the community became possessed of the same constructive aptitude. I
will admit further that, in virtue of the same inscrutable causes,
individuals, at first few, but gradually increasing in number, might
similarly be born with the additional tendency to make cells at the
same, and that the most appropriate, distance from all adjoining cells;
and will freely acknowledge that the bees, modifying their previous mode
of construction, as meliponae necessarily would do under these altered
circumstances, would construct a layer of cells similar in all respects
to those on one side of the hive bee's comb, except that their bases
would be flat instead of pyramidal. Further, I admit that the bases
would become pyramidal in case the bees should set about constructing
double instead of single layers of cells on the same principle. Not a
little liberality is required for these admissions. For, in the first
place, the fact of the bees having acquired the habit of making perfect
and equally sized spheres would not of itself be of any obvious benefit
either to individual bees or to the society at large: in order that it
should enable material and labour to be saved it would have to be
accompanied by the habit of making the cells at special distances from
each other. And, in the second place, though some few individuals should
present themselves with an innate tendency to choose these special
distances, whatever advantage might result therefrom, whatever saving of
material or labour, would be shared in equally by the whole community,
the particular individuals to whom it was due benefiting by it no more
than any of the rest, and not being, in consequence, more likely than
they to survive in any struggle for existence, or to leave behind them
offspring inheriting their special characteristics. No help, therefore,
can be derived from Mr. Darwin's principles towards conjecturing why a
small minority of such specially endowed bees should be gradually
converted into a majority, and should eventually constitute the whole
community, thereupon becoming in fact converted into a new species. Let
us, however, liberally waive this and all similar objections, and assume
a community of hive bees to have been, in the utterly unaccountable
manner indicated by the term spontaneous variation, developed from a
meliponish stock. Unfortunately, all our liberality will be found to
have been thrown away without perceptibly simplifying the problem to be
solved. For, whatever be among meliponae the distribution of the
generative capacities, among hive bees, at any rate, all workers are
sterile neuters, which never have any offspring to whom to bequeath
their cellmaking skill, while the queen bee and drones, which alone can
become parents, have no such skill to bequeath. Clearly the formula of
'descent with modification by natural selection,' is, in its literal
sense, utterly inapplicable here. In whatever manner the cell-making
faculty might have been acquired by the first homogeneous swarm of hive
bees, it must inevitably have terminated with the generation with which
it commenced, if transmission by direct descent had been necessary for
its continuance. The only resource open to Mr. Darwin is to suppose, not
merely (what is, indeed, obviously the fact) that queen bee after queen
bee, besides generating each in turn a progeny of workers endowed with
instincts which their parents did not possess and could not therefore
impart, generated also princess bees destined in due season to generate
a working progeny similarly endowed with instincts underived from their
parents; but to suppose further that all this has happened in the total
absence of aim, object, intention, or design. Now that all this should
have so happened, although not absolutely inconceivable, nor, therefore,
absolutely impossible, is surely too incredible to be believed except in
despair of some other hypothesis a trifle less preposterous. It is
surely not worth while to set the doctrine of probabilities so
completely at naught, for the sake of an explanation which avowedly
leaves every difficulty unexplained, referring them all to causes not
simply unknown but unconjecturable. What excuse, then, have
philosophers, of all people, for doing this in preference to the simple
expedient of supposing that, although the parturient bee, queen or
other, cannot intend that any of her progeny should be more bounteously
endowed than herself, there is an independent intelligence that does so
intend? To content oneself with pronouncing such preference to be
eminently unscientific is tenderness of language nearly akin, I fear, to
literary bathos.
III.
I have said that the form of unbelief to which, on the principle of
calling a spade a spade, I have taken the liberty of giving the name of
Scientific Atheism, manifests itself now-a-days rather by ignoration
than by formal denial of God. This, however, is not a new feature in any
atheism really worthy of being styled scientific. Even as Mr. Darwin
verbally recognises a Creator, although without assigning to Him any
share in creation, even so Kant, when more than a century ago
undertaking, in his 'General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial
Bodies,'[42] to account for the constitution and mechanical origin of
the universe on Newtonian principles, spoke of the elements as deriving
their essential qualities from the 'eternal thought of the Divine
Intelligence,' without, however, crediting the said Intelligence with
having interposed in order to carry out His thoughts. 'Give me matter,'
he says, 'and I will build the world;' and without other data than
diffused atoms of matter endowed with simple attractive and repulsive
forces, he proceeds to expound a complete cosmogony.
He pictures to himself the universe as originally an infinite expansion
of minutely subdivided matter, and supposing a single centre of
attraction to be somewhere therein set up, he endeavours to show that
the result must be a prodigious central body surrounded by systems of
solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. 'In vivid
language,' says Professor Huxley,[43] 'he describes the great
world-maelstrom widening the margin of its prodigious eddy in the slow
progress of millions of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the
molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos.' Then, fixing his
attention more particularly on our own system, he accounts for the
relation between the masses and densities of the planets and their
distances from the sun, for the eccentricity of their orbits, for their
rotation, for their satellites, for the general agreement in the
direction of rotation among the celestial bodies, for Saturn's ring, and
for the zodiacal light. All this he does, according to Professor Huxley,
by 'strict deduction from admitted dynamical principles,' and I, well
aware of my own inability to form an independent judgment on the point,
gladly take so high an authority's word for it. For aught that I know,
Kant's attractive and repulsive forces being admitted, the establishment
of centres of attraction, and of circle within circle of revolutions
round them, and all his other details, would follow naturally and of
course. I limit myself to asking, Whence these simple forces?--and when
Kant replies, 'From the Eternal Thought of the Divine Understanding,' I
should be the last to criticise if his answer stopped there.
Unfortunately, he adds that the forces were 'evolved without purpose';
in other words, that the Intelligence which thought them into existence
failed to think of any purpose for them. 'Matter,' he proceeds, 'is
purely _passive_, yet, nevertheless, has in its simplest state a
_determination_ towards the assumption of a more perfect constitution in
the way of natural development, whereby it _breaks up_ rest, _stirs_ up
nature, gives to chaos shape.' For the elements whereof this passively
stirring up matter is composed 'have native powers of setting each other
in motion, and are to themselves a spring of life;' and when, having of
course being previously dead, they have given themselves life, they
forthwith begin to attract each other with a strength varying with their
varying degrees of specific gravity. The scattered elements of the
denser sort collect by attraction all particles of less specific gravity
out of their immediate neighbourhood, and are themselves similarly
collected by particles of still denser sort, these again by others
denser yet, and so on, until, as results of this particular action,
several masses are formed which in like manner would converge towards
and be united with the largest and densest of their number, were it not
that the counter principle of repulsion now comes into play. This
principle--familiarly exemplified in the elasticity of vapours, the
emanations from strong smelling substances, and the expansion of all
spirituous substances--causes the vertical movements of the converging
masses to be deflected laterally, so as ultimately to enclose the
central mass within circles which, at first intersecting each other in
all directions, are at length, by dint of mutual collision, made all to
revolve in the same direction, and nearly the same plane.
Now I most earnestly protest against being suspected of what in me would
be the intolerable impertinence of desiring to cast ridicule on these
magnificent speculations, the grandeur of which I thoroughly appreciate
so far as my scant mathematics enable me to follow them. I take
exception to them only because the language in which they are couched
seems to imply that operations, of whose nature one of the most powerful
of human intellects could, at its utmost stretch, catch only a faint
hazy inkling, may yet have been initiated and perfected without the
intervention of any intellect at all. This is a falsism against which my
respect for philosophy and philosophers makes me only all the more
indignant when I find any of the latter falling into it, as those of
them inevitably must who, busying themselves, early or late,
With a mighty debate,
A profound speculation about the creation
And organical life, and chaotical strife,
With various notions of heavenly motions,
And rivers and oceans, and valleys and mountains,
And sources of fountains, and meteors on high,
And stars in the sky,--propose by and bye,
like John Hookham Frere's Aristophanic Birds,
If we'll listen and hear,
To make perfectly clear
how creation took place without a conscious Creator. All their fancied
solutions of this hopeless puzzle have one feature in common--a family
likeness which the wickedest wit finds it difficult to caricature. There
is a note to Frere and Canning's 'Loves of the Triangles' which the
reader will be grateful to me for transcribing here, the more frequently
he may have laughed at it already, laughing now all the more, and
laughing heartily at it now though he may never have before.
It begins by tracing the genesis or original formation of _Space_ to a
single point, in the same manner as the elder Darwin had, in his
'Zoonomia,' traced the whole organized universe to his six Filaments. It
represents this primeval Point or _Pinctum saliens_ of the universe,
after '_evolving itself by its own energies_, to have moved forwards in
a right line _ad infinitum_ till it grew tired.' Whereupon, 'the right
line which it had generated would begin to put itself in motion in a
lateral direction, describing an area of infinite extent. This area, as
soon as it became conscious of its own existence, would begin to ascend
or descend, according as its specific weight might determine, forming an
immense solid space filled with vacuum, and capable of containing the
present existing universe.'
Thus slow progressive points protract the line,
As pendant spiders spin the filmy twine:
Thus lengthened lines impetuous sweeping round,
Spread the wide plane, and mark its circling bound;
Thus planes, their substance with their motion grown,
Form the huge cube, the cylinder, the cone.
It then proceeds as follows:--
'SPACE being thus obtained, and presenting a suitable _nidus_ or
receptacle for the _generation_ of _chaotic matter_, an immense deposit
of it would gradually be accumulated; after which the filament of fire
being produced in the chaotic mass by an _idiosyncrasy_ or _self-formed
habit_ analogous to fermentation, explosion would take place, suns would
be shot from the central chaos, planets from suns, and satellites from
planets. In this state of things, the filament of organization would
begin to exert itself in those independent masses which, in proportion
to their bulk, exposed the greatest surface to the action of light and
heat. This filament, after an infinite series of ages, would begin to
ramify, and its viviparous offspring would diversify their forms and
habits so as to accommodate themselves to the various _incunabula_ which
nature had prepared for them. Upon this view of things, it seems highly
probable that the first effort of Nature terminated in the production of
vegetables, and that these being abandoned to their own energies, by
degrees detached themselves from the surface of the earth, and supplied
themselves with wings and feet, according as their different
propensities determined them in favour of aerial or terrestrial
existence. Others, by an inherent disposition to society and
civilisation, and by a stronger effort of volition, would become men.
These in time would restrict themselves to the use of their hind feet;
their tails would gradually rub off by sitting in their caves or huts as
soon as they arrived at a domesticated state; they would invent language
and the use of fire, with our present and hitherto imperfect system of
society. In the meantime, the _Fuci_ and _Algae_, with the Corallines and
Madrepores, would transform themselves into fish, and gradually
populate all the submarine portions of the globe.'[44]
Although the writers of this delicious drollery seem to have had Dr.
Erasmus Darwin only in view, they could not, we thus see, parody his
peculiar crotchets without hitting off not less neatly some of the
corresponding extravagances of both earlier and later expounders of
Nature. Nature is a phrase which, greatly to the confusion of those who
so employ it, is habitually used simultaneously in two quite opposite
senses, so as to denote at the same time both the agency in virtue of
whose action the universe exists, and likewise the universe itself which
results from that action. Nature, in either signification, becomes to a
great extent interpretable when the agency so designated is credited
with sufficient sense to foresee and to intend the results of its own
action. On that condition, although among the many unsolved problems she
may continue to present there will be some evidently lying beyond the
limits of human comprehension, there will be none running counter to
human reason. Except on that condition, the universe is not simply
uninterpretable, it is a bewildering assemblage of irreconcilable
certainties. Philosophy's choice lies between such patent truisms as
that there can be no force but living force, no _vis_ but _vis vivida_,
no _vis inertiae_ otherwise than metaphorically, and such blatant
falsisms as that inertness and exertion may coincide, unintelligence
generate intelligence, agency of whatsoever sort produce, merely by its
own act, and merely out of its own essence, other agency capable of
higher action than its own. Philosophy, when with these sets of
alternatives before her she deliberately chooses the latter, becomes
Scientific Atheism, all the varieties of which have one point in common,
resembling each other in their proneness to rush upon and embrace
demonstrable impossibilities for the sake of avoiding a few things hard
to be understood. One variety, however, the Comtist, far exceeds all the
rest in the lengths to which it is carried by this propensity.
IV.
If, in speaking as I am about to do of Comtism, I commit--heedless of
Mr. Lewes' solemn warning--the grave offence of speaking confidently
about a writer whom I have never read, I may at least plead in
extenuation of my fault, that, although my knowledge of that writer be
confessedly merely an echo of what others have said of him, those
others, at any rate, far from being his antagonists, are two of the most
ardent of his not undiscriminating admirers. It is from Mr. Mill[45] and
from Mr. Lewes[46] himself that I have derived the notions of Comtist
philosophy that suggest to me the following notes.
I lay no stress on certain flaws in the fundamental propositions that
'we have no knowledge of anything but phenomena, and that our knowledge
of phenomena is only relative, not absolute; that we know not the
essence nor the real mode of production of any fact, but only its
relations to other facts in the way of succession or similitude; that
the constant resemblances which link phenomena together, and the
constant sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are
all we know about them, and that their causes, whether efficient or
final, are unknown and inscrutable.' I will only suggest that our mere
consciousness of possessing some knowledge of phenomena is itself a
knowledge distinct from the knowledge which constitutes its
subject--distinct, that is, from the knowledge of phenomena; that if it
were possible for us to be aware of only one single fact, we should know
something about that fact, notwithstanding that there were no other
facts which it could be perceived to have preceded or followed, or to
which it could be likened, even as a polype with a stomach-ache would
know something about a stomach-ache, although ignorant that it had a
stomach, and oblivious of any former sensation, whether painful or
pleasurable; and that if the causes of phenomena be utterly unknown, our
ignorance of them ought not to be so signified as to sound like
knowledge, as it does when resemblances are said to link, and sequences
to unite, phenomena together, thereby warranting the inference that one
phenomenon succeeds another _because_ the two are so linked and united.
These, however, are trifles--mere spots on the sun one might say, were
but the surface on which they appear altogether sunlike--and I leave
them without additional remark except that, although it may perhaps have
been hypercritical to point them out, still the language of a new
philosophy, claiming to supersede all old ones, ought to be proof even
against hypercriticism. I pass on to a generalisation, termed by Mr.
Mill 'the key to Comte's other generalisations: one on which all the
others are dependent, and which forms the back-bone, so to speak, of his
philosophy,' insomuch that 'unless it be true he has accomplished
little.' This is the so much vaunted discovery that all human thought
passes necessarily through three stages, beginning with the
theological, and proceeding through the metaphysical to the positive.
These three terms, however, in the novel sense in which they are used by
Comte, stand very urgently in need of definition. By the theological is
to be understood that stage of the mind in which the facts of the
universe are regarded as governed by single and direct volitions of a
being or beings possessed of life and intelligence. It is the stage in
which winds are supposed to blow, seas to rage, trees to grow, and
mountains to tower aloft, either because winds, seas, trees, and
mountains are themselves alive and so act of their own accord; or
because there is a spirit dwelling in each of them which desires that it
shall so act; or because each separate class of objects is superintended
by an out-dwelling divinity, which similarly desires; or, finally,
because one single divinity, supreme over all things, initiates and
maintains all the apparently spontaneous movements of inanimate bodies.
In the metaphysical stage, phenomena are ascribed not to volitions,
either sublunary or celestial, but to realised abstractions--to
properties, qualities, propensities, tendencies, forces, regarded as
real existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in
which they reside; while the characteristic of the positive stage is the
universal recognition that all phenomena without exception are governed
by invariable laws, with which no volitions, natural or supernatural,
interfere. These being the three stages, the discovery of which as a
series necessarily passed through by human thought in its progress
towards maturity, constitutes one of Comte's chief glories, I almost
tremble at my own audacity, shrinking from the sound myself am making,
when by inexorable sense of duty constrained to declare that the grand
discovery is after all merely that of a distinction without a
difference.
What Comte chiefly condemned in the metaphysical mode of thought, are
the conception of mental abstractions as real entities which exert power
and produce phenomena, and the enunciation of these entities as
explanations of the phenomena; and certainly 'it is,' as Mr. Mill says,
or rather was, previously to his own ingenious solution of it, 'one of
the puzzles of philosophy, how mankind, after inventing a set of mere
names to keep together certain combinations of ideas and images, could
have so far forgotten their own act as to invest these creations of
their will with objective reality, and mistake the name of a phenomenon
for its efficient cause.' Those natural laws, however, on which
Positivism relies--are not they as purely mental abstractions as the
essences, virtues, properties, forces, and what not, for which it is
proposed to substitute them? Yet since Positivism regards these laws as
'governing' phenomena, and having phenomena 'subject' to them, must it
not necessarily regard them likewise as realised abstractions, as real
entities? Plainly, if its language be taken literally, its professors
must acknowledge that it does, unless they prefer to stultify themselves
by propounding such unmitigated nonsense as that power may be exercised,
and phenomena produced, by _non_-entities. But if so, what else is
Positivism than another form of that very metaphysicism which it
condemns? and a form, too, peculiarly obnoxious to Mr. Mill's caustic
remark that 'as in religion, so in philosophy, men marvel at the
absurdity of other people's tenets, while exactly parallel absurdities
remain in their own, and the same man is unaffectedly astonished that
words can be mistaken for things, who is treating other words as if they
were things every time he opens his mouth.'
Possibly, however, it may be replied that 'government by natural laws'
is a phrase which Positivists never use except metaphorically, and by
which they never mean more than certain successions of events.[47] Very
well. Either, then, they acknowledge no real government of phenomena at
all, in which case to speak of phenomena as governed by law is, if not a
purely gratuitous mystification, as glaring an instance as can well be
conceived of a 'bare enunciation of facts, put forward as a theory or
explanation of them:' or, if they do recognise real government, then
they must suppose that, behind those mere mental abstractions, laws or
order of Nature, there must be some lawgiver or other being that
originally issued the laws, or ordained the order, and still enforces
them, or maintains it. But if this be the positivist faith, then, that
we may discover its other self, we have only to go still further back;
as far back, however, as to the theological stage, supposed to have been
so early left behind, yes, even unto the deities or deity that the
metaphysical entities had displaced. Positivism, in short, is in this
dilemma: either the mode of thought claimed by it as peculiarly its own
is simply that process so justly ridiculed by Comte himself as the 'naif
reproduction of phenomena as the reason for themselves,' and by Mr.
Lewes as 'a restatement' (by way of explanation) 'of the facts to be
explained;' or it is at any rate nothing more than a return, either to
the metaphysical or to the theological mode of thought, according as one
or the other is adopted of the only two interpretations that can
possibly be placed on its own nomenclature. A new mode it certainly is
not. It is either no mode of thought at all, but merely an empty form of
words; or it is at best only a new name for one or other of two
old-fashioned modes, both of which its author denounces as false from
the beginning, and now worn out and obsolete into the bargain.
Of other features of Comtist philosophy it would be out of place to
speak here,[48] where, indeed, that philosophy would not have been
mentioned at all but for its having been transformed by its author into
a religion, and that, too, an atheistical religion--the 'Religion of
Humanity.' To myself, as to most people, a religion without a God is a
contradiction in terms. To constitute what is almost universally
understood by religion it does not suffice that there be a 'creed or
conviction claiming authority over the whole of human life: a belief or
set of beliefs deliberately adopted respecting human destiny and duty,
to which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his actions ought
to be subordinate:' nor that there be in addition 'a sentiment connected
with this creed or capable of being invoked by it, sufficiently powerful
to give it, in fact, the authority over human conduct to which it lays
claim in theory:' nor yet that there be, moreover, 'an ideal object, the
believer's attachment and sense of duty towards which are able to
control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and
prescribe to him a rule of life.'[49] That such an object is fully
capable of gathering round it feelings sufficiently strong to enforce
the most rigid rule of life, will certainly not be denied by me,
privileged as I am to count among my friends more than one whose whole
life is little else than a life of devotion to an object, 'the general
interest of the human race,' plainly incapable of affording them in
exchange that 'eternity of personal enjoyment' to which ordinary
devotees look forward as their reward, and whose virtue I honour as
approaching the sublime, on account of its independence of all the props
and stimulants which ordinary virtue finds indispensable. But the
sublimest virtue does not of itself constitute religion. For, besides
the 'creed,' 'conviction,' and 'sentiment' indicated above, there is
needed some suitable object of worship to which the soul may alternately
bow down in humble reverence, and look up in fervent love--some being to
whom its prayer, praise, and thanksgiving may be fittingly addressed.
This want, recognised--as one of the few who do not recognise it
admits--by nine out of every ten persons, was distinctly recognised by
Comte, who, however, attempted to supply it by pointing, not to God, but
to Man. His reason for this was not a conviction that there is no God.
On the contrary, he habitually disclaimed, not without acrimony,
dogmatic atheism; and once even condescended so far as to declare that
'the hypothesis of design has much greater verisimilitude than that of a
blind mechanism.' But in the 'mature state of intelligence' at which his
mind had arrived, 'conjecture founded on analogy did not seem to him a
basis to rest a theory upon.' He preferred a religious theory without a
basis, and therefore adopted one as destitute of support as the tortoise
on which stands the earth-upholding elephant of Hindoo mythology;
selecting, as the 'Grand Etre' to be worshipped, 'the entire Human Race,
conceived as a continuous whole, past, present, and future.' For this
great collective _non_-existence, this compound of that which is, that
which has been but has ceased to be, and that which is not yet, he
elaborated a minute ritual of devotional observances, and would, if he
had had the chance, have consecrated a complete sacerdotal hierarchy,
subordinated to himself as supreme pontiff. Having, for fear of
recognising what possibly might not be, begun by, wilfully and with his
eyes open, recognising what could not possibly be, he proceeded to
invest this sanctified non-existence with precisely those attributes
best calculated to render it unfit to receive the admiration he
prescribed for it. That feeble Humanity--the actually living portion
thereof, that is--may need and be the better for our services, which
Divine Omnipotence of course cannot be, was distinctly urged by him as a
reason why _prayers_, or at least those outpourings of feeling which he
so designated, should be addressed to the former and not to the latter.
That Humanity is in a constant state of progress, so that both the
collective mass and choice specimens of each successive generation of
men must always be superior to the corresponding masses and specimens of
all previous generations, is a prime article of the Comtist creed; but
not the less is it an imperative injunction of the Comtist rubrick that
religious homage shall be paid, not only to the collective 'Grand Etre'
of Humanity, but also to individual worthies of past ages--that
superiors shall consequently fall down before, and worship, and take as
models, their intellectual and moral inferiors. The fact of a religion
made up of tenets like these having been thought out by one of the
profoundest of reasoners does not prevent its being the very perfection
of unreason. Even though on the one side there were nothing more than
some doubt whether Deity might not exist, still with complete certainty
on the other of the non-existence of 'Humanity,' Deity ought in fairness
to have at least the benefit of the doubt. In selection for adoration,
that which only perhaps may be, at any rate deserves to be, preferred to
that which positively is not. The excess of superstition with which St.
Paul reproached the Athenians, for raising an altar to the 'Unknown
God,' looks like excessive circumspection, beside the solemn dedication
of temples to a chimera known not to be. Nay, even Isaiah's maker of
graven images is at length outdone. Even he who, having hewn down a
tree, 'burneth part thereof in the fire, with part thereof eateth flesh,
roasteth roast, and is satisfied, warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am
warm, I have seen the fire; and with the residue maketh a god, yea, his
graven image, and falleth down unto it and worshippeth it, and prayeth
unto it, and saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god'--even he has at
last found more than his match in irrationality. For he has at least
before him a visible tangible block of wood, not the mere memory of one
that has long ago rotted, nor the dream of one that is yet to grow,
whereas that mental figment, Consecrated Humanity, is not even a real
shadow, but only a fancied one, a shadow cast by no substance. And it is
to Comtists of all people--intellectual salt of the earth as they
are--that this figment is recommended for adoration--yes, to those who,
pharisaically standing aloof from the common herd, thank their imaginary
substitute for God, or whatever else it is they deem thankworthy, that
they are not blind as other men are, and least of all as those dazed
metaphysicians who actually personify their own mental abstractions. No
wonder that such extreme provocation should try the patience of all but
the stanchest disciples. No wonder that Mr. Lewes himself should seem
half inclined to apostrophise his quondam master in words resembling
those once addressed to Robespierre, 'Avec ton Grand Etre, tu commences
a m'embeter.'
Here make we one more pause. This chapter's theme is, as was betimes
premised, not the strength of theism, but the weakness of atheism. I
have in it attempted to execute a design which, according to Boswell,
was conceived by Lord Hailes, and approved by Dr. Johnson, that of
writing an essay, _Sur la credulite des incredules_, and I think I have
succeeded so far as to show that, if any one who can swallow atheism
affects to strain at theism, it cannot, at any rate, be for want of a
sufficiently capacious gullet.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] The story was thus told by Diderot, to Sir Samuel Romilly, when a
young man:--'Je vous dirai un trait de lui, mais il vous sera un peu
scandaleux peut-etre, car vous autres Anglais, vous croyez _un peu_ en
Dieu; pour nous autres, nous n'y croyons gueres. Hume dina dans une
grande compagnie avec le baron D'Holbach. Il etait assis a cote du
baron; on parla de la religion naturelle. "Pour les athees," disait
Hume, "je ne crois pas qu'il en existe; je n'en ai jamais vu!" "Vous
avez ete un peu malheureux," repondit l'autre, "vous voici a table avec
dix-sept pour la premiere fois."'--_Edinburgh Review_ for January 1847.
[37] 'Studies in Animal Life,' chap. v.
[38] The reader who, having skipped some of the earlier chapters, may
find this language obscure, is requested to turn back to the essay on
'Huxleyism,' pp. 194-6.
[39] See again, pp. 194-6.
[40] 'Mr. Darwin's Hypotheses.' Part II. 'Fortnightly Review' for June
1868.
[41] 'Origin of Species,' p. 226.
[42] Of this treatise, no English or French translation has, I believe,
been published. For my own very limited acquaintance with it, I am
indebted to the extreme kindness of my friend, Professor Croom
Robertson, who has most obligingly favoured me with a manuscript version
of the portion referred to in the text.
[43] 'Lay Sermons,' p. 240.
[44] 'Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin,' 1799, pp. 214-6.
[45] 'Auguste Comte and Positivism,' _passim_.
[46] 'History of Philosophy,' 4th edition, vol. ii. pp. 654-735.
[47] Not that so restricted a meaning can, with any propriety, be placed
on positivist definitions of law. See, for instance, that of Mr. Lewes
('History of Philosophy,' vol. ii. p. 701), who defines law to be 'the
invariable relation between two distinct phenomena, according to which
one depends on the other.'
[48] Some few additional random remarks, however, though not permissible
in the text may, perhaps, be less inappropriate in a note.
My scientific deficiencies do not prevent my understanding or, at least,
fancying I understand, that Comte's famous 'Classification of the
Sciences' may be extremely serviceable as indicating in what order the
sciences may most profitably be studied. That a student's general
progress would be swifter and surer if, before entering on physics or
chemistry, he had already made considerable progress in algebra,
geometry, and mechanics, than if he commenced all five sciences
simultaneously, seems probable enough. If, however, the classification
be intended also to indicate historically the order in which the
sciences have actually been studied, I cannot but suspect it to be
misleading. Certainly, if knowledge of number was the earliest knowledge
acquired by man, those savage races which have not even yet learnt how
to count beyond four, must have been content with very few lessons in
arithmetic when turning off to other branches of learning.
As to the measure of success that attended Comte's scheme of creating a
Philosophy of General Science, I presume not to utter one syllable of my
own, preferring to cite what Mr. Mill says of that 'wonderful
systematization of the philosophy of all the antecedent sciences from
mathematics to physiology, which, if he had done nothing else, would
have stamped him on all minds competent to appreciate it as one of the
principal thinkers of the age.' In all sincerity, I say that the mere
conception of the enterprise, whose vastness is so luminously expounded
by Mr. Lewes, in the last edition of his 'History of Philosophy,' seems
to me to betoken superior genius. I feel, as it were, simply awe-struck
in the presence of an intellectual ambition, that within the brief span
of one human life could aspire to a mastery over all the sciences,
sufficient, first for co-ordinating the fundamental truths and special
methods, and so obtaining the philosophy of each, and then for
co-ordinating the manifold philosophies so obtained, and--by condensing
them all into one homogeneous doctrine, and blending them into one
organic whole, whereof each part would be seen to depend on all that
preceded, and to determine all that succeeded--transforming all science
into philosophy.
One point however remains on which I shall speak with some confidence,
that, namely, of the inclusion among 'Comte's titles to immortal fame'
of the creation of a Science of Sociology. 'What the law of gravitation
is to astronomy, what the elementary properties of tissues are to
physiology,' that, says Mr. Lewes, in the opinion of Comte's disciples,
'is the law of the three stages to sociology.' But if, as I have shown,
there are not really three but only two stages, the so-called third
stage being simply a return to either the second or the first, the law
of the three stages cannot be much of a law, nor the science of which it
is the essence much of a science.
Mr. Lewes, nevertheless, maintains that M. Comte created Social Science.
Mr. Mill considers that he did not create it, but only proved its
creation to be possible. With all possible deference, I submit that what
he really did was to prove its creation to be impossible.
In a passage of Mr. Mill's 'Positivism,' quoted with approval in Mr.
Lewes's 'History of Philosophy,' and presumably, therefore, expressing
the sentiments of both writers, Comte is described as pronouncing
inappropriate to the Science of Society, the method universally admitted
to be proper to all other sciences--that, namely, of obtaining by
induction the laws of the elementary phenomena, then, from these laws
thinking out deductively those of the complex phenomena, and, finally,
of verifying by specific observation the laws obtained by deduction.
Among social phenomena, he is described as arguing, the elementary ones
are human feelings and actions, the laws of which are the laws of
universal human nature. But the human beings, on the laws of whose
nature social facts depend, are not abstract or universal, but
historical human beings, already shaped and made what they are, not by
the simple tendencies of universal human nature, but by the accumulated
influence of past generations of human society. This being the case, the
laws of universal human nature evidently cannot serve as materials,
whence it would be possible for any powers of deduction, starting from
the bare conception of the Being Man, to predict beforehand how
successive generations of men would feel and act. Wherefore, in order to
get at social laws, we must reverse the ordinary method, seizing upon
any generalizations which the facts of history, empirically considered,
will supply, and then using the universal laws of human nature for the
verification of these generalizations.
I will not linger over the glaring inconsistency involved in the
conclusion thus arrived at, of appealing, for the verification of
empirical generalizations, to a species of deduction confessed to be
impracticable for want of the requisite materials. I prefer to show that
from Comte's own premises, as rendered by Mr. Mill, necessarily results
a separate conclusion, absolutely fatal to his sociologically creative
pretensions. According to him, as we have seen, the laws of elementary
social facts, or of human actions and feelings, are the laws of
universal human nature, which latter can, of course, be no other than
whatever habits of invariably, in given circumstances, feeling and
acting in given modes, may be common to all mankind. But it is admitted
that the particular generation of human beings at any time existing
must, by the accumulated influence of preceding generations, have been
rendered very different from every preceding generation: and nothing is
more certain than that two generations differing widely from each other
in character, would, in many given circumstances, not only not feel and
act in precisely the same, but would inevitably feel and act in widely
different, manners. Nor is this all. The circumstances by which any
generation is surrounded have been partly shaped for it by preceding
generations, partly modified by itself--so that it is not possible for
any two generations ever to find themselves in the same circumstances.
Wherefore, as there never can be a repetition of either men or of
circumstances precisely the same, it is manifestly impossible for any
habits of feeling and thinking, in given modes in given circumstances,
to be common to any two generations of men, still less to universal
mankind. In other words, there cannot possibly be any laws of human
nature: and if no laws of human nature, then no laws of elementary
social facts; and if no laws of elementary social facts, then no laws of
complex social facts; and if no laws of social facts, elementary or
complex, then no single particle of material wherewith to build up the
Science of Society or Sociology.
[49] 'Auguste Comte and Positivism,' pp. 133-4.