assist at the obsequies. The subtle mathematical calculations as to what the probabilities are of a number of disrelated atoms combining into orderly and persistent groups have been many and curious.

The solution has remained somewhat obscure, and has found at certain points some really surprising difficulties, such as the transformation of the mechanical into the vital, or the conversion of a number of nervous thrills into a fully-equipped and self-recognizing consciousness.

However, things must present some elements of stabilty; explanation would find itself in a curious predicament if the results of to-day only sufficed for their complete overthrow tomorrow. Evolution as an adequate and satisfactory account of the phenomena with which it deals, cannot in itself be subject to a constant evolution, for such a hypothesis would render it wholly useless, either as an instrument of investigation or a statement of conclusions. We shall have to be able to plant our feet firmly somewhere at last if we expect really to know anything, or to act intelligently from such knowledge. In other words, the law of progress must be a permanent one, or the achievements of to-day will be ruthlessly swept away overnight. Evolution itself, therefore, is based upon a deeper and larger reality, and this deeper and larger reality cannot be thought as a growth or as something changeable. It has always been, and it will always be. It can in no sense be said to have been evolved; we are confronted with a double series of facts, with one that is stable, actual, permanent, and with another that is fluctuating, developing, growing. Evolution, therefore, is strictly based upon that which is not evolved at all; it cannot be regarded as a universal statement of what is in the world; it is only a small fraction, a part of a greater whole, which encircles it, which overrules it, which gives it such efficacy and such place as it has.

The scientific method has several favorite devices for the surmounting of difficulties. One of these is to throw the fact to be explained into a remote antiquity whither the oldest memory of man has small access, and to allow for the passage of immense periods of time for the bringing about of results. It is

indeed remarkable to discover how much is known about the habits and manner of life of the prehistoric man, whose existence is not always as certain as the things he assuredly did. Should it even be proved that a certain phase of development had no actual foundation, it can always be slipped into the series as a link which the logic of the situation requires. That affairs must have transpired in the dim hoary distance which were wholly different from the ones which we see proceeding under our eyes, is taken for granted, and astonishing transformations are readily admissible in the haze of the void and abysm of time. The ease, too, with which important elements of the problem can be lost sight of in the weltering waste of years, the simplifying of matters otherwise troublesome, deserves to be taken into account and duly considered.

Another device of the scientific method is the minimising of differences by regarding them as made up of fine and insensible gradations. The inorganic shades off by exquisite degrees into the organic, and the unconscious passes by very subtile steps into the conscious. The supposition seems to be that if a distinction is reduced to a scarcely appreciable quantity, it need no longer be seriously considered and indeed may be wholly dropped out as not influential. In such ways it is easy enough to demonstrate that everything is mechanical, and that matter, socalled, contains the promise and potency of the highest possible to all thought. When we, however, begin to ask ourselves what matter is, we meet with a dual process. From one aspect it appears as the ultimate abstraction, emptied of all qualities and hardly susceptible of definition. It can as little be called inorganic as organic, for the one is as dependent upon it for subsistence as the other. It cannot be called a simple or a compound, for these are thinkable only in relation to one another. We may take the desperate Spencerian leap in the dark, and call it a form of the Unknowable, but it cannot be a form at all, and we are then further obliged to ask ourselves what is the Unknowable. This last is assuredly the strangest contradiction in terms that ever the mind of man puzzled itself withal. To call it the Unknowable is to know something about it, and so it ceases to be the Unknowable. To find in it the source of anything or

the explanation of anything, is to bring it out of its worse than Cimmerian gloom and make it deny its own nature. It is the sheerest superfluity in any system of thought, for it adds nothing, helps nothing, in fact is the pure nothingness itself. To write marvellous hymns of praise in prose or rhyme about the Unknowable, is to indulge in a mysticism beside which the rhapsodies of the Oriental metaphysicians are as clear as the latest novel of Mr. Howells, or racy as Mr. Kipling's adventures in the depths of the Asiatic jungle. It is thus, indeed, that science in its unconsciousness of the thought processes which dominate it becomes wholly alien to itself, and proceeds along a route for which it has always expressed the utmost abhorrence.

In the other aspect of matter we reverse the process of abstraction, and by adding to it characteristic after characteristic, make it indeed the potency out of which may come all manner of efflorescence. We may go so far as to call it 'mind-stuff,' and give to every particle a sort of rudimentary consciousness, which, thrown into suitable conditions, may develop into a foolish jelly-fish, or rise to the dignity of creating Victor Hugo's "Legend of the Ages." It may be a question, however, whether the term, 'matter,' is any longer applicable to a reality which contains attributes, and has in it every property of everything ready to be produced whenever it is called upon. It has become the scientist's magical purse, always full to the brim with the coins of all lands, and never lacking in the small change which the special occasion requires. One interesting fact, however, to be observed here, is the kind of oscillating thinking in which there is so free an indulgence. At first we have a continuous abstraction which leaves us in the presence of the Unknowable, and then we have a concreting which terminates where the scientist is a little loath to go. The atomic theory affords no secure halting place; attempts to define the atom present us anew with the difficulties enumerated above. The atom is either stripped of all attributes, and then one atom is wholly indistinguishable from another, and the sum of these zeros can hardly be said to make up a calculable quantity, or the atom becomes a monad with an undeveloped mind, and the whole resurgence is taken for granted in the original terms. To be sure, the

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atomic theory is said to be only a working hypothesis, socalled, apparently, because it can be made to work both ways with equal facility. In the seclusion of the laboratory, and face to face with the expert in the same field, the hypothesis may be admitted as only a convenient form of statement of certain appearances and coincidences and regularities, which have been always observed to take place under given circumstances; but in the heat of popular discussion, and before minds ready to accept results without the knowledge for their independent exploration, the hypothesis rapidly assumes the form and authority of established truth, and the pageant of the world emerging out of and passing into the Unknowable or the Nought makes assuredly an imposing spectacle.

The rise of differences and the transitions from plane to plane of experimental knowledge urgently demand explanation. The passage from the inorganic to the organic, from the organic to the conscious, from the conscious to the spiritual, are among the vexed questions with which science busies itself. The more conservative scientists admit that some of these questions are not solvable by their methods, and indeed are not within the domain of science; inasmuch, however, as these are inclined to think that attempts to answer them are bound to fail, and inasmuch as others present answers which leave out of sight the most important elements, one is left in a dilemma, on either horn of which impalement is peculiarly excruciating. We are obliged to admit on the one hand that we are begirt by a perfect wilderness of contradictions, which becomes more thorny and disastrous the deeper we penetrate it; the opening chapters of Spencer's "First Principles" show us into what a maze of difficulties we rush, unless we are willing to accept his view of the relativity of all knowledge; the first parts of Lotze's "Microcosmus" plunge us into a similar jungle of impassable metaphysical conceptions. It may be supposed that the very thought which so magnificently shows up the two sides of the antithesis, spans them both, and therefore is itself their unity and solution. Failing to see this, we are forced to accept the mechanical theory of the world with all its consequences, and in doing so to obliterate the very things with which we began, and of which

we attempted to give a satisfactory account. When we accept, moreover, the scientific answer, we do not find the peace and comfort which we anticipated. Instead of a delicious harmony, we discover the usual discord, not resolved into the cognate concord. The development theory, whose triumph some years ago we voiced with a fervor that was resonant as a Pindaric ode, seems to-day less assured of itself, and certainly is undergoing transformations which its designers did not expect. It appears that other factors must be introduced beside the transition of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, or the struggle for the survival of the fittest, or the love affairs of the multitudinous creatures, or the inheritance of derived peculiarities, or the successful hiding from the assaults of enemies, or the affection for bright or sombre colorings. Professor Drummond introduces the altruistic factor into the whole selfish carnival, and in so doing opens the door into an entire new world of possibilities and likelihoods. The last word in evolution has not been said by any means, and Darwinism and the others are on the eve of a metamorphosis more radical than any that they were called into being to explain.

When one enters higher spheres the same tendency to deprive the phenomena to be explained of their salient peculiarities appears even more strongly. What mind is in the usual development theory, would be a rather difficult thing to say, but in many of these solutions the essence of mind is first despoiled of what especially constitutes its mind, and then the > reduction to merely mechanical factors becomes very easy. It is true that the characteristics thus dropped out are afterwards re-introduced and discussed, but there is a singular unconscious ness that such re-introduction has in a large measure vitiated the theory to be defended. Mr. Herbert Spencer identifies mind with motion, and on account of that considers himself more an idealist than Hegel or Plato, because these last, he thinks, presuppose some sort of refined material out of which minds are made, different wholly from matter, so-called. His reduction of both matter and motion into forms of the Unknowable contains so many contradictions that it would fill the rest of this article to elucidate even a part of them. But it must be ad