If, now, we condense into a few sentences the combined results of Geology and Biology our summary would stand thus: The planet upon which we live was untold millions of years in forming and coming to its present condition. The several stages in its later history since it began to assume a permanent form, are indicated by its stratified formations whose order, extent, and origin can be definitely made out. By the study of the fossil remains and of extant species of plants and animals the development of life upon the earth has been traced and the successive orders of living creatures have been described.

The vast length of time, a period to be measured only by thousands of years, that man has been an inhabitant of the earth, and the long stages of his progress in civilization, address themselves to us here as the chief inductions of universal human interest. There is in this doctrine veritably a new conception of humanity, a new way of approaching the investigation of every phenomenon of man's life, all the institutions of society, all the creations of the intellect and soul of man. The key that unlocks every door is evolution, admitting, it is true, not, as bigoted sciolists might claim, to absolute knowledge, but to vaster and vaster mystery; explaining method and process, but not the power which thus works, not the ultimate purpose toward which all moves.

The leap that thought now took from the data furnished by a study of the earth and its creatures was analogous to that which occurred when Newton, observing the apple fall, conjectured the universal force of attraction, at one mighty sweep of thought conceiving that the planets and their attendant moons were held in their orbits and governed in their motions by the same attractive force that drew the apple to the earth. The cosmic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, the stupendous outlines of which were given to the world in the middle years of the century, was the product of the application of the

evolutionary hypothesis to all the phenomena of the universe. And this conception in its broad outlines has now become almost as general a possession of humanity as the wonderful induction of Newton.

A fact of interest to recall in this connection is that Newton's doctrine in the early years of its history was regarded with no less fear and hostility than Spencer's has been wont to be regarded. It was said that Newton "substituted gravitation for God," that he took away from the Supreme Ruler "that direct action on his works which is constantly ascribed to him in Scripture, and transferred it to material mechanism." For doing this the great and good philosopher was declared to be "heretical and impious." But, of course, we may admit that the fears excited by the doctrine of universal gravitation were foolish, and that time proved the hostility not only vain but unintelligent and mistaken, this may be admitted, and yet it be maintained that nothing can be proved by this and that, though Newton's doctrine was not really "heretical and impious," yet Spencer's may be altogether so. The sober-minded student may admit that it is too early to pronounce judgment; but while doing so he will repudiate the prejudicial epithets "heretical and impious." A great hindrance to the general acceptance of Spencer's philosophy, is his theory of the unknowableness of God. But I recall that Charles Wesley begins one of his hymns with the line:

"Thou great mysterious God unknown." If I am not mistaken Spencer had some Methodistic antecedents. At any rate, when we come to make up our verdict on the religious significance or bearing of his philosophy we should study carefully his own words in which he is explicit on this matter. For that purpose I take a few sentences from his essay entitled "Religion: A Retrospect and Prospect."

"The final outcome of that speculation

begun by the primitive man, is that the power manifested throughout the universe distinguished as material is the same power which in ourselves swell up under the form of consciousness."

This permits a spiritualistic interpretation of the universe, as likewise does this doctrine: "Phenomenon without noumenon is unthinkable.” And here is his thought upon religion:

"The truly religious element of religion has always been good; that which has proved untenable in doctrine and vicious in practice, has been its irreligious element; and from this it has been ever undergoing purification."

But I hold no brief for any man or any philosophy. I seek to be but a faithful reviewer.

For metaphysics our era has not been distinguished. The genius of the age has not been distinguished. The genius of the age has been for investigation, the finding out of facts and laws, rather than for speculation upon the eternal mysteries. It has been a scientific age rather than a philosophic age. True it is, science comprehends the discovery of principles as well as of facts, the forming of systems and the making of large generalizations; and these are processes of what we ordinarily think of as the philosophic mind. But speculation has adhered closely, in general, to the verifiable; it has acknowledged a constant dependence upon the work of the physical laboratory. At the same time every result of science has acted as an incitement to fresh speculation.

It might be inferred from this acknowledged dependence that the philosophy of the century was materialistic. In reality it was not decidely so, at least in the latter portion of the century. Even the philosophy of the great scientists was not materialistic. Huxley, upon whom fell the opprobrium meant for all, repudiated most emphatically the materialistic view of the world, "as involving grave philo

sophical error." His rejection of the classification of himself which others insisted on making he declares as follows:

"Not among fatalists, for I take the conception of necessity to have a logical and not a physical foundation; not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of those philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God."

Spencer's philosophy, as greatly as it is denounced, can legitimately receive a spiritualistic interpretation. Undoubtedly he leaves an open door for this, else how are we to understand the following utterance:

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"Amid the mysteries," says Spencer, which become the more mysterious the remain the one absolute certainty, that more they are thought about, there will he [man] is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed."

Physical science itself has indeed tended to confirm the mind in the idealistic philosophy. For what are both the positive and the negative conclusions of Physics? First, as one of the great discoveries of the century, we have the doctrine of the conservation of energy and transformation and correlation of forces. Now, what does this doctrine mean? Simply stated, just this: that no force ever disappears; nothing acts, nothing is acted upon, no change takes place in the physical universe, without indeed an expenditure of force, but this force, though spent, is not lost, only altered,

transferred to reside in another state or another object. It is transformed but still conserved. The diverse forces, physical and chemical, are but so many manifestations of one and the same energy. Heat, light, sound, electricity, are only so many modes, not of some material substance, but of the motions of one energy. This is the doctrine of the correlation of forces. Beyond question it strongly supports the idealistic interpretation of the universe The physicist will tell you plainly that he knows nothing that may be called matter; he knows but qualities or conditions, and these are but the manifestations of force. If you ask him, when he has made his final analysis of matter, what the molecule is, he will tell you, so far as he is concerned with it and so far as he knows about it, it is a center of force. He knows nothing whatsoever about any reality called matter. It may exist, it may not; neither the physicist nor the chemist ever came into direct contact with it; neither will affirm that he knows it. But, on the other hand, that there is an "Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed," their philosophy tends to prove. This is not materialism.

To another field I now invite attention, -a field of more universal human interest, for it is that of the historic past, the ancient records of humanity. How wonderful have been the discoveries here! and they belong exclusively to the last hundred years. The most renowned cities of the ancient world, cities whose very locations had been lost to human knowledge, were unearthed with all their treasures of art and literature; and the knowledge thus gained necessitated the rewriting of much history and the revision of much speculation. The documents discovered in the ruins of buried capitals, in the tombs of kings and the temples of gods, have revealed the antiquity of civilization in the world, as the human remains unearthed by natural scientists have revealed the enormous antiquity of man's inhabitancy here.

And these documents have vastly increased our knowledge of the universal modes of thought and of life which everywhere and always belong to man as man. Our knowledge of humanity has been no less extended in the last hundred years than our knowledge of nature.

The antiquity of the civilization that flourished once in the valley of the Nile and left the Pyramids as monuments of its greatness and the Sphinx as a symbol of its mysterious origin and significance, is measured by thousands of years, and is still antedated, by yet other thousands of years, by the civilization that built the cities and founded the libraries of the Tigris and the Euphrates. We are not startled any longer by the discovery of codes of law, land deeds, hymns to the gods, prayers, inscriptions upon tombs, heroic legends, and myths of creation and of great natural occurrences, that date two and three thousand years before Christ. Nor are we disturbed by being told that in the clay-tablets of Hasurbanipal's library are to be read many of the narratives which we were accustomed to regard as the exclusive possession of inspired writers, and our faith takes no shock from the discovery that some of the laws which we supposed to have been handed out of the cloud on Sinai to Moses 1500 years B. C. were in reality contained in the code of Hammurabi 1,000 years earlier.

One truth from this research has been made especially impressive; namely, the universality and the prepotency of the religious sentiment. The oldest books are all sacred books-Bibles. The whole life of the people was religious, and the worship, including the ceremonies that grew out of the paying of homage to the higher Powers, was the most conspicuous business of man in his earlier stages of civilization. Temples and altars were his most imposing structures. Liturgies and levitical codes, hymns and prayers, and narratives of the marvelous doings of God and exhortations to reverence and obedience made up the greater portion of the

contents of his books. And everywhere we find the beginnings and are able in a measure to trace the development of a true morality and sound conception of a Supreme Being, of responsibility and of life beyond death. Thus, fresh apprehension of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man has been gained, and we now understand better than before the great teachings of the prophets and apostles regarding the universal dominion and providence of the God of all the earth.

Max Müller's labors in this field are especially distinguished. His work of translating and editing the Sacred Books of the East is truly a monumental achievement, the like of which no former generation ever conceived, much less undertook. It seems to me that the tendencies of speculative thought as influenced by the results of such study are truly indicated by this same scholar's conclusions set forth in his lectures and essays. His writings were one of the great educative influences of the nineteenth century and his views have told upon all our thinking. The Hibbert Lecture foundation is one of the signs of the sounder spirit of investigation characteristic of our times. The score of volumes comprising the lectures of eminent scholars and setting forth the history and nature of the several most prominent religions of the world, or dealing with particular aspects of the general concepts of religion, these volumes constitute a library that is as characteristic of our era as the scientific works of Darwin and Huxley or the sermons of Dean Stanley and Phillips Brooks. They testify to a broader spirit, a more open mind. The science of religion has coöperated with the other sciences to impress upon the common mind the conception of a universal cause and an all-inclusive providence. There has been revealed a wider application of the unity of nature and the invariableness of law. In the midst of circumstantial and accidental diversities a general essential agreement in the religious

sentiment, in the motive of worship, in the philosophy of conduct, in the interpretations of the moral law, in the conceptions of the divine order of things, has been shown to exist.

We have been made tolerant of the doctrine that every religion has served a divine purpose in the education of the race, that, despite impurities and deficiencies, every religion has contained a measure of truth, a temporary virtue, for discipline, comfort and enlightenment, a a genuine though imperfect revelation of the eternal and God-like. On the other hand, by comparative study, we are enabled to perceive the errors, the defects, and the misconceptions, the moral shortcomings and the spiritual inadequacies, of all the religions of mankind before the appearance of that one perfect religion which was summed up in the two great Commandments of Love and the GoldenRule, and whose essential message to mankind is the Sermon on the Mount.

One trait of the century, and its manifestation in literature, I have yet to notice. This is the growth of the humanitarian spirit. The spread of democracy, the prosperity of missionary work in heathen lands, the literature of common life, social settlements, the large philanthropies of the wealthy— these things all betoken a more universal human sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men than ever before was witnessed upon the earth. Schemes of social and political reform, utopian experiments upon transcendental theories, visions of a new industrial and economic democracy, the founding of all sorts of socialistic communities in the effort to realize in some way the conception of universal human brother, these social phenomena are quite as characteristic of the century as those great mechanical inventions which have been commonly regarded as preeminent distinctions. The religion of humanity, represented in England by a small but respectable body of thinkers, is a significant birth of the era. But if we looked not back of this small

general current of philanthropic feeling of which this sect is but a straw upon the surface, we should but poorly understand our age. In truth the religion of our time is the religion of humanity, for it is striving to become the religion of Christ. Now, underneath such phenomena as these, and giving force and permanency to such a current of feeling, there can with certainty be inferred an originating trend of thought, a general fountainhead of ideas from which as sources flows the stream of sentiment. Such general conceptions I have already pointed out. They are not absolutely new, but they are newly comprehended. They have a new significance. The essential unity and brotherhood of the race is, I say, the chief of these ideas; and another, which science has given us, is the unbroken and uniform rise of humanity to ever higher and truer things, and, with this, a tolerance for the superstitions that once were helpful and practically true, but which, beyond the day of their usefulness and truth, cling to the customs of life.

In order to realize the full force of this disposition of our age let us narrow our consideration, for the sake of definiteness

most conspicuous facts. Unquestionably this is the age of the novel. To confine our view here, as generally in the other kinds of intellectual activity, to the English-speaking race, the century gave us in England, a Walter Scott, a Dickens, a Thackeray, a George Eliot; in America it gave us a Cooper, a Hawthorne, a Bret Harte, a Cable, a Harris,-What is the significance of these names? What the meaning of their work? Just this: that the supreme interest of our humanity. Our study is man. nineteenth-century novel deals with human life in all its range, the essential and universal elements of life: its interest is in man, and nothing that belongs to man is foreign to it. Literature but reflects and embodies the life of a people. As the life is, so will be the literature.

age is

The

Therefore I shall in my next paper attempt to show how the chief writers, the poets and sages, of the nineteenth century were influenced by and reflect the scientific and philosophic thought of their time.

ROBERT T. KERLIN.

Warrensburg, Mo.