extremely vivid, in which respects he differs from the lower animals. Owing to this condition of mind, man cannot avoid looking backwards and comparing the impressions of past events and actions. He also continually looks forward. Hence, after some temporary desire or passion has mastered his social instincts, he will reflect and compare the now weakened impression of such past impulses with the ever present social instinct; and he will then feel that sense of dissatisfaction which all unsatisfied instincts leave behind them. Consequently he resolves to act differently for the future. And this is conscience. Any instinct which is permanently stronger or more enduring than another gives rise to a feeling which we express by saying that it ought to be obeyed. A pointer dog, if able to reflect on his past conduct, would say to himself, I ought (as, indeed, we say of him) to have pointed at that hare, and not have yielded to the passing temptation of hunting it." (Part II. c. xxi.) There is an immense number of unfilled-up breaks in this process, far more so than even in his genealogy of man. That the lower animals are social beings, and that this arises from social instincts, is admitted. But social feelings are one thing, and a sense of right and wrong another thing, — quite as different as color is from shape or sound. It is the sense of right and wrong that constitutes man a moral and (taken along with free will and intelligence) a responsible being. It is when man has his social and instinctive qualities under subjection to the moral law revealed by conscience that he becomes a virtuous being. But these higher qualities present in man are wanting in the lower animals, which are, in consequence, not moral or accountable beings. It may even be allowed that our moral nature is intimately connected with our social feelings. Most of our moral perceptions rise on the contemplation of social relations, our relations to our fellow-men and to God. But they spring up in breasts susceptible of them: they would not come forth in a stock or a stone; there is no evidence that they come forth in the souls of animals. There is no doubt that man is more inclined to look back on the past, and reflect upon it, than the lower creatures, which, I suspect, are not much given to musing or moralizing. But it is one thing to look back on DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN. 361 the past, and another to regard it as morally good or evil. Man is led to declare that there is a moral law which "ought to be obeyed," that there are instincts which ought to be restrained; but there is no evidence of such a moral decision being come to by the pointer dog, or any other animal. The reference to the pointer is a clear evidence that Mr. Darwin has not so much as weighed what is involved in our moral perceptions, judgments, and sentiments, how much is involved in the idea of right and wrong, of ought, obligation, merit and demerit. As the general result of this survey, we see that man has ideas involving principles different from any to be found in the lower creatures. The possession of these puts man in an entirely different order from the brutes that perish: they make him a responsible being, and point to and guarantee an immortality. I believe that man so endowed must have come from the Power which created matter at first, and added life as the ages rolled on, and gave the brutes their instincts or incipient intelligence, and crowned his works by creating a moral and responsible being. More than one half of the "Descent of Man" is occupied with an investigation of Sexual Selection. The discussion of this question must be left to those who have given attention, as Mr. Darwin has done, to the courtship, the propagation, and domestication of animals. Most of what he says has no bearing on the subjects discussed in these Lectures. The views which he presents are always ingenious, but they seem to me to be wire-drawn and overstretched. When animals have a tame, dull hue, it is because they are thereby less exposed to danger than if they had conspicuous colors. If a male has bright colors, it is to attract the female. He adds, however: "We ought to be cautious in concluding that colors which appear to us dull are not attractive to the females of certain species. We should bear in mind such cases as those of the common house-sparrow, in which the male differs much from the female, but does not exhibit any bright tints." Female birds have commonly a duller color, as bright hues would expose them to beasts of prey in hatching. Some males are white, as thereby they are rendered attractive to the females. But in other cases black seems the favorite color. "It seems at first sight a monstrous supposition that the jet blackness of the negro has been gained through sexual selection; but this view is supported by various analogies, and we know that negroes admire their own blackness (Part II. c. xx.) A law so flexible may be drawn round a great many phenomena, and seem to bind them. I am sure that in the vegetable kingdom (which I have studied more carefully) there is a beauty of flower which cannot have been produced by selection on the part of man, for I have seen it in remote isles of Scotland, and virgin forests of America never trodden by human footsteps; and this in plants which cannot have been aided by beauty-loving insects carrying the pollen. And if there be beauty in the vegetable kingdom independent of creature-selection, there may surely be the same in the animal kingdom. Here, as in so many other cases, his law explains so much, but not the whole. In all these speculations, — for Mr. Darwin acknowledges that his work is highly speculative, there are laws and operations implied, of which he can give no account on his theory of Natural Selection. Whence the strong impulses of the males, and the coyness of the females, all implied in the laws which he illustrates, that the male needs gay colors and showy forms to attract the female, who does not require these? Whence the love of the beautiful in the female, the love of certain colors and certain forms, an anticipation of the higher æsthetics among cultivated minds? Whence that love of music appearing in birds, and becoming so cultivated and elevating a taste in advanced humanity? In the way in which all these things have appeared, and in the forms which they have taken, and in the mutual adaptations of all things to one another, and to seasons and circumstances, I delight to trace a presiding Intelligence, foreseeing all things from the beginning, and guiding them towards a grand and beneficent end. Art. III. ON MR. HERBERT SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY. MR. SPENCER is acknowledged, on all hands, to be a powerful speculative thinker. Give him a set of facts, and he at once MR. SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY. 363 proceeds to generalize them, and devise a theory to account for them. He evidently regards it as his function to unify the metaphysics of the day and the grand discoveries lately made in physical science. He is fond of declaring that a number of the great laws announced in our day as the result of a long course of inductive investigation, such as that of the Conservation of Physical Force, can be discovered by a priori cogitation. His strength is his weakness. Instead of proceeding, as Bacon recommends, gradatim from lower to higher axioms, and only in the end to the highest of all, he mounts at once to the very loftiest generalizations. My friend Hugh Miller said of an author, that in his argument there was an immense number of fa’en steeks (fallen stitches): the language might be applied to Mr. Spencer's philosophy. It may be safely said of some of his high speculations, that they will not be either proven or disproven for ages. 1. He proceeds on the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton and Dr. Mansel, maintaining that all our knowledge is Relative; turning the doctrine to a very different purpose from that contemplated by the Edinburgh and Oxford metaphysicians. Hamilton thought that the doctrine of Relativity, with the consequent ignorance of the nature of things, might be applied to humble the pride of the intellect; Mansel used it to undermine religious rationalism; and Spencer employs it, perhaps more logically than either, to show that God, if there be a God, is unknowable. I have been laboring in these Lectures (see IV., V.), and in my works generally (Meth. of Div. Gov., App. VI.; Intuitions, Part III. B. I. c. iii. § 6), to show that the doctrine, as advocated by these metaphysicians, is not a true one; and I am thus prepared to reject that structure which Mr. Spencer would rear upon it. We know self directly in the state in which it is at the time, and not merely in relation to something else declared to be unknown. 2. It follows that there is nothing inconceivable or contradictory, as the school maintains that there is, in such ideas as SelfExistence and First Cause. We know ourselves as existing, and can thence conceive of others, of God, as existing. We certainly do not know ourselves as self-existing, because we dis cover that we are caused; but we can conceive — I mean, think and believe that God, while he exists, is uncaused. I believe that all causation carries us to a substance with powers. The substances we see on earth are evidently derived; but, as we mount up, we come to an underived substance, — and this without falling even into an apparent contradiction. The whole of these alleged contradictions, so much dwelt on by Hamilton in his "Discussions," and Mansel in his "Bampton Lectures," and Spencer in the opening of his "First Principles," are contradictions simply in the propositions of the metaphysicians, and not at all in the actual laws or beliefs of the human mind. 3. It may be doubted whether he is entitled to say that there is an unknown reality beyond the known phenomena. I have referred to this in Lecture VI. I must leave the farther discussion of it to his school, some of whom will deny that he can on his principles know so certainly that there is an unknown. 4. I have shown, in the same Lecture, that the fundamental verities in the mind, properly interpreted, lead us to a God so far known. He talks of our knowing certain things, and says (First Prin. p. 143), “All things known to us are manifestations of the unknowable;” and (p. 170) that force is "a certain conditioned effect of unconditioned cause ;" and (p. 165) “our conception of space is produced by some mode of the unknowable; and he speaks (p. 168) of "the unknown cause which produces in us the effects called Matter, Space, Time, and Motion." I hold that a cause thus known is so far known. 5. He utterly fails to account on his principles, though he seems to be doing so, for some of the most certain of known phenomena, such as Sensation, Nervous Action, Life, and Consciousness. Sensation. Among all the laws mentioned by him, such as the Persistence of Force, Instability of the Homogeneous, no one is in the least degree fitted to produce this common phenomenon, experienced by all of us, in the shape of pleasure and pain. This is one of the most patent of the gaps in his system. Nervous Action. He tells us (First Prin. p. 476) that, through the "continuous sorting and grouping together of changes or motions which constitutes nervous function, there is |