Collected Essays and Reviews

Most readers would dislike to admit without coercion that a law was adequate which obliged them to erase from literature (if by literature were meant anything worthy of the title of “mental product”) all works except treatises on natural science, history, and statistics. Let us examine the reason that Mr. Spencer appears to consider coercive. It is this: That, since every process grows more and more complicated as it develops, more swarmed over by incidental and derivative conditions which disguise and adulterate its original simplicity, the only way to discover its true and essential form is to trace it back to its earliest beginning. There it will appear in its genuine character pure and undefiled. Religious, aesthetic, and ethical judgments, having grown up in the course of evolution, by means that we can very plausibly divine, of course may be stripped off from the main stem of intelligence and leave that undisturbed. With a similar intent Mr. Tylor says: “Whatever throws light on the origin of a conception throws light on its validity.” Thus, then, there is no resource but to appeal to the polyp, or whatever shows us the form of evolution just before intelligence, and what that, and only what that, contains will be the root and heart of the matter.