J. Lawrence Smith

“ And, studying man as a scientist, he goes on to say: "It is established that man has two grand faculties, of which we find not even a trace among animals. He alone has the moral sentiment of good and evil; he alone believes in a future existence succeeding this natural life; he alone believes in beings superior to himself, that he has never seen, and that are capable of influencing his life for good or evil; in other words, man alone is endowed with morality and religion." ”

“ We know him to be a man whose heart is as large as his head, both contributing to the cause of science. We regard him as one of the ablest physicists of the time, and one of the most level-headed philosophers that England has ever produced—a man whose intellect is as symmetrical as the circle, with its every point equidistant from the centre. ”

“ But, in order to illustrate this subject of method more fully, I will refer to Darwin, whose name has become synonymous with progressive development and natural selection, which we had thought had died out with Lamarck fifty years ago. In Darwin we have one of those philosophers whose great knowledge of animal and vegetable life is only transcended by his imagination. In fact, he is to be regarded more as a metaphysician with a highly-wrought imagination than as a scientist, although a man having a most wonderful knowledge of the facts of natural history. ”

“ The fact is, it becomes a question whether there is such a thing as pure theory in science. No true scientific theory deserves the name that is not based on verified hypothesis; in fact, it is but a concise interpretation of the deductions of scientific facts. ”

“ In England and America we find scientific men of the profoundest intellects differing completely in regard to his logic, analogies, and deductions; and in Germany and France the same thing—in the former of these countries some speculators saying that "his theory is our starting-point," and in France many of her best scientific men not ranking the labors of Darwin with those of pure science. Darwin takes up the law of life, and runs it into progressive development. ”

“ More special reference will be made here to the proclivity of the present epoch among philosophers and theologians to be parading science and religion side by side, talking of reconciling science and religion, as if they have ever been unreconciled. Scientists and theologians may have quarrelled, but never science and religion. ”

“ The chemist has as much right to revel in the imaginary formation of sodium from potassium, or iodine and bromine from chlorine, by a process of development, and eall it science, as for the naturalist to revel in many of his wild speculations, or for the physicist who studies the stellar space to imagine it permeated by mind as well as light—mind such as has formed the poet, the statesman, or the philosopher. ”

“ And just here let me contrast the daring of Darwin with the position assumed by one of the great French naturalists of the present day, Prof. Quatrefages, in a recent discourse of his on the physical character of the human race. In referring to the question of the first origin of man, he says distinctly that, in his opinion, it is one that belongs not to science; these questions are treated by theologians and philosophers: "Neither here nor at the Museum am I, nor do I wish to be, either a theologian or a philosopher. I am simply a man of science ”

“ It is common to speak of the theory of gravitation, when there is nothing purely hypothetical in connection with the manner in which it was studied; in it we only see a clear generalization of observed laws which govern the mutual attraction of bodies. ”

“ He is not satisfied to leave the laws of life where he finds them, or to pursue their study by logical and inductive reasoning. His method of reasoning will not allow him to remain at rest; he must be moving onward in his unification of the universe. He started with the lower order of animals, and brought them through their various stages of progressive development until he supposed he had touched the confines of man ”

“ Yet still another step must be taken in this linking together man and the lower order of animals; it is in connection with language; and before long it is not unreasonable to expect another production from that most wonderful and ingenious intellect on the connection between the language of man and the brute creation. ”