Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (Volume 3); Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on the Positive Philosophy (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XI TWO OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED WHEN an objection to a complex theory in any department of science is so extremely obvious as to seem at first sight fatal to the theory, it is unwise to urge it in argument until we have very thoroughly considered the matter. Men like Laplace and Goethe, Spencer and Darwin, in framing their theories of evolution, are indeed liable to overlook difficulties which are so unobtrusive as to be detected only after prolonged observation; but they are very unlikely to overlook difficulties which are so conspicuous as to occur at once to the minds of a hundred general readers. When, therefore, a reader of average culture, who has perhaps never seriously bent his mind to the question of the origin of species, and who is very likely unacquainted with the sciences which throw light upon that subject, finds himself immediately confronted by difficulties in a theory which men of the highest learning and capacity have spent a quarter of a century in testing, common prudence should lead him to continue his study until he has made sure that the difficulty is not due to his own ignorance rather than to the shortcomings of the theory. This wholesome caution is too seldom manifested by literary reviewers, many of whom, in criticising Mr. Darwin's theory without having duly read his works, allege certain objections as being quite obvious to all intelligent people, save to the one-sided speculator who is supposed to have ignored them. In Mr. Darwin's case, this mode of treatment is peculiarly impertinent, since even the less obvious objections to the theory of natural selection were for the most part foreseen and answered in the first edition of the "Origin of Species," ? a book to which, as to an arsenal of scientific facts, one must still resort who would deal...