To Miss Grace Norton.

Oct. 16, 1870.

... I shall not launch forth, then, into any sea of philosophic disquisition, more especially as you have given me no commission for such an errand, and as I now have opportunities to decide and dogmatize on disputed questions and doubtful matters twice a week, orally. The long-meditated lectures have begun. I have talked mental science for five hours to a class of which the smallest attendance has been

eight, the greatest twelve! — not a crowd, you see, but respectable, as our University lectures go, and considering the unattractive character of my subject. I do not aspire yet to rival Mr. Emerson or Mr. Lowell in drawing audiences. These five meetings have been in great measure experimental with me, since they are the first entire hours I have ever attempted to fill with undisputed talk; and for one of them I tried the experiment of reading from a prepared manuscript. Talking succeeds better. What I write usually contemplates an imaginary company of sages or experts, and requires to be read deliberately, and sometimes twice. Writing is, of course, talking to an imaginary audience; but the absent mediocre mind does not inspire in me any desire of communication. One of my class, a former pupil of mine, says that I have not yet given him any occasion to ask questions. There are, however, in my subject, as it is developed, temptation and room enough for questions; and I look forward to livelier times, especially when we get better acquainted. But, meantime, I am somewhat surprised at the ease with which the hour is consumed with continuous talk. All notes and manuscripts are a hindrance. With my mind full of the themes of discourse, the order and even the illustrations develop themselves, and in a manner apparently better suited to hold the listener’s attention than any reading could be, — at any rate, any reading of what I could write.

This is in accordance with my original plan, — if it can be called a plan, — and my preparation was only keeping on the alert in reading and meditations, for whatever might be of service to the lectures. I did not even take notes, feeling sure that I should remember, and could refer to memory with more ease and profit than to a heap of manuscripts for whatever was really worth retaining. Writing and artificial memory are often, I think, in the way of a better sort of memory which holds what is worth retaining by more real ties. I did indeed

take a few notes, but I doubt whether I shall find them of any service. They seemed at the time of more importance than they do now. Perhaps I attach the same exaggerated importance to what occurs to me to say now, and it is rather early to pass judgment on my preparation; five lectures are only one-eighth part of the course. I call the lectures “Expositions of the Principles of Psychology, from the Text of Bain.”

To make this letter as egotistical as possible, or as a letter should be, I must tell you of what you may find in the current number of the “North American Review,” an article on the “Limits of Natural Selection.” Philosophical Discussions, p. 97. ⁵⁶ I read last summer, for my own pleasure and edification, a little book on this subject by Mr. Alfred Wallace; and in one of those moments of easy good-nature which, by the mere pleasure of their gracious majesties, see fit to impose burdens on other and less fortunate moments of our lives, I promised to the editor a notice of the book. I have broken such promises before: the other moments have rebelled, and insisted on their inalienable rights; but this time that great spirit, the sense of duty, which ought to rule over all, brought my leisure into subjection, established the divine right of the lazy promise, and put the pen into my hand, and, lo! what was conceived in the sense of punctilious duty and contracted obligation as a modest book-notice, expanded into the majestic proportions of a body-article, nigh thirty pages long, and was accepted as such, and will appear with all its damning heresies over my signature, without even the cloak of anonymousness to shield me from the indignation of outraged orthodoxy.

I forgot to say about my lectures that ---- came to the first two. He has not come since: it may be on account of my explanation in the second lecture that psychology is more closely

allied to the physical sciences than to metaphysics in its methods and motives; and my claiming for this science the right to take up heretical positions as hypotheses or questions of scientific inquiry, which are illegitimately held in philosophy or metaphysics as finalities, — though so long as scientific investigations are incomplete, as they always may be, these positions are practically finalities, but held in a wholly different spirit from a metaphysical dogma. I disclaimed taking sides in any other sense than as the side presents real problems, and suggests proofs of a scientific character. There is really a difference of method between the scientific adoption of an heretical position and the philosophical adoption or rejection of it. Philosophy passes like a judge upon its questions, as if, in practical matters, decision were quite as important as truth. Science takes them up as matters of curiosity or of possible future utility, and looks, at its leisure, into them. It acknowledges no burden of proof in its judgments, and is content to wait. But, as it happens usually that the heretic holds a possibly verifiable position, or one the evidence of which has not yet been completely explored, science comes to look with favor upon it, and this favorable view appears to the dogmatists of both sides as a really favorable decision. This attitude of science is very unsatisfactory to that hunger for knowledge, or rather for assurance, which is rather a ravening appetite than a discriminating instinct for proof, and is content to feed on fallacies, or will carry conviction by violence. Science contemns this. The rest it seeks is the remainder of knowledge, even principles which we do not yet know; and it holds what we do know as subject to our present ignorance (not a hopeless ignorance), and is hostile to the dogmatic attitude of either side, and to any finality in the present state of our knowledge on philosophical questions.

Don’t suppose that I talked in this way to my class, or even exactly to the same effect. Imagine rather, in place of

rhetoric, a painstaking, expository, much plainer style. I imagine that one great interest in Mr. Bain’s system, on the part of some at least of the class, is in the issue that Mr. Martineau tries to make with him; but the subordinate, almost incidental value that some traditional metaphysical issues (like the ultimate nature of the connection of mind and matter and of cause and effect, and the dependence of life on matter) have in the view of the scientific psychologist, is with difficulty comprehended by those who approach the subject from a religious point of view. Dr. Lionel Beale, in his article in the present number of the “Fortnightly,” on “the Mystery of Life,”—uniting a large culture and great acuteness with an interest in the question that is really metaphysical or theological, — accuses the scientific position that life or the properties of living matter are really subject to material laws, which, if known, would be a higher sort of chemistry, — he accuses this of being a dogmatic position; and probably it is so in the minds of many that hold it. They have the same weakness that the Doctor has. They transcend experience in trying to assimilate the regulative agencies of life and mind to the forces of matter, just as he does in trying to make them appear as different as possible. All his ingenuity cannot make it appear that the view he takes is not dogmatic, and even hopelessly so. His orthodoxy, his belief that life is not a possible chemistry, is unmitigated assumption in fact, however modestly put forward. As being essentially a finality, it leads to no further knowledge, and virtually denies the possibility of further knowledge. The heretical position, on the other hand, that life is, in some at least of its essential phases, a higher form of chemistry, when held with a confidence limited to scientific evidence, is only a following out of those suggestions and guidances of experience which propound the theory, and has, at least, what orthodox faith has not, the character of a working scientific hypothesis. The real animus of both sides is unscientific. The one, from reverence (perhaps a misplaced one), taboos the grounds where the other, from want of reverence, wanders in the dark. The one protests against regarding life as only a higher form of chemistry, as if this theory in some way degraded it, rendered it less worthy of our reverence and regard. In such a protest is seen the real motive to the dogmatism, essentially unscientific, and, at bottom, irrational, that so perverts even an acute mind as to make it charge its own vices upon its opponents. It is this mixing up of two really distinct orders of ideas, ideas of moral dignity and ideas of causal dependence, running through the best thought of all times, that presents the greatest obstacle to scientific progress, not only in what relates to life and mind, but in every branch of science; for all was related to life and mind in the earliest conceptions of them. With what religious horror the ancient orthodox protested against the doctrine that the stars are not gods, but only earth and stones!

Dr. Beale claims that his prejudice does not prevent him from doing good service to science; but this is because there are problems enough outside of his sacred precinct. Science is not finished yet up to that line; but this does not prevent the invasions of hardier pioneers. We have just seen the monkey prejudice invaded in the Darwinian controversy. That men, being what they are, are descended from gods, is supposed to be a nobler conception of human nature than that, being the same creatures, they have struggled up from — well, even I don’t like to say “monkeys” (partly because it isn’t strictly true or probable), but I will say — the monkey’s ancestors. This love of pedigrees and the attribution of moral dignity to them come from a just and useful sentiment when confined to rational limits. There would be a solid ground of assurance of a better future in the fact of a better past. We should have in it a type of the hope and faith in man’s destiny.

A lady, . . . who I afterwards learned was strictly Calvinistic, assured me, the other day, that to believe in Darwinism would destroy all her hope for humanity. But I thought, and said, that there was some encouragement to be had in the progress men have made, according to this theory. Moral constructiveness, our æsthetico-moral nature, turns all history into mythology, and all science into mythic cosmology. It is the very heart of orthodoxy. The theory that there is a correspondence between moral ranks, or spiritual hierarchies, and the dependence of natural causes; that the first in the order of creation is first in order of moral worth; that history is a record of degeneracy; that lifeless matter is essential evil, — a theory received, it is supposed, by Plato from the East, — has, no doubt, been very serviceable by making men regard the past with reverence; and the absence of the sentiments to which it appeals, from the heart of the heretic, is perhaps, quite as often as any better cause, the origin of his heresy. Reverence, or the want of it, has quite as much influence on men’s beliefs, or professions of belief, as proofs and disproofs have. It is only with the latter that science has any thing to do, except in that useful instrument of research, hypothesis, through which it sometimes presses hard on inveterate prejudice, as, I think, it does in Dr. Beale’s case.

How badly I have kept my promise not to write a long or philosophical letter! But I have, at any rate, broken it spontaneously. This talk is not one of my lectures, and is not any part of my article, and was no part of my thought when I set out, — was not, at least, on the surface of my thought. Yet of what else should I talk, since you have all the news on your side of the water. The bits of private news about the great struggle which you sent me were very interesting. I imagine there must be an immense amount of diplomacy going on at the present moment, — a manufacture of opinion quite unscientific.