Conditioned," and has hardly raised its head since John Mill so
effectively demolished it. If criticism of our human intellectual
constitution is needed, it can be got out of Bradley to-day better than
out of Spencer. The latter's way of reconciling science and religion
is, moreover, too absurdly _naif_. Find, he says, a fundamental
abstract truth on which they can agree, and that will reconcile them.
Such a truth, he thinks, is that _there is a mystery_. The trouble is
that it is over just such common truths that quarrels begin. Did the
fact that both believed in the existence of the Pope reconcile Luther
and Ignatius Loyola? Did it reconcile the South and the North that
both agreed that there were slaves? Religion claims that the "mystery"
is interpretable by human reason; "Science," speaking through Spencer,
insists that it is not. The admission of the mystery is the very
signal for the quarrel. Moreover, for nine hundred and ninety-nine
men out of a thousand the sense of mystery is the sense of
_more-to-be-known_, not the sense of a More, _not_ to be known.

But pass the Unknowable by, and turn to Spencer's famous law of
Evolution.

"Science" works with several types of "law." The most frequent and
useful type is that of the "elementary law,"--that of the composition
of forces, that of gravitation, of refraction, and the like. Such laws
declare no concrete facts to exist, and make no prophecy as to any
actual future. They limit themselves to saying that if a certain
character be found in any fact, another character will co-exist with it
or follow it. The usefulness of these laws is proportionate to the
extent to which the characters they treat of pervade the world, and to
the accuracy with which they are definable.

Statistical laws form another type, and positively declare something
about the world of actuality. Although they tell us nothing of the
elements of things, either abstract or concrete, they affirm that the
resultant of their actions drifts preponderantly in a particular
direction. Population tends toward cities; the working classes tend to
grow discontented; the available energy of the universe is running
down--such laws prophesy the real future _en gros_, but they never help
us to predict any particular detail of it.

Spencer's law of Evolution is of the statistical variety. It defines
what evolution means, and what dissolution means, and asserts that,
although both processes are al