For, by being higher, it more readily admits of modifications, as it is also more active by virtue of its greater complication.

"Although the general laws which regulate hereditary transmissions are as yet too little known, the above considerations indicate its high efficacy as regards the direct amelioration of man's nature, his physical, intellectual, and, above all, his moral nature. It is an indisputable fact that hereditary transmission is as applicable, or even more applicable, to our noblest attributes as to our lowest. For phenomena become more susceptible of modification-and, consequently, of improvement-in proportion as they are by nature higher and more special. The valuable results obtained in the principal races of domestic animals convey but a faint idea of the improvements which are reserved for the most eminent species under the systematic guidance of its own providence."

The modifications which man can successfully introduce into the animal and vegetable kingdoms so as to render these more subservient to his highest and lowest uses are hinted at in Mr. Darwin's admirable work on "Animals and Plants under Domestication "-a book more solidly useful than Mr. Darwin's other works, and will come to be seen as such when the din and smoke of the warfare they have led to have cleared away. We say "hinted at" (not fully displayed), because Darwin limits himself to sundry experiments upon certain selected animals and plants, and shows how far these can be carried to modify the animals and plants so as to make them seem quite other and different to what they originally were. This power, once acquired, of producing almost at will animals with certain peculiarities, is one we may be sure man will never relinquish. On the contrary, he will endeavour to render its hold greater and more far-reaching. Guided by sound reasoning and right feeling, it is difficult to estimate the good he may yet accomplish with it. All depends upon its being put to moral and social uses: these uses it is which justify its exertion. Man should exercise it within certain limits only, as it is an inevitable property of all power to deprave its wielder. There is no way of escaping the depravation but through the power being religiously directed. The animal and vegetable kingdoms are ours for use, not abuse, and no experiments with either are justified if cruelty be exercised. Cruelty denaturalises (not

brutalises) the experimenter. We would not talk of the rights of animals any more than we would of the rights of man; but one claim all animals weaker than we are have upon us their weakness and dependency, and he is a dastard who is deaf to such a claim.

If we are able to modify animals and plants to their and our benefit, how much more are we able to modify ourselves for our own and others' benefit! If disease weakens organs, and causes the decay of functions, are we not able to turn the knowledge to our moral and mental uses? Are our intellectual organs duly developed? Are they properly developed? Have we developed some at the expense of others ? and, if we have, are we justified by the result? Have we developed the merely critical and analytical faculties? And what satisfaction has such development given us? One of the most pathetic passages in Mr. Mill's Autobiography" is that in which he speaks of the pass to which intellectual analysis had brought him: the moral as well as intellectual collapse which ensued. When

Not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient all I can,
And haply by abstruse research to steal,
From my own nature all the natural man ;
This was my sole resource, my only plan;
Till what befits a part infects the whole,
And now has almost grown the habit of my soul.

To speak truly, the analytical faculties in these days are cultivated most unduly; the synthetical, little, if at all. Unless these last have due use, they will die out, and a sad future will be in store for man when that shall happen. Ichabod will then be written upon the world and man; neither in himself nor outside of himself will he find peace and rest. Sadly will the poor grief-laden bosom murmur, "The beautiful has vanished, and returns not." He will hear, with Faust when he pronounced the terrible curse upon his past studies and pursuits, the sounds of " Woe, Woe"“Thou hast destroy'd

The beautiful world
With violent blow,

'Tis shiver'd! 'tis shatter'd!

The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter'd !

Now we sweep

The wrecks into nothingness!

Fondly we weep

G

The beauty that's gone!

Thou, 'mongst the sons of earth

Lofty and mighty one,

Build it once more!

In thine own bosom the lost world restore |

Now with unclouded sense

Enter a new career;

Songs salute thine ear

Ne'er heard before."

The mere intellect can build nothing that will satisfy the wants of the heart; and these wants grow more and more urgent. "Great thoughts come from the heart :" and it is to the heart that the intellect owes all its best impulses. Analysis destroys, synthesis builds up. The soul may make itself "a desert, and call it peace;" but it sickens at the ruin it has made, if it has not lost every vestige of humanity.

Never let us forget that the brain is duly used if it be exercised over scientific and philosophic problems which the heart first suggested to it. Theologism and metaphysics weaken the brain and stifle the heart's best impulses. They can yield nothing; their barrenness has been laid open to the sun a thousand times. Our organs need exercise upon what is real and productive-of proved, not fancied" good. We count it not a manly occupation to beat the air, and hardly a satisfactory one to "fill the belly with the east wind." We wish to use to their utmost our best capacities, and let rot into disuse our worst. Exercise develops organs, while lack of it atrophies others and renders them useless. This applies both to noble as well as ignoble organs. Our happiness or misery-and, what is of even more consequence, the happiness or misery of othersdepends upon our power to discipline by exercise or nonexercise-that is, by repression-our passions and propensities. The strength of the brain, or heart, like the strength of a muscle, depends upon its due exercise. There are exercises which do not strengthen the brain and muscleexercises which serve no physical, mental, or social use. There is a labour and a wage which profiteth not. The human heart longs for something to fill it, and then it has rest. A great purpose can occupy it, and dominate life, harmonising all its thoughts and feelings and emotions, fusing moral and mental existence into one great whole. Such lives have been lived, and the barest outlines of them in song or story are beautiful to contemplate, and, contem

plating them, we feel that "we are greater than we know." We see in some men that the right use of all their powers and faculties generates an enthusiasm of humanity-an enthusiasm which transforms and transfigures them, until they become one with the Humanity whose they are and whom they serve. But the life of. relation, so full of fine possibilities of thought and action, may be so spent as to prove worse than useless to the community-immoral.

"In forming the animal series, the subjective method takes as its continual guide the true object of that formation -a logical rather than a scientific object. As we only study the animals to gain a sounder knowledge of man by tracing, through them, his connection with plants, we are fully authorised to exclude from our hierarchy all the species which disturb it. An analogous motive enables us, or rather commands us, to introduce into the series, under proper restrictions, some races purely of our own creation, created for the special purpose of facilitating the more difficult transitions without any shock to the Statical and Dynamical laws of animal life." [Professor Owen has done this in his use of the term "archetype" in his works on the animal kingdom. This type is a purely subjective artifice, but a very useful one in enabling the student of natural history to rise from the simplest to the most complex forms of animal life, so that the whole appears to have been constructed upon a given plan.] "A fuller study of certain animals is really a question of practical utility, in the case of the few species with which the human race finds itself, on various grounds, more or less connected......... The animals which are really links in our chain will, as a whole, always have for us profound scientific interest. They tend to throw light on the general study of all our lower functions, as we can, in them, trace each function as it gradually becomes more simple or more complicated."

And on the permanence of Species, Comte says:"The most important property, common to all living beings, is the aptitude each has to produce offspring similar to itself, as it in turn was produced by similar parents. Not merely is it true that no organic existence ever sprung from inorganic nature, but, further, no species of any kind can spring from one of a different kind, either inferior or superior. The limits of the exceptions to this rule are very narrow, and are as yet but little known. There is, then, a really impassable gulf between the worlds of life and of

matter, and even, though less broad, between the different forms of vitality. This view strengthens our position, that any simply Objective Synthesis is impossible. But it in no way impairs the true Subjective Synthesis, in every case the result of a very gradual ascent towards the type of man."

Within the historic period species have remained fixed. Naturalists cannot gainsay this. When they wish to establish that one species has been transformed into another, they go back into pre-historic times, and take many thousands-sometimes a few millions-of years for the purpose. There is, as Comte shows, a tendency in all animal species towards the formation of a collective organism; but Sociality, the subject of a distinct science, could only be developed where there was historical continuity; and man is the only animal that has had such continuity. Biology as an isolated science is irrational, and is useful only as it prepares the way for Sociology. There are germs of Sociological laws in the animal races.

The three laws of the Social Life are-1. The Law of the Three Stages; 2. Hierarchy of Scientific Conceptions; and 3. Law of Evolution of Activity.

1. The Law of the Three Stages has been already explained in the earlier lectures; a passing allusion is all we will give to it here.

All our knowledge (Sciences) has passed through three stages; it was at one time Theological, then Metaphysical (or transitional), and lastly Positive. There is no branch of knowledge but bears traces of this law, however simple or complex that knowledge may be. Man has always conceived phenomena to be influenced first by persons or wills; then by entities, mere abstractions of the persons or wills; and lastly by invariable laws. This is not only the law of individual, it is also the law of collective development, and can be verified in a thousand ways. "The first stage of this evolution takes place in all the higher animals, as in. ourselves. But in none does it advance further than the theologic phase-a result more attributable to the want of the social state than to mere mental inferiority. Most races remain in a state of Fetichism extremely similar to the condition of primitive man."

2. Hierarchy of Scientific Conceptions.

The Second Law of Sociology is a corollary from the first. "It lays down the Order in which various branches of

abstract truth have arisen, and in which they should be classified; the order of decreasing generality and increasing complication in the phenomena.' We have already shown that the Sciences have been historically developed in this order, the simplest-ie., Mathematics-having first arrived at Positivity, and the most complex, Sociology, last. The Sciences are Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Sociology. As we have already stated, it is obvious there could be no Astronomy without Mathematics; no Physics without Astronomy and Mathematics; no Chemistry without Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics; and no Biology without Chemistry, etc.; and no Sociology without Biology, Chemistry, etc. Comte, the founder of the last and greatest of all the Sciences, has shown the dependence of Sociology upon the preceding Sciences, and how impossible it was to constitue it a Science at all until the fundamental bases had been laid in the preceding order. Sociology must take into account Astronomical, Physical, Chemical, and Biological phenomena, since man and Society, the Organism and Environment, could not be conceived of except as subject to these phenomena. Comte showed that Sociology, like Biology, had its Statical and Dynamical laws, represented by Order and Progress-Progress being a development of Order. Social Statics comprise the permanent relations of Society, such as Family, Language, Government, etc., as these are facts common to society in all its stages. Social Dynamics comprise the Laws of Human Progress. Social Statics were first formulated by Aristotle-see his "Politics "-who knew nothing of human progress, the laws of which could not be formulated until modern times, when that progress could be surveyed and estimated. Sociological phenomena were not until lately thought to be subject to law. The first hints of Sociology occurred at the close of the eighteenth century to Condorcet, Turgot, and Kant. The principal difficulty was to discover the laws of human progress: this was reserved for Auguste Comte. Comte saw the intimate dependence of Sociology upon Biology, and insisted upon the necessity of the student's thoroughly mastering the principles of biological science before attempting to grasp those of social science, to which they were preparatory, and upon which they poured a flood of light. Mr. Herbert Spencer has endeavoured to render justice to Comte on this subject. He wrote, in his "Study of Sociology," pp. 328-330: "To