If you will hand me Mr. Spencer's work from which you have just quoted, I will point out a passage which fully justifies my criticism. It is this: "Before it can be ascertained how organized beings have been gradually evolved, there must be reached the conviction that they have been gradually evolved." He says this in praise of De Maillet, one of the earliest of the modern speculators who reached this conviction, and whose "wild notions" as to the way should not make us, says Mr. Spencer, "forget the merit of his intuition that animals and plants were produced by natural causes."[108] That is to say, first form to yourself a theory, and have a thorough conviction of it. Then investigate, and shape the facts so as to support the theory. Is it not plain that an inquiry into the mode in which organized beings have been gradually evolved must precede any conclusion or conviction on the subject? It is one of those cases in which the _how_ a thing has been done lies at the basis of the inquiry whether it has probably been done at all. If a suggested mode turns out to be wild and visionary, what is the value of any "intuition" of the main fact? But, what is still more extraordinary in this kind of deduction, which is no deduction, is the way in which, according to Mr. Spencer, the first conviction is to be reached before one looks for the facts. The process of the evolution of organisms, according to Mr. Spencer's philosophy, is contained as a part in the great whole of evolution in general. We first convince ourselves that evolution obtains in all the other departments of Nature, and is the interpretation of all their phenomena. Then we conclude that it has obtained in the animal kingdom, and so we have the conviction necessary to be acquired before we examine the phenomena; and then we make that investigation so as to reconcile the facts with the supposed universal laws of matter and motion. I do not exaggerate in the least. Here is what he says: "Only when the process of evolution of organisms is affiliated on the process of evolution in general can it be truly said to be explained. The thing required is to show that its various results are corollaries from first principles. We have to reconcile the facts with the universal laws of the redistribution of matter and motion."[109] What would Bacon have thought of this method of establishing the probable truth of a theory? It leaves out of consideration a multitude of facts, and one of them at least is of the utmost importance. It is that in the domain of animated matter, in organized beings, and most signally in the animal kingdom, there is a principle of life; and, whatever may be the universal laws of the redistribution of matter and motion, in their operation upon or among the products which are not endowed with this principle, when we come to reason about products that _are_ endowed with it we are not entitled to conclude that this principle of animal life is itself