midst of metaphysic; and, so far as I understand the matter, of bad metaphysic. To me the evolution of a collection means the evolutions of the units of that collection, and it means no more. To Mr. Harrison it seems to mean a great deal more. He seems to believe that in his collection there is a real identity, which under changes of component parts is permanent and the same; an identity, further, not of mere material particles or of force in general, but a human identity. If this is his belief, what is the basis of it? What is the ground for his assertion that in past, present (and future?) human beings there is a real self-sameness? I find no hint of any ground in the article; and while no one, who knows what metaphysic is, can doubt that in the above assertion we have metaphysic, it is hard to stifle the doubt whether we have not also mere dogmatic metaphysic.
But I may be doing the writer a wrong. Perhaps he does not affirm that, under differences, humanity is one and the same real being. Perhaps all that he means is that the summed particular effects of past and present human lives are existing in, and can be recognized by, the individual. If so, then, unless we are once more to have a metaphysical doctrine of the identity of cause and effect, this commonplace mechanical view is but a small foundation for Mr. Harrison’s superstructure.
Collective humanity is at any rate organic; and that seems to be the reason for the somewhat strange denial of a ‘collective force’ to the universe as a whole (p. 874). In his definition of an organism the writer seems to me to introduce the ideas of identity and teleology (877). If so, we have once more metaphysical doctrine. If not so, then (vid. Essay V. p. 173) the evolution of humanity is a phrase which has no meaning. In the one case what becomes of the writer’s position against the metaphysicians? In the other, what becomes of his religion and his rhetoric?
But, passing by this, what reason is put forward for the belief that humanity is an organism? Mr. Harrison starts from the social organism—a conception, by the way, not wholly unknown to the metaphysic of the beginning of this century. Let that be as it may, how are we to go from the organism of the state to the organism of humanity? Admit the metaphysical assertion, that civilization is ‘the activity of a being just as real as you or I, and far more permanent’ (879)—but does history, after all, verify the belief that all or most of the perished millions who have covered this globe have entered into the main stream of civilization? Does observation of facts now show that all or most of the dwellers on this globe are organically connected? To show mere reciprocal influence is not enough; for that holds good also of mere physical phenomena. Will observation warrant more than the hope that some day, we know not when, humanity may become an organic whole (cf. Trendelenburg, Naturrecht, 610)?
After all this, it may be idle to say anything about religion; but I must point out that, even if humanity be more than the name of an imaginary collection, even if it really is a self-same being which evolves itself amid change of particles, and in which we are members—even then it can not be the object of
