In the chapter on the transmission of acquired variations, cases where such transmission apparently occurs are explained by supposing the action of an external influence simultaneously upon a body-cell and its corresponding determinant in the germ-cell. Finally, variation in general is referred to the cumulative effect of natural selection and amphimixis upon slight variations in the determinants, produced by influences such as varying nutrition.
This little work is one of the popular attempts at religio-philosophical construction with a view to reconcile diverse world-conceptions and furnish a system which shall satisfy all ideals, intellectual, volitional, and emotional. Spinozism is offered as the new gospel, the authors believing that it alone is fitted to replace Christianity and to become the world-religion as well as the world-philosophy. This fitness consists chiefly in its capacity for assimilating the modern science of nature and for uniting the spiritual and the sensuous in human life into one complete whole. By a liberal use of the words "divine" and "free" in speaking of natural and conscious energy, and by insistence on a "purpose" in nature whose fulfilment in human society is a quality of life elevated above all servitude to particular pains and pleasures, an effort is made to carry the discussion between optimists and pessimists to a higher plane, and to give a religious form to the social ideal. The attempt is perhaps not altogether successful. Though certainly far enough from the facile optimism of the eighteenth century, it occasionally suggests Voltaire's well-known protest:
Ainsi du monde entier tons les munbres gemissent:
Nés tous pour les tourments, l’un par l’autre, ils périssent:
Et vous composerez dans ce chaos fatal
Des malheurs de chaque être un bonheur général!
After the rather fanciful parallel between the relation of Spinoza's teaching to modern life and that of Christianity to the Roman world, comparatively little is said of the Spinozistic philosophy itself, which seems to have been used chiefly as a suggestive introduction. Otherwise one might object to the interpretation it has received; and as it is, some readers will probably find more of Hegel than of Spinoza in the "higher world-conception" which the authors have labored to present. Perhaps the discussion which is invited in the closing paragraph, with the answers which the present writers are willing to offer to possible objections, may bring out something more distinctive than appears in this first presentation.
