Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

INTRODUCTION Two philosophers of an empirical type, R. Browning and J. Christ, agree in disputing the possibility of obtaining a silk purse from the tradi- tional sow’s ear. Can rapes spring from horns ? Or pigs from whistles ? asks the latter ; while the former (by the mouth of his sophistical hero Ca- ponsacchi), declines to believe the sexton who claims to have transfixed a scorpion in the very act of issuing from the mouth of Madonna, and sug- gests (what seems to us quite as improbable) that it issued from the sexton himself... “ Like from like, By way of the ordure corner. . .” At first sight it may seem that Science endorses this dogma in its fullest sense ; but the truth is that if we apply the fundamental fact to man, we are led into error. For the nature of no man is simple thorn or simple grape : in the incalculable tale of his ancestors must inevitably be found, not only both these types, but a host of others. Further, in the complex chemical nature of the cerebral secretions lies the profound possibility of extraordinary divergence from the normal. So many, so fickle, are the combinations which con- stitute Cerebrin, Lethicin, and the rest ; so subtly is the thought dependent upon changes proximate or remote in the composition of the organism, that we must expect character — which is but the statement of the sum of deep-seated habits of thought — to show similar instability. The word habit may seem to invalidate such a conclu- [1]