not enter here into a profound examination of this philosophy.
Let us say merely that _the usual device of the Spencerian method
consists in reconstructing evolution with fragments of the evolved_. If
I paste a picture on a card and then cut up the card into bits, I can
reproduce the picture by rightly grouping again the small pieces. And a
child who working thus with the pieces of a puzzle-picture, and putting
together unformed fragments of the picture finally obtains a pretty
colored design, no doubt imagines that he has _produced_ design and
color. Yet the act of drawing and painting has nothing to do with that
of putting together the fragments of a picture already drawn and already
painted. So, by combining together the most simple results of evolution,
you may imitate well or ill the most complex effects; but of neither the
simple nor the complex will you have retraced the genesis, and the
addition of evolved to evolved will bear no resemblance whatever to the
movement of evolution.

Such, however, is Spencer's illusion. He takes reality in its present
form; he breaks it to pieces, he scatters it in fragments which he
throws to the winds; then he "integrates" these fragments and
"dissipates their movement." Having _imitated_ the Whole by a work of
mosaic, he imagines he has retraced the design of it, and made the
genesis.

Is it matter that is in question? The diffused elements which he
integrates into visible and tangible bodies have all the air of being
the very particles of the simple bodies, which he first supposes
disseminated throughout space. They are, at any rate, "material points,"
and consequently unvarying points, veritable little solids: as if
solidity, being what is nearest and handiest to us, could be found at
the very origin of materiality! The more physics progresses, the more it
shows the impossibility of representing the properties of ether or of
electricity--the probable base of all bodies--on the model of the
properties of the matter which we perceive. But philosophy goes back
further even than the ether, a mere schematic figure of the relations
between phenomena apprehended by our senses. It knows indeed that what
is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action on
them. It is not by dividing the evolved that we shall reach the
principle of that which evolves. It is not by recomposing the evolved
with itself that we shall reproduce the evolution of which it is the
term.

Is