THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE.[47]

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE.[47]Thequestion of the origin of species—the question, namely, whether the vegetable and animal species now on the earth, and those which from the study of its strata we know to be extinct, were in the beginning called into existence by the direct creativefiat, and substantially with the forms they now have; or whether they have been developed from other and pre-existing beings with forms essentially different from their own, in obedience to natural law—is one upon which, since Charles Darwin published the first edition of his book upon the subject, now about twelve years ago, much has been said. We may add that the answer given to it by Mr. Darwin has been much misunderstood. It has been misunderstood initselfby those who would not take the trouble to inquire in what its precise merits consisted: how much of certainty, and how much of mere theory, it contained; what facts or series of facts, if admitted, it was incompetent to throw light upon; and whether there were any facts, botanical or zoological, in conflict and irreconcilable with it. It has been misunderstood, too,in its bearings on revelation, and that by two classes of men: on the one hand, by mere scientists, for the reason that they knew nothing of theology, and were therefore not in a way to decide whether the Bible and the theory of development are compatible with each other; and, on the other, by well-intentioned advocates of Christianity, because frequently they knew nothing of science in general—little of this question, and the precise meaning and worth of Darwin’s answer to it in particular. The former have been at fault in asserting that a science—theology, Catholic theology, we mean, is a science—of which they knew nothing did not harmonize with a hypothesis of which they knew perhaps all that is to be known; the latter, in not acknowledging distinctlythe grain of truth or of certainty contained in the speculations of Darwin.The question is an interesting one, and has accordingly called forth a large literature in England, Germany, France, and Italy. Mr. Chapman’s book is, we believe, the only one written in this country, and professedly devoted to the advocacy of the theory that, to use the author’s own words, “the development of the higher forms of life from the lower has been brought about by natural selection, and that man has descended from a lower extinct form of which the gorilla and chimpanzee are the nearest living representatives”—which is Darwinism pure and simple, and which ought to be distinguished from the more general theory of “evolution.” That Mr. Chapman’s book has been published in America, and that we wish to say a few words on the question which it treats, and especially on the bearings of that question on revealed religion, constitute its only claims on our attention; for neither the style of the writer nor the lucidity of his argument, much less its originality, entitles it to any particular notice. The work is a mere compilation, which, however, may be of service to those who desire to possess in a convenient shape the facts, and to examine the nature of the reasoning, by which the Darwinian hypothesis is supported.When we have said this, and that Mr. Chapman devotes a chapter of his book to the argument from zoology, geology, embryology, etc., respectively, in favor of Darwinism; that these arguments are neither as elegant, scholarly, or cogent as they might be made; that he has followed the materialists of Germany in their version of the theory, and further than there is even the shadow of a warrant to follow it, we have said all that we wish to say about his book, and bestowed upon it the highest praise it is in our power to bestow consistently with truth.What our views on the Darwinian theory are will appear in the sequel. Here we wish simply to say a few words on certain doctrines drawn from it by Mr. Chapman, or, if not drawn from it, associated with it both by him and others—doctrines which, in our view, are not part and parcel of it because mere assumptions in no way countenanced by facts. Thus, Mr. Chapman desires us expressly to understand that “natural selection,” the meaning of which we will explain in a moment, does not imply the existence of a “natural selector”; and this, without any forced interpretation, may be construed into a profession of atheism. Now, as we will see a little further on, the admission of the Darwinian theory does not necessarily lead to any such conclusion. Again, he informs us, p. 14, that life is only a “physical phenomenon, and that the nervous system produces ideas and all the acts of intelligence”—which is rank materialism. That Mr. Chapman advocates fatalism is no less plain, for he assures us that morality is necessarily progressive. On the last page of his book, he defines morals to be “duty to one’s self.” We confess that we do not understand how he reconciles his assertion that morality is necessarily progressive with his definition of morals. It seems to us that, if necessarily moral, men will necessarily do their duty; or rather, they will have no duty to do, since necessity and duty exclude each other. According to this theory, there can be no distinction between good and evil, and all the crimes that are committed are the necessary consequences of man’s origin. Indeed, the author tells us, p. 180: “Crimes and outragesare committed even among the most civilized, simply, in the words of Mr. Spencer, because man ‘partially retains the characteristics that adapted him for an antecedent state. The respects in which he is not fitted to society are the respects in which he is fitted for his original predatory life. His primitive circumstances required that he should sacrifice the welfare of other beings to his own; his present circumstances require that he should not do so; and in as far as his old attribute still clings to him, in so far he is unfit for the social state. All sins of men against each other, from the cannibalism of the Carib to the crimes and venalities we see around us, have their causes comprehended under this generalization.’”Now, if all this be so, we cannot see why murder, or robbery, or any other crime, is not perfectly legitimate. If to the exercise of his “old attributes” in the struggle for existence man owes his “survival” and his place among the fittest, in any degree, however small; and if there be nothing in man not produced by natural selection, we cannot see why he should not even now continue the exercise of these “attributes”; in other words, we do not see why any propensity, passion, or inclination originated by the agency of “natural selection,” to the exclusion of all other agencies, cannot legitimately be exercised to the full extent to which “natural selection” has developed it. If man exercises these “attributes” simply in obedience to a law of nature, we should not if we could, nor could we if we would, resist them. If, indeed, these views of morality be correct, then might is right, the Decalogue a code against nature, civilization an abnormal condition for man, and barbarism his only true state.So much for the atheism, materialism, and fatalism, we do not say of Darwin—for we have reason to believe that that gentleman himself is none of these—but of Mr. Chapman’s version of evolution. There is one very important point, however, on which Mr. Darwin, the man of science, and the compiler, Mr. Chapman, are at one—a point of very great consideration because of its bearings on revelation—the doctrine that the difference between man and the lower animals is not one of “kind,” but of “degree.” We do not wish to argue this point here in full. What we wish to say is that men of the school of Darwin, etc., should be the very last persons in the world to make an assertion of this character, for the reason that they confine our knowledge to appearances, to phenomena. The question, however, whether man and the lower animals differ in “kind” or only in “degree” is not a question of phenomena or appearances: it is a question ofnoumena, of essence, of reality. We do not grant that even appearances warrant the assertion that man differs from the lower animals in nothing essential. There are appearances which forbid any such conclusion. But we maintain that, whether they so differ or not, Darwin and his school are, by the principles of their philosophy, estopped from asserting that they do or do not. They cannot say that the same phenomena imply the same noumena, the same accidents, the same essence, the same appearances, the same reality, because, to assert the identity of nature of two things, both must be known in what constitutes their essence, whereas these men expressly say that of noumena, reality, or essence nothing can be known.Mr. Chapman is more a disciple of Haeckel than of Darwin, and follows that gentleman in all his vagaries—acourse well calculated to increase rather than decrease the amount of prejudice against what there may be of truth in Darwinism. Among the advocates of this, as of almost all theories, there are extremists. Our author seems to have gone to school to all of them, and swallowed all they told him, no matter how paradoxical, no matter how little proof to substantiate it. On the other hand, of all that has been said against pure Darwinism, not a word has been recorded by Mr. Chapman; and of those who, like Prof. Agassiz, do not agree with Mr. Darwin, or who, like St. George Mivart, have, as we think, dealt his theory blows from which it will not recover, he does not make the smallest mention. Yet it cannot be that Agassiz and Mivart are too small to be noticed by Mr. Chapman. Agassiz is too venerable a name in science to need any demonstration that his opinion on scientific matters is entitled to consideration. Mivart is, we take it, a younger man; yet, if he has not made himself an abiding reputation by what he has the modesty to call his “little book,” theGenesis of Species, he has made a name which must live, if Darwin’s, and Lyell’s, and Huxley’s do; since all these men have found in him a foe worthy of their steel—and the latter of the vials of his wrath.We would not consider this article complete without a condensed history of the controversy between Mr. Huxley and Mr. Mivart, occasioned by the publication by the latter of his admirable work, theGenesis of Species. We give it here for this, as well as for the reason that it will serve as the best general answer it is in our power to give to Mr. Chapman and other writers of his character.But first a few remarks on Darwin’s theory. It is only a theory, a mere hypothesis. Mr. Darwin does not pretend to have proved it himself; nor does his advocate, Mr. Huxley, who seems to have taken Mr. Darwin and the Darwinian theory under his special protection, pretend that it is proved.Bearing in mind that the Darwinian theory is only a hypothesis, we must estimate its value as we estimate that of other hypotheses, viz., by its ability to account for all the facts of which it pretends to be the solution.The Copernican system of astronomy, for instance, is only a hypothesis; yet, as there is no known astronomical fact absolutely contradictory to it, we accept it as true. If there were only one fact which it did not explain and could not explain; above all, if there were one fact at variance with the hypothesis, the hypothesis must give way, and the fact stand; for one fact is worth a thousand hypotheses, and one fact in cases of this kind, as Mr. Huxley says, as good as five hundred.Are there, then, any facts which the Darwinian theory of development by natural selection should explain and does not? Mr. Huxley himself says there is one set of such facts—the facts of hybridism; and, as we will presently see, there are a great many others.To St. George Mivart, a scientist, but more than a scientist, a philosopher in a degree, somewhat of a theologian as well, and therefore a man of greater intellectual grasp than either Darwin or Huxley, we are indebted for the fullest presentation of the facts inexplicable by natural selection that has yet been given to the reading world. This that gentleman has done in his book before referred to,The Genesis of Species.One of Mr. Mivart’s great meritsis that he accords to Mr. Darwin’s theory its full meed of praise. He is a scientific man, and as such a good judge of its merits and demerits, therefore competent to acknowledge the one and point out the other.We are not at all prejudiced against Mr. Darwin or his theory. We agree entirely with Mr. Mivart that it “is perhaps the most interesting theory, in relation to natural science, which has been promulgated during the present century.” Before pointing out, however, why it is the most interesting theory of the kind, let us see in brief what the Darwinian theory of natural selection is.In the words of Mr. Mivart it may be stated thus:1. “Every kind of animal and plant tends to increase in numbers in a geometrical proportion.2. “Every kind of animal and plant transmits a general likeness with individual differences to its offspring.3. “Every individual may present minute variations of any kind in any direction.4. “Past time has been practically infinite.5. “Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence, owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary.6. “Thus, every variation of a kind tending to save the life of the individual possessing it, or to enable it more surely to propagate its kind, will in the long run be preserved, and will transmit its favorable peculiarity to some of its offspring, which peculiarity will thus become intensified till it reaches the maximum degree of utility. On the other hand, individuals presenting unfavorable peculiarities will be ruthlessly destroyed. The action of this law of ‘natural selection’ may thus be well represented by the convenient expression, ‘survival of the fittest.’”Now as to the series of facts which this theory throws light upon. Here they are as enumerated by Mr. Mivart. It explains:1. Some singular facts “relating to the geographical distribution of animals and plants; as, for example, on the resemblance between the past and present inhabitants of different parts of the earth’s surface.2. “That often, in adjacent islands, we find animals closely resembling and appearing to represent each other; while, if certain of these islands show signs of more ancient separation, the animals inhabiting them exhibit a corresponding divergence.3. That “‘rudimentary structures’ also receive an explanation by means of this theory.4. “That the singular facts of ‘homology’ are capable of a similar explanation.”5. That “that remarkable series of changes which animals undergo before they attain their adult condition, which is called their process of development, and during which they more or less closely resemble other animals during the early stages of the same process, has also great light thrown on it from the same source.”6. That “by this theory, and as yet by this alone, can any explanation be given of that extraordinary phenomenon which is metaphorically termed ‘mimicry.’”To explain in detail the exact import of each of these heads would carry us beyond the limits of a magazine article; and the reader who wishes for more minute and definite information on them we must refer to Mivart’s own book, or to Darwin’sOrigin of Species.Pass we now to those facts whichDarwin’s theory is incompetent to explain, and to the arguments against it. Mr. Mivart enumerates them thus:1. “That ‘natural’ selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures.2. “That it does not harmonize with the coexistence of closely similar structures of diverse origin.3. “That there are grounds for thinking that specific differences may be developed suddenly instead of gradually.4. “That the opinion that species have definite though very different limits to their variability is still tenable.5. “That certain fossil transitional forms are absent which might have been expected to be present.6. “That some facts of geographical distribution supplement other difficulties.7. “That the objection drawn from the physiological difference between ‘species’ and ‘races’ still exists unrefuted.”Our readers will readily understand that, if species, or rather individual animals, were originated by natural law, and if that law be “natural selection,” the action of “natural selection” must be able to explain not only the production of the animal as a whole, but of its several organs, both when they have reached the point of maximum utility, and at all stages previous thereto.Mr. Mivart shows that it does not accomplish this; that it does not account for “the incipient stages of useful structures,e. g.the heads of flatfishes, the baleen of whales, vertebrate limbs, the laryngeal structures of the new-born kangaroo, the pedicellariæ of echinoderms”; and thus he established his first charge on purely scientific grounds, as a scientist writing for scientists. The other charges are equally well sustained. It would, however, require the rewriting of Mr. Mivart’s book to follow him through all his facts and arguments, and we must beg again to refer the reader who would study the matter in detail, to the book itself.Another series of objections brought forward by Mr. Mivart against the same theory is equally well sustained—objections that go to show that “it cannot be applied at least to the soul of man,” as Mr. Darwin has applied it.Here, again, everyone will see that, if the human soul is not created by God, it, too, must have been gradually evolved from what, for lack of a more convenient term, though not without protest, we must call an animal soul, by the process of natural selection; and therefore there is nothing in man’s soul which was not in the ape’s—the same faculties, moral and intellectual, in kind, different only in degree. This question Mr. Mivart discusses in a separate chapter on “Evolution and Ethics.”The result of the discussion he thus sums up:1. “Natural selection could not have produced, from the sensations of pleasure and pain experienced in brutes, a higher degree of morality than was useful; therefore it could have produced any amount of ‘beneficial habits,’ but not an abhorrence of certain acts as impure and sinful.2. “It could not have developed that high esteem for acts of care and tenderness to the aged and infirm which actually exists, but would rather have perpetuated certain low social conditions which obtain in some savage localities.3. “It could not have evolved from ape sensations the noble virtues of a Marcus Aurelius, or the loving but manly devotion of a S. Louis.4. “That it alone could not havegiven rise to the maxim,Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum.5. “That the interval between material and formal morality is one altogether beyond its power to traverse.”Mr. Mivart further shows “that the anticipatory character of moral principles is a fatal bar to that explanation of their origin which is offered to us by Mr. Herbert Spencer”; and “that the solution of that origin proposed recently by Sir John Lubbock is a mere version of simple utilitarianism, appealing to the pleasure or safety of the individual, and therefore utterly incapable of solving the riddle it attacks.”It is hardly necessary that we should dwell on these points. Our Christian readers need no demonstration of them. Knowing, on the one hand, what Christian morality is, and, on the other, what mere animal behavior, they must know the difference between them, and, knowing this difference, that by no possibility could the one be developed from the other, there being no oneness of kind in them.Just here we would remark that, in addition to his other arguments, Mr. Mivart might have added that from philology against Darwinism, and with good effect. There are those who, from that science, argue the other way. But, in a series of able articles on “Darwinism and the Science of Language,” the Rev. J. Knabenbauer, S. J., has shown that philology points to a diversity of origin for man and the lower animals.He argues that the ultimate elements, the roots of all language, are expressive of general ideas. Now, general ideas are the products of the intellectual processes known as abstraction and generalization. Hence, before the formation of roots, before the beginnings of language, man was man, since he could abstract and generalize. Hence, also, language is not a development of animal cries, nor man of the brute, since the brute can neither abstract nor generalize.Finally, Mr. Mivart shows in his chapter on “Evolution and Theology” that evolution and creation by no means exclude one another; and that a Catholic—Mr. Mivart is a Catholic—may accept the theory of evolution, ancient writers of authority in the church having “asserted abstractprinciplessuch as can perfectlyharmonizewith the requirements of modern science,” and, “as it were, provided for the reception of its most advanced speculations.”In support of this view, Mr. Mivart quotes from S. Augustine, S. Thomas, Cornelius à Lapide, and refers to the Jesuit Suarez, with the doctrines of all of whom it is perfectly consistent to hold that animal species were created only potentially,potentialiter tantum.By that we do not mean to insinuate that the naked Darwinian theory is compatible with Catholic faith; but of this more hereafter.It was not to be expected that Mr. Mivart, in his criticism on Darwinism, would meet with no opponents. He must have expected to be attacked from two quarters, and by two different classes of men: by those committed to the Darwinian hypothesis, in the first place; and, again, by those who value that hypothesis less for its scientific merit than for—as they suppose—its incompatibility with Christian doctrine, and the service they think it might render in the disintegration of the Christian societies. Among the latter we are compelled to class Mr. Huxley, who, if a very good scientist, is, notwithstanding, one of the most arrogant of men.He replied to Mr. Mivart, and in his reply does neither more nor lessthan constitute himself the infallible teacher of all mankind, the supreme pontiff of science, empowered to speak with authority on all matters pertaining to religion and philosophy, as well as to anatomy. He has the commendable modesty, even, to tell Catholics what they may believe, and what they must reject. He interprets the Bible for them, expounds the teachings of the Fathers of the church, comments on the schoolmen, all for their benefit; in fact, entirely forgets the good old maxim, “Let the cobbler stick to his last,” and imagines that, because he has learned a considerable amount about brains and stomachs—dead brains and stomachs, for the most part—he can legislate for the Christian world; that anything in heaven or on earth which he cannot weigh or measure, upon which he cannot bring the knife, or the blowpipe, or the spectroscope to bear, does not exist, or exist otherwise than as it takes form in his own by no means humble mind.In his reply to Mr. Mivart, he virtually passes over all of the latter gentleman’s scientific objections, and fastens on his assertion that evolution is at allcompatiblewith Catholic doctrine.Mr. Mivart had, as we have seen, referred to Suarez, and that, Mr. Mivart assures us, because, in Mr. Huxley’s words, “the popular repute of that learned theologian and subtle casuist was not such as to make his works a likely place of refuge for liberality of thought.”Of course Mr. Mivart did not intend to represent Suarez or the other writers we have mentioned above as advocating the very modern doctrine of evolution, but only abstract principles harmonizing with it; and, if anything, broader than it, inasmuch as they are broad enough not only to take in the recent theory of evolution, but any other theory of development which may be yet advocated; yet Mr. Huxley assumed that Mr. Mivart meant to convey the impression that F. Suarez was a Darwinian or a disciple of Herbert Spencer, which he could not well be, having lived some centuries too early to enjoy any such good-fortune. Having erected this theory, Mr. Huxley went, in his “More Criticisms on Darwin,” deliberately to work to demolish it, in doing which he left his way considerably, raising questions on which Mr. Mivart had said nothing whatever, and which in the discussion are wholly irrelevant; as, for instance, the meaning of the word “day” in the first chapter of Genesis, as advocated by some authorities.Mr. Mivart retorted through the pages of theContemporary Review, and demonstrated that Suarez was “an opponent of the theory of a perpetual direct creation of organisms,” and “that the principles of scholastic theology are such asnot to excludethe theory of development, but rather to favor it.” He quoted again from Suarez, to show that that writer, treating of the opinion that individuals of kinds like the mule, leopard, lynx, etc., must have been created from the beginning, expressed the view that the contrary seemed to him more probable, thus assertingthe principlethat those kinds of animals which arepotentiallycontained in nature need not be supposed to be directly and immediately created. More than this, Mr. Mivart shows that the same authority recognizes the possibility that certain organisms may be originated directly from the inorganic world by cosmical influences.Our readers already know what were the views of S. Augustine on this matter. Mr. Mivart shows that other theologians besides S. Thomas, such as S. Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus,Denis the Carthusian, Cardinal Cajetan, Melchior Canus, Bannes, Vincentius Contenson, Macedo and Cardinal Noris, Tosti, Serri, “and others down to the present day,” agree with S. Augustine in his views on the question we are considering.The great result—the only result in which we feel especially interested—of this controversy was the bringing into clearer light the fact that the kernel of truth contained in Darwinism or in evolution is not at variance with revelation, as indeed it cannot be and be true. This is what Mr. Huxley has done for the church.Of Mr. Huxley’s treatment of his opponent’s objections on the score of morality we have nothing to say which would be of the least service to our readers.Remains the question: How far may a Catholic accept the special Darwinian theory or the doctrine of evolution? Mr. Mivart asserts that a miraculous origin of the body of man is not necessary; that it might have been evolved from that of some lower being by natural law. Darwinians and evolutionists generally maintain an analogous origin for the human soul. Is there anything in this contrary to revelation?We have not space, if we had the ability, to go into a lengthy examination of this question. Nor is there any reason that we should. It has already received the attention of able Catholic writers, and we can do no better than give the results of their investigation. They have shown[48]that, with respect to all organisms lower than man, the doctrine of the fathers is that Catholic faith “does not prevent any one from holding the opinion that life, both vegetable and animal, was in the world in germ at its creation, and afterwards developed by regular process into all the various species now on the earth”; therefore, that “all living things up to man exclusively were evolved by natural law out of minute life-germs primarily created, or even out of inorganic matter,” is an opinion which a Catholic may consistently hold if he thinks fit so to do.As to the question of thebodyof man, the same writers have shown, and we take it to be the safer opinion—in which, perhaps, we differ from Mr. Mivart—“that to question the immediate and instantaneous (or quasi-instantaneous) formation by God of the bodies of Adam and Eve—the former out of inorganic matter, the latter out of the rib of Adam—is at least rash, and probably proximate to heresy.”That the human soul was specially and separately created is an article of Catholic faith.There is not a fact in science at variance with these views of the origin of the body of man and of the human soul. Even Mr. Wallace—to whom the credit of pointing out the influence of “natural selection” in modifying organic beings belongs by right of a title not less valid than that of Mr. Darwin—believes, and he has reason to believe, in the action of an overruling Intelligence in the production of “the human form divine”; and that, in view of man’s special attributes, “he is, indeed, a being apart”—not, therefore, evolved, either as to his body or his soul, from any inferior organism. When a man like Mr. Wallace holds such a view, we may rest assured that the facts in the case do not require any one to hold the contrary. Let us now endeavor to sum up the results in relation to the Darwinian theory and the bearings thus far obtained:1. The tendency of every kind of animal and plant to increase in geometricalprogression, and to transmit a general likeness with individual differences, as well as to present minute variations of any kind in any direction, the great length of past time, the struggle of animals and plants for existence, and the preservation and intensification of favorable variations, are facts on which the theory is based.We accept these facts.2. We do not accept the theory, because, although it throws light on some facts, there are others with which it is not compatible; and because those even on which it does throw light do not require us to accept it.3. There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, or in the more general theory of evolution countenanced by facts bearing on the development of life, which a Catholic may not accept, if he wishes so to do.4. The teaching of Darwinism as to the origin of man’s body is probably next to heretical. At all events, the only safe opinion is that it was not evolved from the body of a lower being, but was directly and quasi-instantaneously created by God.5. Its teaching concerning the origin of the human soul is in direct and irreconcilable contradiction with an article of Catholic faith.6. There is—apart from revealed doctrine—an absolute scientific certainty of the truth of that same doctrine respecting the creation of the human soul, and the highest probability of the immediate creation of the human body.So much for the facts, so much for the theory, so much for its bearings on revelation.In all we have said, we do not wish to be understood as advocating the Darwinian theory, even in so far as it does not conflict with Catholic faith, nor as committing ourselves to the general doctrine of evolution. The fact is, we do not care as Catholics to pledge ourselves hastily to any hypothesis whatever. We know some little of the history of hypotheses, and we know that it has been a history of failures.When the Darwinian hypothesis or the theory of evolution shall have stood the test of years and facts, and the most searching investigations, let the Catholics who will be then alive accept them. There is no special reason why we should profess our faith in them. We do not need them to account for the phenomena about us.On the other hand, we can readily understand why a certain class of minds should subscribe to it.The human mind naturally seeks for an explanation of the origin of things. Intelligent men know the human race has not always been on the earth, that the phenomena about us are not eternal, that animal and vegetable life must have had a beginning here. Catholics know the same, and knew it before science had demonstrated it or discovered its minutiæ.Men who wish to get rid of God welcome any hypothesis which seems to remove him to a greater distance from them, even before that hypothesis has more in its favor than against a it. Catholics, who believe in God, have no such anxiety. They are willing to wait, since they have already an explanation of the origin of things in their belief in God, and in the teachings of his revelation that he in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and all that they contain. The minutiæ, the How of that creation, they leave it to science to discover. When discovered and proved, they will accept it. But science can never give them anything not contained in the first articleof the Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” All it can do is to explicate and confirm this.If it be objected that scientists accept the theory, and that we therefore should, we reply,merescientists do; and of all men, the least safe of guides is the mere scientist. No other man is more apt to become a blind worshipper of the idols of the Cave. He confines himself within the narrow limits of his laboratory, among instruments of death, and then would excogitate a solution to the problems of life and of the universe; as if with bolts and screws he could wring from nature the secret it will not yield.Goethe well knew that from such men we need not expect the answer to the riddle of the universe; that one glance at the world as a whole as it lies bathed in the sun on a summer’s day tells us more than all the tomes of philosophers.“Ah me! this dungeon still I see,This drear, accursed masonry,Where even the welcome daylight strainsBut darkly through the painted panes,Hemmed in by many a toppling heapOf books worm-eaten, gray with dust,Which to the vaulted ceiling creep,Against the smoky paper thrust,With glasses, boxes, round me stocked,And instruments together hurled,Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed:Such is my world: and what a world!And do I ask wherefore my heartFalters, oppressed with unknown needs?With some inexplicable smartAll movement of my life impedes?Alas! in living nature’s stead,Where God his human creature setIn smoke and mould, the fleshless deadAnd bones and beasts surround me yet!”And although we can see some force in the general theory of evolution, we cannot accept it till it settles its account with the principle on which the whole inductive method is raised—the constancy of the laws of nature.The theory of evolution strikes, it seems to us, at the very root of this principle. It proclaims that there is not and has never been any constancy in nature. It devours all other law, or rather destroys it. It means simply change. Permanency, constancy, and their synonymes are opposed to it; and thus the theory of evolution must invalidate all the sciences which are founded on the assumption that nature is constant; in other words, that it does not change, does not evolve. The definition of evolution given by Mr. Spencer makes it simply a change. True, he states the method or law of that change. But the method is discovered by induction. Induction is in turn annihilated by evolution. The fabric as it rises loses its foundation, and floats in the air, a baseless vision.But if we are in no haste to yield assent to Darwinism or evolution in general; as applied to man’s soul by advocates like Spencer or Chapman, we reject itin toto. It is incompetent to account for the facts, nay, in glaring contradiction to them.We take our stand against man’s relation to the ape on facts as undeniable as any the zoologist or anatomist advances in its favor. These compare man’s body and the ape, andfindno very great superiority of the one over the other as they lie recently dead on the anatomist’s table. Let the two lie there only a little longer, and none at all will be discoverable. A little dust which the winds of heaven will soon scatter to the four points of the compass is all that will be left of either. Shall we therefore infer their oneness of kind? By no means.We know that man is in some respects not unlike the ape in form; but we know, too, that there are Godlike faculties in man which are not in the ape. We know this, and we know, moreover, that the philosopher through whose brain roll vast choruses of thought; who stands on theheights of Christian philosophy and human speculation, and discourses on death and immortality; who, from the eminence to which Christianity has raised him, looks down, not with indifference and not with contempt, but with deep serenity, on the little loves and little hates of the world, because conscious of his eternal destiny—we know, we have an intuition, which we trust more than we trust Darwin and Huxley, that this philosopher is more than a developed ape.And when the anatomist tells us there is little anatomical difference between man and the ape, therefore between man as man and the ape as ape there is little difference or a difference only of degree, we reply: Between man and the ape, between a Newton or even a savage and a monkey, there is, in the intellectual order, a vast difference, an infinite difference.Thiswe take as the fact, and draw the conclusion that the amount of anatomical difference between a monkey and a man is no criterion or measure of the real difference.We treat the argument from embryology in the same way. Because at a certain stage in its development the human embryo cannot be distinguished from that of certain of the lower animals, we are assured that man differs from these only in degree. We grant the fact, we reject the inference; and we reason: notwithstanding you can detect no difference at certain stages between the two, time develops one so great that the one may become a Shakespeare, the other becomes only a Shakespeare’s dog. What follows? Simply this: that there is a something in the human embryo which is not in the other—a something which the sense cannot detect, but the existence of which the mind may infer; that there is more of life than the embryologist can find out by his methods, as there is more of the rose than is found in its ashes—more of life than we would be apt to see in a dissecting-room or a charnel-house.No; whatever force the special Darwinian theory may have to the student of animal life, to the student of man as an animal, it can have very little to him who views man in his higher manifestations. Whatever else it may account for, it never can throw any light on the facts of man’s moral nature. It never can explain the origin of a being who believes in purity or pity.Let the Darwinian, indeed, explain, if he can, how, if man owes his existence and his development, physical, moral, and mental, to success in the struggle for existence—in other words, to natural selection—and this success, in turn, to the exercise of the selfish or combative faculties, or to both combined—faculties which, according to this theory, he must have exercised, his present and previous states taken together, for ages unnumbered—so long, indeed, that they ought to have grown into uncontrollable instincts—and which are the only ones he can have exercised from the beginning, to which, therefore, as the most imperious, all others should be subordinate—let him, we say, explain who can how this tendency to battle, inherited through infinite ages, has not taken complete possession of man, nor caused his life to be a continual strife with his fellows; let him explain how, instead of all this, therearemen who have learned, not to hate, but to love their enemies, to compassionate the weak, the poor, and the lowly, to nurse the sick and the dying, to care even for the dead; nay, how it comes that there are men who are guided by the sublime command: “Love them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that persecuteand calumniate you”; or, further yet, how, in spite of the exercise of the selfish and combative faculties, in the struggle for existence, the tendency of which must have been to strengthen by use the organs of destruction, the same organs should gradually disappear, and that in man not one of them should be left.Let him explain, again, how out of mere animality, by “natural selection,” out of the mere brute, in a “struggle for existence,” beings should come—men to whom this would be a law: Be pure; for “he that looketh after a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.” There are such men—men to whom this is a law, and who obey it. Will a Vogt or a Büchner believe it? Will a Darwin account for it by “natural selection”?Finally, let him explain how, if man has always been only growing out of some lower condition, he has yet learned, in a measure, to go beyond himself, to harbor an ideal which he has never reached, but towards which he ever strives, inasmuch as he endeavors to fulfil the command of the Son of God: “Be ye perfect, as my heavenly Father also is perfect.”

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE.[47]Thequestion of the origin of species—the question, namely, whether the vegetable and animal species now on the earth, and those which from the study of its strata we know to be extinct, were in the beginning called into existence by the direct creativefiat, and substantially with the forms they now have; or whether they have been developed from other and pre-existing beings with forms essentially different from their own, in obedience to natural law—is one upon which, since Charles Darwin published the first edition of his book upon the subject, now about twelve years ago, much has been said. We may add that the answer given to it by Mr. Darwin has been much misunderstood. It has been misunderstood initselfby those who would not take the trouble to inquire in what its precise merits consisted: how much of certainty, and how much of mere theory, it contained; what facts or series of facts, if admitted, it was incompetent to throw light upon; and whether there were any facts, botanical or zoological, in conflict and irreconcilable with it. It has been misunderstood, too,in its bearings on revelation, and that by two classes of men: on the one hand, by mere scientists, for the reason that they knew nothing of theology, and were therefore not in a way to decide whether the Bible and the theory of development are compatible with each other; and, on the other, by well-intentioned advocates of Christianity, because frequently they knew nothing of science in general—little of this question, and the precise meaning and worth of Darwin’s answer to it in particular. The former have been at fault in asserting that a science—theology, Catholic theology, we mean, is a science—of which they knew nothing did not harmonize with a hypothesis of which they knew perhaps all that is to be known; the latter, in not acknowledging distinctlythe grain of truth or of certainty contained in the speculations of Darwin.The question is an interesting one, and has accordingly called forth a large literature in England, Germany, France, and Italy. Mr. Chapman’s book is, we believe, the only one written in this country, and professedly devoted to the advocacy of the theory that, to use the author’s own words, “the development of the higher forms of life from the lower has been brought about by natural selection, and that man has descended from a lower extinct form of which the gorilla and chimpanzee are the nearest living representatives”—which is Darwinism pure and simple, and which ought to be distinguished from the more general theory of “evolution.” That Mr. Chapman’s book has been published in America, and that we wish to say a few words on the question which it treats, and especially on the bearings of that question on revealed religion, constitute its only claims on our attention; for neither the style of the writer nor the lucidity of his argument, much less its originality, entitles it to any particular notice. The work is a mere compilation, which, however, may be of service to those who desire to possess in a convenient shape the facts, and to examine the nature of the reasoning, by which the Darwinian hypothesis is supported.When we have said this, and that Mr. Chapman devotes a chapter of his book to the argument from zoology, geology, embryology, etc., respectively, in favor of Darwinism; that these arguments are neither as elegant, scholarly, or cogent as they might be made; that he has followed the materialists of Germany in their version of the theory, and further than there is even the shadow of a warrant to follow it, we have said all that we wish to say about his book, and bestowed upon it the highest praise it is in our power to bestow consistently with truth.What our views on the Darwinian theory are will appear in the sequel. Here we wish simply to say a few words on certain doctrines drawn from it by Mr. Chapman, or, if not drawn from it, associated with it both by him and others—doctrines which, in our view, are not part and parcel of it because mere assumptions in no way countenanced by facts. Thus, Mr. Chapman desires us expressly to understand that “natural selection,” the meaning of which we will explain in a moment, does not imply the existence of a “natural selector”; and this, without any forced interpretation, may be construed into a profession of atheism. Now, as we will see a little further on, the admission of the Darwinian theory does not necessarily lead to any such conclusion. Again, he informs us, p. 14, that life is only a “physical phenomenon, and that the nervous system produces ideas and all the acts of intelligence”—which is rank materialism. That Mr. Chapman advocates fatalism is no less plain, for he assures us that morality is necessarily progressive. On the last page of his book, he defines morals to be “duty to one’s self.” We confess that we do not understand how he reconciles his assertion that morality is necessarily progressive with his definition of morals. It seems to us that, if necessarily moral, men will necessarily do their duty; or rather, they will have no duty to do, since necessity and duty exclude each other. According to this theory, there can be no distinction between good and evil, and all the crimes that are committed are the necessary consequences of man’s origin. Indeed, the author tells us, p. 180: “Crimes and outragesare committed even among the most civilized, simply, in the words of Mr. Spencer, because man ‘partially retains the characteristics that adapted him for an antecedent state. The respects in which he is not fitted to society are the respects in which he is fitted for his original predatory life. His primitive circumstances required that he should sacrifice the welfare of other beings to his own; his present circumstances require that he should not do so; and in as far as his old attribute still clings to him, in so far he is unfit for the social state. All sins of men against each other, from the cannibalism of the Carib to the crimes and venalities we see around us, have their causes comprehended under this generalization.’”Now, if all this be so, we cannot see why murder, or robbery, or any other crime, is not perfectly legitimate. If to the exercise of his “old attributes” in the struggle for existence man owes his “survival” and his place among the fittest, in any degree, however small; and if there be nothing in man not produced by natural selection, we cannot see why he should not even now continue the exercise of these “attributes”; in other words, we do not see why any propensity, passion, or inclination originated by the agency of “natural selection,” to the exclusion of all other agencies, cannot legitimately be exercised to the full extent to which “natural selection” has developed it. If man exercises these “attributes” simply in obedience to a law of nature, we should not if we could, nor could we if we would, resist them. If, indeed, these views of morality be correct, then might is right, the Decalogue a code against nature, civilization an abnormal condition for man, and barbarism his only true state.So much for the atheism, materialism, and fatalism, we do not say of Darwin—for we have reason to believe that that gentleman himself is none of these—but of Mr. Chapman’s version of evolution. There is one very important point, however, on which Mr. Darwin, the man of science, and the compiler, Mr. Chapman, are at one—a point of very great consideration because of its bearings on revelation—the doctrine that the difference between man and the lower animals is not one of “kind,” but of “degree.” We do not wish to argue this point here in full. What we wish to say is that men of the school of Darwin, etc., should be the very last persons in the world to make an assertion of this character, for the reason that they confine our knowledge to appearances, to phenomena. The question, however, whether man and the lower animals differ in “kind” or only in “degree” is not a question of phenomena or appearances: it is a question ofnoumena, of essence, of reality. We do not grant that even appearances warrant the assertion that man differs from the lower animals in nothing essential. There are appearances which forbid any such conclusion. But we maintain that, whether they so differ or not, Darwin and his school are, by the principles of their philosophy, estopped from asserting that they do or do not. They cannot say that the same phenomena imply the same noumena, the same accidents, the same essence, the same appearances, the same reality, because, to assert the identity of nature of two things, both must be known in what constitutes their essence, whereas these men expressly say that of noumena, reality, or essence nothing can be known.Mr. Chapman is more a disciple of Haeckel than of Darwin, and follows that gentleman in all his vagaries—acourse well calculated to increase rather than decrease the amount of prejudice against what there may be of truth in Darwinism. Among the advocates of this, as of almost all theories, there are extremists. Our author seems to have gone to school to all of them, and swallowed all they told him, no matter how paradoxical, no matter how little proof to substantiate it. On the other hand, of all that has been said against pure Darwinism, not a word has been recorded by Mr. Chapman; and of those who, like Prof. Agassiz, do not agree with Mr. Darwin, or who, like St. George Mivart, have, as we think, dealt his theory blows from which it will not recover, he does not make the smallest mention. Yet it cannot be that Agassiz and Mivart are too small to be noticed by Mr. Chapman. Agassiz is too venerable a name in science to need any demonstration that his opinion on scientific matters is entitled to consideration. Mivart is, we take it, a younger man; yet, if he has not made himself an abiding reputation by what he has the modesty to call his “little book,” theGenesis of Species, he has made a name which must live, if Darwin’s, and Lyell’s, and Huxley’s do; since all these men have found in him a foe worthy of their steel—and the latter of the vials of his wrath.We would not consider this article complete without a condensed history of the controversy between Mr. Huxley and Mr. Mivart, occasioned by the publication by the latter of his admirable work, theGenesis of Species. We give it here for this, as well as for the reason that it will serve as the best general answer it is in our power to give to Mr. Chapman and other writers of his character.But first a few remarks on Darwin’s theory. It is only a theory, a mere hypothesis. Mr. Darwin does not pretend to have proved it himself; nor does his advocate, Mr. Huxley, who seems to have taken Mr. Darwin and the Darwinian theory under his special protection, pretend that it is proved.Bearing in mind that the Darwinian theory is only a hypothesis, we must estimate its value as we estimate that of other hypotheses, viz., by its ability to account for all the facts of which it pretends to be the solution.The Copernican system of astronomy, for instance, is only a hypothesis; yet, as there is no known astronomical fact absolutely contradictory to it, we accept it as true. If there were only one fact which it did not explain and could not explain; above all, if there were one fact at variance with the hypothesis, the hypothesis must give way, and the fact stand; for one fact is worth a thousand hypotheses, and one fact in cases of this kind, as Mr. Huxley says, as good as five hundred.Are there, then, any facts which the Darwinian theory of development by natural selection should explain and does not? Mr. Huxley himself says there is one set of such facts—the facts of hybridism; and, as we will presently see, there are a great many others.To St. George Mivart, a scientist, but more than a scientist, a philosopher in a degree, somewhat of a theologian as well, and therefore a man of greater intellectual grasp than either Darwin or Huxley, we are indebted for the fullest presentation of the facts inexplicable by natural selection that has yet been given to the reading world. This that gentleman has done in his book before referred to,The Genesis of Species.One of Mr. Mivart’s great meritsis that he accords to Mr. Darwin’s theory its full meed of praise. He is a scientific man, and as such a good judge of its merits and demerits, therefore competent to acknowledge the one and point out the other.We are not at all prejudiced against Mr. Darwin or his theory. We agree entirely with Mr. Mivart that it “is perhaps the most interesting theory, in relation to natural science, which has been promulgated during the present century.” Before pointing out, however, why it is the most interesting theory of the kind, let us see in brief what the Darwinian theory of natural selection is.In the words of Mr. Mivart it may be stated thus:1. “Every kind of animal and plant tends to increase in numbers in a geometrical proportion.2. “Every kind of animal and plant transmits a general likeness with individual differences to its offspring.3. “Every individual may present minute variations of any kind in any direction.4. “Past time has been practically infinite.5. “Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence, owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary.6. “Thus, every variation of a kind tending to save the life of the individual possessing it, or to enable it more surely to propagate its kind, will in the long run be preserved, and will transmit its favorable peculiarity to some of its offspring, which peculiarity will thus become intensified till it reaches the maximum degree of utility. On the other hand, individuals presenting unfavorable peculiarities will be ruthlessly destroyed. The action of this law of ‘natural selection’ may thus be well represented by the convenient expression, ‘survival of the fittest.’”Now as to the series of facts which this theory throws light upon. Here they are as enumerated by Mr. Mivart. It explains:1. Some singular facts “relating to the geographical distribution of animals and plants; as, for example, on the resemblance between the past and present inhabitants of different parts of the earth’s surface.2. “That often, in adjacent islands, we find animals closely resembling and appearing to represent each other; while, if certain of these islands show signs of more ancient separation, the animals inhabiting them exhibit a corresponding divergence.3. That “‘rudimentary structures’ also receive an explanation by means of this theory.4. “That the singular facts of ‘homology’ are capable of a similar explanation.”5. That “that remarkable series of changes which animals undergo before they attain their adult condition, which is called their process of development, and during which they more or less closely resemble other animals during the early stages of the same process, has also great light thrown on it from the same source.”6. That “by this theory, and as yet by this alone, can any explanation be given of that extraordinary phenomenon which is metaphorically termed ‘mimicry.’”To explain in detail the exact import of each of these heads would carry us beyond the limits of a magazine article; and the reader who wishes for more minute and definite information on them we must refer to Mivart’s own book, or to Darwin’sOrigin of Species.Pass we now to those facts whichDarwin’s theory is incompetent to explain, and to the arguments against it. Mr. Mivart enumerates them thus:1. “That ‘natural’ selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures.2. “That it does not harmonize with the coexistence of closely similar structures of diverse origin.3. “That there are grounds for thinking that specific differences may be developed suddenly instead of gradually.4. “That the opinion that species have definite though very different limits to their variability is still tenable.5. “That certain fossil transitional forms are absent which might have been expected to be present.6. “That some facts of geographical distribution supplement other difficulties.7. “That the objection drawn from the physiological difference between ‘species’ and ‘races’ still exists unrefuted.”Our readers will readily understand that, if species, or rather individual animals, were originated by natural law, and if that law be “natural selection,” the action of “natural selection” must be able to explain not only the production of the animal as a whole, but of its several organs, both when they have reached the point of maximum utility, and at all stages previous thereto.Mr. Mivart shows that it does not accomplish this; that it does not account for “the incipient stages of useful structures,e. g.the heads of flatfishes, the baleen of whales, vertebrate limbs, the laryngeal structures of the new-born kangaroo, the pedicellariæ of echinoderms”; and thus he established his first charge on purely scientific grounds, as a scientist writing for scientists. The other charges are equally well sustained. It would, however, require the rewriting of Mr. Mivart’s book to follow him through all his facts and arguments, and we must beg again to refer the reader who would study the matter in detail, to the book itself.Another series of objections brought forward by Mr. Mivart against the same theory is equally well sustained—objections that go to show that “it cannot be applied at least to the soul of man,” as Mr. Darwin has applied it.Here, again, everyone will see that, if the human soul is not created by God, it, too, must have been gradually evolved from what, for lack of a more convenient term, though not without protest, we must call an animal soul, by the process of natural selection; and therefore there is nothing in man’s soul which was not in the ape’s—the same faculties, moral and intellectual, in kind, different only in degree. This question Mr. Mivart discusses in a separate chapter on “Evolution and Ethics.”The result of the discussion he thus sums up:1. “Natural selection could not have produced, from the sensations of pleasure and pain experienced in brutes, a higher degree of morality than was useful; therefore it could have produced any amount of ‘beneficial habits,’ but not an abhorrence of certain acts as impure and sinful.2. “It could not have developed that high esteem for acts of care and tenderness to the aged and infirm which actually exists, but would rather have perpetuated certain low social conditions which obtain in some savage localities.3. “It could not have evolved from ape sensations the noble virtues of a Marcus Aurelius, or the loving but manly devotion of a S. Louis.4. “That it alone could not havegiven rise to the maxim,Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum.5. “That the interval between material and formal morality is one altogether beyond its power to traverse.”Mr. Mivart further shows “that the anticipatory character of moral principles is a fatal bar to that explanation of their origin which is offered to us by Mr. Herbert Spencer”; and “that the solution of that origin proposed recently by Sir John Lubbock is a mere version of simple utilitarianism, appealing to the pleasure or safety of the individual, and therefore utterly incapable of solving the riddle it attacks.”It is hardly necessary that we should dwell on these points. Our Christian readers need no demonstration of them. Knowing, on the one hand, what Christian morality is, and, on the other, what mere animal behavior, they must know the difference between them, and, knowing this difference, that by no possibility could the one be developed from the other, there being no oneness of kind in them.Just here we would remark that, in addition to his other arguments, Mr. Mivart might have added that from philology against Darwinism, and with good effect. There are those who, from that science, argue the other way. But, in a series of able articles on “Darwinism and the Science of Language,” the Rev. J. Knabenbauer, S. J., has shown that philology points to a diversity of origin for man and the lower animals.He argues that the ultimate elements, the roots of all language, are expressive of general ideas. Now, general ideas are the products of the intellectual processes known as abstraction and generalization. Hence, before the formation of roots, before the beginnings of language, man was man, since he could abstract and generalize. Hence, also, language is not a development of animal cries, nor man of the brute, since the brute can neither abstract nor generalize.Finally, Mr. Mivart shows in his chapter on “Evolution and Theology” that evolution and creation by no means exclude one another; and that a Catholic—Mr. Mivart is a Catholic—may accept the theory of evolution, ancient writers of authority in the church having “asserted abstractprinciplessuch as can perfectlyharmonizewith the requirements of modern science,” and, “as it were, provided for the reception of its most advanced speculations.”In support of this view, Mr. Mivart quotes from S. Augustine, S. Thomas, Cornelius à Lapide, and refers to the Jesuit Suarez, with the doctrines of all of whom it is perfectly consistent to hold that animal species were created only potentially,potentialiter tantum.By that we do not mean to insinuate that the naked Darwinian theory is compatible with Catholic faith; but of this more hereafter.It was not to be expected that Mr. Mivart, in his criticism on Darwinism, would meet with no opponents. He must have expected to be attacked from two quarters, and by two different classes of men: by those committed to the Darwinian hypothesis, in the first place; and, again, by those who value that hypothesis less for its scientific merit than for—as they suppose—its incompatibility with Christian doctrine, and the service they think it might render in the disintegration of the Christian societies. Among the latter we are compelled to class Mr. Huxley, who, if a very good scientist, is, notwithstanding, one of the most arrogant of men.He replied to Mr. Mivart, and in his reply does neither more nor lessthan constitute himself the infallible teacher of all mankind, the supreme pontiff of science, empowered to speak with authority on all matters pertaining to religion and philosophy, as well as to anatomy. He has the commendable modesty, even, to tell Catholics what they may believe, and what they must reject. He interprets the Bible for them, expounds the teachings of the Fathers of the church, comments on the schoolmen, all for their benefit; in fact, entirely forgets the good old maxim, “Let the cobbler stick to his last,” and imagines that, because he has learned a considerable amount about brains and stomachs—dead brains and stomachs, for the most part—he can legislate for the Christian world; that anything in heaven or on earth which he cannot weigh or measure, upon which he cannot bring the knife, or the blowpipe, or the spectroscope to bear, does not exist, or exist otherwise than as it takes form in his own by no means humble mind.In his reply to Mr. Mivart, he virtually passes over all of the latter gentleman’s scientific objections, and fastens on his assertion that evolution is at allcompatiblewith Catholic doctrine.Mr. Mivart had, as we have seen, referred to Suarez, and that, Mr. Mivart assures us, because, in Mr. Huxley’s words, “the popular repute of that learned theologian and subtle casuist was not such as to make his works a likely place of refuge for liberality of thought.”Of course Mr. Mivart did not intend to represent Suarez or the other writers we have mentioned above as advocating the very modern doctrine of evolution, but only abstract principles harmonizing with it; and, if anything, broader than it, inasmuch as they are broad enough not only to take in the recent theory of evolution, but any other theory of development which may be yet advocated; yet Mr. Huxley assumed that Mr. Mivart meant to convey the impression that F. Suarez was a Darwinian or a disciple of Herbert Spencer, which he could not well be, having lived some centuries too early to enjoy any such good-fortune. Having erected this theory, Mr. Huxley went, in his “More Criticisms on Darwin,” deliberately to work to demolish it, in doing which he left his way considerably, raising questions on which Mr. Mivart had said nothing whatever, and which in the discussion are wholly irrelevant; as, for instance, the meaning of the word “day” in the first chapter of Genesis, as advocated by some authorities.Mr. Mivart retorted through the pages of theContemporary Review, and demonstrated that Suarez was “an opponent of the theory of a perpetual direct creation of organisms,” and “that the principles of scholastic theology are such asnot to excludethe theory of development, but rather to favor it.” He quoted again from Suarez, to show that that writer, treating of the opinion that individuals of kinds like the mule, leopard, lynx, etc., must have been created from the beginning, expressed the view that the contrary seemed to him more probable, thus assertingthe principlethat those kinds of animals which arepotentiallycontained in nature need not be supposed to be directly and immediately created. More than this, Mr. Mivart shows that the same authority recognizes the possibility that certain organisms may be originated directly from the inorganic world by cosmical influences.Our readers already know what were the views of S. Augustine on this matter. Mr. Mivart shows that other theologians besides S. Thomas, such as S. Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus,Denis the Carthusian, Cardinal Cajetan, Melchior Canus, Bannes, Vincentius Contenson, Macedo and Cardinal Noris, Tosti, Serri, “and others down to the present day,” agree with S. Augustine in his views on the question we are considering.The great result—the only result in which we feel especially interested—of this controversy was the bringing into clearer light the fact that the kernel of truth contained in Darwinism or in evolution is not at variance with revelation, as indeed it cannot be and be true. This is what Mr. Huxley has done for the church.Of Mr. Huxley’s treatment of his opponent’s objections on the score of morality we have nothing to say which would be of the least service to our readers.Remains the question: How far may a Catholic accept the special Darwinian theory or the doctrine of evolution? Mr. Mivart asserts that a miraculous origin of the body of man is not necessary; that it might have been evolved from that of some lower being by natural law. Darwinians and evolutionists generally maintain an analogous origin for the human soul. Is there anything in this contrary to revelation?We have not space, if we had the ability, to go into a lengthy examination of this question. Nor is there any reason that we should. It has already received the attention of able Catholic writers, and we can do no better than give the results of their investigation. They have shown[48]that, with respect to all organisms lower than man, the doctrine of the fathers is that Catholic faith “does not prevent any one from holding the opinion that life, both vegetable and animal, was in the world in germ at its creation, and afterwards developed by regular process into all the various species now on the earth”; therefore, that “all living things up to man exclusively were evolved by natural law out of minute life-germs primarily created, or even out of inorganic matter,” is an opinion which a Catholic may consistently hold if he thinks fit so to do.As to the question of thebodyof man, the same writers have shown, and we take it to be the safer opinion—in which, perhaps, we differ from Mr. Mivart—“that to question the immediate and instantaneous (or quasi-instantaneous) formation by God of the bodies of Adam and Eve—the former out of inorganic matter, the latter out of the rib of Adam—is at least rash, and probably proximate to heresy.”That the human soul was specially and separately created is an article of Catholic faith.There is not a fact in science at variance with these views of the origin of the body of man and of the human soul. Even Mr. Wallace—to whom the credit of pointing out the influence of “natural selection” in modifying organic beings belongs by right of a title not less valid than that of Mr. Darwin—believes, and he has reason to believe, in the action of an overruling Intelligence in the production of “the human form divine”; and that, in view of man’s special attributes, “he is, indeed, a being apart”—not, therefore, evolved, either as to his body or his soul, from any inferior organism. When a man like Mr. Wallace holds such a view, we may rest assured that the facts in the case do not require any one to hold the contrary. Let us now endeavor to sum up the results in relation to the Darwinian theory and the bearings thus far obtained:1. The tendency of every kind of animal and plant to increase in geometricalprogression, and to transmit a general likeness with individual differences, as well as to present minute variations of any kind in any direction, the great length of past time, the struggle of animals and plants for existence, and the preservation and intensification of favorable variations, are facts on which the theory is based.We accept these facts.2. We do not accept the theory, because, although it throws light on some facts, there are others with which it is not compatible; and because those even on which it does throw light do not require us to accept it.3. There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, or in the more general theory of evolution countenanced by facts bearing on the development of life, which a Catholic may not accept, if he wishes so to do.4. The teaching of Darwinism as to the origin of man’s body is probably next to heretical. At all events, the only safe opinion is that it was not evolved from the body of a lower being, but was directly and quasi-instantaneously created by God.5. Its teaching concerning the origin of the human soul is in direct and irreconcilable contradiction with an article of Catholic faith.6. There is—apart from revealed doctrine—an absolute scientific certainty of the truth of that same doctrine respecting the creation of the human soul, and the highest probability of the immediate creation of the human body.So much for the facts, so much for the theory, so much for its bearings on revelation.In all we have said, we do not wish to be understood as advocating the Darwinian theory, even in so far as it does not conflict with Catholic faith, nor as committing ourselves to the general doctrine of evolution. The fact is, we do not care as Catholics to pledge ourselves hastily to any hypothesis whatever. We know some little of the history of hypotheses, and we know that it has been a history of failures.When the Darwinian hypothesis or the theory of evolution shall have stood the test of years and facts, and the most searching investigations, let the Catholics who will be then alive accept them. There is no special reason why we should profess our faith in them. We do not need them to account for the phenomena about us.On the other hand, we can readily understand why a certain class of minds should subscribe to it.The human mind naturally seeks for an explanation of the origin of things. Intelligent men know the human race has not always been on the earth, that the phenomena about us are not eternal, that animal and vegetable life must have had a beginning here. Catholics know the same, and knew it before science had demonstrated it or discovered its minutiæ.Men who wish to get rid of God welcome any hypothesis which seems to remove him to a greater distance from them, even before that hypothesis has more in its favor than against a it. Catholics, who believe in God, have no such anxiety. They are willing to wait, since they have already an explanation of the origin of things in their belief in God, and in the teachings of his revelation that he in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and all that they contain. The minutiæ, the How of that creation, they leave it to science to discover. When discovered and proved, they will accept it. But science can never give them anything not contained in the first articleof the Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” All it can do is to explicate and confirm this.If it be objected that scientists accept the theory, and that we therefore should, we reply,merescientists do; and of all men, the least safe of guides is the mere scientist. No other man is more apt to become a blind worshipper of the idols of the Cave. He confines himself within the narrow limits of his laboratory, among instruments of death, and then would excogitate a solution to the problems of life and of the universe; as if with bolts and screws he could wring from nature the secret it will not yield.Goethe well knew that from such men we need not expect the answer to the riddle of the universe; that one glance at the world as a whole as it lies bathed in the sun on a summer’s day tells us more than all the tomes of philosophers.“Ah me! this dungeon still I see,This drear, accursed masonry,Where even the welcome daylight strainsBut darkly through the painted panes,Hemmed in by many a toppling heapOf books worm-eaten, gray with dust,Which to the vaulted ceiling creep,Against the smoky paper thrust,With glasses, boxes, round me stocked,And instruments together hurled,Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed:Such is my world: and what a world!And do I ask wherefore my heartFalters, oppressed with unknown needs?With some inexplicable smartAll movement of my life impedes?Alas! in living nature’s stead,Where God his human creature setIn smoke and mould, the fleshless deadAnd bones and beasts surround me yet!”And although we can see some force in the general theory of evolution, we cannot accept it till it settles its account with the principle on which the whole inductive method is raised—the constancy of the laws of nature.The theory of evolution strikes, it seems to us, at the very root of this principle. It proclaims that there is not and has never been any constancy in nature. It devours all other law, or rather destroys it. It means simply change. Permanency, constancy, and their synonymes are opposed to it; and thus the theory of evolution must invalidate all the sciences which are founded on the assumption that nature is constant; in other words, that it does not change, does not evolve. The definition of evolution given by Mr. Spencer makes it simply a change. True, he states the method or law of that change. But the method is discovered by induction. Induction is in turn annihilated by evolution. The fabric as it rises loses its foundation, and floats in the air, a baseless vision.But if we are in no haste to yield assent to Darwinism or evolution in general; as applied to man’s soul by advocates like Spencer or Chapman, we reject itin toto. It is incompetent to account for the facts, nay, in glaring contradiction to them.We take our stand against man’s relation to the ape on facts as undeniable as any the zoologist or anatomist advances in its favor. These compare man’s body and the ape, andfindno very great superiority of the one over the other as they lie recently dead on the anatomist’s table. Let the two lie there only a little longer, and none at all will be discoverable. A little dust which the winds of heaven will soon scatter to the four points of the compass is all that will be left of either. Shall we therefore infer their oneness of kind? By no means.We know that man is in some respects not unlike the ape in form; but we know, too, that there are Godlike faculties in man which are not in the ape. We know this, and we know, moreover, that the philosopher through whose brain roll vast choruses of thought; who stands on theheights of Christian philosophy and human speculation, and discourses on death and immortality; who, from the eminence to which Christianity has raised him, looks down, not with indifference and not with contempt, but with deep serenity, on the little loves and little hates of the world, because conscious of his eternal destiny—we know, we have an intuition, which we trust more than we trust Darwin and Huxley, that this philosopher is more than a developed ape.And when the anatomist tells us there is little anatomical difference between man and the ape, therefore between man as man and the ape as ape there is little difference or a difference only of degree, we reply: Between man and the ape, between a Newton or even a savage and a monkey, there is, in the intellectual order, a vast difference, an infinite difference.Thiswe take as the fact, and draw the conclusion that the amount of anatomical difference between a monkey and a man is no criterion or measure of the real difference.We treat the argument from embryology in the same way. Because at a certain stage in its development the human embryo cannot be distinguished from that of certain of the lower animals, we are assured that man differs from these only in degree. We grant the fact, we reject the inference; and we reason: notwithstanding you can detect no difference at certain stages between the two, time develops one so great that the one may become a Shakespeare, the other becomes only a Shakespeare’s dog. What follows? Simply this: that there is a something in the human embryo which is not in the other—a something which the sense cannot detect, but the existence of which the mind may infer; that there is more of life than the embryologist can find out by his methods, as there is more of the rose than is found in its ashes—more of life than we would be apt to see in a dissecting-room or a charnel-house.No; whatever force the special Darwinian theory may have to the student of animal life, to the student of man as an animal, it can have very little to him who views man in his higher manifestations. Whatever else it may account for, it never can throw any light on the facts of man’s moral nature. It never can explain the origin of a being who believes in purity or pity.Let the Darwinian, indeed, explain, if he can, how, if man owes his existence and his development, physical, moral, and mental, to success in the struggle for existence—in other words, to natural selection—and this success, in turn, to the exercise of the selfish or combative faculties, or to both combined—faculties which, according to this theory, he must have exercised, his present and previous states taken together, for ages unnumbered—so long, indeed, that they ought to have grown into uncontrollable instincts—and which are the only ones he can have exercised from the beginning, to which, therefore, as the most imperious, all others should be subordinate—let him, we say, explain who can how this tendency to battle, inherited through infinite ages, has not taken complete possession of man, nor caused his life to be a continual strife with his fellows; let him explain how, instead of all this, therearemen who have learned, not to hate, but to love their enemies, to compassionate the weak, the poor, and the lowly, to nurse the sick and the dying, to care even for the dead; nay, how it comes that there are men who are guided by the sublime command: “Love them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that persecuteand calumniate you”; or, further yet, how, in spite of the exercise of the selfish and combative faculties, in the struggle for existence, the tendency of which must have been to strengthen by use the organs of destruction, the same organs should gradually disappear, and that in man not one of them should be left.Let him explain, again, how out of mere animality, by “natural selection,” out of the mere brute, in a “struggle for existence,” beings should come—men to whom this would be a law: Be pure; for “he that looketh after a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.” There are such men—men to whom this is a law, and who obey it. Will a Vogt or a Büchner believe it? Will a Darwin account for it by “natural selection”?Finally, let him explain how, if man has always been only growing out of some lower condition, he has yet learned, in a measure, to go beyond himself, to harbor an ideal which he has never reached, but towards which he ever strives, inasmuch as he endeavors to fulfil the command of the Son of God: “Be ye perfect, as my heavenly Father also is perfect.”

Thequestion of the origin of species—the question, namely, whether the vegetable and animal species now on the earth, and those which from the study of its strata we know to be extinct, were in the beginning called into existence by the direct creativefiat, and substantially with the forms they now have; or whether they have been developed from other and pre-existing beings with forms essentially different from their own, in obedience to natural law—is one upon which, since Charles Darwin published the first edition of his book upon the subject, now about twelve years ago, much has been said. We may add that the answer given to it by Mr. Darwin has been much misunderstood. It has been misunderstood initselfby those who would not take the trouble to inquire in what its precise merits consisted: how much of certainty, and how much of mere theory, it contained; what facts or series of facts, if admitted, it was incompetent to throw light upon; and whether there were any facts, botanical or zoological, in conflict and irreconcilable with it. It has been misunderstood, too,in its bearings on revelation, and that by two classes of men: on the one hand, by mere scientists, for the reason that they knew nothing of theology, and were therefore not in a way to decide whether the Bible and the theory of development are compatible with each other; and, on the other, by well-intentioned advocates of Christianity, because frequently they knew nothing of science in general—little of this question, and the precise meaning and worth of Darwin’s answer to it in particular. The former have been at fault in asserting that a science—theology, Catholic theology, we mean, is a science—of which they knew nothing did not harmonize with a hypothesis of which they knew perhaps all that is to be known; the latter, in not acknowledging distinctlythe grain of truth or of certainty contained in the speculations of Darwin.

The question is an interesting one, and has accordingly called forth a large literature in England, Germany, France, and Italy. Mr. Chapman’s book is, we believe, the only one written in this country, and professedly devoted to the advocacy of the theory that, to use the author’s own words, “the development of the higher forms of life from the lower has been brought about by natural selection, and that man has descended from a lower extinct form of which the gorilla and chimpanzee are the nearest living representatives”—which is Darwinism pure and simple, and which ought to be distinguished from the more general theory of “evolution.” That Mr. Chapman’s book has been published in America, and that we wish to say a few words on the question which it treats, and especially on the bearings of that question on revealed religion, constitute its only claims on our attention; for neither the style of the writer nor the lucidity of his argument, much less its originality, entitles it to any particular notice. The work is a mere compilation, which, however, may be of service to those who desire to possess in a convenient shape the facts, and to examine the nature of the reasoning, by which the Darwinian hypothesis is supported.

When we have said this, and that Mr. Chapman devotes a chapter of his book to the argument from zoology, geology, embryology, etc., respectively, in favor of Darwinism; that these arguments are neither as elegant, scholarly, or cogent as they might be made; that he has followed the materialists of Germany in their version of the theory, and further than there is even the shadow of a warrant to follow it, we have said all that we wish to say about his book, and bestowed upon it the highest praise it is in our power to bestow consistently with truth.

What our views on the Darwinian theory are will appear in the sequel. Here we wish simply to say a few words on certain doctrines drawn from it by Mr. Chapman, or, if not drawn from it, associated with it both by him and others—doctrines which, in our view, are not part and parcel of it because mere assumptions in no way countenanced by facts. Thus, Mr. Chapman desires us expressly to understand that “natural selection,” the meaning of which we will explain in a moment, does not imply the existence of a “natural selector”; and this, without any forced interpretation, may be construed into a profession of atheism. Now, as we will see a little further on, the admission of the Darwinian theory does not necessarily lead to any such conclusion. Again, he informs us, p. 14, that life is only a “physical phenomenon, and that the nervous system produces ideas and all the acts of intelligence”—which is rank materialism. That Mr. Chapman advocates fatalism is no less plain, for he assures us that morality is necessarily progressive. On the last page of his book, he defines morals to be “duty to one’s self.” We confess that we do not understand how he reconciles his assertion that morality is necessarily progressive with his definition of morals. It seems to us that, if necessarily moral, men will necessarily do their duty; or rather, they will have no duty to do, since necessity and duty exclude each other. According to this theory, there can be no distinction between good and evil, and all the crimes that are committed are the necessary consequences of man’s origin. Indeed, the author tells us, p. 180: “Crimes and outragesare committed even among the most civilized, simply, in the words of Mr. Spencer, because man ‘partially retains the characteristics that adapted him for an antecedent state. The respects in which he is not fitted to society are the respects in which he is fitted for his original predatory life. His primitive circumstances required that he should sacrifice the welfare of other beings to his own; his present circumstances require that he should not do so; and in as far as his old attribute still clings to him, in so far he is unfit for the social state. All sins of men against each other, from the cannibalism of the Carib to the crimes and venalities we see around us, have their causes comprehended under this generalization.’”

Now, if all this be so, we cannot see why murder, or robbery, or any other crime, is not perfectly legitimate. If to the exercise of his “old attributes” in the struggle for existence man owes his “survival” and his place among the fittest, in any degree, however small; and if there be nothing in man not produced by natural selection, we cannot see why he should not even now continue the exercise of these “attributes”; in other words, we do not see why any propensity, passion, or inclination originated by the agency of “natural selection,” to the exclusion of all other agencies, cannot legitimately be exercised to the full extent to which “natural selection” has developed it. If man exercises these “attributes” simply in obedience to a law of nature, we should not if we could, nor could we if we would, resist them. If, indeed, these views of morality be correct, then might is right, the Decalogue a code against nature, civilization an abnormal condition for man, and barbarism his only true state.

So much for the atheism, materialism, and fatalism, we do not say of Darwin—for we have reason to believe that that gentleman himself is none of these—but of Mr. Chapman’s version of evolution. There is one very important point, however, on which Mr. Darwin, the man of science, and the compiler, Mr. Chapman, are at one—a point of very great consideration because of its bearings on revelation—the doctrine that the difference between man and the lower animals is not one of “kind,” but of “degree.” We do not wish to argue this point here in full. What we wish to say is that men of the school of Darwin, etc., should be the very last persons in the world to make an assertion of this character, for the reason that they confine our knowledge to appearances, to phenomena. The question, however, whether man and the lower animals differ in “kind” or only in “degree” is not a question of phenomena or appearances: it is a question ofnoumena, of essence, of reality. We do not grant that even appearances warrant the assertion that man differs from the lower animals in nothing essential. There are appearances which forbid any such conclusion. But we maintain that, whether they so differ or not, Darwin and his school are, by the principles of their philosophy, estopped from asserting that they do or do not. They cannot say that the same phenomena imply the same noumena, the same accidents, the same essence, the same appearances, the same reality, because, to assert the identity of nature of two things, both must be known in what constitutes their essence, whereas these men expressly say that of noumena, reality, or essence nothing can be known.

Mr. Chapman is more a disciple of Haeckel than of Darwin, and follows that gentleman in all his vagaries—acourse well calculated to increase rather than decrease the amount of prejudice against what there may be of truth in Darwinism. Among the advocates of this, as of almost all theories, there are extremists. Our author seems to have gone to school to all of them, and swallowed all they told him, no matter how paradoxical, no matter how little proof to substantiate it. On the other hand, of all that has been said against pure Darwinism, not a word has been recorded by Mr. Chapman; and of those who, like Prof. Agassiz, do not agree with Mr. Darwin, or who, like St. George Mivart, have, as we think, dealt his theory blows from which it will not recover, he does not make the smallest mention. Yet it cannot be that Agassiz and Mivart are too small to be noticed by Mr. Chapman. Agassiz is too venerable a name in science to need any demonstration that his opinion on scientific matters is entitled to consideration. Mivart is, we take it, a younger man; yet, if he has not made himself an abiding reputation by what he has the modesty to call his “little book,” theGenesis of Species, he has made a name which must live, if Darwin’s, and Lyell’s, and Huxley’s do; since all these men have found in him a foe worthy of their steel—and the latter of the vials of his wrath.

We would not consider this article complete without a condensed history of the controversy between Mr. Huxley and Mr. Mivart, occasioned by the publication by the latter of his admirable work, theGenesis of Species. We give it here for this, as well as for the reason that it will serve as the best general answer it is in our power to give to Mr. Chapman and other writers of his character.

But first a few remarks on Darwin’s theory. It is only a theory, a mere hypothesis. Mr. Darwin does not pretend to have proved it himself; nor does his advocate, Mr. Huxley, who seems to have taken Mr. Darwin and the Darwinian theory under his special protection, pretend that it is proved.

Bearing in mind that the Darwinian theory is only a hypothesis, we must estimate its value as we estimate that of other hypotheses, viz., by its ability to account for all the facts of which it pretends to be the solution.

The Copernican system of astronomy, for instance, is only a hypothesis; yet, as there is no known astronomical fact absolutely contradictory to it, we accept it as true. If there were only one fact which it did not explain and could not explain; above all, if there were one fact at variance with the hypothesis, the hypothesis must give way, and the fact stand; for one fact is worth a thousand hypotheses, and one fact in cases of this kind, as Mr. Huxley says, as good as five hundred.

Are there, then, any facts which the Darwinian theory of development by natural selection should explain and does not? Mr. Huxley himself says there is one set of such facts—the facts of hybridism; and, as we will presently see, there are a great many others.

To St. George Mivart, a scientist, but more than a scientist, a philosopher in a degree, somewhat of a theologian as well, and therefore a man of greater intellectual grasp than either Darwin or Huxley, we are indebted for the fullest presentation of the facts inexplicable by natural selection that has yet been given to the reading world. This that gentleman has done in his book before referred to,The Genesis of Species.

One of Mr. Mivart’s great meritsis that he accords to Mr. Darwin’s theory its full meed of praise. He is a scientific man, and as such a good judge of its merits and demerits, therefore competent to acknowledge the one and point out the other.

We are not at all prejudiced against Mr. Darwin or his theory. We agree entirely with Mr. Mivart that it “is perhaps the most interesting theory, in relation to natural science, which has been promulgated during the present century.” Before pointing out, however, why it is the most interesting theory of the kind, let us see in brief what the Darwinian theory of natural selection is.

In the words of Mr. Mivart it may be stated thus:

1. “Every kind of animal and plant tends to increase in numbers in a geometrical proportion.

2. “Every kind of animal and plant transmits a general likeness with individual differences to its offspring.

3. “Every individual may present minute variations of any kind in any direction.

4. “Past time has been practically infinite.

5. “Every individual has to endure a very severe struggle for existence, owing to the tendency to geometrical increase of all kinds of animals and plants, while the total animal and vegetable population (man and his agency excepted) remains almost stationary.

6. “Thus, every variation of a kind tending to save the life of the individual possessing it, or to enable it more surely to propagate its kind, will in the long run be preserved, and will transmit its favorable peculiarity to some of its offspring, which peculiarity will thus become intensified till it reaches the maximum degree of utility. On the other hand, individuals presenting unfavorable peculiarities will be ruthlessly destroyed. The action of this law of ‘natural selection’ may thus be well represented by the convenient expression, ‘survival of the fittest.’”

Now as to the series of facts which this theory throws light upon. Here they are as enumerated by Mr. Mivart. It explains:

1. Some singular facts “relating to the geographical distribution of animals and plants; as, for example, on the resemblance between the past and present inhabitants of different parts of the earth’s surface.

2. “That often, in adjacent islands, we find animals closely resembling and appearing to represent each other; while, if certain of these islands show signs of more ancient separation, the animals inhabiting them exhibit a corresponding divergence.

3. That “‘rudimentary structures’ also receive an explanation by means of this theory.

4. “That the singular facts of ‘homology’ are capable of a similar explanation.”

5. That “that remarkable series of changes which animals undergo before they attain their adult condition, which is called their process of development, and during which they more or less closely resemble other animals during the early stages of the same process, has also great light thrown on it from the same source.”

6. That “by this theory, and as yet by this alone, can any explanation be given of that extraordinary phenomenon which is metaphorically termed ‘mimicry.’”

To explain in detail the exact import of each of these heads would carry us beyond the limits of a magazine article; and the reader who wishes for more minute and definite information on them we must refer to Mivart’s own book, or to Darwin’sOrigin of Species.

Pass we now to those facts whichDarwin’s theory is incompetent to explain, and to the arguments against it. Mr. Mivart enumerates them thus:

1. “That ‘natural’ selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures.

2. “That it does not harmonize with the coexistence of closely similar structures of diverse origin.

3. “That there are grounds for thinking that specific differences may be developed suddenly instead of gradually.

4. “That the opinion that species have definite though very different limits to their variability is still tenable.

5. “That certain fossil transitional forms are absent which might have been expected to be present.

6. “That some facts of geographical distribution supplement other difficulties.

7. “That the objection drawn from the physiological difference between ‘species’ and ‘races’ still exists unrefuted.”

Our readers will readily understand that, if species, or rather individual animals, were originated by natural law, and if that law be “natural selection,” the action of “natural selection” must be able to explain not only the production of the animal as a whole, but of its several organs, both when they have reached the point of maximum utility, and at all stages previous thereto.

Mr. Mivart shows that it does not accomplish this; that it does not account for “the incipient stages of useful structures,e. g.the heads of flatfishes, the baleen of whales, vertebrate limbs, the laryngeal structures of the new-born kangaroo, the pedicellariæ of echinoderms”; and thus he established his first charge on purely scientific grounds, as a scientist writing for scientists. The other charges are equally well sustained. It would, however, require the rewriting of Mr. Mivart’s book to follow him through all his facts and arguments, and we must beg again to refer the reader who would study the matter in detail, to the book itself.

Another series of objections brought forward by Mr. Mivart against the same theory is equally well sustained—objections that go to show that “it cannot be applied at least to the soul of man,” as Mr. Darwin has applied it.

Here, again, everyone will see that, if the human soul is not created by God, it, too, must have been gradually evolved from what, for lack of a more convenient term, though not without protest, we must call an animal soul, by the process of natural selection; and therefore there is nothing in man’s soul which was not in the ape’s—the same faculties, moral and intellectual, in kind, different only in degree. This question Mr. Mivart discusses in a separate chapter on “Evolution and Ethics.”

The result of the discussion he thus sums up:

1. “Natural selection could not have produced, from the sensations of pleasure and pain experienced in brutes, a higher degree of morality than was useful; therefore it could have produced any amount of ‘beneficial habits,’ but not an abhorrence of certain acts as impure and sinful.

2. “It could not have developed that high esteem for acts of care and tenderness to the aged and infirm which actually exists, but would rather have perpetuated certain low social conditions which obtain in some savage localities.

3. “It could not have evolved from ape sensations the noble virtues of a Marcus Aurelius, or the loving but manly devotion of a S. Louis.

4. “That it alone could not havegiven rise to the maxim,Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum.

5. “That the interval between material and formal morality is one altogether beyond its power to traverse.”

Mr. Mivart further shows “that the anticipatory character of moral principles is a fatal bar to that explanation of their origin which is offered to us by Mr. Herbert Spencer”; and “that the solution of that origin proposed recently by Sir John Lubbock is a mere version of simple utilitarianism, appealing to the pleasure or safety of the individual, and therefore utterly incapable of solving the riddle it attacks.”

It is hardly necessary that we should dwell on these points. Our Christian readers need no demonstration of them. Knowing, on the one hand, what Christian morality is, and, on the other, what mere animal behavior, they must know the difference between them, and, knowing this difference, that by no possibility could the one be developed from the other, there being no oneness of kind in them.

Just here we would remark that, in addition to his other arguments, Mr. Mivart might have added that from philology against Darwinism, and with good effect. There are those who, from that science, argue the other way. But, in a series of able articles on “Darwinism and the Science of Language,” the Rev. J. Knabenbauer, S. J., has shown that philology points to a diversity of origin for man and the lower animals.

He argues that the ultimate elements, the roots of all language, are expressive of general ideas. Now, general ideas are the products of the intellectual processes known as abstraction and generalization. Hence, before the formation of roots, before the beginnings of language, man was man, since he could abstract and generalize. Hence, also, language is not a development of animal cries, nor man of the brute, since the brute can neither abstract nor generalize.

Finally, Mr. Mivart shows in his chapter on “Evolution and Theology” that evolution and creation by no means exclude one another; and that a Catholic—Mr. Mivart is a Catholic—may accept the theory of evolution, ancient writers of authority in the church having “asserted abstractprinciplessuch as can perfectlyharmonizewith the requirements of modern science,” and, “as it were, provided for the reception of its most advanced speculations.”

In support of this view, Mr. Mivart quotes from S. Augustine, S. Thomas, Cornelius à Lapide, and refers to the Jesuit Suarez, with the doctrines of all of whom it is perfectly consistent to hold that animal species were created only potentially,potentialiter tantum.

By that we do not mean to insinuate that the naked Darwinian theory is compatible with Catholic faith; but of this more hereafter.

It was not to be expected that Mr. Mivart, in his criticism on Darwinism, would meet with no opponents. He must have expected to be attacked from two quarters, and by two different classes of men: by those committed to the Darwinian hypothesis, in the first place; and, again, by those who value that hypothesis less for its scientific merit than for—as they suppose—its incompatibility with Christian doctrine, and the service they think it might render in the disintegration of the Christian societies. Among the latter we are compelled to class Mr. Huxley, who, if a very good scientist, is, notwithstanding, one of the most arrogant of men.

He replied to Mr. Mivart, and in his reply does neither more nor lessthan constitute himself the infallible teacher of all mankind, the supreme pontiff of science, empowered to speak with authority on all matters pertaining to religion and philosophy, as well as to anatomy. He has the commendable modesty, even, to tell Catholics what they may believe, and what they must reject. He interprets the Bible for them, expounds the teachings of the Fathers of the church, comments on the schoolmen, all for their benefit; in fact, entirely forgets the good old maxim, “Let the cobbler stick to his last,” and imagines that, because he has learned a considerable amount about brains and stomachs—dead brains and stomachs, for the most part—he can legislate for the Christian world; that anything in heaven or on earth which he cannot weigh or measure, upon which he cannot bring the knife, or the blowpipe, or the spectroscope to bear, does not exist, or exist otherwise than as it takes form in his own by no means humble mind.

In his reply to Mr. Mivart, he virtually passes over all of the latter gentleman’s scientific objections, and fastens on his assertion that evolution is at allcompatiblewith Catholic doctrine.

Mr. Mivart had, as we have seen, referred to Suarez, and that, Mr. Mivart assures us, because, in Mr. Huxley’s words, “the popular repute of that learned theologian and subtle casuist was not such as to make his works a likely place of refuge for liberality of thought.”

Of course Mr. Mivart did not intend to represent Suarez or the other writers we have mentioned above as advocating the very modern doctrine of evolution, but only abstract principles harmonizing with it; and, if anything, broader than it, inasmuch as they are broad enough not only to take in the recent theory of evolution, but any other theory of development which may be yet advocated; yet Mr. Huxley assumed that Mr. Mivart meant to convey the impression that F. Suarez was a Darwinian or a disciple of Herbert Spencer, which he could not well be, having lived some centuries too early to enjoy any such good-fortune. Having erected this theory, Mr. Huxley went, in his “More Criticisms on Darwin,” deliberately to work to demolish it, in doing which he left his way considerably, raising questions on which Mr. Mivart had said nothing whatever, and which in the discussion are wholly irrelevant; as, for instance, the meaning of the word “day” in the first chapter of Genesis, as advocated by some authorities.

Mr. Mivart retorted through the pages of theContemporary Review, and demonstrated that Suarez was “an opponent of the theory of a perpetual direct creation of organisms,” and “that the principles of scholastic theology are such asnot to excludethe theory of development, but rather to favor it.” He quoted again from Suarez, to show that that writer, treating of the opinion that individuals of kinds like the mule, leopard, lynx, etc., must have been created from the beginning, expressed the view that the contrary seemed to him more probable, thus assertingthe principlethat those kinds of animals which arepotentiallycontained in nature need not be supposed to be directly and immediately created. More than this, Mr. Mivart shows that the same authority recognizes the possibility that certain organisms may be originated directly from the inorganic world by cosmical influences.

Our readers already know what were the views of S. Augustine on this matter. Mr. Mivart shows that other theologians besides S. Thomas, such as S. Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus,Denis the Carthusian, Cardinal Cajetan, Melchior Canus, Bannes, Vincentius Contenson, Macedo and Cardinal Noris, Tosti, Serri, “and others down to the present day,” agree with S. Augustine in his views on the question we are considering.

The great result—the only result in which we feel especially interested—of this controversy was the bringing into clearer light the fact that the kernel of truth contained in Darwinism or in evolution is not at variance with revelation, as indeed it cannot be and be true. This is what Mr. Huxley has done for the church.

Of Mr. Huxley’s treatment of his opponent’s objections on the score of morality we have nothing to say which would be of the least service to our readers.

Remains the question: How far may a Catholic accept the special Darwinian theory or the doctrine of evolution? Mr. Mivart asserts that a miraculous origin of the body of man is not necessary; that it might have been evolved from that of some lower being by natural law. Darwinians and evolutionists generally maintain an analogous origin for the human soul. Is there anything in this contrary to revelation?

We have not space, if we had the ability, to go into a lengthy examination of this question. Nor is there any reason that we should. It has already received the attention of able Catholic writers, and we can do no better than give the results of their investigation. They have shown[48]that, with respect to all organisms lower than man, the doctrine of the fathers is that Catholic faith “does not prevent any one from holding the opinion that life, both vegetable and animal, was in the world in germ at its creation, and afterwards developed by regular process into all the various species now on the earth”; therefore, that “all living things up to man exclusively were evolved by natural law out of minute life-germs primarily created, or even out of inorganic matter,” is an opinion which a Catholic may consistently hold if he thinks fit so to do.

As to the question of thebodyof man, the same writers have shown, and we take it to be the safer opinion—in which, perhaps, we differ from Mr. Mivart—“that to question the immediate and instantaneous (or quasi-instantaneous) formation by God of the bodies of Adam and Eve—the former out of inorganic matter, the latter out of the rib of Adam—is at least rash, and probably proximate to heresy.”

That the human soul was specially and separately created is an article of Catholic faith.

There is not a fact in science at variance with these views of the origin of the body of man and of the human soul. Even Mr. Wallace—to whom the credit of pointing out the influence of “natural selection” in modifying organic beings belongs by right of a title not less valid than that of Mr. Darwin—believes, and he has reason to believe, in the action of an overruling Intelligence in the production of “the human form divine”; and that, in view of man’s special attributes, “he is, indeed, a being apart”—not, therefore, evolved, either as to his body or his soul, from any inferior organism. When a man like Mr. Wallace holds such a view, we may rest assured that the facts in the case do not require any one to hold the contrary. Let us now endeavor to sum up the results in relation to the Darwinian theory and the bearings thus far obtained:

1. The tendency of every kind of animal and plant to increase in geometricalprogression, and to transmit a general likeness with individual differences, as well as to present minute variations of any kind in any direction, the great length of past time, the struggle of animals and plants for existence, and the preservation and intensification of favorable variations, are facts on which the theory is based.

We accept these facts.

2. We do not accept the theory, because, although it throws light on some facts, there are others with which it is not compatible; and because those even on which it does throw light do not require us to accept it.

3. There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, or in the more general theory of evolution countenanced by facts bearing on the development of life, which a Catholic may not accept, if he wishes so to do.

4. The teaching of Darwinism as to the origin of man’s body is probably next to heretical. At all events, the only safe opinion is that it was not evolved from the body of a lower being, but was directly and quasi-instantaneously created by God.

5. Its teaching concerning the origin of the human soul is in direct and irreconcilable contradiction with an article of Catholic faith.

6. There is—apart from revealed doctrine—an absolute scientific certainty of the truth of that same doctrine respecting the creation of the human soul, and the highest probability of the immediate creation of the human body.

So much for the facts, so much for the theory, so much for its bearings on revelation.

In all we have said, we do not wish to be understood as advocating the Darwinian theory, even in so far as it does not conflict with Catholic faith, nor as committing ourselves to the general doctrine of evolution. The fact is, we do not care as Catholics to pledge ourselves hastily to any hypothesis whatever. We know some little of the history of hypotheses, and we know that it has been a history of failures.

When the Darwinian hypothesis or the theory of evolution shall have stood the test of years and facts, and the most searching investigations, let the Catholics who will be then alive accept them. There is no special reason why we should profess our faith in them. We do not need them to account for the phenomena about us.

On the other hand, we can readily understand why a certain class of minds should subscribe to it.

The human mind naturally seeks for an explanation of the origin of things. Intelligent men know the human race has not always been on the earth, that the phenomena about us are not eternal, that animal and vegetable life must have had a beginning here. Catholics know the same, and knew it before science had demonstrated it or discovered its minutiæ.

Men who wish to get rid of God welcome any hypothesis which seems to remove him to a greater distance from them, even before that hypothesis has more in its favor than against a it. Catholics, who believe in God, have no such anxiety. They are willing to wait, since they have already an explanation of the origin of things in their belief in God, and in the teachings of his revelation that he in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and all that they contain. The minutiæ, the How of that creation, they leave it to science to discover. When discovered and proved, they will accept it. But science can never give them anything not contained in the first articleof the Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” All it can do is to explicate and confirm this.

If it be objected that scientists accept the theory, and that we therefore should, we reply,merescientists do; and of all men, the least safe of guides is the mere scientist. No other man is more apt to become a blind worshipper of the idols of the Cave. He confines himself within the narrow limits of his laboratory, among instruments of death, and then would excogitate a solution to the problems of life and of the universe; as if with bolts and screws he could wring from nature the secret it will not yield.

Goethe well knew that from such men we need not expect the answer to the riddle of the universe; that one glance at the world as a whole as it lies bathed in the sun on a summer’s day tells us more than all the tomes of philosophers.

“Ah me! this dungeon still I see,This drear, accursed masonry,Where even the welcome daylight strainsBut darkly through the painted panes,Hemmed in by many a toppling heapOf books worm-eaten, gray with dust,Which to the vaulted ceiling creep,Against the smoky paper thrust,With glasses, boxes, round me stocked,And instruments together hurled,Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed:Such is my world: and what a world!And do I ask wherefore my heartFalters, oppressed with unknown needs?With some inexplicable smartAll movement of my life impedes?Alas! in living nature’s stead,Where God his human creature setIn smoke and mould, the fleshless deadAnd bones and beasts surround me yet!”

And although we can see some force in the general theory of evolution, we cannot accept it till it settles its account with the principle on which the whole inductive method is raised—the constancy of the laws of nature.

The theory of evolution strikes, it seems to us, at the very root of this principle. It proclaims that there is not and has never been any constancy in nature. It devours all other law, or rather destroys it. It means simply change. Permanency, constancy, and their synonymes are opposed to it; and thus the theory of evolution must invalidate all the sciences which are founded on the assumption that nature is constant; in other words, that it does not change, does not evolve. The definition of evolution given by Mr. Spencer makes it simply a change. True, he states the method or law of that change. But the method is discovered by induction. Induction is in turn annihilated by evolution. The fabric as it rises loses its foundation, and floats in the air, a baseless vision.

But if we are in no haste to yield assent to Darwinism or evolution in general; as applied to man’s soul by advocates like Spencer or Chapman, we reject itin toto. It is incompetent to account for the facts, nay, in glaring contradiction to them.

We take our stand against man’s relation to the ape on facts as undeniable as any the zoologist or anatomist advances in its favor. These compare man’s body and the ape, andfindno very great superiority of the one over the other as they lie recently dead on the anatomist’s table. Let the two lie there only a little longer, and none at all will be discoverable. A little dust which the winds of heaven will soon scatter to the four points of the compass is all that will be left of either. Shall we therefore infer their oneness of kind? By no means.

We know that man is in some respects not unlike the ape in form; but we know, too, that there are Godlike faculties in man which are not in the ape. We know this, and we know, moreover, that the philosopher through whose brain roll vast choruses of thought; who stands on theheights of Christian philosophy and human speculation, and discourses on death and immortality; who, from the eminence to which Christianity has raised him, looks down, not with indifference and not with contempt, but with deep serenity, on the little loves and little hates of the world, because conscious of his eternal destiny—we know, we have an intuition, which we trust more than we trust Darwin and Huxley, that this philosopher is more than a developed ape.

And when the anatomist tells us there is little anatomical difference between man and the ape, therefore between man as man and the ape as ape there is little difference or a difference only of degree, we reply: Between man and the ape, between a Newton or even a savage and a monkey, there is, in the intellectual order, a vast difference, an infinite difference.Thiswe take as the fact, and draw the conclusion that the amount of anatomical difference between a monkey and a man is no criterion or measure of the real difference.

We treat the argument from embryology in the same way. Because at a certain stage in its development the human embryo cannot be distinguished from that of certain of the lower animals, we are assured that man differs from these only in degree. We grant the fact, we reject the inference; and we reason: notwithstanding you can detect no difference at certain stages between the two, time develops one so great that the one may become a Shakespeare, the other becomes only a Shakespeare’s dog. What follows? Simply this: that there is a something in the human embryo which is not in the other—a something which the sense cannot detect, but the existence of which the mind may infer; that there is more of life than the embryologist can find out by his methods, as there is more of the rose than is found in its ashes—more of life than we would be apt to see in a dissecting-room or a charnel-house.

No; whatever force the special Darwinian theory may have to the student of animal life, to the student of man as an animal, it can have very little to him who views man in his higher manifestations. Whatever else it may account for, it never can throw any light on the facts of man’s moral nature. It never can explain the origin of a being who believes in purity or pity.

Let the Darwinian, indeed, explain, if he can, how, if man owes his existence and his development, physical, moral, and mental, to success in the struggle for existence—in other words, to natural selection—and this success, in turn, to the exercise of the selfish or combative faculties, or to both combined—faculties which, according to this theory, he must have exercised, his present and previous states taken together, for ages unnumbered—so long, indeed, that they ought to have grown into uncontrollable instincts—and which are the only ones he can have exercised from the beginning, to which, therefore, as the most imperious, all others should be subordinate—let him, we say, explain who can how this tendency to battle, inherited through infinite ages, has not taken complete possession of man, nor caused his life to be a continual strife with his fellows; let him explain how, instead of all this, therearemen who have learned, not to hate, but to love their enemies, to compassionate the weak, the poor, and the lowly, to nurse the sick and the dying, to care even for the dead; nay, how it comes that there are men who are guided by the sublime command: “Love them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that persecuteand calumniate you”; or, further yet, how, in spite of the exercise of the selfish and combative faculties, in the struggle for existence, the tendency of which must have been to strengthen by use the organs of destruction, the same organs should gradually disappear, and that in man not one of them should be left.

Let him explain, again, how out of mere animality, by “natural selection,” out of the mere brute, in a “struggle for existence,” beings should come—men to whom this would be a law: Be pure; for “he that looketh after a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.” There are such men—men to whom this is a law, and who obey it. Will a Vogt or a Büchner believe it? Will a Darwin account for it by “natural selection”?

Finally, let him explain how, if man has always been only growing out of some lower condition, he has yet learned, in a measure, to go beyond himself, to harbor an ideal which he has never reached, but towards which he ever strives, inasmuch as he endeavors to fulfil the command of the Son of God: “Be ye perfect, as my heavenly Father also is perfect.”

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