‘Flower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies;I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,Little flower.—ButifI could understandWhat you are, root and all, and all in all,I should know what God and man is.’
‘Flower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies;I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,Little flower.—ButifI could understandWhat you are, root and all, and all in all,I should know what God and man is.’
‘Flower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies;I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,Little flower.—ButifI could understandWhat you are, root and all, and all in all,I should know what God and man is.’
‘Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower.—ButifI could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.’
I merely contend that whatever were the means by which dead matter first lived, they were higher, infinitely higher, than matter and motion; they could only have been the resources of acompetentpower.
I adopt gladly the language of Professor Huxley: ‘Belief, in the scientific sense of the word,’ he says, ‘is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not-Living matter.’[21]So should I.
By what other means than by the operation of natural ‘laws’ can we think of the Infinite Power, extending through all extent, as the fountain of all being, as acting? Every process of nature that ever man has investigated throughout all space and all time, results from a perfect and unalterable method which we call a ‘law’ of nature. Then why should the primal process, by which not-living matter became, once for all, living, be brought about by any othermeans than the predetermined action of competent natural laws? Because life—living matter—does notnowarise directly from that which is not-life, does it follow that the creative method was discontinuous? that the primordial creative laws willed into operation ‘in the beginning’ were only competent to evolve the inorganic and not-living? and that at this point a supernatural ‘interference,’ a ‘miraculous interposition,’ had to be effected to endow what was dead with the transcendent properties of life? The whole line of human experience, interpreted in the light of modern scientific knowledge, compels the conclusion that the ‘primordial germs’ in which life on earth began, arose by the operation of natural creative laws. That an energy, not now operating within the area of our experience, was at work, when not-living matter progressed into living structure, is certain. But there is nothing, within the range of our knowledge, that permits the inference that it was brought about by any other means, than such as, if we could have seen them in operation, we should have called ‘laws’ of nature. This view surely ennobles without limit our fatally humanized view of creative action. ‘The beginning’ was thus, by the unsearchable mystery of a creative mind and will, thepotentialityof all the universe through all its duration; which it only required ‘time’ in which the potential powers and modes should operate, to make actual, in the universe we see.
As the highest mental powers and products of the most gifted of our race, were originally potential in the primitive ovum from which each took his origin, so, it is congruous, and capable of being grasped by our thought although it cannot be portrayed by our imagination, thatthe mind and will of the inscrutable Creator prevised and preordered the whole series of conditions which, by their immutable action, interaction, and rhythmic concurrence as ‘laws,’ evolved the universe.
So far as the finest and keenest researches in chemistry and physics carry us, especially such researches as those of Crooks and Lockyer, it is powerfully indicated that the creative method in the inorganic world was a sublime progressive plan, a building up by law, of the dome of heaven and the floor of earth, and all that goes with both. But behind the matter and the motion, above the energies and the force, there surely was, as we have been constrained to see, what we can only think of as the conception, the purpose, and the will by which the evolving order, marked in high, and higher sublimity, the upward and onward movement of the ripening and uncounted ages.
But when the highest point of the inorganic, the not-living, was reached, and a new factor had to appear in the world to crown some of its matter withlifeand all its wonders, what was it that ensued? If ‘law’ did not cease to act; if there were no break in the continuity of evolution, and yet a factor of power, not now operating within the range of our knowledge, was absolutely necessary to change the not-living matter of the earth into matter that lived, how was it brought about?
Our inability to reply, does not invalidate the facts on the one hand, nor justify attempts at explanations that find no sanction in experience and knowledge on the other.
Suggestion by analogy, feeble as it is, is the nearest approach that we can make to the solution of what must, perhaps, remain for ever a splendid mystery.
If creation be, then, the expression of the mind and will of a Creator, uttered in method and issuing in phenomena, he must see the end from the beginning: his resource is infinite. The human mathematician, of the highest order, can devise, with all the adaptations and prearrangements that are needed, an instrument or machine, which shall continue for a number of motions, without necessary limit, according to a primal law, but which by such prevised and preordered arrangements would, suddenly, at the required point of time, undergo change, and operate henceforth after a law entirely new.
An instrument has actually been made which was competent to effect the solution of quadratic equations whose roots are real. One has also been made capable of effecting the determination of the real roots of any equation. It is perfectly conceivable that an instrument could be made which should go on finding the real roots only, for a measured time, and then by a prearranged and provided method should suddenly, by the very laws and principles of its construction, so change, that for another period, or for evermore, it should also determine the imaginary roots.
Is it not conceivable that infinite resource, infinite wisdom, infinite prevision and power could in a manner which this illustration only suggests have caused the non-vital universe to become in some parts vital? Could not infinite power, infinite wisdom, the originator of all that we call material phenomena, have prevised and preordered, in the impenetrable mystery of ‘the beginning,’ that the creative laws of evolution for an inorganic world, should, as they brought about the completion of their perfect purpose, have carried with them from that ‘beginning’ preordered potentialities,that should, by the primal volition of the Creator, emerge, as an inevitable and orderly sequence, into the operation of higher activities and new laws?
If that may not be, it is not a divine being that is in our thought. But if that may be, then the self-acting laws of nature are self-acting, as the products of eternal mind and will. Each self-acting phenomenon is, to us, an embodied thought of God; emerging in matter now, as a consequence of the sublimity and perfection of the methods divinely willed ‘in the beginning.’
Let this illustration weigh for what it will; this at least is clear, that the mechanical philosophy, whether or not it refuses to be called ‘material,’ has proved its formula incompetent. Atomic matter without property, affected by motion, with persistent relations between the matter and the motion, can no more account for the universe even up to the point of the origin of the lowest life, than the vibrations of a musical chord can account for the joy begotten of music.
But how stands the problem of its origin, when, in that which lives, we include the presence of mind? None more firmly contends for the absolute disparity, the entire and unqualified difference between mind and matter, than Mr. Spencer. To him there can be nothing within the whole realm of thought severed by a wider interval than consciousness and thought on the one hand, and matter on the other. ‘Just,’ he says, ‘in the same way that the object is the unknown permanentnexuswhich is never itself a phenomenon, but is that which holds phenomena together, so is the subject the unknown permanentnexuswhich is never itself a state of consciousness, but which holds allstates of consciousness together.’[22]Mind and matter, then, are here admitted to be infinitely unlike, but absolutely equal realities. This is boldly reaffirmed; he says: ‘No effort of imagination enables us to think of a shock, however minute, except as undergone by an entity. We are compelled, therefore, to postulate a substance of mind that is affected, before we can think of its affections.’[23]
This is as clear as a geometric definition. Mind and matter are admitted to be the two opposite termini of thought; they are divided by an interval beyond which thought cannot go. They are symbolized asxandy, two equally unknown, but absolutely unlike, quantities. Beyond the common fact of existence, there is not a quality of the one that is not infinitely unlike all the qualities of the other.
What this disparity is we all know: enough, that matter is inert, absolutely without perceiving power, and unable in itself to move or to produce motion. But mind is conscious, knows that it exists; and, however mysteriously, originates motion. Matter has mass; mind is absolutely without it. Matter cannot be thought of save as an occupant of space. Mind has no extension.
Is it conceivable, then, that we should be required by this philosophy, which thus admits the utter disparity of mind and matter, to make mind a function of matter? that we should be asked to mentally follow a process by whichyshall be changed intox? This verily is so!
I must repeat the formula of this philosophy of evolution. ‘Evolution is an integration of matter, and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matterpasses from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.’
Matter and motion, these are the all; no suggestion of aught besides. Then, if on that formula the philosophy is built, the rhythmic vicissitudes through which matter has passed during limitless millenniums of time, are supposed to be able to change matter’s unconsciousness into self-perception and thought; to cause extended and gravitating mass to pass into an unextended realization of its own being, unyoked to gravity; to emerge from space relations involving motion produced by outside forces, to an absolute independence of space relations which makes motion impossible. If we make ourknowledgeof phenomena and the processes and methods of Nature the basis of our judgment, is it not manifest, that such a change is incapable of being thought?
The unknowny, that is, matter, must, by sheer physical vicissitudes, actually abnegate its own qualities, and emerge, no longeritself,y, but another entity, infinitely unlike itself, that is,x!
If mind and matter are divergent from each other by infinite unlikeness of quality, the mind refuses assent, that any process, based on the foundation of accurate human knowledge, would sanction the emergence of mind by physical processes from matter. Mind is the antithesis, and cannot be a function, of matter.
The mind is intimately linked with cerebral action. We do not know mind apart from brain; but there is no discovered correlation between theworkof the brain, and consciousness. Dr. Tyndall, whose keen and instructed intellect hasaddressed itself to this deep problem from the position of a physicist, says, amongst many similar utterances: ‘But when we endeavour to pass ... from the phenomena of physics to those of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable expansion of the powers which we now possess. We may think over the subject again and again, but it eludes all intellectual presentation. We stand at length face to face with the incomprehensible. The territory of physics is wide, but it has its limits, from which we look with vacant gaze into the region beyond, ... and thus it will ever loom, compelling the philosophies of successive ages to confess that—
“We are such stuffAs dreams are made of, and our lifeIs rounded by a sleep.”’[24]
“We are such stuffAs dreams are made of, and our lifeIs rounded by a sleep.”’[24]
“We are such stuffAs dreams are made of, and our lifeIs rounded by a sleep.”’[24]
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our life
Is rounded by a sleep.”’[24]
The same thinker asks, ‘What is the causal connexion ... between molecular motions and states of consciousness?’ And he answers that neither he nor any other can know; and adds: ‘It is no explanation to say that the objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides? This is the very core of the difficulty. There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost ferns upon a window pane? If not, why should the molecular motion of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion—consciousness?’[25]
Says Professor Tait, one of our most distinguished physicists: ‘There are ... things associated with livingbeings which, of course, no one in his senses can regard as physical. Even such things as consciousness and volition we have absolutely no reason, however vague, for classifying even in the smallest degree under the head of physics.’[26]
‘I,’ writes Professor Huxley, ‘know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.’[27]And again, ‘All our knowledge is a knowledge of states of consciousness. “Matter” and “force” are, so far as we can know, mere names for certain forms of consciousness.‘[28]
Such disparity is there, then, between matter and mind, that it would be apparently as congruous to conceive of a thought as solidifying itself into a material object, as to conceive of any affection of material molecules as being the sole cause of thought. Hence, it follows that the Spencerian philosophy, which affirms the absolute distinctness of mind from matter, on the one hand; but, having no other structural elementsthanmatter in motion, on the other hand, seeks to educe mind from these, is surely incongruous, and fails.
The demand is, that the primal atoms of the cosmic cloud, without a single logically added agent besides, have, by combining and recombining, by changing size and shape and intensifying the complexity of their motions, at last emerged into ‘I am,’ ‘I can,’ ‘I ought;’ that in effect they have written Faust and Hamlet, produced philosophies, discovered gravitation, calculated eclipses, realized the eternalnobility of right and the eternal baseness of wrong: in brief, have brought about the moral and intellectual manhood that is ours. What weknowby scientific evidence is this: that the persistence of force makes the relations of matter and force permanent. Says Faraday: ‘A particle of oxygen is ever a particle of oxygen, nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into combination and reappears as oxygen—if it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral—if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved—it is oxygen with its first qualities, neither more nor less. It has all its original force, and only that.’[29]
Then, in all the area of the universe as we know it, that is, within the range of our experience and experiment, infinite vicissitude leaves what we know as an elementary body, with its first qualities intact, neither more nor less. But we must transcend experience, disregard the evidence before us, andbelievethat if we give the primal atoms with their inalienable motiontime enough, they will emerge at last, not only as life, but as intellect!
Can it avail to repudiate materialism, and yet to philosophically conjure mind out of matter? We must indeed recast our definition of matter to do this; but how? Says Professor Max Müller: ‘Mill declares in one place (Logicv. 3, 3) that it is a mere fallacy to say that matter cannot think. Here again he ought to define first of all what he means by matter, and according to his definition it may or may not be a fallacy to say that matter cannot think. If we say that matter cannot think, we do not say so because we cannot conceive thought to be annexed to anyarrangement of material particles ... the reason why we are justified in saying “matter cannot think” is our having in our language and thought separated matter from thought, our having called and conceived what is without thought matter, and what is without matter thought. Having done this, we are as certain that our matter cannot think as that A=A and not =B.‘[30]
The verdict of consciousness is the immovable base of all mental action. Our consciousness affirms our personality and insists on our identity. The Ego is conscious of itself as the hidden thread of unity on which are strung all the past and present states of consciousness and thought. Separate ‘states of consciousness’ as affections of matter we have seen are impossible. But even if they could exist,towhom is their existence? A pang of unutterable remorse, a thrill of keenest pleasure, do not feel themselves. I feel them; what is that I, to whom the feeling is? It is always there, and in the language of Spencer already quoted ‘is the unknown permanentnexuswhich is never itself a state of consciousness, but which holds all states of consciousness together.’ Then it is as real and more absolute than the ‘states of consciousness’ themselves.
The personal pronouns are as plentiful in the language of modern materialists as in the language of sentiment or theology. What do they represent?
Looking back and looking forward, thinking of ‘what might have been’ and anticipating what will be; and being absolutely conscious that it is ‘I’ in unchanged and unchanging identity that am looking back upon myself, and looking forward to myself, is unthinkable, unlesssomethingto which all successive states of consciousness have been, are, and shall be, is admitted. If I deny the separate existence of the Ego, I to all intents and purposes deny that I am, and yet it is I that am there, perjuring myself by the denial.
Not only is there consciousness and thought, memory and prevision, power and volition; but the person, the identity that is conscious and thinks, that remembers and anticipates, that is able and that wills, is an inextinguishable factor of being. And for this there is no provision in the formula of the Spencerian Philosophy.
True, as we have seen, it is fain to admit, outside its formula, the existence of a permanent somewhat lying beneath and outlasting all the flow of mental states; that it has always existed, that it must exist for evermore; that it is a ‘power’ sometimes identified with ‘force;’ but it is contended that this is infinitely and for ever unknowable. With this we cannot be concerned; in practice it is an abstraction equal to nothing. But it is no element of our analysis; it is no factor of the formula which contained the only data required by this philosophy to construct the universe. We cannot assume that this power was the cause of matter, or the cause of motion; for we are shown that we can know nothing concerning it. But this also is of no moment; for matter, motion, and the combinations they bring about, over countless millenniums of time, clearly understood, and fully interpreted, are supposed to contain in themselves, the explanation of all that is. But surely the promise of this philosophy is unfulfilled, its pledge is broken; it left its formula at the very outset of its career, and has employed structural principles, which toitare absolutely alien.
Then to affirm that mind does not exist is impossible; to affirm that matter gave origin to mind is a contradiction. There is but one alternative: it is, that in the beginning, mind, acting through and in matter, by immutable and perfect modes, through unmeasured time, caused matter to assume its forms and display its phenomena; and, being mind, imparted mind to the universe wherever it is found: crowning all, in the moral and intellectual nature of man.
Thus the ultimate demand of thought, of reason, and of consciousness, is that when we are unravelling the modes of phenomena, pushing our inquiries into the conditions of all existences, generalizing vast areas of knowledge, expressing in formula of geometry and numbers the splendid rhythm and order of all things in heaven and earth, we are simply finding, and expressing, the thoughts of an Infinite Intelligence; discovering the modes by which His immutable perfections were caused to take form in matter and mind.
It is science alone that can discover and express themodeof action; it is theology alone that must strive reverently to lead the mind up from the mode, not to theconception, but to the inevitable existence and thought of the Creator.
In doing this, to suppose that there are no intellectual difficulties is to manifest narrow mental grasp; but there are no absolute contradictions; no incongruities intolerable to the mind. True, as we have seen above, we encounter the inevitable fact of the uncreate existence of the Infinite. But we have seen that this, though infinitely impenetrable by us for ever, is still not repugnant to our reasoning and moral faculties. Indeed the eternal existence ofmatteras not requiring proof is one of the assumptions of somematerialists. But surely the self and necessary existence of an intelligent omnipotence is without measure more congruous. It has been argued that the eternity of matter is thinkable, because matter is immutable—retains its properties through every vicissitude conceivable in time and space. But surely gravity is an indispensable quality of matter; yet take a bar of iron, weighing a thousand pounds at the sea level, four miles high, and it loses two pounds of its weight; carry it to the distance of the moon from the earth, and it weighs but five ounces; and at a distance which could be computed its gravity would be absolutely lost. It is conceivable that all the ‘modes of motion’ by which matter is known to us, might, if we knew enough concerning them, be found to have conditions in which they would cease to operate. We must know that matter is unchangeable before the argument is valid. But even then it is incompetent.
What the mind asks, is power and intelligence, to account for the majesty of the universe, and the existence of mind; and if their cause, to be such, must be admitted to be uncaused, the majority of reflective minds can accept this, and in doing so, can fairly rest, and fully hope.
But, this granted, the question shapes itself afresh, ‘In the beginning what?’ Had matter a coeval existence, an eternal being like God? or did He create it? bring, what to our senses is something, directly out of nothing? None dare answer. Both suggestions refuse to be dealt with by reason. But the incongruity of both might vanish like starlight in the dawn, if we knewwhatthat is, which constitutes matter. It would, perhaps, make the Divine mind more immanent than we could dare to imagine. Butit is easier without measure, judged of by our only source of knowledge, our own mental experience, to conceive of matter as a product of mind, than mind as a product of matter.
What, then, is it that the reverent mean by a ‘creative act’? What is involved in the affirmation, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’?Mustthe answer be speculative? or does the evidence of Nature indicate a method? If the answer must be wholly speculative, it is without a shred of value. But if themodeof creation be a question of evidence, who are the witnesses? They are those who are students and masters of thefactsof Nature. Willing or not willing, in the end, wemustaccept the facts of Science. What, from the very nature and constitution of our mind, we are bound to accept as truth, it would be a travesty of all morality to ignore, much more to reject.
What was gained to morals, or religion, by rejecting Galileo’s demonstration of a revolving earth and a central sun? When Kepler demonstrated the laws of planetary motion, in the spirit of his age he was obliged to suppose that the direct motion of the planets was brought about by some spirit influence which he denominated ‘immateriate species,’ capable of overcoming the inertia of material bodies. But the splendid insight of Newton enabled him to perceive, that the laws of planetary motion, were a consequence of the cosmical law of gravitation. This took the moving planets out of spirit hands, and reduced the music of their motions to a method—a mechanical ‘law.’ To thousands that was deemed a truce to ‘atheism;’ but it is an unalterable truth; and men yet believe in God.
Within the range of living memory it has been held asvital to the existence of theology that creation, from the stars that fringe the margin of the universe, to the earth, and the crown of manhood, arose in six literal days. But science, with no weapon but inexorable fact, has made this for ever untenable. But the foundations of religion are unshaken.
Science has removed whole regions and æons of phenomena, from what was considered the supernatural, to the natural; but to believe that this is so much lost to theology is a feeble and faithless fallacy.
That conception of the Great Creator which takes its rise in the majestic law of universal gravitation must be sublimer than that which thought of Him as telling off spirits to move, and bear up the planets, in their paths.
Can that be a higher view of an illimitable Creative Mind, which conceived of Him as a Power who caused the earth to be formed, and the heavens to be filled, in six literal days, rather than to think of Him to whom there can be no yesterday and no to-morrow, but an unchanging now, as determining laws and forces, which, in the slow progression of uncounted ages, should express His creative will and accomplish His Divine idea?
I have read in vain, I have thought in vain, to understand what to later theologians was the method and the meaning of a creative act. ‘Order is heaven’s first law;’ and law—method—is the very pulse of order. Surely creative action in matter could only have proceeded by law? It could only have been the prevision and predetermination, by the inscrutable Creator, of definite affections of matter by force, issuing in rhythmic motions and cosmic harmonies, which, by their progress through immeasurable time, shouldaccomplish the creative purpose. ‘Let there be light;’ that is the equivalent, in human thought, of an incomprehensible Divine volition. ‘And there was light,’ that is, in human phrase, the affirmation of its historic accomplishment. But to those who know, as we at present do, the science of light, what time, what power, what majesty of method, did its perfect accomplishment involve!
‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven.’ That, in human phrase, and according to human modes of thought, expresses the mysterious intent of Almighty Mind to fill space with the splendour we see; and to people it with intelligence of which we can form no faintest vision. ‘And it was so,’ that is the record of the realized intent. But how realized? Not by a material actor who
‘Rounded in his palm those spacious orbs,And bowled them flaming through the dark profound.’
‘Rounded in his palm those spacious orbs,And bowled them flaming through the dark profound.’
‘Rounded in his palm those spacious orbs,And bowled them flaming through the dark profound.’
‘Rounded in his palm those spacious orbs,
And bowled them flaming through the dark profound.’
That is impossible to thought; a travesty of the sublimer conceptions possible, even to finite minds. Then do we conceive them as, in our human sense, leaping into existence and place and relation and motion and order? All our knowledge repudiates this merely human conception.
The only conception we can justly form is, that in the awful mystery of creative action, Divine will determined law, modes of affection of matter by motion, through force: making the dome of heaven and the peopled earth the realized will of the Eternal.
‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.’ That is the utterance of the human conception, which can alone represent to us the Divine resolve to fill the earth with life—and the joy ofliving things. ‘And it was so.’ But what epochs of countless ages filled the incalculable interval! What life on life, through age on age, moved in stately march from the lower to the higher, while the rocks kept imperishable record! The facts of geology, so far as they carry us, are more accurate and certain than any records of human history. And the irresistible lesson taught by the accurate study of the fossil flora and fauna, from the dawn of the Laurentian epoch, is a persistent and upward unfolding of life-forms by law; and the operation of the law is as manifest, as the operation of the law of increasing adaptation is visible, in a historical study of naval architecture, from the first rude plank, the dangerous raft, right up, through all increasing adjustments and improved design, to the latest ship with stately curves and splendid speed.
There is a sense indeed in which creation by evolution or development is taking place for ever around us. Development is evolution beginning at a fixed point; evolution is only developmentab initio.
Every spore that unfolds itself into a fern, every seed that gives origin to another tenant of the forest, every egg that peoples earth or air or sea with another life, is an instance of development. It is only abbreviated evolution; evolution which gives a written record of its laws in every stage, down to the primitive ovum. There the record of the organism in itself ceases. The primitive ovum is a simple cell. The worm, the grayling, the eagle, the man, are evolved from such.
But can the egg unfold itself from this protoplasmic speck by any process save that of predetermined law and energy? Is not every law that shall act, and all theunchangeable power to enforce it, contained potentially in that globule of matter which we cannot see? Every change that is wrought, from the first that is discoverable, to the last that ensues, in the evolving egg, is one unbroken stream of method; force, with mandates, as it were, acting on matter, with special adaptations. Never did human mechanist strive more visibly to embody his prescribed purpose than do the progressive activities of the embryo lead straight to the final result. They did not, as movements, determine their own actions, or the actions of each other; they all lay together potentially from the first.
In this, if you will carry back the conception of Divine law and purpose to the beginning, and apply it to the incomprehensible majesty of the universe, I can see a miniature of suggestion as to the creative method.
Can it strip theology of one ray of the splendour of Deity, to find, from the evidence of nature, that He thought, and willed into action, the balanced forces and immutable laws, which were so related to each other, and to the foreseen requirements of onward and upward movement, that their progress is music, and their products are harmonies?—perfect adjustments—and, amidst ever-changing circumstances, ever-changing adaptations and self-adjusted design?
Can there be any splendour of the Infinite mind more ineffable and effulgent than the evidence, in His works, that in the beginning He determined the potency and prevision of all the life, and all the adaptations, that ever have emerged or can emerge?
Will it be urged that this one comprehensive law of creative action, with all its methods and potentialities complete in the beginning, must denude history of miracle?must make all things inevitable sequences, and every outcome in nature through all time only what must be, when the moment for its emergence had come? And that therefore the unforeseen would be impossible. I submit that such an inference is not inevitable. The universe becomes one lasting act of the unsearchable but immanent Eternal. The power by which the self-adjusting mechanism of the universe acts, took its rise, and has its continuity, in Him.
A miracle, in its broadest aspect, is a wonderful event; something, which from the known course of phenomena, science could not previse. Science would stultify her past and make impossible her future, if she affirmed that the unprevised and marvellous could not happen. Says Professor Huxley: ‘A miracle, in the sense of a sudden and complete change in the customary order of nature, is intelligible, can be distinctly conceived, implies no contradiction; and therefore, according to Hume’s own showing, cannot be proved false by any demonstrative argument.’[31]
Our knowledge of the observed processes of nature erects no mental barrier to the occurrence of something never before observed. Miracles are not, it is now broadly admitted, dependent on science, but onevidencefor their possibility and truth. Nay, more, it is conceivable that, what to us might be profoundly miraculous, might be the outcome of sheer and unmodified natural law.
If we could annul the interval of time between the great minds of the long past and bring them into direct and intelligent contact with the most marked victories of modern research and genius, what would be the effect? Let it be imagined that Aristotle or Plato could stand by whileTyndall demonstrated to them in Athens, that they could hold direct and instant intercourse with a friend in India; or proved to them, that we can demonstrate the actual constituents of the sun and stars, and their physical conditions, with the same certainty as we can determine the analysis of an earthly compound; or bid the sunbeam paint the portrait of a bird or beast in rapid motion; or let them gaze upon the marvellous world of the minute unfolded by the modern microscope; and I do not hesitate to say that if he were the Aristotle or Plato of his own age, standing before these triumphs of this age, he would be standing in the presence of absolute miracles. Yet how have these, to Plato, unforeseen and wonderful events arisen? Only by discovery of, and absolute obedience to, thelaws of natureas they are for ever and immutably acting. Man has created nothing, interrupted nothing, violated nothing: he has obeyed; and by obedience conquered.
Then grant that mind, by infinite wisdom and will, gave origin to this ever-unfolding universe, by methods that are all and for ever known to Him, as they can never be known to us, is it according to reason to contend that nothing shall ever happeneven according to the strict methods of natural phenomenawhich past experience has never known?
That will happen, on the assumption of a Creative Mind as the origin of all, which isneedful, to complete the universe; and what happens need be no interruption, no turning aside, of the course of nature, but only sublime compliance with it.
But more: one of the gravest conflicts of sheer material philosophy with Theism and Theology is, that by mechanicalevolution design is swept clean from the universe; that teleology has received its death-blow.
Science finds that phenomena are self-acting, and self-adjusting. The energy is competent; the method is perfect for bringing about the result investigated. Science can find no more; it asks no more; and materialism says, there is no more. There is no design in it; it is, because to be at all, it must be that. There is no design in the form of the river-bed which the mighty waters have engraved for themselves in their irresistible movement down the mountain slope and along the windings of the valley to the sea. It is the result of the force of gravity. Such is the argument.
But while science as such, in strict obedience to its canons, must stop at the self-adjustment of immediate phenomena, and materialism will stop there, the reasoning faculties of the race, as we have seen, will not stop there. They must come at last, by the laws of reason, upon the power and the intelligence by which the methods of nature were made self-acting. Gravitation and the properties of water will account for the perfect adaptation of the river to its bed, and the bed to the purpose of a river. But how came gravity? How came the properties of water? There may be, there is, no direct design in the path of the Amazon or the Danube; but surely there is magnificence in the design that caused the great, the cosmicmethodsof nature so to co-operate as to cause those rivers inevitably to carve their perfect paths? The dynamics of nature are self-acting up to the very limit of our power of research; but after that, and beyond it, what? Why is thedirectionof nature’s dynamical methods always and everywhere, through all time and space, beneficent and beautiful?
It is only the design, the teleology, of the old school, touched by the Ithuriel spear of modern knowledge, and changing into a conception of universal design, that can only have originated in an infinite mind.
The ‘law of evolution’ and that of ‘variation and the survival of the fittest’ may, if you will, be held to account for all that narrower knowledge had attributed to direct design. But evolution, like gravitation, is only a method; and the self-adjustments demonstrated in the ‘origin of species’ only make it, to reason, the clearer, that variation and survival is a method that took its origin in mind. It is true that the egg of a moth, and the eye of a dogfish, and the forearm of a tigermustbe what they are to accomplish the end of their being. But that only shows, as we shade our mental eyes, and gaze back to the beginning, the magnificence of the design that wasinvolved in nature’s beginning, so as to beevolved, by the designed rhythm of nature’s methods.
Whatever matter may be; whatever force is; or whether or not both are the one inseverable product of omnipotent volition; the first affection of matter by force carried with it, potentially, the finished purpose of the All-wise, whatever that may be. Every instance of what such writers as Darwin are obliged to write of as ‘contrivance’ or ‘adaptation’ throughout this universe as it now is, or that shall yet arise in it through all duration, are, and will be, but factors of related harmony in a stupendously vast interlocked ‘mosaic’ of design, which in its entirety has a ‘final purpose’ too great for man to see.
It is admitted by the fullest and farthest thinkers, that the teleological, and the mechanical views, of phenomenaand their origin, are not antagonistic. Instead of mutually excluding each other in thought, they are the complement of each other.
To argue, that because we can by analysis and research, discover and demonstrate the physical conditions or antecedents, that, apparently automatically, bring about a manifest contrivance, therefore, we have excluded the possibility of any universal primal design, is a mode of reasoning, the fallacy of which, surely, needs no great logical acumen to lay bare.
Because we discover the molecular shapes and movements that determine the structure of a beautiful crystal, it would be surely illogical and unwarranted to say that there was no design, no arrangement in the primary order of things, out of which these very conditions arose. It is conceivable that there may be infinitely more mind in the origination of that which automatically gives rise to a manifest ‘contrivance,’ than in directly originating it.
An ordinary watch is, as a rule, a good timekeeper, under a fixed, say a temperate meridian; but take it to the arctic circle, and it goes too fast; or to the torrid zone, and it goes too slow. But in a chronometer, delicate compensations are made, of a beautiful kind, so contrived as to counteract the thermal changes. Would it be logical to think of the more complex contrivance as devoid of design because it is self-acting?
I grant that there may not be absolute parity of reasoning in the human as compared with the natural instance; but I only desire the reasoning to apply to one essential point. If primarily the methods of nature, which by their rhythmic action automatically produce contrivances, livingor otherwise, took their origin in mind, the contrivances so produced were so designed to be produced; and this is contrivance of an infinitely higher order than the self-compensating balance of the chronometer. It is contrivances brought about by arrangements that are infinitely complex, transcending all thought; and which include in their vast sweep, all time, all space, all matter, all motion, and all their relations, from the most inconceivably minute phenomenon to the most stupendous that ever has happened, or can happen, as a product of nature.
We may easily reduce this to a practical form by illustration. The arm or fore-limb of all mammals is constructed essentially on the same type. The forearm of the horse is most highly specialized. In the forearm there is, as in the human skeleton, theradiusand theulna. But the ulna has lost its function, and is fused with the radius. What we call the knee in the horse’s fore-limb is really the wrist. There are eight bones in the human wrist. The horse has only seven. Now, immediately succeeding the wrist bones in the human hand, are the five bones that form the palm; and these are followed by the five digits or fingers.
It appears, then, that, unlike the majority of mammal hands, the horse is peculiar. Instead of five bones corresponding to the palm bones, it has only one, which is called the ‘cannon bone;’ and this is followed by but one digit or finger with a huge nail. The horse then walks upon a single finger, viz. the third, on each fore foot and each hind foot. Why is this? and can we discover the history of this modification?
Examine the cannon bone of a horse with care; you willfind fixed on either side of it two delicate bones, called ‘splints,’ with actually no mission in the economy of the extant horse.
Now go steadily back in geological time. There are three great geological epochs, the primary, the secondary, and the tertiary. The recent period called the quaternary is a sub-section of the last. Now in the quaternary and upper tertiary, fossil horses are found. They correspond with the horses we see. But in the middle of the tertiary epoch we come upon the horse, not only in Europe, but in India, and above all in America, with the splint bones, that we find in extant horses fixed to the cannon bone, as long as that bone itself, and provided with small spurious or useless hoofs, while the ulna can be traced for its whole length.
In the earliest miocene deposits the horse is found with these spurious or partially aborted toes, no longer useless, but having the full length of the middle toe; making the horse of that epoch a distinctly three-toed creature, and each toe operative; while the forearm is in a condition normal to mammals.
Yet another form, found in America, shows, not only the three distinct and useful toes, but upon the third toe a splint, suggesting a rudiment of the little or fifth finger; while in the oldest of the tertiary rocks has again been found a horse with the fourth finger complete. While finally, in the very earliest tertiary deposits is found a horse with a foot of four perfect digits, consisting of the second, the third, the fourth, and fifth fingers, with a rudiment or splint of the first finger distinctly visible.
Similar facts reveal themselves in relation to the hindfeet and legs; and slow variations palpably affected the entire body of the successive types of horse; the teeth, for example, undergoing remarkable successive modifications: and whilst theEohippusand theOrohippus, the last types of horse, discovered respectively in the oldest and later of the eocene beds, possess forty-four teeth, as in a large number of fossil and extant mammalian forms, the recent horse has the number reduced to forty, and their forms remarkably altered, as the final outcome of a succession of modifications.
We have here, then, a series of generic types; for the true relations of which to each other we are indebted to the insight of such workers as Huxley and Marsh and Lartet, and others. They do not afford us illustrations of the minute and scarcely observable modifications which the law of the origin of species involves; they present us rather with a series of family groups; but the relation between them is such as to leave the mind accustomed to biological investigations convinced, that, could we see all the forms that occurred between them, there could be no question as to the origin of these forms, fromeohippusof the oldest eocene beds toequusof to-day. Unlike as in a general sense they are, they are progressive modifications, with higher and higher specializations, until, in the extant horse, the highest special modification is attained.
It will harmonize with no dogma of theology, and no doctrine of science, to assume that these equine forms, separated by such enormous epochs of time, were specially created: all accurate knowledge forbids the supposition; while varieties sufficiently marked, such as the race-horse, the giant and powerful dray-horse, the Shetland and theNorman ponies, known to be derived from a common parentage, give the clearest sanction to the inference, that what we now know of the geological history of the horse proves it to be a product of the Darwinian law of evolution; that there has been no total destruction of equine (or any other) life in the great past; but that there has been a continuity of it, borne from region to region, and modified continuously by a thousand changing circumstances. Consequently we find, in the rocky records of the past, that organic types become simpler, and liker to each other, as we trace them through the incomplete geological record to a dim and far off age.
Here, then, we have a series of such generalized types, plainly related to each other in time, leading us down from the horse of historic times to less and less specialized forms of it, as the epoch grows more remote; until in the upper mesozoic or lower eocene beds, we find the progenitor of the line of the equine types we know, to be an animal with a splay foot of five toes, adapted to slow movement in a boggy soil. The slow specialization adapted it to increasing rapidity and ease of movement, and modified states of soil; acting, without doubt, as an increasing protection against its enemies, and providing it with an ever surer means of obtaining abundant and suitable food. And beneficial variation continued to act until the noble horse, beautiful in form, exquisitely graceful in action, and swift as the wind, had been thus created.
Now the most absolutely assured, the most universally accepted truth within the whole realm of human knowledge and experience is the immutability of nature’s laws; and the certainty that their action has been ‘established for ever’through all space and all time. Great as was the knowledge of ancient and classic peoples, that of which they knew relatively least, was nature. This arose from their inability to perceive the inexpressible vastness of nature, on the one hand, and the detailed constitution of the earth and its universal flora and fauna, on the other. The obvious inference as to the origin of the universe, as they knew it, was, that all that constituted the world and its occupants and inhabitants, mineral, vegetable, and animal, were individual direct creations. But, knowing as we now know, the immutability and universality of the laws of nature, in relation equally to the organic and living as to the inorganic and not-living, and knowing as we do the geological and palæontological history of the earth, and the nature and characteristics of its living inhabitants, it is as manifest as the axioms of geometry, that the direct and supra-natural creation of new species, or even new genera, is absolutely untenable.
Now modern biological science, guided by the splendid genius and ceaseless research of Darwin, and the whole field of biologists, for the past quarter of a century, has been able for all practical purposes to discover and demonstrate a great ‘law’ or method, according to which all the varieties of living ‘species,’ animal and vegetable, have arisen; connecting the remotest ages of the life of the globe with the present flora and fauna in one unbroken continuity, by one unchanging method. The organic history of any individual becomes an analogue of the organic history of the world. The individual begins existence as a minute ovum, and progresses to completeness. The vast series of organic forms, fossil and extant, began in one or more‘primordial germs.’ The law of all living things, and especially the lowliest, is rapid and abundant reproduction. Variations in individuals so reproduced are as absolutely universal as reproduction itself. It does not require the accurate knowledge of the botanist or the zoologist to discover this. A careful study of any group of living forms, lowly or highly organized, will make this palpable to any observer. The septic organisms, for example, which arise from germs (not those which arise from self-division) constantly vary; and I have been able to make use of this tendency so as to enable three of these wonderful organic and vital specks to slowly change, so as to adapt themselves to changed environments, until, in the course of years, from normally living at a temperature of 60° Fahr. they lived at last, and multiplied enormously, at a temperature of 157° Fahr.; and in the slow process of adaptation, demonstrated fundamental changes were undergone by the organisms.[32]
A study of the Desmids, the Diatoms, the Radiolaria, or the Foraminifera amongst minute organisms will show that variations are so constant and so numerous, that the determination of what is called species, is difficult, and at times, impossible.
Who does not know of the varieties that are annually produced from seed-growths of favourite flowering plants?—the pelargonium, the primula, the viola, the rose, and hundreds of others.
That this is not confined to forms under cultivation is equally manifest. Common observation has not noted it perhaps, but there are no fewer than thirteen distinct formsof the common bramble or blackberry, with stem, flower, and fruit sufficiently varied to have induced some botanists to consider them species. Although each when seen is called by the majority of people ‘the wild rose,’ there are at the very least seventeen natural varieties. ‘Artificial selection’ has had no part in these variations and a thousand others that might be named.
Consider the variations constantly arising in fowls, canaries, dogs, and cattle. No litter of kittens is ever precisely alike, or precisely like either parent; and this is true even in human families.
Variation, then, is constant and universal; it acts in all directions and in every living thing. If, amidst the exigencies of the history of an organism, some variation in the progeny is beneficial in altered circumstances, it is by the very nature of things preserved. The offspring of all living organisms are greatly in excess of the number that can reach maturity; and with variations in every organism, and in every part of their organization, for ever occurring; and environments, during great cycles of time, undergoing constant and enormous changes; it is palpable that successive modifications must arise, and through all the countless ages of the past have arisen: resulting always in the ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘natural selection,’ which ‘signifies the preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious.’[33]This is palpable, for individuals possessed of advantage over others must have the best chance of surviving and multiplying their kind; hence arise ‘varieties,’ ‘races,’ and ‘species;’ and if the enormous age of the period of life upon theglobe, and the vicissitudes through which it has passed, be taken into account, it is impossible for a biologist to withhold consent to the fact that a ‘law,’ a method, has been demonstrated, which has been a certain and powerful factor, in producing the variety of the flora and fauna that have filled the earth, from the dawn of life upon the globe, up to the extant animals and vegetables which are the latest outcome of this great law. This is the conviction of all the experts of the world.
That there are other factors of evolution not yet discovered is almost inevitable; they, however, will be but added ‘laws;’ supplementary and co-ordinated methods—giving greater completeness to our knowledge of the origin of species.
But having reached this conclusion, we are at once compelled to ask, What is the origin of this unceasing continuity of variation in all living things? this power to become constantly adapted to change of environment, and for ever, in the fittest form, to survive? Is not this palpably a creative method? Is it not the emergence in time and history of the thought and will of the Creative Power in the beginning?—one of the processes that lay enfolded in the very purpose of the production of heaven and earth, and which as a prevised method only awaited ‘the fulness of time’ to come inevitably into play?
The earth, as is well known, and we have already pointed out, is constantly subject to minute, as well as to smaller cyclic and great secular, changes. Nothing but an ability to become adapted through all duration to current and recurrent changes, could have made a continuity of the livingpopulation of the globe possible. We have found the principal ‘law’ of those adaptive changes. But because we have learned the nature of the law or method, by which throughout all time, these changes have been brought about; and because the methodappearsself-acting like the balance wheel of a chronometer, must we argue that there is no design either in the method or its results? That will not satisfy the constant demands of reason. Finding the law according to which a projectile moves, must not be confounded with the cause of its motion.
‘Natural selection’ cannot originate anything. Variation does not explain itself. Why is it a property of all living things to vary indefinitely and in all directions? The Darwinian law has no existence without it; but that ‘law’ no more accounts for this tendency, than the law of falling bodies explains gravitation, or shows why it acts as it does.
It is easy to explain the law of the compensations of a chronometer balance, or a compensating clock pendulum; but that does not account for their existence.
The law of ‘inheritance,’ the likeness of progeny to parents, is, like the law of variation, universal. But why is it so? If it were not so, there could be no survival of the fittest. Yet it is no more explained by the discovery of that law, than the nature of that which thinks, is explained by a discovery of the laws of thought.
Selection implies alternatives to select from. The splendid organic mechanism of all the animals of the earth, with their perfect relations to their sphere, could as a whole, only have been brought about by means that started for, and led to, that goal. ‘The law by which structures originate isone thing; those by which they are restricted, directed, or destroyed is another.’[34]
Then, because the horse becomes specialized and adapted to its circumstances in a remarkable manner, leaving evidence in the rocks of long severed but successive epochs, of the very manner in which it was created as we know it; and because we have proof that this method is practically self-acting, shall we stultify reason by assuming that in its self-action there is no design? that as a great rhythmic law it had no origin? that, because to our powers of observation it is automatic, it explains its own existence? or that it strips the mind, by this very automatism, of any necessity for, or right of, having its origin explained? None of these assumptions are congruous; they surely violate the fundamental principles of thought.
We may be enabled no longer to say of any structure that it is a ‘final cause;’ our insight is not deep enough for that; but an equally powerful weapon in defence of theism takes its place: I designate it ‘CONCURRENT ADAPTATION;’ that is,fitness, for ever, throughout all time and all space; and fitness absolutely constant amidst all changes. Adaptation is universally concurrent with existence; and whether we have to account for it by sudden and unexplained action, or by the slow operation of laws, is a matter of no essential moment:it is there.
Nothing, for example, can be more certain, than the powerful influence exerted on the coloration and morphology of flowers, all over the earth, by the visits of insects. The insects assiduously visit flowers for food, or nectar; and by their visits the pollen of one flower iscarried to the stigmatic surface of another: so effecting cross fertilization. The contrivances for making insect agency efficient, are so numerous, so palpable, and so exquisitely perfect as to entrance the observer. One flower has its nectar in a tube, to reach which the proboscis of the visiting insect must touch and split a delicate tissue and expose the moist adhesive surfaces of a couple of pollen masses, which adhere to and are carried away by the insect, in such a position that, in visiting another flower of the same species, it must deposit the pollen where alone it can do its fertilizing work.
Another flower is so contrived, that to reach the nectar, the visiting insect must touch a sensitive surface causing the rupture of a tissue, which confines a pollen mass; but, on the rupture of the tissue, this flies out like an arrow at the unbidden guest; and an adhesive end sticks to the insect, which is startled away; but, visiting another flower of a like kind, deposits, in the right place, the fertilizing pollen it unconsciously carries.
Another flower has an ingenious arrangement by which it lures an insect into its corolla, and then imprisons it, provided with plenty of food, until its anthers are ripe, when it sheds their pollen over the insect; after which, by a special organic arrangement, it opens the prison door and lets its visitor emerge, charged with pollen, to visit another similar flower, which will inevitably be in a condition to receive fertilization from its pollen-covered body.
Thousands of other instances might be given.
Now we know perfectly the mutability of flowers. It is highly probable that the visiting insect and the visited flower were wholly unlike, in some instances, what they noware, twenty thousand years ago; and it is equally improbable that they will be what they now are, twenty thousand years hence. But that which this great biological law affirms, is, that whatever the changes, and however brought about, past or future, there never has been, there is not, and there never will be, an instant’s cessation of concurrent adaptation:—the operation of the ‘law’ that secures to all that lives adjustment to its environments. That surely must be a method that took its origin in mind; and it must have had its prevised and preordered place potentially assigned, from the earliest creative movement; as it must continue to have unceasing action to the very terminus of all organic existence.
Design, purpose, intention, appear, then, when all the facts of the universe are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to be ineradicable from our view of the creation. Teleology does not now depend for its existence on Paleyean ‘instances;’ but all the universe, its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of teleology. The will and purpose running through it are as incapable of being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, as its phenomena and their modes are of being rendered wholly imperceptible by our senses.
A ‘mind’ that is not a mind, in any sense as we know it, is, to us, nothing. Will, to be will, to us, must be such as we know of; though it be infinite. Intelligence that is infinite cannot cease to be intelligence. To an infinite intelligence, as to us, in the same conditions, the properties of conic sections must be what we know them to be. But an Infinite Mind would differ absolutely from ours in that there could be nothing tentative, nothing experimental inits methods, through all time and space. Only the right means would ever be employed, or the right ends ever be brought about. But, surely, even an Infinite will, in the realm of matter, mustusemeans. When human power takes a pebble from a great height and places it at the sea-level it has only done what gravity could have done. But when human will by continuity of purpose combines materials to form a calculating machine, we have an evidence of the action of mind; something, which, while it is made and exists by the very laws of nature, yet the laws of nature could not, by themselves, have made.
Similar results must be due, then, to similar conditions. The teleology, that is the inseverable motive, as it were, of all the activities and interactions of nature, must be the product of mind.
Then wasman, as a physical being, the terminal link in the great progressive chain of living forms that had peopled the earth through countless ages? Or does he, in physical origin, stand apart? Is he a being from whose existence a new creative epoch dates? Or is he the final product of the vast ancestral line of life that ran through all the ages? Did God make man ‘of the dust of the ground’ by some process of which we can form no conception, and can discover no trace? Or is there evidence that the Creator made man of the dust of the ground by majestic laws, acting over vast epochs, until he had become meet for the inbreathing of a higher nature?
That is a question of profoundest interest. But if the authoritative and final demonstration were given either way to-morrow, we, in ourselves, should remain unaltered. We should be conscious of no uplifting and of no fall.Immediate or mediate creation, if God be the author, must be alike Divine. To fear the consequences of honest truth seeking research on this momentous question, is to manifest little love of truth for its own sake, on the one hand; and little stalwartness of personal conviction, as to the security of the foundation of professed beliefs, on the other. Whether we will or not, the whole matter will be searched to its deepest depths. But amidst all the conflict of opinion as to details, in one thing all are agreed, and that is, that the gulf between man and the noblest apes is such as to be practically without comparison. Whatever science may be able to show ultimately as to the relation of man to the anthropoid apes, there is to-day no biologically demonstrated and direct kinship. That the anthropoid apes, as we know them, were in any proper sense thedirectancestors of man, is not a serious contention of even extreme evolutionists. The facts before us do not justify it. The highest ape is still an ape; and whilst the oldest human remains, such as the Eugis and Neanderthal skulls, discovered in association with evidences of immense antiquity, have remarkable characteristics, pointing in some respects in the direction of the great apes, they are still the crania of men. After a critical and exhaustive examination of the two skulls above referred to, Professor Huxley says concerning the Eugis skull: ‘Its measurements agree equally well with those of some European skulls. And assuredly there is no mark of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.’[35]And insumming up the results of an equally critical examination of the far more remarkable Neanderthal skull, the same unquestionable authority says: ‘In no sense, then, can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being intermediate between men and apes. At most they demonstrate the existence of amanwhose skull may be said to revert somewhat towards the pithecoid type.... And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of known human skulls, the Neanderthal cranium is by no means so isolated as it appears to be at first, but forms in reality the extreme term of a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed of human crania.’[36]Nothing has arisen to seriously modify these authoritative statements. No thorough anatomist practically familiar with the structure of the anthropoids on the one side, and man on the other, could attempt to argue that man can be directly a descendant of chimpanzee, gorilla, or orang. ‘I may say,’ says Huxley, ‘that the fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he has probably become what he is.’[37]
But let us beware of mistaking, or even distorting, the true meaning of this, as understood by the philosophical evolutionist. It does not for a moment place the physical nature of man outside the range of the great creative law of natural selection. No arrangement of the monkeys can present us with a rational order of development, of which man is physically the latest and highest outcome. But the precursor of man, of whose actual existence no direct proof has yet arisen, is assumed, on the evidence of absolutelyinnumerable details, the full value of which is only to be clearly seen by experts, to have ascended, not from any anthropoid,—chimpanzee, gorilla, nor orang,—but these apes are found to form the nearest branch existing, produced by the same trunk, out of which, physically, man’s nature was, by the law of descent, evolved.
That the embryological and anatomical resemblances between man and the highest apes are of a profound and striking character, no sane educated man would attempt to traverse; and that this involves close biological relationship, and proves the operation on each, of the same organic laws of development, so far as physical origin is concerned, is also certain.
That there are evidences of an antiquity of the human race, as such, immensely disproportionate to that indicated in the absolutely unreliable and useless ‘received’ chronologies, it would be folly to doubt and immorality to neglect. It is evidenced by man’s works, which are shown, without question, to be of indefinitely vast antiquity; and correspond, in the main, with the works of races of men still living. It is shown by the enormous antiquity of races of men as we know them; by the vast age of languages, made evident, by a deep analysis of their structure, as sister and parent languages; as well as by the great age of even human remains.
Now all this, taken in connection with the anatomical structure and embryological development of man, makes it impossible to suppose that man’s physical nature was not a product of the same great creative laws, the same vital processes, as those that gave origin to the chimpanzee or the gorilla; a slow creation, through a long line of varied life,from ‘the dust of the ground,’ the elements of the earth. There is in this relation an almost marvellous insight in David’s song:—