Chapter 10

[AT]Another element in this is also the question raised by Dawkins, Geikie, and others as to subdivisions of the Post-glacial period and intermissions of the Glacial cold. After careful consideration of these views, however, I cannot consider them as of much importance.

Such are the glimpses, obscure though stimulating to the imagination, which geology can give of the circumstances attending the appearance of man in Western Europe. How far we are from being able to account for his origin, or to give its circumstances and relative dates for the whole world, the reader will readily understand. Still it is something to know that there is an intelligible meeting-place of the later geological ages and the age of man, and that it is one inviting to many and hopeful researches. It is curious also to find that the few monuments disinterred by geology, the antediluvian record of Holy Scripture, and the golden age of heathen tradition, seem alike to point to similar physical conditions, and to that simple state of the arts of life in which “gold and wampum and flint stones”[AU]constituted the chief material treasures of the earliest tribes of men. They also point to the immeasurable elevation, then as now, of man over his brute rivals for the dominion of the earth. To the naturalist this subject opens up most inviting yet most difficult paths of research, to beentered on with caution and reverence, rather than in the bold and dashing spirit of many modern attempts. The Christian, on his part, may feel satisfied that the scattered monumental relics of the caves and gravels will tell no story very different from that which he has long believed on other evidence, nor anything inconsistent with those views of man’s heavenly origin and destiny which have been the most precious inheritance of the greatest and best minds of every age, from that early pre-historic period when men, “palaeolithic” men, no doubt, began to “invoke the name of Jehovah,” the coming Saviour, down to those times when life and immortality are brought to light, for all who will see, by the Saviour already come.

[AU]So I read the “gold, bedolah, and shoham” of the description of Eden in Genesis ii.—the oldest literary record of the stone age.

In completing this series of pictures, I wish emphatically to insist on the imperfection of the sketches which I have been able to present, and which are less, in comparison with the grand march of the creative work, even as now imperfectly known to science, than the roughest pencilling of a child when compared with a finished picture. If they have any popular value, it will be in presenting such a broad general view of a great subject as may induce further study to fill up the details. If they have any scientific value, it will be in removing the minds of British students for a little from the too exclusive study of their own limited marginal area, which has been to them too much the “celestial empire” around which all other countries must be arranged, and in divesting the subject of the special colouringgiven to it by certain prominent cliques and parties.

Geology as a science is at present in a peculiar and somewhat exceptional state. Under the influence of a few men of commanding genius belonging to the generation now passing away, it has made so gigantic conquests that its armies have broken up into bands of specialists, little better than scientific banditti, liable to be beaten in detail, and prone to commit outrages on common sense and good taste, which bring their otherwise good cause into disrepute. The leaders of these bands are, many of them, good soldiers, but few of them fitted to be general officers, and none of them able to reunite our scattered detachments. We need larger minds, of broader culture and wider sympathies, to organise and rule the lands which we have subdued, and to lead on to further conquests.

In the present state of natural science in Britain, this evil is perhaps to be remedied only by providing a wider and deeper culture for our young men. Few of our present workers have enjoyed that thorough training in mental as well as physical science, which is necessary to enable men even of great powers to take large and lofty views of the scheme of nature. Hence we often find men who are fair workers in limited departments, reasoning most illogically, taking narrow and local views, elevating the exception into the rule, led away by baseless metaphysical subtleties, quarrelling with men who look at their specialtiesfrom a different point of view, and even striving and plotting for the advancement of their own hobbies. Such defects certainly mar much of the scientific work now being done. In the more advanced walks of scientific research, they are to some extent neutralised by that free discussion which true science always fosters; though even here they sometimes vexatiously arrest the progress of truth, or open floodgates of error which it may require much labour to close. But in public lectures and popular publications they run riot, and are stimulated by the mistaken opposition of narrow-minded good men, by the love of the new and sensational, and by the rivalry of men struggling for place and position. To launch a clever and startling fallacy which will float for a week and stir up a hard fight, seems almost as great a triumph as the discovery of an important fact or law; and the honest student is distracted with the multitude of doctrines, and hustled aside by the crowd of ambitious groundlings.

The only remedy in the case is a higher and more general scientific education; and yet I do not wonder that many good men object to this, simply because of the difficulty of finding honest and competent teachers, themselves well grounded in their subjects, and free from that too common insanity of specialists and half-educated men, which impels them to run amuck at everything that does not depend on their own methods of research. This is a difficulty which can be met in our time only by the general goodsense and right feeling of the community taking a firm hold of the matter, and insisting on the organization and extension of the higher scientific education, as well as that of a more elementary character, under the management of able and sane men. Yet even if not so counteracted, present follies will pass away, and a new and better state of natural science will arise in the future, by its own internal development. Science cannot long successfully isolate itself from God. Its life lies in the fact that it is the exponent of the plans and works of the great Creative Will. It must, in spite of itself, serve His purposes, by dispelling blighting ignorance and superstition, by lighting the way to successive triumphs of human skill over the powers of nature, and by guarding men from the evils that flow from infringement of natural laws. And it cannot fail, as it approaches nearer to the boundaries of that which may be known by finite minds, to be humbled by the contemplation of the infinite, and to recognise therein that intelligence of which the human mind is but the image and shadow.

It may be that theologians also are needed who shall be fit to take the place of Moses to our generation, in teaching it again the very elements of natural theology; but let them not look upon science as a cold and godless demon, holding forth to the world a poisoned cup cunningly compounded of truth and falsehood; but rather as the natural ally and associate of the gospel of salvation. The matter is so put in one of those visions which close the canon ofrevelation, when the prophet sees a mighty angel having the “everlasting gospel to preach;” but he begins his proclamation by calling on men to “worship Himthat made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters.” Men must know God as the Creator even before they seek Him as a benefactor and redeemer. Thus religion must go hand in hand with all true and honest science. In this way only may we look forward to a time when a more exact and large-minded science shall be in perfect accord with a more pure and spiritual Christianity, when the natural and the spiritual shall be seen to be the necessary complements of each other, and when we shall hear no more of reconciliations between science and theology, because there will be no quarrels to reconcile. Already, even in the present chaos of scientific and religious opinion, indications can be seen by the observant, that the Divine Spirit of order is breathing on the mass, and will evolve from it new and beautiful worlds of mental and spiritual existence.

CHAPTER XIV.

PRIMITIVE MAN. CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO MODERN THEORIES AS TO HIS ORIGIN.

Thegeological record, as we have been reading it, introduces us to primitive man, but gives us no distinct information as to his origin. Tradition and revelation have, it is true, their solutions of the mystery, but there are, and always have been, many who will not take these on trust, but must grope for themselves with the taper of science or philosophy into the dark caverns whence issue the springs of humanity. In former times it was philosophic speculation alone which lent its dim and uncertain light to these bold inquirers; but in our day the new and startling discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology have flashed up with an unexpected brilliancy, and have at least served to dazzle the eyes and encourage the hopes of the curious, and to lead to explorations more bold and systematic than any previously undertaken. Thus has been born amongst us, or rather renewed, for it is a very old thing, that evolutionist philosophy, which has been well characterised as the “baldest of all the philosophies which have sprung up in our world,” and which solves the question of human origin by the assumption that human nature exists potentially in mere inorganic matter, and that a chainof spontaneous derivation connects incandescent molecules or star-dust with the world, and with man himself.

This evolutionist doctrine is itself one of the strangest phenomena of humanity. It existed, and most naturally, in the oldest philosophy and poetry, in connection with the crudest and most uncritical, attempts of the human mind to grasp the system of nature; but that in our day a system destitute of any shadow of proof, and supported merely by vague analogies and figures of speech, and by the arbitrary and artificial coherence of its own parts, should be accepted as a philosophy, and should find able adherents to string upon its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores of knowledge, is surpassingly strange. It seems to indicate that the accumulated facts of our age have gone altogether beyond its capacity for generalisation; and but for the vigour which one sees everywhere, it might be taken as an indication that the human mind has fallen into a state of senility, and in its dotage mistakes for science the imaginations which were the dreams of its youth.

In many respects these speculations are important and worthy of the attention of thinking men. They seek to revolutionise the religious beliefs of the world, and if accepted would destroy most of the existing theology and philosophy. They indicate tendencies among scientific thinkers, which, though probably temporary, must, before they disappear, descend to lower strata, and reproduce themselves in grosserforms, and with most serious effects on the whole structure of society. With one class of minds they constitute a sort of religion, which so far satisfies the craving for truths higher than those which relate to immediate wants and pleasures. With another and perhaps larger class, they are accepted as affording a welcome deliverance from all scruples of conscience and fears of a hereafter. In the domain of science evolutionism has like tendencies. It reduces the position of man, who becomes a descendant of inferior animals, and a mere term in a series whose end is unknown. It removes from the study of nature the ideas of final cause and purpose; and the evolutionist, instead of regarding the world as a work of consummate plan, skill, and adjustment, approaches nature as he would a chaos of fallen rocks, which may present forms of castles and grotesque profiles of men and animals, but they are all fortuitous and without significance. It obliterates the fine perception of differences from the mind of the naturalist, and resolves all the complicated relations of living things into some simple idea of descent with modification. It thus destroys the possibility of a philosophical classification, reducing all things to a mere series, and leads to a rapid decay in systematic zoology and botany, which is already very manifest among the disciples of Spencer and Darwin in England. The effect of this will be, if it proceeds further, in a great degree to destroy the educational value and popular interest attaching to these sciences, and to throw themdown at the feet of a system of debased metaphysics. As redeeming features in all this, are the careful study of varietal forms, and the inquiries as to the limits of species, which have sprung from these discussions, and the harvest of which will be reaped by the true naturalists of the future.

Thus these theories as to the origin of men and animals and plants are full of present significance, and may be studied with profit by all; and in no part of their applications more usefully than in that which relates to man. Let us then inquire,—1. What is implied in the idea of evolution as applied to man? 2. What is implied in the idea of creation? 3. How these several views accord with what we actually know as the result of scientific investigation? The first and second of these questions may well occupy the whole of this chapter, and we shall be able merely to glance at their leading aspects. In doing so, it may be well first to place before us in general terms the several alternatives which evolutionists offer, as to the mode in which the honour of an origin from apes or ape-like animals can be granted to us, along with the opposite view as to the independent origin of man which have been maintained either on scientific or scriptural grounds.

All the evolutionist theories of the origin of man depend primarily on the possibility of his having been produced from some of the animals more closely allied to him, by the causes now in operation which lead to varietal forms, or by similar causes which havebeen in operation; and some attach more and others less weight to certain of these causes, or gratuitously suppose others not actually known. Of such causes of change some are internal and others external to the organism. With respect to the former, one school assumes an innate tendency in every species to change in the course of time.[AV]Another believes in exceptional births, either in the course of ordinary generation or by the mode of parthenogenesis.[AW]Another refers to the known facts of reproductive accelleration or retardation observed in some humble creatures.[AX]New forms arising in any of these ways or fortuitously, may, it is supposed, be perpetuated and increased and further improved by favouring external circumstances and the effort of the organism to avail itself of these,[AY]or by the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.[AZ]

[AV]Parsons, Owen.

[AW]Mivart, Ferris.

[AX]Hyatt and Cope.

[AY]Lamarck, etc.

[AZ]Darwin, etc.

On the other hand, those who believe in the independent origin of man admit the above causes as adequate only to produce mere varieties, liable to return into the original stock. They may either hold that man has appeared as a product of special and miraculous creation, or that he has been created mediately by the operation of forces also concerned in the production of other animals, but the precise nature of which is still unknown to us; or lastly, they may hold what seems to be the view favoured by the book of Genesis, that his bodily form is a productof mediate creation and his spiritual nature a direct emanation from his Creator.

The discussion of all these rival theories would occupy volumes, and to follow them into details would require investigations which have already bewildered many minds of some scientific culture. Further, it is the belief of the writer that this plunging into multitudes of details has been fruitful of error, and that it will be a better course to endeavour to reach the root of the matter by looking at the foundations of the general doctrine of evolution itself, and then contrasting it with its rival.

Taking, then, this broad view of the subject, two great leading alternatives are presented to us. Either man is an independent product of the will of a Higher Intelligence, acting directly or through the laws and materials of his own institution and production, or he has been produced by an unconscious evolution from lower things. It is true that many evolutionists, either unwilling to offend, or not perceiving the logical consequences of their own hypothesis, endeavour to steer a middle course, and to maintain that the Creator has proceeded by way of evolution. But the bare, hard logic of Spencer, the greatest English authority on evolution, leaves no place for this compromise, and shows that the theory, carried out to its legitimate consequences, excludes the knowledge of a Creator and the possibility of His work. We have, therefore, to choose between evolution and creation; bearing in mind, however, that there may be a placein nature for evolution, properly limited, as well as for other things, and that the idea of creation by no means excludes law and second causes.

Limiting ourselves in the first place to theories of evolution, and to these as explaining the origin of species of living beings, and especially of man, we naturally first inquire as to the basis on which they are founded. Now no one pretends that they rest on facts actually observed, for no one has ever observed the production of even one species. Nor do they even rest, like the deductions of theoretical geology, on the extension into past time of causes of change now seen to be in action. Their probability depends entirely on their capacity to account hypothetically for certain relations of living creatures to each other, and to the world without; and the strongest point of the arguments of their advocates is the accumulation of cases of such relations supposed to be accounted for. Such being the kind of argument with which we have to deal, we may first inquire what we are required to believe as conditions of the action of evolution, and secondly, to what extent it actually does explain the phenomena.

In the first place, as evolutionists, we are required to assume certain forces, or materials, or both, with which evolution shall begin. Darwin, in his Origin of Species, went so far as to assume the existence of a few of the simpler types of animals; but this view, of course, was only a temporary resting-place for his theory. Others assume a primitive protoplasm, orphysical basis of life, and arbitrarily assigning to this substance properties now divided between organised and unorganised, and between dead and living matter, find no difficulty in deducing all plants and animals from it. Still, even this cannot have been the ultimate material. It must have been evolved from something. We are thus brought back to certain molecules of star-dust, or certain conflicting forces, which must have had self-existence, and must have potentially included all subsequent creatures. Otherwise, if with Spencer we hold that God is “unknowable” and creation “unthinkable,” we are left suspended on nothing over a bottomless void, and must adopt as the initial proposition of our philosophy, that all things were made out of nothing, and by nothing; unless we prefer to doubt whether anything exists, and to push the doctrine of relativity to the unscientific extreme of believing that we can study the relations of things non-existent or unknown. So we must allow the evolutionist some small capital to start with; observing, however, that self-existent matter in a state of endless evolution is something of which we cannot possibly have any definite conception.

Being granted thus much, the evolutionist next proceeds to demand that we shall also believe in the indefinite variability of material things, and shall set aside all idea that there is any difference in kind between the different substances which we know. They must all be mutually convertible, or at leastderivable from some primitive material. It is true that this is contrary to experience. The chemist holds that matter is of different kinds, that one element cannot be converted into another; and he would probably smile if told that, even in the lapse of enormous periods of time, limestone could be evolved out of silica. He may think that this is very different from the idea that a snail can be evolved from an oyster, or a bird from a reptile. But the zoologist will inform him that species of animals are only variable within certain limits, and are not transmutable, in so far as experience and experiment are concerned. They have their allotropic forms, but cannot be changed into one another.

But if we grant this second demand, the evolutionist has a third in store for us. We must also admit that by some inevitable necessity the changes of things must in the main take place in one direction, from the more simple to the more complex, from the lower to the higher. At first sight this seems not only to follow from the previous assumptions, but to accord with observation. Do not all living things rise from a simpler to a more complex state? has not the history of the earth displayed a gradually increasing elevation and complexity? But, on the other hand, the complex organism becoming mature, resolves itself again into the simple germ, and finally is dissolved into its constituent elements. The complex returns into the simple, and what we see is not an evolution, but a revolution. In like manner, ingeological time, the tendency seems to be ever to disintegration and decay. This we see everywhere, and find that elevation occurs only by the introduction of new species in a way which is not obvious, and which may rather imply the intervention of a cause from without; so that here also we are required to admit as a general principle what is contrary to experience.

If, however, we grant the evolutionist these postulates, we must next allow him to take the facts of botany and zoology out of their ordinary connection, and thread them like a string of beads, as Herbert Spencer has done in his “Biology,” on the threefold cord thus fashioned. This done, we next find, as might have been expected, certain gaps or breaks which require to be cunningly filled with artificial material, in order to give an appearance of continuity to the whole.

The first of these gaps which we notice is that between dead and living matter. It is easy to fill this with such a term as protoplasm, which includes matter both dead and living, and so to ignore this distinction; but practically we do not yet know as a possible thing the elevation of matter, without the agency of a previous living organism, from that plane in which it is subject merely to physical force, and is unorganised, to that where it becomes organised, and lives. Under that strange hypothesis of the origin of life from meteors, with which Sir William Thomson closed his address at a late meeting of the BritishAssociation, there was concealed a cutting sarcasm which the evolutionists felt. It reminded them that the men who evolve all things from physical forces do not yet know how these forces can produce the phenomena of life even in its humblest forms. It is true that the scientific world has been again and again startled by the announcement of the production of some of the lowest forms of life, either from dead organic matter, or from merely mineral substances; but in every case heretofore the effort has proved as vain as the analogies attempted to be set up between the formation of crystals and that of organized tissues are fallacious.

A second gap is that which separates vegetable and animal life. These are necessarily the converse of each other, the one deoxidizes and accumulates, the other oxidizes and expends. Only in reproduction or decay does the plant simulate the action of the animal, and the animal never in its simplest forms assumes the functions of the plant. Those obscure cases in the humbler spheres of animal and vegetable life which have been supposed to show a union of the two kingdoms, disappear on investigation. This gap can, I believe, be filled up only by an appeal to our ignorance. There may be, or may have been, some simple creature unknown to us, on the extreme verge of the plant kingdom, that was capable of passing the limit and becoming an animal. But no proof of this exists. It is true that the primitive germs of many kinds of humble plants and animals are so much alike, that much confusion has arisen in tracing their development. It is also true that some of these creatures can subsist under very dissimilar conditions, and in very diverse states, and that under the specious name of Biology,[BA]we sometimes find a mass of these confusions, inaccurate observations and varietal differences made to do duty for scientific facts. But all this does not invalidate the grand primary distinction between the animal and the plant, which should be thoroughly taught and illustrated to all young naturalists, as one of the best antidotes to the fallacies of the evolutionist school.

[BA]It is doubtful whether men who deny the existence of vital force have a right to call their science “Biology,” any more than atheists have to call their doctrine “Theology;” and it is certain that the assumption of a science of Biology as distinct from Phytology and Zoology, or including both, is of the nature of a “pious fraud” on the part of the more enlightened evolutionists. The objections stated in the text, to what have been called Archebiosis and Heterogenesis seem perfectly applicable, in so far as I can judge from a friendly review by Wallace, to the mass of heterogeneous material accumulated by Dr. Bastian in his recent volumes. The conclusions of this writer, would also, if established, involve evolution in a fatalembarras des richesses, by the hourly production during all geological time, of millions of new forms all capable of indefinite development.

A third is that between any species of animal or plant and any other species. It was this gap, and this only, which Darwin undertook to fill up by his great work on the origin of species, but, notwithstanding the immense amount of material thus expended, it yawns as wide as ever, since it must beadmitted that no case has been ascertained in which an individual of one species has transgressed the limits between it and other species. However extensive the varieties produced by artificial breeding, the essential characters of the species remain, and even its minor characters may be reproduced, while the barriers established in nature between species by the laws of their reproduction, seem to be absolute.

With regard to species, however, it must be observed that naturalists are not agreed as to what constitutes a species. Many so-called species are probably races, or varieties, and one benefit of these inquiries has been to direct attention to the proper discrimination of species from varieties among animals and plants. The loose discrimination of species, and the tendency to multiply names, have done much to promote evolutionist views; but the researches of the evolutionists themselves have shown that we must abandon transmutation of true species as a thing of the present; and if we imagine it to have occurred, must refer it to the past.

Another gap is that between the nature of the animal and the self-conscious, reasoning, moral nature of man. We not only have no proof that any animal can, by any force in itself, or by any merely physical influences from without, rise to such a condition; but the thing is in the highest degree improbable. It is easy to affirm, with the grosser materialists, that thought is a secretion of brain, as bile is of the liver; but a moment’s thought shows that no realanalogy obtains between the cases. We may vaguely suppose, with Darwin, that the continual exercise of such powers as animals possess, may have developed those of man. But our experience of animals shows that their intelligence differs essentially from that of man, being a closed circle ever returning into itself, while that of man is progressive, inventive, and accumulative, and can no more be correlated with that of the animal than the vital phenomena of the animal with those of the plant. Nor can the gap between the higher religious and moral sentiments of man, and the instinctive affections of the brutes, be filled up with that miserable ape imagined by Lubbock, which, crossed in love, or pining with cold and hunger, conceived, for the first time in its poor addled pate, “the dread of evil to come,” and so became the father of theology. This conception, which Darwin gravely adopts, would be most ludicrous, but for the frightful picture which it gives of the aspect in which religion appears to the mind of the evolutionist.

The reader will now readily perceive that the simplicity and completeness of the evolutionist theory entirely disappear when we consider the unproved assumptions on which it is based, and its failure to connect with each other some of the most important facts in nature: that, in short, it is not in any true sense a philosophy, but merely an arbitrary arrangement of facts in accordance with a number of unproved hypotheses. Such philosophies, “falsely so called,”have existed ever since man began to reason on nature, and this last of them is one of the weakest and most pernicious of the whole. Let the reader take up either of Darwin’s great books, or Spencer’s “Biology,” and merely ask himself as he reads each paragraph, “What is assumed here and what is proved?” and he will find the whole fabric melt away like a vision. He will find, however, one difference between these writers. Darwin always states facts carefully and accurately, and when he comes to a difficulty tries to meet it fairly. Spencer often exaggerates or extenuates with reference to his facts, and uses the arts of the dialectician where argument fails.

Many naturalists who should know better are puzzled with the great array of facts presented by evolutionists; and while their better judgment causes them to doubt as to the possibility of the structures which they study being produced by such blind and material processes, are forced to admit that there must surely be something in a theory so confidently asserted, supported by so great names, and by such an imposing array of relations which it can explain. They would be relieved from their weak concessions were they to study carefully a few of the instances adduced, and to consider how easy it is by a little ingenuity to group undoubted facts around a false theory. I could wish to present here illustrations of this, which abound in every part of the works I have referred to, but space will not permit. One or two must suffice. The first may be taken from one ofthe strong points often dwelt on by Spencer in his “Biology.”[BB]

[BB]“Principles of Biology,” § 118.

"But the experiences which most clearly illustrate to us the process of general evolution are our experiences of special evolution, repeated in every plant and animal. Each organism exhibits, within a short space of time, a series of changes which, when supposed to occupy a period indefinitely great and to go on in various ways instead of one, may give us a tolerably clear conception of organic evolution in general. In an individual development we have compressed into a comparatively infinitesimal space a series of metamorphoses equally vast with those which the hypothesis of evolution assumes to have taken place during those unmeasurable epochs that the earth’s crust tells us of. A tree differs from a seed immeasurably in every respect—in bulk, in structure, in colour, in form, in specific gravity, in chemical composition: differs so greatly that no visible resemblance of any kind can be pointed out between them. Yet is the one changed in the course of a few years into the other; changed so gradually that at no moment can it be said, ‘Now the seed ceases to be and the tree exists.’ What can be more widely contrasted than a newly-born child and the small gelatinous spherule constituting the human ovum? The infant is so complex in structure that a cyclopædia is needed to describe its constituent parts. The germinal vesicle is so simplethat it may be defined in a line.... If a single cell under appropriate conditions becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may in the course of untold millions of years give origin to the human race."

“It is true that many minds are so unfurnished with those experiences of nature, out of which this conception is built, that they find difficulty in forming it.... To such the hypothesis that by any series of changes a protozoan should ever give origin to a mammal seems grotesque—as grotesque as did Galileo’s assertion of the earth’s movement seem to the Aristoteleans; or as grotesque as the assertion of the earth’s sphericity seems now to the New Zealanders.”

I quote the above as a specimen of evolutionist reasoning from the hand of a master, and as referring to one of the corner-stones of this strange philosophy. I may remark with respect to it, in the first place, that it assumes those “conditions” of evolution to which I have already referred. In the second place, it is full of inaccurate statements of fact, all in a direction tending to favour the hypothesis. For example, a tree does not differ “immeasurably” from a seed, especially if the seed is of the same species of tree, for the principal parts of the tree and its principal chemical constituents already exist and can be detected in the seed, and unless it were so, the development of the tree from the seed could not takeplace. Besides, the seed itself is not a thing self-existent or fortuitous. The production of a seed without a previous tree of the same kind is quite as difficult to suppose as the production of a tree without a previous seed containing its living embryo. In the third place, the whole argument is one of analogy. The germ becomes a mature animal, passing through many intermediate stages, therefore the animal may have descended from some creature which when mature was as simple as the germ. The value of such an analogy depends altogether on the similarity of the “conditions” which, in such a case, are really the efficient causes at work. The germ of a mammal becomes developed by the nourishment supplied from the system of a parent, which itself produced the germ, and into whose likeness the young animal is destined to grow. These are the “appropriate conditions” of its development. But when our author assumes from this other “appropriate conditions,” by which an organism, which on the hypothesis is not a germ but a mature animal, shall be developed into the likeness, of something different from its parent, he oversteps the bounds of legitimate analogy. Further, the reproduction of the animal, as observed, is a closed series, beginning at the embryo and returning thither again; the evolution attempted to be established is a progressive series going on from one stage to another. A reproductive circle once established obeys certain definite laws, but its origin, or how it can leave its orbit and revolve in some other, wecannot explain without the introduction of some new efficient cause. The one term of the analogy is a revolution, and the other is an evolution. The revolution within the circle of the reproduction of the species gives no evidence that at some point the body will fly off at a tangent, and does not even inform us whether it is making progress in space. Even if it is so making progress, its orbit of revolution may remain the same. But it may be said the reproduction of the species is not in a circle but in a spiral. Within the limit of experience it is not so, since, however it may undulate, it always returns into itself. But supposing it to be a spiral, it may ascend or descend, or expand and contract; but this does not connect it with other similar spirals, the separate origin of which is to be separately accounted for.

I have quoted the latter part of the passage because it is characteristic of evolutionists to decry the intelligence of those who differ from them. Now it is fair to admit that it requires some intelligence and some knowledge of nature to produce or even to understand such analogies as those of Mr. Spencer and his followers, but it is no less true that a deeper insight into the study of nature may not only enable us to understand these analogies, but to detect their fallacies. I am sorry to say, however, that at present the hypothesis of evolution is giving so strong a colouring to much of popular and even academic teaching, more especially in the easy and flippant conversion of the facts of embryology into instancesof evolution on the plan of the above extract, that the Spencerians may not long have to complain of want of faith and appreciation on the part of the improved apes whom they are kind enough to instruct as to their lowly origin.

The mention of “appropriate conditions” in the above extract reminds me of another fatal objection to evolution which its advocates continually overlook. An animal or plant advancing from maturity to the adult state is in every stage of its progress a complete and symmetrical organism, correlated in all its parts and adapted to surrounding conditions. Suppose it to become modified in any way, to ever so small an extent, the whole of these relations are disturbed. If the modification is internal and spontaneous, there is no guarantee that it will suit the vastly numerous external agencies to which the creature is subjected. If it is produced by agencies from without, there is no guarantee that it will accord with the internal relations of the parts modified. The probabilities are incalculably great against the occurrence of many such disturbances without the breaking up altogether of the nice adjustment of parts and conditions. This is no doubt one reason of the extinction of so many species in geological time, and also of the strong tendency of every species to spring back to its normal condition when in any way artificially caused to vary. It is also connected with the otherwise mysterious law of the constant transmission of all the characters of the parent.

Spencer and Darwin occasionally see this difficulty, though they habitually neglect it in their reasonings. Spencer even tries to turn one part of it to account as follows:—

“Suppose the head of a mammal to become very much more weighty—what must be the indirect results? The muscles of the neck are put to greater exertions; and the vertebras have to bear additional tensions and pressures caused both by the increased weight of the head and the stronger contraction of muscles that support and move the head.” He goes on to say that the processes of the vertebrae will have augmented strains put upon them, the thoracic region and fore limbs will have to be enlarged, and even the hind limbs may require modification to facilitate locomotion. He concludes: “Any one who compares the outline of the bison with that of its congener, the ox, will clearly see how profoundly a heavier head affects the entire osseous and muscular system.”

We need not stop to mention the usual inaccuracies as to facts in this paragraph, as, for example, the support of the head being attributed to muscles alone, without reference to the strong elastic ligament of the neck. We may first notice the assumption that an animal can acquire a head “very much more weighty” than that which it had before, a very improbable supposition, whether as a monstrous birth Dr as an effect of external conditions after birth. But suppose this to have occurred, and what is even less likely, that the very much heavier head is an advantagein some way, what guarantee can evolution give us that the number of other modifications required would take place simultaneously with this acquisition! It would be easy to show that this would depend on the concurrence of hundreds of other conditions within and without the animal, all of which must co-operate to produce the desired effect, if indeed they could produce this effect even by their conjoint action, a power which the writer, it will be observed, quietly assumes, as well as the probability of the initial change in the head. Finally, the naivete with which it is assumed that the bison and the ox are examples of such an evolution, would be refreshing in these artificial days, if instances of it did not occur in almost every page of the writings of evolutionists.

It would only weary the reader to follow evolution any further into details, especially as my object in this chapter is to show that generally, and as a theory of nature and of man, it has no good foundation; but we should not leave the subject without noting precisely the derivation of man according to this theory; and for this purpose I may quote Darwin’s summary of his conclusions on the subject.[BC]

[BC]“Descent of Man,” part ii., ch. 21.

“Man,” says Mr. Darwin, “is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World. This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed amongst the quadrumana, as surelyas would the common, and still more ancient, progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. The quadrumana and all the higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal; and this, through a long line of diversified forms, either from some reptile-like or some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchiæ, with the two sexes united in the same individual, and with the most important organs of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly developed. This animal seems to have been more like the larvæ of our existing marine Ascidians than any other form known.”

The author of this passage, in condescension to our weakness of faith, takes us no further back than to an Ascidian, or “sea-squirt,” the resemblance, however, of which to a vertebrate animal is merely analogical, and, though a very curious case of analogy, altogether temporary and belonging to the young state of the creature, without affecting its adult state or its real affinities with other mollusks. In order, however, to get the Ascidian itself, he must assume all the “conditions” already referred to in the previous part of this article, and fill most of the gaps. He has, however, in the “Origin of Species” and “Descent of Man,” attempted merely to fill one of the breaks in the evolutionary series, that between distinct species, leaving us to receive all the rest on merefaith. Even in respect to the question of species, in all the long chain between the Ascidian and the man, he has not certainly established one link; and in the very last change, that from the ape-like ancestor, he equally fails to satisfy us as to matters so trivial as the loss of the hair, which, on the hypothesis, clothed the pre-human back, and on matters so weighty as the dawn of human reason and conscience.

We thus see that evolution as an hypothesis has no basis in experience or in scientific fact, and that its imagined series of transmutations has breaks which cannot be filled. We have now to consider how it stands with the belief that man has been created by a higher power. Against this supposition the evolutionists try to create a prejudice in two ways. First, they maintain with Herbert Spencer that the hypothesis of creation is inconceivable, or, as they say, “unthinkable;” an assertion which, when examined, proves to mean only that we do not know perfectly the details of such an operation, an objection equally fatal to the origin either of matter or life, on the hypothesis of evolution. Secondly, they always refer to creation as if it must be a special miracle, in the sense of a contravention of or departure from ordinary natural laws; but this is an assumption utterly without proof, since creation may be as much according to law as evolution, though in either case the precise laws involved may be very imperfectly known.

How absurd, they say, to imagine an animal createdat once, fully formed, by a special miracle, instead of supposing it to be slowly elaborated through, countless ages of evolution. To Darwin the doctrine of creation is but “a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion.” “These authors,” he says, “seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth; but do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth’s history, certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues?” Darwin, with all his philosophic fairness, sometimes becomes almost Spencerian in his looseness of expression; and in the above extract, the terms “miraculous,” “innumerable,” “elemental atoms,” “suddenly,” and “flash,” all express ideas in no respect necessary to the work of creation. Those who have no faith in evolution as a cause of the production of species, may well ask in return how the evolutionist can prove that creation must be instantaneous, that it must follow no law, that it must produce an animal fully formed, that it must be miraculous. In short, it is a portion of the policy of evolutionists to endeavour to tie down their opponents to a purely gratuitous and ignorant view of creation, and then to attack them in that position.

What, then, is the actual statement of the theory of creation as it may be held by a modern man of science? Simply this; that all things have been produced by the Supreme Creative Will, acting either directly or through the agency of the forces and materials of His own production.

This theory does not necessarily affirm that creation is miraculous, in the sense of being contrary to or subversive of law; law and order are as applicable to creation as to any other process. It does not contradict the idea of successive creations. There is no necessity that the process should be instantaneous and without progression. It does not imply that all kinds of creation are alike. There may be higher and lower kinds. It does not exclude the idea of similarity or dissimilarity of plan and function as to the products of creation. Distinct products of creation may be either similar to each other in different degrees, or dissimilar. It does not even exclude evolution or derivation to a certain extent: anything once created may, if sufficiently flexible and elastic, be evolved or involved in various ways. Indeed, creation and derivation may, rightly understood, be complementary to each other. Created things, unless absolutely unchangeable, must be more or less modified by influences from within and from without, and derivation or evolution may account for certain subordinate changes of things already made. Man, for example, may be a product of creation, yet his creation may have been in perfect harmony with those laws of procedure which the Creator has set for His own operations. He may have been preceded by other creations of things more or less similar or dissimilar. He may have been created by the same processes with some or all of these, or by different means. His body may have been created in one way, his soul in another. Hemay, nay, in all probability would be, part of a plan of which some parts would approach very near to him in structure or functions. After his creation, spontaneous culture and outward circumstances may have moulded him into varieties, and given him many different kinds of speech and of habits. These points are so obvious to common sense that it would be quite unnecessary to insist on them, were they not habitually overlooked or misstated by evolutionists.

The creation hypothesis is also free from some of the difficulties of evolution. It avoids the absurdity of an eternal progression from the less to the more complex. It provides in will, the only source of power actually known to us by ordinary experience, an intelligible origin of nature. It does not require us to contradict experience by supposing that there are no differences of kind or essence in things. It does not require us to assume, contrary to experience, an invariable tendency to differentiate and improve. It does not exact the bridging over of all gaps which may be found between the several grades of beings which exist or have existed.

Why, then, are so many men of science disposed to ignore altogether this view of the matter? Mainly, I believe, because, from the training of many of them, they are absolutely ignorant of the subject, and from their habits of thought have come to regard physical force and the laws regulating it as the one power in nature, and to relegate all spiritual powers or forces,or, as they have been taught to regard them, “supernatural” things, to the domain of the “unknowable.” Perhaps some portion of the difficulty may be got over by abandoning altogether the word “supernatural,” which has been much misused, and by holding nature to represent the whole cosmos, and to include both thephysicaland thespiritual, both of them in the fullest sense subject to law, but each to the law of its own special nature. I have read somewhere a story of some ignorant orientals who were induced to keep a steam-engine supplied with water by the fiction that it contained a terribledjin, or demon, who, if allowed to become thirsty, would break out and destroy them all. Had they been enabled to discard this superstition, and to understand the force of steam, we can readily imagine that they would now suppose they knew the whole truth, and might believe that any one who taught them that the engine was a product of intelligent design, was only taking them back to the old doctrine of the thirsty demon of the boiler. This is, I think, at present, the mental condition of many scientists with reference to creation.

Here we come to the first demand which the doctrine of creation makes on us by way of premises. In order that there may be creation there must be a primary Self-existent Spirit, whose will is supreme. The evolutionist cannot refuse to admit this on as good ground as that on which we hesitate to receive the postulates of his faith. It is no real objection to say that a God can be known to us only partially, and,with reference to His real essence, not at all; since, even if we admit this, it is no more than can be said of matter and force.

I am not about here to repeat any of the ordinary arguments for the existence of a spiritual First Cause, and Creator of all things, but it may be proper to show that this assumption is not inconsistent with experience, or with the facts and principles of modern science. The statement which I would make on this point shall be in the words of a very old writer, not so well known as he should be to many who talk volubly enough about antagonisms between science and Christianity: “That which is known of God is manifest in them (in men), for God manifested it unto them. For since the creation of the world His invisible things, even His eternal power and divinity are plainly seen, being perceived by means of things that are made.”[BD]The statement here is very precise. Certain things relating to God are manifest within men’s minds, and are proved by the evidence of His works; these properties of God thus manifested being specially His power or control of all forces, and His divinity or possession of a nature higher than ours. The argument of the writer is that all heathens know this; and, as a matter of fact, I believe it must be admitted even by those most sceptical on such points, that some notion of a divinity has been derived from nature by men of all nations and tribes, if we except, perhaps, a few enlightened positivists of this nineteenth centurywhom excess of light has made blind. “If the light that is in man be darkness, how great is that darkness.” But then this notion of a God is a very old and primitive one, and Spencer takes care to inform us that “first thoughts are either wholly out of harmony with things, or in very incomplete harmony with them,” and consequently that old beliefs and generally diffused notions are presumably wrong.

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