combined have run back with wonderful sagacity and success over a
certain length of the line of biological succession. Guided by
analogy, in his “Origin of Species” he placed as the root of life a
primordial germ, from which he conceived the amazing richness and
variety of the life that now is upon the earth’s surface, might be
deduced. If this were true it would not be final. The human
imagination would infallibly look behind the germ, and inquire into
the history of its genesis.
Certainty is here hopeless, but the materials for an opinion may be
attainable. In this dim twilight of speculation the inquirer
welcomes every gleam, and seeks to augment his light by indirect
incidences. He studies the methods of nature in the ages and the
worlds within his reach, in order to shape the course of imagination
in the antecedent ages and worlds. And though the certainty
possessed by experimental inquiry is here shut out, the imagination
is not left entirely without guidance. From the examination of the
solar system, Kant and Laplace came to the conclusion that its
various bodies once formed parts of the same undislocated mass; that
matter in a nebulous form preceded matter in a dense form; that as
the ages rolled away heat was wasted, condensation followed, planets
were detached, and that finally the chief portion of the fiery cloud
reached, by self-compression, the magnitude and density of our sun.
The earth itself offers evidence of a fiery origin; and in our day
the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace receives the independent
countenance of spectrum analysis, which proves the same substances
to be common to the earth and sun. Accepting some such view of the
construction of our system as probable, a desire immediately arises
to connect the present life of our planet with the past. We wish to
know something of our remotest ancestry.
On its first detachment from the central mass, life, as we
understand it, could hardly have been present on the earth. How then
did it come there? The thing to be encouraged here is a reverent
freedom—a freedom preceded by the hard discipline which checks
licentiousness in speculation—while the thing to be repressed, both
in science and out of it, is dogmatism. And here I am in the hands
of the meeting—willing to end, but ready to go on. I have no right
to intrude upon you, unasked, the unformed notions which are
floating like clouds or gathering to more solid consistency in the
modern speculative scientific mind. But if you wish me to speak
plainly, honestly, and undisputatiously, I am willing to do so. On
the present occasion
You are ordained to call, and I to come.
Two views, then, offer themselves to us. Life was present
potentially in matter when in the nebulous form, and was unfolded
from it by the way of natural development, or it is a principle
inserted into matter at a later date. With regard to the question of
time, the views of men have changed remarkably in our day and
generation; and I must say as regards courage also, and a manful
willingness to engage in open contest, with fair weapons, a great
change has also occurred.
The clergy of England—at all events the clergy of London—have nerve
enough to listen to the strongest views which any one amongst us
would care to utter; and they invite, if they do not challenge, men
of the most decided opinions to state and stand by those opinions in
open court. No theory upsets them. Let the most destructive
hypothesis be stated only in the language current among gentlemen,
and they look it in the face. They forego alike the thunders of
heaven and the terrors of the other place, smiting the theory, if
they do not like it, with honest secular strength. In fact, the
greatest cowards of the present day are not to be found among the
clergy, but within the pale of science itself.
Two or three years ago in an ancient London college—a clerical
institution—I heard a very remarkable lecture by a very remarkable
man. Three or four hundred clergymen were present at the lecture.
The orator began with the civilization of Egypt in the time of
Joseph; pointing out that the very perfect organization of the
kingdom, and the possession of chariots, in one of which Joseph
rode, indicated a long antecedent period of civilization. He then
passed on to the mud of the Nile, its rate of augmentation, its
present thickness, and the remains of human handiwork found therein;
thence to the rocks which bound the Nile valley, and which team with
organic remains. Thus, in his own clear and admirable way, he caused
the idea of the world’s age to expand itself indefinitely before the
mind of his audience, and he contrasted this with the age usually
assigned to the world.
During his discourse he seemed to be swimming against a stream; he
manifestly thought that he was opposing a general conviction. He
expected resistance; so did I. But it was all a mistake; there was
no adverse current, no opposing conviction, no resistance, merely
here and there a half humorous but unsuccessful attempt to entangle
him in his talk. The meeting agreed with all that had been said
regarding the antiquity of the earth and of its life. They had,
indeed, known it all long ago, and they good-humoredly rallied the
lecturer for coming amongst them with so stale a story. It was quite
plain that this large body of clergymen, who were, I should say, the
finest samples of their class, had entirely given up the ancient
landmarks, and transported the conception of life’s origin to an
indefinitely distant past.
In fact, clergymen, if I might be allowed a parenthesis to say so,
have as strong a leaning towards scientific truth as other men, only
the resistance to this bent—a resistance due to education—is
generally stronger in their case than in others. They do not lack
the positive element, namely, the love of truth, but the negative
element, the fear of error, preponderates.
The strength of an electric current is determined by two things—the
electro-motive force, and the resistance that force has to overcome.
A fraction, with the former as numerator and the latter as
denominator, expresses the current-strength. The “current-strength”
of the clergy towards science may also be expressed by making the
positive element just referred to the numerator, and the negative
one the denominator of a fraction. The numerator is not zero nor is
it even small, but the denominator is large; and hence the current
strength is such as we find it to be. Slowness of conception, even
open hostility, may be thus accounted for. They are for the most
part errors of judgment, and not sins against truth. To most of us
it may appear very simple, but to a few of us it appears
transcendently wonderful, that in all classes of society truth
should have this power and fascination. From the countless
modifications that life has undergone through natural selection and
the integration of infinitesimal steps, emerges finally the grand
result that the strength of truth is greater than the strength of
error, and that we have only to make the truth clear to the world to
gain the world to our side. Probably no one wonders more at this
result than the propounder of the law of natural selection himself.
Reverting to an old acquaintance of ours, it would seem, on purely
scientific grounds, as if a Veracity were at the heart of things; as
if, after ages of latent working, it had finally unfolded itself in
the life of man; as if it were still destined to unfold itself,
growing in girth, throwing out stronger branches and thicker leaves,
and tending more and more by its overshadowing presence to starve
the weeds of error from the intellectual soil.
But this is parenthetical; and the gist of our present inquiry
regarding the introduction of life is this: Does it belong to what
we call matter, or is it an independent principle inserted into
matter at some suitable epoch—say when the physical conditions
become such as to permit of the development of life? Let us put the
question with all the reverence due to a faith and culture in which
we all were cradled—a faith and culture, moreover, which are the
undeniable historic antecedents of our present enlightenment. I say,
let us put the question reverently, but let us also put it clearly
and definitely.
There are the strongest grounds for believing that during a certain
period of its history the earth was not, nor was it fit to be, the
theater of life. Whether this was ever a nebulous period, or merely
a molten period, does not much matter; and if we revert to the
nebulous condition, it is because the probabilities are really on
its side. Our question is this: Did creative energy pause until the
nebulous matter had condensed, until the earth had been detached,
until the solar fire had so far withdrawn from the earth’s vicinity
as to permit a crust to gather round a planet? Did it wait until the
air was isolated, until the seas were formed, until evaporation,
condensation, and the descent of rain had begun, until the eroding
forces of the atmosphere had weathered and decomposed the molten
rocks so as to form soils, until the sun’s rays had become so
tempered by distance and by waste as to be chemically fit for the
decompositions necessary to vegetable life? Having waited through
those æons until the proper conditions had set in, did it send the
fiat forth, “Let life be!”? These questions define a hypothesis not
without its difficulties, but the dignity of which was demonstrated
by the nobleness of the men whom it sustained.
Modern scientific thought is called upon to decide between this
hypothesis and another; and public thought generally will afterwards
be called upon to do the same. You may, however, rest secure in the
belief that the hypothesis just sketched can never be stormed, and
that it is sure, if it yield at all, to yield to a prolonged siege.
To gain new territory, modern argument requires more time than
modern arms, though both of them move with greater rapidity than of
yore.
But however the convictions of individuals here and there may be
influenced, the process must be slow and secular which commends the
rival hypothesis of natural evolution to the public mind. For what
are the core and essence of this hypothesis? Strip it naked and you
stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble
forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of
the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism
of the human body, but that the human mind itself—emotion,
intellect, will, and all their phenomena—were once latent in a fiery
cloud. Surely the mere statement of such a motion is more than a
refutation. But the hypothesis would probably go even further than
this. Many who hold it would probably assent to the position that at
the present moment all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our
science, and all our art—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael—are
potential in the fires of the sun.
We long to learn something of our origin. If the evolution
hypothesis be correct, even this unsatisfied yearning must have come
to us across the ages which separate the unconscious primeval mist
from the consciousness of to-day. I do not think that any holder of
the evolution hypothesis would say that I overstate it or overstrain
it in any way. I merely strip it of all vagueness, and bring before
you, unclothed and unvarnished, the notions by which it must stand
or fall.
Surely these notions represent an absurdity too monstrous to be
entertained by any sane mind. Let us, however, give them fair play.
Let us steady ourselves in front of the hypothesis, and, dismissing
all terror and excitement from our minds, let us look firmly into it
with the hard, sharp eye of intellect alone. Why are these notions
absurd, and why should sanity reject them? The law of relativity, of
which we have previously spoken, may find its application here.
These evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the
intellectual gibbet in relation to the ideas concerning matter which
were drilled into us when young. Spirit and matter have ever been
presented to us in the rudest contrast, the one as all noble, the
other as all vile. But is this correct? Does it represent what our
mightiest spiritual teacher would call the eternal fact of the
universe? Upon the answer to this question all depends.
Supposing, instead of having the foregoing antithesis of spirit and
matter presented to our youthful minds, we had been taught to regard
them as equally worthy and equally wonderful; to consider them, in
fact, as two opposite faces of the self-same mystery. Supposing that
in youth we had been impregnated with the notion of the poet Goethe,
instead of the notion of the poet Young, looking at matter, not as
brute matter, but as “the living garment of God;” do you not think
that under these altered circumstances the law of relativity might
have had an outcome different from its present one? Is it not
probable that our repugnance to the idea of primeval union between
spirit and matter might be considerably abated? Without this total
revolution of the notions now prevalent the evolution hypothesis
must stand condemned; but in many profoundly thoughtful minds such a
revolution has already taken place. They degrade neither member of
the mysterious duality referred to; but they exalt one of them from
its abasement, and repeal the divorce hitherto existing between
both. In substance, if not in words, their position as regards
spirit and matter is: “What God hath joined together let not man put
asunder.”
I have thus led you to the outer rim of speculative science, for
beyond the nebula scientific thought has never ventured hitherto,
and have tried to state that which I considered ought, in fairness,
to be outspoken. I do not think this evolution hypothesis is to be
flouted away contemptuously; I do not think it is to be denounced as
wicked. It is to be brought before the bar of disciplined reason,
and there justified or condemned. Let us hearken to those who wisely
support it, and to those who wisely oppose it; and let us tolerate
those, and they are many, who foolishly try to do neither of these
things.
The only thing out of place in the discussion is dogmatism on either
side. Fear not the evolution hypothesis. Steady yourselves in its
presence upon that faith in the ultimate triumph of truth which was
expressed by old Gamaliel when he said: “If it be of God, ye cannot
overthrow it; if it be of man, it will come to naught.” Under the
fierce light of scientific inquiry this hypothesis is sure to be
dissipated if it possess not a core of truth. Trust me, its
existence as an hypothesis in the mind is quite compatible with the
simultaneous existence of all those virtues to which the term
Christian has been applied. It does not solve—it does not profess to
solve—the ultimate mystery untouched. At bottom it does nothing more
than “transport the conception of life’s origin to an indefinitely
distant past.”
For, granting the nebula and its potential life, the question,
whence came they? would still remain to baffle and bewilder us. And
with regard to the ages of forgetfulness which lie between the
conscious life of the nebula and the conscious life of the earth, it
is but an extension of that forgetfulness which preceded the birth
of us all. Those who hold the doctrine of evolution are by no means
ignorant of the uncertainty of their data, and they yield no more to
it than a provisional assent. They regard the nebular hypothesis as
probable, and in the utter absence of any evidence to prove the act
illegal, they extend the method of nature from the present into the
past. Here the observed uniformity of nature is their only guide.
Within the long range of physical inquiry they have never discerned
in nature the insertion of caprice. Throughout this range the laws
of physical and intellectual continuity have run side by side.
Having thus determined the elements of their curve in this world of
observation and experiment, they prolong that curve into an
antecedent world, and accept as probable the unbroken sequence of
development from the nebula to the present time.
You never hear the really philosophical defenders of the doctrine of
uniformity speaking of _impossibilities_ in nature. They never say,
what they are constantly charged with saying, that it is impossible
for the builder of the universe to alter His work. Their business is
not with the possible, but the actual; not with a world which
_might_ be, but with a world which _is_. This they explore with a
courage not unmixed with reverence, and according to methods which,
like the quality of a tree, are tested by their fruits. They have
but one desire—to know the truth. They have but one fear—to believe
a lie. And if they know the strength of science, and rely upon it
with unswerving trust, they also know the limits beyond which
science ceases to be strong. They best know that questions offer
themselves to thought which science, as now prosecuted, has not even
the tendency to solve. They keep such questions open, and will not
tolerate any unlawful limitation of the horizon of their souls. They
have as little fellowship with the atheist who says there is no God
as with the theist who professes to know the mind of God.
“Two things,” said Immanuel Kant, “fill me with awe: the starry
heavens and the sense of moral responsibility in man.” And in his
hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action
has ceased and the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific
investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking
contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with
a power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he
can neither analyze nor comprehend.
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ The first 44 footnotes are gathered together in the “NOTES AND
REFERENCES” section. The following footnotes appear in the text
where they are referenced.
○ The mid dot—“·” is used in numbers to separate the whole part
from the decimal fraction of the number.
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores
(_italics_).
○ The use of a caret (^) before a letter, or letters, shows that
the following letter or letters was intended to be a
superscript, as in S^t Bartholomew or 10^{th} Century.
○ Superscripts are used to indicate numbers raised to a power. In
this plain text document, they are represented by characters
like this: “MV^2” or “10^{18}”, i.e. MV squared or 10 to the
18th power.