In other words, man wondered countless ages before he reasoned; because

feeling travels along the line of least resistance, while thought, or

the challenge by inquiry--therefore the assumption that there may be two

sides to a question--must pursue a path obstructed by the dominance of

custom, the force of imitation, and the strength of prejudice and fear.

It is here that anthropology, notably that psychical branch of it

comprehended under folk-lore, takes up the cue from the momentous

doctrine of heredity; explains the persistence of the primitive; and

the causes of man's tardy escape from the illusions of the senses,

and the general conservatism of human nature. "Born into life! in

vain, Opinions, those or these, unalter'd to retain the obstinate

mind decrees," as in the striking illustration cited in Heine's

Travel-Pictures. "A few years ago Bullock dug up an ancient stone idol

in Mexico, and the next day he found that it had been crowned during

the night with flowers. And yet the Spaniard had exterminated the old

Mexican religion with fire and sword, and for three centuries had been

engaged in ploughing and harrowing their minds and implanting the

seed of Christianity." The causes of error and delusion, and of

the spiritual nightmares of olden time, being made clear, there is

begotten a generous sympathy with that which empirical notions of

human nature attributed to wilfulness or to man's fall from a high

estate. Superstitions which are the outcome of ignorance can only

awaken pity. Where the corrective of knowledge is absent, we see that

it could not be otherwise. Where that corrective is present, but

either perverted or not exercised, pity is supplanted by blame. In

either case, we learn that the art of life largely consists in that

control of the emotions and that diversion of them into wholesome

channels, which the intellect, braced with the latest knowledge, can

alone effect.

Therefore, discarding theories of revelation, spiritual illumination,

and other assumed supra-mundane sources of knowledge, sufficing causes

of abnormal mental phenomena are found in abnormal working of the mental

apparatus. The investigation of hallucinations (Lat. _alucinor_, to

wander in mind) leaves no doubt that they are the effect of a morbid

condition of that intricate, delicately poised structure, the nervous

system, under which objects are seen and sensations felt when no

corresponding impression has been made through the medium of the senses.

When the nervous system is out of gear, voices, whether divine or of the

dead, may be heard; and actual figures may be seen. A mental image

becomes a visual image; an imagined pain a real pain, as the great

physiologist, John Hunter, testified when he said, "I am confident that

I can fix my attention to any part until I have a sensation in that

part." Shakespere portrays the like condition when Macbeth attempts to

clutch the dagger wherewith to stab Duncan:

There's no such thing;

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes.

This abnormal state, which sees things having no existence outside the

"mind's eye," is no respecter of persons; the savage and the civilized

are alike its victims. It may be organic or functional. Organic, when

disease is present; functional, through excessive fatigue, lack of food

or sleep, or derangement of the digestive system, causing the patient,

as Hood says, "to think he's pious when he's only bilious." Under such

conditions, hallucinations of all sorts possess the mind; hallucinations

from which the true peptic, who, as Carlyle says, "has no system," is

delivered. Only the mentally anæmic, the emotionally overwrought, the

unbalanced, and the epileptic, are the victims, whether of the lofty

illusions of august visions such as carried Saint Paul, Saint Theresa,

and Joan of Arc, into the presence of the holiest; or hallucination of

drowned cat, thin and "dripping with water," born of the disordered

nerves of Mrs. Gordon Jones. To quote from Dr. Gower's Bowman Lecture

(Nature, 4th July, 1895) on Subjective Visual Sensations, such as

accompany fits, when, e. g., sensations of sight occur without the

retina being stimulated:

The spectra perceived before epileptic fits vary widely. They may be

stars or sparks, spherical luminous bodies, or mere flashes of

light, white or coloured, still or in movement. Often they are more

elaborate, distinct visions of faces, persons, objects, places. They

may be combined with sensations from the other special senses, as

with hearing and smell. In one case a warning, constant for years,

began with thumping in the chest ascending to the head, where it

became a beating sound. Then two lights appeared, advancing nearer

with a pulsating motion. Suddenly these disappeared and were

replaced by the figure of an old woman in a red cloak, always the

same, who offered the patient something that had the smell of

Tonquin beans, and then he lost consciousness. Such warnings may be

called psychovisual sensations. The psychical element may be very

strong, as in one woman whose fits were preceded by a sudden

distinct vision of London in ruins, the river Thames emptied to

receive the rubbish, and she the only survivor of the inhabitants.

Had a man of lesser renown and mental calibre than Mr. Wallace thrown

the weight of his testimony into the scales in favour of spiritualism,

there would have been neither necessity nor excuse for this digression.

But both these pleas prevail when we find the co-formulator of the

Darwinian theory among mediums and their dupes. The respectful

attention which his words command: the tremendous claims which he makes

on behalf of the phenomena at _séances_ as proving the existence of soul

apart from body after death, and as revealing the conditions under which

it lives, have made incumbent the foregoing attempt to indicate what

other explanation is given of those phenomena, showing how these fall in

with all we know of man's tendencies to imperfect observation and

self-deception, and with all that history tells of the persistence of

animistic ideas.

A salutary lesson on the use and misuse of the imagination is thus

taught. That which, under wholesome restraint, is the initiative and

incentive of inquiry, of enterprise, and of noble ideas; unrestricted,

leads the dreamer and the enthusiast into ingulfing quicksands of

illusions and delusions. Hence the necessity of curbing a faculty so

that in unison with reason, it works toward definite ends within the

domain, marking man's limits of service. As Dr. Maudsley reminds us in

his sane and sober book on Natural Causes and Supernatural Seeming, "not

by standing out of Nature in the ecstasy of a rapt and over-strained

idealism of any sort, but by large and close and faithful converse with

Nature and human nature in all their moods, aspects, and relations, is

the solid basis of fruitful ideas and the soundest mental development

laid. The endeavour to stimulate and strain any mental function to an

activity beyond the reach and need of a physical correlate in external

nature, and to give it an independent value, is certainly an endeavour

to go directly contrary to the sober and salutary method by which solid

human development has taken place in the past, and is taking place in

the present."

* * * * *

The story of Darwin's work must now be resumed. Shortly after the

Linnæan meeting, he prepared a series of chapters which, always regarded

by him as an "Abstract," ultimately took book form, and was published,

under the title of the Origin of Species, on the 24th of November, 1859.

The story of the reception of the work is admirably told by Huxley in

the chapter which he contributed to Darwin's Life and Letters, and it

may be commended as useful reading to a generation which, drinking-in

Darwinism from its birth, will not readily understand how such storm and

outcry as rent the air, both in scientific as well as clerical quarters,

could have been raised. "In fact," says Huxley, "the contrast between

the present condition of public opinion upon the Darwinian question;

between the estimation in which Darwin's views are now held in the

scientific world; between the acquiescence, or, at least, quiescence, of

the theologian of the self-respecting order at the present day, and the

outburst of antagonism on all sides in 1858-59, when the new theory

respecting the origin of species first became known to the older

generation to which I belong, is so startling that, except for

documentary evidence, I should be sometimes inclined to think my

memories dreams." The like reflection arises when we consider the

indifference with which books of the most daring and revolutionary

character, both in theology and morals, are treated nowadays, in

contrast to the uproar which greeted such a _brutum fulmen_ as Essays

and Reviews. As for Colenso's Pentateuch, and books of its type,

orthodoxy has long taken them to its bosom.

So far as the larger number of naturalists, and of the intelligent

public who followed their lead, were concerned, there was an absolutely

open mind on the question of the mutation of species. There had been,

as the foregoing sections of this book have shown, a long time of

preparation and speculation. We certainly find the keynote of Evolution

in Heraclitus, and more than two thousand years after his time Herbert

Spencer, above all men, had removed it from the empirical stage, and

placed it on a base broad as the facts which supported it. But it needed

the leaven of the human and personal to stir it into life, and touch

man in his various interests; and not all that Mr. Spencer had done

in application of the theory of development to social questions and

institutions could avail much till Darwin's theory gave it practical

shape. Dissertations on the passage of the "homogeneous to the

heterogeneous"; explanations of the theory of the evolution of complex

sidereal systems out of diffused vapours of seemingly simple texture,

interested people only in a vague and wondering fashion. But when Darwin

illustrated the theory of the modification of life-forms by familiar

examples gathered from his own experiments and observations, and from

intercourse with breeders of pigeons, horses, and dogs, this went to

men's "business and bosoms," and if the vulgar interpreted Darwinism,

as some, who should know better, interpret it even now, as explaining

man's descent from a monkey, or how a bear became a whale by taking to

swimming, the thoughtful accepted it as a master-key unlocking not the

mystery of origins or of causes of variations, but the mystery of the

ceaselessly-acting agent which, operating on favourable variations, has

brought about myriads of species from simple forms.

As Huxley reminds us in the passage quoted above, the attitude of the

clergy toward the theory of Evolution has undergone an astounding

change. Dr. Whewell remarked that every great discovery in science has

had to pass through three stages. First, people said, "It is absurd";

then they said, "It is contrary to the Bible"; finally, they said, "We

always knew that it was so." Thus it has been with Evolution. It is

calmly discussed; even claimed as a "defender of the faith," at Church

Congresses nowadays. It was not so in the sixties. Here and there a

single voice was raised in qualified sympathy--Charles Kingsley showed

more than this--but both in the Old and the New World the "drum

ecclesiastic" was beaten. Cardinal Manning declared Darwinism to be a

"brutal philosophy, to wit, there is no God and the ape is our Adam."

Protestant and Catholic agreed in condemning it as "an attempt to

dethrone God"; as "a huge imposture," as "tending to produce disbelief

of the Bible," and "to do away with all idea of God," as "turning the

Creator out of doors." Such are fair samples to be culled from the

anthology of invective which was the staple content of nearly every

"criticism." Occasionally some parody of reasoning appears when the

"argument" is advanced that there is "a simpler explanation of the

presence of these strange forms among the works of God in the fall of

Adam," but even this pseudo-concession to logic is rare; and one divine

had no hesitation in predicting the fate of Darwin and his followers in

the world to come. "If," said a Dr. Duffield in the Princeton Review,

"the development theory of the origin of man shall, in a little while,

take the place--as doubtless it will--with other exploded scientific

speculations, then they who accept it with its proper logical

consequences will, in the life to come, have their portion with those

who in this life 'know not God and obey not the Gospel of His Son.'" But

the most notable attack came from Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of

Oxford, in the Quarterly Review of July, 1860. "It is," said Huxley, in

his review of Haeckel's Evolution of Man, "a production which should be

bound in good stout calf, or better, asses' skin, by the curious

book-collector, together with Brougham's attack on the undulatory

theory of light when it was first propounded by Young." The bishop

declared "the principle of natural selection to be absolutely

incompatible with the word of God" and as "contradicting the revealed

relations of creation to its Creator." If by "revealed relations" and

the "word of God" the Bible is intended, the evolutionist is in

agreement with the bishop. But, at this time of day, it seems scarcely

worth while to shake the dust off articles which have gone the way of

all purely controversial matter, and justification for reference to them

lies only in the fact that the contest between the biologists and the

bishops is not yet ended.

In contrast to all this, and in evidence of the compromise by which

theology is vainly striving to justify itself, are these vague sentences

from Archdeacon Wilson's address at the Church Congress at Shrewsbury in

the autumn of 1896: "It is scarcely too much to say that the Theistic

Evolutionist cannot be otherwise than a practical Trinitarian, and

cannot find a difficulty in the Incarnation or in the doctrine of the

Holy Spirit." "Christian doctrine, apart from the statement of

historical facts, is the attempt to create out of Christ's teaching, a

philosophy of life which shall satisfy these needs (i. e., the needs of

humanity), and it will therefore remain the same in substance. But the

form in which that doctrine will be presented must change with man's

intellectual environment. The bearing of Evolution on Christian

doctrine is, therefore, in a word, to modify, not the doctrine, but the

form in which it is expressed."

Postponing the story of the famous debate between Wilberforce and

Huxley, the reception accorded to the Origin of Species by Darwin's

scientific contemporaries may be noted. Herbert Spencer's position, as

will be shown later on, was already distinctive: he was a Darwinian

before Darwin. Hooker, Huxley,--who said that he was prepared to go to

the stake, if needs be, in support of some parts of the book,--Bates,

and Lubbock were immediate converts; so were Asa Gray and Lyell, but

with reservations, for Lyell, whose creed was Unitarian, never wholly

accepted the inclusion of man, "body, soul, and spirit," as the outcome

of natural selection. Henslow and Pictet went one mile, but refused to

go twain; Agassiz, Murray, and Harvey would have none of the new heresy;

neither would Adam Sedgwick, who wrote a long protest to Darwin, couched

in loving terms, and ending with the hope that "we shall meet in

heaven." The attitude of Owen, if apparently neutral or tentative in

open conversation, was, as an anonymous critic, deadly hostile. Although

it is not included in the list of his writings given in the Life by his

grandson, he is known to have been the author of the critique on the

Origin of Species in the Edinburgh Review of April, 1860.

At the outset of the article he speaks of Darwin's "seduction" of

"several, perhaps the majority of our younger naturalists" by the

homoeopathic form of the transmutation of species presented to them

under the phrase of natural selection.... "Owen has long stated his

belief that some pre-ordained law or secondary cause is operative in

bringing about the change ... we therefore regard the painstaking and

minute comparison by Cuvier of the osteological and every other

character that could be tested in the mummified ibis, cat, or crocodile

with those of species living in his time; and the equally philosophical

investigation of the polyps operating at an interval of thirty thousand

years in the building-up of coral reefs by the profound palæontologist

of Neuchâtel (Agassiz is here referred to), as of far truer value in

reference to the inductive determination of the question of the origin

of species than the speculations of Demailler, Buffon, Lamarck,

'Vestiges,' Baden Powell, or Darwin" (p. 532).

Entangled in the meshes of this theory of a "pre-ordained law," which

seems to bear some relation to Aristotle's "perfecting principle," and

is in close alliance with the teaching of the great Cuvier, at whose

feet Owen had sat, he remained to the end of his life a type of arrested

development. While the Church cited him as an authority against the

Darwinian theory, especially in its application to man's descent, there

remained in the memory of his brother savants his lack of candour in

never withdrawing the statement made by him, and demonstrated by Huxley

as untrue, that the "hippocampus minor" in the human brain is absent

from the brain of the ape.

As for the reception of the book abroad, the French savants were

somewhat coy, but the Germans, with Haeckel at their head, were

enthusiastic. Darwin had, like all prophets, more honour in other

countries than in his own, Evolution being rechristened _Darwinismus_.

Translation after translation of the Origin followed apace, and the

personal interest that gathered round the central idea led to the

perusal of the book by people who had never before opened a scientific

treatise. Punch seized on it as subject of caricature; and writers of

light verse found welcome material for "chaff" which the winds of

oblivion have blown away, a stanza here and there surviving, as in Mr.

Courthope's Aristophanic lines:

Eggs were laid as before, but each time more and more varieties

struggled and bred,

Till one end of the scale dropped its ancestor's tail, and the other

got rid of his head.

From the bill, in brief words, were developed the Birds, unless our

tame pigeons and ducks lie;

From the tail and hind legs, in the second-laid eggs, the apes.--and

Professor Huxley!

Heeding neither squib, satire, nor sermon, Darwin, in the quiet of his

Kentish home, went on rearranging old materials, collecting new

materials, and verifying both, the outcome of this being his works on

the Fertilization of Orchids and the Variation of Plants and Animals

under Domestication, published in 1862 and 1867 respectively. Between

these dates Huxley's Man's Place in Nature--logical supplement to the

Origin of Species--appeared. But of this more anon.

Meanwhile, as already named, Mr. Patrick Matthew had in the Gardener's

Chronicle of 7th April, 1860, drawn attention to an appendix to his book

on Naval Timber and Arboriculture published in 1831, in which he

anticipated Darwin and Wallace's theory as follows:

"The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in

part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of Nature, who, as before

stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much

beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up

the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is

limited and pre-occupied, it is only the hardier, more robust,

better-suited-to-circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle

forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they

have superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other

kind; the weaker and less circumstance-suited being prematurely

destroyed. This principle is in constant action; it regulates the

colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals in

each species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or

protection from enemies, or defence from inclemencies or vicissitudes of

climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence,

and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the

physical energies to self-advantage according to circumstances--in such

immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come to maturity

from the strict ordeal by which Nature tests their adaptation to

her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind by

reproduction" (pp. 384, 385).

While speaking of difficulty in understanding some passages in Mr.

Matthew's appendix, Darwin says that "the full force of the principle of

natural selection" is there, and, in referring to it in a letter to

Lyell, he adds that "one may be excused in not having discovered the

fact in a work on Naval Timber!"

Five years after this, another pre-Darwinian was unearthed, and, like

Patrick Matthew, in unsuspected company. Dr. W. C. Wells read a paper

before the Royal Society in 1813 on a White Female Part of whose Skin

resembles that of a Negro, but this was not published till 1818, when it

formed part of a volume including the author's famous Two Essays upon

Dew and Single Vision. In his Historical Sketch Darwin says that Wells

"distinctly recognises the principle of natural selection, and this is

the first recognition which has been indicated; but he applies it only

to the races of man, and to certain characters alone.... Of the

accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the first few and

scattered inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa, some one would be

better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the country. This

race would consequently multiply, while the others would decrease; not

only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease, but from

their incapacity of contending with their more vigorous neighbours."

When the simplicity of the long-hidden solution is brought home, we can

understand Huxley's reflection on mastering the central idea of the

Origin: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" Twelve years

elapsed before Darwin followed up his world-shaking book with the

Descent of Man. But the ground had been prepared for its reception in

the decade between 1860 and 1870. Quoting Grant Allen's able summary of

the advance of the theory of Evolution in his Charles Darwin: "One by

one the few scientific men who still held out were overborne by

the weight of evidence. Geology kept supplying fresh instances of

transitional forms; the progress of research in unexplored countries

kept adding to our knowledge of existing intermediate species and

varieties. During those ten years, Herbert Spencer published his First

Principles, his Biology, and the remodelled form of his Psychology;

Huxley brought out Man's Place in Nature, the Lectures on Comparative

Anatomy, and the Introduction to the Classification of Animals; Wallace

produced his Malay Archipelago and his Contributions to the Theory of

Natural Selection (Bates, we may here add to Mr. Allen's list, published

his paper on Mimicry in 1861, and his Naturalist on the Amazons in

1863); and Galton wrote his admirable work on Hereditary Genius, of

which his own family is so remarkable an instance. Tyndall and Lewes had

long since signified their warm adhesion. At Oxford, Rolleston was

bringing up a fresh generation of young biologists in the new faith; at

Cambridge, Darwin's old university, a whole school of brilliant and

accurate physiologists was beginning to make itself both felt and heard.

In the domain of anthropology, Tylor was welcoming the assistance of the

new ideas, while Lubbock was engaged on his kindred investigations into

the Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. All

these diverse lines of thought both showed the widespread influence of

Darwin's first great work, and led up to the preparation of his second,

in which he dealt with the history and development of the human race.

And what was thus true of England was equally true of the civilized

world, regarded as a whole: everywhere the great evolutionary movement

was well in progress, everywhere the impulse sent forth from the quiet

Kentish home was permeating and quickening the entire pulse of

intelligent humanity."

The Origin of Species, as we have seen, was intended as a rough draft or

preliminary outline of the theory of natural selection. The materials

which Darwin had collected in support of that theory being enormous, the

several books which followed between 1859 and 1881, the year before his

death, were expansions of hints and parts of the pioneer book. The last

to appear was that treating of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through

the Action of Worms. It embodied the results of experiments which had

been carried on for more than forty years, since, as far back as 1837,

Darwin read a paper on the subject before the Geological Society.

Reference to it recalls a story, characteristic of Darwin's innate

modesty, told to the writer by the present John Murray. Darwin called on

the elder Murray (presumably some time in 1880), and after fumbling in

his coat-tail pocket, drew out a packet, which he handed to Murray with

the timidity of an unfledged author submitting his first manuscript. "I

have brought you," he said, "a little thing of mine on the action of

worms on soil," and then paused as if in doubt whether Murray would care

to run the risk of bringing out the book! One story leads to another,

and our second relates to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey.

Among the signatures of members of Parliament, requesting Dean Bradley's

consent to Darwin's interment there, was that of Mr. Richard B. Martin,

partner in the well-known bank of that name, trading under the sign of

the "Grasshopper." In his history of this old institution Mr. John B.

Martin prints the following letter, which was received on the 27th of

April, 1882, the day after Darwin's funeral.--

SIRS--We have this day drawn a check for the sum of £280, which

closes our account with your firm. Our reasons for thus closing an

account opened so very many years ago are of so exceptional a kind

that we are quite prepared to find that they are deemed wholly

inadequate to the result.... They are entirely the presence of Mr.

R. B. Martin at Westminster Abbey, not merely as giving sanction to

the same as an individual, but appearing as one of the deputation

from a Society which has especially become the indorser and

sustainer of Mr. Darwin's theories.

---- & Co.

The accordance of a resting-place to Darwin's remains among England's

illustrious dead in that Valhalla, was an irenicon from Theology to one

whose theories, pushed to their logical issues, have done more than any

other to undermine the supernatural assumptions on which it is built.

Not that Darwin was a man of aggressive type. If he speaks on the high

matters round which, like planet tethered to sun, the spirit of man

revolves by irresistible attraction, it is with hesitating voice and

with no deep emotion. A man of placid temper, in whom the observing

faculties were stronger than the reflective, he was content to collect

and co-ordinate facts, leaving to others the work of pointing out their

significance, and adjusting them, as best they could, to this or that

theory. It would be unjust to say of him what John Morley says of

Voltaire, that "he had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual

voice," but we know from his own confessions, what limitations hemmed in

his emotional nature. The Life and Letters tells us that he was glad,

after the more serious work and correspondence of the day were over, to

listen to novels, for which he had a great love so long as they ended

happily, and contained "some person whom one can thoroughly love, if a

pretty woman, so much the better." But strangely enough, he lost all

pleasure in music, art, and poetry after thirty. When at school he

enjoyed Thomson, Byron, and Scott; Shelley gave him intense delight, and

he was fond of Shakespeare, especially the historical plays; but in his

old age he found him "so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher æsthetic tastes

is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels

(independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and

essays on all sorts of subjects, interest me as much as ever they

did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding

general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should

have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the

higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more

highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I

suppose, have thus suffered; and, if I had to live my life again, I

would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music

at least once every week, for perhaps the parts of my brain now

atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of

these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious

to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by

enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

It is often said that a man's religion concerns himself only. So far as

the value of the majority of people's opinions on such high matters

goes, this is true; but it is a shallow saying when applied to men whose

words carry weight, or whose discoveries cause us to ask what is their

bearing on the larger questions of human relations and destinies to

which past ages have given answers that no longer satisfy us, or that

are not compatible with the facts discovered. Whatever silence Darwin

maintained in his books as to his religious opinions, intelligent

readers would see that unaggressive as was the mode of presentments of

his theory, it undermined current beliefs in special providence,

with its special creations and contrivances, and therefore in the

intermittent interference of a deity; thus excluding that supernatural

action of which miracles are the decaying stock evidence.

Nor could they fail to ask whether the theory of natural selection by

"descent with modification" was to apply to the human species. And when

Darwin, already anticipated in this application by his more daring

disciples, Professors Huxley and Haeckel, published his Descent of

Man, with its outspoken chapter on the origin of conscience and

the development of belief in spiritual beings, a belief subject to

periodical revision as knowledge increased, it was obvious that the

bottom was knocked out of all traditional dogmas of man's fall and

redemption, of human sin and divine forgiveness. Therefore, what Darwin

himself believed was a matter of moment. His answers to inquiries which

were made public during his lifetime told us that while the varying

circumstances and modes of life caused his judgment to often fluctuate,

and that while he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the

existence of a God, "I think," he says, "that generally (and more and

more as I grow older) but not always, an agnostic would be the most

correct description of my state of mind." The chapter on Religion,

although a part of the autobiography, is printed separately in the Life

and Letters. As the following quotation shows, it is interesting as

detailing a few of the steps by which Darwin reached that suspensive

stage.

Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember

being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though

themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable

authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of

the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come by this

time--i. e., 1836 to 1839--to see that the Old Testament was no more

to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. The question,

then, continually rose before my mind, and would not be banished--is

it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos

he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva,

etc., as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament? This

appeared to me utterly incredible.

By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite

to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity

is supported--and that the more we know of the fixed laws of Nature

the more incredible do miracles become--that the men at that time

were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible

by us, that the Gospels can not be proved to have been written

simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important

details, far too important, as it seems to me, to be admitted as the

usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses: by such reflections as these,

which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they

influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a

divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread

over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with

me.

But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this,

for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of

old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being

discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most

striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it

more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to

invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief

crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The

rate was so slow that I felt no distress.

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God

until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the

vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from

design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so

conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been

discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful

hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent

being, like the hinge of a door by a man. There seems to be no more

design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of

natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. But I

have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation

of Domesticated Animals and Plants, and the argument there given has

never, as far as I can see, been answered.

Without doubt, the influence of the conclusions deducible from the

theory of Evolution are fatal to belief in the supernatural. When we say

the supernatural, we mean that great body of assumptions out of which

are constructed all theologies, the essential element in these being the

intimate relation between spiritual beings, of whom certain qualities

are predicated, and man. These beings have no longer any place in the

effective belief of intelligent and unprejudiced men, because they are

found to have no correspondence with the ascertained operations of

Nature.

[Illustration: Herbert Spencer]

2. _Herbert Spencer._

Contact with many "sorts and conditions of men" brings home the need of

ceaselessly dinning into their ears the fact that _Darwin's theory deals

only with the evolution of plants and animals from a common ancestry.

It is not concerned with the origin of life itself, nor with those

conditions preceding life which are covered by the general term_,

Inorganic Evolution. Therefore, it forms but a very small part of the

general theory of the origin of the earth and other bodies, "as the sand

by the seashore innumerable," that fill the infinite spaces.

We have seen that speculation about the universe had its rise in Ionia.

After centuries of discouragement, prohibition, and, sometimes, actual

persecution, it was revived, to advance, without further serious arrest,

some three hundred years ago. A survey of the history of philosophies of

the origin of the cosmos from the time of the renascence of inquiry,

shows that the great Immanuel Kant has not had his due. As remarked

already, he appears to have been the first to put into shape what is

known as the nebular theory. In his General Natural History and Theory

of the Celestial Bodies; or an Attempt to Account for the Constitution

and the Mechanical Origin of the Universe upon Newtonian Principles,

published in 1775, he "pictures to himself the universe as once an

infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this

he supposes a single centre of attraction set up, and shows how this

must result in the development of a prodigious central body, surrounded

by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development.

In vivid language he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widening the

margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of millions of

ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and

converting chaos into cosmos. But what is gained at the margin is lost

in the centre; the attractions of the central systems bring their

constituents together, which then, by the heat evolved, are converted

once more into molecular chaos. Thus the worlds that are lie between

the ruins of the worlds that have been and the chaotic materials of the

worlds that shall be; and in spite of all waste and destruction, Cosmos

is extending his borders at the expense of Chaos."

Kant's speculations were confirmed by the celebrated mathematician,

Laplace. He showed that the "rings" rotate in the same direction as the

central body from which they were cast off; sun, planets, and moons

(those of Uranus excepted) moving in a common direction, and almost in

the same plane. The probability that these harmonious movements are the

effects of like causes he calculated as 200,000 billions to one.

The observations of the famous astronomer, Sir William Herschel, which

resulted in the discovery of binary or double stars, of star-clusters,

and cloud-like nebulæ (as that term implies) were further confirmations

of Kant's theory. And such modifications in this as have been made

by subsequent advance in knowledge, notably by the doctrine of the

Conservation of Energy (the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace being based

on gravitation alone), affect not the general theory of the origin

of the heavenly bodies from seemingly formless, unstable, and

highly-diffused matter. The assumption of primitive unstableness and

unlikeness squares with the unequal distribution of matter; with the

movements of its masses in different directions, and at different rates;

and with the ceaseless redistribution of matter and motion. For all

changes of states are due to the rearrangement of the atoms of which

matter is made up, resulting in the evolution of the seeming like into

the actual unlike; of the simple into the more and more complex,

till--speaking of the only planet of whose life-history we can have

knowledge--with the cooling of the earth to a temperature permitting of

the evolution of living matter, the highest complexity is reached in

the infinitely diverse forms of plants and animals. Therefore, as our

knowledge of matter is limited to the changes of which we assume it to

be the vehicle, it would seem that science reduces the Universe to the

intelligible concept of Motion.

Since the great discovery by Kirchoff, in 1859, of the meaning of the

dark lines that cross the refracted sun-rays, the spectroscope has come

as powerful evidence in support of the nebular theory, while the

photographic plate is a scarcely less important witness. The one has

demonstrated that many nebulæ, once thought to be star-clusters, are

masses of glowing hydrogen and nitrogen gases; that, to quote the

striking communication made by the highest authority on the subject, Dr.

Huggins, in his Presidential Address to the British Association, 1891,

"in the part of the heavens within our ken, the stars still in the early

and middle stages of evolution exceed greatly in number those which

appear to be in an advanced condition of condensation." The other,

recording infallible vibrations on a sensitive plate, and securing

accurate registration of the impressions, reveals, as in Dr. Roberts's

grand photograph of the nebula in Andromeda, a central mass round which

are distinct rings of luminous matter, these being separated from the

main body by dark rifts or spaces. To quote Dr. Huggins once more, "We

seem to have presented to us some stage of cosmical Evolution on a

gigantic scale."

The great fact that lies at the back of all these confirmations of the

nebular theory is the fundamental identity of the stuff of which the

universe is made; a fact which entered into the prevision of the Ionian

cosmologists. Dr. Huggins says that "if the whole earth were heated to

the temperature of the sun, its spectrum would resemble very closely the

solar spectrum."

In referring to this, there may be carrying of "owls to Athens," but

that re-statements may sometimes be needful has illustration in Lord

Salisbury's Presidential Address to the British Association, 1894,

wherein the assumed absence of oxygen and nitrogen in the sun's spectrum

is adduced as an argument against the theory of the common origin of the

bodies of the solar system. Speaking of the predominant proportion of

oxygen in the solid and liquid substances of the earth, and of the

predominance of nitrogen in our atmosphere, his lordship asked, "if the

earth be a detached bit whisked off the mass of the sun, as cosmogonists

love to tell us, how comes it that, in leaving the sun, we cleaned him

out so completely of his nitrogen and oxygen that not a trace of these

gases remains behind to be discovered even by the searching vision of

the spectroscope?" If Lord Salisbury had consulted Dr. Huggins, or some

foreign astronomer of equal rank, as Dunér or Scheiner, he would not

have put a question exposing his ignorance, and unmasking his prejudice.

These authorities would have told him that when a mixture of the

incandescent vapours of the metals and metalloids (or non-metallic

elementary substances, to which class both oxygen and nitrogen belong),

or their compounds, is examined with the spectroscope, the spectra of

the metalloids always yield before that of the metals. Hence the absence

of the lines of oxygen and other metalloids, carbon and silicon

excepted, among the vast crowd of lines in the solar spectrum. Then,

too, in extreme states of rarefaction of the sun's absorbing layer, the

absorption of the oxygen is too small to be sensible to us.

"While the genesis of the Solar System, and of countless other systems

like it, is thus rendered comprehensible, the ultimate mystery continues

as great as ever. The problem of existence is not solved: it is simply

removed further back. The Nebular Hypothesis throws no light on the

origin of diffused matter; and diffused matter as much needs accounting

for as concrete matter. The genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive

than the genesis of a planet. Nay, indeed, so far from making the

universe a less mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery.

Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by

evolution. A man can put together a machine; but he cannot make a

machine develop itself. The ingenious artisan, able as some have been so

far to imitate vitality as to produce a mechanical pianoforte player,

may in some sort conceive how, by greater skill, a complete man might be

artificially produced; but he is unable to conceive how such a complex

organism gradually arises out of a minute structureless germ. That our

harmonious universe once existed potentially as formless diffuse matter,

and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far more

astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial

method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from

phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis

implies a First Cause as much transcending 'the mechanical God of Paley'

as does the fetish of the savage."

This quotation is from an essay on the Nebular Hypothesis, which

appeared in the Westminster Review of July, 1858, and which must,

therefore, have been written before the eventful date of the reading

of Darwin and Wallace's memorable paper before the Linnæan Society.

The author of that essay is Mr. Herbert Spencer, and the foregoing

extract from it may fitly preface a brief account of his life-work in

co-ordinating the manifold branches of knowledge into a synthetic whole.

In erecting a complete theory of Evolution on a purely scientific

basis "his profound and vigorous writings," to quote Huxley, "embody

the spirit of Descartes in the knowledge of our own day." Laying the

foundation of his massive structure in early manhood, Mr. Spencer has

had the rare satisfaction of placing the topmost stone on the building

which his brain devised and his hand upreared. While the sheets of this

little book are being passed for press, there arrives the third volume

of the Principles of Sociology, which completes Mr. Spencer's Synthetic

Philosophy. In the preface to this, the venerable author says:

"On looking back over the six-and-thirty years which I have passed since

the Synthetic Philosophy was commenced, I am surprised at my audacity

in undertaking it, and still more surprised by its completion. In 1860

my small resources had been nearly all frittered away in writing and

publishing books which did not repay their expenses; and I was suffering

under a chronic disorder, caused by overtax of brain in 1855, which,

wholly disabling me for eighteen months, thereafter limited my work to

three hours a day, and usually to less. How insane my project must have

seemed to onlookers, may be judged from the fact that before the first

chapter of the first volume was finished, one of my nervous breakdowns

obliged me to desist.

"But imprudent courses do not always fail. Sometimes a forlorn hope

is justified by the event. Though, along with other deterrents, many

relapses, now lasting for weeks, now for months, and once for years,

often made me despair of reaching the end, yet at length the end is

reached. Doubtless in earlier years some exultation would have resulted;

but as age creeps on feelings weaken, and now my chief pleasure is in my

emancipation. Still there is satisfaction in the consciousness that

losses, discouragements, and shattered health have not prevented me

from fulfilling the purpose of my life."

These words recall a parallel invited by Gibbon's record of his

feelings on the completion of his immortal work, when walking under the

acacias of his garden at Lausanne, he pondered on the "recovery of his

freedom, and perhaps the establishment of his fame," but with a "sober

melancholy" at the thought that "he had taken an everlasting leave of an

old and agreeable companion."

HERBERT SPENCER, spiritual descendant--_longo intervallo_--of Heraclitus

and Lucretius, was born at Derby on the 27th of April, 1820. His father

was a schoolmaster; a man of scientific tastes, and, it is interesting

to note, secretary of the Derby Philosophical Association founded by

Erasmus Darwin. In Mr. Spencer's book on Education there are hints of

his inheritance of the father's bent as an observer and lover of Nature

in the remark that, "whoever has not in youth collected plants and

insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows

can assume." He was articled in his seventeenth year to a railway

engineer, and followed that profession until he was twenty-five. During

this period he wrote various papers for the Civil Engineers' and

Architects' Journal, and, what is of importance to note, a series of

letters to the Nonconformist in 1842 on The Proper Sphere of Government

(republished as a pamphlet in 1844), in which "the only point of

community with the general doctrine of Evolution is a belief in the

modifiability of human nature through adaptation to conditions, and a

consequent belief in human progression." After giving up engineering,

Mr. Spencer joined the staff of the Economist, and while thus employed,

published, in 1850, his first important book, Social Statics, or the

Conditions essential to Human Happiness specified, and the first of

them developed. In a footnote to the later editions of this work Mr.

Spencer points out a brace of paragraphs in the chapter on General

Considerations in which "may be seen the first step toward the general

doctrine of Evolution. After referring to the analogy between the

subdivision of labour, which goes on in human society as it advances;

and the gradual diminution in the number of like parts and the

multiplication of unlike parts which are observable in the higher

animals; Mr. Spencer says:

"Now, just the same coalescence of like parts and separation of unlike

ones--just the same increasing subdivision of function--takes place in

the development of society. The earliest social organisms consist almost

wholly of repetitions of one element. Every man is a warrior, hunter,

fisherman, builder, agriculturist, toolmaker. Each portion of the

community performs the same duties with every other portion; much as

each slice of the polyp's body is alike stomach, muscle, skin, and

lungs. Even the chiefs, in whom a tendency towards separateness of

function first appears, still retain their similarity to the rest in

economic respects. The next stage is distinguished by a segregation of

these social units into a few distinct classes--warriors, priests, and

slaves. A further advance is seen in the sundering of the labourers into

different castes, having special occupations, as among the Hindoos. And,

without further illustration, the reader will at once perceive, that

from these inferior types of society up to our own complicated and more

perfect one, the progress has ever been of the same nature. While he

will also perceive that this coalescence of like parts, as seen in the

concentration of particular manufactures in particular districts, and

this separation of agents having separate functions, as seen in the more

and more minute division of labour, are still going on.

"Thus do we find, not only that the analogy between a society and a

living creature is borne out to a degree quite unsuspected by those who

commonly draw it, but also that the same definition of life applies to

both. This union of many men into one community--this increasing mutual

dependence of units which were originally independent--this formation of

a whole consisting of unlike parts--this growth of an organism, of which

one portion cannot be injured without the rest feeling it--may all be

generalized under the law of individuation. The development of society,

as well as the development of man and the development of life generally,

may be described as a tendency to individuate--_to become a thing_. And

rightly interpreted, the manifold forms of progress going on around us

are uniformly significant of this tendency."

_Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto_: "I am a man and nothing

human is foreign to me." This oft-quoted saying of the old farmer in the

Self-Tormentor of Terence might be affixed as motto to Herbert Spencer's

writings from the tractate on the Proper Sphere of Government to the

concluding volume of the Principles of Sociology. For thought of human

interests everywhere pervades them; social and ethical questions are

kept in the van throughout. Philosophy is brought from her high seat to

mix in the sweet amenities of home, in the discipline of camp, in the

rivalry of market; and linked to conduct. Conduct is defined as "acts

adjusted to ends," the perfecting of the adjustment being the highest

aim, so that "the greatest totality of life in self, in offspring, and

in fellow-men" is secured, the limit of evolution of conduct not being

reached, "until, beyond avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to

others, there are spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others."

Emerson puts this ideal into crisp form when he speaks of the time in

which a man shall care more that he wrongs not his neighbour than that

his neighbour wrongs him; then will his "market-cart become a chariot of

the sun."

That humanity is the pivot round which Mr. Spencer's philosophic system

revolves is seen in the earliest Essays, and notably in his making

mental evolution the subject of the first instalment of his Synthetic

Philosophy. For, in the Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, he

limits feeling or consciousness to animals possessing a nervous system,

and traces its beginnings in the "blurred, undetermined feeling

answering to a single pulsation or shock" (as for example, to go no

lower down the life-scale, in the medusa or jelly-fish), to its highest

form as self-consciousness, or knowing that we know, in man. This

dominant element in Mr. Spencer's philosophy secures it a life and

permanence which, had it been restricted to explaining the mechanics of

the inorganic universe, it could never have possessed. It has been

observed how the Darwinian theory aroused attention in all quarters

because it touched human interests on every side. And, although less

obvious to the multitude, the Synthetic Philosophy, dealing with all

cosmic processes as purely mechanical problems, interprets "the

phenomena of life (excluding the question of its origin), mind, and

society, in terms of matter and motion." Anticipating the levelling

of epithets against such apparent materializing of mental phenomena

involved in that method, Spencer remarks on the dismay with which men,

who have not risen above the vulgar conception which unites with matter

the contemptuous epithets "gross" and "brute," regard the proposal to

reduce the phenomena of Life, of Mind, and of Society, to a level which

they think so degraded. "Whoever remembers that the forms of existence

which the uncultivated speak of with so much scorn, are shown by the

man of science to be the more marvellous in their attributes the more

they are investigated, and are also proved to be in their ultimate

natures absolutely incomprehensible--as absolutely incomprehensible

as sensation, or the conscious something which perceives it--whoever

clearly recognises this truth, will see that the course proposed does

not imply a degradation of the so-called higher, but an elevation of

the so-called lower. Perceiving, as he will, that the Materialist

and Spiritualist controversy is a mere war of words,--in which the

disputants are equally absurd, each thinking that he understands that

which it is impossible for any man to understand,--he will perceive how

utterly groundless is the fear referred to. Being fully convinced that

no matter what nomenclature is used, the ultimate mystery must remain

the same, he will be as ready to formulate all phenomena in terms of

Matter, Motion, and Force, as in any other terms; and will rather indeed

anticipate, that only in a doctrine which recognises the Unknown Cause

as co-extensive with all orders of phenomena, can there be a consistent

Religion, or a consistent Philosophy."

This is clear enough; yet such is the crass density of some objectors

that eighteen years after the above was written, Mr. Spencer, in

answering criticisms on First Principles, had to rebut the charge that

he believed matter to consist of "space-occupying units, having shape

and measurement."

The Principles of Psychology was both preceded and followed by a series

of essays in which the process of change from the "homogeneous to the

heterogeneous," i. e., from the seeming like to the actual unlike, was

expounded. Mr. Spencer tells us that in 1852 he first became acquainted

with Von Baer's Law of Development, or the changes undergone in each

living thing, from the general to the special, during its advance

from the embryonic to the fully-formed state. That law confirmed the

prevision indicated in the passages quoted above from Social Statics,

and impressed him as one of the three doctrines which are indispensable

elements of the general theory of Evolution. The other two are the

Correlation of the Physical Forces, or the transformation of different

modes of motion into other modes of motion, as of heat or light into

electricity, and so forth, in Proteus-like fashion; and the Conservation

of Energy, or the indestructibility of matter and motion, whatever

changes or transformations these may undergo.

In permitting the quotation of the useful abstract of the Synthetic

Philosophy which, originally drawn up for the late Professor Youmans,

was imbodied in a letter to the Athenæum of 22d of July, 1882, Mr.

Spencer was good enough to volunteer the following details to the

writer:--

"You are probably aware that the conception set forth in that abstract

was reached by slow steps during many years. These steps occurred as

follows:--

1850. Social Statics: especially chapter General Considerations.

(Higher human Evolution.)

1852. March. Development Hypothesis, in the Leader. (Evolution of

species, _vid. ante_, p. 111.)

1852. April. Theory of Population, etc., in Westminster Review.

(Higher human Evolution.)

1854. July. The Genesis of Science in British Quarterly Review.

(Intellectual Evolution.)

1855. July. Principles of Psychology. (Mental Evolution in general.)

1857. April. Progress: its Law and Cause: Westminster Review.

(Evolution at large.)

1857. April. Ultimate Laws of Physiology. National Review. (Another

factor of Evolution at large.)

"From these last two Essays came the inception of the Synthetic

Philosophy. The first programme of it was drawn up in January, 1858." ...

When seeing Mr. Spencer on the subject of this letter, he took the

further trouble to point out certain passages in the essays originally

comprised in the one volume edition of 1858 which contain germinal ideas

of his synthesis. That they are his selection will add to the interest

and value of their quotation, revealing, as perchance they may, a

fragment of the autobiography which it is an open secret Mr. Spencer

has written.

"That Law, Religion, and Manners are thus related--that their respective

kinds of operation come under one generalisation--that they have in

certain contrasted characteristics of men a common support and a common

danger--will, however, be most clearly seen on discovering that they

have a common origin. Little as from present appearances we should

suppose it, we shall yet find that at first, the control of religion,

the control of laws, and the control of manners, were all one control.

However incredible it may now seem, we believe it to be demonstrable

that the rules of etiquette, the provisions of the statute-book, and the

commands of the decalogue, have grown from the same root. If we go far

back enough into the ages of primeval Fetishism, it becomes manifest

that originally Deity, Chief, and Master of the Ceremonies were

identical" (Essays, vol. i, 1883 edition; Manners and Fashion, p. 65).

"Scientific advance is as much from the special to the general as from

the general to the special. Quite in harmony with this we find to be the

admissions that the sciences are as branches of one trunk, and that they

were at first cultivated simultaneously; and this becomes the more

marked on finding, as we have done, not only that the sciences have

a common root, but that science in general has a common root with

language, classification, reasoning, art; that throughout civilisation

these have advanced together, acting and reacting on each other just

as the separate sciences have done; and that thus the development of

intelligence in all its divisions and subdivisions has conformed to this

same law to which we have shown the sciences conform" (Ib. The Genesis

of Science, pp. 191, 192).

(In correspondence with this, recognising that the same method has to be

adopted in all inquiry, whether we deal with the body or the mind, the

following may be quoted from Hume's Treatise on Human Nature.

"'Tis evident that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less,

to human nature; and that, however wide any of them may seem to run

from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even

_Mathematics_, _Natural Philosophy_, and _Natural Religion_ are in some

measure dependent on the science of MAN, since they lie under the

cognisance of men, and are judged of by their powers and qualities.)

"The analogy between individual organisms and the social organisms

is one that has in all ages forced itself on the attention of the

observant.... While it is becoming clear that there are no such special

parallelisms between the constituent parts of a man and those of a

nation, as have been thought to exist, it is also becoming clear that

the general principles of development and structure displayed in all

organised bodies are displayed in societies also. The fundamental

characteristic both of societies and of living creatures is, that they

consist of mutually dependent parts; and it would seem that this

involves a community of various other characteristics.... Meanwhile, if

any such correspondence exists, it is clear that Biology and Sociology

will more or less interpret each other.

"One of the positions we have endeavoured to establish is, that

in animals the process of development is carried on, not by

differentiations only, but by subordinate integrations. Now in the

social organism we may see the same duality of process; and further, it

is to be observed that the integrations are of the same three kinds.

Thus we have integrations that arise from the simple growth of adjacent

parts that perform like functions; as, for instance, the coalescence of

Manchester with its calico-weaving suburbs. We have other integrations

that arise when, out of several places producing a particular commodity,

one monopolises more and more of the business, and leaves the rest to

dwindle; as witness the growth of the Yorkshire cloth districts at the

expense of those in the west of England.... And we have yet those

other integrations that result from the actual approximation of the

similarly-occupied parts, whence results such facts as the concentration

of publishers in Paternoster Row, of lawyers in the Temple and

neighbourhood, of corn merchants about Mark Lane, of civil engineers in

Great George Street, of bankers in the centre of the city" (Essays,

vol. iii, 1878 edition; Transcendental Physiology, pp. 414-416).

But, divested of technicalities, and summarized in words to be

"understanded of the people," the following quotation from the Essay on

Progress: Its Law and Cause, gives the gist of the Synthetic Philosophy:

"We believe we have shown beyond question that that which the German

physiologists (Von Baer, Wolff, and others) have found to be the law of

organic development (as of a seed into a tree, and of an egg into an

animal), is the law of all development. The advance from the simple to

the complex, through a process of successive differentiations (i. e.,

the appearance of differences in the parts of a seemingly like

substance), is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to

which we can reason our way back; and in the earlier changes which we

can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic

evolution of the Earth, and of every single organism on its surface; it

is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the

civilised individual, or in the aggregation of races; it is seen in the

evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious,

and its economical organisation; and it is seen in the evolution of all

those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which

constitute the environment of our daily life. From the remotest past

which Science can fathom, up to the novelties of yesterday, that in

which Progress essentially consists, is the transformation of the

homogeneous into the heterogeneous" (Essays, vol. i, 1883, p. 30).

To this may fitly follow the "succinct statement of the cardinal

principles developed in the successive works," which Mr. Spencer, as

named above, prepared for Professor Youmans.

1. Throughout the universe in general and in detail there is an

unceasing redistribution of matter and motion.

2. This redistribution constitutes evolution when there is a predominant

integration of matter and dissipation of motion, and constitutes

dissolution when there is a predominant absorption of motion and

disintegration of matter.

3. Evolution is simple when the process of integration, or the formation

of a coherent aggregate, proceeds uncomplicated by other processes.

4. Evolution is compound, when along with this primary change from an

incoherent to a coherent state, there go on secondary changes due to

differences in the circumstances of the different parts of the

aggregate.

5. These secondary changes constitute a transformation of the

homogeneous into the heterogeneous--a transformation which, like the

first, is exhibited in the universe as a whole and in all (or nearly

all) its details; in the aggregate of stars and nebulæ; in the planetary

system; in the earth as an inorganic mass; in each organism, vegetal or

animal (Von Baer's law otherwise expressed); in the aggregate of

organisms throughout geologic time; in the mind; in society; in all

products of social activity.

6. The process of integration, acting locally as well as generally,

combines with the process of differentiation to render this change

not simply from homogeneity to heterogeneity, but from an indefinite

homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity; and this trait of increasing

definiteness, which accompanies the trait of increasing heterogeneity,

is, like it, exhibited in the totality of things and in all its

divisions and subdivisions down to the minutest.

7. Along with this redistribution of the matter composing any evolving

aggregate there goes on a redistribution of the retained motion of its

components in relation to one another; this also becomes, step by step,

more definitely heterogeneous.

8. In the absence of a homogeneity that is infinite and absolute, that

redistribution, of which evolution is one phase, is inevitable. The

causes which necessitate it are these--

9. The instability of the homogeneous, which is consequent upon the

different exposures of the different parts of any limited aggregate to

incident forces.

The transformations hence resulting are--

10. The multiplication of effects. Every mass and part of a mass on

which a force falls subdivides and differentiates that force, which

thereupon proceeds to work a variety of changes; and each of these

becomes the parent of similarly-multiplying changes; the multiplication

of them becoming greater in proportion as the aggregate becomes more

heterogeneous. And these two causes of increasing differentiations are

furthered by--

11. Segregation, which is a process tending ever to separate unlike

units and to bring together like units--so serving continually to

sharpen, or make definite, differentiations otherwise caused.

12. Equilibration is the final result of these transformations which an

evolving aggregate undergoes. The changes go on until there is reached

an equilibrium between the forces which all parts of the aggregate are

exposed to and the forces these parts oppose to them.

Equilibration may pass through a transition stage of balanced motions

(as in a planetary system) or of balanced functions (as in a living

body) on the way to ultimate equilibrium; but the state of rest in

inorganic bodies, or death in organic bodies, is the necessary limit of

the changes constituting evolution.

13. Dissolution is the counter-change which sooner or later every

evolved aggregate undergoes. Remaining exposed to surrounding forces

that are unequilibrated, each aggregate is ever liable to be dissipated

by the increase, gradual or sudden, of its contained motion; and

its dissipation, quickly undergone by bodies lately animate, and

slowly undergone by inanimate masses, remains to be undergone at an

indefinitely remote period by each planetary and stellar mass, which

since an indefinitely distant period in the past has been slowly

evolving; the cycle of its transformations being thus completed.

14. This rhythm of evolution and dissolution, completing itself

during short periods in small aggregates, and in the vast aggregates

distributed through space completing itself in periods immeasurable by

human thought, is, so far as we can see, universal and eternal--each

alternating phase of the process predominating now in this region of

space and now in that, as local conditions determine.

15. All these phenomena, from their great features down to their

minutest details, are necessary results of the persistence of force

under its forms of matter and motion. Given these as distributed through

space, and their quantities being unchangeable, either by increase or

decrease, there inevitably result the continuous redistributions

distinguishable as evolution and dissolution, as well as all these

special traits above enumerated.

16. That which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in

form, under these sensible appearances which the universe presents

to us, transcends human knowledge and conception--is an unknown and

unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognise as without limit in

space and without beginning or end in time.

All that is comprised in the dozen volumes which, exclusive of the minor

works and the Sociological Tables, form the great body of the Synthetic

Philosophy, is the expansion of this abstract. The general lines

laid down in that Philosophy have become a permanent way along which

investigation will continue to travel. The revisions which may be called

for will not affect it fundamentally, being limited to details, more

especially in the settlement of the relative functions of individuals

and communities, and cognate questions. Into these we cannot enter here.

Suffice it, that to those who have the rare possession of sound mental

peptics, no more nutritive diet can be recommended than is supplied by

First Principles and the works in which its theses are developed. For

those who, blessed with good digestion, lack leisure, there is provided

in a convenient volume the excellent epitome which Mr. Howard Collins

has prepared.

The prospectus of the then proposed issue of the series of works which,

beginning with First Principles, ends with the Principles of Sociology

(1862-1896), was issued by Mr. Spencer in March, 1860. Through his

courtesy the writer has seen the documents which prove that the first

draft of that prospectus was written out on the 6th of January, 1858,

and that it was the occasion of an interesting correspondence between

Mr. Spencer and his father--mainly in the form of questions from the

latter--during that month. The record of these facts is of some moment

as evidencing that the scheme of the Synthetic Philosophy took definite

shape in 1857. Therefore, the Theory of Evolution, dealing with the

universe _as a whole_, was formulated some months before the publication

of the Darwin-Wallace paper, in which only _organic evolution_ was

discussed. The Origin of Species, as the outcome of that paper, showed

that the action of natural selection is a sufficing cause for the

production of new life-forms, and thus knocked the bottom out of the old

belief in special creation.

The general doctrine of Evolution, however, is not so vitally related to

that of natural selection that the two stand or fall together. The

evidence as to the connection between the succession of past life-forms

which, regard being had to the well-nigh obliterated record, has been

supplied by the fossil-yielding rocks; and the evidence as to the

unbroken development of the highest plants and animals from the lowest

which more and more confirms the theory of Von Baer; alike furnish a

body of testimony placing the doctrine of Organic Evolution on a

foundation that can never be shaken. And, firm as that, stands the

doctrine of Inorganic Evolution upon the support given by modern science

to the speculations of Immanuel Kant.

There is the more need for laying stress on this because recent

discussions, revealing divided opinions among biologists as to the

sufficiency of natural selection as a cause of all modifications in the

structure of living things, lead timid or half-informed minds to hope

that the doctrine of Evolution may yet turn out not to be true. It is in

such stratum of intelligence that there lurks the feeling, whenever

some old inscription or monument verifying statements in the Bible is

discovered, that the infallibility of that book has further proof. For

example, until the present year, not a single confirmatory piece of

evidence as to the story of the Exodus was forthcoming from Egypt

itself. Even the inscription which has come to light does not, in the

judgment of such an expert as Dr. Flinders Petrie, supply the exact

confirmation desired. But let that irrefragable witness appear, and

while the historian will welcome it as evidence of the sojourn of the

Israelites in Egypt, thus throwing light on the movements of races, and

adding to the historical value of the Pentateuch; the average orthodox

believer will feel a vague sort of satisfaction that the foundations of

his belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation are somehow strengthened.

[Illustration: T. H. Huxley]

3. _Thomas Henry Huxley._

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY was born at Ealing, on the 4th of May, 1825.

Montaigne tells us that he was "borne between eleven of the clock and

noone," and, with like quaint precision, Huxley gives the hour of his

birth as "about eight o'clock in the morning." Speaking of his first

Christian name, he humorously said that, by curious chance, his parents

chose that of the particular apostle with whom, as the doubting member

of the twelve, he had always felt most sympathy.

Concerning his father, who was "one of the masters in a large

semi-public school" (the father of Herbert Spencer, it will be

remembered, was also a schoolmaster), Huxley has little to say in the

slight autobiographical sketch reprinted as an introduction to the first

volume of the Collected Essays. On that side, he tells us, he could find

hardly any trace in himself, except a certain faculty for drawing, and

a certain hotness of temper. "Physically and mentally," he was the son

of his mother, "a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic

temperament." His school training was brief and profitless; his tastes

were mechanical, and but for lack of means, he would have started life

in the same profession which Herbert Spencer followed till he forsook

Messrs. Fox's office for journalism. So, with a certain shrinking from

anatomical work, Huxley studied medicine for a time under a relative,

and in his seventeenth year entered the Charing Cross Hospital School as

a student. In those days there was no instruction in physics, and only

in such branch of chemistry as dealt with the nature of drugs. _Non

multa, sed multum_, and what was lacking in breadth was, perhaps, gained

in thoroughness. Huxley had as excellent a teacher in Wharton Jones as

the latter had a promising pupil in Huxley, and in working with the

microscope, the evidence of that came in his discovery of a certain

root-sheath in the hair, which has since then been known as "Huxley's

layer."

Up to the time of his studentship, he had been left, intellectually,

altogether to his own devices. He tells us that he was a voracious and

omnivorous reader, "a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well

endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject

which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience." Among

the books and essays that impressed him were Guizot's History of

Civilization; and Sir William Hamilton's essay On the Philosophy of the

Unconditioned which he accidentally came upon in an odd volume of the

Edinburgh Review. This, he adds, was "devoured with avidity," and it

stamped upon his mind the strong conviction "that on even the most

solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases

for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a great number

of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not merely actually

impossible, but theoretically inconceivable." Thus, before he was out of

his teens, the philosophy that ruled his life-teaching was taking

definite shape.

In 1845, he won his M. B. London with honours in anatomy and physiology,

and after a few months' practice at the East End, applied, at the

instance of his senior fellow-student, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Joseph

Fayrer, for an appointment in the medical service of the Navy. At the

end of two months he was fortunate enough to be entered on the books of

Nelson's old ship, the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital. His

official chief was the famous Arctic Explorer, Sir John Richardson,

through whose recommendation he was appointed, seven months later,

assistant surgeon of the Rattlesnake. That ship, commanded by Captain

Owen Stanley, was commissioned to survey the intricate passage within

the Barrier Reef skirting the eastern shores of Australia, and to

explore the sea lying between the northern end of that reef and New

Guinea. It was the best apprenticeship to what was eventually the work

of Huxley's life--the solution of biological problems and the indication

of their far-reaching significance. Darwin and Hooker had passed through

a like marine curriculum. The former served as naturalist on board the

Beagle when she sailed on her voyage round the world in 1831; the latter

as assistant-surgeon on board the Erebus on her Antarctic Expedition in

1839. Fortune was to bring the three shoulder to shoulder when the

battle against the theory of the immutability of species was fought.

During his four-years' absence Huxley, in whom the biologist dominated

the doctor, made observations on the various marine animals collected.

These he sent home to the Linnæan Society in vain hope of acceptance.

A more elaborate paper to the Royal Society, communicated through

the Bishop of Norwich (author of a book on birds, and father of Dean

Stanley), secured the coveted honour of publication, and on Huxley's

return in 1850 a "huge packet of separate copies" awaited him. It dealt

with the anatomy and affinities of the Medusæ, and the original research

which it evidenced justified his election in 1851 to the fellowship of

the society whose presidential chair he was in after years to adorn.

He would seem to have won the blue ribbon of science _per saltum_.

Probably, so far as their biological value is concerned, nothing that

he did subsequently has surpassed his contributions to scientific

literature at that period; but if his services to knowledge had been

limited to the class of work which they represent, he would have

remained only a distinguished specialist. Further recognition of his

well-won position came in the award of the society's royal medal. But

fellowships and medals keep no wolf from the door, and Huxley was a poor

man. After vain attempts to obtain, first, a professorship of physiology

in England, and then a chair of natural history at Toronto (Tyndall was

at the same time an unsuccessful candidate for the chair of physics in

the same university), a settled position was secured by Sir Henry de

la Beche's offer of the professorship of palæontology and of the

lectureship on natural history in the Royal School of Mines, vacated

by Edward Forbes. That was in 1854. Between that date and the time of

his return Huxley had contributed a number of valuable papers on the

structure of the invertebrates, and on histology, or the science of

tissues. But these, while adding to his established qualifications for

a scientific appointment, demand no detailed reference here. With both

chairs there was united the curatorship of the fossil collections in

the Museum of Practical Geology, and these, with the inspectorship of

salmon fisheries, which office he accepted in 1881, complete the list of

Huxley's more important public appointments. He surrendered them all in

1885, having reached the age at which, as he jocosely remarked to the

writer, "Every scientific man ought to be poleaxed." Perhaps he dreaded

the conservatism of attitude, the non-receptivity to new ideas, which

often accompany old age. But for himself such fears were needless. He

was never of robust constitution; in addition to the lasting effects

of an illness in boyhood, Carlyle's "accursed Hag," dyspepsia, which

troubled both Darwin and Bates for the rest of their lives after their

return from abroad, troubled him. Therefore, considerations of health

mainly prompted the surrender of his varied official responsibilities,

the loyal discharge of which met with becoming recognition in the grant

of a pension. This secured a modest competence in the evening of life

to one who had never been wealthy, and who had never coveted wealth. To

Huxley may fitly be applied what Faraday said of himself, that he had

"no time to make money." And yet, to his abiding discredit, the present

editor of Punch allowed his theological animus, which had already been

shown in abortive attempts in the pages of that "facetious" journal to

appraise a Roman Catholic biologist at the expense of Huxley, to further

degrade itself by affixing the letters "L. S. D." to his name in a

character-sketch.

His public life may be said to date from 1854. The duties which he then

undertook included the delivery of a course of lectures to working men

every alternate year. Some of these--models of their kind--have been

reissued in the Collected Essays. Among the most notable are those on

Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature. At the

outset of his public career lecturing was as distasteful to him as in

earlier years the trouble of writing was detestable. But mother wit and

"needs must" trained him in a short time to win the ear of an audience.

One evening in 1852 he made his début at the Royal Institution, and the

next day he received a letter charging him with every possible fault

that a lecturer could commit--ungraceful stoop, awkwardness in use of

hands, mumbling of words, or dropping them down the shirt front. The

lesson was timely, and its effect salutary. Huxley was fond of telling

this story, and it is worth recording--if but as encouragement to

stammerers who have something to say--at what price he "bought this

freedom" which held an audience spellbound. How he thus held it in

later years they will remember who in the packed theatre of the Royal

Institution listened on the evening of Friday, 9th of April, 1880, to

his lecture On the Coming of Age of the Origin of Species.

In 1856 Huxley visited the glaciers of the Alps with Tyndall, the result

appearing in their joint authorship of a paper on Glacial Phenomena in

the Philosophical Transactions of the following year. But this was a

rare interlude. What time could be wrested from daily routine was given

to the study of invertebrate and vertebrate morphology, palæontology,

and ethnology, familiarity with which was no mean equipment for the

conflict soon to rage round these seemingly pacific materials when

their deep import was declared. The outcome of such varied industry is

apparent to the student of scientific memoirs. But a recital of the

titles of papers contributed to these, as e. g., On Ceratodus,

Hyperodapedon Gordoni, Hypsilophodon, Telerpeton, and so forth, will not

here tend to edification. The original and elaborate investigations

which they embody have had recognition in the degrees and medals

which decorated the illustrious author. But it is not by these that

Huxley's renown as one of the most richly-endowed and widely-cultured

personalities of the Victorian era will endure. They might sink into

the oblivion which buries most purely technical work without in any

way affecting that foremost place which he fills in the ranks of

philosophical biologists both as clear-headed thinker and luminous

interpreter.

In this high function the publication of the Origin of Species gave

him his opportunity. That was in 1859. As with Hooker and Bates, his

experiences as a traveller, and, more than this, his penetrating inquiry

into significances and relations, prepared his mind for acceptance of

the theory of descent with modification of living forms from one stock.

Hence the mutability, as against the old theory of the fixity, of

species.

In the chapter On the Reception of the Origin of Species, which Huxley

contributed to Darwin's Life and Letters, he gives an interesting

account of his attitude toward that burning question. He says--

* * * * *

"I think that I must have read the Vestiges (see p. 119) before I left

England in 1846, but if I did the book made very little impression upon

me, and I was not brought into serious contact with the 'species'

question until after 1850. At that time I had long done with the

Pentateuchal cosmogony which had been impressed upon my childish

understanding as Divine truth with all the authority of parents and

instructors, and from which it had cost me many a struggle to get free.

But my mind was unbiassed in respect of any doctrine which presented

itself if it professed to be based on purely philosophical and

scientific reasoning.... I had not then and I have not now the smallest

_a priori_ objection to raise to the account of the creation of animals

and plants given in Paradise Lost, in which Milton so vividly embodies

the natural sense of Genesis. Far be it from me to say that it is untrue

because it is impossible. I confine myself to what must be regarded as a

modest and reasonable request for some particle of evidence that the

existing species of animals and plants did originate in that way as a

condition of my belief in a statement which appears to me to be highly

improbable....

"And by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to

give to the evolutionists of 1851-58. Within the ranks of the biologists

of that time I met with nobody, except Dr. Grant, of University College,

who had a word to say for Evolution, and his advocacy was not calculated

to advance the cause. Outside these ranks the only person known to me

whose knowledge and capacity compelled respect, and who was at the same

time a thoroughgoing evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose

acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds

of a friendship which I am happy to think has known no interruption.

Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my

friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of apt illustration could

not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two

grounds: firstly, that up to that time the evidence in favour of

transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion

respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed which had been made

was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the

state of knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other

conclusion was justifiable.

"As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my

contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter were very

much in my own state of mind--inclined to say to both Mosaists and

Evolutionists 'A plague on both your houses!' and disposed to turn aside

from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion to labour in

the fertile fields of ascertainable fact. And I may therefore further

suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858,

and still more that of the Origin in 1859, had the effect upon them of

the flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night

suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or

not, certainly goes his way. That which we were looking for and could

not find was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms

which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to

be actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any

other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions

which could be brought face to face with facts, and have their validity

tested. The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought.

Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing us for ever from the

dilemma--refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to

propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had no

answer ready, and I do not think that any one else had. A year later

we reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed by such an

inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central

idea of the Origin was 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of

that!' I suppose that Columbus's companions said much the same when he

made the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for

existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough, but none

of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem

lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and

the beacon-fire of the Origin guided the benighted."

But the disciple soon outstripped the master. As was said of Luther in

relation to Erasmus, Huxley hatched the egg that Darwin laid. For in the

Origin of Species the theory was not pushed to its obvious conclusion:

Darwin only hinted that it "would throw much light on the origin of

man and his history." His silence, as he candidly tells us in the

Introduction to the Descent of Man, was due to a desire "not to add to

the prejudices against his views." No such hesitancy kept Huxley silent.

In the spirit of Plato's Laws, he followed the argument whithersoever it

led. In 1860 he delivered a course of lectures to working-men On the

Relations of Man to the Lower Animals, and in 1862, a couple of lectures

on the same subject at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution.

The important and significant feature of these discourses was the

demonstration that no cerebral barrier divides man from apes; that

the attempt to draw a psychical distinction between him and the lower

animals is futile; and that "even the highest faculties of feeling and

of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life." The lectures

were published in 1863 in a volume entitled Evidence as to Man's Place

in Nature; and it was with pride warranted by the results of subsequent

researches that Huxley, in a letter to the writer, thus refers to the

book when arranging for its reissue among the Collected Essays--

I was looking through Man's Place in Nature the other day. I do not

think there is a word I need delete, nor anything I need add, except

in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down. That

is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a

very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it would

certainly ruin all my prospects.

The sparse annotations to the whole series of reprinted matter show that

the like permanence attends all his writings. And yet, true workman,

with ideal ever lying ahead, as he was, he remarked to the writer that

never did a book come hot from the press, but he wished that he could

suppress it and rewrite it.

But before dealing with the momentous issues raised in Man's Place in

Nature, we must return to 1860. For that was the "Sturm und Drang"

period. Then, at Oxford, "home of lost causes," as Matthew Arnold

apostrophizes her in the Preface to his Essays in Criticism, was fought,

on Saturday, 30th of June, a memorable duel between biologist and

bishop; perhaps in its issues, more memorable than the historic

discussion on the traditional doctrine of special creation between

Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the French Academy in 1830.

Both Huxley and Wilberforce were doughty champions. The scene of combat,

the Museum Library, was crammed to suffocation. Fainting women were

carried out. There had been "words" between Owen and Huxley on the

previous Thursday. Owen contended that there were certain fundamental

differences between the brains of man and apes. Huxley met this with

"direct and unqualified contradiction," and pledged himself to "justify

that unusual procedure elsewhere." No wonder that the atmosphere was

electric. The bishop was up to time. Declamation usurped the vacant

place of argument in his speech, and the declamation became acrid. He

finished his harangue by asking Huxley whether he was related by his

grandfather's or grandmother's side to an ape. "The Lord hath delivered

him into my hands," whispered Huxley to a friend at his side, as he rose

to reply. After setting his opponent an example in demonstrating his

case by evidence which, although refuting Owen, evoked no admission of

error from him then or ever after, Huxley referred to the personal

remark of Wilberforce. And this is what he said--

I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of

having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I

should feel shame in recalling, it would be a _man_, a man of

restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal

success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific

questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure

them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his

hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, and

skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

Perhaps the best comment on a piece of what is now ancient history is to

quote the admissions made by Lord Salisbury--a rigid High Churchman--in

his presidential address to the British Association in this same city of

Oxford in 1894--

Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by differences far

exceeding those that distinguish what we know as species have yet

descended from common ancestors.... Darwin has, as a matter of fact,

disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species.

Few, also, are now found to doubt not only that doctrine, but also the

doctrine that all life-forms have a common origin; plants and animals

being alike built-up of matter which is identical in character. This

doctrine, to-day a commonplace of biology, was, thirty years ago, rank

heresy, since it seemed to reduce the soul of man to the level of his

biliary duct. Hence the Oxford storm was but a capful of wind compared

with that which raged round Huxley's lecture on The Physical Basis of

Life delivered, thus aggravating the offence, on a "Sabbath" evening in

Edinburgh in 1868. People had settled down, with more or less vague

understanding of the matter, into quiescent acceptance of Darwinism. And

now their somnolence was rudely shaken by this Southron troubler of

Israel, with his production of a bottle of solution of smelling salts,

and a pinch or two of other ingredients, which represented the

elementary substances entering into the composition of every living

thing from a jelly-speck to man. Well might the removal of the stopper

to that bottle take their breath away! Microscopists, philosophers

"so-called," and clerics alike raised the cry of "gross materialism,"

never pausing to read Huxley's anticipatory answer to the baseless

charge, an answer repeated again and again in his writings, as in the

essay of Descartes' Discourse touching the method of using one's reason

rightly, and in his Hume. In season and out of season he never wearies

in insisting that there is nothing in the doctrine inconsistent with the

purest idealism. "All the phenomena of Nature are, in their ultimate

analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness." The cyclone thus

raised travelled westward on the heels of Tyndall, when in 1874 he

asserted the fundamental identity of the organic and inorganic; dashing,

as his Celtic blood stirred him, the statements with a touch of poetry

in the famous phrase that "the genius of Newton was potential in the

fires of the sun."

The ancient belief in "spontaneous generation," which Redi's experiments

upset, was the subject of Huxley's Presidential Address to the British

Association in 1870. But while he showed how subsequent investigation

confirmed the doctrine of Abiogenesis, or the non-production of living

from dead matter, he made this statement in support of Tyndall's creed

as to the fundamental unity of the vital and the non-vital.

"Looking back through the prodigious vista of the past, I find no record

of the commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of any means of

forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions of its appearance.

Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, 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 the 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

to 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 non-living matter. I should expect to see it appear

under forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the

power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters

as ammonium carbonates, oxalates, and tartrates, alkaline and earthy

phosphates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the expectation

to which analogical reasoning leads me; but I beg you once more to

recollect that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an act of

philosophical faith."

Huxley was the Apostle Paul of the Darwinian movement, and one main

result of his active propagandism was to so effectively prepare the way

for the reception of the profounder issues involved in the theory of the

origin of species, that the publication of Darwin's Descent of Man in

1871 created mild excitement. And the weight of his support is the

greater because he never omitted to lay stress on the obscurity which

still hides the causes of variation which, it must be kept in mind,

natural selection cannot bring about, and on which it can only act. He

insists on the non-implication of the larger theory with its subordinate

parts, or with the fate of them. The "doctrine of Evolution is a

generalisation of certain facts which may be observed by any one who

will take the necessary trouble." The facts are those which biologists

class under the heads of Embryology and Palæontology, to the conclusions

from which "all future philosophical and theological speculations will

have to accommodate themselves."

That is the direction of the revolution to which the publication of

Man's Place in Nature gave impetus; and it is in the all-round

application of the theory of man's descent that Huxley stands foremost,

both as leader and lawgiver. Mr. Spencer has never shrunk from

controversy, but he has not forsaken the study for the arena, and hence

his influence, great and abiding as it is, has been less direct and

personal than that of his comrade, "ever a fighter," who, in Browning's

words, "marched breast forward." Man's Place in Nature was the first of

a series of deliverances upon the most serious questions that can occupy

the mind; and its successors, the brilliant monograph on Hume, published

in 1879, and the Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, delivered at

Oxford, 18th of May, 1893, are but expansions of the thesis laid down in

that wonderful little volume; wonderful in the prevision which fills it,

and in the justification which it has received from all subsequent

research, notably in psychology.

If the propositions therein maintained are unshaken, then there is no

possible reconciliation between Evolution and Theology, and all the

smooth sayings in attempted harmonies between the two, of which

Professor Drummond's Ascent of Man is a type, and in speeches at Church

Congresses of which that delivered by Archdeacon Wilson (see p. 161) is

a type, do but hypnotize the "light half-believers of our casual

creeds." To some there are "signs of the times" which point to

approaching acquiescence in the sentiment of Ovid, paralleled by a

famous passage in Gibbon, that "the existence of the gods is a matter of

public policy, and we must believe it accordingly." It looks like the

prelude to surrender of what is the cardinal dogma of Christianity when

we read in the Archdeacon's address that "the theory of Evolution is

indeed fatal to certain _quasi_-mythological doctrines of the Atonement

which once prevailed, but it is in harmony with its spirit." For those

doctrines, as the Venerable apologist may learn from the evidence in

Frazer's Golden Bough (chap. iii, _passim_), are wholly mythological,

because barbaric. But, in truth, there is not a dogma of Christendom,

not a foundation on which the dogma rests, that Evolution does not

traverse. The Church of England adopts "as thoroughly to be received

and believed," the three ancient creeds, known as the Apostles', the

Athanasian, and the Nicene. There is not a sentence in any one of these

which finds confirmation; and only a sentence or two that find neither

confirmation nor contradiction, in Evolution.

The question, on which reams of paper have been wasted, lies in a

nutshell. The statements in the Creeds profess to have warrant in the

direct words of the Bible; or in inferences drawn from those words, as

defined by the Councils of the Church. The decisions of these Councils

represent the opinion of the majority of fallible men composing those

assemblies, and no number of fallible parts can make an infallible

whole. As Selden quaintly puts it (Table Talk, xxx, Councils), "they

talk (but blasphemously enough) that the Holy Ghost is president of

their General Councils, when the truth is the odd man is still the Holy

Ghost." With this same "odd man" rested the decision as to what books

should be included or excluded from the collection on which the Church

bases its authority and formulates its creeds. So, in the last result,

both sets of questions are settled by a human tribunal employing a

circular argument. But, dismissing this for the moment, let us see to

what issues the controversy is narrowed, to quote Huxley's words

(written in 1871), by "the spontaneous retreat of the enemy from

nine-tenths of the territory which he occupied ten years ago."

The battle has no longer to be fought over the question of the

fundamental identity of the physical structure of man and of the

anthropoid apes. The most enlightened Protestant divines accept this as

proven; and not a few Catholic divines are adopting an attitude toward

it which is only the prelude to surrender. Matters must have moved apace

in the Church which Huxley, backed by history, describes as "that

vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral, and

social life of mankind," to permit the Roman Catholic Professor of

Physics in the University of Notre Dame, America, to parley as follows:

"Granting that future researches in palæontology, anthropology, and

biology, shall demonstrate beyond doubt that man is genetically related

to the inferior animals, and we have seen how far scientists are from

such a demonstration (?), there will not be, even in such an improbable

event, the slightest ground for imagining that then, at last, the

conclusions of science are hopelessly at variance with the declarations

of the sacred text, or the authorised teachings of the Church of Christ.

All that would logically follow from the demonstration of the animal

origin of man, would be a modification of the traditional view regarding

the origin of the body of our first ancestor. We should be obliged to

revise the interpretation that has usually been given to the words of

Scripture which refer to the formation of Adam's body, and read these

words in the sense which Evolution demands, a sense which, as we have

seen, may be attributed to the words of the inspired record, without

either distorting the meaning of terms, or in any way doing violence to

the text" (Evolution and Dogma. By the Reverend J. A. Zahm, Ph. D.,

C.S.C., pp. 364, 365).

Upon this suggested revision of writings which are claimed as forming

part of a divine revelation, one of the highest authorities, Francisco

Suarez, thus refers, in his Tractatus de Opere sex Dierum, to the

elastic interpretation given in his time to the "days" in the first

chapter of Genesis. "It is not probable that God, in inspiring Moses to

write a history of the Creation, which was to be believed by ordinary

people, would have made him use language the true meaning of which it

was hard to discover, and still harder to believe." Three centuries have

passed since these wise words were penned, and the reproof which they

convey is as much needed now as then.

In near connection with the question of man's origin is that of his

antiquity. The existence of his remains, rare as they are everywhere, in

deposits older than the Pleistocene or Quaternary Epoch is not proven.

This applies to the remarkable fragments found by Dr. Dubois in Java,

the character of which, in the judgment of several palæontologists,

indicates the nearest approach between man and ape hitherto discovered.

But the evidence of the physical relation of these two being conclusive,

the exact place of man in the earth's time-record is rendered of

subordinate importance.

The theologians have come to their last ditch in contesting that the

mental differences between man and the lower animals are fundamental,

being differences of kind, and therefore that no gradual process from

the mental faculties of the one to those of the other has taken place.

This struggle against the application of the theory of Evolution to

man's intellectual and spiritual nature will be long and stubborn. It

is a matter of life and death to the theologian to show that he has in

revelation, and in the world-wide belief of mankind in spiritual

existences without, and in a spirit or soul within, evidence of the

supernatural. The evolutionist has no such corresponding deep concern.

When the argument against him is adduced from the Bible, he can only

challenge the ground on which that book is cited as divine authority, or

as an authority at all. Granting, for the sake of argument, that a

revelation has been made, the writings purporting to contain it must

comply with the twofold condition attaching to it, namely, that it makes

known matters which the human mind could not, unaided, have found out;

and that it embodies those matters in language as to the meaning of

which there can be no doubt whatever. If there be any sacred books which

comply with these conditions, they have yet to be discovered.

When the argument against the evolutionist is drawn from human

testimony, he does not dispute the existence of the belief in a soul and

in all the accompanying apparatus of the supernatural; but he calls in

the anthropologist to explain how these arose in the barbaric mind.

Meanwhile, let us summarize the evidence which points to the psychical

unity between man and the lower life-forms. As stated on p. 187, Mr.

Herbert Spencer traces the gradual evolution of consciousness from "the

blurred, indeterminate feeling which responds to a single nerve

pulsation or shock." There is no trace of a nervous system in the

simplest organisms, but this counts for little, because there are also

no traces of a mouth, or a stomach, or limbs. In these seemingly

structureless creatures every part does everything. The amoeba eats and

drinks, digests and excretes, manifests "irritability," that is,

responds to the various stimuli of its surroundings, and multiplies,

without possessing special organs for these various functions. Division

of labour arises at a slightly higher stage, when rudimentary organs

appear; the development of function and organ going on simultaneously.

Speaking broadly, the functions of living things are threefold: they

feed; they reproduce; they respond to their "environment," and it is

this last-named function--communication with surroundings--which is the

special work of the nervous system. It was an old Greek maxim that "a

man may once say a thing as he would have said it: he cannot say it

twice." This is the warrant for transferring a few sentences on the

origin of the nerves from my Story of Creation. They are but a meagre

abstract of Mr. Spencer's long, but luminous exposition of the subject.

"As every part of an organism is made up of cells, and as the functions

govern the form of the cells, the origin of nerves must be due to a

modification in cell shape and arrangement, whereby certain tracts or

fibres of communication between the body and its surroundings are

established.

"But what excited that modification? The all-surrounding medium, without

which no life had been, which determined its limits, and _touches_ it at

every point with its throbs and vibrations. In the beginnings of a

primitive layer or skin manifested by creatures a stage above the

lowest, unlikenesses would arise, and certain parts, by reason of their

finer structure, would be the more readily stimulated by, and the more

quickly responsive to, the ceaseless action of the surroundings, the

result being that an extra sensitiveness along the lines of least

resistance would be set up in those more delicate parts. These,

developing, like all things else, by use, would become more and more the

selected paths of the impulses, leading, as the molecular waves thrilled

them, to structural changes or modification into nerve-cells, and

nerve-fibres, of increasing complexity as we ascend the scale of life.

The entire nervous system, with its connections; the brain and all the

subtle mechanism with which it controls the body; the organs of the

senses alike begin as sacs formed by infoldings of the primitive outer

skin."

Biologists are agreed that a certain stage in the organization of the

nervous system--the germs of which, we saw, are visible in the quivering

of an amoeba, and probably in plants as well as animals--must be reached

before consciousness is manifest. Obscurity still hangs round the stage

at which mere irritability passes into sensibility, but so long as the

continuity of development is clear, the gradations are of lesser

importance. And, for the present purpose, there is no need to descend

far in the life-scale; if the psychical connection between man and the

mammals immediately beneath him is proven, the connection of the mammals

with the lowest invertebrate may be assumed as also established.

Speaking only of vertebrates, the brain being, whether in fish or man,

the organ of mental phenomena, how far does its structure support or

destroy the theory of mental continuity? In Man's Place in Nature, and

its invaluable supplement, the second part of the monograph on Hume,

this subject is expounded by Huxley with his usual clearness. In the

older book he traces the gradual modification of brain in the series of

backboned animals. He points out that the brain of a fish is very small

compared with the spinal cord into which it is continued, that in

reptiles the mass of brain, relatively to the spinal cord, is larger,

and still larger in birds, until among the lowest mammals, as the

opossums and kangaroos, the brain is so increased in proportion as to be

extremely different from that of fish, bird, or reptile. Between these

marsupials and the highest or placental mammals, there occurs "the

greatest leap anywhere made by Nature in her brain work." Then follows

this important statement in favour of continuity.

"As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of

erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has

provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of

gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent to brains

little lower than that of Man." After giving technical descriptions

in proof of this, and laying special stress on the presence of the

structure known as the "hippocampus minor" in the brain of man as well

as of the ape--in the denial of which Owen cut such a sorry figure,

Huxley adds:

"So far as cerebral structure goes, therefore, it is clear that Man

differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang than these do even

from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the

Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant when compared with that

between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.... Thus, whatever

system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in

the ape series leads to one and the same result,--that the structural

differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are

not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes.

But in enunciating this important truth I must guard myself against a

form of misunderstanding which is very prevalent ... that the structural

differences between man and even the highest apes are small and

insignificant. Let me then distinctly assert, on the contrary, that they

are great and significant; that every bone of a Gorilla bears marks by

which it might be distinguished from the corresponding bone of a Man;

and that, in the present creation, at any rate, no intermediate link

bridges over the gap between _Homo_ and _Troglodytes_. It would be no

less wrong than absurd to deny the existence of this chasm; but it is at

least equally wrong and absurd to exaggerate its magnitude, and, resting

on the admitted fact of its existence, to refuse to inquire whether it

is wide or narrow. Remember, if you will, that there is no existing link

between Man and the Gorilla, but do not forget that there is a no less

sharp line of demarcation, a no less complete absence of any traditional

form, between the Gorilla and the Orang, or the Orang and the Gibbon."