F. No more horrid than that you should eat roast mutton or boiled beef.
C. But it is utterly subversive of Christianity; for if this theory is
true the fall of man is entirely fabulous; and if the fall, then the
redemption, these two being inseparably bound together.
F. My dear friend, there I am not bound to follow you. I believe in
Christianity, and I believe in Darwin. The two appear irreconcilable.
My answer to those who accuse me of inconsistency is, that both being
undoubtedly true, the one must be reconcilable with the other, and that
the impossibility of reconciling them must be only apparent and
temporary, not real. The reconciliation will never be effected by
planing a little off the one and a little off the other and then gluing
them together with glue. People will not stand this sort of dealing, and
the rejection of the one truth or of the other is sure to follow upon any
such attempt being persisted in. The true course is to use the freest
candour in the acknowledgment of the difficulty; to estimate precisely
its real value, and obtain a correct knowledge of its precise form. Then
and then only is there a chance of any satisfactory result being
obtained. For unless the exact nature of the difficulty be known first,
who can attempt to remove it? Let me re-state the matter once again.
All animals and plants in a state of Nature are undergoing constant
competition for the necessaries of life. Those that can hold their
ground hold it; those that cannot hold it are destroyed. But as it also
happens that slight changes of food, of habit, of climate, of
circumjacent accident, and so forth, produce a slight tendency to vary in
the offspring of any plant or animal, it follows that among these slight
variations some may be favourable to the individual in whom they appear,
and may place him in a better position than his fellows as regards the
enemies with whom his interests come into collision. In this case he
will have a better chance of surviving than his fellows; he will thus
stand also a better chance of continuing the species, and in his
offspring his own slight divergence from the parent type will be apt to
appear. However slight the divergence, if it be beneficial to the
individual it is likely to preserve the individual and to reappear in his
offspring, and this process may be repeated _ad infinitum_. Once grant
these two things, and the rest is a mere matter of time and degree. That
the immense differences between the camel and the pig should have come
about in six thousand years is not believable; but in six hundred million
years it is not incredible, more especially when we consider that by the
assistance of geology a very perfect chain has been formed between the
two. Let this instance suffice. Once grant the principles, once grant
that competition is a great power in Nature, and that changes of
circumstances and habits produce a tendency to variation in the offspring
(no matter how slight such variation may be), and unless you can define
the possible limit of such variation during an infinite series of
generations, unless you can show that there is a limit, and that Darwin’s
theory over-steps it, you have no right to reject his conclusions. As
for the objections to the theory, Darwin has treated them with admirable
candour, and our time is too brief to enter into them here. My
recommendation to you is that you should read the book again.
C. Thank you, but for my own part I confess to caring very little
whether my millionth ancestor was a gorilla or no; and as Darwin’s book
does not please me, I shall not trouble myself further about the matter.