itself. It has no originating power. It is simply a method and law of
the occurrence of things. Evolution shows that all things proceed,
little by little, without breach of continuity; that the higher ever
proceeds from the lower; the more complex ever unfolds from the more
simple. For every species or form, it points out some ancestor or
natural antecedent, from which by gradual modification, it has been
derived. And in natural selection, the influence of the environment,
sexual selection, use and disuse, sterility, and the variability of the
organism, Science shows us some of the secondary factors or conditions
of this development. But none of these are supposed by it to be first
causes or originating powers. What these are, science itself does not
claim the right as yet to declare.
Now, it is true that this unbroken course of development, this
omnipresent reign of law, is inconsistent with the theological theories
of supernatural intervention that have so often claimed a monopoly of
faith. But independent of all scientific reasons, on religious and
philosophical grounds themselves, this dogmatic view is no longer to be
accepted. For if God be the God of all-seeing wisdom and foresight that
reverence conceives him to be, his work should be too perfect from the
outset to demand such changes of plan and order of working. The great
miracle of miracles, as Isaac Taylor used to say, is that Providence
needs no miracles to carry out its all-perfect plans.
But if, I hear it asked, the huge machine of the universe thus grinds on
and has ever ground on, without interruption; if every event is closely
bound to its physical antecedent, life to the cell, mind to brain, man
to his animal ancestry and bodily conditions,--what other result will
there be than an inevitable surrender to materialism? When Laplace was
asked by Napoleon, on presenting to him his famous essay on the nebular
hypothesis of the origin of the stellar universe, "Why do I see here no
mention of the Deity?" the French astronomer proudly replied: "Sire, I
have no need of that hypothesis."
Is not that the natural lesson of Evolutionism, to say that God is a
hypothesis, no longer needed by science and which progressive thought,
therefore, better dismiss?
I do not think so. Old time materialism dismissed the idea of God
because it dismissed the idea of a beginning. The forces and phenomena
of the world were supposed eternal; and therefore a Creator was
unnecessary. But the conception of Evolution is radically different. It
is a movement that demands a motor force behind it. It is a movement,
moreover, that according to the testimony of modern science cannot have
been eternal. The modern theory of heat and the dissipation of energy
requires that our solar system and the nebula from which it sprang
should have had a beginning in some finite period of time. The
evolutionary process cannot have been going on forever; for the amount
of heat and the number of degrees of temperature and the rate of
cooling, are all finite, calculable quantities, and therefore the
process cannot have been going on for more than a certain finite number
of years, more or less millions, say. Moreover, if the original
fire-mist was perfectly homogeneous, and not impelled into motion by any
external force, it would never have begun to rotate and evolve into
planets and worlds. If perfectly homogeneous, it would have remained,
always balanced and always immobile. To start it on its course of
rotation and evolution, there must have been either some external
impelling power, or else some original differentiation of forces or
conditions; for which, again, some other cause than itself must be
supposed. For the well-known law of inertia forbids that any material
system that is in absolute equilibrium should spontaneously start itself
into motion. As John Stuart Mill has admitted, "the laws of nature can
give no account of their own origin."
In the second place, notice that the materialistic interpretation of
Evolution fails to account for that which is most characteristic in the
process, the steady progress it reveals. Were Evolution an aimless,
fruitless motion, rising and falling alternately, or moving round and
round in an endless circle, the reference of these motions to the blind
forces of matter might have, perhaps, a certain plausibility. But the
movements of the evolution process are of quite a different character.
They are not chaotic; no barren, useless circlings back to the same
point, again and again; but they are progressive; and if often they seem
to return to their point of departure, we see, on close examination,
that the return is always on a higher plane. The motion is a spiral one,
ever advancing to loftier and loftier ranges. Now this progressive
motion is something that no accidental play of the atoms will account
for. For chance builds no such rational structures. Chance writes no
such intelligent dramas, with orderly beginning, crescendo, and climax.
Or if some day, chance builds a structure with some show of order in it,
to-morrow it pulls it down. It does not move steadily forward with
permanent constructiveness.
The further Science penetrates into the secrets of the universe the more
regular seems the march of thought presented there; the more harmonious
the various parts; the more rational the grand system that is
discovered. "How the one force of the universe should have pursued the
pathway of Evolution through the lapse of millions of ages, leaving
traces so legible by intelligence to-day, unless from beginning to end
the whole process had been dominated by intelligence," this is
something, as Francis Abbot well says, that passes the limits of
conjecture. The all-luminous intelligibility of the universe is the
all-sufficient proof of the intelligence of the cause that produced it.
In the annals of science there is nothing more curious than the
prophetic power which those savans have gained who have grasped this
secret of nature--the rationality of the universe. It was by this
confidence in finding in the hitherto unexplored domains of nature what
reason demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the mammalian
skeleton, discovered the intermaxillary bone in man; and Sir William
Hamilton, from the mathematical consequences of the undulation of light,
led the way to the discovery of conical refraction. A similar story is
told of Prof. Agassiz and Prof. Pierce, the one the great zoölogist, the
other the great mathematician, of Cambridge. Agassiz, having studied the
formation of radiate animals, and having found them all referable to
three different plans of structure, asked Prof. Pierce, without
informing him of his discovery, how to execute all the variations
possible, conformed to the fundamental idea of a radiated structure
around a central axis. Prof. Pierce, although quite ignorant of natural
history, at once devised the very three plans discovered by Agassiz, as
the only fundamental plans which could be framed in accordance with the
given elements. How significantly do such correspondences speak of the
working of mind in nature, moulding it in conformity with ideas of
reason. Thus to see the laws of thought exhibiting themselves as also
the laws of being seems to me a fact sufficient of itself to prove the
presence of an over-ruling mind in nature.
Is there any way of escaping this obvious conclusion? The only method
that has been suggested has been to refer these harmonies of nature back
to the original regularity of the atoms. As the drops of frozen moisture
on the window pane build up the symmetrical frost-forms without design
or reason, by virtue of the original similarity of the component parts,
so do the similar atoms, without any more reason or plan, build up the
harmonious forms of nature.
But this answer brings us face to face with a third still more
significant problem, a still greater obstacle to materialism. Why are
the atoms of nature thus regular, thus similar, one to another? Here are
millions on millions of atoms of gold, each like its fellow atom.
Millions and millions of atoms of oxygen, each with the same velocity of
movement, same weight and chemical properties. All the millions on
millions on millions of atoms on the globe are not of infinitely varied
shape, weight, size, quality; but there are only some seventy different
kinds, and all the millions of one kind, just as like one another as
bullets out of the same mould, so that each new atom of oxygen that
comes to a burning flame does the same work and acts in precisely the
same way as its fellows. Did you ever think of that? If you have ever
realized what it means, you must recognize this uniformity of the atoms,
billions and billions of them as like one another as if run out of the
same mould--as the most astonishing thing in nature.
Now, among the atoms, there can have been no birth, no death, no
struggle for existence, no natural selection to account for this. What
other explanation, then, in reason is there, than to say, as those great
men of science, Sir John Herschel and Clerk Maxwell, who have, in our
day, most deeply pondered this curious fact, have said, that this
division of all the infinity of atoms in nature into a very limited
number of groups, all the billions of members in each group
substantially alike in their mechanical and chemical properties, "gives
to each of the atoms the essential characters at once of a manufactured
article and a subordinate agent."
Evolution cannot, then, be justly charged with materialism. On the
contrary, it especially demands a divine creative force as the starter
of its processes and the endower of the atoms with their peculiar
properties. The foundation of that scientific system which the greatest
of modern expositors of Evolution has built up about that principle
(Herbert Spencer's synthetic philosophy) is the persistence of an
infinite, eternal, and indestructible force, of which all things that we
see are the manifestations.
To suppose, as many of the camp-followers of the evolution philosophy
do, that the processes of successive change and gradual modification,
which have been so clearly traced out in nature, relieve us from the
need or right of asking for any anterior and higher cause of these
processes; or that because the higher and finer always unfolds from the
lower and coarser, therefore there was really nothing else in existence,
either at the beginning or at present, than these crude elements which
alone disclose themselves at first; and that these gross, sensuous facts
are the only source and explanation of all that has followed them,--this
is a most superficial and inadequate view. For this explanation, as we
have already noticed, furnishes no fountain-head of power to maintain
the constant upward-mounting of the waters in the world's conduits. It
furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams into ever wise and
ordered channels. To explain the higher life that comes out of these low
beginnings, we must suppose the existence of spiritual powers, unseen at
first, and disclosing themselves only in the fuller, later results, the
moral and spiritual phenomena that are the crowning flower and fruit of
the long process. When a thing has grown from a lower to a higher form,
its real rank in nature is not shown by what it began in, but by what it
has become. Though chemistry has grown out of alchemy, and astronomy out
of astrology, this does not empty them of present truth or impair at all
their authority and trustworthiness to-day. Though man's mind has grown
out of the sensations of brutish ancestors, that does not take away the
fact that he has now risen to a height from which he overlooks all these
mists and sees the light which never was on sea or land. The real
beginning of a statue is not in the rough outline in which it first
appears, but in the creative idea of the perfect work which regulates
its whole progress. The real nature of a tree is not to be discovered in
the first swellings of the acorn, or the first out-pushing of its
rootlets, but rather are acorn and rootlet themselves parts of that
generic idea, that _evolutive potentiality_, which is only to be
understood when manifested in its completer form in the full-grown
monarch of the forest. So to discern the real character and motor-power
of the world's evolution, we must look, not to its beginnings, but to
its end, and see in the latest stages, and its highest moral and
spiritual forms and forces, not disguises of its earlier stages, but
ampler manifestations of that Divine power and purpose which is the
ever-active agent, working through all the varied levels of creation.
The evolution theory is, also, it must be acknowledged, hostile to that
phase of theology which conceives of God as a being outside of nature;
which regarded the universe as a dead lump, a mechanical fabric where
the Creator once worked, at the immensely remote dawn of creation; and
to which again, for a few short moments, this transcendental Power
stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive species of living
beings were called into being in brief exertions of supernatural energy.
But this mechanical view of God who, as Goethe said, "only from without
should drive and twirl the universe about," what a poor conception of
God, after all, was that; not undeserving the ridicule of the great
German.
Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has given us, as a Power not
indefinitely remote, but ever present and infinitely near,
"A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things,"
is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This is the conception
of God that Paul has given us, "the God in whom we live and move and
have our being;" this is the conception that the book of Wisdom gives
us, "as the Divine Spirit who filleth the world."
And to this conception of God, Evolution has no antagonism, but on the
contrary, throws its immense weight in its favor. Evolution, in fact,
instead of removing the Deity from us, brings him close about us; sets
us face to face with his daily activities. The universe is but the body
of which God is the soul; "the Interior Artist," as Giordano Bruno used
to say, who from within moulds his living shapes of beauty and power.
What else, in fact, is Evolution but the secular name for the Divine
Indwelling; the scientific alias for the growth and progressive
revelation of the Holy Spirit, daily putting off the old and putting on
the new; constantly busy from the beginning of time to this very day
moulding and forwarding his work?
Not long ago I came across the mental experience of a working geologist
which well illustrates this. "Once in early boyhood," says Mr. James E.
Mills, "I left a lumberman's camp at night to go to the brook for water.
It was a clear, cold, moonlight night and very still, except the distant
murmuring of the Penobscot at some falls. A sense of the grandeur of the
forest and rivers, the hills, and sky, and stars came over the boy, and
he stood and looked around. An owl hooted, and the hooting was not a
cheerful sound. The men were all asleep, and the conditions were lonely
enough. But there was no feeling of loneliness; for with the sense of
the grandeur of creation, came the sense, very real and strong, of the
Creator's presence. In boyish imagination, I could see His almighty hand
shaping the hills and scooping out the valleys, spreading the sky
overhead, and making trees, animals, and men. Thirty years later I
camped alone in the open air on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear,
cold, moonlight night. The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches were on
the warpath. An owl again hooted; but again all loneliness was dispelled
by a sense of the Creator's presence, and the night of long ago by the
Penobscot came into my mind, and with it the question: What is the
difference to my mind between the Creator's presence now and then? To
the heart, it was very like, but to the mind very different. Now, no
great hand was shaping things from without. But God was everywhere,
reaching down through long lines of forces, and shaping and sustaining
things from within. I had been travelling all day by mountains of lava
which had cooled long ages ago, and over grounds which the sea, now far
off, had left on its beaches; and with the geologist's habit recalled
the lava still glowing and flowing, and the sea still rolling its
pebbles on the beaches. But now I knew it was by forces within the earth
that the lava was poured out, and that the waves which rolled the
pebbles were driven by the wind and the wind by the sun's heat. And the
forces within the earth and the heat within the sun come from still
further within. Inward, always inward, the search for the original
energy and law carried my mind, for He whose will is the source of all
force, and whose thought is the source of all law is on the inside of
the universe. The kingdom of God is within you."
"Now this change from the boyish idea of God creating things from
without, to the manhood's view of God creating and sustaining all things
from within," is indeed as this working geologist so well says, "the
essential change which modern science has wrought in the habit of
religious thought. From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step in
the development of science has cost the giving up of some idea of a God
creating things as man shapes them from without, and has illustrated the
higher idea of God reaching His works from within. Every step has led
toward the truth that life and force come to the forms in which they are
clothed from God by the inner way; and by the same way, their law comes
with them; and that the forms are the effects of the force and life,
acting according to the law."
This is certainly a most noble, uplifting conception of the world. But
how, perhaps it will be asked, can we find justification for such a view
of the Divine Spirit as indwelling in nature? It is a question worth
dwelling upon, and when we carefully ponder it, we find that one of the
phases of the evolution philosophy that has been a chief source of alarm
is precisely the one that lends signal support to this doctrine of
Divine Indwelling.
Evolution is especially shrunk from, because it connects man so closely
with nature; our souls are traced back to an animal origin;
consciousness to instinct, instinct to sensibility, and this to lower
laws and properties of force. By the law of the correlation of forces,
our mental and spiritual powers are regarded as but transformed phases
of physical forces, conditioned as they are on our bodily states and
changes; and the soul, it is said, is but a child of nature, who is most
literally its mother.
To many minds this is appalling. But let us look it candidly in the face
and see its full bearing. We will recall in the first place, the
scientific law, no life but from proceeding life. Let us recollect next
the dictum of mechanics, no fountain can rise higher than its source.
The natural corollary and consequence of this is "no evolution without
preceding involution." If mind and consciousness come out of nature,
they must first have been enveloped in nature, resident within its
depths. If the spirit within our hearts is one with the force that stirs
the sense and grows in the plant, then that sea of energy that envelops
us is also spirit.
When we come to examine the idea of force, we find that there is only
one form in which we get any direct knowledge of it, only one place in
which we come into contact with it, and that is, in our own conscious
experiences, in the efforts of our own will. According to the scientific
rule, always to interpret the unknown by the known, not the known by the
unknown, it is only the rational conclusion that force elsewhere is also
will. Through this personal experience of energy, we get, just once, an
inside view of the universal energy, and we find it to be spiritual; the
will-force of the Infinite Spirit dwelling in all things. That the
encircling force of the universe can best be understood through the
analogy of our own sense of effort, and therefore is a form of will, of
Spirit, is a conclusion endorsed by the most eminent men of
science,--Huxley, Herschel, Carpenter, and Le Conte. There is,
therefore, no real efficient force but Spirit. The various energies of
nature are but different forms or special currents of this Omnipresent
Divine Power; the laws of nature, but the wise and regular habits of
this active Divine will; physical phenomena but projections of God's
thought on the screen of space; and Evolution but the slow, gradual
unrolling of the panorama on the great stage of time.
In geology and paleontology, as is admitted, Evolution is not directly
observed, but only inferred. The process is too slow; the stage too
grand for direct observation. There is one field and only one where it
has been directly observed. This is in the case of domestic animals and
plants under man's charge. Now as here, where alone we see Evolution
going on, it is under the guidance of superintending mind, it is a
justifiable inference that in nature, also, it goes on under similar
intelligent guidance. Now, it is the observation of distinguished men of
science that we see precisely such guidance in nature. There is nothing
in the Darwinian theory, as I said, that would conduct species upward
rather than downward. To account for the steady upward progress we must
resort to a higher Cause. We must say with Asa Gray, "Variation has been
led along certain beneficial lines, like a stream along definite and
useful lines of irrigation." We must say with Prof. Owen, "A purposive
route of development and change, of correlation and inter-dependence,
manifesting intelligent will, is as determinable in the succession of
races as in the development and organization of the individual.
Generations do not vary accidentally in any and every direction, but in
pre-ordained, definite, and correlated courses." This judgment is one
which Prof. Carpenter has also substantially agreed with, declaring that
the history of Evolution is that of a consistent advance along definite
lines of progress, and can only be explained as the work of a mind in
nature.
The old argument from Design, it has been frequently said of late, is
quite overthrown by Evolution. In one sense it is: _i.e._ the old idea
of a special purpose and a separate creation of each part of nature. But
the divine agency is not dispensed with, by Evolution; only shifted to a
different point of application; transferred from the particular to the
general; from the fact to the law. Paley compared the eye to a watch;
and said it must have been made by a divine hand. The modern scientist
objects that the eye has been found to be no hand-work; it is the last
result of a complicated combination of forces; the mighty machine of
nature, which has been grinding at the work for thousands of years. Very
well; but the modern watch is not made by hand, either, but by a score
of different machines. But does it require less, or not more
intelligence to make the watch in this way? Or if some watch should be
discovered that was not put together by human hand, but formed by
another watch, not quite so perfect as itself, and this by another
watch, further back, would the wonder, the demand for a superior
intelligence as the origin of the process be any the less? It strikes me
that it would be but the greater. The farther back you go, and the more
general, and invariable, and simple the fundamental laws that brought
all things into their present form, then, it seems to me, the more
marvellous becomes the miracle of the eye, the ear, each bodily organ,
when recognized as a climax to whose consummation each successive stage
of the world has contributed. How much more significant of purposive
intelligence than any special creation is this related whole, this host
of co-ordinated molecules, this complex system of countless interwoven
laws and movements, all driven forward, straight to their mark, down the
vistas of the ages, to the grand world consummation of to-day? What else
but omniscience is equal to this?