Darwinism Considered from a Vitalistic Stand-Point.
Granting that the assumption of Darwinism rests, as claimed, on the fixed
and inflexible adaptation of means to ends, in the diversified yet
measurably specialized processes of nature, there is no logical deduction
to be drawn therefrom but that which traces the representatives of all the
great types of the animal kingdom to one single source, and that not the
Sovereign Intelligence of the Universe, but a mere "ovule in protoplasm,"
or what may be defined, in its unaggregated form, as an inconceivably
small whirligig, having motion on a central axis, but whether an
independent motion of its own, or one derived from an Infinite
Intelligence, the Darwinian systematizers are not bold enough to aver.
They have too many _a priori_ scruples either to assert the one
proposition or to deny the other. What set this little whirligig in motion
is a mystery that lies beyond the purview of science, so called, and into
the depths of this infinitessimal and most mysterious little chamber they
refuse to go.
They search not for the evidence of an Infinite Intelligence in the
outermost circle of the heavens where the highest is to be found, and
where a bound is set that we may not pass, but shutting their eyes to all
the grander evidences of such an Intelligence, they dive down into the
infinitessimal realm of nature and assume to dig out the sublimer secrets
of the universe there. And this is their grand discovery: That this
infinitessimal whirligig of theirs has not only whirled man into
existence, but the entire circle of the heavens, with the innumerable host
of stars that march therein, and all the boundless systems of worlds that
roll in space. With this subordination of the Infinite to the
infinitessimal, of intelligence to insensate matter, of divine energy, so
to speak, to blind molecular force, they are satisfied; and, like the mole
in the fable, conceive their little molecule to be the only possible
creator of a stupendous universe.
Scrutinize my propositions closely, and see if I am guilty of misstating
theirs. Their new theory is only a slight modification of an old one, or
the old adage, _omne vivum ex ovo_--all life is from an egg. For they
assert that every living thing primordially proceeds from an ovule in
protoplasm, the essential part of the protoplasmic egg, so to speak, being
this little _ovum_ or cellule, from which have issued all possible
organisms in both the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Nor is this theory
essentially confined to organic matter. A scientific coördination of its
several known parts, or alleged functions, extends the operations of this
infinitessimal whirligig to the plastic or uniformly diffused state of all
matter, from which has been evolved, in an infinite duration of past time,
not only life in its highest manifestations, but a universe so
stupendously grand that no amount of human intelligence can grasp the
first conception of it.
Mr. Emerson--our Ralph Waldo--virtually accepts this theory of
development, substituting, however, a stomach for an ovule, and the
reverse of the Darwinian proposition, in what he is pleased to call "the
incessant opposition of nature to everything hurtful." It is not the
"selection of the fittest" but the "rejection of the unfit," by which "a
beneficent necessity (I use his language) is always bringing things
right." "It is in the stomach of plants," he says, "that development
begins, and ends in the circles of the universe." "'Tis a long way," he
admits, "from the gorilla to the gentleman--from the gorilla to Plato,
Newton, Shakespeare--to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of
legislation, the summits of science, art, poetry."
Few persons, I take it, will dispute this proposition. The road is a long
one and beset with all sorts of thorns and briars, such as Mr. Emerson's
philosophy will hardly eradicate from the wayside. Even the most refined
empiricism will find it difficult to stomach his stomachic theory of the
universe, which lands all atomic or corpuscular philosophy in a digestive
sac, such as Jack Falstaff bore about him with its measureless capacity
for potations and Eastcheap fare. It is a road too in which Mr. Emerson's
philosophy will get many sharp raps from an external world of phenomena,
in the futility of both his and the Darwinian hypothesis to explain away
the independent origination of certain species of plants and animals--new
varieties still springing into existence, under favorable conditions, in
obedience to the divine fiat, "Let the earth bring forth."
In laying the foundations of this new science, if science it shall be
called, we must insist that the course of nature is uniform, and that,
however extended our generalizations in any one of her lines of
uniformity, all intermediate, as well as ultimate propositions, must not
only be stated with the utmost scientific accuracy, but the logical
deductions therefrom must also be uniform, or lie in the path of
uniformity. The earliest and latest inductions must either coincide or
approximate the same end. No links must be broken, no chasms bridged, in
the scientific series. There must be a distinct and separate link
connecting each preceding and each succeeding one in the chain. The lowest
known mammal must be found in immediate relationship with his higher
congener or brother, not in any remote cousinship. There must be no
saltatory progress--no leaping over intermediate steps or degrees. The
heights of science are not to be scaled _per saltum_, except as degrees
may sometimes be conferred by our universities.[35]
There are some fish-like animals, say our Darwinian systematizers, like
the Lepidosirens and their congeners, with the characteristics of
amphibians; and hence they infer that by successive deviations and
improvements the lower order has risen into the higher. But out of what
page in the volume of nature, in the countless leaves we have turned back,
has the immediate congener dropped, that we are obliged to look for the
relationship in thirty-fourth cousins? We might as well say that some of
the _Infusoria_ possess the same or similar characteristics, and predicate
relationship between them and the amphibians; for giants sometimes spring
from dwarfs and dwarfs from giants. At all events, our diagnoses must be
freed from these intermediate breaks or failures in the chain of
continuity, or the doctrine of descent must tumble with the imaginary
foundations on which it is built. And bear in mind that the most
enthusiastic Darwinist is forced to admit that there are still rigid
partitions between the lower and higher organisms that have not been
pierced by the light of scientific truth, but they assume that future
discoveries and investigations will solve the difficulty. But science,
inflexible as she is, or ought to be, in her demands, admits of no
assumptions, much less sanctions such exceptions and deviations as we
constantly find in the Darwinian path of continuity. The eye of
imagination can supply nothing to her vision. She is eagle-eyed, and soars
into the bright empyrean--does not dive into quagmires and the slime of
creation after truth.
But let us see how Mr. Darwin bridges one of the very first chasms he
meets with in constructing his chain of generation. He goes back to the
first link, or to what he calls primordial generation. Here the leap is
from inorganic matter to the lowest form of organic life--from inanimate
to animate dust. The chasm is immense, as all will agree. But he bridges
it by falling back on his infinitessimal whirligig--his _primum
mobile_--or on the motions of elements as yet inaccessible, except to the
eye of imagination. For even Plato's monad, or ultimate atom, was not
matter itself, being indivisible, but rather a formal unit or primary
constituent of matter, which, like Mr. Darwin's whirligig in its
unaggregated form, admits of neither a maximum nor a minimum of
comprehension; but rests entirely on imaginary hypothesis. And we may here
add that a system which begins in imaginary hypotheses and ends in
them--as that of bridging the chasmal difference between a gorilla and a
Plato--can be dignified into a science only by a still greater stretch of
the imagination--that of bridging the difference between the Darwinian
zero and his ninety degrees of development in a Darwin himself!
Bear in mind, as we proceed, that the function of an argument in
philosophy, as in logic, is to prove that a certain relation exists
between two concepts or objects of thought, when that relation is not
self-evident. In the Darwinian chain we have, as the first link, organic
life springing from inorganic matter, without the slightest relation
existing between the two, except what may be universally predicated of
matter itself, whether animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic; and
there is no other affirmative premise, expressing their agreement as
extremes, that can possibly admit of an affirmative conclusion. The parts
are so separated in thought that no metaphysical or ideal distinction
exists to coordinate them in classification. We are simply forced back, in
our attempt at classification, upon the intuitions of consciousness, where
reason manifestly ceases to enforce its inductions.
And here the human mind intuitively springs an objection which is at once
aimed at the very citadel of Darwinism. On what rests the validity of
these intuitions except it be that "breath of life," which, as we have
before said, was breathed into man when he became a living soul? If we
follow the divine record, instead of these blind systematizers leading the
blind, we shall have no difficulty in establishing the validity of these
intuitions--the highest potential factors this side of Deity to be found
anywhere in the universe. For if our intuitions are not to be relied
upon--if their objects and perceptions are to be discarded as
unreliable--then there can be no agreement or disagreement between any two
ideas presented, objectively or subjectively, to the human mind. No
processes of mental analysis or ratiocination, like those pursued in the
elementary methods of Euclid, can present the basis of an intellectual
judgment, or lay the foundation of the slightest faith or belief in the
world. To deny the primary perception of truth by intuition is as fatal to
"Evolution" as to the sublimer teachings of the Bible Genesis.
But from the very nature of our being, as well as the primary _datum_ of
consciousness itself, we must rest the validity of these intuitions on
something, and that, something more than a finite intelligence; and since
science, with all her knowledge methodically digested and arranged,
furnishes no clue to the mystery, we are left to the higher sources of
inspiration to reach it. And this inspiration, however it may be derived,
necessarily becomes a part of our intuitions, since it addresses itself to
the strongest possible cravings of the human soul, and is accepted as its
inseparable companion and guest.
Shall we build our faith then on the Divine Word,--on the Word that was in
the beginning with God, and, when incarnate, _was_ God,--or on Mr.
Darwin's little whirligig that originally set everything in motion, and
has only to go on _ad infinitum_ to whirl us out a God, as it has already
whirled us out a Darwinian universe without one. For if this ovulistic
whirligig has bridged the chasmal difference between protoplasm and man,
since the transition from inorganic matter to organic life, the process
has only to be indefinitely extended to bridge the chasm between man and
Deity, or between finite and infinite intelligence. This gives us nature
evolving a God, instead of the doctrine of the old Theogonies, of a God
presiding from all eternity over nature; one "who laid the foundations of
the earth that it should not be removed forever; who stretchest out the
heavens like a curtain; who layeth the beams of his chambers in the
waters; who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire."
These evolutionists manifestly get the cart before the horse in their
category of cosmological events. It is not inert matter organizing itself
into life, nor any mode of physical or chemical action, nor any mere
manifestation of motion or of heat, nor any other conceivable correlation
of natural forces. None of these has enabled us to penetrate the
mysterious _inner-chamber_ of life itself. For reasons obviously connected
with our own welfare, He, from whom alone are "the issues of life," seems
to have ordained that we should fathom the depths of both physical and
chemical force, and beneficently wield and direct them to our own uses.
But this vital force; this something that stands apart from and is
essentially different from all other kinds of force, is of a nature that
baffles all our efforts to approach. The power to grasp it, or even to
penetrate in the slightest degree its mysteries, is delegated to none. All
attempts to lay bare this principle of vitality, or level the barriers
that separate it from physical or chemical action, have utterly failed. We
know no more of its essence now than was known a thousand years ago, and
know no less than will be known a thousand years hence. To become masters
of the mystery, we must enter the impenetrable veil within which the
Infinite Intelligence of the universe presides,--who, we are told,
"sendeth forth his spirit, and we are created, who taketh away our breath,
we die and return to our dust." [36]
We are just as much bewildered in respect to this vital principle in our
classifications of the myriads of little creatures careering over the
field of the microscope, as when we turn to the most marked formations of
genera and species in geological distribution. The great trouble with Mr.
Darwin's _vinculum_ is, that its weakest links are precisely where the
strongest should be found, and _vice versa_. With a candor rarely
displayed by a writer who is spinning a theory, he admits this. The
geological record is not what he would have it to be. Whole chapters are
gone where they are most needed, and nature's lithography seems constantly
at fault. Independent species are now and then springing up where
derivatives should be looked for, while derivatives are everywhere
disappearing in non-derivatives. Many of the middle Tertiary _molusca_,
and a large proportion of the later Tertiary period, are specifically
identical with the living species, of to-day. What has "natural selection"
been doing for this family in the last million years or more? Manifestly
nothing, and less than nothing, for some of the species have dropped out
altogether.
These facts, and hundreds of others like them, are constantly obtruding
themselves upon our attention to show, in harmony with the Bible Genesis,
the immutability of species--the absolute fixity of types--rather than
their variability, as claimed. If nature abhors anything more than a
_vacuum_, it is manifestly any marked transition from fixed types, and she
thunders her edicts against it in the non-fertility of all hybrids. The
doctrine of variation lacks the all-essential element of continuity, and
is oftener at war with the theory of the "selection of the fittest," than
it is with the selection of the "unfit." The leap from Lepidosirens to
Amphibians is no greater than the interval between any two species of
animals or plants yet discovered, either fossil or living. The intervals
are as numerous as the species themselves, and everywhere constitute great
and sudden leaps, or such transitional changes as "natural selection"
could not have effected independently of intervening forms--those that
nowhere exist in nature, and never have existed, if we are to credit
geologic and paleontologic records. There is everywhere similarity of
structure, but not identity; and the nearer we approach to identity of
structure the wider the divergence in similarity of characteristics. A
bird may be taught to talk and sing snatches of music. But no monkey has
ever been able to articulate human sounds, much less give them rhythmical
utterance.
Take the case of the wild pigeon, a subject that especially delights Mr.
Darwin. Most of the deviations are confined to the domesticated breeds,
and none of these rank in strength, hardiness, capability of flight, or
symmetry of structure, with the wild or typical bird. There are
well-defined deviations, but no sensible improvements, except to the eye
of the bird-fancier. The deviations are simply entailed weaknesses, or the
very reverse of what should appear from the "selection of the fittest."
The fact undeniably is, that these variations are almost wholly
abnormal--mere exaggerated characteristics, induced in the first instance,
perhaps, by high cultivation and close in-and-in breeding.
Turn these abnormal varieties loose, let them go back to the aboriginal
stock, and these characteristics will rapidly disappear; that is, they
will ultimately lose themselves or melt away in the original type. Mr.
Darwin admits that the tendency will be to reversion, but he insists,
manifestly without any positive proof therefor, that the greater tendency
is to new centres of attraction, and not necessarily the primitive one.
But this is mere assumption--sheer begging the question on his
part,--since all the oscillations are incontestibly about the original or
type centre.
The same may be said of the typical races of men, like the negro and wild
Indian of our prairies. You may lift them out of their primitive
condition--temporarily suspend, if you please so to put it, their
primordial attraction,--but, left again to themselves, they will go back
to the original type; that is, their offspring will again infest the
jungles and roam their native hunting-grounds. The process here is the
very reverse of the Darwinian theory. Reversion, as a rule, follows the
degeneracy of types, instead of there being any favorable homogeneous
result, springing from a new centre of attraction. The Indian makes a
splendid savage, but a very poor white man. Think of Red Jacket taking the
part of Mercutio in the play or enacting the more valiant _role_ of
Falstaff in King Henry the Fourth. An infusion of white blood does not
help the matter, but rather makes it worse. Generally, the meanest Indian
on the continent is your half-breed, and among the negroes there is no
term so expressive of the contempt of that race, as that applied by them
to a mulatto. The present condition of Mexico affords a striking
exemplification of this law of reversion. The inheritable characteristics
or variations, produced from an infusion of Spanish blood, are rapidly
disappearing--the native blood whipping out the European. The potency is
in the inferior blood, simply because it is the predominating one. The
result has been no homogeneous new race, but a reversion, now manifestly
in progress, to the type centre or aboriginal stock. And the curse
pronounced by Ezekiel upon mongrel tribes--"woe unto the mingled peoples"
may have a significance in this connection worth considering; but it
manifestly falls outside the scope of our present inquiry.
In considering the embryological structure of man, and the homologies he
therein presents to the lower animals, Mr. Darwin thus conclusively (in
his judgment) remarks: "We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy
quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in
his habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World."
But Mr. Darwin's pronominal "we," in this connection, admits of
qualification. He can hardly speak for all the scientific world at once.
The philosophical maxim of Sir Isaac Newton--_hypotheses non fingo_--I
build no hypotheses, make no suppositions, but adhere to facts--has a few
followers still left. But what are Mr. Darwin's facts? Has he yet
discovered the caudal man, except as the ever-fertile Mr. Stanley heard of
one in Africa? And where is his monkey that first lost the prehensile
power to climb trees? For bear in mind that it was the loss of this
prehensile power that resulted in the caudal atrophy of our monkey
progenitors, _who became men simply because they were tailless monkeys!_
They had lost their power to climb trees, and accordingly had no longer
any use for tails to let themselves down from the limbs. A "beneficent
necessity" therefore, according to Mr. Emerson, dropped the tail as
something decidedly "unfit." For the simplest tyro in Darwinian philosophy
will see that the loss of the Catarrhine monkey's tail, if it ever
occurred, could not have resulted from the "selection of the fittest." The
deeper Emersonian philosophy of the "rejection of the unfit," affords the
only solution of the difficulty, and then only on the assumption that the
tail is an unfit appendage for the monkey.
With the loss of his tail, in the light of this new genesis, the monkey
necessarily ceased to be arboreal in his habits. He could no longer
subsist on the fruits and nuts of trees, or take refuge therein from his
enemies. He had to go to work and make weapons to defend himself--to
construct tools--make and set traps, live on his wits, and not on his
prehensile power to climb trees. He soon discovered, of course, that the
longest pole knocked the persimmon. This was his first intellectual stride
towards the future Edison. From the simplest sort of Grahamitic
philosopher he passed into the robust, beef-eating Englishman. But this
was not all. As an arboreal gymnast, he was manifestly on his way to more
masterly feats of agility than ever,--those dependent, not on muscular
function, but on the nervous action of the brain and spinal marrow.
Necessity became with him the "mother of invention," and how admirably he
improved under this maternal instructor we are left to infer from the
paramount conclusion of Mr. Darwin, _that the demoralized monkey became
the incipient man_!
But this conclusively accounts for only one of the many anatomical
differences between man and his caudal progenitor. For why should the
loss of his tail have resulted in the changed chemistry of the monkey's
brain? or in the increased involutions of his brain even? The specific
differences between the present and ancestral types are very numerous
and demand separate classification. Their variability runs through every
bone, muscle, tissue, fibre, nerve. Their blood corpuscles are not the
same. The chemistry of their bones essentially differs. The nerves are
differently bundled and differently strung. In intonations of
voice--symmetry of arms, legs, chest--hairlessness of body, and aquatic
and land habits, the frog is a much nearer approach to man than the
monkey, as all caricaturists, delineating aldermanic proportions, will
agree. And Mr. Darwin might have immortalized himself by deriving the
builders of the ancient pile-habitations and other primitive water-rats
and croakers of the Swiss lakes, from this tailless batrachian. For
everybody knows, or thinks he knows, how the frog lost his tail. If he
didn't wag it off, he certainly absorbed its waggishness as a
distinguishing characteristic of the "coming man"--the future Artemas
Wards and Mark Twains of the race. This ancestral origin will also
account for the otherwise unaccountable proclivity of all human
juveniles to play at the game of leap-frog! Besides, it would have
relieved Mr. Darwin from one of the greatest perplexities he has had to
encounter. As he derives man from a hairy quadruped, the absence of hair
on the human body, is a phenomenal fact that gives him great trouble. He
agrees that it does not result from "natural selection," as he says "the
loss of hair is an inconvenience and probably an injury to man." Nor
does he suppose it to result from what he calls "correlated
development." He is more puzzled over this problem of divestiture than
any other, and finds the solution of it only in "sexual selection." That
is, he assumes that among our semi-human progenitors, far back in the
Tertiary or some other period, some female monkeys were less hirsute
than others, and that they naturally preferred males possessing similar
characteristics. These divergencies were thus commenced, and, by
continuous "sexual selection," the infirmity (for such he regards the
loss of hair) was propagated until the race was almost entirely denuded
or bereft of this covering. In the same way he accounts for nearly all
the differentiations of the race, among the various tribes now or
formerly inhabiting the earth. All have sprung from the same semi-human
progenitors--_apes that lost their capacity to subsist as apes, and
hence found it necessary to subsist as men_!
The law of degeneracy has, therefore, had quite as much to do with human
origins as that of progressive development. In fact, it is the paramount
law from a Darwinian stand-point. For the loss of hair and of the
prehensile power to climb trees are both conceded by Mr. Darwin to be
serious defects and drawbacks in the ape family.
But the law of sexual selection, as treated by the evolutionists, is not
scientifically accurate, nor is it true in fact. The loving tendency of
nature is to opposites, not likes. The positive and negative poles are
those that play into each other with most marvellous effect. Each repels
its like and rushes to the embrace of its opposite. Extremes lovingly meet
everywhere. A brunette selects a blonde and a blonde a brunette, as a
general rule in matrimony. A tall man or woman, with rare exceptions,
chooses a short companion for life. Dark eyes delight in those that are
light, and _vice-versa_. Everywhere nature seeks diversity, not
similitude. The gayest and brightest feathered songster craves
companionship in modest and unobtrusive colors. Diversity is the law of
life, as equality, or versimilitude, is that of death. Neither natural
selection, nor sexual selection, runs counter to this law. If Mr. Darwin's
theory were true, that likes selected likes, then the two marked extremes
which should have characterized the race, soon after its emergence from
the semi-human state, should have been giants and pigmies, Gargantuas and
Lilliputs. Otherwise "sexual selection," as treated by its author, plays
no intelligible part in the economy of nature, except to counterbalance
variability, not to propagate it.
But the Darwinian assumption that the primeval man, or his immediate
ape-like progenitor, came through "natural selection," that is, through
the "survival of the fittest," is subject to one or two other objections
which we shall briefly notice. And the first objection is not altogether
a technical one. The term "fittest," as applied to a monkey, has at once
a definite and comprehensive significance to us. It implies the presence
of whatever is most perfect of its kind in the monkey _as_ a monkey, and
not in the monkey _as_ something else than a monkey. They are all
admirably adapted for climbing trees; and it is this adaptation that
secures them safety, or complete immunity, in shelter from their
enemies. To say that nature selects the fittest for them--for any
species of monkey--by converting their forefeet into rudimentary hands,
with a loss of prehension and no corresponding advantages in locomotion,
is to use language without any appreciable significance to us. We can
only say that what is fittest for the monkey is ill-fitted for man, and
the reverse. This is all we can definitely predicate of them, from what
we know of their anatomical structure, and the diversified uses to which
it may be put.
The fact is, as the Bible genesis shows, that every living thing is
perfect of its kind, and whatever is perfect admits of no Darwinian
variations or improvements for the better. And the simple statement of
this undeniable proposition is, we submit, a complete refutation of
Darwinism. When the waters and the earth were commanded to bring forth
abundantly of every living creature and every living thing, "it was so,
and God saw that it was good," that is, everything perfect of its kind,
and in its kind. With this single limitation as to kind, a rattlesnake is
no less perfect than a Plato or a John Howard.
When we consider man's upright position; the firmness and steadiness with
which he plants his foot upon the earth; when we examine the mechanism of
his hand, and the wonderful and almost unlimited range it possesses for
diversified use; when we see how ill-fitted he is for climbing trees, yet
how express and admirable for climbing among the stars, even to the
outermost milky-way, the idea that what is fittest for him is fit for the
chattering monkey, is too absurd to give us pause. And yet how does Mr.
Darwin know that the monkey has been climbing up, all these hundred
thousand or million years, into man, as one of the congenital freaks of
nature, and not man shambling down into the monkey as a reverse
congenital freak. Children have sometimes been born with a singular
resemblance to the ape family, but no ape has ever, to Mr. Darwin's
knowledge, produced issue more manlike than itself. The divergencies run
the wrong way to meet the conditions of the development theory. We have
had nearly five thousand years in which to mark these transitional
changes, and yet the monkey of to-day is identical with that painted on
the walls of ancient Meroe. In all this time he has made no advance in
the genetic relation; and if we turn back the lithographic pages of
nature for a hundred times five thousand years, we shall find no
essential departure from aboriginal types.
But the Darwinian hypothesis admits of a more conclusive answer than we
have yet given. Past time, it will be conceded, is theoretically if not
actually infinite; and in all past time, nature has been tugging away at
Mr. Darwin's problem of the "survival of the fittest." It is no two
hundred and fifty thousand years, nor two hundred and fifty millions, but
an infinite duration of past time that covers the period in which she has
been wrestling with this problem. How successfully has she solved it? In
the Darwinian sense of the term "fittest," she has not so much as stated
her first equation or extracted the root of her first power. She is
manifestly as much puzzled over the problem as Mr. Darwin himself. He
fails to see that the "survival of the fittest," necessarily implies, or
carries with it, the correlative proposition,--the "non-survival of the
unfit." And when such a law has been operative for an infinite duration of
past time, the "unfit," however infinitely distributed at first, should
have disappeared altogether, many thousands, if not millions, of years
ago. If the evolutionists are dealing with vast problems, and assigning to
nature, unlimited factors to express the totality of her unerring
operations, they must be careful to limit the time in which any one of her
given labors is to be accomplished. If she makes any progress at all, an
infinite duration of past time should enable her to complete her work just
as effectually as an infinite duration of time to come.
But by what law of "natural selection," appertaining to a single pair of
old world monkeys, have their offspring advanced to this regal state of
manhood, while all other pairs have remained stationary, or precisely
where they were two hundred and fifty thousand years ago or more? Why
this exceptional divergence in the case of a single pair of monkeys? Why
this anomalous, aberrant, and thoroughly eccentric movement on the part
of nature? We had supposed that her operations were uniform--conformable
to fixed laws of movement. The doctrine of the "survival of the fittest"
implies this. Why then, should nature, in her unerring operations, have
selected the fittest in respect to a single pair of Catarrhine monkeys,
and at the same time rejected the fittest in the case of a million other
pairs? If she had selected only the fittest in respect to this old world
stock of monkeys, the entire Catarrhine family should have disappeared
in the next higher or fitter group--a group nowhere to be found in
geological distribution. The break between man and this Catarrhine
monkey covers quite a series of links in the genetic vinculum;[37] and
yet between the two we find no high form of a low type fitting into a
low form of a high type, as we manifestly should, to account for all the
diversified changes that must have taken place in the interim. And what
is true of the types is measurably true of the classes within the types,
as well as of the orders within the classes. Wide deviations in forms,
as in characteristics, would seem to be the invariable rule; the
blending of type into type, except perhaps in remote relationships, is
nowhere visible.
But if "variation" and "natural selection" have played important parts in
the economy of nature, why may not "specific creation" have played _its_
part also? Positive science can hardly flatter itself with the belief that
it is rolling back the mystery of the universe to a point beyond which
"specific creation" might not have commenced, or the divine fiat been put
forth. To believe in the possibility of a rational synthesis, limited to
sensible experience, or phenomenal facts within our reach, that shall
climb from law to law, or from concrete fact to abstract conception, until
it shall reach the _Ultima Thule_ of all law, is to carry the faith of the
scientist beyond the most transcendental belief of the theologian, and
make him a greater dupe to his illusions than was ever cloistered in a
monastery or affected austerity therein as a balm to the flesh. We may
substitute new dogmatisms for old ones, but we can never postulate a
principle that shall make the general laws of nature any less mysterious
than the partial or exceptional, or that shall in the long run, render
"natural selection" any more comprehensible, or acceptable to the rational
intuition, than "specific creation." For while one class of scientists is
climbing the ladder of synthesis, by assigning a reason for a higher law
that may be predicated of a lower, we shall find the broader and more
analytical mind accepting the higher mystery for the lower, and, by
divesting its faith of all metaphysical incumbrance, landing in the belief
of an all-encompassing law, which shall comprehend the entire assemblage
of known laws and facts in the universe. And the natural drift of the
human mind is ever towards this abstract conception--this one
all-encompassing law of the universe. It steadily speculates in this
direction, and some of the highest triumphs of our age, in physical as
well as metaphysical science, are measurably due to this tendency. The
scientific mind is not confined wholly to experimental research. It is
stimulated to higher contemplations, and is constantly disposed to make
larger and more comprehensive groupings of analogous facts. It is fast
coming to regard light, heat, electricity, magnetism, gravitation,
chemical affinity, molecular force, and even Mr. Darwin's little
whirligig, as only so many manifestations or expressions of one and the
same force in the universe--that ultimate, all-encompassing, divine force
(not to speak unscientifically) that upholds the order of the heavens,
"binds the sweet influences of the Pleiades, brings forth Mazzaroth in his
season, and guides Arcturus with his suns."
It is the boast of the Darwinian systematizers that their development
theory not only harmonizes with, but admirably supplements and out-rounds
the grander speculation of Laplace, termed the "Nebular Hypothesis," which
regards the universe as having originally consisted of uniformly diffused
matter, filling all space, which subsequently became aggregated by
gravitation, much after the manner of Mr. Darwin's little whirligig, into
an infinite number of sun-systems, occupying inconceivably vast areas in
space. Of the correctness of this hypothesis it is unnecessary to speak.
It is to the Darwinian speculation what the infinite is to the
infinitessimal, and we only refer to it to bring out the vastness of the
conception as compared to the latter theory, and to predicate thereon the
more conclusive induction that an Infinite Intelligence directs and
superintends all.
In an area in the Milky-way not exceeding one-tenth of the moon's disc,
Mr. Herschel computes the number of stars at not less than twenty
thousand, with clusters of nebulae lying still beyond. As we know that no
bodies shining by reflected light could be visible at such enormous
distances, we are left to conclude that each of these twinkling points is
a sun, dispensing light and heat to probably as many planets as hold their
courses about the central orb in our own system. From the superior
magnitude of many of the stars, as compared with the sun, we may
reasonably infer that many of these vast sun-systems occupy a much larger
field in space than our own. This would give an area in space of not less
than six thousand millions of miles as the field occupied by each of these
sun-systems. And as the distance between each of these systems and its
nearest neighbor is probably not less than that of our sun from the
nearest star, we have the enormous and inconceivable distance of not less
than nineteen billions of miles separating each one of these twenty
thousand stars or sun-systems, occupying a space in the heavens apparently
no bigger than a man's hand. And yet Infinity, as we apprehend the term,
lies beyond this vast cluster of constellated worlds! Where is Mr.
Darwin's little whirligig in the comparison, or Mr. Emerson's vegetal
stomach, or Mr. Herbert Spencer's "potential factors," to express the
sum-total of all this totality,--this gigantic assemblage of stars
clustered about a single point in the Milky-way? The human mind absolutely
reels--staggers bewildered and amazed--under the load of conceptions
imposed by these few twinkling stars, and is ready to exclaim,--
"Oh, star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there,
To waft us back a message of despair?"
But when we reflect that all this vast aggregation of sun systems, visible
in the telescopic field, is not stationary, but is revolving with
inconceivable rapidity about some unknown and infinitely remote centre of
the universe, how immeasurably vast does the conception become, and how
unutterably puerile and fatuous the thought of _Mr. Darwin's little
whirligig as the author of it all!_ No wonder the inspired Psalmist
exclaims; "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth
his handiwork." But listen to the Darwinian exclamation: "The heavens
declare the glory of my little whirligig, and the firmament showeth the
immensity of my little ovules." With the veil of faith and inspiration
lifted, the words of the Psalmist swell into the highest cherubic anthem,
while those of Mr. Darwin hardly rise above the squeak of a mole burrowing
beneath the glebe!
And what presumptuous mortal shall say that this infinitely remote centre
of the universe, around which revolves this infinite number of
sun-systems, is not the seat and throne of the Infinite One himself--the
Sovereign Intelligence and Power of the universe, directing and upholding
all? We know that some of the stars are travelling about this central
point of the heavens at a pace exceeding 194,000 miles an hour, or with
nearly three times the rapidity of our earth in its orbit. That there must
be infinite power, not physical, at this unknown centre of the universe,
to hold these myriads of sun-systems in their courses, is a logical
induction as irrefragable as that the sun holds his planets in their
orbits. And if infinite power is predicable upon this central point, why
not infinite intelligence also? Intelligence, we know, controls and
utilizes all power in this world; why not all power in the universe? It
can utilize every drop of water that thunders down Niagara to-day, as it
has already seized upon the lightnings of heaven to make them our
post-boy. This is what finite intelligence--that insignificant factor that
science would eliminate from the universe--can do; then what may not
Infinite Intelligence accomplish?
But the Darwinian systematizers object that science must limit itself to a
coordination of the known relations of things in the universe, or deal
only with phenomenal facts, not dogmatisms; forgetting that they dogmatize
quite as extensively, in constructing their chain of generation, as the
theologians do in adhering to the Bible genesis. No theologian objects to
a rational synthesis of phenomena, limited to sensible experience; but, in
climbing from law to law, he reasonably enough insists, that, when
concrete facts rise into abstract conceptions, the highest round in the
ladder shall not be knocked out for the accommodation of Robert G.
Ingersoll or any other boasted descendant of a gorilla. And he also
insists that when _a priori_ speculation is lost in abstract conceptions,
the highest must necessarily press alone upon the intuitions of
consciousness, where all generalizations cease, and all synthesis is
undeniably at an end. Here, in this mysterious chamber of the soul, we
stand silent and alone, with only dim and shadowy phantoms about us, as if
in the august presence of Deity itself.
But how does scientific speculation propose to stifle these intuitions of
consciousness--reduce them to the least of all potential factors in the
universe? We will take the very latest of these speculations. In
supplementing both the Darwinian theory and the grander speculation of
Laplace, the scientists, so called, tell us that the process of
aggregation, or the turning out of new worlds in the universe, is still
going on; but that the time is coming when all the primeval potency or
energy, originally inhering in diffused matter, will have exhausted itself
in actual energy, and that then all light, life and motion in the
universe, will cease and be at an end. This dissipation of potential
energy is to result, they say, in a played-out universe, as it has already
resulted, they claim, in a played-out moon, if not countless other
heavenly bodies.[38] All the exterior planets, or a majority of them at
least, are to be placed in this category of dismantled worlds, or those in
which all life has hopelessly ceased and become extinct. All has utterly
disappeared, or, to paraphrase one of Pope's couplets,
"Beast, bird, fish, insect--what no eye can scan,
Nor glass can reach--from zoophyte to man."
All these dismantled planets, and satellites to planets, are only so many
immense cinders--mere refuse slag--of no conceivable interest to science,
except to predicate the ultimate conclusion--"a played-out universe,
resulting from a played-out potency within the universe." The magnificent
clockwork of the heavens will then have run down, with no Darwinian
whirligig to wind it up again, and the terrible reality of Byron's dream,
which it would seem was not all a dream, be realized in the bright sun
extinguished, the stars darkling the eternal space, rayless and pathless,
and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
Oh, if this be star-eyed science, give us anything in place of it!
Blear-eyed bigotry in his cloistered den, mumbling unintelligible prayers,
and believing that man is to be saved, not by what he does, but by a
_credo_ only, is far preferable to it. But oh, how unspeakably preferable
the simple faith of the star-led Magi, who
"Deeming the light that in the east was seen
An earnest and a prophecy of rest
To weary wanderers, such as they had been,"
came on that bleak December night, 1880 years ago, to pay their homage to
the Christ-child--the long expected Messiah--the Redeemer of the world!
Footnotes
[1]: It may be proper, however, to state that the tenth and concluding
chapter was originally written as a lecture, and delivered about a
year ago in New Haven, Boston, and at other points. A request for its
publication has induced the author to place it in this volume, with
the portion referring to the Bible genesis omitted. It will be found
germane to the general subject.
[2]: "Without this latent presence of the 'I am,' all modes of existence
in the external world flit before us as colored shadows, with no
greater depth, root, or fixure, than the image of a rock hath in the
gliding stream, or the rainbow on the fast-sailing rain
storm."--_Coleridge's_ "_Comments on Essays_."
[3]: And science that is not purely inductive--i.e. primarily based on
the inviolability of our intuitions--is no science at all, but the
sheerest possible speculation.
[4]: This presence of an active living principle in nature, one originally
assigned as the "_divina particula auræ_" of every living thing, is
frequently referred to in the higher inspirational moods of our
poets. Wordsworth exquisitely refers to it in the following lines of
his "Excursion:"--
"To every form of being is assigned
An _active_ principle: howe'er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all nature, in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds;
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks."
[5]: The existence of vital units is conceded by some of the staunchest
materialists, such as Herbert Spencer, Professor Bastian and others.
Professor Bastian says: "The countless myriads of living units which
have been evolved in different ages of the world's history, must, in
each period, have given rise to innumerable multitudes of what have
been called 'trees of life.'" He insists, however, that they have
been "evolved" from something, or by some unknown process. But we
shall show further on that a "unit" can neither be _evolved_ nor
_involved_, and that this is as true of vital units as of the
mathematical or chemical unit. Neither evolution nor involution will
ever effect the value of a unit.
[6]: According to Aristotle, the great world-_ordainer_ is the constant
world-_sustainer_.
[7]: The definition which Professor Robinson, in his Lexicon of the New
Testament, gives of the word σπέρμα, as connected with the "divine
life," entirely harmonizes with this view of the subject. He says: Trop.
I John 3, 9, πἃς ό γεγενημένος ἐκ του ϑεου σπέρμα ἀυτον (ϑεὄν) εν ᾶντῶ
πενεὶ _i.e._ the germ or principle of divine life through which he
is begotten of god, το πνεὒμα.
[8]: Professor Schmidt, of the University of Strasburg, who insists that
species are only relatively stable, admits that they remain
persistent as long as they exist under the same external conditions.
Time is, therefore, not a factor in the mutation of species. Nor are
environing conditions factors, except as a failure of conditions
results in the disappearance of species, as the presence of
conditions results in their appearance.
[9]: Says M. Ch. Bonnet, in his "La Palingéuésie Philosophique;" "Il est
de la plus parfaite évidence que la matiere est susceptible d'une
infinité de mouvemens divers, et de modifications diverses," and this
is the universal claim of the materialists.
[10]: Professor Burdach (as trad, par Jourdan), in speaking of the
productive power of nature, says, "Limitée quant á l' étendue de ses
manifestations, elle continue toujottrs d' agir pour la conservation
de ce qui a été créé, et, quoiqu' elle ne maintenue les formes
organiques supérieures que par la seule propagation, il ne répugne
point au bon sens de penser qu' aujourd' hui encore elle a la
puissance de produire les formes inférieures avec des eléments
hétérogénes, comme elle a créé originairement tout ce qui posséde l'
organisation." This shows that its author believed in the
possibility of the "superior organic forms," like the mastodon,
megatherium, etc. from the "heterogenetic elements"--those
undergoing every conceivable change--as well as the "inferior
forms." At all events, it is a legitimate induction from
materialistic premises.
[11]: This point is conclusively made by Professor Burdach, who says (we
quote from Jourdan); "La tendance interieure á la configuration
existe avant sa manifestation." And by his _tendance interieure_ he
must mean some vital or other law, equivalent to an _entia_ in
matter, which results _in_, not _from_ manifestation.
[12]: Goethe borrowed his idea of an archetypal world from Plato and the
Eleatic school. They held that the world was originated, and not
eternal; that it was framed by the Creator after a perfect
archetype, one eternally existing in the divine mind, if not an
actual soul-world of which our own is but the reflex.
[13]: In a note to Prof. Bastian's "Beginnings of Life" (vol II. p. 537)
an important fact is mentioned as obtained from the writings of Dr.
Schneider, to wit, that _Nematoids_ (microscopical forms) may be
"obtained at will," almost as readily as mushrooms, by a process
entirely independent of spores. For instance, small pieces of beef
were carefully examined to see if they contained any of the ova of
Nematoids, and, finding none, they were buried in a small quantity
of earth (also carefully examined for the presence of Nematoids or
their ova) in a gallipot. "After three weeks," says Prof. B. "this
earth was found to be absolutely swarming with two kinds of
Nematoids--quite different from any forms which I had previously,
seen, although I had been seeking them for more than two years
previously in all sorts of situations." The reason why he had not
found them previously, was because the "necessary conditions" for
their appearance had not been obtained by him, or he had not sought
for them in their proper environment. They were not produced "at
will," but were the natural outgrowth of conditions, as much so as
the spores of fungi, which make their appearance whenever and
wherever the necessary environing conditions exist. According to Dr.
Gros, it takes about three weeks for these Nematoid forms to develop
into a reproductive state.
[14]: The necessity of turning plants and animals into "tramps" is just as
great in the case of "Evolution" as in that of "specific creation in
pairs." In both cases, we must insist upon geneological
consanguinity. For the chances of any two highly specialized forms,
originally starting on different lines of divergence, and ultimately
reaching individual identity, both in form and characteristics, is
an impossible problem in the determination of chances. Consequently,
Mr. Darwin finds the necessity of accounting for the presence of
northern forms in the southern hemisphere, and the reverse, just as
great as in the Linnæan theory, which was fully accepted by Cuvier.
[15]: Burdach, in his "_Traité Physiologie" (Trad. par Jourdan_. 1837)
says: "Effectivement nous rencontrons des traces de vie dans toute
existence quelconque." This is as broad a panspermic statement as
can be made, and is only true of inorganic matter so far as
vegetable life is concerned, including such infusorial, mycologic,
and cryptogamic forms as may lie so near to the "force vegetative"
of Needham as to be indistinguishable from it.
[16]: In the case of volcanic islands, the upheavals were undoubtedly
accompanied by deposits of mud, sand (ocean detritus), marine
vegetation, and more or less animal matter, and these organic
substances were washed down by the rains into the broken valleys and
plains below, when land vegetation almost immediately made its
appearance; not because seeds may have drifted thither by any of the
different agencies that have been mentioned, but because organic
matter can no more help bringing forth life in some form, when
conditions favor, than salt water, when exposed to evaporation, can
help crystallizing into its symmetrically-arranged salts. And the
same would be true of all the coral islands, bringing up the organic
matter of the sea to the influence of the light, the rains, and the
dews. The islands thus formed in the Pacific Ocean begin to exhibit
vegetable life almost as soon as they make their appearance above
the reefs, and a line of sea-beach is formed about them.
[17]: These, while presenting the most varied and diverse forms of
infusorial life, are nevertheless the most constant and abundant
type. They abound more or less in all organic infusions. Ehrenberg,
however, holds that they are no more animal than vegetal forms. They
vary in length from 1/15000 to 1/2000 of an inch, and are
consequently too minute to be satisfactorily classified in respect
to all their diversified characteristics.
[18]: The extent of the southern ice-cap may at least be approximately
reached from explorations already made. Capt. Weddell, in 1823,
extended his explorations southward to within about 15° of the
south pole, where he found an open sea. Capt. Ross, in 1842,
approached to within about 13° of the same pole, without serious
obstruction. It is true that, in the following year, he encountered
ice barriers near the line of the antarctic circle, but they were
floating barriers coming down from Weddell's open sea. Capt.
Wilkes, in 1840, explored a considerable portion of the Antarctic
Continent, lying almost entirely within the antarctic circle. Other
explorations have been made, showing that the southern ice-cap does
not probably extend, continuously at least, much farther north than
78° or 80°, or to within some ten or twelve degrees of the south
pole, independently of the packs of drifting ice in the otherwise
open seas.
[19]: The truth or falsity of "Evolution" depends entirely on the
successful solution of this problem, for the chances are
quintillions to ones that no two identical forms could have
originated from different centres, or from the same centre on
divergent lines, and ever reached identically the same results. And
how any two forms should happen to be sexually paired, on the same
or different lines of divergence, is one of those inexplicable
mysteries which must puzzle Herbert Spencer in all his labyrinthian
searches into "Force-correlation," "Differentiation," "the Dynamic
Force of Molecules," etc., etc. However successful he may be in
other directions, he will inevitably fail in this. We must fall back
on the grand Old Bible genesis for the solution of this difficulty,
where every living thing was commanded to produce seed, or multiply
and replenish the waters and the earth with offspring.
[20]: These transcendental or ideal forms may be said to correspond to the
"spiritual essences" of Plato. They are the eternal, immutable
principles which are discernible to the eye of the soul, as the
sensible objects they represent are discernible to the eye of the
body. Modern metaphysics may deem them mere abstractions, but a
higher realistic philosophy will treat them as substantive forms, of
which the objective reality is but the shadow.
[21]: Herbert Spencer may be quoted as authority on this point. He says:
"There is invariably, and necessarily, a conformity between the
vital functions of any organism, and the _conditions_ in which it is
placed ... We find that every animal is limited to a certain range
of climate; every plant to certain zones of latitude and elevation."
And the same law holds good as to the marine fauna and flora, each
specific form being confined to its own sea-depth, or distance north
or south from the thermal equator.
[22]: Speaking of the ultimate principles or elements of matter, Plato is
quoted by Humboldt as exclaiming with modest diffidence, "God alone,
and those whom he loves among men, know what they are." It is only
those who seek to eliminate God from the universe that speak with
confident flippancy on the subject of molecular machinery and
force-correlations.
[23]: As long as the evolutionists cannot agree among themselves as to
what constitutes the process of evolution, it can hardly be expected
that the public will accept their speculations as conclusive
inductions. Professor Bastian, who strongly commits himself to the
doctrine, thinks the word "evolution" arbitrary and open to many
objections, while Mr. Herbert Spencer says;--"The antithetical word
Involution would much more truly express the nature of the process."
[24]: "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of
God dwelleth in you?" 1 Cor. 3. xvi.
[25]: Dr. Drysdale, in his work on the "Protoplasmic Theory of Life,"
says: "Matter cannot change its state of motion or rest without the
influence of some force from without. True spontaneity of movement
is, therefore, just as impossible to it as to what we call dead
matter.... So we are compelled to admit the existence of an exciting
cause in the form of some force from without to give the initial
impulse in all vital actions." In all life-manifestations, this
"force from without," must be a pre-existing vital principle
operating to effect the otherwise impossible change in matter.
[26]: A favorite set-phrase of Professor Bastian in speaking of
morphological cells or "units," as he sometimes calls them.
[27]: That great and justly celebrated naturalist, Buffon, in speaking of
the universal origination of the lower forms of animal life by a
process termed, in his time, "spontaneous generation," says: "There
are, perhaps, as many living things, both animal and vegetable,
which are produced by the fortuitous aggregations of 'molécules
organiques,' as there are others which reproduce themselves by a
constant succession of generations." It is said that Buffon was for
some time associated with the Abbé Needham in his experiments in
vital directions, and was much influenced by them. So that it is by
no means certain that he did not accept the Abbé's "force
végétative" in place of his more materialistic views respecting
"molécules organiques." At all events, his statement that as many
living things appear in nature independently of reproducing causes
as by successive generation, is no doubt true.
[28]: M. Tréviranus, who followed Spallanzani and M. Bonnet in these flask
experimentations, first noticed the important fact that the
animalculæ appearing in different organic infusions, depended on
the nature and quality of the infusions themselves, and that the
changed conditions of the same infusion produced new and independent
forms of life.
[29]: Leibnitz, as quoted by M. Bonnet, says:--"Que l'Entendement Divin
étoit la religion éternelle des Essences; parce que tout ce qui
existe existoit comme de toute éternité comme possible ou en idée
dans l'entendement de Dieu. J'exprimerai cette vérité sublime en
d'autres termes: le plan entier d'univers existoit de toute Eternité
dans l'entendement du Suprême Architecte. Tou tes les parties de
l'univers et jusqu' an moindre atome étoient deffinés dans ce plan.
Tous les changemens qui devoient survenir aux différentes pieces de
ce Tout immense y avoient aussi leurs représentations. Chaque etre y
étoit figuré par ses characteres propres: et l'acte par lequel la
Souveraine Puissance a réalisé ce plan, est ce que nous nommons la
Création."
[30]: Here is a fact given us by Dr. F. Hall, of Wallingford, Conn.: In a
peat meadow in that town, owned by him, which was at no time subject
to overflow, a large quantity of peat had been removed at different
intervals of time, when the excavations naturally filled with water.
In these excavations there appeared not only the _Cyprinidae_ in
considerable numbers, but fresh water clams which grew to be as
large as those in the most favored streams. They made their
appearance the very first season after the peat was removed, and
have flourished there ever since. In no other portions of the meadow
were there any fish or clams ever noticed before, nor was there any
other source of water-supply than the rain-falls in that locality.
[31]: Professor Beale, in one of his very latest works says: "Of the
chemical and physical forms of energy something is known, but of
the relationship of the so called _vital_ energy, nothing has
been proved. We only know that the influence it exerts is
altogether different from that which has been traced to physical
and chemical energy."
[32]: It is admitted, even in the case of _Bacteria_, whose movements are
the most uniform, that they are sometimes so inert and languid as to
show no movements at all; while, at other times, they exhibit mere
Brownian movements or those no more nearly allied to "life" than the
minute particles of carbon escaping from the flame of a kerosene
lamp. And among the most distinguished microscopists, it is a
question whether these infusorial forms, those exhibiting the most
active oscillations, are really vegetal or animal in origin; in
other words, whether they are _Fungus-spores_ or _Torula_-cells, or
whether they may not be some intermediate forms.
[33]: The difficulty of assigning any definitional value to a "primordial
germ" is due to the vagueness of idea attached to it in the popular
mind, as well as to the diversified theories and speculations of the
scientists concerning the origin of life. We can only define it as a
"vital unit," as the chemist defines his smallest conceivable
quantity--his "primary least"--of an element, as a "chemical unit."
[34]: Let two comrades be shot at the same instant in battle, the one
through the heart, and the other through the arm, shattering it
badly. What is there to prevent the surgeon from taking a piece of
bone out of the arm of the man shot through the heart and instantly
killed, and using it to make good the arm of the man still living?
Apparently nothing but that the dead man's bone will not knit. He
may not have been dead five minutes, and Professor Beale's bioplasts
might still be at work spinning matter and weaving tissue for the
integrity of the displaced bone. Why will it not knit? Simply
because the vital principle that differentiates matter is gone--can
no longer act. If the integrity of the bone depended on the action
of the molecules, and not on the vital principle, there is no reason
why this experiment should not be a success. For the molecules are
all there, and their action will not be disturbed for hours after
the death of the man shot through the heart.
[35]: It is safe to adhere to the Leibnitzian axiom, _Natura non agit
saltatim_.
[36]: One of the most cultured classes of Christian believers in our day,
holds that "all life is from the Lord;" that "He is the fountain,
and we only the streams thence." And this, they claim, is true of
all life. To "take away our breath," therefore, is to cut off this
stream perpetually flowing from its invisible source--the fountain
of all Life. When scientific methods substitute for a first cause a
mere resultant effect, all primary principles disappear in their
intermediates.
[37]: Professor Marsh, of Yale College, has predicted that the "missing
link" will be found in Borneo--evidently not crediting Mr. Stanley's
statement about its presence in the interior of Africa. But one
"missing link" is hardly enough; there ought to be an extensive
family of them to complete Mr. Darwin's plexus. From the lowest
genetic form to the anthropoid ape is a distance which does not half
cover the length of this plexus--the immense gap between the monkey
and the man being decidedly the greater length of chain. And yet the
first half of the chain is traversed by innumerable forms--millions
of links, so to speak. How, then, is the greater length of the
plexus to be covered by a single "missing link?" A long line of
caudal ancestry must be dug up, therefore, in Borneo, and shipped to
the Peabody Museum, before this tremendous stretch in the chain of
animated nature is satisfactorily accounted for. Borneo must be
exceedingly rich in osteologic remains, even to bridge the chasm
between its own ourang-outangs and the Dyaks, or aboriginal
inhabitants, of that island.
[38]: This daring hypothesis of the materialists is so utterly repugnant
to all our ideas of a perfected Cosmos, that we have no patience
with those advancing it. It is, at best, speculation run mad, and is
based on no other assumption than that of the inherent
imperfectibility of the universe as it came from the hand of God, or
from the dynamic play of molecules extending throughout vast
geognostic epochs.
From a materialistic stand-point this assumption of imperfectibility
inevitably runs into the _reductio ad absurdum_. For if, in the play
of the material forces of the universe, an infinite duration of past
time has effected nothing but mutually disturbing and re-adjusting
movements and relations among cosmical bodies, then an infinite
duration of time to come can effect nothing but similarly mutual
adjustments and re-adjustments in respect to such bodies. With an
infinity of time, space, matter and motion, everywhere presenting a
unity of phenomena in the universe, "there can never be anything,"
according to the great Stagirite, "unconnected or out of place, as
in a bad tragedy." Conservation must, therefore, be the rule, and
desinence the impossible exception.
But these adherents of inherent imperfectibility instance the fact
of vanished and variable stars, as well as those that have suddenly
appeared, and, after brief periods of intense brilliancy, as
suddenly disappeared, to show that there are mighty disturbances in
the sidereal heavens which entirely negative the idea of
"conservation" as a geognostic law. But the phenomena of variable
stars, with all their apparent irregularity of motion and
fluctuations in luminosity, are now being traced to definite and
well-determined laws of motion, if not of light, while the theory of
extinguished and disappearing stars belongs exclusive to the age of
Tycho Brahe. Where there is one self-luminious body (or sun) in the
interstellary spaces, there are probably not less than forty
non-luminous or dark cosmical bodies revolving about their
respective centres of light and heat, as the attending planets
revolve about the common centre of gravity in our own system. And
this is especially true of that vast and fathomless star-stratum,
called the Milky-way, in which most of these peculiar phenomena
occur, with the exception of the variable stars only.
That stars should vary in their intensity of light by the probable
transits of these dark cosmical bodies across their discs, is no
matter of wonder or astonishment: on the contrary, it is surprising
that these sidereal phenomena do not occur with much greater
frequency. This would inevitably be the case if the planes of
revolution, in the case of these non-luminous bodies about their
central orbs, were coincident with the lines of vision from our own
planet--a circumstance by no means improbable from the vastness of
the sidereal heavens and the innumerable hosts of stars marching
therein. Besides, these periodical variations may be accounted for
in part--especially in the case of double stars--from their apparent
rather than real change of place in the heavens. For if our
sun-system is travelling towards a point in the constellation
Hercules at the rate of 194 thousand miles an hour (the rapidity of
Arcturus' flight), it is impossible to determine, in the present
state of astronomical knowledge, whether the apparent change of
place in any star is real or merely optical. But, in the case of
double stars, each is travelling (independently of its other
motions) about the common centre of gravity obtaining in its own
system, and these relative movements may account for the greater or
less intensity of light as the two stars, viewed as one, present a
greater or less area of luminosity in their united surfaces.
The assumed revolution of one of these stars about the other--thus
destroying all the known analogies of the universe, as exemplified
in our own system--may be accounted for in the same way. With
stupendous planetary systems revolving about each of these
apparently double stars, they must respectively have a revolution,
real as well as apparent, about their own centres of gravity--not
one and the same centre, but different and far distant centres.
Lying in nearly the same line of vision, with planes of movement at
right angles with it, they would necessarily present the appearance
of one star revolving about the other--an _apparent_ motion only.
And the writer here ventures an explanation of the phenomena of
_temporary_ stars, or those making their appearance in the heavens,
flaming up into stars of the first, second and third magnitudes, and
then disappearing altogether. The most remarkable of these stars, or
_apparent_ stars, was that of Tycho Brahe in 1572, presenting its
maximum brilliancy at the very first, but gradually diminishing in
size until the end of seventeen months, when it disappeared, without
change of place, from the heavens. This temporary star was visible
in Cassiopeia, on the verge of the Milky-way, within whose swarm of
stellar worlds most of these apparent stars have made their
appearance. Tycho Brahe, in seeking to account for this stellar
phenomenon, advanced the theory that stars might be "formed and
molded out of cosmical vapor," or "vapory celestial matter," as the
elder Herschel put it, "which becomes luminous as it condenses
(conglomerates) into fixed stars." But any such rapid condensation
of "vapory matter," in the light of Laplace's "nebular theory," is
manifestly too absurd for scientific recognition. A more
satisfactory explanation may be here suggested:--Supposing the
apparent relative position of any six or seven stars of the sixth
magnitude in the Milky-way, should be so changed by the combined
motions of our sun-system and of the stars themselves, as to throw
them into one and the same line of vision, but so clustered together
as to show their several star-discs as one, we should unquestionably
have a star of the first magnitude, which would continue as long as
this extraordinary stellar conjunction should last. As one after
another of these stars should fall out of line, by reason of the
combined motions named, the apparent star would be diminished from
the first to the second magnitude, and so on until it reached the
sixth magnitude, when it would pass beyond the reach of unaided
human vision. But as the star of Tycho Brahe suddenly appeared at
its fullest brilliancy, it may be objected that this suggested
theory fails to meet the required conditions.
As 18,000,000, out of the 20,000,000, of telescopic stars lie in the
Milky-way, it is not by any means improbable that such a conjunction
of stars may occur therein as often at least as once or twice in a
century. We certainly see brilliant patches of closely-crowded
stars, in great numbers, in this galactic zone, and the fact that
these temporary stars almost uniformly appear in that zone renders
the suggestion here made quite as rational, in the way of
speculation at least, as that of "vapory celestial matter" suddenly
condensed into a star of the first magnitude, as Sir. William
Herschel would have us believe was possible, if not probable.
Besides, it is a definitely ascertained fact that such clusters of
stars, lying in almost the same line of vision, exist in various
parts of the heavens, which present to the naked eye the appearance
of a star of the fourth or fifth magnitude, and probably would, if
more thickly clustered, present that of a star of the first
magnitude. But powerful telescopes resolve them into a large number
of stars, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth magnitude. One such
cluster in Andromeda's girdle has been resolved into not less than
fifteen hundred small stars of very low magnitude, and pretty widely
scattered in the telescopic field. Alexander Von Humboldt, in
speaking of stars that have thus disappeared, says that "their
disappearance may be the result of their motion as much as of any
diminution of their photometric processes (whether on their surfaces
or in their photospheres), as would render the waves of light too
weak too excite the organs of sight." And he adds: "What we no
longer see is not necessarily annihilation," repeating at the same
time the question of Pliny--"_Stellæ an obirent nascerenturve?_"
But another, and (to our mind) more satisfactory, explanation of
these stellar phenomena, may be hazarded in this connection: There
are, for instance, in the Milky-way, among the more brilliant
clusters of stars, dark granular spots, of greater or less
magnitude, in which the most powerful telescopes show no glints or
traces of stars. They are among Humboldt's smaller "fissures or
chasms in the heavens," in which he asserts that there is a great
paucity of stars, or none at all. Now, if one of these thick stellar
clusters, which show to the naked eye as a single star, should, by
the combined cosmical movements of our sun-system and the stellar
group in question, pass into the field of one of these small rents
or "fissures" in the galactic curtain--that lying in front of the
stellar cluster--it would immediately show as a star of possibly the
first magnitude, and would continue to shine as a star of that
magnitude so long as it remained in the field of the narrow rent or
fissure. It would shine out suddenly like a star through a rift in
the clouds of a dark night, and disappear as soon as it had
traversed, or apparently traversed, the rift in question. This
galactic curtain, it should be borne in mind, is made up of
18,000,000 of stars, or sun-systems, and not less than 720,000,000
dark cosmical bodies revolving about their respective centres of
gravity. If the "nebular theory" of the universe be true, this is
unquestionably the exact condition of things in the Milky-way. Of
the more distant stars in this crowded galaxy, we can only catch,
even in the telescopic field, mere glints of light as the
intervening swarms of stellar and planetary worlds thicken in the
foreground and shut out the more distant view. It is only through
these rents and fissures in this great galactic curtain that the
brighter stellar clusters beyond can ever be seen; and these glints
of far distant light, showing dimly through this curtain, may
account for the peculiar _milky_ appearance of the galaxy, arising
from the loss of chromatic power in the full beams themselves. It
was undoubtedly through one of these rents in the galactic curtain
that the condensed starry cluster of Tycho Brahe suddenly made its
appearance in the outer fringes of the Milky-way, and remained
visible for a period of seventeen months.