HISTORY OF THE IDEA
Among the few stray principles that the future will probably be able to
save from the wreck of Spencer's philosophy, is the advisability of
looking into =the genealogy of an idea=. What has been its surroundings?
What is its family history? Does it come of good stock, or is its family
low and not very respectable?
This is especially true in the case of a scientific idea, which above
all others needs to have a clean bill of health and a good family
record. But, unfortunately, the idea we are here considering has a bad
record, very bad in fact; for the whole family of Cosmogonies, of which
this notion is the only surviving representative, were supposed to have
been banished from the land of science long ago, and were all reported
dead. Some of them had to be executed by popular ridicule, but most of
them died natural deaths, the result of inherited taint, in the latter
part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is perfectly
astonishing how any of the family could have survived over into the
twentieth century, in the face of such an antecedent record.
For one of the chief traits of the family as a whole is that of mental
disorder of various stages and degrees. Some of them were raving crazy;
others were mild and comparatively harmless, except that their drivel
had such a disturbing effect on scientific investigations that they had
to be put out of the way. It seems such a pity that when this last
fellow, early in life, was up before Doctors Huxley and Spencer for
examination, he was not locked up or put in limbo forthwith. This is
especially unfortunate, because this survivor of an otherwise extinct
race has since then produced a large family, some of which it is true
have already expired, while the eldest son, Darwinism, was reported in
1901 to be "at its last gasp,"[4] and was even said last year to have
had its "tombstone inscription" written by von Hartmann of Germany. But
the succession of life idea itself, the father of all this brood, is
still certified by those in authority to be healthy and _compos mentis_.
The Cosmogony Family is a very ancient one, running back to the time of
Plato and Thales of Miletus. Indeed the cuneiform inscriptions of
Babylonia seem to indicate that a tribe with very similar
characteristics existed several millenniums before the Christian era.
But discarding all these, the first men that we need to mention are
perhaps Burnet and Whiston, who knew no other way of arriving at
geological truth than to spin a yarn about how the world was made.
Woodward seems to have had a little better sense, and is named along
with Hooke and John Ray as one of the real founders of the science.
Unfortunately the brood of Cosmogonists was not dead, for Moro and De
Maillet were at this same period spinning their fantastic theories about
the origin of things; or as Zittel puts it, "accepted the risks of
error, and set about explaining the past and present =from the
subjective standpoint=."[5] This tendency we will find to be a birthmark
in the family, and will serve to invariably identify any of them
wherever found. We must remember this, and apply the test to the modern
survivors.
Buffon seems to have been really the founder of the family in the modern
form. He is credited with the sarcastic remark that "geologists must
feel like the ancient Roman augurs who could not meet each other without
laughing;" though in view of his fantastic scheme of seven "epochs," in
which he endeavors to portray "the beginning, the past, and the future
(_sic_) of our planet,"[6] one is reminded of the common symptom which
manifests itself in thinking all the rest of the world crazy.
The "Heroic Age of Geology" succeeded this period, and was characterized
largely by a determination to discard speculation, and to seek to build
up a true science of actual fact and truth.
We have already seen from Spencer's remarks that A. G. Werner, who was,
however, one of the leaders in Germany at this time, was very far from
following true inductive methods. And the following language of Sir
Arch. Geikie shows that in him the family characteristics were decidedly
prominent:
"But never in the history of science did a stranger hallucination arise
than that of Werner and his school, when they supposed themselves to
discard theory and build on a foundation of accurately-ascertained fact.
Never was a system devised in which theory was more rampant; theory,
too, unsupported by observation, and, as we now know, utterly erroneous.
From beginning to end of Werner's method and its applications,
assumptions were made for which there was no ground, and these
assumptions were treated as demonstrable facts. =The very point to be
proved was taken for granted=, and the geognosts, who boasted of their
avoidance of speculation, were in reality among the most hopelessly
speculative of all the generations that had tried to solve the problem
of the theory of the earth."[7]
In fact this author says that:
"The Wernerians were as certain of the origin and sequence of the rocks
as if they had been present at the formation of the earth's crust." (pp.
288-9.)
Here we see the family characteristics very strongly developed.
In speaking of Werner's five successive "suites" or onion-coats in which
he wrapped his embryo world, Zittel complains:
"Unfortunately, Werner's field observations were =limited to a small
district=, the Erz mountains and the neighboring parts of Saxony and
Bohemia. And his chronological scheme of formations was founded upon the
mode of occurrence of the rocks within these narrow confines." (p. 59.)
And yet, as we have seen, it is precisely such a charge as this that
Spencer and Huxley bring against the modern phase of the doctrine of
successive ages based on the succession of life idea. Werner, from
observations "limited to a small district," constructed his scheme of
exact chronological sequence, basing it entirely upon the mineral or
mechanical character of his "suites." And hundreds of enthusiastic
followers long declared that the rocks everywhere conformed to this
classification, even so great an observer as von Humboldt thinking that
the rocks which he examined in Central and South America fully confirmed
Werner's chronological arrangement.
But such notions to-day only cause a smile of pity, for it is now well
known that, take the world over, =the rocks do not occur= as Werner
imagined, though, as Geikie says, he and his disciples were as certain
of the matter "as if they had been present at the formation of the
earth's crust." Besides, as already pointed out, we moderns ought now to
have pretty well assimilated the idea that while one kind of mineral or
rock was forming in one locality, =a totally different kind of deposit=
may have been in process of formation in another spot some distance off
=at the very same time=, and we cannot imagine a time in the past when
this principle would not hold good. But in a precisely similar way the
idea of a time value was, as we shall see, transferred from the
mechanical and mineral character of the rocks to their fossil contents;
and from observations again "limited to a small district," William Smith
and Cuvier conceived the idea that the fossils occurred =only= in a
certain order; that only certain fossils lived at a certain time; that,
for example, while Trilobites were living and dying in one locality,
Nummulites or Mammals positively were not living and dying in another
locality, though in any system of clear thinking this latter notion is
just as irrational as that of Werner. Hence Spencer is compelled to say,
"though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its spirit is still
traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the conclusions of its
antagonists."
The two cases are exactly parallel; only it has taken us nearly a
hundred years, it seems, to find out that the fossils do not follow the
prearranged order of Smith and Cuvier any better than the rocks and
minerals do the scheme of Werner. If hundreds of geologists still seem
to think that the fossils in general agree with the standard order, we
must remember how many sharp observers said the same thing for decades
about Werner's scheme. The taint of heredity will always come out sooner
or later; and both of these schemes exhibit very strongly the family
history of the whole tribe of Cosmogonies, viz., =the facts refuse to
certify that they are of sound mind=.
It was William Smith, an English land surveyor, who first conceived the
idea of fixing the relative ages of strata by their fossils. Just how
far he carried this idea it seems difficult to determine exactly.
Lyell[8] says nothing along this line about him, save that he followed
the leading divisions of the Secondary strata as outlined by Werner,
though he claims "independently" of the latter. Whewell[9] remarks
rather pityingly on his having had "no literary cultivation" in his
youth, but has nothing about the degree in which he is responsible for
the modern scheme of life succession of which many modern geologists
have made him the "father". Geikie and Zittel are much more explicit.
The former[10] says that "he had reached early in life the conclusions
on which his fame rests, and he never advanced beyond them." "His plain,
solid, matter-of-fact intellect never branched into theory or
speculation, but occupied itself wholly in the observation of facts."
Zittel[11] says pretty much the same thing, remarking that "Smith
confined himself to the empirical investigation of his country, and was
never tempted into general speculations about the history of the
formation of the earth"--words which to my mind are the very highest
praise, for they seem to indicate that he was only in a very limited way
responsible for the unscientific and illogical scheme of a "phylogenic
series" or complete "life-history of the earth," which now passes as the
science of geology. Doubtless like his little bright-eyed German
contemporary, A. G. Werner, he had not had his imagination sufficiently
cultivated in his youth to be able to appreciate the beauty of first
assuming your premises and then proving them by means of your
conclusion, i.e., first assuming that there has been a gradual
development on the earth from the lowest to the highest, and then
arranging the fossils from scattered localities over the earth in such a
way that they cannot fail to testify to the fact.
The following may be taken as a fair statement of what he actually
accomplished and taught:
"After his long period of field observations, William Smith came to the
conclusion that one and the same succession of strata stretched through
England from the south coast to the east, and that each individual
horizon could be recognized by its particular fossils, that certain
forms reappear in the same beds in the different localities, and that
each fossil species belongs to a definite horizon of rock."[12]
But even granting the perfect accuracy of this generalization of Smith's
for the rocks which he examined, I fail to see how it is any better than
Werner's scheme, which Zittel characterizes as "weak" and premature, and
of which Whewell (p. 521) says that "he promulgated, as respecting the
world, a scheme collected from a province, and even too hastily gathered
from that narrow field."
Quoting again from Zittel's criticism of Werner's work ("Hist. of
Geology," p. 59), we must admit that Smith's observations also were
"limited to a small district," and "his chronological scheme of
formations was founded upon the mode of occurrence of the rocks
(fossils) within these narrow confines." There is, as we have shown, a
monstrous jump from this to the conclusion that =even these particular
fossils= must always occur in this particular relative order over the
whole earth. How can any one deny that if we had a complete collection
of all the fossils laid down during the last thousand years--when all
admit that the so-called "phylogenic series" is complete--particular
fossils would in many cases be found to occur only in particular rocks,
and we could still arrange them in this same order from the lowest to
the highest forms of life, while we might even happen to find "small
districts" where the "mode of occurrence of the rocks within these
narrow confines" would have all the appearance of showing a true
"phylogenic" order. This of itself ought to be sufficient to show us
the weakness of this subjective method of study, and the purely
hypothetical and imaginary value of the fossils in determining the real
age of a rock deposit.
The name of Baron Cuvier is the next that we have to consider. An
examination of part of his teaching will come naturally a little later
when considering "extinct species." That part of his work which related
to the doctrine of Catastrophism is somewhat aside from the subject of
our study; while with regard to his influence on the succession of life
idea _per se_ there is not very much that need be said. And yet Cuvier
is the real founder of modern cosmological geology, and thus in a
certain sense the father of biological evolution.
But if the absence of the architectonic mania for building a cosmogony
will serve to remove in a great measure any suspicions with regard to
William Smith's results, we cannot say the same for those of Cuvier. In
his scheme the hereditary Cosmological taint, which is such an
invariable characteristic of the family, is very strong, though
disguised and almost transfigured by learning and genius. It is
doubtless these latter qualities which have secured for the theory such
a phenomenal length of life, though of course we know that nothing born
of this whole brood can ever secure a permanent home in the kingdom of
science.
"How glorious," wrote this otherwise truly great man in his famous
"Preliminary Discourse," "it would be if we could arrange the organized
products of the universe in their chronological order, as we can already
(Werner's onion-coats) do with the more important mineral substances!"
His work (with that of his co-laborer Brongniart) on the fossils of the
Paris basin was probably accurate and logical enough for that limited
locality. It was only when he quietly assumed as Werner had done, that
the rocks must always occur in this particular order all over the world,
or as Whewell expresses it, "promulgated as respecting the world, a
scheme collected from a province, and (perhaps) even too hastily
gathered from that narrow field"--it was only, I say, when this
monstrous assumption was incorporated into his scheme, and he began to
call into being his vision of organic creation on the instalment plan,
as Werner had done with the minerals, that his great and valuable work
for science became tainted with the deadly Cosmological virus, dooming
it to death sooner or later. Sherlock Holmes might attempt to diagnose a
disease by a mere glance at his patient's boots, but even this gave him
more data and was a more logical proceeding than the facts and methods
of Cuvier supplied for constructing a scheme of organic creation.
It will not be necessary to detail the manner in which the modern
"phylogenic series" was gradually pieced together from the scattered
fragments here and there all over the globe; but it should be noted here
that the whole chain of life was practically complete before any serious
attempt was made to study the rocks on the top of the ground, and to
find out how this marvellous record of the past =joined on to the modern
period=, thus reversing completely the true inductive method, and
leaving the most important of all, viz., the rocks containing human
remains and other living species, over till the last, with the result
that we have for over half a century been laboring under a "Glacial
Nightmare," and these deposits on the top of the ground "still remain in
many respects the despair of geology."
Then came Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin; and now in the light of the keen
discussions instituted by Weismann in the later eighties of the last
century, the modern world is pretty well agreed on two results, viz.,
that so far from natural selection being able to originate a species, it
can't possibly =originate= anything at all, and also that no individual
can transmit to his descendants what he has himself acquired in his
lifetime, and hence it is hard to see how he can transmit what he has
not got himself and what none of his ancestors ever had.
I have not the space to show how Agassiz further complicated the problem
immensely by his absurdly illogical use of his three "laws" of
comparison, when the prime fact of there ever having been a succession
of life on the globe in any order whatever had never been proved; but I
am free to say that if Cuvier's system of creation on the instalment
plan had been fact instead of fancy, some scheme of evolution would
undoubtedly be implied in this general fact. It is this instinctive
feeling on the part of modern scientists which makes them to-day, while
confessing the failure of Darwinism, still cling to the general idea of
evolution =somehow=. Hence it seems quite evident that, having deviated
from strict inductive methods by pursuing this _ignis fatuus_ of a
cosmological history of creation, it was essential in the interests of
true science to go the whole journey and make a complete investigation
of the biological side of the question, in order to complete the
demonstration that science was on a wrong tack entirely. Darwin and
Weismann were inevitable in view of the wholly unscientific course on
which biology entered under the guidance of Buffon and Cuvier.
What then can we take as the general lesson to be learned from the
stubborn way in which, for over a hundred years, the world has followed
this hypnotic suggestion of folly, that we might explain our genesis and
being from the scientific standpoint? One of the lessons--there may be
others--is that =science knows nothing about origins=, and that, in
speculating along these lines, the cosmological taint will always
vitiate the accuracy of our conclusions and debauch the true spirit of
induction. A hundred years ago, they thought they knew all about how the
world was made. The keen investigations inspired by Darwinism were
necessary to convince us that we know nothing at all about it. Modern
biology has simply developed a gigantic _reductio ad absurdum_ argument
against the easy assumptions of the earlier geologists that it occurred
by a progression from the low to the high. A hundred years--nay fifty
years ago--this assumption did not appear so unscientific, for we did
not then have the biological evidence to refute such an idea. Now,
however, in the light of the modern progress of science, this awful
mystery of our existence, of our creation and destiny, is borne in upon
us from every dividing cell, from every sprouting seed, from countless
millions of the eloquent voices of nature, which our forefathers were
too blind to see, too deaf to understand; and with weary, reluctant
sadness does science confess that about it all she knows absolutely
nothing.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Nature, Nov. 28, 1901, pp. 76, 77.
[5] "History of Geology," p. 23.
[6] Zittel, p. 42.
[7] "Founders of Geology," p. 112; Johns Hopkins Press, 1901.
[8] "Principles," p. 50, 8th Ed.
[9] "History of the Inductive Sciences," vol. ii., p. 521.
[10] "Founders of Geology," pp. 237-8.
[11] "History," p. 112.
[12] Zittel, "History," p. 110. It should be noted that all these rocks
in England thus examined by Smith make up only a small fraction of
the total geological series--largely what we now call the Jurassic
and Cretaceous rocks.