Life: Its True Genesis Part 11

Its germination is the springing up of the inner living principle of the grain, not its outer envelope or dead husk. This disappears in decay, except the small nutrient portion within which the germinal principle of life would seem to reside, and which undergoes a thorough chemical change in the process of pa.s.sing from death unto life, or being a.s.similated and taken up into the new living structure. The Apostle's comparison distinctly marks these several changes as the one process of pa.s.sing from death unto life. He saw in this wonderful provision of nature, the still more wonderful prevision of G.o.d. To his mind it was over the debris of the dead past that the living present is constantly marching towards a higher and more perfect life--the ultimate fruition and joy of an eternal home in the skies! And he saw that the two grand instrumentalities and co-accessory agencies to this end, were Life and Death, both equally constant and active, like all the other instrumentalities and governing agencies of the universe. Life is forever unlocking the portals of the present to youth and vigor; Death is forever closing them to age and decrepitude. This divine prevision thus becomes the wisest and most beneficent provision. Without life there would be no such thing as death, and without death no such thing as this grand succession and march of life--this pa.s.sing from out the Shadow into the Day.

Chapter X.

Darwinism Considered from a Vitalistic Stand-Point.

Granting that the a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sert 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 pa.s.s, but shutting their eyes to all the grander evidences of such an Intelligence, they dive down into the infinitessimal realm of nature and a.s.sume 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 a.s.sert 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 coArdination 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, subst.i.tuting, 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 sanct.i.ties 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 relations.h.i.+p with his higher congener or brother, not in any remote cousins.h.i.+p. 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 relations.h.i.+p in thirty-fourth cousins? We might as well say that some of the _Infusoria_ possess the same or similar characteristics, and predicate relations.h.i.+p 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 part.i.tions between the lower and higher organisms that have not been pierced by the light of scientific truth, but they a.s.sume 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 a.s.sumptions, 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 const.i.tuent 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 cla.s.sification. We are simply forced back, in our attempt at cla.s.sification, 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 G.o.d, and, when incarnate, _was_ G.o.d,--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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, instead of the doctrine of the old Theogonies, of a G.o.d 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 cla.s.sifications 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 const.i.tute 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 ident.i.ty; and the nearer we approach to ident.i.ty of structure the wider the divergence in similarity of characteristics. A bird may be taught to talk and sing s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 a.s.sumption--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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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 h.o.m.ogeneous new race, but a reversion, now manifestly in progress, to the type centre or aboriginal stock. And the curse p.r.o.nounced 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 h.o.m.ologies 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 p.r.o.nominal "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 a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sification. 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 divest.i.ture than any other, and finds the solution of it only in "s.e.xual selection." That is, he a.s.sumes 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 "s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 companions.h.i.+p in modest and un.o.btrusive colors. Diversity is the law of life, as equality, or versimilitude, is that of death. Neither natural selection, nor s.e.xual 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 "s.e.xual 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 a.s.sumption 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.signing 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 cla.s.ses within the types, as well as of the orders within the cla.s.ses. Wide deviations in forms, as in characteristics, would seem to be the invariable rule; the blending of type into type, except perhaps in remote relations.h.i.+ps, 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 subst.i.tute 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 cla.s.s of scientists is climbing the ladder of synthesis, by a.s.signing a reason for a higher law that may be predicated of a lower, we shall find the broader and more a.n.a.lytical mind accepting the higher mystery for the lower, and, by divesting its faith of all metaphysical inc.u.mbrance, landing in the belief of an all-encompa.s.sing law, which shall comprehend the entire a.s.semblage 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-encompa.s.sing 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 a.n.a.logous 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-encompa.s.sing, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 cl.u.s.ters of nebulae lying still beyond. As we know that no bodies s.h.i.+ning 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 s.p.a.ce than our own. This would give an area in s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce in the heavens apparently no bigger than a man's hand. And yet Infinity, as we apprehend the term, lies beyond this vast cl.u.s.ter 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 a.s.semblage of stars cl.u.s.tered 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 G.o.d, 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...o...b..t. 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.