Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
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Title: Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
Author: Thomas Henry Huxley
Release date: December 19, 2010 [eBook #34698]
Language: English
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Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they
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* * * * *
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* * * * *
ESSAYS
UPON SOME
CONTROVERTED QUESTIONS
BY
THOMAS H. HUXLEY, F.R.S.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1892
_All rights reserved_
* * * * *
{v}
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE Page 1
I
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PALAEONTOLOGY
An Address delivered at the York Meeting of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, 1881 55
II
THE INTERPRETERS OF GENESIS AND THE INTERPRETERS OF
NATURE
_Nineteenth Century_, December 1885 75
III
MR GLADSTONE AND GENESIS
_Nineteenth Century_, February 1886 98
_Note on the proper sense of the "Mosaic" narrative of the Creation_ 126
IV
THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
_Nineteenth Century_, March and April 1886 131
V
SCIENCE AND MORALS
_Fortnightly Review_, November 1886 209
{vi}
VI
SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM
_Nineteenth Century_, February 1887 237
VII
SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE
_Nineteenth Century_, April 1887 265
VIII
AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY
_Nineteenth Century_, November 1887 298
IX
AGNOSTICISM
_Nineteenth Century_, February 1889 329
X
THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS
_Nineteenth Century_, March 1889 378
XI
AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER
_Nineteenth Century_, April 1889 407
XII
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
_Nineteenth Century_, June 1889 449
XIII
THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE
_Nineteenth Century_, July 1890 501
{vii}
XIV
THE KEEPERS OF THE HERD OF SWINE
_Nineteenth Century_, December 1890 535
XV
ILLUSTRATIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL METHODS
_Nineteenth Century_, March 1891 559
XVI
HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE
_Nineteenth Century_, June 1891 583
* * * * *
{viii}
I am indebted to the Editors of the _Nineteenth Century_ and of the
_Fortnightly Review_ for permission to reprint such of the following Essays
as have appeared in the pages of those periodicals: and so large a
proportion of the papers has been published in the _Nineteenth Century_
that my acknowledgments are especially due to Mr. Knowles.
T. H. H.
_May 4, 1892._
* * * * * {1}
PROLOGUE
Le plus grand service qu'on puisse rendre a la science est d'y faire
place nette avant d'y rien construire.--CUVIER.
Most of the Essays comprised in the present volume have been written during
the last six or seven years, without premeditated purpose or intentional
connection, in reply to attacks upon doctrines which I hold to be well
founded; or in refutation of allegations respecting matters lying within
the province of natural knowledge, which I believe to be erroneous; and
they bear the mark of their origin in the controversial tone which pervades
them.
Of polemical writing, as of other kinds of warfare, I think it may be said,
that it is often useful, sometimes necessary, and always more or less of an
evil. It is useful, when it attracts attention to topics which might
otherwise be neglected; and when, as does sometimes happen, those who come
to see a contest remain to think. It is necessary, when the interests of
truth and of justice are at stake. It is an evil, in so far as controversy
always tends to degenerate into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue
of what is right and what is wrong to the very small question {2} of who is
right and who is wrong. I venture to hope that the useful and the necessary
were more conspicuous than the evil attributes of literary militancy, when
these papers were first published; but I have had some hesitation about
reprinting them. If I may judge by my own taste, few literary dishes are
less appetising than cold controversy; moreover, there is an air of
unfairness about the presentation of only one side of a discussion, and a
flavour of unkindness in the reproduction of "winged words," which, however
appropriate at the time of their utterance, would find a still more
appropriate place in oblivion. Yet, since I could hardly ask those who have
honoured me by their polemical attentions to confer lustre on this
collection, by permitting me to present their lucubrations along with my
own; and since it would be a manifest wrong to them to deprive their, by no
means rare, vivacities of language of such justification as they may derive
from similar freedoms on my part; I came to the conclusion that my best
course was to leave the essays just as they were written;[1] assuring my
honourable adversaries that any heat of which signs may remain was
generated, in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, by the
force of their own blows, and has long since been dissipated into space.
But, however the polemical concomitants of these discussions may be
regarded--or better, {3} disregarded--there is no doubt either about the
importance of the topics of which they treat, or as to the public interest
in the "Controverted Questions" with which they deal. Or rather, the
Controverted Question; for disconnected as these pieces may, perhaps,
appear to be, they are, in fact, concerned only with different aspects of a
single problem, with which thinking men have been occupied, ever since they
began seriously to consider the wonderful frame of things in which their
lives are set, and to seek for trustworthy guidance among its intricacies.
Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's
stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst the seeming
confusion, and that many events take place according to unchanging rules.
To this region of familiar steadiness and customary regularity they gave
the name of Nature. But, at the same time, their infantile and untutored
reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination, led
them to believe that this tangible, commonplace, orderly world of Nature
was surrounded and interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious
world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the
thoughts and passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to
exercise an intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They
attributed to the entities, with which they peopled this dim and dreadful
region, an unlimited amount of that power of modifying the course of events
of which they themselves possessed a small share, and thus {4} came to
regard them as not merely beyond, but above, Nature.
Hence arose the conception of a "Supernature" antithetic to "Nature"--the
primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and a supernatural,
left to the free play of volition--which has pervaded all later speculation
and, for thousands of years, has exercised a profound influence on
practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory of the Universe, the
successful conduct of life must demand careful attention to both worlds;
and, if either is to be neglected, it may be safer that it should be
Nature. In any given contingency, it must doubtless be desirable to know
what may be expected to happen in the ordinary course of things; but it
must be quite as necessary to have some inkling of the line likely to be
taken by supernatural agencies able, and possibly willing, to suspend or
reverse that course. Indeed, logically developed, the dualistic theory must
needs end in almost exclusive attention to Supernature, and in trust that
its over-ruling strength will be exerted in favour of those who stand well
with its denizens. On the other hand, the lessons of the great
schoolmaster, experience, have hardly seemed to accord with this
conclusion. They have taught, with considerable emphasis, that it does not
answer to neglect Nature; and that, on the whole, the more attention paid
to her dictates the better men fare.
Thus the theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism. From
the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and {5}
Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled
with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in
the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and
Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and
people.
These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature,
they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which
have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences,
which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the
best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have
accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the
conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that
knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly,
acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.
History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its
cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different
character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions.
These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural
knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature;
they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations
with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the
ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear,
however, that supernaturalists have attained {6} to any agreement about
these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of
supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary,
the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their
adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with
criminality, deserving an ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In
singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of
mankind with the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more
exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the
greater, the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of
civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would
seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge.
As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in trustworthiness, so
has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more
and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the
region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal
recognition.
Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of
Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress, of
humanity; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life; is a
matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that
the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are growing to be
seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity,
which is generally, and I venture to {7} think not unreasonably, regarded
as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate
elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of
men's thoughts. The question--How far is this process to go?--is, in my
apprehension, the Controverted Question of our time.
Controversy on this matter--prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the
weapons of the flesh, as well as with those of the spirit--is no new thing
to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these five
hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to establish a
_modus vivendi_ between the antagonists, some of which have had a
world-wide influence; though, unfortunately, none have proved universally
and permanently satisfactory.
In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was, whether
certain portions of the Supernaturalism of mediaeval Christianity were
well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of the problem which, in the
course of the following two hundred years, acquired wide popularity and
vast historical importance: Lollards, Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists,
Zwinglians, Socinians, and Anabaptists, whatever their disagreements,
concurred in the proposal to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity
within the limits sanctioned by the Scriptures. None of the chiefs of
Protestantism called in question either the supernatural origin and
infallible authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the
{8} supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford
to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible was
the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to upset the
Chair of St. Peter. The "freedom of private judgment" which they
proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than permission to themselves to
make free with the public judgment of the Roman Church, in respect of the
canon and of the meaning to be attached to the words of the canonical
books. Private judgment--that is to say, reason--was (theoretically, at any
rate) at liberty to decide what books were and what were not to take the
rank of "Scripture"; and to determine the sense of any passage in such
books. But this sense, once ascertained to the mind of the sectary, was to
be taken for pure truth--for the very word of God. The controversial
efficiency of the principle of biblical infallibility lay in the fact that
the conservative adversaries of the Reformers were not in a position to
contravene it without entangling themselves in serious difficulties; while,
since both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking efficient measures to
stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these did not count.
The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the inherent
weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the infallibility
of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of
the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the latter may be. If the
latter is {9} to be accepted, or rejected, by private judgment, why not the
former? Even if the Bible could be proved anywhere to assert its own
infallibility, the value of that self-assertion to those who dispute the
point is not obvious. On the other hand, if the infallibility of the Bible
was rested on that of a "primitive Church," the admission that the "Church"
was formerly infallible was awkward in the extreme for those who denied its
present infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle
applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible text,
when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially countenance
contradictory deductions; and furnish forth creeds and confessions as
diverse as the quality and the information of the intellects which
exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway, such judgments. Every
sect, confident in the derivative infallibility of its wire-drawing of
infallible materials, was ready to supply its contingent of martyrs; and to
enable history, once more, to illustrate the truth, that steadfastness
under persecution says much for the sincerity and still more for the
tenacity, of the believer, but very little for the objective truth of that
which he believes. No martyrs have sealed their faith with their blood more
steadfastly than the Anabaptists.
Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself the
germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran, Calvinistic,
and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had reached. Since their
creeds were professedly based {10} on the canonical Scriptures, it followed
that, in the long run, whoso settled the canon defined the creed. If the
private judgment of Luther might legitimately conclude that the epistle of
James was contemptible, while the epistles of Paul contained the very
essence of Christianity, it must be permissible for some other private
judgment, on as good or as bad grounds, to reverse these conclusions; the
critical process which excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any
rate by people who rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its
operations to Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes; nor, having got so
far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress
of criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not
fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason; and, in
the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the despotism of
the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated
with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was
minimised; and its decrees were valid only so far as they were
countersigned by common sense, the responsible minister.
The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the Reformation of
the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason; but it may be doubted
if their contention has any solid ground; while there is a good deal of
evidence to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing
whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy {11} as hard
blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their
work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most
irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to
Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a
trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is
a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the
intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more
accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly
shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the
arrogant Caesaro-papistry of a state-enforced creed, had no more hesitation
about forcibly extinguishing opponent private judgments and judges, than
had the old-fashioned Pontiff-papistry.
It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal system
that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was, essentially,
an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain practical
deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in principle,
acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of abolishing
transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences, ecclesiastical
infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal presence mystifications,
the bibliolatry, the "inner-light" pretensions, and the demonology, which
are fruits of the same supernaturalistic tree, remained in enjoyment of the
spiritual and temporal support of a new infallibility? One does not free a
{12} prisoner by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles.
It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products of
that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under the
general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten, Beza, were
they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus, fautor-in-chief
of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely deserted it?
From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they often
forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means convertible
terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous reformers, before,
during, and after the birth and growth of Protestantism, who would have
nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the rejuvenescence of science and of art;
the widening of the field of Nature by geographical and astronomical
discovery; the revelation of the noble ideals of antique literature by the
revival of classical learning; the stir of thought, throughout all classes
of society, by the printers' work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened
the hold of mediaeval Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture
and of national welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to
anything which tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the
monks, and they willingly supported every movement in the direction of
weakening ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of a
common enemy was the only real tie between the humanist {13} and the
protestant; their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and, sooner
or later, to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of the humanists,
whether they were aware of it or not, was the attainment of the complete
intellectual freedom of the antique philosopher, than which nothing could
be more abhorrent to a Luther, a Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli.
The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to lie
in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many
weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and professed
himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory movement which he
originally contemplated; and it was impossible he should have deserted the
specifically Protestant reformation in which he never took part. He was
essentially a theological whig, to whom radicalism was as hateful as it is
to all whigs; or, to borrow a still more appropriate comparison from modern
times, a broad churchman who refused to enlist with either the High Church
or the Low Church zealots, and paid the penalty of being called coward,
time-server and traitor, by both. Yet really there is a good deal in his
pathetic remonstrance that he does not see why he is bound to become a
martyr for that in which he does not believe; and a fair consideration of
the circumstances and the consequences of the Protestant reformation seems
to me to go a long way towards justifying the course he adopted.
Few men had better means of being acquainted {14} with the condition of
Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual shallowness
and self-contradiction of the protestant criticism of catholic doctrine;
and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond imagination that the waters
let out by the Renascence would come to rest amidst the blind alleys of the
new ecclesiasticism. The bastard, whilom poor student and monk, become the
familiar of bishops and princes, at home in all grades of society, could
not fail to be aware of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers
imminent from the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no
less than from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under
their oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in
England, in Italy, and who counted many of the best and most influential
men in each country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly
the enormous forces which were still at the command of the Papacy. Bad as
the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse; and a person of far more
sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the future,
except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the Church from
the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as
beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man
of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of
one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however
learned and logical, of others; and to a cautious thinker, by whom,
whatever his shortcomings, the {15} ethical ideal of the Christian evangel
was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question, whether it was worth
while to bring about a political and social deluge, the end of which no
mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up Lutheran, Zwinglian,
and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual claimant to the reversion
of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman.
Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian
movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to
Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of Anabaptist
communism, which opened the apocalypse, had succeeded, in shadowy
procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England, with the
judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter tyranny of
evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long agony of
religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated France and
reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the spectacle of
Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism,
before it was a century old; while Jesuitry triumphed over Protestantism in
three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the
corruptions Erasmus and his friends sought to abolish; might not he have
quite honestly thought this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for
Protestantism; more especially, since no one was in a better position than
himself to know how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions
was able to bear the light {16} which the inevitable progress of humanistic
criticism would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw,
Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent
Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he
was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth
century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his
"Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism.
In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left
Protestantism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:
while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later. By
this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate
became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked Supernaturalism in
its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with equal
zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and
Calvinism were merely three persons of the one "Infame" which it was the
object of his life to crush. If he hated one more than another, it was
probably the last; while D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the
free-thinking host, were disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and
Pantheism.
The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific noise
and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but cool judges
might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later rebels
were no more likely {17} than those of the earlier, to furnish permanent
resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry. However worthy of
admiration may be the acuteness, the common-sense, the wit, the broad
humanity, which abound in the writings of the best of the free-thinkers;
there is rarely much to be said for their work as an example of the
adequate treatment of a grave and difficult investigation. I do not think
any impartial judge will assert that, from this point of view, they are
much better than their adversaries. It must be admitted that they share to
the full the fatal weakness of _a priori_ philosophising, no less than the
moral frivolity common to their age; while a singular want of appreciation
of history, as the record of the moral and social evolution of the human
race, permitted them to resort to preposterous theories of imposture, in
order to account for the religious phenomena which are natural products of
that evolution.
For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the
free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and with
vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one great
Christian apologist fairly captured the guns of the free-thinking array,
and turned their batteries upon themselves. Speculative "infidelity" of the
eighteenth century type was mortally wounded by the _Analogy_; while the
progress of the historical and psychological sciences brought to light the
important part played by the mythopoeic faculty; and, by demonstrating the
extreme readiness of men {18} to impose upon themselves, rendered the
calling in of sacerdotal co-operation, in most cases, a superfluity.
Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and
political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_, who
objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as they did
to _L'Infame_, were credited with the responsibility for all the evil deeds
of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much justification as
Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt, or Luther for the
_Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our _ancien regime_ was not altogether
lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad way as in France; it was
still capable of being repaired; and our forefathers, very wisely,
preferred to wait until that operation could be safely performed, rather
than pull it all down about their ears, in order to build a philosophically
planned house on brand-new speculative foundations. Under these
circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in this country, practical men
preferred the gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while
enough of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and
support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical
supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the indifference,
prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth century, was
replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which submerged the work
of the free-thinkers; and even seemed, for a time, to have arrested the
naturalistic movement of {19} which that work was an imperfect indication.
Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to
running underground, safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface.
My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and the
tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the neighbourhood
of Oxford; but when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was rampant; when church and
chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God, the crude assumptions of
the worst informed and, in natural sequence, the most presumptuously
bigoted, of all theological schools.
In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my
authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar
tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher,
ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of theology,
outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured forth, from the
safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against those who deviated from
his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to "sceptics" and "infidels,"
I became aware of the existence of people who trusted in carnal reason; who
audaciously doubted that the world was made in six natural days, or that
the deluge was universal; perhaps even went so far as to question the
literal accuracy of the story of Eve's temptation, or of {20} Balaam's ass;
and, from the horror of the tones in which they were mentioned, I should
have been justified in drawing the conclusion that these rash men belonged
to the criminal classes. At the same time, those who were more directly
responsible for providing me with the knowledge essential to the right
guidance of life (and who sincerely desired to do so), imagined they were
discharging that most sacred duty by impressing upon my childish mind the
necessity, on pain of reprobation in this world and damnation in the next,
of accepting, in the strict and literal sense, every statement contained in
the protestant Bible. I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt
about any of them was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict. I
suppose that, out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at
least, had their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name of
the God of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of years
later, those who ventured to question the exact historical accuracy of any
part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the Gospels, had to expect a
pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say nothing of the other
disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in any way, run counter to
that chaos of prejudices called public opinion.
My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal of
a remarkable document,[2] {21} signed by as many as thirty-eight out of the
twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It does not appear
that the signataries are officially accredited spokesmen of the
ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but I feel bound to take
their word for it, that they are "stewards of the Lord, who have received
the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept this memorial as evidence that,
though the Evangelicism of my early days may be deposed from its place of
power, though so many of the colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate
the title of Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes
as it did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses
to offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of "a dishonour to God,"
imperilling his salvation.
It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they
discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They are
awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been discovered
"not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the supernatural
itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate myself upon such
weighty confirmation of an opinion in which I have had the fortune to
anticipate them. But whether it is more to the credit of the courage, than
to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight that they should go on to proclaim
that the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments "declare
incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past
events and of the delivery of predictions {22} to be thereafter fulfilled,"
must be left to the coming generation to decide.
The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think, be
based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which it
is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a
counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on the
part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who therefore
have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare themselves "stewards of the
Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the stream of tendency
towards Naturalism, the course of which I have briefly traced, has, of late
years, flowed so strongly, that even the Churches have begun, I dare not
say to drift, but, at any rate, to swing at their moorings. Within the pale
of the Anglican establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment,
there are as many thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as
there were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago.
Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual
historical truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives. University
professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical decision that the
Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as author
or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might be; highly
placed Divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be
ignored; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of
{23} the second century B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth
Gospel are not always to be distinguished from those which he puts into the
mouth of Jesus. Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole
passages, some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are
interpolations. An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical
infallibility seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more
to substitute the authority of the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my
old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding
Christianity as a "religion of a book" as gravely as, in my youth, I should
have been reprehended for doubting that proposition. It is a no less
interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more anxious to
repudiate all complicity with the principles of the Protestant Reformation
and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old
intelligible sense, is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures
are, indeed, inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable
"human element"; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of
biblical whipping boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or
physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame;
while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out
of reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour
inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal to treat the
Bible "like any other book" which caused so much {24} scandal, forty years
ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop Colenso's
criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban, yet the
Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the scientific
tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will ne'er consent," has
consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism which the
memorialists renounce and denounce.
A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to assume
even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may well find this
conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities
perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to
either, until the question of precedence between them is settled. And this
course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely the
fundamental position of the memorialists is examined.
"No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on literary
criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical, criticism] of
the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere with the
traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once ascertained
and verified by appeal to antiquity."[3]
Grant that it is "the traditionary testimony of the Church" which
guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and New
Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet, according
to the thirty-eight, this "traditionary {25} testimony" has to be
"ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." But "ascertainment and
verification" are purely intellectual processes, which must be conducted
according to the strict rules of scientific investigation, or be
self-convicted of worthlessness. Moreover, before we can set about the
appeal to "antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully vague term must be
defined by similar means. "Antiquity" may include any number of centuries,
great or small; and whether "antiquity" is to comprise the Council of
Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of Nicaea, or to come to an end in
the time of Irenaeus, or in that of Justin Martyr, are knotty questions
which can be decided, if at all, only by those critical methods which the
signataries treat so cavalierly. And yet the decision of these questions is
fundamental, for as the limits of the canonical scriptures vary, so may the
dogmas deduced from them require modification. Christianity is one thing,
if the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles,
and the Apocalypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly true;
and another thing, if they are not. As I have already said, whoso defines
the canon defines the creed.
Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as the
Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and the Western
Church differed in opinion for centuries; and yet neither the one branch,
nor the other, can have considered its judgment infallible, since they
eventually agreed to a transaction, by which each gave up its {26}
objection to the book patronised by the other. Moreover, the "fathers"
argue (in a more or less rational manner) about the canonicity of this or
that book, and are by no means above producing evidence, internal and
external, in favour of the opinions they advocate. In fact, imperfect as
their conceptions of scientific method may be, they not unfrequently used
it to the best of their ability. Thus it would appear that though science,
like Nature, may be driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet
she surely comes back again. The appeal to "antiquity" is, in fact, an
appeal to science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly, to
determine what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity; thirdly, to
prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the
shape of the abhorred "criticism," has done this, and has shown that
"antiquity" used her own methods, however clumsily and imperfectly, she
naturally turns round upon the appealers to "antiquity," and demands that
they should show cause why, in these days, science should not resume the
work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry it out efficiently.
But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius, Origen,
Tertullian, Irenaeus, to argue for the reception of this book into the canon
and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds, "antiquity" admitted the
whole principle of modern criticism. If Irenaeus produces ridiculous reasons
for limiting the Gospels to four, it was open to any one else to produce
good reasons (if he had them) for cutting them down to three, or increasing
them to {27} five. If the Eastern branch of the Church had a right to
reject the Apocalypse and accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the
Western an equal right to accept the Apocalypse and reject the Epistle,
down to the fourth century, any other branch would have an equal right, on
cause shown, to reject both, or, as the Catholic Church afterwards actually
did, to accept both.
Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own
petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a
round-about way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of which
they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian supernaturalism
on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and furnished the elephant with
standing ground on the tortoise of "antiquity," they, like their famous
Hindoo analogue, have been content to look no further; and have thereby
been spared the horror of discovering that the tortoise rests on a
grievously fragile construction, to a great extent the work of that very
intellectual operation which they anathematise and repudiate.
Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course true
that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not, depends on
the connotation of the definite article) existed before the Christian
scriptures; and that the infallibility of these depends upon the
infallibility of the judgment of the persons who selected the books, of
which they are composed, out of the mass of literature current among the
early Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine showed him that the
authority of the Gospel he preached {28} must rest on that of the Church to
which he belonged.[4] But it is no less true that the Hebrew and the
Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of the Old Testament books existed
before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; and that their divine authority is
presupposed by, and therefore can hardly depend upon, the religious body
constituted by his disciples. As everybody knows, the very conception of a
"Christ" is purely Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic
prophecies vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a
matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the
writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised as
the highest court of appeal of the Christian.
The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the
infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority
vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are
erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if a
claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should offer
his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the will. And, even
were not such a circular, or rather rotatory, argument, that the
infallibility of the Bible is testified by the infallible Church, whose
infallibility is testified by the infallible Bible, too absurd for serious
consideration, it remains permissible to ask; Where and when the Church,
during the period of its infallibility, as {29} limited by Anglican
dogmatic necessities, has officially decreed the "actual historical truth
of all records" in the Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when he
denied the actual historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father
Suarez, standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that
he was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their appeal to
that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so great a part, to say
so.
Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view with
delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of Supernaturalism which
manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged along the whole flight of
steps, which, in this case, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--from
Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light mysticism, at the top, to unclean things,
not worthy of mention in the same breath, at the bottom. In my poor
opinion, the importance of these manifestations is often greatly
over-estimated. The extant forms of Supernaturalism have deep roots in
human nature, and will undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days,
they have to cope with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning
to be put out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are
hemming them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation
of systematised natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries,
has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is
confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every {30} region in which the
Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.
When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic Greece
and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of authorship of
the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific literary criticism;
when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory
of the universe, and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of
groups of like cosmic specks, circling, at unimaginable distances from one
another, through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of
the duration of the earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those
of its relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic
gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewish and the early Christian
records would be treated in the same manner; that the authorship of the
Hexateuch and of the Gospels would be as severely tested; and that the
evidence in favour of the veracity of many of the statements found in the
Scriptures would have to be strong indeed, if they were to be opposed to
the conclusions of physical science. In point of fact, so far as I can
discover, no one competent to judge of the evidential strength of these
conclusions, ventures now to say that the biblical accounts of the creation
and of the deluge are true in the natural sense of the words of the
narratives. The most the modern Reconciler ventures upon is to affirm, that
some quite different sense may be put upon the words; and that this
non-natural sense may, with a little trouble, be manipulated {31} into some
sort of non-contradiction of scientific truth.
My purpose, in the essay (XVI.) which treats of the narrative of the
Deluge, was to prove, by physical criticism, that no such event as that
described ever took place; to exhibit the untrustworthy character of the
narrative demonstrated by literary criticism; and, finally, to account for
its origin, by producing a form of those ancient legends of pagan Chaldaea,
from which the biblical compilation is manifestly derived. I have yet to
learn that the main propositions of this essay can be seriously challenged.
In the essays (II., III.) on the narrative of the Creation, I have
endeavoured to controvert the assertion that modern science supports,
either the interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any
interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the narrative,
quite apart from particular details. The first chapter of Genesis teaches
the supernatural creation of the present forms of life; modern science
teaches that they have come about by evolution. The first chapter of
Genesis teaches the successive origin--firstly, of all the plants,
secondly, of all the aquatic and aerial animals, thirdly, of all the
terrestrial animals, which now exist--during distinct intervals of time;
modern science teaches that, throughout all the duration of an immensely
long past, so far as we have any adequate knowledge of it (that is as far
back as the Silurian epoch), plants, aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial
animals have {32} co-existed; that the earliest known are unlike those
which at present exist; and that the modern species have come into
existence as the last terms of a series, the members of which have appeared
one after another. Thus, far from confirming the account in Genesis, the
results of modern science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in
detail, hopelessly discordant with it.
Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient Hebrew
writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and friends from
whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter themselves against
the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the two most important of all
events, the origin of things and the palingenesis of terrestrial life, what
historical credit dare any serious thinker attach to the narratives of the
fabrication of Eve, of the Fall, of the commerce between the _Bene Elohim_
and the daughters of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial
legends? And, if these are to lose all historical worth, what becomes of
the infallibility of those who, according to the later scriptures, have
accepted them, argued from them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic
conclusions upon their historical accuracy?
It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to try to
hide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable connection of
its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked. The question will
still be asked, if the first nine chapters of the Pentateuch are
unhistorical, how is {33} the historical accuracy of the remainder to be
guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of the Exodus than that
of the Deluge, to belief? If God did not walk in the Garden of Eden, how
can we be assured that he spoke from Sinai?
In some other of the following essays (IX., X., XI., XII., XIV., XV.) I
have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and literary
criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the canonical
scriptures of the New Testament "declare incontrovertibly the actual
historical truth in all records." We are told that the Gospels contain a
true revelation of the spiritual world--a proposition which, in one sense
of the word "spiritual," I should not think it necessary to dispute. But,
when it is taken to signify that everything we are told about the world of
spirits in these books is infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the
demonology which constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to
profess belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive
people--it is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be unable to
define the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral
obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful
occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the
Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply three, partially
discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the origin, and
the authority for which we know absolutely nothing. But the {34} evidence
in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any other.
Elsewhere, I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to declaim
against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted tendency to
deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian faith, and to destroy
the foundations of morality; still less to brand them with the
question-begging vituperative appellation of "infidelity." The point is not
whether they are wicked; but, whether, from the point of view of scientific
method, they are irrefragably true. If they are, they will be accepted in
time, whether they are wicked, or not wicked. Nature, so far as we have
been able to attain to any insight into her ways, recks little about
consolation and makes for righteousness by very round-about paths. And, at
any rate, whatever may be possible for other people, it is becoming less
and less possible for the man who puts his faith in scientific methods of
ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to have that faith justified by daily
experience, to be consciously false to his principle in any matter. But the
number of such men, driven into the use of scientific methods of inquiry
and taught to trust them, by their education, their daily professional and
business needs, is increasing and will continually increase. The
phraseology of Supernaturalism may remain on men's lips, but in practice
they are Naturalists. The magistrate who listens with devout attention to
the precept "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday,
dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge {35} of bewitching a cow
brought against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who
substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a short
tenure of office; even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers for rain,
so long as the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of pestilence sends
men, not to the churches, but to the drains. In spite of prayers for the
success of our arms and _Te Deums_ for victory, our real faith is in big
battalions and keeping our powder dry; in knowledge of the science of
warfare; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these, as in all other
practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "_Laborare est orare_"; we admit
that intelligent work is the only acceptable worship; and that, whether
there be a Supernature or not, our business is with Nature.
It is important to note that the principle of the scientific Naturalism of
the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the intellectual
movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was first clearly
formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the existence of any
Supernature;[5] but simply to the denial of the validity of the evidence
adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant form of Supernaturalism.
{36}
Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view, the
assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through endless
space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than man's as his is
greater than a blackbeetle's; no being endowed with powers of influencing
the course of nature as much greater than his, as his is greater than a
snail's, seems to me not merely baseless, but impertinent. Without stepping
beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos
with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically
indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our
intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands
of years ago and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is
clearly within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even
of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole
future; if the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a
magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an
omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives
us some influence over events, practical omniscience may confer indefinably
greater power. Finally, if evidence that a thing may be, were equivalent to
proof that it is, analogy might justify the construction of a naturalistic
theology and demonology not less wonderful than the current supernatural;
just as it might justify the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living
forms to which terrestrial biology offers no {37} parallel. Until human
life is longer and the duties of the present press less heavily, I do not
think that wise men will occupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural
history; and they will probably agree to a verdict of "not proven" in
respect of naturalistic theology; taking refuge in that agnostic
confession, which appears to me to be the only position for people who
object to say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know. As
to the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind could
be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of life, a
reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet seen; an
approximation to the millennium, such as no supernaturalistic religion has
ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in effecting.
I have hitherto dwelt upon scientific Naturalism chiefly in its critical
and destructive aspect. But the present incarnation of the spirit of the
Renascence differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth century, in that
it builds up, as well as pulls down.
That of which it has laid the foundation, of which it is already raising
the superstructure, is the doctrine of evolution. But so many strange
misconceptions are current about this doctrine--it is attacked on such
false grounds by its enemies, and made to cover so much that is disputable
by some of its friends, that I think it well to define as clearly as I can,
what I do not and what I do understand by the doctrine. {38}
I have nothing to say to any "Philosophy of Evolution." Attempts to
construct such a philosophy may be as useful, nay, even as admirable, as
was the attempt of Descartes to get at a theory of the universe by the same
_a priori_ road; but, in my judgment, they are as premature. Nor, for this
purpose, have I to do with any theory of the "Origin of Species," much as I
value that which is known as the Darwinian theory. That the doctrine of
natural selection presupposes evolution is quite true; but it is not true
that evolution necessarily implies natural selection. In fact, evolution
might conceivably have taken place, without the development of groups
possessing the characters of species.
For me, the doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a generalisation
of certain facts, which may be observed by any one who will take the
necessary trouble. These facts are those which are classed by biologists
under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology. Embryology proves that
every higher form of individual life becomes what it is by a process of
gradual differentiation from an extremely low form; palaeontology proves, in
some cases, and renders probable in all, that the oldest types of a group
are the lowest; and that they have been followed by a gradual succession of
more and more differentiated forms. It is simply a fact, that evolution of
the individual animal and plant is taking place, as a natural process, in
millions and millions of cases every day; it is a fact, that the species
which have succeeded one another in the past, do, in many {39} cases,
present just those morphological relations, which they must possess, if
they had proceeded, one from the other, by an analogous process of
evolution.
The alternative presented, therefore, is: either the forms of one and the
same type--say, _e.g._, that of the Horse tribe[6]--arose successively, but
independently of one another, at intervals, during myriads of years; or,
the later forms are modified descendants of the earlier. And the latter
supposition is so vastly more probable than the former, that rational men
will adopt it, unless satisfactory evidence to the contrary can be
produced. The objection sometimes put forward, that no one yet professes to
have seen one species pass into another, comes oddly from those who believe
that mankind are all descended from Adam. Has any one then yet seen the
production of negroes from a white stock, or _vice versa_? Moreover, is it
absolutely necessary to have watched every step of the progress of a
planet, to be justified in concluding that it really does go round the sun?
If so, astronomy is in a bad way.
I do not, for a moment, presume to suggest that some one, far better
acquainted than I am with astronomy and physics; or that a master of the
new chemistry, with its extraordinary revelations; or that a student of the
development of human society, of language, and of religions, may not find a
sufficient foundation for the doctrine of evolution in these several
regions. {40} On the contrary, I rejoice to see that scientific
investigation, in all directions, is tending to the same result. And it may
well be, that it is only my long occupation with biological matters that
leads me to feel safer among them than anywhere else. Be that as it may, I
take my stand on the facts of embryology and of palaeontology; and I hold
that our present knowledge of these facts is sufficiently thorough and
extensive to justify the assertion that all future philosophical and
theological speculations will have to accommodate themselves to some such
common body of established truths as the following:--
1. Plants and animals have existed on our planet for many hundred thousand,
probably millions of years. During this time, their forms, or species, have
undergone a succession of changes, which eventually gave rise to the
species which constitute the present living population of the earth. There
is no evidence, nor any reason to suspect, that this secular process of
evolution is other than a part of the ordinary course of nature; there is
no more ground for imagining the occurrence of supernatural intervention,
at any moment in the development of species in the past, than there is for
supposing such intervention to take place, at any moment in the development
of an individual animal or plant, at the present day.
2. At present, every individual animal or plant commences its existence as
an organism of extremely simple anatomical structure; and it acquires all
the complexity it ultimately possesses by gradual {41} differentiation into
parts of various structure and function. When a series of specific forms of
the same type, extending over a long period of past time, is examined, the
relation between the earlier and the later forms is analogous to that
between earlier and later stages of individual development. Therefore, it
is a probable conclusion that, if we could follow living beings back to
their earliest states, we should find them to present forms similar to
those of the individual germ, or, what comes to the same thing, of those
lowest known organisms which stand upon the boundary line between plants
and animals. At present, our knowledge of the ancient living world stops
very far short of this point.
3. It is generally agreed, and there is certainly no evidence to the
contrary, that all plants are devoid of consciousness; that they neither
feel, desire, nor think. It is conceivable that the evolution of the
primordial living substance should have taken place only along the plant
line. In that case, the result might have been a wealth of vegetable life,
as great, perhaps as varied, as at present, though certainly widely
different from the present flora, in the evolution of which animals have
played so great a part. But the living world thus constituted would be
simply an admirable piece of unconscious machinery, the working out of
which lay potentially in its primitive composition; pleasure and pain would
have no place in it; it would be a veritable Garden of Eden without any
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The question of the moral
government of such a world {42} could no more be asked, than we could
reasonably seek for a moral purpose in a kaleidoscope.
4. How far down the scale of animal life the phenomena of consciousness are
manifested, it is impossible to say. No one doubts their presence in his
fellow-men; and, unless any strict Cartesians are left, no one doubts that
mammals and birds are to be reckoned creatures that have feelings analogous
to our smell, taste, sight, hearing, touch, pleasure, and pain. For my own
part, I should be disposed to extend this analogical judgment a good deal
further. On the other hand, if the lowest forms of plants are to be denied
consciousness, I do not see on what ground it is to be ascribed to the
lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule, a
foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling; and, in spite
of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the "poor
beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing when we turn
to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a fowl feels; that
the chick just hatched feels; that the chick when it chirps within the egg
may possibly feel; what is to be said of it, on the fifth day, when the
bird is there, but with all its tissues nascent? Still more, on the first
day, when it is nothing but a flat cellular disk? I certainly cannot bring
myself to believe that this disk feels. Yet if it does not, there must be
some time in the three weeks, between the first day and the day of
hatching, when, as a concomitant, or a consequence, of the attainment by
the brain of {43} the chick of a certain stage of structural evolution,
consciousness makes its appearance. I have frequently expressed my
incapacity to understand the nature of the relation between consciousness
and a certain anatomical tissue, which is thus established by observation.
But the fact remains that, so far as observation and experiment go, they
teach us that the psychical phenomena are dependent on the physical.
In like manner, if fishes, insects, scorpions, and such animals as the
pearly nautilus, possess feeling, then undoubtedly consciousness was
present in the world as far back as the Silurian epoch. But, if the
earliest animals were similar to our rhizopods and monads, there must have
been some time, between the much earlier epoch in which they constituted
the whole animal population and the Silurian, in which feeling dawned, in
consequence of the organism having reached the stage of evolution on which
it depends.
5. Consciousness has various forms, which may be manifested independently
of one another. The feelings of light and colour, of sound, of touch,
though so often associated with those of pleasure and pain, are, by nature,
as entirely independent of them as is thinking. An animal devoid of the
feelings of pleasure and of pain, may nevertheless exhibit all the effects
of sensation and purposive action. Therefore, it would be a justifiable
hypothesis that, long after organic evolution had attained to
consciousness, pleasure and pain were still absent. Such a world {44} would
be without either happiness or misery; no act could be punished and none
could be rewarded; and it could have no moral purpose.
6. Suppose, for argument's sake, that all mammals and birds are subjects of
pleasure and pain. Then we may be certain that these forms of consciousness
were in existence at the beginning of the Mesozoic epoch. From that time
forth, pleasure has been distributed without reference to merit, and pain
inflicted without reference to demerit, throughout all but a mere fraction
of the higher animals. Moreover, the amount and the severity of the pain,
no less than the variety and acuteness of the pleasure, have increased with
every advance in the scale of evolution. As suffering came into the world,
not in consequence of a fall, but of a rise, in the scale of being, so
every further rise has brought more suffering. As the evidence stands, it
would appear that the sort of brain which characterises the highest mammals
and which, so far as we know, is the indispensable condition of the highest
sensibility, did not come into existence before the Tertiary epoch. The
primordial anthropoid was probably, in this respect, on much the same
footing as his pithecoid kin. Like them he stood upon his "natural rights,"
gratified all his desires to the best of his ability, and was as incapable
of either right or wrong doing as they. It would be as absurd as in their
case, to regard his pleasures, any more than theirs, as moral rewards, and
his pains, any more than theirs, as moral punishments. {45}
7. From the remotest ages of which we have any cognizance, death has been
the natural and, apparently, the necessary concomitant of life. In our
hypothetical world (3), inhabited by nothing but plants, death must have
very early resulted from the struggle for existence: many of the crowd must
have jostled one another out of the conditions on which life depends. The
occurrence of death, as far back as we have any fossil record of life,
however, needs not to be proved by such arguments; for, if there had been
no death there would have been no fossil remains, such as the great
majority of those we meet with. Not only was there death in the world, as
far as the record of life takes us; but, ever since mammals and birds have
been preyed upon by carnivorous animals, there has been painful death,
inflicted by mechanisms specially adapted for inflicting it.
8. Those who are acquainted with the closeness of the structural relations
between the human organisation and that of the mammals which come nearest
to him, on the one hand; and with the palaeontological history of such
animals as horses and dogs, on the other; will not be disposed to question
the origin of man from forms which stand in the same sort of relation to
_Homo sapiens_, as _Hipparion_ does to _Equus_. I think it a conclusion,
fully justified by analogy, that, sooner or later, we shall discover the
remains of our less specialised primatic ancestors in the strata which have
yielded the less specialised equine and canine quadrupeds. At present,
fossil remains of men do not take us back further than the later {46} part
of the Quaternary epoch; and, as was to be expected, they do not differ
more from existing men, than Quaternary horses differ from existing horses.
Still earlier we find traces of man, in implements, such as are used by the
ruder savages at the present day. Later, the remains of the palaeolithic and
neolithic conditions take us gradually from the savage state to the
civilisations of Egypt and of Mycenae; though the true chronological order
of the remains actually discovered may be uncertain.
9. Much has yet to be learned, but, at present, natural knowledge affords
no support to the notion that men have fallen from a higher to a lower
state. On the contrary, everything points to a slow natural evolution;
which, favoured by the surrounding conditions in such localities as the
valleys of the Yang-tse-kang, the Euphrates, and the Nile, reached a
relatively high pitch, five or six thousand years ago; while, in many other
regions, the savage condition has persisted down to our day. In all this
vast lapse of time there is not a trace of the occurrence of any general
destruction of the human race; not the smallest indication that man has
been treated on any other principles than the rest of the animal world.
10. The results of the process of evolution in the case of man, and in that
of his more nearly allied contemporaries, have been marvellously different.
Yet it is easy to see that small primitive differences of a certain order,
must, in the long run, bring about a wide divergence of the human stock
from the others. {47} It is a reasonable supposition that, in the earliest
human organisms, an improved brain, a voice more capable of modulation and
articulation, limbs which lent themselves better to gesture, a more perfect
hand, capable among other things of imitating form in plastic or other
material, were combined with the curiosity, the mimetic tendency, the
strong family affection, of the next lower group; and that they were
accompanied by exceptional length of life and a prolonged minority. The
last two peculiarities are obviously calculated to strengthen the family
organisation, and to give great weight to its educative influences. The
potentiality of language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the
faculty of modulating and articulating the voice. The potentiality of
writing, as the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw;
and in the mimetic tendency, which, as we know, was gratified by drawing,
as far back as the days of Quaternary man. With speech as the record, in
tradition, of the experience of more than one generation; with writing as
the record of that of any number of generations; the experience of the
race, tested and corrected generation after generation, could be stored up
and made the starting point for fresh progress. Having these perfectly
natural factors of the evolutionary process in man before us, it seems
unnecessary to go further a-field in search of others.
11. That the doctrine of evolution implies a former state of innocence of
mankind is quite true; but, as I have remarked, it is the innocence of the
ape and of {48} the tiger, whose acts, however they may run counter to the
principles of morality, it would be absurd to blame. The lust of the one
and the ferocity of the other are as much provided for in their
organisation, are as clear evidences of design, as any other features that
can be named.
Observation and experiment upon the phenomena of society soon taught men
that, in order to obtain the advantages of social existence, certain rules
must be observed. Morality commenced with society. Society is possible only
upon the condition that the members of it shall surrender more or less of
their individual freedom of action. In primitive societies, individual
selfishness is a centrifugal force of such intensity that it is constantly
bringing the social organisation to the verge of destruction. Hence the
prominence of the positive rules of obedience to the elders; of standing by
the family or the tribe in all emergencies; of fulfilling the religious
rites, non-observance of which is conceived to damage it with the
supernatural powers, belief in whose existence is one of the earliest
products of human thought; and of the negative rules, which restrain each
from meddling with the life or property of another.
12. The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the
desire to do what is best for the whole, dominates and limits the action of
every member of that society. The more complex the social organisation the
greater the number of acts from which each man must abstain, if he desires
to do that which is best for all. Thus the progressive {49} evolution of
society means increasing restriction of individual freedom in certain
directions.
With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of cities and of nations
by the coalescence of families and of tribes, the rules which constitute
the common foundation of morality and of law became more numerous and
complicated, and the temptations to break or evade many of them stronger.
In the absence of a clear apprehension of the natural sanctions of these
rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed; and imagination supplied the
motives which reason was supposed to be incompetent to furnish. Religion,
at first independent of morality, gradually took morality under its
protection; and the supernaturalists have ever since tried to persuade
mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up with that of
supernaturalism.
I am not of that opinion. But, whether it is correct or otherwise, it is
very clear to me that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the aid of
Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality. It is, we
are told, the special peculiarity of the devil that he was a liar from the
beginning. If we set out in life with pretending to know that which we do
not know; with professing to accept for proof evidence which we are well
aware is inadequate; with wilfully shutting our eyes and our ears to facts
which militate against this or that comfortable hypothesis; we are
assuredly doing our best to deserve the same character.
I have not the presumption to imagine that, in {50} spite of all my
efforts, errors may not have crept into these propositions. But I am
tolerably confident that time will prove them to be substantially correct.
And if they are so, I confess I do not see how any extant supernaturalistic
system can also claim exactness. That they are irreconcilable with the
biblical cosmogony, anthropology, and theodicy is obvious; but they are no
less inconsistent with the sentimental Deism of the "Vicaire Savoyard" and
his numerous modern progeny. It is as impossible, to my mind, to suppose
that the evolutionary process was set going with full foreknowledge of the
result and yet with what we should understand by a purely benevolent
intention, as it is to imagine that the intention was purely malevolent.
And the prevalence of dualistic theories from the earliest times to the
present day--whether in the shape of the doctrine of the inherently evil
nature of matter; of an Ahriman; of a hard and cruel Demiurge; of a
diabolical "prince of this world," show how widely this difficulty has been
felt.
Many seem to think that, when it is admitted that the ancient literature,
contained in our Bibles, has no more claim to infallibility than any other
ancient literature; when it is proved that the Israelites and their
Christian successors accepted a great many supernaturalistic theories and
legends which have no better foundation than those of heathenism, nothing
remains to be done but to throw the Bible aside as so much waste paper.
I have always opposed this opinion. It appears to {51} me that if there is
anybody more objectionable than the orthodox Bibliolater it is the
heterodox Philistine, who can discover in a literature which, in some
respects, has no superior, nothing but a subject for scoffing and an
occasion for the display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he owes to
former generations.
Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of the Bible as an instrument of
popular education, and I venture to repeat what I then said:
"Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book
has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English
history; that it has become the national epic of Britain and is as familiar
to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante
and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and
purest English and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form;
and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind, who never left his village,
to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations
and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest
nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so
much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical
procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval
between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time,
according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are
earning their payment for their work?"[7]
{52}
At the same time, I laid stress upon the necessity of placing such
instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief, that it would thus
gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that the
theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the
perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical contents would
come more and more into view.
I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and the attention
of a democratic age. Throughout the history of the western world, the
Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt
against the worst forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has
been the _Magna Charta_ of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern
times, no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people
are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than
the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in
Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the
welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the
citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no trash about
the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty
to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from
struggling for "rights;" on the fraternity of taking thought for one's
neighbour as for oneself.
So far as such equality, liberty, and fraternity are included under the
democratic principles which assume the same names, the Bible is the most
{53} democratic book in the world. As such it began, through the heretical
sects, to undermine the clerico-political despotism of the middle ages,
almost as soon as it was formed, in the eleventh century; Pope and King had
as much as they could do to put down the Albigenses and the Waldenses in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the Lollards and the Hussites gave
them still more trouble in the fourteenth and fifteenth; from the sixteenth
century onward, the Protestant sects have favoured political freedom in
proportion to the degree in which they have refused to acknowledge any
ultimate authority save that of the Bible.
But the enormous influence which has thus been exerted by the Jewish and
Christian Scriptures has had no necessary connection with cosmogonies,
demonologies, and miraculous interferences. Their strength lies in their
appeals, not to the reason, but to the ethical sense. I do not say that
even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive of others or needs no
supplement. But I do believe that the human race is not yet, possibly may
never be, in a position to dispense with it.
* * * * *
{55}
I
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PALAEONTOLOGY
That application of the sciences of biology and geology, which is commonly
known as palaeontology, took its origin in the mind of the first person who,
finding something like a shell, or a bone, naturally embedded in gravel or
rock, indulged in speculations upon the nature of this thing which he had
dug out--this "fossil"--and upon the causes which had brought it into such
a position. In this rudimentary form, a high antiquity may safely be
ascribed to palaeontology, inasmuch as we know that, 500 years before the
Christian era, the philosophic doctrines of Xenophanes were influenced by
his observations upon the fossil remains exposed in the quarries of
Syracuse. From this time forth not only the philosophers, but the poets,
the historians, the geographers of antiquity occasionally refer to fossils;
and, after the revival of learning, lively controversies arose respecting
their real nature. But hardly more than two centuries have elapsed since
this fundamental problem was first exhaustively treated; it was only in the
last century that the archaeological value of fossils--their importance, I
mean, as records of the history of the earth--was fully {56} recognised;
the first adequate investigation of the fossil remains of any large group
of vertebrated animals is to be found in Cuvier's _Recherches sur les
Ossemens Fossiles_, completed in 1822; and, so modern is stratigraphical
palaeontology, that its founder, William Smith, lived to receive the just
recognition of his services by the award of the first Wollaston Medal in
1831.
But, although palaeontology is a comparatively youthful scientific
speciality, the mass of materials with which it has to deal is already
prodigious. In the last fifty years the number of known fossil remains of
invertebrated animals has been trebled or quadrupled. The work of
interpretation of vertebrate fossils, the foundations of which were so
solidly laid by Cuvier, was carried on, with wonderful vigour and success,
by Agassiz in Switzerland, by Von Meyer in Germany, and last, but not
least, by Owen in this country, while, in later years, a multitude of
workers have laboured in the same field. In many groups of the animal
kingdom the number of fossil forms already known is as great as that of the
existing species. In some cases it is much greater; and there are entire
orders of animals of the existence of which we should know nothing except
for the evidence afforded by fossil remains. With all this it may be safely
assumed that, at the present moment, we are not acquainted with a tithe of
the fossils which will sooner or later be discovered. If we may judge by
the profusion yielded within the last few years by the Tertiary formations
of North America, there seems to be no limit to the {57} multitude of
Mammalian remains to be expected from that continent; and analogy leads us
to expect similar riches in Eastern Asia, whenever the Tertiary formations
of that region are as carefully explored. Again, we have as yet almost
everything to learn respecting the terrestrial population of the Mesozoic
epoch--and it seems as if the Western territories of the United States were
about to prove as instructive in regard to this point as they have in
respect of tertiary life. My friend Professor Marsh informs me that, within
two years, remains of more than 160 distinct individuals of mammals,
belonging to twenty species and nine genera, have been found in a space not
larger than the floor of a good-sized room; while beds of the same age have
yielded 300 reptiles, varying in size from a length of 60 feet or 80 feet
to the dimensions of a rabbit.
The task which I have set myself to-night is to endeavour to lay before
you, as briefly as possible, a sketch of the successive steps by which our
present knowledge of the facts of palaeontology and of those conclusions
from them which are indisputable, has been attained; and I beg leave to
remind you, at the outset, that in attempting to sketch the progress of a
branch of knowledge to which innumerable labours have contributed, my
business is rather with generalisations than with details. It is my object
to mark the epochs of palaeontology, not to recount all the events of its
history.
That which I just now called the fundamental problem of palaeontology, the
question which has to be {58} settled before any other can be profitably
discussed, is this, What is the nature of fossils? Are they, as the healthy
common sense of the ancient Greeks appears to have led them to assume
without hesitation, the remains of animals and plants? Or are they, as was
so generally maintained in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries, mere figured stones, portions of mineral matter which have
assumed the forms of leaves and shells and bones, just as those portions of
mineral matter which we call crystals take on the form of regular
geometrical solids? Or, again, are they, as others thought, the products of
the germs of animals and of the seeds of plants which have lost their way,
as it were, in the bowels of the earth, and have achieved only an imperfect
and abortive development? It is easy to sneer at our ancestors for being
disposed to reject the first in favour of one or other of the last two
hypotheses; but it is much more profitable to try to discover why they, who
were really not one whit less sensible persons than our excellent selves,
should have been led to entertain views which strike us as absurd. The
belief in what is erroneously called spontaneous generation, that is to
say, in the development of living matter out of mineral matter, apart from
the agency of pre-existing living matter, as an ordinary occurrence at the
present day--which is still held by some of us, was universally accepted as
an obvious truth by them. They could point to the arborescent forms assumed
by hoar-frost and by sundry metallic minerals as evidence of the existence
in nature of a "plastic {59} force" competent to enable inorganic matter to
assume the form of organised bodies. Then, as every one who is familiar
with fossils knows, they present innumerable gradations, from shells and
bones which exactly resemble the recent objects, to masses of mere stone
which, however accurately they repeat the outward form of the organic body,
have nothing else in common with it; and, thence, to mere traces and faint
impressions in the continuous substance of the rock. What we now know to be
the results of the chemical changes which take place in the course of
fossilisation, by which mineral is substituted for organic substance,
might, in the absence of such knowledge, be fairly interpreted as the
expression of a process of development in the opposite direction--from the
mineral to the organic. Moreover, in an age when it would have seemed the
most absurd of paradoxes to suggest that the general level of the sea is
constant, while that of the solid land fluctuates up and down through
thousands of feet in a secular ground swell, it may well have appeared far
less hazardous to conceive that fossils are sports of nature than to accept
the necessary alternative, that all the inland regions and highlands, in
the rocks of which marine shells had been found, had once been covered by
the ocean. It is not so surprising, therefore, as it may at first seem,
that although such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy took just
views of the nature of fossils, the opinion of the majority of their
contemporaries set strongly the other way; nor even that error maintained
itself long after the {60} scientific grounds of the true interpretation of
fossils had been stated, in a manner that left nothing to be desired, in
the latter half of the seventeenth century. The person who rendered this
good service to palaeontology was Nicolas Steno, professor of anatomy in
Florence, though a Dane by birth. Collectors of fossils at that day were
familiar with certain bodies termed "glossopetrae," and speculation was rife
as to their nature. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Fabio
Colonna had tried to convince his colleagues of the famous Accademia dei
Lincei that the glossopetrae were merely fossil sharks' teeth, but his
arguments made no impression. Fifty years later, Steno reopened the
question, and, by dissecting the head of a shark and pointing out the very
exact correspondence of its teeth with the glossopetrae, left no rational
doubt as to the origin of the latter. Thus far, the work of Steno went
little further than that of Colonna, but it fortunately occurred to him to
think out the whole subject of the interpretation of fossils, and the
result of his meditations was the publication, in 1669, of a little
treatise with the very quaint title of _De Solido intra Solidum naturaliter
contento_. The general course of Steno's argument may be stated in a few
words. Fossils are solid bodies which, by some natural process, have come
to be contained within other solid bodies, namely, the rocks in which they
are embedded; and the fundamental problem of palaeontology, stated
generally, is this: "Given a body endowed with a certain shape and produced
in accordance with natural laws, to find {61} in that body itself the
evidence of the place and manner of its production."[8] The only way of
solving this problem is by the application of the axiom that "like effects
imply like causes," or as Steno puts it, in reference to this particular
case, that "bodies which are altogether similar have been produced in the
same way."[9] Hence, since the glossopetrae are altogether similar to
sharks' teeth, they must have been produced by sharklike fishes; and since
many fossil shells correspond, down to the minutest details of structure,
with the shells of existing marine or freshwater animals, they must have
been produced by similar animals; and the like reasoning is applied by
Steno to the fossil bones of vertebrated animals, whether aquatic or
terrestrial. To the obvious objection that many fossils are not altogether
similar to their living analogues, differing in substance while agreeing in
form, or being mere hollows or impressions, the surfaces of which are
figured in the same way as those of animal or vegetable organisms, Steno
replies by pointing out the changes which take place in organic remains
embedded in the earth, and how their solid substance may be dissolved away
entirely, or replaced by mineral matter, until nothing is left of the
original but a cast, an impression, or a mere trace of its contours. The
principles of investigation thus excellently stated and illustrated by
Steno in 1669, are those which have, {62} consciously or unconsciously,
guided the researches of palaeontologists ever since. Even that feat of
palaeontology which has so powerfully impressed the popular imagination, the
reconstruction of an extinct animal from a tooth or a bone, is based upon
the simplest imaginable application of the logic of Steno. A moment's
consideration will show, in fact, that Steno's conclusion that the
glossopetrae are sharks' teeth implies the reconstruction of an animal from
its tooth. It is equivalent to the assertion that the animal of which the
glossopetrae are relics had the form and organisation of a shark; that it
had a skull, a vertebral column, and limbs similar to those which are
characteristic of this group of fishes; that its heart, gills, and
intestines presented the peculiarities which those of all sharks exhibit;
nay, even that any hard parts which its integument contained were of a
totally different character from the scales of ordinary fishes. These
conclusions are as certain as any based upon probable reasonings can be.
And they are so, simply because a very large experience justifies us in
believing that teeth of this particular form and structure are invariably
associated with the peculiar organisation of sharks, and are never found in
connection with other organisms. Why this should be we are not at present
in a position even to imagine; we must take the fact as an empirical law of
animal morphology, the reason of which may possibly be one day found in the
history of the evolution of the shark tribe, but for which it is hopeless
to seek for an explanation in ordinary physiological reasonings. Every one
{63} practically acquainted with palaeontology is aware that it is not every
tooth, nor every bone, which enables us to form a judgment of the character
of the animal to which it belonged; and that it is possible to possess many
teeth, and even a large portion of the skeleton of an extinct animal, and
yet be unable to reconstruct its skull or its limbs. It is only when the
tooth or bone presents peculiarities, which we know by previous experience
to be characteristic of a certain group, that we can safely predict that
the fossil belonged to an animal of the same group. Any one who finds a
cow's grinder may be perfectly sure that it belonged to an animal which had
two complete toes on each foot and ruminated; any one who finds a horse's
grinder may be as sure that it had one complete toe on each foot and did
not ruminate; but if ruminants and horses were extinct animals of which
nothing but the grinders had ever been discovered, no amount of
physiological reasoning could have enabled us to reconstruct either animal,
still less to have divined the wide differences between the two. Cuvier, in
the _Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_, strangely
credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others, with the
invention of a new method of palaeontological research. But if you will turn
to the _Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles_ and watch Cuvier, not
speculating, but working, you will find that his method is neither more nor
less than that of Steno. If he was able to make his famous prophecy from
the jaw which lay upon the surface of a block of stone to the pelvis of the
same animal which lay hidden in it, it was not {64} because either he, or
any one else, knew, or knows, why a certain form of jaw is, as a rule,
constantly accompanied by the presence of marsupial bones, but simply
because experience has shown that these two structures are co-ordinated.
The settlement of the nature of fossils led at once to the next advance of
palaeontology, viz. its application to the deciphering of the history of the
earth. When it was admitted that fossils are remains of animals and plants,
it followed that, in so far as they resemble terrestrial, or freshwater,
animals and plants, they are evidences of the existence of land, or fresh
water; and, in so far as they resemble marine organisms, they are evidences
of the existence of the sea at the time at which they were parts of
actually living animals and plants. Moreover, in the absence of evidence to
the contrary, it must be admitted that the terrestrial or the marine
organisms implied the existence of land or sea at the place in which they
were found while they were yet living. In fact, such conclusions were
immediately drawn by everybody, from the time of Xenophanes downwards, who
believed that fossils were really organic remains. Steno discusses their
value as evidence of repeated alteration of marine and terrestrial
conditions upon the soil of Tuscany in a manner worthy of a modern
geologist. The speculations of De Maillet in the beginning of the
eighteenth century turn upon fossils; and Buffon follows him very closely
in those two remarkable works, the _Theorie de la Terre_ and the _Epoques
de la Nature_, with {65} which he commenced and ended his career as a
naturalist.
The opening sentences of the _Epoques de la Nature_ show us how fully
Buffon recognised the analogy of geological with archaeological inquiries.
"As in civil history we consult deeds, seek for coins, or decipher antique
inscriptions in order to determine the epochs of human revolutions and fix
the date of moral events; so, in natural history, we must search the
archives of the world, recover old monuments from the bowels of the earth,
collect their fragmentary remains, and gather into one body of evidence all
the signs of physical change which may enable us to look back upon the
different ages of nature. It is our only means of fixing some points in the
immensity of space, and of setting a certain number of waymarks along the
eternal path of time."
Buffon enumerates five classes of these monuments of the past history of
the earth, and they are all facts of palaeontology. In the first place, he
says, shells and other marine productions are found all over the surface
and in the interior of the dry land; and all calcareous rocks are made up
of their remains. Secondly, a great many of these shells which are found in
Europe are not now to be met with in the adjacent seas; and, in the slates
and other deep-seated deposits, there are remains of fishes and of plants
of which no species now exist in our latitudes, and which are either
extinct, or exist only in more northern climates. Thirdly, in Siberia and
in other northern regions of Europe and of Asia, bones and {66} teeth of
elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses occur in such numbers that
these animals must once have lived and multiplied in those regions,
although at the present day they are confined to southern climates. The
deposits in which these remains are found are superficial, while those
which contain shells and other marine remains lie much deeper. Fourthly,
tusks and bones of elephants and hippopotamuses are found not only in the
northern regions of the old world, but also in those of the new world,
although, at present, neither elephants nor hippopotamuses occur in
America. Fifthly, in the middle of the continents, in regions most remote
from the sea, we find an infinite number of shells, of which the most part
belong to animals of those kinds which still exist in southern seas, but of
which many others have no living analogues; so that these species appear to
be lost, destroyed by some unknown cause. It is needless to inquire how far
these statements are strictly accurate; they are sufficiently so to justify
Buffon's conclusions that the dry land was once beneath the sea; that the
formation of the fossiliferous rocks must have occupied a vastly greater
lapse of time than that traditionally ascribed to the age of the earth;
that fossil remains indicate different climatal conditions to have obtained
in former times, and especially that the polar regions were once warmer;
that many species of animals and plants have become extinct; and that
geological change has had something to do with geographical distribution.
But these propositions almost constitute the framework of palaeontology. In
order to complete it but {67} one addition was needed, and that was made,
in the last years of the eighteenth century, by William Smith, whose work
comes so near our own times that many living men may have been personally
acquainted with him. This modest land-surveyor, whose business took him
into many parts of England, profited by the peculiarly favourable
conditions offered by the arrangement of our secondary strata to make a
careful examination and comparison of their fossil contents at different
points of the large area over which they extend. The result of his accurate
and widely-extended observations was to establish the important truth that
each stratum contains certain fossils which are peculiar to it; and that
the order in which the strata, characterised by these fossils, are
superimposed one upon the other is always the same. This most important
generalisation was rapidly verified and extended to all parts of the world
accessible to geologists; and now it rests upon such an immense mass of
observations as to be one of the best established truths of natural
science. To the geologist the discovery was of infinite importance, as it
enabled him to identify rocks of the same relative age, however their
continuity might be interrupted or their composition altered. But to the
biologist it had a still deeper meaning, for it demonstrated that,
throughout the prodigious duration of time registered by the fossiliferous
rocks, the living population of the earth had undergone continual changes,
not merely by the extinction of a certain number of the species which had
at first existed, but by the continual generation {68} of new species, and
the no less constant extinction of old ones.
Thus the broad outlines of palaeontology, in so far as it is the common
property of both the geologist and the biologist, were marked out at the
close of the last century. In tracing its subsequent progress I must
confine myself to the province of biology, and, indeed, to the influence of
palaeontology upon zoological morphology. And I accept this limitation the
more willingly as the no less important topic of the bearing of geology and
of palaeontology upon distribution has been luminously treated in the
address of the President of the Geographical Section.[10]
The succession of the species of animals and plants in time being
established, the first question which the zoologist or the botanist had to
ask himself was, What is the relation of these successive species one to
another? And it is a curious circumstance that the most important event in
the history of palaeontology which immediately succeeded William Smith's
generalisation was a discovery which, could it have been rightly
appreciated at the time, would have gone far towards suggesting the answer,
which was in fact delayed for more than half a century. I refer to Cuvier's
investigation of the Mammalian fossils yielded by the quarries in the older
tertiary rocks of Montmartre, among the chief results of which was the
bringing to light of two genera of extinct hoofed quadrupeds, the
_Anoplotherium_ and the _Palaeotherium_. The rich materials at Cuvier's
disposition enabled him {69} to obtain a full knowledge of the osteology
and of the dentition of these two forms, and consequently to compare their
structure critically with that of existing hoofed animals. The effect of
this comparison was to prove that the _Anoplotherium_, though it presented
many points of resemblance with the pigs on the one hand and with the
ruminants on the other, differed from both to such an extent that it could
find a place in neither group. In fact, it held, in some respects, an
intermediate position, tending to bridge over the interval between these
two groups, which in the existing fauna are so distinct. In the same way,
the _Palaeotherium_ tended to connect forms so different as the tapir, the
rhinoceros, and the horse. Subsequent investigations have brought to light
a variety of facts of the same order, the most curious and striking of
which are those which prove the existence, in the mesozoic epoch, of a
series of forms intermediate between birds and reptiles--two classes of
vertebrate animals which at present appear to be more widely separated than
any others. Yet the interval between them is completely filled, in the
mesozoic fauna, by birds which have reptilian characters on the one side,
and reptiles which have ornithic characters on the other. So again, while
the group of fishes termed ganoids is at the present time so distinct from
that of the dipnoi, or mudfishes, that they have been reckoned as distinct
orders, the Devonian strata present us with forms of which it is impossible
to say with certainty whether they are dipnoi or whether they are ganoids.
{70}
Agassiz's long and elaborate researches upon fossil fishes, published
between 1833 and 1842, led him to suggest the existence of another kind of
relation between ancient and modern forms of life. He observed that the
oldest fishes present many characters which recall the embryonic conditions
of existing fishes; and that, not only among fishes, but in several groups
of the invertebrata which have a long palaeontological history, the latest
forms are more modified, more specialised, than the earlier. The fact that
the dentition of the older tertiary ungulate and carnivorous mammals is
always complete, noticed by Professor Owen, illustrated the same
generalisation.
Another no less suggestive observation was made by Mr. Darwin, whose
personal investigations during the voyage of the _Beagle_ led him to remark
upon the singular fact, that the fauna, which immediately precedes that at
present existing in any geographical province of distribution, presents the
same peculiarities as its successor. Thus, in South America and in
Australia, the later tertiary or quaternary fossils show that the fauna
which immediately preceded that of the present day was, in the one case, as
much characterised by edentates and, in the other, by marsupials as it is
now, although the species of the older are largely different from those of
the newer fauna.
However clearly these indications might point in one direction, the
question of the exact relation of the successive forms of animal and
vegetable life could be satisfactorily settled only in one way; namely, by
comparing, stage by stage, the series of {71} forms presented by one and
the same type throughout a long space of time. Within the last few years
this has been done fully in the case of the horse, less completely in the
case of the other principal types of the ungulata and of the carnivora; and
all these investigations tend to one general result, namely, that, in any
given series, the successive members of that series present a gradually
increasing specialisation of structure. That is to say, if any such mammal
at present existing has specially modified and reduced limbs or dentition
and complicated brain, its predecessors in time show less and less
modification and reduction in limbs and teeth and a less highly developed
brain. The labours of Gaudry, Marsh, and Cope furnish abundant
illustrations of this law from the marvellous fossil wealth of Pikermi and
the vast uninterrupted series of tertiary rocks in the territories of North
America.
I will now sum up the results of this sketch of the rise and progress of
palaeontology. The whole fabric of palaeontology is based upon two
propositions: the first is, that fossils are the remains of animals and
plants; and the second is, that the stratified rocks in which they are
found are sedimentary deposits; and each of these propositions is founded
upon the same axiom, that like effects imply like causes. If there is any
cause competent to produce a fossil stem, or shell, or bone, except a
living being, then palaeontology has no foundation; if the stratification of
the rocks is not the effect of such causes as at present produce {72}
stratification, we have no means of judging of the duration of past time,
or of the order in which the forms of life have succeeded one another. But
if these two propositions are granted, there is no escape, as it appears to
me, from three very important conclusions. The first is that living matter
has existed upon the earth for a vast length of time, certainly for
millions of years. The second is that, during this lapse of time, the forms
of living matter have undergone repeated changes, the effect of which has
been that the animal and vegetable population, at any period of the earth's
history, contains some species which did not exist at some antecedent
period, and others which ceased to exist at some subsequent period. The
third is that, in the case of many groups of mammals and some of reptiles,
in which one type can be followed through a considerable extent of
geological time, the series of different forms by which the type is
represented, at successive intervals of this time, is exactly such as it
would be, if they had been produced by the gradual modification of the
earliest forms of the series. These are facts of the history of the earth
guaranteed by as good evidence as any facts in civil history.
Hitherto I have kept carefully clear of all the hypotheses to which men
have at various times endeavoured to fit the facts of palaeontology, or by
which they have endeavoured to connect as many of these facts as they
happened to be acquainted with. I do not think it would be a profitable
employment of our time to discuss conceptions which doubtless have had
their justification and even their use, but which {73} are now obviously
incompatible with the well-ascertained truths of palaeontology. At present
these truths leave room for only two hypotheses. The first is that, in the
course of the history of the earth, innumerable species of animals and
plants have come into existence, independently of one another, innumerable
times. This, of course, implies either that spontaneous generation on the
most astounding scale, and of animals such as horses and elephants, has
been going on, as a natural process, through all the time recorded by the
fossiliferous rocks; or it necessitates the belief in innumerable acts of
creation repeated innumerable times. The other hypothesis is, that the
successive species of animals and plants have arisen, the later by the
gradual modification of the earlier. This is the hypothesis of evolution;
and the palaeontological discoveries of the last decade are so completely in
accordance with the requirements of this hypothesis that, if it had not
existed, the palaeontologist would have had to invent it.
I have always had a certain horror of presuming to set a limit upon the
possibilities of things. Therefore I will not venture to say that it is
impossible that the multitudinous species of animals and plants may have
been produced, one separately from the other, by spontaneous generation;
nor that it is impossible that they should have been independently
originated by an endless succession of miraculous creative acts. But I must
confess that both these hypotheses strike me as so astoundingly improbable,
so devoid of a shred of either scientific or traditional support, that even
if {74} there were no other evidence than that of palaeontology in its
favour, I should feel compelled to adopt the hypothesis of evolution.
Happily, the future of palaeontology is independent of all hypothetical
considerations. Fifty years hence, whoever undertakes to record the
progress of palaeontology will note the present time as the epoch in which
the law of succession of the forms of the higher animals was determined by
the observation of palaeontological facts. He will point out that, just as
Steno and as Cuvier were enabled from their knowledge of the empirical laws
of coexistence of the parts of animals to conclude from a part to the
whole, so the knowledge of the law of succession of forms empowered their
successors to conclude, from one or two terms of such a succession, to the
whole series; and thus to divine the existence of forms of life, of which,
perhaps, no trace remains, at epochs of inconceivable remoteness in the
past.
* * * * *
{75}
II
THE INTERPRETERS OF GENESIS AND THE INTERPRETERS OF NATURE
Our fabulist warns "those who in quarrels interpose" of the fate which is
probably in store for them; and, in venturing to place myself between so
powerful a controversialist as Mr. Gladstone and the eminent divine whom he
assaults with such vigour in the last number of this Review,[11] I am fully
aware that I run great danger of verifying Gay's prediction. Moreover, it
is quite possible that my zeal in offering aid to a combatant so extremely
well able to take care of himself as M. Reville may be thought to savour of
indiscretion.
Two considerations, however, have led me to face the double risk. The one
is that though, in my judgment, M. Reville is wholly in the right in that
part of the controversy to which I propose to restrict my observations,
nevertheless he, as a foreigner, has very little chance of making the truth
prevail with Englishmen against the authority and the dialectic skill of
the greatest master of persuasive rhetoric among English-speaking men of
our time. {76} As the Queen's proctor intervenes, in certain cases, between
two litigants in the interests of justice, so it may be permitted me to
interpose as a sort of uncommissioned science proctor. My second excuse for
my meddlesomeness is, that important questions of natural
science--respecting which neither of the combatants professes to speak as
an expert--are involved in the controversy; and I think it is desirable
that the public should know what it is that natural science really has to
say on these topics, to the best belief of one who has been a diligent
student of natural science for the last forty years.
The original _Prolegomenes de l'histoire des Religions_ has not come in my
way; but I have read the translation of M. Reville's work, published in
England under the auspices of Professor Max Mueller, with very great
interest. It puts more fairly and clearly than any book previously known to
me, the view which a man of strong religious feelings, but at the same time
possessing the information and the reasoning power which enable him to
estimate the strength of scientific methods of inquiry and the weight of
scientific truth, may be expected to take of the relation between science
and religion.
In the chapter on "The Primitive Revelation" the scientific worth of the
account of the Creation given in the book of Genesis is estimated in terms
which are as unquestionably respectful as, in my judgment, they are just;
and, at the end of the chapter on "Primitive Tradition," M. Reville
appraises the value of pentateuchal anthropology in a way which I should
{77} have thought sure of enlisting the assent of all competent judges,
even if it were extended to the whole of the cosmogony and biology of
Genesis:--
As, however, the original traditions of nations sprang up in an epoch
less remote than our own from the primitive life, it is indispensable
to consult them, to compare them, and to associate them with other
sources of information which are available. From this point of view,
the traditions recorded in Genesis possess, in addition to their own
peculiar charm, a value of the highest order; but we cannot ultimately
see in them more than a venerable fragment, well deserving attention,
of the great genesis of mankind.
Mr. Gladstone is of a different mind. He dissents from M. Reville's views
respecting the proper estimation of the pentateuchal traditions, no less
than he does from his interpretation of those Homeric myths which have been
the object of his own special study. In the latter case, Mr. Gladstone
tells M. Reville that he is wrong on his own authority, to which, in such a
matter, all will pay due respect: in the former, he affirms himself to be
"wholly destitute of that kind of knowledge which carries authority," and
his rebuke is administered in the name and by the authority of natural
science.
An air of magisterial gravity hangs about the following passage:--
But the question is not here of a lofty poem, or a skilfully
constructed narrative: it is whether natural science, in the patient
exercise of its high calling to examine facts, finds that the works of
God cry out against what we have fondly believed to be His word and
tell another tale; or whether, in this nineteenth century of Christian
progress, it substantially echoes back the majestic sound, which,
before it existed as a pursuit, went forth into all lands. {78}
First, looking largely at the latter portion of the narrative, which
describes the creation of living organisms, and waiving details, on
some of which (as in v. 24) the Septuagint seems to vary from the
Hebrew, there is a grand fourfold division, set forth in an orderly
succession of times as follows: on the fifth day
1. The water-population;
2. The air-population;
and, on the sixth day,
3. The land-population of animals;
4. The land-population consummated in man.
Now this same fourfold order is understood to have been so affirmed in
our time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated
conclusion and established fact (p. 696).
"Understood?" By whom? I cannot bring myself to imagine that Mr. Gladstone
has made so solemn and authoritative a statement on a matter of this
importance without due inquiry--without being able to found himself upon
recognised scientific authority. But I wish he had thought fit to name the
source from whence he has derived his information, as, in that case, I
could have dealt with his authority, and I should have thereby escaped the
appearance of making an attack on Mr. Gladstone himself, which is in every
way distasteful to me.
For I can meet the statement in the last paragraph of the above citation
with nothing but a direct negative. If I know anything at all about the
results attained by the natural science of our time, it is "a demonstrated
conclusion and established fact" that the "fourfold order" given by Mr.
Gladstone is not that in which the evidence at our disposal {79} tends to
show that the water, air, and land-populations of the globe have made their
appearance.
Perhaps I may be told that Mr. Gladstone does give his authority--that he
cites Cuvier, Sir John Herschel, and Dr. Whewell in support of his case. If
that has been Mr. Gladstone's intention in mentioning these eminent names,
I may remark that, on this particular question, the only relevant authority
is that of Cuvier. But great as Cuvier was, it is to be remembered that, as
Mr. Gladstone incidentally remarks, he cannot now be called a recent
authority. In fact, he has been dead more than half a century; and the
palaeontology of our day is related to that of his, very much as the
geography of the sixteenth century is related to that of the fourteenth.
Since 1832, when Cuvier died, not only a new world, but new worlds, of
ancient life have been discovered; and those who have most faithfully
carried on the work of the chief founder of palaeontology have done most to
invalidate the essentially negative grounds of his speculative adherence to
tradition.
If Mr. Gladstone's latest information on these matters is derived from the
famous discourse prefixed to the _Ossemens Fossiles_, I can understand the
position he has taken up; if he has ever opened a respectable modern manual
of palaeontology, or geology, I cannot. For the facts which demolish his
whole argument are of the commonest notoriety. But before proceeding to
consider the evidence for this assertion we must be clear about the meaning
of the phraseology employed. {80}
I apprehend that when Mr. Gladstone uses the term "water-population" he
means those animals which in Genesis i. 21 (Revised Version) are spoken of
as "the great sea monsters and every living creature that moveth, which the
waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind." And I presume that it
will be agreed that whales and porpoises, sea fishes, and the innumerable
hosts of marine invertebrated animals, are meant thereby. So
"air-population" must be the equivalent of "fowl" in verse 20, and "every
winged fowl after its kind," verse 21. I suppose I may take it for granted
that by "fowl" we have here to understand birds--at any rate primarily.
Secondarily, it may be that the bats and the extinct pterodactyles, which
were flying reptiles, come under the same head. But whether all insects are
"creeping things" of the land-population, or whether flying insects are to
be included under the denomination of "winged fowl," is a point for the
decision of Hebrew exegetes. Lastly, I suppose I may assume that
"land-population" signifies "the cattle" and "the beast of the earth," and
"every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth," in verses 25 and 26;
presumably, it comprehends all kinds of terrestrial animals, vertebrate and
invertebrate, except such as may be comprised under the head of the
"air-population."
Now what I want to make clear is this: that if the terms
"water-population," "air-population," and "land-population" are understood
in the senses here defined, natural science has nothing to say in favour of
the proposition that they succeeded one another in {81} the order given by
Mr. Gladstone; but that, on the contrary, all the evidence we possess goes
to prove that they did not. Whence it will follow that, if Mr. Gladstone
has interpreted Genesis rightly (on which point I am most anxious to be
understood to offer no opinion), that interpretation is wholly
irreconcilable with the conclusions at present accepted by the interpreters
of nature--with everything that can be called "a demonstrated conclusion
and established fact" of natural science. And be it observed that I am not
here dealing with a question of speculation, but with a question of fact.
Either the geological record is sufficiently complete to afford us a means
of determining the order in which animals have made their appearance on the
globe or it is not. If it is, the determination of that order is little
more than a mere matter of observation; if it is not, then natural science
neither affirms nor refutes the "fourfold order," but is simply silent.
The series of the fossiliferous deposits, which contain the remains of the
animals which have lived on the earth in past ages of its history, and
which can alone afford the evidence required by natural science of the
order of appearance of their different species, may be grouped in the
manner shown in the left-hand column of the following table, the oldest
being at the bottom:--
Formations First known appearance of
Quaternary.
Pliocene.
Miocene.
Eocene. Vertebrate _air_-population (Bats).
{82}
Cretaceous.
Jurassic Vertebrate _air_-population (Birds and
Pterodactyles).
Triassic.
Upper Palaeozoic.
Middle Palaeozoic Vertebrate _land_-population (Amphibia,
Reptilia [?]).
Lower Palaeozoic.
Silurian. Vertebrate _water_-population (Fishes).
Invertebrate _air_ and _land_-population (Flying
Insects and Scorpions).
Cambrian Invertebrate _water_-population (much
earlier, if _Eozoon_ is animal).
In the right-hand column I have noted the group of strata in which,
according to our present information, the _land_, _air_, and
_water_-populations respectively appear for the first time; and in
consequence of the ambiguity about the meaning of "fowl," I have separately
indicated the first appearance of bats, birds, flying reptiles, and flying
insects. It will be observed that, if "fowl" means only "bird," or at most
flying vertebrate, then the first certain evidence of the latter, in the
Jurassic epoch, is posterior to the first appearance of truly terrestrial
_Amphibia_, and possibly of true reptiles, in the Carboniferous epoch
(Middle Palaeozoic) by a prodigious interval of time.
The water-population of vertebrated animals first appears in the Upper
Silurian.[12] Therefore, if we found ourselves on vertebrated animals and
take "fowl" to mean birds only, or, at most, flying vertebrates, natural
science says that the order of succession was water, land, and
air-population, and {83} not--as Mr. Gladstone, founding himself on
Genesis, says--water, air, land-population. If a chronicler of Greece
affirmed that the age of Alexander preceded that of Pericles and
immediately succeeded that of the Trojan war, Mr. Gladstone would hardly
say that this order is "understood to have been so affirmed by historical
science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established
fact." Yet natural science "affirms" his "fourfold order" to exactly the
same extent--neither more nor less.
Suppose, however, that "fowl" is to be taken to include flying insects. In
that case, the first appearance of an air-population must be shifted back
for long ages, recent discovery having shown that they occur in rocks of
Silurian age. Hence there might still have been hope for the fourfold
order, were it not that the fates unkindly determined that
scorpions--"creeping things that creep on the earth" _par
excellence_--turned up in Silurian strata nearly at the same time. So that,
if the word in the original Hebrew translated "fowl" should really after
all mean "cockroach"--and I have great faith in the elasticity of that
tongue in the hands of Biblical exegetes--the order primarily suggested by
the existing evidence--
2. Land and air-population;
1. Water-population;
and Mr. Gladstone's order--
3. Land-population;
2. Air-population;
1. Water-population;
{84} can by no means be made to coincide. As a matter of fact, then, the
statement so confidently put forward turns out to be devoid of foundation
and in direct contradiction of the evidence at present at our disposal.[13]
If, stepping beyond that which may be learned from the facts of the
successive appearance of the forms of animal life upon the surface of the
globe, in so far as they are yet made known to us by natural science, we
apply our reasoning faculties to the task of finding out what those
observed facts mean, the present conclusions of the interpreters of nature
appear to be no less directly in conflict with those of the latest
interpreter of Genesis.
Mr. Gladstone appears to admit that there is some truth in the doctrine of
evolution, and indeed places it under very high patronage.
I contend that evolution in its highest form has not been a {85} thing
heretofore unknown to history, to philosophy, or to theology. I contend
that it was before the mind of Saint Paul when he taught that in the
fulness of time God sent forth His Son, and of Eusebius when he wrote
the _Preparation for the Gospel_, and of Augustine when he composed the
_City of God_ (p. 706).
Has any one ever disputed the contention, thus solemnly enunciated, that
the doctrine of evolution was not invented the day before yesterday? Has
any one ever dreamed of claiming it as a modern innovation? Is there any
one so ignorant of the history of philosophy as to be unaware that it is
one of the forms in which speculation embodied itself long before the time
either of the Bishop of Hippo or of the Apostle to the Gentiles? Is Mr.
Gladstone, of all people in the world, disposed to ignore the founders of
Greek philosophy, to say nothing of Indian sages to whom evolution was a
familiar notion ages before Paul of Tarsus was born? But it is ungrateful
to cavil at even the most oblique admission of the possible value of one of
those affirmations of natural science which really may be said to be "a
demonstrated conclusion and established fact." I note it with pleasure, if
only for the purpose of introducing the observation that, if there is any
truth whatever in the doctrine of evolution as applied to animals, Mr.
Gladstone's gloss on Genesis in the following passage is hardly happy:--
God created
(_a_) The water-population;
(_b_) The air-population.
And they receive His benediction (v. 20-23).
{86}
6. Pursuing this regular progression from the lower to the higher, from
the simple to the complex, the text now gives us the work of the sixth
"day," which supplies the land-population, air and water having been
already supplied (pp. 695, 696).
The gloss to which I refer is the assumption that the "air-population"
forms a term in the order of progression from lower to higher, from simple
to complex--the place of which lies between the water-population below and
the land-population above--and I speak of it as a "gloss," because the
pentateuchal writer is nowise responsible for it.
But it is not true that the air-population, as a whole, is "lower" or less
"complex" than the land-population. On the contrary, every beginner in the
study of animal morphology is aware that the organisation of a bat, of a
bird, or of a pterodactyle presupposes that of a terrestrial quadruped; and
that it is intelligible only as an extreme modification of the organisation
of a terrestrial mammal or reptile. In the same way winged insects (if they
are to be counted among the "air-population") presuppose insects which were
wingless, and, therefore, as "creeping things," were part of the
land-population. Thus theory is as much opposed as observation to the
admission that natural science endorses the succession of animal life which
Mr. Gladstone finds in Genesis. On the contrary, a good many
representatives of natural science would be prepared to say, on theoretical
grounds alone, that it is incredible that the "air-population" should have
appeared before the "land-population"--and that, if this assertion is to be
{87} found in Genesis, it merely demonstrates the scientific worthlessness
of the story of which it forms a part.
Indeed, we may go further. It is not even admissible to say that the
water-population, as a whole, appeared before the air and the
land-populations. According to the Authorised Version, Genesis especially
mentions, among the animals created on the fifth day, "great whales," in
place of which the Revised Version reads "great sea monsters." Far be it
from me to give an opinion which rendering is right, or whether either is
right. All I desire to remark is, that if whales and porpoises, dugongs and
manatees, are to be regarded as members of the water-population (and if
they are not, what animals can claim the designation?), then that much of
the water-population has, as certainly, originated later than the
land-population as bats and birds have. For I am not aware that any
competent judge would hesitate to admit that the organisation of these
animals shows the most obvious signs of their descent from terrestrial
quadrupeds.
A similar criticism applies to Mr. Gladstone's assumption that, as the
fourth act of that "orderly succession of times" enunciated in Genesis,
"the land-population consummated in man."
If this means simply that man is the final term in the evolutional series
of which he forms a part, I do not suppose that any objection will be
raised to that statement on the part of students of natural science. But if
the pentateuchal author goes further than this, and intends to say that
which is ascribed to him by {88} Mr. Gladstone, I think natural science
will have to enter a _caveat_. It is by not any means certain that man--I
mean the species _Homo sapiens_ of zoological terminology--has
"consummated" the land-population in the sense of appearing at a later
period of time than any other. Let me make my meaning clear by an example.
From a morphological point of view, our beautiful and useful
contemporary--I might almost call him colleague--the horse (_Equus
caballus_), is the last term of the evolutional series to which he belongs,
just as _Homo sapiens_ is the last term of the series of which he is a
member. If I want to know whether the species _Equus caballus_ made its
appearance on the surface of the globe before or after _Homo sapiens_,
deduction from known laws does not help me. There is no reason, that I know
of, why one should have appeared sooner or later than the other. If I turn
to observation, I find abundant remains of _Equus caballus_ in Quaternary
strata, perhaps a little earlier. The existence of _Homo sapiens_ in the
Quaternary epoch is also certain. Evidence has been adduced in favour of
man's existence in the Pliocene, or even in the Miocene epoch. It does not
satisfy me; but I have no reason to doubt that the fact may be so,
nevertheless. Indeed, I think it is quite possible that further research
will show that _Homo sapiens_ existed, not only before _Equus caballus_,
but before many other of the existing forms of animal life; so that, if all
the species of animals have been separately created, man, in this case,
would by no means be the "consummation" of the land-population. {89}
I am raising no objection to the position of the fourth term in Mr.
Gladstone's "order"--on the facts, as they stand, it is quite open to any
one to hold, as a pious opinion, that the fabrication of man was the acme
and final achievement of the process of peopling the globe. But it must not
be said that natural science counts this opinion among her "demonstrated
conclusions and established facts," for there would be just as much, or as
little, reason for ranging the contrary opinion among them.
It may seem superfluous to add to the evidence that Mr. Gladstone has been
utterly misled in supposing that his interpretation of Genesis receives any
support from natural science. But it is as well to do one's work thoroughly
while one is about it; and I think it may be advisable to point out that
the facts, as they are at present known, not only refute Mr. Gladstone's
interpretation of Genesis in detail, but are opposed to the central idea on
which it appears to be based.
There must be some position from which the reconcilers of science and
Genesis will not retreat, some central idea the maintenance of which is
vital and its refutation fatal. Even if they now allow that the words "the
evening and the morning" have not the least reference to a natural day, but
mean a period of any number of millions of years that may be necessary;
even if they are driven to admit that the word "creation," which so many
millions of pious Jews and Christians have held, and still hold, to mean a
sudden act of the Deity, signifies a process of gradual {90} evolution of
one species from another, extending through immeasurable time; even if they
are willing to grant that the asserted coincidence of the order of Nature
with the "fourfold order" ascribed to Genesis is an obvious error instead
of an established truth; they are surely prepared to make a last stand upon
the conception which underlies the whole, and which constitutes the essence
of Mr. Gladstone's "fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession
of times." It is, that the animal species which compose the
water-population, the air-population, and the land-population respectively,
originated during three distinct and successive periods of time, and only
during those periods of time.
This statement appears to me to be the interpretation of Genesis which Mr.
Gladstone supports, reduced to its simplest expression. "Period of time" is
substituted for "day"; "originated" is substituted for "created"; and "any
order required" for that adopted by Mr. Gladstone. It is necessary to make
this proviso, for if "day" may mean a few million years, and "creation" may
mean evolution, then it is obvious that the order (1) water-population, (2)
air-population, (3) land-population, may also mean (1) water-population,
(2) land-population, (3) air-population; and it would be unkind to bind
down the reconcilers to this detail when one has parted with so many others
to oblige them.
But even this sublimated essence of the pentateuchal doctrine (if it be
such) remains as discordant with natural science as ever. {91}
It is not true that the species composing any one of the three populations
originated during any one of three successive periods of time, and not at
any other of these.
Undoubtedly, it is in the highest degree probable that animal life appeared
first under aquatic conditions; that terrestrial forms appeared later, and
flying animals only after land animals; but it is, at the same time,
testified by all the evidence we possess, that the great majority, if not
the whole, of the primordial species of each division have long since died
out and have been replaced by a vast succession of new forms. Hundreds of
thousands of animal species, as distinct as those which now compose our
water, land, and air-populations, have come into existence and died out
again, throughout the aeons of geological time which separate us from the
lower Palaeozoic epoch, when, as I have pointed out, our present evidence of
the existence of such distinct populations commences. If the species of
animals have all been separately created, then it follows that hundreds of
thousands of acts of creative energy have occurred, at intervals,
throughout the whole time recorded by the fossiliferous rocks; and, during
the greater part of that time, the "creation" of the members of the water,
land, and air-populations must have gone on contemporaneously.
If we represent the water, land, and air-populations by _a_, _b_, and _c_
respectively, and take vertical succession on the page to indicate order in
time, then the following schemes will roughly shadow forth the contrast I
have been endeavouring to explain:-- {92}
Genesis (as interpreted by Nature (as interpreted by
Mr. Gladstone). natural science).
b b b c^1 a^3 b^2
c c c c a^2 b^1
a a a b a^1 b
a a a
So far as I can see, there is only one resource left for those modern
representatives of Sisyphus, the reconcilers of Genesis with science; and
it has the advantage of being founded on a perfectly legitimate appeal to
our ignorance. It has been seen that, on any interpretation of the terms
water-population and land-population, it must be admitted that invertebrate
representatives of these populations existed during the lower Palaeozoic
epoch. No evolutionist can hesitate to admit that other land animals (and
possibly vertebrates among them) may have existed during that time, of the
history of which we know so little; and, further, that scorpions are
animals of such high organisation that it is highly probable their
existence indicates that of a long antecedent land-population of a similar
character.
Then, since the land-population is said not to have been created until the
sixth day, it necessarily follows that the evidence of the order in which
animals appeared must be sought in the record of those older Palaeozoic
times in which only traces of the water-population have as yet been
discovered.
Therefore, if any one chooses to say that the creative work took place in
the Cambrian or Laurentian epoch, in exactly that manner which Mr.
Gladstone does, and natural science does not, affirm, natural {93} science
is not in a position to disprove the accuracy of the statement. Only one
cannot have one's cake and eat it too, and such safety from the
contradiction of science means the forfeiture of her support.
Whether the account of the work of the first, second, and third days in
Genesis would be confirmed by the demonstration of the truth of the nebular
hypothesis; whether it is corroborated by what is known of the nature and
probable relative antiquity of the heavenly bodies; whether, if the Hebrew
word translated "firmament" in the Authorised Version really means
"expanse," the assertion that the waters are partly under this "expanse"
and partly above it would be any more confirmed by the ascertained facts of
physical geography and meteorology than it was before; whether the creation
of the whole vegetable world, and especially of "grass, herb yielding seed
after its kind, and tree bearing fruit," before any kind of animal, is
"affirmed" by the apparently plain teaching of botanical palaeontology, that
grasses and fruit-trees originated long subsequently to animals--all these
are questions which, if I mistake not, would be answered decisively in the
negative by those who are specially conversant with the sciences involved.
And it must be recollected that the issue raised by Mr. Gladstone is not
whether, by some effort of ingenuity, the pentateuchal story can be shown
to be not disprovable by scientific knowledge, but whether it is supported
thereby.
There is nothing, then, in the criticisms of Dr. Reville but what
rather tends to confirm than to impair the old-fashioned {94} belief
that there is a revelation in the book of Genesis (p. 694).
The form into which Mr. Gladstone has thought fit to throw this opinion
leaves me in doubt as to its substance. I do not understand how a hostile
criticism can, under any circumstances, tend to confirm that which it
attacks. If, however, Mr. Gladstone merely means to express his personal
impression, "as one wholly destitute of that kind of knowledge which
carries authority," that he has destroyed the value of these criticisms, I
have neither the wish nor the right to attempt to disturb his faith. On the
other hand, I may be permitted to state my own conviction that, so far as
natural science is involved, M. Reville's observations retain the exact
value they possessed before Mr. Gladstone attacked them.
Trusting that I have now said enough to secure the author of a wise and
moderate disquisition upon a topic which seems fated to stir unwisdom and
fanaticism to their depths, a fuller measure of justice than has hitherto
been accorded to him, I retire from my self-appointed championship, with
the hope that I shall not hereafter be called upon by M. Reville to
apologise for damage done to his strong case by imperfect or impulsive
advocacy. But, perhaps, I may be permitted to add a word or two, on my own
account, in reference to the great question of the relations between
science and religion; since it is one about which I have thought a good
deal ever since I have been able to think at all; and about which I have
{95} ventured to express my views publicly, more than once, in the course
of the last thirty years.
The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much,
appears to me to be purely factitious--fabricated, on the one hand, by
short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science,
theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted
scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that
which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside
the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination,
with hope, and with ignorance.
It seems to me that the moral and intellectual life of the civilised
nations of Europe is the product of that interaction, sometimes in the way
of antagonism, sometimes in that of profitable interchange, of the Semitic
and the Aryan races, which commenced with the dawn of history, when Greek
and Phoenician came in contact, and has been continued by Carthaginian and
Roman, by Jew and Gentile, down to the present day. Our art (except,
perhaps, music) and our science are the contributions of the Aryan; but the
essence of our religion is derived from the Semite. In the eighth century
B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew
prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as
wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of
Aristotle.
"And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to {96} do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I
think it wantonly mutilates, while, if it adds thereto, I think it
obscures, the perfect ideal of religion.
But what extent of knowledge, what acuteness of scientific criticism, can
touch this, if any one possessed of knowledge, or acuteness, could be
absurd enough to make the attempt? Will the progress of research prove that
justice is worthless and mercy hateful; will it ever soften the bitter
contrast between our actions and our aspirations; or show us the bounds of
the universe, and bid us say, Go to, now we comprehend the infinite? A
faculty of wrath lay in those ancient Israelites, and surely the prophet's
staff would have made swift acquaintance with the head of the scholar who
had asked Micah whether, peradventure, the Lord further required of him an
implicit belief in the accuracy of the cosmogony of Genesis!
What we are usually pleased to call religion nowadays is, for the most
part, Hellenised Judaism; and, not unfrequently, the Hellenic element
carries with it a mighty remnant of old-world paganism and a great infusion
of the worst and weakest products of Greek scientific speculation; while
fragments of Persian and Babylonian, or rather Accadian, mythology burden
the Judaic contribution to the common stock.
The antagonism of science is not to religion, but to the heathen survivals
and the bad philosophy under which religion herself is often wellnigh
crushed. {97} And, for my part, I trust that this antagonism will never
cease; but that, to the end of time, true science will continue to fulfil
one of her most beneficent functions, that of relieving men from the burden
of false science which is imposed upon them in the name of religion.
This is the work that M. Reville and men such as he are doing for us; this
is the work which his opponents are endeavouring, consciously or
unconsciously, to hinder.
* * * * *
{98}
III
MR. GLADSTONE AND GENESIS
In controversy, as in courtship, the good old rule to be off with the old
before one is on with the new, greatly commends itself to my sense of
expediency. And, therefore, it appears to me desirable that I should
preface such observations as I may have to offer upon the cloud of
arguments (the relevancy of which to the issue which I had ventured to
raise is not always obvious) put forth by Mr. Gladstone in the January
number of this Review,[14] by an endeavour to make clear to such of our
readers as have not had the advantage of a forensic education the present
net result of the discussion.
I am quite aware that, in undertaking this task, I run all the risks to
which the man who presumes to deal judicially with his own cause is liable.
But it is exactly because I do not shun that risk, but, rather, earnestly
desire to be judged by him who cometh after me, provided that he has the
knowledge and impartiality appropriate to a judge, that I adopt my present
course.
{99}
In the article on "The Dawn of Creation and Worship," it will be remembered
that Mr. Gladstone unreservedly commits himself to three propositions. The
first is that, according to the writer of the Pentateuch, the
"water-population," the "air-population," and the "land-population" of the
globe were created successively, in the order named. In the second place,
Mr. Gladstone authoritatively asserts that this (as part of his "fourfold
order") has been "so affirmed in our time by natural science, that it may
be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact." In the third
place, Mr. Gladstone argues that the fact of this coincidence of the
pentateuchal story with the results of modern investigation makes it
"impossible to avoid the conclusion, first, that either this writer was
gifted with faculties passing all human experience, or else his knowledge
was divine." And having settled to his own satisfaction that the first
"branch of the alternative is truly nominal and unreal," Mr. Gladstone
continues, "So stands the plea for a revelation of truth from God, a plea
only to be met by questioning its possibility" (p. 697).
I am a simple-minded person, wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so
that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in
these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor plummet.
Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like intellectual
limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of
attaining that position of a representative of average opinion which
appears to be the modern ideal of a {100} leader of men, when I make free
confession that, after turning the matter over in my mind, with all the aid
derived from a careful consideration of Mr. Gladstone's reply, I cannot get
away from my original conviction that, if Mr. Gladstone's second
proposition can be shown to be not merely inaccurate, but directly
contradictory of facts known to every one who is acquainted with the
elements of natural science, the third proposition collapses of itself.
And it was this conviction which led me to enter upon the present
discussion. I fancied that if my respected clients, the people of average
opinion and capacity, could once be got distinctly to conceive that Mr.
Gladstone's views as to the proper method of dealing with grave and
difficult scientific and religious problems had permitted him to base a
solemn "plea for a revelation of truth from God" upon an error as to a
matter of fact, from which the intelligent perusal of a manual of
palaeontology would have saved him, I need not trouble myself to occupy
their time and attention with further comments upon his contribution to
apologetic literature. It is for others to judge whether I have efficiently
carried out my project or not. It certainly does not count for much that I
should be unable to find any flaw in my own case, but I think it counts for
a good deal that Mr. Gladstone appears to have been equally unable to do
so. He does, indeed, make a great parade of authorities, and I have the
greatest respect for those authorities whom Mr. Gladstone mentions. If he
will get them to sign a joint memorial to the effect that our present {101}
palaeontological evidence proves that birds appeared before the
"land-population" of terrestrial reptiles, I shall think it my duty to
reconsider my position--but not till then.
It will be observed that I have cautiously used the word "appears" in
referring to what seems to me to be absence of any real answer to my
criticisms in Mr. Gladstone's reply. For I must honestly confess that,
notwithstanding long and painful strivings after clear insight, I am still
uncertain whether Mr. Gladstone's "Defence" means that the great "plea for
a revelation from God" is to be left to perish in the dialectic desert; or
whether it is to be withdrawn under the protection of such skirmishers as
are available for covering retreat.
In particular, the remarkable disquisition which covers pages 11 to 14 of
Mr. Gladstone's last contribution has greatly exercised my mind. Socrates
is reported to have said of the works of Heraclitus that he who attempted
to comprehend them should be a "Delian swimmer," but that, for his part,
what he could understand was so good that he was disposed to believe in the
excellence of that which he found unintelligible. In endeavouring to make
myself master of Mr. Gladstone's meaning in these pages, I have often been
overcome by a feeling analogous to that of Socrates, but not quite the
same. That which I do understand, in fact, has appeared to me so very much
the reverse of good, that I have sometimes permitted myself to doubt the
value of that which I do not understand. {102}
In this part of Mr. Gladstone's reply, in fact, I find nothing of which the
bearing upon my arguments is clear to me, except that which relates to the
question whether reptiles, so far as they are represented by tortoises and
the great majority of lizards and snakes, which are land animals, are
creeping things in the sense of the pentateuchal writer or not.
I have every respect for the singer of the Song of the Three Children
(whoever he may have been); I desire to cast no shadow of doubt upon, but,
on the contrary, marvel at, the exactness of Mr. Gladstone's information as
to the considerations which "affected the method of the Mosaic writer"; nor
do I venture to doubt that the inconvenient intrusion of these contemptible
reptiles--"a family fallen from greatness" (p. 14), a miserable decayed
aristocracy reduced to mere "skulkers about the earth" (_ibid._)--in
consequence, apparently, of difficulties about the occupation of land
arising out of the earth-hunger of their former serfs, the mammals--into an
apologetic argument, which otherwise would run quite smoothly, is in every
way to be deprecated. Still, the wretched creatures stand there,
importunately demanding notice; and, however different may be the practice
in that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and
laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no
avail whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to bury them out of
sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my experience of "the Elysian
regions of Science," wherein it is a pleasure to me to think that a man of
Mr. Gladstone's {103} intimate knowledge of English life, during the last
quarter of a century, believes my philosophic existence to have been
rounded off in unbroken equanimity.
However reprehensible, and indeed contemptible, terrestrial reptiles may
be, the only question which appears to me to be relevant to my argument is
whether these creatures are or are not comprised under the denomination of
"everything that creepeth upon the ground."
Mr. Gladstone speaks of the author of the first chapter of Genesis as "the
Mosaic writer"; I suppose, therefore, that he will admit that it is equally
proper to speak of the author of Leviticus as the "Mosaic writer." Whether
such a phrase would be used by any one who had an adequate conception of
the assured results of modern Biblical criticism is another matter; but, at
any rate, it cannot be denied that Leviticus has as much claim to Mosaic
authorship as Genesis. Therefore, if one wants to know the sense of a
phrase used in Genesis, it will be well to see what Leviticus has to say on
the matter. Hence, I commend the following extract from the eleventh
chapter of Leviticus to Mr. Gladstone's serious attention:--
And these are they which are unclean unto you among the creeping things
that creep upon the earth: the weasel, and the mouse, and the great
lizard after its kind, and the gecko, and the land-crocodile, and the
sand-lizard, and the chameleon. These are they which are unclean to you
among all that creep (v. 29-31).
The merest Sunday-school exegesis therefore suffices {104} to prove that
when the "Mosaic writer" in Genesis i. 24 speaks of "creeping things," he
means to include lizards among them.
This being so, it is agreed, on all hands, that terrestrial lizards, and
other reptiles allied to lizards, occur in the Permian strata. It is
further agreed that the Triassic strata were deposited after these.
Moreover, it is well known that, even if certain footprints are to be taken
as unquestionable evidence of the existence of birds, they are not known to
occur in rocks earlier than the Trias, while indubitable remains of birds
are to be met with only much later. Hence it follows that natural science
does not "affirm" the statement that birds were made on the fifth day, and
"everything that creepeth on the ground" on the sixth, on which Mr.
Gladstone rests his order; for, as is shown by Leviticus, the "Mosaic
writer" includes lizards among his "creeping things."
Perhaps I have given myself superfluous trouble in the preceding argument,
for I find that Mr. Gladstone is willing to assume (he does not say to
admit) that the statement in the text of Genesis as to reptiles cannot "in
all points be sustained" (p. 16). But my position is that it cannot be
sustained in any point, so that, after all, it has perhaps been as well to
go over the evidence again. And then Mr. Gladstone proceeds as if nothing
had happened to tell us that--
There remain great unshaken facts to be weighed. First, the fact that
such a record should have been made at all.
As most peoples have their cosmogonies, this "fact" does not strike me as
having much value. {105}
Secondly, the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it has
placed itself under the severe conditions of a chronological order
reaching from the first _nisus_ of chaotic matter to the consummated
production of a fair and goodly, a furnished and a peopled world.
This "fact" can be regarded as of value only by ignoring the fact
demonstrated in my previous paper, that natural science does not confirm
the order asserted so far as living things are concerned; and by upsetting
a fact to be brought to light presently, to wit, that, in regard to the
rest of the pentateuchal cosmogony, prudent science has very little to say
one way or the other.
Thirdly, the fact that its cosmogony seems, in the light of the
nineteenth century, to draw more and more of countenance from the best
natural philosophy.
I have already questioned the accuracy of this statement, and I do not
observe that mere repetition adds to its value.
And, fourthly, that it has described the successive origins of the five
great categories of present life with which human experience was and is
conversant, in that order which geological authority confirms.
By comparison with a sentence on page 14, in which a fivefold order is
substituted for the "fourfold order," on which the "plea for revelation"
was originally founded, it appears that these five categories are "plants,
fishes, birds, mammals, and man," which, Mr. Gladstone affirms, "are given
to us in Genesis in the order of succession in which they are also given by
the latest geological authorities." {106}
I must venture to demur to this statement. I showed, in my previous paper,
that there is no reason to doubt that the term "great sea monster" (used in
Gen. i. 21) includes the most conspicuous of great sea animals--namely,
whales, dolphins, porpoises, manatees, and dugongs;[15] and, as these are
indubitable mammals, it is impossible to affirm that mammals come after
birds, which are said to have been created on the same day. Moreover, I
pointed out that as these Cetacea and Sirenia are certainly modified land
animals, their existence implies the antecedent existence of land mammals.
Furthermore, I have to remark that the term "fishes," as used, technically,
in zoology, by no means covers all the moving creatures that have life,
which are bidden to "fill the waters in the seas" (Gen. i. 20-22). Marine
mollusks and crustacea, echinoderms, corals, and foraminifera are not
technically fishes. But they are abundant in the palaeozoic rocks, ages upon
ages older than those in which the first evidences of true fishes appear.
And if, in a geological book, Mr. Gladstone finds the quite true statement
that plants appeared before fishes, it is only by a complete
misunderstanding that he can be led to imagine it serves his purpose. As a
matter of fact, at the present moment, it is a question whether, on the
bare evidence afforded by fossils, the marine creeping thing or the marine
plant has the seniority. {107} No cautious palaeontologist would express a
decided opinion on the matter. But, if we are to read the pentateuchal
statement as a scientific document (and, in spite of all protests to the
contrary, those who bring it into comparison with science do seek to make a
scientific document of it), then, as it is quite clear that only
terrestrial plants of high organisation are spoken of in verses 11 and 12,
no palaeontologist would hesitate to say that, at present, the records of
sea animal life are vastly older than those of any land plant describable
as "grass, herb yielding seed, or fruit-tree."
Thus, although, in Mr. Gladstone's "Defence," the "old order passeth into
new," his case is not improved. The fivefold order is no more "affirmed in
our time by natural science" to be "a demonstrated conclusion and
established fact" than the fourfold order was. Natural science appears to
me to decline to have anything to do with either; they are as wrong in
detail as they are mistaken in principle.
There is another change of position, the value of which is not so apparent
to me, as it may well seem to be to those who are unfamiliar with the
subject under discussion. Mr. Gladstone discards his three groups of
"water-population," "air-population," and "land-population," and
substitutes for them (1) fishes, (2) birds, (3) mammals, (4) man. Moreover,
it is assumed, in a note, that "the higher or ordinary mammals" alone were
known to the "Mosaic writer" (p. 6). No doubt it looks, at first, as if
something {108} were gained by this alteration; for, as I have just pointed
out, the word "fishes" can be used in two senses, one of which has a
deceptive appearance of adjustability to the "Mosaic" account. Then the
inconvenient reptiles are banished out of sight; and, finally, the question
of the exact meaning of "higher" and "ordinary" in the case of mammals
opens up the prospect of a hopeful logomachy. But what is the good of it
all in the face of Leviticus on the one hand and of palaeontology on the
other?
As, in my apprehension, there is not a shadow of justification for the
suggestion that when the pentateuchal writer says "fowl" he excludes bats
(which, as we shall see directly, are expressly included under "fowl" in
Leviticus), and as I have already shown that he demonstrably includes
reptiles, as well as mammals, among the creeping things of the land, I may
be permitted to spare my readers further discussion of the "fivefold
order." On the whole, it is seen to be rather more inconsistent with
Genesis than its fourfold predecessor.
But I have yet a fresh order to face. Mr. Gladstone (p. 11) understands
"the main statements of Genesis in successive order of time, but without
any measurement of its divisions, to be as follows:--
1. A period of land, anterior to all life (v. 9, 10).
2. A period of vegetable life, anterior to animal life (v. 11, 12).
3. A period of animal life, in the order of fishes (v. 20).
4. Another stage of animal life, in the order of birds.
5. Another, in the order of beasts (v. 24, 25).
6. Last of all, man (v. 26, 27)."
{109}
Mr. Gladstone then tries to find the proof of the occurrence of a similar
succession in sundry excellent works on geology.
I am really grieved to be obliged to say that this third (or is it fourth?)
modification of the foundation of the "plea for revelation" originally set
forth, satisfies me as little as any of its predecessors.
For, in the first place, I cannot accept the assertion that this order is
to be found in Genesis. With respect to No. 5, for example, I hold, as I
have already said, that "great sea monsters" includes the Cetacea, in which
case mammals (which is what, I suppose, Mr. Gladstone means by "beasts")
come in under head No. 3, and not under No. 5. Again, "fowl" are said in
Genesis to be created on the same day as fishes; therefore I cannot accept
an order which makes birds succeed fishes. Once more, as it is quite
certain that the term "fowl" includes the bats,--for in Leviticus xi. 13-19
we read, "And these shall ye have in abomination among the fowls ... the
heron after its kind, and the hoopoe, and the bat,"--it is obvious that
bats are also said to have been created at stage No. 3. And as bats are
mammals, and their existence obviously presupposes that of terrestrial
"beasts," it is quite clear that the latter could not have first appeared
as No. 5. I need not repeat my reasons for doubting whether man came "last
of all."
As the latter half of Mr. Gladstone's sixfold order thus shows itself to be
wholly unauthorised by, and inconsistent with, the plain language of the
Pentateuch, {110} I might decline to discuss the admissibility of its
former half.
But I will add one or two remarks on this point also. Does Mr. Gladstone
mean to say that in any of the works he has cited, or indeed anywhere else,
he can find scientific warranty for the assertion that there was a period
of land--by which I suppose he means dry land (for submerged land must
needs be as old as the separate existence of the sea)--"anterior to all
life"?
It may be so, or it may not be so; but where is the evidence which would
justify any one in making a positive assertion on the subject? What
competent palaeontologist will affirm, at this present moment, that he knows
anything about the period at which life originated, or will assert more
than the extreme probability that such origin was a long way antecedent to
any traces of life at present known? What physical geologist will affirm
that he knows when dry land began to exist, or will say more than that it
was probably very much earlier than any extant direct evidence of
terrestrial conditions indicates?
I think I know pretty well the answers which the authorities quoted by Mr.
Gladstone would give to these questions; but I leave it to them to give
them if they think fit.
If I ventured to speculate on the matter at all, I should say it is by no
means certain that sea is older than dry land, inasmuch as a solid
terrestrial surface may very well have existed before the earth was cool
enough to allow of the existence of fluid water. And, {111} in this case,
dry land may have existed before the sea. As to the first appearance of
life, the whole argument of analogy, whatever it may be worth in such a
case, is in favour of the absence of living beings until long after the hot
water seas had constituted themselves; and of the subsequent appearance of
aquatic before terrestrial forms of life. But whether these "protoplasts"
would, if we could examine them, be reckoned among the lowest microscopic
algae, or fungi; or among those doubtful organisms which lie in the
debatable land between animals and plants, is, in my judgment, a question
on which a prudent biologist will reserve his opinion.
I think that I have now disposed of those parts of Mr. Gladstone's defence
in which I seem to discover a design to rescue his solemn "plea for
revelation." But a great deal of the "Proem to Genesis" remains which I
would gladly pass over in silence, were such a course consistent with the
respect due to so distinguished a champion of the "reconcilers."
I hope that my clients--the people of average opinions--have by this time
some confidence in me; for when I tell them that, after all, Mr. Gladstone
is of opinion that the "Mosaic record" was meant to give moral, and not
scientific, instruction to those for whom it was written, they may be
disposed to think that I must be misleading them. But let them listen
further to what Mr. Gladstone says in a compendious but not exactly correct
statement respecting my opinions:-- {112}
He holds the writer responsible for scientific precision: I look for
nothing of the kind, but assign to him a statement general, which
admits exceptions; popular, which aims mainly at producing moral
impression; summary, which cannot but be open to more or less of
criticism of detail. He thinks it is a lecture. I think it is a sermon
(p. 5).
I note, incidentally, that Mr. Gladstone appears to consider that the
_differentia_ between a lecture and a sermon is, that the former, so far as
it deals with matters of fact, may be taken seriously, as meaning exactly
what it says, while a sermon may not. I have quite enough on my hands
without taking up the cudgels for the clergy, who will probably find Mr.
Gladstone's definition unflattering.
But I am diverging from my proper business, which is to say that I have
given no ground for the ascription of these opinions; and that, as a matter
of fact, I do not hold them and never have held them. It is Mr. Gladstone,
and not I, who will have it that the pentateuchal cosmogony is to be taken
as science.
My belief, on the contrary, is, and long has been, that the pentateuchal
story of the creation is simply a myth. I suppose it to be an hypothesis
respecting the origin of the universe which some ancient thinker found
himself able to reconcile with his knowledge, or what he thought was
knowledge, of the nature of things, and therefore assumed to be true. As
such, I hold it to be not merely an interesting, but a venerable, monument
of a stage in the mental progress of mankind; and I find it difficult to
suppose that any one who is acquainted with the cosmogonies of other {113}
nations--and especially with those of the Egyptians and the Babylonians,
with whom the Israelites were in such frequent and intimate
communication--should consider it to possess either more, or less,
scientific importance than may be allotted to these.
Mr. Gladstone's definition of a sermon permits me to suspect that he may
not see much difference between that form of discourse and what I call a
myth; and I hope it may be something more than the slowness of
apprehension, to which I have confessed, which leads me to imagine that a
statement which is "general" but "admits exceptions," which is "popular"
and "aims mainly at producing moral impression," "summary" and therefore
open to "criticism of detail," amounts to a myth, or perhaps less than a
myth. Put algebraically, it comes to this, _x_ = _a_ + _b_ + _c_; always
remembering that there is nothing to show the exact value of either _a_, or
_b_, or c. It is true that _a_ is commonly supposed to equal 10, but there
are exceptions, and these may reduce it to 8, or 3, or 0; _b_ also
popularly means 10, but being chiefly used by the algebraist as a "moral"
value, you cannot do much with it in the addition or subtraction of
mathematical values; _c_ also is quite "summary," and if you go into the
details of which it is made up, many of them may be wrong, and their sum
total equal to 0, or even to a minus quantity.
Mr. Gladstone appears to wish that I should (1) enter upon a sort of essay
competition with the author of the pentateuchal cosmogony; (2) that I
should make a further statement about some {114} elementary facts in the
history of Indian and Greek philosophy; and (3) that I should show cause
for my hesitation in accepting the assertion that Genesis is supported, at
any rate to the extent of the first two verses, by the nebular hypothesis.
A certain sense of humour prevents me from accepting the first invitation.
I would as soon attempt to put Hamlet's soliloquy into a more scientific
shape. But if I supposed the "Mosaic writer" to be inspired, as Mr.
Gladstone does, it would not be consistent with my notions of respect for
the Supreme Being to imagine Him unable to frame a form of words which
should accurately, or, at least, not inaccurately, express His own meaning.
It is sometimes said that, had the statements contained in the first
chapter of Genesis been scientifically true, they would have been
unintelligible to ignorant people; but how is the matter mended if, being
scientifically untrue, they must needs be rejected by instructed people?
With respect to the second suggestion, it would be presumptuous in me to
pretend to instruct Mr. Gladstone in matters which lie as much within the
province of Literature and History as in that of Science; but if any one
desirous of further knowledge will be so good as to turn to that most
excellent and by no means recondite source of information, the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, he will find, under the letter E, the word
"Evolution," and a long article on that subject. Now, I do not recommend
him to read the first half of the article; but the second half, by my {115}
friend Mr. Sully, is really very good. He will there find it said that in
some of the philosophies of ancient India, the idea of evolution is clearly
expressed: "Brahma is conceived as the eternal self-existent being, which,
on its material side, unfolds itself to the world by gradually condensing
itself to material objects through the gradations of ether, fire, water,
earth, and other elements." And again: "In the later system of emanation of
Sankhya there is a more marked approach to a materialistic doctrine of
evolution." What little knowledge I have of the matter--chiefly derived
from that very instructive book, _Die Religion des Buddha_, by C. F.
Koeppen, supplemented by Hardy's interesting works--leads me to think that
Mr. Sully might have spoken much more strongly as to the evolutionary
character of Indian philosophy, and especially of that of the Buddhists.
But the question is too large to be dealt with incidentally.
And, with respect to early Greek philosophy,[16] the seeker after
additional enlightenment need go no further than the same excellent
storehouse of information:--
The early Ionian physicists, including Thales, Anaximander, and
Anaximenes, seek to explain the world as generated out of a primordial
matter which is at the same time the universal support of things. This
substance is endowed with a generative or transmutative force by virtue
of which it passes into a {116} succession of forms. They thus resemble
modern evolutionists, since they regard the world, with its infinite
variety of forms, as issuing from a simple mode of matter.
Further on, Mr. Sully remarks that "Heraclitus deserves a prominent place
in the history of the idea of evolution," and he states, with perfect
justice, that Heraclitus has foreshadowed some of the special peculiarities
of Mr. Darwin's views. It is indeed a very strange circumstance that the
philosophy of the great Ephesian more than adumbrates the two doctrines
which have played leading parts, the one in the development of Christian
dogma, the other in that of natural science. The former is the conception
of the Word ([Greek: logos]) which took its Jewish shape in Alexandria, and
its Christian form[17] in that Gospel which is usually referred to an
Ephesian source of some five centuries later date; and the latter is that
of the struggle for existence. The saying that "strife is father and king
of all" ([Greek: polemos panton men pater esti, panton de basileus]),
ascribed to Heraclitus, would be a not inappropriate motto for the "Origin
of Species."
I have referred only to Mr. Sully's article, because his authority is quite
sufficient for my purpose. But the consultation of any of the more
elaborate histories of Greek philosophy, such as the great work of Zeller,
for example, will only bring out the same fact into still more striking
prominence. I have professed no "minute acquaintance" with either Indian or
Greek philosophy, but I have taken a great deal of pains to {117} secure
that such knowledge as I do possess shall be accurate and trustworthy.
In the third place, Mr. Gladstone appears to wish that I should discuss
with him the question whether the nebular hypothesis is, or is not,
confirmatory of the pentateuchal account of the origin of things. Mr.
Gladstone appears to be prepared to enter upon this campaign with a light
heart. I confess I am not, and my reason for this backwardness will
doubtless surprise Mr. Gladstone. It is that, rather more than a quarter of
a century ago (namely, in February 1859), when it was my duty, as President
of the Geological Society, to deliver the Anniversary Address,[18] I chose
a topic which involved a very careful study of the remarkable cosmogonical
speculation, originally promulgated by Immanuel Kant and, subsequently, by
Laplace, which is now known as the nebular hypothesis. With the help of
such little acquaintance with the principles of physics and astronomy as I
had gained, I endeavoured to obtain a clear understanding of this
speculation in all its bearings. I am not sure that I succeeded; but of
this I am certain, that the problems involved are very difficult, even for
those who possess the intellectual discipline requisite for dealing with
them. And it was this conviction that led me to express my desire to leave
the discussion of the question of the asserted harmony between Genesis and
the nebular hypothesis to experts in the appropriate branches of knowledge.
And I think my course was a {118} wise one; but as Mr. Gladstone evidently
does not understand how there can be any hesitation on my part, unless it
arises from a conviction that he is in the right, I may go so far as to set
out my difficulties.
They are of two kinds--exegetical and scientific. It appears to me that it
is vain to discuss a supposed coincidence between Genesis and science
unless we have first settled, on the one hand, what Genesis says, and, on
the other hand, what science says.
In the first place, I cannot find any consensus among Biblical scholars as
to the meaning of the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and
the earth." Some say that the Hebrew word _bara_, which is translated
"create," means "made out of nothing." I venture to object to that
rendering, not on the ground of scholarship, but of common sense.
Omnipotence itself can surely no more make something "out of" nothing than
it can make a triangular circle. What is intended by "made out of nothing"
appears to be "caused to come into existence," with the implication that
nothing of the same kind previously existed. It is further usually assumed
that "the heaven and the earth" means the material substance of the
universe. Hence the "Mosaic writer" is taken to imply that where nothing of
a material nature previously existed, this substance appeared. That is
perfectly conceivable, and therefore no one can deny that it may have
happened. But there are other very authoritative {119} critics who say that
the ancient Israelite[19] who wrote the passage was not likely to have been
capable of such abstract thinking; and that, as a matter of philology,
_bara_ is commonly used to signify the "fashioning," or "forming," of that
which already exists. Now it appears to me that the scientific investigator
is wholly incompetent to say anything at all about the first origin of the
material universe. The whole power of his organon vanishes when he has to
step beyond the chain of natural causes and effects. No form of the nebular
hypothesis, that I know of, is necessarily connected with any view of the
origination of the nebular substance. Kant's form of it expressly supposes
that the nebular material from which one stellar system starts may be
nothing but the disintegrated substance of a stellar and planetary system
which has just come to an end. Therefore, so far as I can see, one who
believes that matter has existed from all eternity has just as much right
to hold the nebular hypothesis as one who believes that matter came into
existence at a specified epoch. In other words, the nebular hypothesis and
the creation hypothesis, up to this point, neither confirm nor oppose one
another.
Next, we read in the revisers' version, in which I suppose the ultimate
results of critical scholarship to be embodied: "And the earth was waste
['without form,' in the Authorised Version] and void." Most {120} people
seem to think that this phraseology intends to imply that the matter out of
which the world was to be formed was a veritable "chaos," devoid of law and
order. If this interpretation is correct, the nebular hypothesis can have
nothing to say to it. The scientific thinker cannot admit the absence of
law and order, anywhere or anywhen, in nature. Sometimes law and order are
patent and visible to our limited vision; sometimes they are hidden. But
every particle of the matter of the most fantastic-looking nebula in the
heavens is a realm of law and order in itself; and, that it is so, is the
essential condition of the possibility of solar and planetary evolution
from the apparent chaos.[20]
"Waste" is too vague a term to be worth consideration. "Without form,"
intelligible enough as a metaphor, if taken literally, is absurd; for a
material thing existing in space must have a superficies, and if it has a
superficies it has a form. The wildest streaks of marestail clouds in the
sky, or the most irregular heavenly nebulae, have surely just as much form
as a geometrical tetrahedron; and as for "void," how can that be void which
is full of matter? As poetry, these lines are vivid and admirable; as a
scientific statement, which they must be taken to be if any one is
justified in comparing them with another scientific statement, they fail to
convey any intelligible conception to my mind.
{121}
The account proceeds: "And darkness was upon the face of the deep." So be
it; but where, then, is the likeness to the celestial nebulae, of the
existence of which we should know nothing unless they shone with a light of
their own? "And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." I
have met with no form of the nebular hypothesis which involves anything
analogous to this process.
I have said enough to explain some of the difficulties which arise in my
mind, when I try to ascertain whether there is any foundation for the
contention that the statements contained in the first two verses of Genesis
are supported by the nebular hypothesis. The result does not appear to me
to be exactly favourable to that contention. The nebular hypothesis assumes
the existence of matter, having definite properties, as its foundation.
Whether such matter was created a few thousand years ago, or whether it has
existed through an eternal series of metamorphoses of which our present
universe is only the last stage, are alternatives, neither of which is
scientifically untenable, and neither scientifically demonstrable. But
science knows nothing of any stage in which the universe could be said, in
other than a metaphorical and popular sense, to be formless or empty; or in
any respect less the seat of law and order than it is now. One might as
well talk of a fresh-laid hen's egg being "without form and void," because
the chick therein is potential and not actual, as apply such terms to the
nebulous mass which contains a potential solar system. {122}
Until some further enlightenment comes to me, then, I confess myself wholly
unable to understand the way in which the nebular hypothesis is to be
converted into an ally of the "Mosaic writer."[21]
But Mr. Gladstone informs us that Professor Dana and Professor Guyot are
prepared to prove that the "first or cosmogonical portion of the Proem not
only accords with, but teaches, the nebular hypothesis." There is no one to
whose authority on geological questions I am more readily disposed to bow
than that of my eminent friend Professor Dana. But I am familiar with what
he has previously said on this topic in his well-known and standard work,
into which, strangely enough, it does not seem to have occurred to Mr.
Gladstone to look before he set out upon his present undertaking; and
unless Professor Dana's latest contribution (which I have not yet met with)
takes up altogether new ground, I am afraid I shall {123} not be able to
extricate myself, by its help, from my present difficulties.
It is a very long time since I began to think about the relations between
modern scientifically ascertained truths and the cosmogonical speculations
of the writer of Genesis; and, as I think that Mr. Gladstone might have
been able to put his case with a good deal more force if he had thought it
worth while to consult the last chapter of Professor Dana's admirable
_Manual of Geology_, so I think he might have been made aware that he was
undertaking an enterprise of which he had not counted the cost, if he had
chanced upon a discussion of the subject which I published in 1877.[22]
Finally, I should like to draw the attention of those who take interest in
these topics to the weighty words of one of the most learned and moderate
of Biblical critics:--
A propos de cette premiere page de la Bible, on a coutume de nos jours
de disserter, a perte de vue, sur l'accord du recit mosaique avec les
sciences naturelles; et comme celles-ci, tout eloignees qu'elles sont
encore de la perfection absolue, ont rendu populaires et en quelque
sorte irrefragables un certain nombre de faits generaux ou de theses
fondamentales de la cosmologie et de la geologie, c'est le texte sacre
qu'on s'evertue a torturer pour le faire concorder avec ces
donnees.[23]
In my paper on the "Interpreters of Nature and the Interpreters of
Genesis," while freely availing myself of the rights of a scientific
critic, I endeavoured to keep the expression of my views well within those
{124} bounds of courtesy which are set by self-respect and consideration
for others. I am therefore glad to be favoured with Mr. Gladstone's
acknowledgment of the success of my efforts. I only wish that I could
accept all the products of Mr. Gladstone's gracious appreciation, but there
is one about which, as a matter of honesty, I hesitate. In fact, if I had
expressed my meaning better than I seem to have done, I doubt if this
particular proffer of Mr. Gladstone's thanks would have been made.
To my mind, whatever doctrine professes to be the result of the application
of the accepted rules of inductive and deductive logic to its
subject-matter; and accepts, within the limits which it sets to itself, the
supremacy of reason, is Science. Whether the subject-matter consists of
realities or unrealities, truths or falsehoods, is quite another question.
I conceive that ordinary geometry is science, by reason of its method, and
I also believe that its axioms, definitions, and conclusions are all true.
However, there is a geometry of four dimensions, which I also believe to be
science, because its method professes to be strictly scientific. It is true
that I cannot conceive four dimensions in space, and therefore, for me, the
whole affair is unreal. But I have known men of great intellectual powers
who seemed to have no difficulty either in conceiving them, or, at any
rate, in imagining how they could conceive them; and, therefore,
four-dimensioned geometry comes under my notion of science. So I think
astrology is a science, in so far as it professes to reason logically from
principles {125} established by just inductive methods. To prevent
misunderstanding, perhaps I had better add that I do not believe one whit
in astrology; but no more do I believe in Ptolemaic astronomy, or in the
catastrophic geology of my youth, although these, in their day,
claimed--and, to my mind, rightly claimed--the name of science. If nothing
is to be called science but that which is exactly true from beginning to
end, I am afraid there is very little science in the world outside
mathematics. Among the physical sciences, I do not know that any could
claim more than that it is true within certain limits, so narrow that, for
the present at any rate, they may be neglected. If such is the case, I do
not see where the line is to be drawn between exactly true, partially true,
and mainly untrue forms of science. And what I have said about the current
theology at the end of my paper [p. 95] leaves, I think, no doubt as to the
category in which I rank it. For all that, I think it would be not only
unjust, but almost impertinent, to refuse the name of science to the
_Summa_ of St. Thomas or to the _Institutes_ of Calvin.
In conclusion, I confess that my supposed "unjaded appetite" for the sort
of controversy in which it needed not Mr. Gladstone's express declaration
to tell us he is far better practised than I am (though probably, without
another express declaration, no one would have suspected that his
controversial fires are burning low) is already satiated.
In "Elysium" we conduct scientific discussions in {126} a different medium,
and we are liable to threatenings of asphyxia in that "atmosphere of
contention" in which Mr. Gladstone has been able to live, alert and
vigorous beyond the common race of men, as if it were purest mountain air.
I trust that he may long continue to seek truth, under the difficult
conditions he has chosen for the search, with unabated energy--I had almost
said fire--
May age not wither him, nor custom stale
His infinite variety.
But Elysium suits my less robust constitution better, and I beg leave to
retire thither, not sorry for my experience of the other region--no one
should regret experience--but determined not to repeat it, at any rate in
reference to the "plea for revelation."
* * * * *
NOTE ON THE PROPER SENSE OF THE "MOSAIC" NARRATIVE OF THE CREATION.
It has been objected to my argument from Leviticus (p. 103), that the
Hebrew words translated by "creeping things" in Genesis i. 24 and
Leviticus xi. 29, are different; namely, "reh-mes" in the former,
"sheh-retz" in the latter. The obvious reply to this objection is that
the question is not one of words but of the meaning of words. To borrow
an illustration from our own language, if "crawling things" had been
used by the translators in Genesis and "creeping things" in Leviticus,
it would not have been necessarily implied that they intended to denote
different groups of animals. "Sheh-retz" is employed in a wider sense
than "reh-mes." There are "sheh-retz" of the waters, of the earth, of
the air, and of the land. Leviticus speaks of land reptiles, among
other animals, as "sheh-retz"; Genesis speaks of all creeping land
animals, among which land reptiles are necessarily included, as
"reh-mes." Our translators, therefore, {127} have given the true sense
when they render both "sheh-retz" and "reh-mes" by "creeping things."
Having taken a good deal of trouble to show what Genesis i.-ii. 4 does
not mean, in the preceding pages, perhaps it may be well that I should
briefly give my opinion as to what it does mean. I conceive that the
unknown author of this part of the Hexateuchal compilation believed,
and meant his readers to believe, that his words, as they understood
them--that is to say, in their ordinary natural sense--conveyed the
"actual historical truth." When he says that such and such things
happened, I believe him to mean that they actually occurred and not
that he imagined or dreamed them; when he says "day," I believe he uses
the word in the popular sense; when he says "made" or "created," I
believe he means that they came into being by a process analogous to
that which the people whom he addressed called "making" or "creating";
and I think that, unless we forget our present knowledge of nature,
and, putting ourselves back into the position of a Phoenician or a
Chaldaean philosopher, start from his conception of the world, we shall
fail to grasp the meaning of the Hebrew writer. We must conceive the
earth to be an immovable, more or less flattened, body, with the vault
of heaven above, the watery abyss below and around. We must imagine
sun, moon, and stars to be "set" in a "firmament" with, or in, which
they move; and above which is yet another watery mass. We must consider
"light" and "darkness" to be things, the alternation of which
constitutes day and night, independently of the existence of sun, moon,
and stars. We must further suppose that, as in the case of the story of
the deluge, the Hebrew writer was acquainted with a Gentile (probably
Chaldaean or Accadian) account of the origin of things, in which he
substantially believed, but which he stripped of all its idolatrous
associations by substituting "Elohim" for Ea, Anu, Bel, and the like.
From this point of view the first verse strikes the keynote of the
whole. In the beginning "Elohim[24] created the heaven and the earth."
Heaven and earth were not primitive existences from which the gods
proceeded, as the Gentiles taught; on the contrary, the "Powers"
preceded and created heaven and earth. {128} Whether by "creation" is
meant "causing to be where nothing was before" or "shaping of something
which pre-existed," seems to me to be an insoluble question.
As I have pointed out, the second verse has an interesting parallel in
Jeremiah iv. 23: "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void;
and the heavens, and they had no light." I conceive that there is no
more allusion to chaos in the one than in the other. The earth-disk lay
in its watery envelope, like the yolk of an egg in the _glaire_, and
the spirit, or breath, of Elohim stirred the mass. Light was created as
a thing by itself; and its antithesis "darkness" as another thing. It
was supposed to be the nature of these two to alternate, and a pair of
alternations constituted a "day" in the sense of an unit of time.
The next step was, necessarily, the formation of that "firmament," or
dome over the earth-disk, which was supposed to support the celestial
waters; and in which sun, moon, and stars were conceived to be set, as
in a sort of orrery. The earth was still surrounded and covered by the
lower waters, but the upper were separated from it by the "firmament,"
beneath which what we call the air lay. A second alternation of
darkness and light marks the lapse of time.
After this, the waters which covered the earth-disk, under the
firmament, were drawn away into certain regions, which became seas,
while the part laid bare became dry land. In accordance with the
notion, universally accepted in antiquity, that moist earth possesses
the potentiality of giving rise to living beings, the land, at the
command of Elohim, "put forth" all sorts of plants. They are made to
appear thus early, not, I apprehend, from any notion that plants are
lower in the scale of being than animals (which would seem to be
inconsistent with the prevalence of tree worship among ancient people),
but rather because animals obviously depend on plants; and because,
without crops and harvests, there seemed to be no particular need of
heavenly signs for the seasons.
These were provided by the fourth day's work. Light existed already;
but now vehicles for the distribution of light, in a special manner and
with varying degrees of intensity, were provided. I conceive that the
previous alternations of light and darkness were supposed to go on; but
that the "light" was {129} strengthened during the daytime by the sun,
which, as a source of heat as well as of light, glided up the firmament
from the east, and slid down in the west, each day. Very probably each
day's sun was supposed to be a new one. And, as the light of the day
was strengthened by the sun, so the darkness of the night was weakened
by the moon, which regularly waxed and waned every month. The stars
are, as it were, thrown in. And nothing can more sharply mark the
doctrinal purpose of the author, than the manner in which he deals with
the heavenly bodies, which the Gentiles identified so closely with
their gods, as if they were mere accessories to the almanac.
Animals come next in order of creation, and the general notion of the
writer seems to be that they were produced by the medium in which they
live; that is to say, the aquatic animals by the waters and the
terrestrial animals by the land. But there was a difficulty about
flying things, such as bats, birds, and insects. The cosmogonist seems
to have had no conception of "air" as an elemental body. His "elements"
are earth and water, and he ignores air as much as he does fire. Birds
"fly above the earth in the open firmament" or "on the face of the
expanse" of heaven. They are not said to fly through the air. The
choice of a generative medium for flying things, therefore, seemed to
lie between water and eart
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