WitaT is
DARWINISM?

CHARLES HopcE

PRESIDENT WHITE LIBRARY,
CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

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AC SE4C2 20/2/92

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Cornell University

Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

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WHAT IS DARWINISM?

BY

CHARLES HODGE,

PRINCETON, N. J.

NEW YORK:
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG, AND COMPANY.
1874.

[29

* petted

“COR! No L. L*
UNIVER SITY!
LIBRARY id

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
Scripner, ARMsTRONG, & ComPANY,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE :
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY
H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.

CONTENTS.

—_e—

IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION 2 ‘ ‘ ‘ 1
Dirrerent THEORIES AS TO THE Oniex OF THE Unrvenen,
AND SPECIALLY OF VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL ORGANISMS.

1. The Scriptural Theory ‘ ‘ ¢ . c 4 3
2. The Pantheistic Theory . - « : . ‘ . 7
3. The Epicurean Theory és ‘ . 5 - 10
4. The Doctrine of Herbert Spencer . é q . wae
5. Hylozoic Theory . , . ‘ . 3 . 21
6. Unscriptural Forms of Theism . z i - 22
Darwin’s THEORY 7 ‘ ‘ : : 4 2 ‘ 26°
NatuRAL SELECTION x ¥ ‘ * # 4 . $i
SENSE IN WHICH DaRWIN USES THE WoRD Nira ‘ 40
Tue THREE ELEMENTS OF DARWINISM . - ‘ . 48
Tue Exciusion or Design In NATURE THE Forwarive Ipra
or Darwin’s THEORY . ‘ , 49
Proor or Darwin’s DENIAL OF ‘Temouoer: FROM HIS OWN
WRITINGS 4 Z i . - 58

PROOF FROM THE Pendeinina OF HIS Temaee BY ITS AVOWED
ADVOCATES.

Mr. Russell Wallace , i : ‘ ‘ 64
- Professor Huxley - és “ ‘ : . a: 2
Dr. Biichner . i : : F 7 ‘ ‘ 84
Carl Vogt . F ‘ ‘ F < : 3 . » 85
Prof. Haeckel . ? 2 ; ‘ ¥ . A ‘ 87
Strauss ‘ 5 147

PRoor FROM THE Guswenrcue 7 URGED BY THE Geeoriinrs OF
Mr. Darwin’s THEORY.

Duke of Argyll : . - ‘ : a z : 96
Agassiz = ‘ $ . ‘ 7 ‘ Z - . 101l>
Professor Janet ‘ . ; . é F F i 105
M. Flourens z " re 3 : c 4 : . 108
Rev. Walter Mitchell a ‘i ° * ‘ % , 111
Principal Dawson . . ‘ ae.” Hy F ‘i » hy

RELATION OF DARWINISM TO RELIGION P . , ‘ 125

iv CONTENTS.

CAUSES OF THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN SCIENCE AND Re-
LIGION . : , , ‘i 2 : ‘ F b

Tue Evo.LutTion THEORY CONTRARY TO Facts AND TO Scrip-
TURE . . . . . . . . . . .

Sir Witit1am THomson on TELEOLOGY . F . ‘i

Dr. Asa Gray * ‘ i ‘

DARWINI8M TANTAMOUNT TO ATHEISM . < * ‘ ‘

126

141
165
174
177

WHAT IS DARWINISM?

THis is a question which needs an answer.
Great confusion and diversity of opinion pre-
vail as to the real views of the man whose
writings have agitated the whole world, sci-
entific and religious. If a man says he is a
Darwinian, many understand him to avow him-
self virtually an atheist; while another under-
stands him as saying that he adopts some harm-
less form of the doctrine of evolution. This is
a great evil.

It is obviously useless to discuss: any theory
until we are agreed as to what that theory is.
The question, therefore, What is Darwinism ?
must take precedence of all discussion of its
merits.

The great fact of experience is that the uni-
verse exists. The great problem which ha:
ever pressed upon the human mind is to ac-
count for its existence. What was its origin?

To what causes are the changes we witness
1

2 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

around us to be referred? As we are a part of
the universe, these questions concern ourselves.
What are the origin, nature, and destiny of
man? Professor Huxley is right in saying,
“The question of questions for mankind — the
problem which underlies all others, and is
more interesting than any other —is the as-
certainment of the place which Man occupies
in nature and of his relation to the universe of
things. Whence our race has come, what are
the limits of our power over nature, and of
nature’s power over us, to what goal are we
tending, are the problems which present them-
selves anew and with undiminished interest to
every man born into the world.”’? Mr. Darwin
undertakes to answer these questions. He
proposes a solution of the problem which thus
deeply concerns every living man. Darwinism
is, therefore, a theory of the universe, at least
so far as the living organisms on this earth
are concerned. This being the case, it may be
well to state, in few words, the other prevalent
theories on this great subject, that the points
of agreement and of difference between them
and the views of Mr. Darwin may be the more
clearly seen.

1 Evidences of Man’s Place in Nature. London, 1864, p. 57.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 3

The Scriptural Solution of the Problem of the
Universe.

That solution is stated in words equally sim-
ple and sublime: “In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth.” We have
here, first, the idea of God. The word God
has in the Bible a definite meaning. It does
not stand for an abstraction, for mere force, for
law or ordered sequence. God is a spirit, and
as we are spirits, we know from consciousness
that God is, (1.) A Substance; (2.) That He
is a person; and, therefore, a self-conscious,
intelligent, voluntary agent. He can say I;
we can address Him as Thou ; we can speak of
Him as He or Him. This idea of God per-
vades the Scriptures. It les at the foundation
of natural religion. It is involved in our relig-
ious consciousness. It enters essentially into
our sense of moral obligation. It is inscribed
ineffaceably, in letters more or less legible, on
the heart of every human being. The man
who is trying to be an atheist is trying to free
himself from the laws of his being. He might
as well try to free himself from liability to
hunger or thirst.

The God of the Bible, then, is a Spirit, infi-

4 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

nite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being,
wisdom, power, holiness, goodness, and truth.
As every theory must begin with some pos-
tulate, this is the grand postulate with which
the Bible begins. This is the first point.

The second point concerns the origin of the
universe. It is not eternal either as to mat-
ter or form. It is not independent of God.
It is not an evolution of his being, or his ex-
istence form. He is extramundane as well as
antemundane. The universe owes its exist-
ence to his will.

Thirdly, as to the nature of the universe ;
it is not a mere phenomenon. It is an entity,
having real objective existence, or actuality.
This implies that matter is a substance en-
dowed with certain properties, in virtue of
which it is capable of acting and of being
acted upon. These properties being uniform
and constant, are physical laws to which, as
their proximate causes, all the phenomena of
nature are to be referred.

Fourthly, although God is extramundane,
He is nevertheless everywhere present. That
presence is not only a presence of essence,
but also of knowledge and power. He up-
holds all things. He controls all physical

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 5

causes, working through them, with them, and
without them, as He sees fit. As we, in our
limited spheres, can use physical causes to ac-
complish our purposes, so God everywhere
and always codperates with them to accom-
plish his infinitely wise and merciful designs.

Fifthly, man a part of the universe, is, ac-
cording to the Scriptures, as concerns his body,
of the earth. So far, he belongs to the ani-
mal kingdom. As to his soul, he is a child of
God, who is declared to be the Father of the
spirits of all men. God is a spirit, and we are
spirits. We are, therefore, of the same nature
with God. We are God-like ; so that in know-
ing ourselves we know God. No man con-
scious of his manhood can be ignorant of his
relationship to God as his Father.

The truth of this theory of the universe
rests, in the first place, so far as it has been
correctly stated, on the infallible authority of
the Word of God. In the second place, it is
a satisfactory solution of the problem to be
solved, — (1.) It accounts for the origin of the
universe. (2.) It accounts for all the universe
contains, and gives a satisfactory explanation
of the marvellous contrivances which abound in
living organisms, of the adaptations of these or-

6 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

ganisms to conditions external to themselves,
and for those provisions for the future, which
on any other assumption are utterly inexplica-
ble. (3.) It is in conflict with no truth of reason
and with no fact of experience.’ (4.) The Scrip-
tural doctrine accounts for the spiritual nature
of man, and meets all his spiritual necessities.
It gives him an object of adoration, love, and
confidence. It reveals the Being on whom his

1 The two facts which are commonly urged as inconsistent
with Theism, are the existence of misery in the world, and the
occurrence of undeveloped or useless organs, as teeth in the jaws
of the whale and mammez on the breast of aman. As to the
former objection, sin, which is the only real evil, is accounted
for by the voluntary apostasy of man; and as to undeveloped or-
gans they are regarded as evidences of the great plan of struc-
ture which can be traced in the different orders of animals.
These unused organs were —says Professor Joseph Le Conte, in
his interesting volume on Religion and Science, New York,
1874, p. 54 — regarded as blunders in nature, until it was
discovered that use is not the only end of design. ‘By fur-
ther patient study of nature,” he says, ‘‘ came the recognition of
another law beside use, — a law of order underlying and condi-
tioning the law of use. Organisms are, indeed, contrived for
use, but according to a preordained plan of structure, which
must not be violated.” It is of littke moment whether this ex-
planation be considered satisfactory or not. It would certainly
be irrational to refuse to believe that the eye was made for the
purpose of vision, because we cannot tell why a man has mam-
me. A man might as well refuse to admit that there is any
meaning in all the writings of Plato, because there is a sentence
in them which he cannot understand.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 7

indestructible sense of responsibility terminates.
The truth of this doctrine, therefore, rests not
only on the authority of the Scriptures, but on
the very constitution of our nature. The Bi-
ble has little charity for those who reject it.
It pronounces them to be either derationalized
or demoralized, or both.

The Pantheistic Theory.

This has been one of the most widely dif-
fused and persistent forms of human thought
on this whole subject. It has been for thou-
sands of years not only the philosophy, but the
religion of India, and, to a great extent, of
China. It underlies all the forms of Greek
philosophy. It crept into the Church, con-
cealed under the disguise of Scriptural termi-
nology, in the form of Neo-Platonism. It was
constantly reappearing during the Middle Ages,
sometimes in a philosophical, and sometimes a
mystical form. It was revived by Spinoza in
the seventeenth century, and subsequently be-
came dominant in the philosophy and literature
of Europe. It is coming up again. Some dis-
tinguished naturalists are swinging round from
one pole to the opposite; from saying there is
no God, to teaching that everything is God.

8 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Sometimes, one and the same book in one
half teaches materialism, in the other half
idealism: the one affirming that everything is
matter, the other that matter is nothing, but
that everything is mind, and mind is God.

The leading principles of the Pantheistic the-
ory are, —(1.) That there is an Infinite and
Absolute Being. Of this Being nothing can
be affirmed but actuality. It is denied that it
is conscious, intelligent, or voluntary. (2.) It
is subject to the blind necessity of self-evolu-
tion or development. (3.) This development
being necessary is constant; from everlasting
to everlasting. According to the Braminical
doctrine, indeed, there are successive cycles of
activity and repose, each cycle being measured
by countless milliards of centuries. According
to the moderns, self-evolution being necessary,
there can be no repose, so that Ohne Welt kein
Gott. (4.) The Finite is, therefore, the exist-
ence form of the Infinite; all that is in the
latter for the time being is in the former.
All that is possible is actual. (5.) The Finite
is the Infinite, or, to use theistic language, the
World is God, in the sense that all the world
is and contains is the form in which God, at
each successive moment, exists. There is no

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 9

power, save only the power manifested in the
world ; no consciousness, intelligence, or volun-
tary activity, but in finite things, and the ag-
gregate of these is the power, consciousness,
intelligence, and activity of God. What we
call sin is as much a form of God’s activity as
what we call virtue. In other words, there is
no such thing as free agency in man, no such
thing as sin or responsibility. When a man
dies he sinks into the abyss of being as a drop
of water is lost m the ocean. (6.) Man is the
highest form of God’s existence. God is incar-
nate in the human race. Strauss says, that
what the Church teaches of Christ is not true
of any individual man, but is true of mankind.
Or, as Feuerbach more concisely expresses it,
“ Man alone is our God.” The blasphemy of
some of the German philosophers on this sub-
ject is simply unutterable. In India we see
the practical operation of this system when it
takes hold on the people. There the personi-
fication of the Infinite as evil (the Goddess
Kala) is the most popular object of worship.

10 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Epicurean Theory.

Epicurus assumed the existence of matter,
force and motion, — Stoff und Kraft. He held
that all space was filled with molecules of mat-
ter in a state of rapid motion in every direc-
tion. These molecules were subject to gravity
and endowed with properties or forces. One
combination of molecules gave rise to unorgan-
ized matter, another to life, another to mind ;
and from the various combinations, guided by
unintelligent physical laws, all the wonderful
organisms of plants and animals have arisen.
To these combinations also all the phenomena
of life, instinct, and intelligence in the world
are to be referred. This theory has been
adopted in our day by a large class of scien-
tific men, especially in Germany. The mod-
ern advocates of the theory are immeasurably
superior to the ancient Epicureans in their
knowledge of astronomy, botany, zodlogy, and
biology ; but in their theory of the universe,
and in their mode of accounting for all the
phenomena of life and intelligence, they are
precisely on the same level. They have not
added an idea to the system, which has ever
been regarded as the opprobrium of human

WHAT IS DARWINISM ? 11

thought. Biichner, Moleschott, Vogt, hold that
matter is eternal and indestructible ; that mat-
ter and force are inseparable: the one cannot
exist without the other. What, it is asked, is
motion without something moving? What is
electricity without an electrified body? What
is attraction without molecules attracting each
other? What is contractibility without muscu-
lar fibre, or secretion without a secreting gland ?
One combination of molecules exhibits the phe-
nomena of life, another combination exhibits
the phenomena of mind. All this was taught
by the old heathen philosopher more than two
thousand years ago. That this system denies
the existence of God, of mind as a thinking
substance distinct from matter, and of the pos-
sibility of the conscious existence of man after
death, are not inferences drawn by opponents,
but conclusions openly avowed by its advocates.

Herbert Spencer’s New Philosophy.

Mr. Darwin calls Spencer our “ great phi-
losopher.” His is the speculating mind of the
new school of science. This gives to his opin-
ions special interest, although no one but him-
self is to be held responsible for his peculiar
views, except so far as others see fit to avow

12 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

them. Mr. Spencer postulates neither mind
nor matter. He begins with Force. Force,
however, is itself perfectly inscrutable. All we
know about it is, that it is, that it is inde-
structible, and that it is persistent.

As to the origin of the universe, he says
there are three possible suppositions: Ist.
That it is self-existent. 2d. That it is self-
created. 3d. That it is created by an exter-
nal agency.’ All these he examines and re-
jects. The first is equivalent to Atheism, by
which Spencer understands the doctrine which
makes Space, Matter, and Force eternal and the
causes of allphenomena. This, he says, assumes
the idea of self-existence, which is unthinkable.
The second theory he makes equivalent to
Pantheism. “The precipitation of vapor,”
he says, “into cloud, aids us in forming a sym-
bolic conception of a self-evolved universe ;”
but, he adds, “really to conceive self-creation,
is to conceive potential existence passing into
actual existence by some inherent necessity,
which we cannot do.” (p. 32). The Theistic
theory, he says, is equally untenable. “ Who-
ever agrees that the atheistic hypothesis is

1 First Principles of a New System of Philosophy. By Herbert
Spencer. Second edition. New York, 1869, p. 30.

WHAT 18 DARWINISM? 13

untenable because it involves the impossible
idea of self-existence, must perforce admit that
the theistic hypothesis is untenable if it con-
tains the same impossible idea.” (p.38). The
origin of the universe is, therefore, a fact
which cannot be explained. It must have had
a cause; and all we know is that its cause is
unknowable and inscrutable.

When we turn to nature the result is the
same. Hverything is inscrutable. All we
know is that there are certain appearances,
and that where there is appearance there must
be something that appears. But what that
something is, what is the noumenon which
underlies the phenomenon, it is impossible for
us to know. In nature we find two orders of
phenomena, or appearances; the one objective
or external, the other subjective in our con-
sciousness. There are an Ego and a non-
Ego, a subject and object. These are not
identical. “It is,” he says, “rigorously im-
possible to conceive that our knowledge is a
knowledge of appearances only, without at the
same time conceiving a reality of which they
are appearances, for appearance without real-
ity is unthinkable.” (p.88). So far we can go.
There is a reality which is the cause of phe-

14 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

nomena. Further than that, in that direction,
our ignorance is profound. He proves that
space cannot be an entity, an attribute, or
a category of thought, or a nonentity. The
same is true of time, of motion, of matter, of
electricity, light, magnetism, etc., etc. They
all resolve themselves into appearances pro-
duced by an unknown cause.

As the question, What is matter? is a crucial
one, he dwells upon it in various parts of his
writings. Newton’s theory of ultimate atoms ;
Leibnitz’s doctrine of monads; and the dynam-
ic theory of Boscovich, which makes matter
mere centres of force, are all dismissed as un-
thinkable. It is not very clear in what sense
that word is to be taken. Sometimes it seems
to mean, meaningless; at others, self-contra-
dictory or absurd ; at others, inconceivable, 7. e.
that of which no conception or mental image
can be formed; at any rate, it implies what
is unknowable and untenable. The result is,
so far as matter is concerned, that we know
nothing about it. “ Our conception of matter,”
he says, “reduced to its simplest shape, is
that of coexistent positions that offer resist-
ance, as contrasted with our conception of
space in which the coexistent positions offer

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 15

no resistance.” (p. 166). Resistance, however,
is a form of force; and, therefore, on the fol-
lowing page, Spencer says, “that forces stand-
ing in certain correlations, form the whole con-
tents of our idea of matter.”

When we turn from the objective to the
subjective, from the external to the inward
world, the result is still the same. He agrees
with Hume in saying that the contents of our
consciousness is a series of impressions and
ideas. He dissents, however, from that phi-
losopher, in saying that that series is all we
know. He admits that impressions necessa-
rily imply that there is something that is im-
pressed. He starts the question, What is it that
thinks? and answers, We do not know. (p. 63).
He admits that the reality of individual per-
sonal minds, the conviction of personal exist-
ence is universal, and perhaps indestructible.
Nevertheless that conviction cannot justify it-
self at the bar of reason ; nay, reason is found
to reject it. (p. 65). Dean Mansel says, that
consciousness gives us a knowledge of self as
a substance and not merely of its varying
states. This, however, he says, “is absolutely
negatived by the laws of thought. The fun-
damental condition to all consciousness, em-

16 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

phatically insisted upon by Mr. Mansel in
common with Sir William Hamilton and others,
is the antithesis of subject and object.....
What is the corollary from this doctrine, as
bearing on the consciousness of self? The
mental act in which self is known implies, like
every other mental act, a perceiving subject
and a perceived object. If, then, the object
perceived is self, what is the subject that per-
ceives? Or if it is the true self which thinks,
what other self can it be that is thought of?
Clearly, a true cognition of self implies a state
in which the knowing and the known are one
—in which subject and object are identified ;
and this Mr. Mansel rightly holds to be the an-
nihilation of both. So that the personality of
which each is conscious, and of which the exist-
ence is to each a fact beyond all others the most
certain, is yet a thing which cannot be known
at all; knowledge of it is forbidden by the very
nature of human thought.” (pp. 65, 66).

Mr. Spencer does not seem to expect that
any man will be shaken in his conviction by
any such argument as that. When a man is
conscious of pain, he is not to be puzzled by
telling him that the pain is one thing (the ob-
ject perceived) and the self another thing (the

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 17

perceiving subject). He knows that the pain
is a state of the self of which he is conscious.
Consciousness is a form of knowledge; but
knowledge of necessity supposes an intelligent
reality which knows. A philosophy which can-
not be received until men cease to believe in
their own existence, must be in extremis.

Mr. Spencer’s conclusion is, that the uni-
verse — nature, or the external world with
all its marvels and perpetual changes, — the
world of consciousness with its ever varying
states, are impressions or phenomena, due to
an inscrutable, persistent force.

As to the nature of this primal force or
power, he quotes abundantly and approvingly
from Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel, to
prove that it is unknowable, inconceivable,
unthinkable. He, however, differs from those
distinguished writers in two points. While
admitting that we know no more of the first
cause than we do of a geometrical figure which
is at once a circle and a square, yet we do
know that it is actual. For this conviction we
are not dependent on faith. In the second
place, Hamilton and Mansel taught that we
know that the Infinite cannot be a person,

self-conscious, intelligent, and voluntary; yet
2

18 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

we are forced by our moral constitution to be-
lieve it to be an intelligent person. This Mr.
Spencer denies. “Let those,” he says, “ who
can, believe that there is eternal war between
our intellectual faculties and our moral obli-
gations. I, for one, admit of no such radical
vice in the constitution of things.” (p. 108).
Religion has always erred, he asserts, in that
while it teaches that the Infinite Being can-
not be known, it insists on ascribing to it such
and such attributes, which of course assumes
that so far forth it is known. We have no
right, he contends, to ascribe personality to the
“Unknown Reality,” or anything else, except
that it is the cause of all that we perceive or
experience. There may be a mode of being,
as much transcending intelligence and will, as
these transcend mechanical motion. To show
the folly of referring to the Unknown the at-
tributes of our own spirits, he makes “ the gro-
tesque supposition that the tickings and other
movements of a watch constituted a kind of
consciousness ; and that a watch possessed of
such a consciousness, insisted on regarding the
watchmaker’s actions as determined like ‘its
own by springs and escapements.” (p. 111).
The vast majority of men, instead of agreeing

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 19

with Mr. Spencer in this matter, will doubtless
heartily, each for himself, joi the German
philosopher Jacobi, in saying, “I confess to
Anthropomorphism inseparable from the con-
viction that man bears the image of God; and
maintain that besides this Anthropomorphism,
which has always been called Theism, is noth-
ing but Atheism or Fetichism.” ?

My. Spencer, therefore, in accounting for the
origin of the universe and all its phenomena,
physical, vital, and mental, rejects Theism, or
the doctrine of a personal God, who is extra-
mundane as well as antemundane, the creator
end governor of all things; he rejects Panthe-
ism, which makes the finite the existence-form
of the Infinite; he rejects Atheism, which he
understands to be the doctrine of the eternity
and self-existence of matter and force. He
contents himself with saying we must acknowl-
edge the reality of an unknown something
which is the cause of all things, — the noume-
non of all phenomena. “If science and religion
are to be reconciled, the basis of the reconcilia-
tion must be this deepest, widest, and most cer-
tain of all facts, —that the Power which the

1 Von den gittlichen Dingen, Werke, III. pp. 422, 425. Leipzig,
1816.

20 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

universe manifests is utterly inscrutable.” (p.
46). “The ultimate of ultimates is Force.”
“Matter and motion, as we know them, are
differently conditioned manifestations of force.”
“Tf, to use an algebraic illustration, we repre-
sent Matter, Motion, and Force, by the symbols
x, y,%; then we may ascertain the values of x
and y in terms of z, but the value of z can
never be found; z is the unknown quantity,
which must forever remain unknown, for the
obvious reason that there is nothing in which
its value can be expressed.” (pp. 169,170).
We have, then, no God but Force. Atheist is
everywhere regarded as a term of reproach.
Every man instinctively recoils from it. Even
the philosophers of the time of the French
Revolution repudiated the charge of atheism,
because they believed in motion; and motion
being inscrutable, they believed in an inscrutable
something, 7. e. in Force. We doubt not Mr.
Spencer would indignantly reject the imputation
of atheism ; nevertheless, in the judgment of
most men, the difference between Antitheist
and Atheist is a mere matter of orthography.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 21

Hylozoic Theory.

This theory assumes the universe to be eter-
nal. There is nothing extra, or antemundane.
There is but one substance, and that, substance
is matter. Matter, however, has an active
and passive principle. Life and rationality are
among its attributes or functions. The uni-
verse, therefore, is a living whole pervaded by
a principle not only of life but of intelligence.
This hylozoic doctrine, some modern scientific
men, as Professor Tyndall, seem inclined to
adopt. They tell us that matter is not the
dead and degraded thing it is commonly re-
garded. It is active and transcendental. What
that means, we do not know. The word trans-
cendental is like a parabola, in that there is no
knowing where its meaning ends. To say that
matter is transcendental, is saying there is no
telling what it is up to. This habit of using
words which have no definite meaning is very
convenient to writers, but very much the re-
verse for readers. Some of the ancient Stoics
distinguished between the active and passive
principles in the world, calling the one mind,
the other, matter. These however were as
intimately united as matter and life in a plant
or animal.

22 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Theism in Unscriptural Forms.

There are men who are constrained to admit
the being of God, who depart from the Scriptural
doctrine as to his relation to the world. Ac-
cording to some, God created matter and en-
dowed it with certain properties, and then left
it to itself to work out, without any interfer-
ence or control on his part, all possible results.
According to others, He created not only matter,
but life, or living germs, one or more, from
which without any divine intervention all living
organisms have been developed. Others, again,
refer not only matter and life, but mind also to
the act of the Creator; but with creation his
agency ceases. He has no more to do with the
world, than a ship-builder has with the ship he
has constructed, when it is launched and far off
upon the ocean. According to all these views
a creator isa mere Deus ex machina, an assump-
tion to account for the origin of the universe.

Another general view of God’s relation to the
world goes to the opposite extreme. Instead
of God doing nothing, He does everything.
Second causes have no efficiency. The laws of
nature are said to be the uniform modes of
divine operation. Gravitation does not flow from

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 23

the nature of matter, but is a mode of God’s
uniform efficiency. What are called chemical
affinities are not due to anything in different
kinds of matter, but God always acts in one way
in connection with an acid, and in another way
in connection with an alkali. If a man places a
particle of salt or sugar on his tongue, the sen-
sation which he experiences is not to be re-
ferred to the salt or sugar, but to God’s agency.
When this theory is extended, as it generally
is by its advocates, from the external to the in-
ternal world, the universe of matter and mind,
with all their phenomena, is a constant effect of
the omnipresent activity of God. The minds of
some men, as remarked above, are so consti-
tuted that they can pass from the theory that
God does nothing, to the doctrine that He does
everything, without seeing the difference. Mr.
Russel Wallace, the companion and peer of Mr.
Darwin, devotes a large part of his book on
“ Natural Selection,” to prove that the organs
of plants and animals are formed by blind physi-
cal causes. Toward the close of the volume he
teaches that there are no such causes. He asks
the question, What is Matter? and answers,
Nothing. We know, he says, nothing but force ;
and as the only force of which we have any

24 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

immediate knowledge is mind-force, the infer-
ence is “ that the whole universe is not merely
dependent on, but actually is, the will of higher
intelligences, or of one Supreme Intelligence.” *
This is a transition from virtual materialism to
idealistic pantheism. The effect of this admis-
sion on the part of Mr. Wallace on the theory of
natural selection, is what an explosion of its
boiler would be to a steamer in mid-ocean,
which should blow out its deck, sides, and bot-
tom. Nothing would remain above water.

The Duke of Argyll seems at times inclined
to lapse into the same doctrine. “Science,” he
says, “in the modern doctrine of conservation
of energy and the convertibility of forces, is
already getting a firm hold of the idea, that all
kinds of force are but forms of manifestations
of one central force issuing from some one
fountain-head of power. Sir John Herschel
has not hesitated to say, ‘ that it is but reason-
able to regard the force of gravitation as the
direct or indirect result of a consciousness or
will existing somewhere.’ And even if we can-
not certainly identify force in all its forms with
the direct energies of the one Omnipresent and

1 The Theory of Natural Selection. By Alfred Russel Wal-
lace. London, 1870, p. 368.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 25

All-pervading Will, it is at least in the highest
degree unphilosophical to assert the contrary, —
to think or to speak, as if the forces of nature
were either independent of, or even separate
from the Creator’s power.” ? The Duke, how-
ever, in the general tenor of his book, does not
differ from the common doctrine, except in one
point. He does not deny the efficiency of
physical causes, or resolve them all into the
efficiency of God; but he teaches that God, in
this world at least, never acts except through
those causes. He applies this doctrine even to
miracles, which he regards as effects produced
by second causes of which we are ignorant,
that is, by some higher law of nature. The
Scriptures, however, teach that God is not
thus bound; that He operates through second
causes, with them, or without them, as He sees
fit. It is a purely arbitrary assumption, that
when Christ raised the dead, healed the lepers,
or gave sight to the blind, any second cause
intervened between the effect and the effi-
ciency of his will. What physical law, or uni-
formly acting force, operated to make the axe
float at the command of the prophet? or, in

1 Reign of Law. By the Duke of Argyle. Fifth edition, Lon-
don, 1867, p. 123.

26 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

that greatest of all miracles, the original crea-
tion of the world.

Mr. Darwin's Theory.

We have not forgotten Mr. Darwin. It
seemed desirable, in order to understand his
theory, to see its relation to other theories of
the universe and its phenomena, with which it
is more or less connected. His work on the
“ Origin of Species” does not purport to be
philosophical. In this aspect it is very differ-
ent from the cognate works of Mr. Spencer.
Darwin does not speculate on the origin of the
universe, on the nature of matter, or of force.
He is simply a naturalist, a careful and labo-
rious observer ; skillful in his descriptions, and
singularly candid in dealing with the difficul-
ties in the way of his peculiar doctrine. He
set before himself a single problem, namely,
How are the fauna and flora of our earth to be
accounted for? In the solution of this prob-
lem, he assumes : —

1. The existence of matter, although he
says little on the subject. Its existence how-
ever, as a real entity, is everywhere taken for
granted.

2. He assumes the efficiency of physical

WHAT IS DARWINISM? oT

causes, showing no disposition to resolve them
into mind-force, or into the efficiency of the
First Cause.

3. He assumes also the existence of life in
the form of one or more primordial germs. He
does not adopt the theory of spontaneous gen-
eration. What life is he does not attempt to
explain, further than to quote (p. 326), with
approbation, the definition of Herbert Spen-
cer, who says, “Life depends on, or consists
in, the incessant action and reaction of vari-
ous forces,’’ — which conveys no very definite
idea.

4. To account for the existence of matter
and life, Mr. Darwin admits a Creator. This
is done explicitly and repeatedly. Nothing,
however, is said of the nature of the Creator
and of his relation to the world, further than is
implied in the meaning of the word.

5. From the primordial germ or germs (Mr.
Darwin seems to have settled down to the
assumption of only one primordial germ), all
living organisms, vegetable and animal, includ-
ing man, on our globe, through all the stages
of its history, have descended.

6. As growth, organization, and reproduction
are the functions of physical life, as soon as

28 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

the primordial germ began to live, it began to
grow, to fashion organs however simple, for its
nourishment and increase, and for the repro-
duction, in some way, of living forms like it-
self. How all living things on earth, including
the endless variety of plants, and all the diver-
sity of animals — insects, fishes, birds, the
ichthyosaurus, the mastodon, the mammoth,
and man— have descended from the primor-
dial animalcule, he thinks, may be accounted
for by the operation of the following natural
laws, viz. : —

First, the law of Heredity, or that by which
like begets like. The offspring are like the
parent.

Second, the law of Variation, that is, while
the offspring are, in all essential characteristics,
like their immediate progenitor, they never-
theless vary more or less within narrow limits,
from their parent and from each other. Some
of these variations are indifferent, some dete-
riorations, some improvements, that is, they are
such as enable the plant or animal to exercise
its functions to greater advantage.

Third, the law of Over Production. All
plants and animals tend to increase in a geo-
metrical ratio; and therefore tend to overrun

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 29

enormously the means of support. If all the
seeds of a plant, all the spawn of a fish, were
to arrive at maturity, in a very short time the
world could not contain them. Hence of ne-
cessity arises a struggle for life. Only a few
of the myriads born can possibly live.

Fourth, here comes in the law of Natural
Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. That
is, if any individual of a given species of plant
or animal happens to have a slight deviation
from the normal type, favorable to its success in
the struggle for life, it will survive. This vari-
ation, by the law of heredity, will be trans-
mitted to its offspring, and by them again to
theirs. Soon these fuvored ones gain the
ascendency, and the less favored perish; and
the modification becomes established in the
species. After a time another and another of
such favorable variations occur, with like re-
sults. Thus very gradually, great changes of
structure are introduced, and not only species,
but genera, families, and orders in the vegeta-
ble and animal world, are produced. Mr. Dar-
win says he can set no limit to the changes of
structure, habits, instincts, and intelligence,
which these simple laws in the course of mil-
lions or milliards of centuries may bring into

30 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

existence. He says, “‘ we cannot comprehend
what the figures 60,000,000 really imply,
and during this, or perhaps a longer roll of
years, the land and waters have everywhere
teemed with living creatures, all exposed to the
struggle for life, and undergoing change.”
(p. 3854). “ Mr. Croll,” he tells us, “ estimates
that about sixty millions of years have elapsed
since the Cambrian period, but this, judging
from the small amount of organic change since
the commencement of the glacial period, seems
a very short time for the many and the great
mutations of life, which have certainly oc-
curred since the Cambrian formation ; and the
previous one hundred and forty million years
can hardly be considered as sufficient for the
development of the varied forms of life which
certainly existed toward the close of the Cam-
brian period.” (p. 379). Years in this con-
nection have no meaning. We might as well
try to give the distance of the fixed stars in
inches. As astronomers are obliged to take
the diameter of the earth’s orbit as the unit of
space, so Darwinians are obliged to take a
geological cycle as their unit of duration.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 31

Natural Selection.

As Natural Selection which works so slowly
is a main element in Mr. Darwin’s theory, it is
necessary to understand distinctly what he
means by it. On this point he leaves us no
room for doubt. On p. 92, he says: “ This
preservation of favorable variations, and the
destruction of injurious variations, I call Natu-
ral Selection, or,,the Survival of the Fittest.”
“Owing to the struggle (for life) variations,
however slight and from whatever cause pro-
ceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to
the individuals of a species, in their infinitely
complex relations to other organic beings and
to their physical conditions of life, will tend to
the preservation of such individuals, and will
generally be inherited by their offsprmg. The
offspring also will thus have a better chance of
surviving, for, of the many individuals of any
species which are periodically born, but a small
number can survive. I have called this prin-
ciple, by which each slight variation, if useful,
is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in
order to mark its relation to man’s power of
selection. But the expression often used by
Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fit-

32 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

test, is more accurate, and sometimes is equal-
ly convenient.” (p.72). “Slow though the
progress of selection may be, if feeble man can
do so much by artificial selection, I can see no
limit to the amount of change, to the beauty
and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations
between all organic beings, one with another,
and with their physical conditions of life, which
may be effected in the long course of time by
nature’s power of selection, or the survival of
the fittest.” (p.125). “It may be objected that
if organic beings thus tend to rise in the scale,
how is it that throughout the world a multi-
tude of the lowest forms still exist; and how
is it that in each great class some forms are

On our theory the continuous existence of
lowly forms offers no difficulty; for natural
selection, or the survival of the fittest, does not
necessarily include progressive development,
it only takes advantage of such variations as
arise and are beneficial to each creature under
its complex relations of life..... Geology
tells us that some of the lowest forms, the in-
fusoria and rhizopods, have remained for an
enormous period in nearly their present state.”
(p. 145). “The fact of little or no modifiea-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 33

tion having been effected since the glacial pe-
riod would be of some avail against those who
believe in an innate and necessary law of de-
velopment, but is powerless against the doc-
trine of natural selection, or the survival of
the fittest, which implies only that variations
or individual differences of a favorable nature
occasionally arise in a few species and are then
preserved.” (p. 149)

This process of improvement under the law
of natural selection includes not only chances
in the organic structure of animals, but also in
their instincts and intelligence. On entering
on this part of his subject, Mr. Darwin says, “ I
would premise that I have nothing to do with
the origin of the primary mental powers, any
more than I have with that of life itself. We
are concerned only with the diversities of in-
stinct and of other mental qualities within the
same class.” (p.255) He shows that even in
a state of nature the instincts of animals of the
same species do in some degree vary, and that
they are transmitted by inheritance. A mas-
tiff has imparted courage to a greyhound, and
a greyhound has transmitted to a shepherd-dog
a disposition to hunt hares. Among sporting

dogs, the young of the pointer or .retriever
3

34 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

have been known to point or to retrieve with-
out instruction. “If,” he says, “it can be
shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then
I can see no difficulty in natural selection pre-
serving and continually accumulating varia-
tions of instinct to any extent that was profita-
ble. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most
complex and wonderful instincts have arisen.”
(p. 257) He was rather unguarded in saying
that he saw no difficulty in accounting for the
most wonderful instincts of animals. He ad-
mits that he has found very great difficulty.
He selects three cases which he found it spe-
cially hard to deal with: that of the cuckoo,
that of the cell-building bee, and of the slave-
making ant. He devotes much space and
labor in endeavoring to show how the instinct
of the bee, for example, in the construction of
its cell, might have been gradually acquired.
It is clear, however, that he was not able fully
to satisfy even his own mind; for he admits
that “it will be thought that I have an over-
weening confidence in the principle of natural
selection, when I do not admit that such won-
derful and well established facts do not anni-
hilate the theory.’ (p.290) This remark
was made with special reference to the instincts

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 85

of the ant, which he finds very hard to account
for. He adds, “ No doubt many instincts of
very difficult explanation could be opposed to
the theory of natural selection: cases in which
we cannot see how an instinct could possibly
have originated; cases in which no interme-
diate gradations are known to exist; cases of
instinct of such trifling importance that they
could hardly have been acted upon by natural
selection ; cases of instincts almost identically
the same in animals so remote in the scale
of nature, that we cannot account for their
similarity by inheritance from a common pro-
genitor, and consequently cannot believe that
they were independently acquired through nat-
ural selection. Iwill not here enter on those
cases, but will confine myself to one special
difficulty which at first appeared to me insu-
perable, and actually fatal to the whole theory.
I allude to neuters, or sterile females in insect
communities; for these neuters often differ
widely in instinct and structure from both the
males and the fertile females, and yet, from
being sterile, they cannot propagate their
kind.” (p.289) He is candid enough to say,
in conclusion, “‘I do not pretend that the facts
given in this chapter (on instinct) strengthen

36 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

in any great degree my theory; but none of
the cases of difficulty, to the best of my judg-
ment, annihilate it.” (p.297) When it is re-
membered that his theory is, that slight varia-
tions occurring in an individual advantageous
to it (not to its associates), in the struggle for
life, is perpetuated by inheritance, it is no
wonder that the case of sterile ants gave him
so much trouble. Accidental sterility is not
favorable to the individual, and its being made
permanent by inheritance, is out of the ques-
tion, for the sterile have no descendants. Yet
these sterile females are not degenerations,
they are in general larger and more robust
than their associates.

We have thus seen that, according to Mr.
Darwin, all the infinite variety of structure in
plants and animals is due to the law of natural
selection. ‘On the principle of natural selec-
tion with divergence of character,” he says,
“it does not seem incredible that, from some
such low and intermediate form, both animals
and plants have been developed, and if we
admit this, we must likewise admit that all the
organized beings which have ever lived on this
earth may be descended from some one pri-
mordial form.” (p.573) We have seen also

WHAT IS DARWINISM? aT

that he does not confine his theory to organic
structure, but applies it to all the instincts and
all the forms of intelligence manifested by irra-
tional creatures. Nor does he stop there; he
includes man within the sweep of the same
law. “In the distant future I see open fields
for far more important researches. Psychol-
ogy will be based on a new foundation, that
of the necessary acquirement of each mental
power and capacity by gradation. Light will
be thrown on the origin of man and his his-
tory.” (p. 577)

The “distant future” was near at hand. In
his introduction to his work on the “ Descent
of Man,” he says, he had determined not to
publish on that subject, “as I thought that I
should thus only add to the prejudices against
my views. It seemed to me sufficient to indi-
cate, in the first edition of my ‘Origin of
Species, that ‘by this work ‘light would be
thrown on the origin of man and his history ;’
and this implies that man must be included
with other organic beings in any general con-
clusion respecting his manner of appearance on
this earth. Now the case wears a wholly dif-
ferent aspect. When a naturalist like Carl
Vogt (we shall see in what follows what kind

88 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

of a witness he is) ventures to say in his ad-
dress as President of the National Institution
of Geneva (1869), ‘Personne, en Europe au
moins, n’ose plus soutenir la création indépen-
dante et de toutes piéces, des espéces,’—it is
manifest that at least a large number of natu-
ralists must admit that species are the modified
descendants of other species; and this espe-
cially holds good of the younger and rising
naturalists... . . Of the older and honored
chiefs in natural science, many unfortunately
are still opposed to evolution in every form.”
Carl Vogt would not write thus. To him no
man is honored who does agree with him, and
any man who believes in God he execrates.

In 1871, Mr. Darwin ventured on the publica-
tion of his “ Descent of Man.” In that work, he
endeavors to show that the proximate progeni-
tor of man is the ape. He says “there is less
difference of structure between: the two, than
between the higher and lower forms of apes
themselves.” Not only so, but he attempts to
show that the mental faculties of man are
derived by slight variations, long continued,
from the measure of intellect possessed by
lower animals. He even says, that there is
less difference in intelligence between man and

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 39

the higher mammals, than there is between the
intelligence of the ant and that of the coccus,
insects of the same class.’

In like manner he teaches that man’s moral
nature has been evolved by slow degrees from
the social instincts common to many animals.
(pp. 68, 94) The moral element, thus de-
rived, he admits might lead to very different
lines of conduct. “If men,” he says, “were
reared under the same conditions as hives-bees,
there can hardly be a doubt, that our unmar-
ried females would, like the worker-bees, think
it a sacred duty to kill all their brothers, and
mothers would strive to kill their fertile daugh-
ters; and no one would think of interfering.
(vol. i. p. 70)

“‘ Lower animals, especially the dog, manifest
love, reverence, fidelity, and obedience; and
it is from these elements that the religious
sentiment in man has been slowly evolved by
a process of natural selection.” (vol. i. p. 65)

The grand conclusion is, “man (body, soul,
and spirit) is descended from a hairy quad-
ruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears,
probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhab-

1 Descent of Man, etc. By Charles Darwin, M. A., F. R. S..
ete. New York, 1871, vol. i. p. 179.

40 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

itant of the Old World.” (vol.ii. p.372) Mr.
Darwin adds: “‘ He who denounces these views
(as irreligious) is bound to explain why it is
more irreligious to explain the origin of man
as a distinct species by descent from some
lower form, through the laws of variation and
natural selection, than to explain the birth of
the individual through the laws of ordinary
reproduction.” (vol. i. p. 378)

The Sense in which Mr. Darwin uses the Word
“& Natural.”

We have not yet reached the heart of Mr.
Darwin’s theory. The main idea of his sys-
tem lies in the word “ natural.’’ He uses that
word in two senses: first, as antithetical to the
word artificial. Men can produce very marked
varieties as to structure and habits of animals.
This is exemplified in the production of the dif-
ferent breeds of horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs;
and specially, as Mr. Darwin seems to think,
in the case of pigeons. Of these, he says, “ The
diversity of breeds is something astonishing.”
Some have long, and some very short bills;
some have large feet, some small; some long
necks, others long wings and tails, while others
have singularly short tails; some have thirty,

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 41

and even forty, tail-feathers, instead of the
normal number of twelve or fourteen. They
differ as much in instinct as they do in form.
Some are carriers, some pouters, some tum-
blers, some trumpeters; and yet all are de-
scendants of the Rock Pigeon which is still
extant. If, then, he argues, man, in a com-
paratively short time, has by artificial selection
produced all these varieties, what might be
accomplished on the boundless scale of nature,
during the measureless ages of the geologic
periods.

Secondly, he uses the word natural as anti-
thetical to supernatural. Natural selection is
a selection made by natural laws, working with-
out intention and design. It is, therefore, op-
posed not only to artificial selection, which is
made by the wisdom and skill of man to accom-
plish a given purpose, but also to supernatural
selection, which means either a selection orig-
inally intended by a power higher than na-
ture ; or which is carried out by such power.
In using the expression Natural Selection, Mr.
Darwin intends to exclude design, or final
causes. All the changes in structure, instinct,
or intelligence, in the plants or animals, includ-
ing man, descended from the primordial germ,

42 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

or animalcule, have been brought about by un-
intelligent physical causes. On this point he
leaves us in no doubt. He defines nature to be
“the aggregate action and product of natural
laws ; and laws are the sequence of events as
ascertained by us.” It had been objected that
he often uses teleological language, speaking of
purpose, intention, contrivance, adaptation, etc.
In answer to this objection, he says: “It has
been said, that I speak of natural selection as
a power or deity ; but who objects to an author
speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling
the movements of the planet?” He admits that
in the literal sense of the words, natural selec-
tion is a false term ; but “ who ever objected to
chemists, speaking of the elective affinities of
various elements? and yet an acid cannot
strictly be said to elect the base with which it
in preference combines.” (p. 93) We have
here an affirmation and a negation. It is af-
firmed that natural selection is the operation
of natural laws, analogous to the action of grav-
itation and of chemical affinities. It is denied
that it is a process originally designed, or
guided by intelligence, such as the activity
which foresees an end and consciously selects
and controls the means of its accomplishment.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 43

Artificial selection, then, is an intelligent pro-
cess ; natural selection is not.

There are in the animal and vegetable
worlds innumerable instances of at least appar-
ent contrivance, which have excited the admi-
ration of men in allages. There are three ways
of accounting for them. The first is the Scrip-
tural doctrine, namely, that God is a Spirit, a
personal, self-conscious, intelligent agent; that
He is is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in
his being and perfections; that He is ever
present ; that this presence is a presence of
knowledge and power. In the external world
there is always and everywhere indisputable
evidence of the activity of two kinds of force :
the one physical, the other mental. The phys-
ical belongs to matter, and is due to the prop-
erties with which it has been endowed; the
other is the everywhere present and ever act-
ing mind of God. To the latter are to be re-
ferred all the manifestations of design in nat-
ure, and the ordering of events in Providence.
This doctrine does not ignore the efficiency of
second causes ; it simply asserts that God over-
rules and eanivele them. Thus the Psalmist
says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

. My substance was not hid from thee, when

44 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Iwas made in secret, and curiously wrought (or
embroidered) in the lower parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see my substance yet being im-
perfect ; and in thy book all my members were
written, which in continuance were fashioned,
when as yet there were none of them.” “He
who fashioned the eye, shall not He see? He
that formed the ear shall not He hear?” “ God
makes the grass to grow, and herbs for the
children of men.” He sends rain, frost, and
snow. He controls the winds and the waves.
He determines the casting of the lot, the flight
of an arrow, and the falling of a sparrow. This
universal and constant control of God is not
only one of the most patent and pervading doc-
trines of the Bible, but it is one of the funda-
mental principles of even natural religion.
The second method of accounting for contri-
vances in nature admits that they were fore-
seen and purposed by God, and that He en-
dowed matter with forces which He foresaw and
intended should produce such results. But here
his agency stops. He never interferes to.guide
the operation of physical causes. He does
nothing to control the course of nature, or the
events of history. On this theory it may be
said, (1.) That it is utterly inconsistent with the

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 45

Scriptures. (2.) It does not meet the relig-
ious and moral necessities of our nature. It
renders prayer irrational and inoperative. It
makes it vain for a man in any emergency to
look to God for help. (3.) It is inconsistent
with obvious facts. We see around us innu-
merable evidences of the constant activity of
mind. This evidence of mind and of its opera-
tions, according to Lord Brougham and Dr.
Whewell, is far more clear than that of the ex-
istence of matter and of its forces. If one or
the other is to be denied, it is the latter rather
than the former. Paley indeed says, that if the
construction. of a watch be an undeniable evi-
dence of design it would be a still more wonder-
ful manifestation of skill, if a watch could be
be made to produce other watches ; and, it may
be added, not only other watches, but all kinds
of time-pieces in endless variety. So it has
been asked, if man can make a telescope, why
cannot God make a telescope which produces
others like itself? This is simply asking,
whether matter can be made to do the work
of mind? The idea involves a contradiction.
For a telescope to make a telescope, supposes
it to select copper and zinc in due proportions
and fuse them into brass; to fashion that brass

46 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

into inter-entering tubes; to collect and com-
bine the requisite materials for the different
kinds of glass needed; to melt them, grind,
fashion, and polish them ; adjust their densities
and focal distances, etc., etc. A man who can
believe that brass can do all this, might as well
believe in God. The most credulous men in the
world are unbelievers. The great Napoleon
could not believe in Providence; but he be-
lieved in his star, and in lucky and unlucky
days.

This banishing God from the world is simply
intolerable, and, blessed be his name, impossi-
ble. An absent God who does nothing is, to
us, no God. Christ brings God constantly near
to us. He said to his disciples, ‘‘ Consider the
ravens, for they neither sow nor reap; which
have neither store-house nor barn; and God
feedeth them; how much better are ye than
the fowls. And which of you by taking
thought can add to his stature one cubit?
Consider the lilies how they grow; they toil
not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto
you that Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these. If then God so
clothe the grass, which is to-day in the field,
and to-morrow is cast into the oven; how much

WHAT IS DARWINISM? AT

more will He clothe you, O ye of little faith.”
“ And seek ye not what ye shall eat, or what
ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind.
For all these things do the nations of the world
seek after ; and your Father knoweth that ye
have need of these things.” It may be said
that Christ did not teach science. True, but
He taught truth; and science, so called, when
it comes in conflict with ‘truth, is what man is
when he comes in conflict with God.

The advocates of these extreme opinions pro-
test against being considered irreligious. Her-
bert Spencer says, that his doctrine of an in-
scrutable, unintelligent, unknown force, as the
cause of all things, is a much more religious
doctrine than that of a personal, intelligent,
and voluntary Being of infinite power and
goodness. Matthew Arnold holds that an un-
conscious “ power which makes for right,” is a
higher idea of God than the Jehovah of the
Bible. Christ says, God is a Spirit. Holbach
thought that he made a great advance on that
definition, when he said, God is motion.

The third method of accounting for the con-
trivances manifested in the organs of plants
and animals, is that which refers them to the
blind operation of natural causes. They are

48 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

“not due to the continued codperation and con-
trol of the divine mind, nor to the original pur-
pose of God in the constitution of the universe.
This is the doctrine of the Materialists, and to
this doctrine, we are sorry to say, Mr. Darwin,
although himself a theist, has given in his
adhesion. It is on this account the Material-
ists almost deify him.

From what has been said, it appears that
Darwinism includes three distinct elements.
‘First, evolution; or the assumption that all
organic forms, vegetable and animal, have
been evolved or developed from one, or a few,
primordial living ‘germs; second, that this
evolution has been effected by natural selec-
tion, or the survival of the fittest; and third,
and by far the most important and only dis-
tinctive element of his theory, that this natural
selection is without design, bemg conducted
by unintelligent physical causes. , Neither the
first nor the second of these elements consti-
tute Darwinism; nor do the two combined.
As to the first, namely, evolution, Mr. Darwin
himself, in the historical sketch prefixed to the
fifth edition of his “Origin of Species,” says,
that Lamarck, in 1811 and more fully in 1815,
“taught that all species, including man, are

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 49

descended from other species.” He refers to
some six or eight other scientists, as teaching
the same doctrine. This idea of Evolution
was prominently presented and elaborated in
the “ Vestiges of Creation,” first published in
1844. Ulrici, Professor in the University of
Halle, Germany, in his work “ Gott und die
Natur,” says that the doctrine of evolution
took no hold on the minds of scientific men,
but was positively rejected by the most emi-
nent physiologists, among whom he mentions
J. Miiller, R. Wagner, Bischoff, Hoffmann, and
others! The Rev. George Henslow, Lecturer
on Botany at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital,
London, himself a pronounced evolutionist,
says the theories of Lamarck and of the “ Ves-
tiges of Creation” have given place to that
of Mr. Darwin; “and there are not wanting
many symptoms of decay in the acceptance
even of his. Not only has he considerably
modified his views in later editions of the
‘Origin of Species,’ distinctly expressing the
opinion that he attributed too great influence
to natural selection, but even men of science,
Owen, Huxley, — and at least in its application

1 Gott und die Natur. Von D. Hermann Ulrici. Zweite

Auflage. Leipzig, 1866, p. 804.
4

50 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

to man, Wallace himself, — are either opposed
to it in great measure, or else give it but a
qualified assent. Thus, it has been the fate of
all theories of the development of living things
to lapse into oblivion. Zvolution itself, how-
ever, will stand the same.”? We find in the
“ Transactions of the Victoria Institute,” a still
more decided repudiation of Darwinism on the
part of Mr. Henslow. He there says: “I do
not believe in Darwin’s theory; and have en-
deavored to refute it by showing its utter im-
possibility.” ? He defines Evolution by saying,
“ It supposes all animals and plants that exist
now, or have ever existed, to have been pro-
duced through laws of generation from preéx-
isting animals and plants respectively; that
affinity amongst organic beings implies, or is
due to community of descent; and that the
degree of affinity between organisms is in pro-
portion to their nearness of generation, or, at
least, to the persistence of common characters,
they being the products of originally the same

38

parentage. A man, therefore, may be an

1 The Theory of Evolution of Living Things and the Applica-
tion of the Principles of Evolution to Religion. By Rev. George
Henslow, M. A., F. L. §., F. G..§. London, 1873, pp. 27, 28.

2 Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute, or Philo-
sophical Society of Great Britain. Vol. iv. London, 1870, p. 278.

8 Evolution and Religion, p. 29.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 51

evolutionist, without being a Darwinian. It
should be mentioned that Mr. Henslow ex-
pressly excludes man, both as to body and
soul, from the law of evolution.

Nor is the theory of natural selection the
vital principle of Mr. Darwin’s theory, unless
the word natural be taken in a sense anti-
thetical to supernatural. In the historical
sketch just referred to, Mr. Darwin not only
says that he had been anticipated in teaching
the doctrine of Evolution by Lamarck and the
author of the “ Vestiges of Creation ;” but that
the theory of natural selection, as the means of
accounting for evolution, was not original with
him. He tells us that as early as 1813, Dr.
W. OC. Wells “distinctly recognizes the princi-
ple of natural selection ;” and that Mr. Patrick
Matthew, in 1831, “ gives precisely the same
view of the origin of species as that pro-
pounded by Mr. Wallace and myself.” Ideas
are like seed: they are often cast forth, and
not finding a congenial soil produce no fruit.
To Mr. Darwin is undoubtedly due the elabora-
tion and thoroughly scientific defence of the
theory of natural selection, and to him is to
be referred the deep and widespread interest
which it has excited.

52 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Darwinism excludes Teleology.

It is however neither evolution nor natural
selection, which give Darwinism its peculiar
character and importance. It is that Darwin
rejects all teleology, or the doctrine of final
causes. He denies design in any of the organ-
isms in the vegetable or animal world. He
teaches that the eye was formed without any
purpose of producing an organ of vision.

Although evidence on this point has already
been adduced, yet as it is often overlooked,
at least in this country, so that many men
speak favorably of Mr. Darwin’s theory, who
are no more Darwinians than they are Mussul-
mans; and as it is this feature of his system
which brings it into conflict not only with
Christianity, but with the fundamental prin-
ciples of natural religion, it should be clearly
established. The sources of proof on this point
are, — 1st. Mr. Darwin’s own writings. 2d.
The expositions of his theory given by its ad-
vocates. 3d. The character of the objections
urged by its opponents.

The point to be proved is that it is the dis-
tinctive doctrine of Mr. Darwin, that species
owe their origin, not to the original intention

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 53

of the divine mind; not to special acts of
creation calling new forms into existence at
certain epochs; not to the constant and every-
where operative efficiency of God, guiding phys-
ical causes in the production of intended ef-
fects; but to the gradual accumulation of un-
intended variations of structure and instinct,
securing some advantage to their subjects.

Darwin's own Testimony.

That such is Mr. Darwin’s doctrine we prove
from his own writings. And the first proof
from that source is found in express declara-
tions. When an idea pervades a book and
constitutes its character, detached passages
constitute a very small part of the evidence
of its being inculcated. In the present case,
however, such passages are sufficient to satisfy
even those who have not had occasion to read
Mr. Darwin’s books. In referring to the sim-
ilarity of structure in animals of the same class,
he says, “‘ Nothing can be more hopeless than
to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern
in members of the same class, by utility or the
doctrine of final causes.” ?

On the last page of his work, he says: “It

1 Origin of Species, p. 517.

54 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank,
clothed with many plants of many kinds, with
birds singing on the bushes, with various in-
sects flitting about, and with worms crawling
through the damp earth, and to reflect that
these elaborately constructed forms, so differ-
ent from each other, and dependent on each
other in so complex a manner, have all been
produced by laws acting around us. These
laws, taken in the largest sense, being growth
with reproduction; variability from the indi-
rect and direct action of the conditions of life,
and from use and disuse; a ratio of increase
so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as
a consequence to natural selection, entailing
divergence of character and extinction of less
improved forms. Thus from the war of nature,
from famine and death, the most exalted ob-
ject which we are capable of conceiving, the
production of the higher animals directly fol-
lows. There is a grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers, having been originally
breathed by the Creator into a few forms or
into one; and that whilst this planet has gone
cycling on according to the fixed law of grav-
ity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being evolved.” (p. 579)

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 55

In another of his works, he asks, “ Did He
(God) ordain that crop and tail-feathers of the
pigeon should vary, in order that the fancier
might make his grotesque pouter and fan-tail
breeds? Did He cause the frame and mental
qualities of the dog to vary, in order that a
breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity,
with jaws fitted to pin down the bull, for man’s
brutal sport? But if we give up the principle
in one case ; if we do not admit that the varia-
tions of the primeval dog were intentionally
guided in order, for instance, that the grey-
hound, that perfect image of symmetry and
vigor, might be formed; no shadow of reason
can be assigned for the belief that variations,
alike in nature and the results of the same
general laws, which have been the groundwork
through natural selection of the most perfectly
adapted animals in the world, man included,
were intentionally and specially guided. How-
ever much we may wish it, we can hardly fol-
low Professor Asa Gray, in his belief ‘ that
variations have been led along certain benefi-
cial lines, as a stream is led along useful lines
of irrigation.’ ” *

1 The Variations of Aninals and Plants under Domestication.
By Charles Darwin, F. R. S., etc. New York, 1868, vol. ii. pp.
515, 516.

56 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Variations, which by their gradual accumula-
tion give rise to new species, genera, families,
and orders, are themselves, step by step,
accidental. Mr. Darwin sometimes says they
happen by chance; sometimes he says they hap-
pen of necessity; at others he says, “ We are
profoundly ignorant of their causes.” These
are only different ways of saying that they are
not intentional. When a man lets anything
fall from his hands, and says it was accidental,
he does not mean that it was causeless, he
only means that it was not intentional. And
that is precisely what Darwin means when he
says that species arise out of accidental varia-
tions. His whole book is an argument against
teleology. The whole question is, How are we
to account for the innumerable varieties, kinds,
and genera of plants and animals, including
man? Were they intended? or, Did they arise
from the gradual accumulations of uninten-
tional variations? His answer to these ques-
tions is plain. On page 245, he says: “ Noth-
ing at first can appear more difficult to believe
than that the more complex organs and in-
stincts have been perfected not by means supe-
rior to, though analogous with, human reason,
but by innumerable slight variations, each good

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 57

for the individual possessor. Nevertheless,
this difficulty, though appearing to our imag-
ination’ insuperably great, cannot be consid-
ered real, if we admit the following proposi-
tions, namely, that all parts of the organizations
and instincts offer, at least, individual differ-
ences; that there is a struggle for existence,
which leads to the preservation of profitable
deviations of structure or instinct ; and, lastly,
that gradations in the state of perfection of
each organ may have existed, each good of its
kind.” He says, over and over, that if beauty
or any variation of structure can be shown
to be intended, it would “ annihilate his the-
ory.” His doctrine is that such unintended
variations, which happen to be useful in the
struggle for life, are preserved, on the principle
of the survival of the fittest. He urges the
usual objections to teleology derived from un-
developed or useless organs, as web-feet in the
upland goose and frigate-bird, which never
swim.

What, however, perhaps more than anything,
makes clear his rejection of design is the man-
ner in which he deals with the complicated or-

1 What can the word ‘imagination’ mean in this sentence,
if it daes not mean “ Common Sense ?”’

58 WHAT IS DARWINISM ?

gans of plants and animals. Why don’t he say,
they are the product of the divine intelligence ?
If God made them, it makes no difference, so
far as the question of design is concerned, how
He made them: whether at once or by a pro-
cess of evolution. But instead of referring
them to the purpose of God, he laboriously en-
deavors to prove that they may be accounted
for without any design or purpose whatever.
“To suppose,” he says, “ that the eye with
all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the
focus to different distances, for admitting dif-
ferent degrees of light, and for the correction
of spherical and chromatic aberration, could
have been formed by natural selection, seems,
I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
(p. 222) Nevertheless he attempts to explain
the process. “It is scarcely possible,” he says,
“to avoid comparing the eye with the telescope.
We know that this instrument has been per-
fected by the long continued efforts of the
highest of human intellects; and we naturally
infer that the eye has been formed by a some-
‘what analogous process. But may not this in-
ference be presumptuous? Have we any right
to assume that the Creator works by intellectual
powers like those of man? If we must compare

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 59

the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in
imagination to take a thick layer of transparent
tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a
nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then sup-
pose every part of this layer to be continually
changing slowly in density, so as to separate
into layers of different densities and thicknesses,
placed at different ‘distances from each other,
and with the surfaces of each layer slowly
changing inform. Further, we must suppose
that there is a power represented by natural
selection, or the survival of the fittest, always
intently watching each slight alteration in the
transparent layers, and carefully preserving
each, which, under varied circumstances, tends
to produce a distinct image. We must sup-
pose each new state of the instrument to be
multiplied by the million ; each to be preserved
until a better is produced, and the old ones to
be all destroyed. In living bodies, variations
will cause the slight alterations, generation will
multiply them almost infinitely, and natural
selection will pick out with unerring skill each
improvement.”* (p.226) “Let this process,

1 Mr. Darwin’s habit of personifying nature has given, as
his friend Mr. Wallace says, his readers a good deal of trouble.
He defines nature to be the aggregate of physical forces; and in

60 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

he says, “go on for millions of years,” and
we shall at last have a perfect eye.

It would be absurd to say anything disre-
spectful of such a man as Mr. Darwin, and
scarcely less absurd to indulge in any mere ex-
travagance of language; yet we are express-
ing our own experience, when we say that we
regard Mr. Darwin’s books'the best refutation
of Mr. Darwin’s theory. He constantly shuts
us up to the alternative of believing that the
eye is a work of design or the product of the
unintended action of blind physical causes.
To any ordinarily constituted mind, it is ab-
solutely impossible to believe that it is not a
work of design. Darwin himself, it is evi-
dent, dear as his theory is, can hardly believe
it. “It is indispensable,” he says, “to ar-
rive at a just conclusion as to the formation
of the eye, that the reason should conquer
the imagination ; but I have felt the difficulty
far too keenly to be surprised at any degree
of hesitation in extending the principle of
natural selection to so startling an extent.” (p.

225)

the single passage quoted, he speaks of Natural Selection ‘as
intently watching ”’ “ picking out with unerring skill,”’ and “ care-
fully preserving.” It is true, he tells us this is all to be under-
stood metaphorically.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 61

It will be observed that every step in his
account of the formation of the eye is an ar-
bitrary assumption. We must first assume a
thick layer of tissue; then that the tissue is
transparent; then that it has cavities filled
with fluid; that beneath the tissue is a nerve
sensitive to light; then that the fluid is con-
stantly varying in density and thickness ; that
its surfaces are constantly changing their con-
tour; that its different portions are ever shift-
ing their relative distances; that every favor-
able change is seized upon and rendered per-
manent,— thus after millions of years we may
get an eye as perfect as that of an eagle. In
like manner we may suppose a man to sit down
to account for the origin and contents of the
Bible, assuming as his “ working hypothesis,”
that it is not the product of mind either hu-
man or divine, but that it was made by a type-
setting machine worked by steam, and picking
out type hap-hazard. In this way in a thou-
sand years one sentence might be produced, in
another thousand a second, and in ten thousand
more, the two might get together in the right
position. Thus in the course of “ millions of
years” the Bible might have been produced,
with all its historical details, all its elevated

62 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

truths, all its devout and sublime poetry, and
above all with the delineation of the character
of Christ, the iSéa tév idedy, the ideal of maj-
esty and loveliness, before which the whole
world, believing and unbelieving, perforce
bows down in reverence. And when reason
has sufficiently subdued the imagination to
admit all this, then by the same theory we
may account for all the books in all languages
in all the libraries in the world. Thus we
should have Darwinism applied in the sphere
of literature. This is the theory which we
are told is to sweep away Christianity and the
Church !

Mr. Darwin gives the same unsatisfactory
account of the marvellous “ contrivances ” in
the vegetable world. In one species of Orchids,
the labellum or lower lip is hollowed into a
great bucket continually filled with water, se-
creted from two horns which stand above it;
when the bucket is sufficiently filled, the water
flows out through a pipe or spout on one side.
The bees, which crowd into the flower for sake
of the nectar, jostle each other, so that some
fall into the water ; and their wings becoming
wet they are unable to fly, and are obliged to
crawl through the spout. In doing this they

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 63

come in contact with the pollen, which, adher-
ing to their backs, is carried off to other flow-
ers. This complicated contrivance by which
the female plants are fertilized has, according
to the theory, been brought about by the slow
process of natural selection or survival of the
fittest.

Still more wonderful is the arrangement in
another species of Orchids. When the bee be-
gins to gnaw the labellum, he unavoidably
touches a tapering projection, which, when
touched, transmits a vibration which ruptures
a membrane, which sets free a spring by which
a mass of pollen is shot, with unerring aim, over
the back of the bee, who then departs on his
errand of fertilization.

A very large class of plants are fertilized by
means of insects. These flowers are beautiful,
not for the sake of beauty, — for that Mr. Dar-
win says would annihilate his theory, — but
those which happen to be beautiful attract in-
sects, and thus become fertilized and perpetua-
ted, while the plainer ones are neglected and
perish. So with regard to birds. The females
are generally plain, because those of bright col-
ors are so exposed during the period of incuba-
tion that they are destroyed by their enemies.

64 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

In like manner male birds are usually adorned
with brilliant plumage. This is accounted for
on the ground that they are more attractive,
and thus they propagate their race, while the
plainer ones have few or no descendants. Thus
all design is studiously and laboriously ex-
cluded from every department of nature.

The preceding pages contain only a small
part of the evidence furnished by Mr. Darwin’s
own writings, that his doctrine involves the
denial of all final causes. The whole drift of
his books is to prove that all the organs of
plants and animals, all their instincts and
mental endowments, may be accounted for by
the blind operation of natural causes, without
any intention, purpose, or codperation of God.
This is what Professor Huxley and others call
“the creative idea,” to which the widespread
influence of his writings is to be referred.

Testimony of the Advocates of the Theory.

It is time to turn to the exposition of Dar-
winism by its avowed advocates, in proof of the
assertion that it excludes all teleology.

The first of these witnesses is Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace, himself a distinguished natu-
ralist. Mr. Darwin informs his readers that as

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 65

early as 1844, he had collected his material and
worked out his theory, but had not published
it to the world, although it had been commu-
nicated to some of his friends. In 1858 he re-
ceived a memoir from Mr. Wallace, who was
then studying the natural history of the Malay
Archipelago. From that memoir he learnt that
Mr. Wallace had “ arrived at almost exactly the
same conclusions as I (he himself) have on the
origin of species.” This led to the publishing
his book on that subject contemporaneously
with Mr. Wallace’s memoir. There has been
no jealousy or rivalry between these gentle-
men. Mr. Wallace gracefully acknowledges
the priority of Mr. Darwin’s claim, and attrib-
utes to him the credit of having elaborated
and sustained it in a way to secure for it uni-
versal attention. These facts are mentioned in
order to show the competency of Mr. Wallace
as a witness as to the true character of Dar-
winism.

Mr. Wallace, in “ The Theory of Natural Se-
lection,” devotes a chapter to the considération
of the objections urged by the Duke of Argyll,
in his work on the “ Reign of Law,” against
that theory. Those objections are principally

two: first, that design necessarily implies an
5

66 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

intelligent designer; and second, that beauty
not being an advantage to its possessor in the
struggle for life, cannot be accounted for on the
principle of the survival of the fittest. The
Duke, he says, maintains that contrivance and
beauty indicate “the constant supervision and
interference of the Creator, and cannot possi-
bly be explained by the unassisted action of
any combination of laws. Now, Mr. Darwin’s
work,” he adds, “has for its main object to
show that all the phenomena of living things
—all their wonderful organs and complicated
structures, their infinite variety of form, size,
and color, their intricate and involved relations
to each other — may have been produced by
the action of a few general laws of the simplest
kind, laws which are in most cases mere state-
ments of admitted facts.” (p. 265) Those laws
are those with which we are familiar: Hered-
ity, Variations, Over Production, Struggle for
Life, Survival of the Fittest. “It is probable,”
he says, “ that these primary facts or laws are
but results of the very nature of life, and of
the essential properties of organized and unor-
ganized matter. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his
‘First Principles’ and in his ‘ Biology,’ has, I
think, made us able to understand how this may

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 67

be; but at present we may accept these simple
laws, without going further back, and the ques-
tion then is, Whether the variety, the harmony,
the contrivance, and the beauty we perceive,
can have been produced by the action of these
laws alone, or whether we are required to be-
lieve in the incessant interference and direct
action of the mind and will of the Creator.” (p.
267)* Mr. Wallace says, that the Duke of
Argyll maintains that God “has personally
applied general laws to produce effects which
those laws are not in themselves capable of
producing ; that the universe alone with all its
laws intact, would be a sort of chaos, without
variety, without harmony, without design,
without beauty; that there is not (and there-
fore we may presume that there could not be)
any self-developing power in the universe. I
believe, on the contrary, that the universe is so
constituted as to be self-regulating; that as
long it contains life, the forms under which

1 The question is not, as Mr. Wallace says, ‘‘ How has the
Creator worked?” but it is, as he himself states, whether the
essential properties of matter have alone worked out all the
wonders of creation ; or, whether they are to be referred to the
mind and will of God. It is worthy of remark how Messrs.
Darwin and Wallace refer to Mr. Spencer as their philosopher.
We have seen what Spencer’s philosophy is.

68 ‘WHAT IS DARWINISM?

that life is manifested have an inherent power
of adjustment to each other and to their sur-
roundings; and that this adjustment necessarily
leads to the greatest amount of variety and
beauty and enjoyment, because it does depend
on general laws, and not on a continual super-
vision and rearrangement of details.” (p. 268)

“The strange springs and traps and pitfalls
found in the flowers of Orchids, cannot,’ he
says, “be necessary per se, since exactly the
same end is gained in ten thousand other flowers
which do not possess them. Is it not then an
extraordinary idea, to imagine the Creator of
the universe contriving the various complicated
parts of these flowers, as a mechanic might
contrive an ingenious toy or a difficult puzzle ?
Is it not a more worthy conception, that they
are the results of those general laws which were
so codrdinated at the first introduction of life
upon the earth as to result necessarily in the
utmost possible development of varied forms.”
(p- 270) “TI for one,” he says, “ cannot believe
that the world would come to chaos if left to
law alone. .... If any modification of struc-
ture could be the result of law, why not all?
If some self-adaptations should arise, why not
others? If any varieties of color, why not all.

WHAT I8 DARWINISM? 69

the varieties we see? No attempt is made to
explain this except by reference to the fact
that ‘purpose’ and ‘contrivance’ are every-
where visible, and by an illogical deduction
they could only have arisen by the direct ac-
tion of some mind, because the direct action
of our minds produce similar ‘ contrivances ;’
but it is forgotten that adaptation, however
produced, must have the appearance of de-
sign.” (p. 280)" After referring to the fact
that florists and breeders can produce varieties
in plants and animals, so that, “whether they
wanted a bull-dog to torture another animal,
a greyhound to catch a hare, or a bloodhound
to hunt down their oppressed fellow-creatures,
the required variations have always appeared,”
he adds: “To be consistent, our opponents
must maintain that every one of the variations
that have rendered possible the changes pro-
duced by man, have been determined at the
right time and place by the Creator. Every
race produced by the florist or breeder, the
dog or the pigeon fancier, the rat-catcher, the
sporting man, or the slave-hunter, must have
been provided for by varieties occurring when

1Jt is, therefore, clear that design is what Mr. Darwin and
Mr. Wallace repudiate.

70 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

wanted ; and as these variations were never
withheld, it would prove that the sanction of an
all-wise and all powerful Being has been given
to that which the highest human minds consider
to be trivial, mean, or debasing.” (p. 290) *
The Nebular Hypothesis, as propounded by
La Place, proposed to account for the origin of
the universe, by a process of evolution under
the control of mere physical forces. That
hypothesis has, so far as evolution is concerned,
been adopted by men who sincerely believe
in God and in the Bible. But they hold
not only that God created matter and en-
dowed it with its properties, but that He de-
signed the universe, and so controlled the
operation of physical laws that they accom-
plished his purpose. So there are Christian
men who believe in the. evolution of one kind
of plants and animals out of earlier and simpler
forms; but they believe that everything was
designed by God, and that it is due to his pur-
pose and power that all the forms of vegetable
and animal life are what they are. But this is
not the question. What Darwin and the ad-

1 That God permits men in the use of the laws of nature to
distil alcohol and brew poisons, does not prove that He approves
of drunkenness or murder.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? val

vocates of his theory deny, is all design. The
organs, even the most complicated and wonder-
ful, were not intended. They are said to be
due to the undirected and unintended opera-
tion of physical laws. This is Mr. Wallace’s
argument. He endeavors to show that it is
unworthy of God that He should be supposed
to have contrived the mechanism of the or-
chids, as a mechanist contrives a curious puzzle.

We recently heard Prof. Joseph Henry, in
a brief address, say substantially: “If I take
brass, glass, and other materials, and fuse
them, the product is a slag. This is what
physical laws do. If I take those same mate-
rials, and form them into a telescope, that is
what mind does.” This is the whole question
in a nutshell. That design implies an intelli-
gent designer, is a self evident truth. Every
man believes it; and no man can practically
disbelieve it. Even those naturalists who
theoretically deny it, if they find in a cave so
simple a thing as a flint arrow-head, are as
sure that it was made by a man as they are
of their own existence. And yet they want us
to believe that an eagle’s eye is the product of
blind natural causes. No combination of phys-
ical forces ever made a ship or a locomotive.

72 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

It may, indeed, be said that they are dead
matter, whereas plants and animals live. But
what is life but one form of the organizing
efficiency of God ?

Mr. Wallace does not go as far as Mr. Dar-
win. He recoils from regarding man either
as to body or soul as the product of mere nat-
ural causes. He insists that ‘a superior in-
telligence is necessary to account for man.” (p.
309) This of course implies that the agency
of no such higher intelligence is admitted in
the production of plants or of animals lower
than man.

Professor Huxley.

The second witness as to the character of
Mr. Darwin’s theory is Professor Huxley. We
have some hesitation in including the name of
this distinguished naturalist among the advo-
cates of Darwinism.’ On the one hand, in his

1 Mr. Huxley, if we may judge from what he says of himself,
is somewhat liable to be misunderstood. He says he was four-
teen years laboring to resist the charge of Positivism made
azainst the class of scientific men to which he belongs. He also
tells us in his letter to Professor Tyndall, prefixed to his volume
of Lay Sermons and Addresses, that the ‘‘ Essay on the Phys-
ical Basis of Life,’’ included in that volume, was intended as a
protest, from the philosophical side, against what is commonly
called Materialism. It turned out, however, that the public re-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 73

Essay on the Origin of Species, printed in the
“ Westminster Review,” in 1860, and re-

garded it as an argument in favor of Materialism. This we
think was a very natural, if not an unavoidable mistake, on the
part of the public. For in that Essay, he says that Protoplasm,
or the physical basis of life, ‘is a kind of matter common to all
living beings, that the powers or faculties of all kinds of living
matter, diverse as they may be in degree, are substantially of the
same kind.’ Protoplasm as far as examined contains the four
elements, — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. These are
lifeless bodies, “but when brought together under certain con-
ditions, they give rise to the still more complex body Protoplasm ;
and this protoplasm exhibits the phenomena of life.” There is
no more reason, he teaches, for assuming the existence of a mys-
terious something called vitality to account for vital phenomena,
than there is for the assumption of something called Aquasity to
account for the phenomena of water. Life is said to be ‘‘ the
product of a certain disposition of material molecules.” The
matter of life is ‘‘ composed of ordinary matter, differing from it
only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated. I take it,’”’
he says, “ to be demonstrable that it is utterly impossible to prove
that anything whatever may not be the effect of « material and
necessary cause, and that human logic is equally incompetent to
prove that any act is really spontaneous. A really spontaneous
act is one, which, by the assumption, has no cause ; and the at-
tempt to prove such a negative as this, is on the face of the
matter absurd. And while it is thus a philosophical impossibility
to demonstrate that any given phenomenon is not the effect of a
material cause, any one who is acquainted with the history of
science will admit that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and
now more than ever means, the extension of what we call mat-
ter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from
all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spon-
taneity.’”

74 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

printed in his “ Lay Sermons,” etc., in 1870,
he says: “There is no fault to be found with
Mr. Darwin’s method, but it is another thing
whether he has fulfilled all the conditions im-
posed by that method. Is it satisfactorily
proved that species may’ be originated by se-
lection? that none of the phenomena exhib-
ited by species are inconsistent with the origin
of species in this way? If these questions can
be answered in the affirmative, Mr. Darwin’s
view steps out of the rank of hypotheses into
that of theories; but so long as the evidence
at present adduced falls short of enforcing that
affirmative, so long, to our minds, the new
doctrine must be content to remain among
the former, —an extremely valuable, and in
the highest degree probable, doctrine ; indeed,
the only extant hypothesis which is worth
anything in a scientific pomt of view; but
still a hypothesis, and not yet a theory of
species. After much consideration,” he adds,

1Jt cannot escape the attention of any one that Mr. Darwin,
Mr. Wallace, Professor Huxley, and all the other advocates or
defenders of Darwinism, do not pretend to prove anything more
than that species may be originated by selection, not that there is
no other satisfactory account of their origin. Mr. Darwin admits
that referring them to the intention and efficiency of God, ac-
counts for everything, but, he says, that is not science.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 7d

“and assuredly with no bias against Mr. Dar-
win’s views, it is our clear conviction that, as
the evidence now stands, it is not absolutely
proven that a group of animals, having all the
characters exhibited by species in Nature, has
ever been originated by selection, whether
artificial or natural.’’}

Again, in his work on “ Man’s Place in Na-
ture,” he expresses himself much to the same
effect: “A true physical cause is admitted to
be such only on one condition, that it shall ac-
count for all the phenomena which come within
the range of its operation. If it is inconsist-
ent with any one phenomenon it must be re-
jected ; if it fails to explain any one phenome-
non it is so far to be suspected, though it may
have a perfect right to provisional acceptance.
... . Our acceptance, therefore, of the Dar-
winian hypothesis must be provisional so long
as one link in the chain of evidence is want-
ing; and so long as all the animals and
plants certainly produced by selective breed-
ing from a common stock are fertile, and their
progeny are fertile one with another, that
link will be wanting. For so long selective

1 Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews. By Thomas Henry
Huxley, LL. D., F. R. §. London, 1870, p. 323.

76 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

breeding will not be proved to be competent
to all that is required if it produce natural

?1 Tn immediate connection with the

species.’
above passage, there is another which throws
a clear light on Professor Huxley’s cosmical
views. “The whole analogy of natural opera-
tions furnish so complete and crushing an
argument against the intervention of any but
what are called secondary causes, in the pro-
duction of all the phenomena of the universe ;
that, in view of the intimate relations of man
and the rest of the living world, and between
the forces exerted by the latter and all other
forces, I can see no reason for doubting that
all are codrdinate terms of nature’s great pro-
gression, from formless to formed, from the
inorganic to the organic, from blind force to
conscious intellect and will.” ?

1 Evidence of Man’s Place in Nature. London, 1864, p. 107.

2 Since writing the above paragraph our eye fell on the follow-
ing note on the 89th page of the Duke of Argyle’s Reign of Law,
which it gives us pleasure to quote. It seems that a writer in the
Spectator had charged Professor Huxley with Atheism. In the
number of that paper for February 10,1866, the Professor replies:
“T do not know that I care very much about popular odium, so
there is no great merit in saying that if I really saw fit to deny
the existence of a God I should certainly do so, for the sake of

my own intellectual freedom, and be the honest atheist you are
pleased to say Iam. As it happens, however, I cannot take this

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 77

Ought not this to settle the matter? Are we
to give up the Bible and all our hopes for the
sake of an hypothesis that all living things,
including man, on the face of the earth, are
descended from a primordial animalcule, by
natural selection, when such a man as Huxley,
who (as Voltaire said of the prophet Hab-
bakuk) is capable de tout, says that it has not
been proved that any one species has thus
originated ?

But on the other hand, while he honestly
admits that Darwin’s doctrine is a mere hy-
pothesis and not a theory, he has nevertheless
written at least three essays or reviews in its
exposition and vindication. He is freely re-
ferred to on the continent of Europe, at least,
as an ardent advocate of the doctrine ; and he
quotes without protest such designations of
himself. At any rate, as he assures his readers
that he has no bias against Mr. Darwin’s views,
as he has devoted much time and attention to
the subject, and as he is one of the most prom-

position with honesty, inasinuch as it is, and always has been, a
favorite tenet, that Atheism is as absurd, logically speaking, as
Polytheism.” In the same paper he says, ‘‘ The denying the
possibility of miracles seems to me quite as unjustifiable as spec-
ulative Atheism.” How this can be reconciled with the pas-
sages quoted above, we are unable to see.

78 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

inent naturalists of the age, there can be no
question as to his competency as a witness as
to what Darwinism is.

His testimony that Mr. Darwin’s doctrine
excludes all teleology, or final causes, is ex-
plicit. In his review of the “ Criticisms on the
Origin of Species,’ he says, “that when he
first read Mr. Darwin’s book, that which struck
him most forcibly was the conviction that tele-
ology, as commonly understood, had received
its death-blow at Mr. Darwin’s hands. For
the teleological argument runs thus: An organ
is precisely fitted to perform a function or
purpose ; therefore, it was specially constructed
to perform that function. In Paley’s famous
illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of a
watch to the function or purpose of showing
the time, is held to be evidence that the watch
was specially contrived to that end; on the
ground that the only cause we know of compe-
tent to produce such an effect as a watch
which shall keep time, is a contriving intelli-
gence adapting the means directly to that
end.’* This, Mr. Huxley tells us, is pre-
cisely what Darwin denies with reference to
the organs of plants and animals. The eye

1 Lay Sermons, ete., p. 330.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 79

was not formed for the purpose of seeing, or
the ear for hearing. It so happened that a
nerve became sensitive to light; then in course
of time, it happened that a transparent tissue
came over it; and thus in “ millions of years”
an eye, as we have seen above, happened
to be formed. No such organ was ever in-
tended or designed by God or man. “ An ap-
paratus,” says Professor Huxley, “ thoroughly
adapted to a particular purpose, might be the
result of a method of trial and error worked by
unintelligent agents, as well as by the appli-
cation of means appropriate to the end by an
intelligent agent.” “ For the notion that every
organism has been created as it is and launched
straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes
the conception of something, which may fairly
be termed a method of trial and error. Organ-
isms vary incessantly ; of these variations the
few meet with surrounding conditions which
suit them, and thrive; the many are unsuited,
and become extinguished.” “For the teleol-
ogist an organism exists, because it was made
for the conditions in which it is found; for the
Darwinian an organism exists, because, out of
many of its kind, it is the only one which has
been able to persist in the conditions in which

80 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

it is found.” “If we apprehend,” Huxley fur-
ther says, “the spirit of the ‘ Origin of Species’
rightly, then, nothing can be more entirely and
absolutely opposed to teleology, as it is com-
monly understood, than the Darwinian theory.”
(p. 803)

It has already been stated that Mr. Wallace
does not apply the doctrine of evolution to
man; neither does Mr. Mivart, a distinguished
naturalist, who is a member of the Latin
Church. The manner in which Professor Hux-
ley speaks of these gentlemen shows how
thoroughly, in his judgment, Mr. Darwin ban-
ishes God from his works: “Mr. Wallace and
Mr. Mivart are as stout evolutionists as Mr.
Darwin himself; but Mr. Wallace denies that
man can have been evolved from a lower ani-
mal by that process of natural selection, which
he, with Mr. Darwin, holds to be sufficient for
the evolution of all animals below man; while
Mr. Mivart, admitting that natural selection
has been one of the conditions of the animals
below man, maintains that natural selection
must, even in ‘their case, have been supple-
mented by some other cause,—of the nature
of which, unfortunately, he does not give us
any idea. Thus Mr. Mivart is less of a Dar-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 81

winian than Mr. Wallace, for he has faith in
the power of natural selection. But he is more
of an evolutionist than Mr. Wallace, because
Mr. Wallace thinks it necessary to call in an
intelligent agent, a sort of supernatural Sir
John Sebright, to produce even the animal
frame of man; while Mr. Mivart requires no
Divine assistance till he comes to man’s soul.” ?

1 Contemporary Review, vol. xviii. 1871, p. 444. In this same
article Mr. Huxley says: ‘‘ Elijah’s great question, Will ye serve
God or Baal ? Choose ye, is uttered audibly enough in the ears of
every one of us as we come to manhood. Let every man who tries
to answer it seriously ask himself whether he can be satisfied with
the Baal of authority, and with all the good things his worship-
pers are promised in this world and the next. If he can, let him,
if he be so inclined, amuse himself with such scientific imple-
ments as authority tells him are safe and will not cut his fingers;
but let him not imagine that he is, or can be, both a true son of
the Church and a loyal soldier of science.’’ “And, on the other
hand, if the blind acceptance of authority appear to him in its
true colors, as mere private judgment in excelsis, and if he have
courage to stand alone face to face with the abyss of the Eternal
and Unknowable, let him be eontent, once for all, not only to
renounce the good things promised by ‘ Infallibility,’ but even
to bear the bad things which it prophesies; content to follow
reason and fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever
they may lead, in the sure faith that a hell of honest men will
to him be more endurable than a paradise full of angelic shams.”
There can be no doubt that the Apostle Paul believed in the
infallibility of the Scriptures. Imagine Professor Huxley calling
St. Paul to his face, a sham! What are all the Huxleys who
have ever lived or ever can live, to that one Paul in power for

good over human thought, character, and destiny!
6

82 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

In the “ Academy ” for October, 1869, there is
a review by Professor Huxley of Dr. Haeckel’s
“Naturlische Schépfungsgeschichte,” in which
he says: “ Professor Haeckel enlarges on the
service which the ‘ Origin of Species’ has done
in favoring what he terms ‘the causal or me-
chanical’ view of living nature as opposed to
the ‘ teleological or vitalistic’ view. And no
doubt it is quite true the doctrine of evolution
is the most formidable of all the commoner and
coarser forms of teleology. Perhaps the most
remarkable service to the philosophy of Bio-
logy rendered by Mr. Darwin is the reconcilia-
tion of Teleology and Morphology, and the
explanation of the facts of both which his
view offers.

“ The teleology which supposes that the eye,

Professor Huxley goes on in the next paragraph to say: ‘‘ Mr.
Mivart asserts that ‘ without belief in a personal God there is no
religion worthy of the name.’ This is a matter of opinion. But
it may be asserted, with less reason to fear contradiction, that
the worship of a personal God, who, on Mr. Mivart’s hypothesis,
must have used words studiously calculated to deceive his
creatures and worshippers, is ‘no religion worthy of the name.’
‘Ineredibile est, Deum illis verbis ad populum fuisse locutum
quibis deciperetur,’ is a verdict in which for once Jesuit casuis-
try concurs with the healthy moral sense of all mankind.”
(p. 458). Mr. Huxley calls believers in the Scriptures, and
(apparently) believers in a personal God, bigots, old ladies of
both sexes, bibliolators, fools, etc., etc.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 83

such as we see it in man or in the higher ver-
tebrata, was made with the precise structure
which it exhibits, to make the animal which
possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its
death-blow. But it is necessary to remember
that there isa higher teleology, which is not
touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is act-
ually based on the fundamental proposition of
evolution. That proposition is, that the whole
world, living and not living, is the result of the
mutual interaction, according to definite laws,
of forces possessed by the molecules of which
the primitive nebulosity of the universe was
composed. If this.be true, it is no less certain
that the existing world lay potentially in the
cosmic vapor; and that a sufficient intelligence
could, from a knowledge of the properties of
that vapor, have predicted, say, the state of
fauna of Great Britain in 1869, with as much
certainty as one can say what will happen to
the vapor of the breath on a cold winter’s
day.”’ This is the doctrine of the self-evolution
of the universe. We know not what may lie
behind this in Mr. Huxley’s mind; but we are
very sure that there is not an idea in the
above paragraph which Epicurus of old, and
Biichner, Voght, Haeckel, and other “ Material-

84 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

isten von Profession,’ would not cheerfully
adopt. His distinction between a higher and
lower teleology is of no account in this dis-
cussion. What is the teleology to which, he
says, Mr. Darwin has given the death-blow,
the extracts given above clearly show. The
eye, Huxley says, was not made for the pur-
pose of seeing, or the ear for the purpose of
hearing. “ According to teleology,” he says,
“each organism is like a rifle bullet fired
straight at a mark; according to Darwin, or-
ganisms are like grapeshot, of which one hits
something and the rest fall wide.” ?

Biichner.

Dr. Louis Bichner, president of the medical
association of Hessen-Darmstadt, etc., etc., is
not only a man of science but a popular writer.
Perhaps no book of its class, in our day, has
been so widely circulated as his volume on
“ Kraft und Stoff,’ Matter and Force. It has
been translated into all the languages of Eu-
rope. He holds that matter and force are
inseparable ; there cannot be the one without
the other ; both are eternal and imperishable ;
neither can be either increased or diminished ;

1 Lay Sermons, ete. p. 331.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 85

life originated spontaneously by the combina-
tion of molecules of matter under favorable
conditions; all the phenomena of the universe,
inorganic and organic, whether physical, vital,
or mental, are due to matter and its forces.
Consequently there is no God, no creation, no
mind distinct from matter, no conscious exist-
ence of man after death. All this is asserted
in the most explicit terms. Dr. Buchner has
published a work on Darwinism in two vol-
umes. Darwin’s theory, he says, “is the most
thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined,
and far more atheistic than that of his decried
predecessor Lamarck, who admitted at least a
general law of progress and development ;
whereas, according to Darwin, the whole de-
velopment is due to the gradual summation
of innumerable minute and accidental opera-

tions.”’ 4

Carl Vogt.

In his preface to his work on the “ Descent
of Man,” Mr. Darwin quotes this author as a
high authority. We see him elsewhere refer-
red to as one of the first physiologists of Ger-
many. Vogt devotes the concluding lecture of

1 Sechs Vorlesungen tiber die Darwinische Theorie. Von Lud-
wig Biichner. Zweite Auflage, Leipzig, 1848, vol. i. p. 125.

86 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

the second volume of his work on Man, to the
consideration of Darwinism. He expresses his
opinion of it, after high commendation, in the
following terms. He says that it cannot be
doubted that Darwin’s “ theory turns the Cre-
ator — and his occasional intervention in the
revolutions of the earth and in the produc-
tion of species — without any hesitation out of
doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the small-
est room for the agency of such a Being. The
first living germ being granted, out of it the
creation develops itself progressively by natu-
ral selection, through all the geological periods
of our planets, by the simple law of descent —
no new species arises by creation and none
perishes by divine annihilation — the natural
course of things, the process of evolution of all
organisms and of the earth itself, is of itself
sufficient for the production of all we see.
Thus Man is not a special creation, produced
in a different way, and distinct from other ani-
mals, endowed with an individual soul and
animated by the breath of God; on the con-
trary, Man is only the highest product of the
progressive evolution of animal life springing
from the group of apes next below him.” ?

1 Vorlesungen tiber den Menschen, seine Stellung in der Schoep-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 87

After this no one can be surprised to hear
him say, that “the pulpits of the orthodox, the
confessionals of the priests, the platforms of the
interior missions, the presidential chairs of the
consistories, resound with protestations against
the assaults made by Materialism and Darwin-
ism against the very foundations of society.”
(p. 286) This he calls “ Das Wehgeschrei der
Moralisten”’ (the Wail of the Moralists). The
designation Moralists is a felicitous one, as ap-
plied to the opponents of Vogt and his associ-
ates. It distinguishes them as men who have
not lost their moral sense; who refuse to limit
their faith to what can be proved by the five
senses ; who bow to the authority of the law
written by the finger of God, on the hearts of
men, which neither sophistry nor wickedness
can effectually erase. All Vogt thinks it nec-
essary to reply to these Moralists is, “ Lasst sie
bellen, bis sie ausgebellt haben” (Let them
bark till they are tired). “ Ende.”

Haeckel.

Dr. Ernst Haeckel, Professor in the Univer-
sity of Jena, is said to stand at the head of

fung und in der Geschichte der Erde. Von Carl Vogt. Giessen,
1863, vol. ii. p. 260.

88 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

the living naturalists of Germany. His work
on “ Natural History of Creation” contains a
course of lectures delivered to the professors,
students, and citizens of Jena. It is, therefore,
somewhat popular in its character. The abil-
ity of the writer is manifest on every page.
The distinctness of his perceptions, precis-
ion of language, perspicuity of style, and the
strength of his convictions, give the impression
of a man fully master of his subject, who has
thought himself through, and is perfectly sat-
isfied with the conclusions at which he has
arrived. At the same time it is the impression
of a man who is developed only on one side;
who never looks within; who takes no cogni-
zance of the wonders revealed in conscious-
ness; to whom the intuitions of reason and of
the conscience, the sense of dependence on a
will higher than our own — the sense of obli-
gation and responsibility are of no account, —
in short a man to whom the image of God en-
stamped on the soul of man is invisible. This
being the case, he that is least in the kingdom
of heaven is greater than he.

Haeckel admits that the title of his book,
“Natural Creation,” 7. e. creation by natural
laws, is a contradiction. He distinguishes,

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 89

however, between the creation of substance
and the creation of form. Of the former he
says science knows nothing. To the scientist
matter is eternal. If any one chooses to as-
sume that it was created by an extramundane
power, Haeckel says he will not object. But
that is a matter of faith; and “ where faith be-
gins, science ends.” The very reverse of this
is true. Science must begin with faith. It
cannot take a single step without it. How
does Haeckel know that his senses do not
deceive him? How does he know that he can
trust to the operations of his intellect? How
does he know that things are as they appear?
How does he know that the universe is not a
great phantasmagoria, as so many men have re-
garded it, and man the mere sport of chimeras?
He must believe in the laws of belief impressed
on his nature. Knowledge implies a mind
that knows, and confidence in the act of know-
ing implies belief in the laws of mind. “An
inductive science of nature,” says President
Porter, “‘ presupposes a science of induction,
and a science of induction presupposes a sci-

ence of man.”? Haeckel, however, says faith

1 The Science of Nature versus the Science of Man. By
Noah Porter, President of Yale College. New York, 1871, p. 29.

90 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

is the mere product of the poetic imagination ;
science, of the understanding; if its conclu-
sions come into conflict with the creations of
the imagination, the latter, of course, must give
way.

He says, there have ever been two conflict-
ing theories of the universe : the one, monistic ;
the other, dualistic. The one admits of only
one substance, matter; the other of two, mat-
ter and mind. He prefers to call the former
monism rather than materialism, because the
latter term often includes the idea of moral
materialism, 7. é¢. the doctrine that sensual
pleasure is the end of life; a doctrine, he says,
much more frequently held by princely church-
men than by men of science. He maintains,
however, that “all knowable nature is one;
that the same eternal, immutable (ehernen,
brazen) laws are active in the life of animals
and plants, in the formation of crystals, and
the power of steam; in the whole sphere of
biology, zodlogy, and botany. We have,
therefore, the right to hold fast the monistic
and mechanical view, whether men choose to

1 Natiirliche Schépfungsgeschichte. Won Dr. Ernst Haeckel,
Professor in der Universitit Jena. Zweite Auflage, Berlin,
1873, pp. 8, and 9.

WHAT 1S DARWINISM? 91

brand the system as Materialism or not. In
this sense, all natural science, with the law of
causation at its head, is thoroughly material-
istic.” (p. 32)

The monistic theory he calls “ mechanical or
causal,” as distinguished from the dualistic
theory, which he calls “teleological or vitalis-
tic.” According to the latter, “the vegetable
and animal kingdoms are considered as the
products of a creative agency, working with a
definite design. In looking on an organism, the
conviction seems unavoidable that so skilfully
constructed a machine, such a complicated
working apparatus, as an organism is, could
be produced only by an agency analogous to,
although far more perfect than the agency of
man.” “This,” he says, “supposes the Crea-
tor to be an organism analogous to man, al-
though infinitely more perfect; who contem-
plates his formative powers, lays the plan of
the machine, and then, by the use of appro-
priate means, produces an effect answering to
the preconceived plan..... However highly
the Creator may be exalted, this view involves
the ascription to Him of human attributes, in
virtue of which he can form a plan, and con-
struct organisms to correspond with it. That

92 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

is the view to which Darwin’s doctrine is di-
rectly opposed, and of which Agassiz is, among
naturalists, the most important advocate. The
famous work of Agassiz, ‘ Hssay on Classifica-
tion,’ which is in direct opposition to Darwin’s,
and appeared about the same time, has carried
out logically to the utmost the absurd an-
thropomorphic doctrine of a Creator.” (p. 17)

The monistic theory is called “ mechanical
and causal,” because it supposes that all the
phenomena of the universe, organic and inor-
ganic, vegetable and animal, vital and mental,
are due to mechanical or necessarily operating
causes (cause efficientes) ; just as the dualistic
theory is called “teleological or vitalistic,”’
because it refers natural organisms to causes
working for the accomplishment of a given end
(cause finales). (p. 67)

The grand difficulty in the way of the me-
chanical or monistic theory was the occurrence
of innumerable organisms, apparently at least,
indicative of design. To get over this diffi-
culty, Haeckel says, some who could not
believe in a creative and controlling mind
adopted the idea of a metaphysical ghost called
vitality. The grand service rendered by Dar-
win to science is, that his theory enables us to

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 93

account for the appearances of design in nature
without assuming final causes, or, a mind work-
ing for a foreseen and intended end. “ All that
had appeared before Darwin,” he says, “ failed
to secure success, and to meet with general
acceptance of the doctrine of the mechanical
production of vegetable and animal organisms.
This was accomplished by Darwin’s theory.”
(p- 20)

The precise difficulty which Mr. Darwin's
doctrine has, according to Haeckel, enabled
men of science to surmount, is thus clearly
stated on p. 633. It is, “that organs for a
definite end should be produced by unde-
signing or mechanical causes.” This difficulty
is overcome by the doctrine of evolution.
“Through the theory of descent, we are for the.
first time able to establish the monistic doc-
trine of the unity of nature, that a mechanic-
causal explanation of the most complicated
organisms, e. g. the formation and constitution
of the organs of sense, have no more difficulty
for the common understanding, than the me-
chanical explanation of any physical process,
as, for example, earthquakes, the direction of
the winds, or the currents of the sea. We
thus arrive at the conviction of the last im-

94 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

portance, that all natural bodies with which we
are acquainted are equally endowed with life
(gleichmissig belebt sind); that the distinc-
tion between living and dead matter does not
exist. When a stone is thrown into the air
and falls by certain laws to the ground, or
when a solution of salt forms a crystal, the
result is neither more nor less a mechanical
manifestation of life, than the flowering of a
plant, the generation or sensibility of animals,
or the feelings or the mental activity of man.
In thus establishing the monistic theory of
nature lies the highest and most comprehen-
sive merit of the doctrine of descent, as re-
formed by Darwin.” (p. 21) “As to the much
vaunted design in nature, it is a reality only
for those whose views of animal and vegetable
life are to the last degree superficial. Any
one who has gone deeper into the organization
and vital activity of animals and plants, who
has made himself familiar with the action and
reaction of vital phenomena, and the so-called
economy of nature, comes of necessity to the
conclusion, that design does not exist, any
more than the vaunted goodness of the Crea-
tor” (die vielgeriihmte Allgiite des Schopfers).

(p- 17)

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 95

Professor Huxley, in his review of this work
of Haeckel, already quoted, says: “I do not
like to conclude without reminding the reader
of my entire concurrence with the general -
tenor and spirit of the work, and of my high
estimate of its value.” If you take out of
Haeckel’s book its doctrine of Monism, which
he himself says means Materialism, it has no
“tenor or spirit” in it. It is not, however,
for us to say how far Professor Huxley in-
tended his indorsement to go.

Haeckel says that Darwin’s theory of evolu-
tion leads inevitably to Atheism and Material-
ism. In this we think he is correct. But we
have nothing to do with Haeckel’s logic or
with our own. We make no charge against
Mr. Darwin. We cite Haeckel merely as a wit-
ness to the fact that Darwinism involves the
denial of final causes ; that it excludes all intel-
ligent design in the production of the organs
of plants and animals, and even in the produc-
tion of the soul and body of man. This first
of German naturalists would occupy a strange
position in the sight of all Europe, if, after
lauding a book to the skies because it teaches
a certain doctrine, it should turn out that the
book taught no such doctrine at all.

96 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

The Opponents of Darwinism.
The Duke of Argyll.

When cultivated men undertake to refute a
certain system, it is to be presumed that they
give themselves the trouble to ascertain what
that system is. As the advocates of Mr. Dar-
win’s theory defend and applaud it because it
excludes design, and as its opponents make
that the main ground of their objection to it,
there can be no reasonable doubt as to its real
character. The question is, How are the con-
trivances in nature to be accounted for? One
answer is, They are due to the purpose of God.
Mr. Darwin says, They are due to the gradual
and undesigned accumulation of slight varia-
tions. The Duke’s first objection to that doc-
trine is, that the evidence of design in the or-
gans of plants and animals is so clear that Mr.
Darwin himself cannot avoid using teleological
language. “He exhausts,” he says, “every
form of words and of illustration by which
intention or mental purpose can be described.
‘ Contrivance,’ ‘ beautiful contrivance,’ ‘ curious
contrivance,’ are expressions which occur over
and over again. Here is one sentence de-
scribing a particular species (of orchids): ‘The

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 97

labellum is developed in order to attract the
Lepidoptera ; and we shall soon see reason for
supposing that the nectar is purposely so
lodged, that it can be sucked only slowly in
order to give time for the curious chemical
quality of the matter setting hard and dry.
We have already seen that Mr. Darwin’s an-
swer to this objection is, that it is hard to keep
from personifying nature, and that these ex-
pressions as used by him mean no more than
chemists mean when they speak of affinities,
and one element preferring another.

A second objection is, that a variation would
not be useful to the individual in which it hap-
pens to occur, unless other variations should
occur at the right time and in the right order ;
and that the concurrence of so many accidents
as are required to account for the infinite di-
versity of forms in plants and animals, is alto-
gether inconceivable.

A third objection is, that the variations often
have no reference to the organism of the ani-
mal itself but to other organisms. “Take one
instance,” he says, “out of millions. The
poison of a deadly snake,—let us for a mo-
ment consider what that is. It is a secretion

1 Reign of Law. - London, 1867, p. 40.
7

ro]

98 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

of definite chemical properties with reference
not only — not even mainly — to the organism
of the animal in which it is developed, but
specially to another animal which it is in-
tended to destroy.” “How,” he asks, “ will
the law of growth adjust a poison in one ani-
mal with such subtle knowledge of the organi-
zation of the other, that the deadly virus shall
in a few minutes curdle the blood, benumb the
nerves, and rush in upon the citadel of life?
There is but one explanation: a Mind having
minute and perfect knowledge of the structure
of both has designed the one to be capable of
inflicting death upon the other. This mental
purpose and resolve is the one thing which our
intelligence perceives with direct and intuitive
recognition. The method of creation by which
this purpose has been carried into effect is ut-
terly unknown.” ! ,

A fourth objection has reference to beauty.
According to Mr. Darwin, flowers are not in-
tentionally made beautiful, but those which
happen to be beautiful attract insects, and by
their agency are fertilized and survive. Male
birds are not intentionally arrayed in bright
colors, but those which happen to be so ar-

1 Reign of Law. London, 1867, p. 37.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 99

rayed are attractive, and thus become the
progenitors of their race. Against this expla-
nation the Duke earnestly protests. He re-
fers to the gorgeous adorned class of Humming-
birds, of which naturalists enumerate no less
than four hundred and thirty different species,
distinguished one from the other, in general,
only by their plumage. “Now,” he asks,
“ what explanation does the law of natural se-
lection give, —I will not say of the origin, but
even of the continuance of such specific vari-
eties as these? None whatever. A crest of
topaz is no better in the struggle of existence
than a crest of sapphire. A frill ending in
spangles of the emerald is no better in the
battle of life than a frill ending in spangles
of the ruby. A tail is not affected for the pur-
poses of flight, whether its marginal, or its
central feathers are decorated with white. It
is impossible to bring such varieties into any
physical law known to us. It has relation
however to a Purpose, which stands in close
analogy with our knowledge of purpose in
the works of men. Mere beauty and mere
variety, for their own sake, are objects which
we ourselves seek, when we can make the
forces of nature subordinate to the attain-

100 ‘WHAT IS DARWINISM?

ment of them. There seems to be no conceiv-
able reason why we should doubt or question
that these are ends and aims also in the forms
given to living organisms, when the facts cor-
respond with this view and with no other.” ?

It will be observed that all these objections
have reference to the denial of teleology on the
part of Mr. Darwin. If his theory admitted
that the organisms in nature were due to a
divine purpose, the objections would be void of
all meaning.

There is a fifth objection. According to
Darwin’s theory organs are formed by the
slow accumulation of unintended variations,
which happen to be favorable to the subject
of them in the struggle for life. But in many
cases these organs, instead of being favorable,
are injurious or cumbersome until fully devel-
oped. Take the wing of a bird, for example.
Tn its rudimental state, it is useful neither for
swimming, walking, nor flying. Now, as Dar-
win says it took millions of years to bring the
eye to perfection, how long did it take to ren-
der a rudimental wing useful? It is no suffi-
cient answer to say that these rudimental or-
gans might have been suited to the condition

\ Reign of Law, pp. 247, 248.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 101

in which the animal existed, during the forma-
tive process. This is perfectly arbitrary. It
has no basis of fact. There are but three
kinds of locomotion that we know of: in the
water, on the ground, and through the air;
for all these purposes a half-formed wing would
be an impediment.

The Duke devotes almost a whole chapter
of his interesting book to the consideration
of “ contrivance in the machinery for flight.”
The conditions to secure regulated movement
through the atmosphere are so numerous, so
complicated, and so conflicting, that the prob-
lem never has been solved by human in-
genuity. In the structure of the bird it is
solved to perfection. As we are not writing
a teleological argument, but only producing
evidence that Darwinism excludes teleology,
we cannot follow the details which prove that
the wing of the gannet or swift is almost as
wonderful and beautiful a specimen of contriv-
ance as the eye of the eagle.

Agassiz.

Every one knows that the illustrious Agassiz,
over whose recent grave the world stands
weeping, was from the beginning a pronounced-

102 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

and earnest opponent of Mr. Darwin’s theory.
He wrote as a naturalist, and therefore his_ob-
jections._are principally directed against the

only destitute of any scientific basis, but as
subversive of the best “establishedfacts i in
zodlogy. Nevertheless it is evident that his
zeal was greatly intensified by his apprehen-
sion that a theory which obliterates all evi-
dence of the being of God from the works of
nature, endangered faith in that great doctrine
itself. The Rev. Dr. Peabody, in the discourse
delivered on the occasion of Professor Agassiz’s
funeral, said: “I cannot close this hasty and
inadequate, yet fervent and hearty tribute,
without recalling to your memory the reverent
spirit in which he pursued his scientific labors.
Nearly forty years ago, in his first great work
on fossil fishes, in developing principles of
classification, he wrote in quotations, ‘An in-
visible thread in all ages runs through this‘im-
mense diversity, exhibiting as a general result
that there is a continual progress in develop-
ment ending in man, the four classes of verte-
brates presenting the intermediate steps, and
the invertebrates the constant accessory ac-
companiment. Have we not here the mani-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 103

festation of a mind as powerful as prolific? an
act of intelligence as sublime as provident?
the marks of goodness as infinite as wise? the
most palpable demonstration of the existence
of a personal God, author of all this; ruler
of the universe, and the dispenser of all good ?
This at least is what I read in the works of
creation.” And it was what he ever read, and
with profound awe and adoration. To this ex-
alted faith he was inflexibly loyal. The laws
of nature were to him the eternal Word of
God.

“His repugnance to Darwinism grew in
great part from his apprehension of its atheis-
tical tendency, — an apprehension which I con-
fess I cannot share; for I forget not that these
theories, now in the ascendent, are maintained
by not a few devout Christian men, and while
they appear to me unproved and incapable of
demonstration, I could admit them without
parting with one iota of my faith in God and
Christ. Yet I cannot but sympathize most
strongly with him in the spirit in which he
resisted what seemed to him lese-majesty
against the sovereign of the universe. Nor
was his a theoretical faith. His whole life, in
its broad philanthropy, in its pervading spirit

104 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

of service, in its fidelity to arduous trusts and
duties, and in its simplicity and truthfulness,
bespoke one who was consciously fulfilling a
mission from God to his fellow-men.”

The words “evolution” and “ Darwinism ”
are so often in this country, but not in Europe,
used interchangeably, that it is conceivable
that Dr. Peabody could retain his faith in God,
and yet admit the doctrine of evolution. But
it is not conceivable that any man should adopt
the main element of Mr. Darwin’s theory, viz.,
the denial of all final causes, and the assertion,
that since the first creation of matter and life,
God has left the universe to the control of un-
intelligent physical causes, so that all the phe-
nomena of the plants and animals, all that is in
man, and all that has ever happened on the
earth, is due to physical force, and yet retain
his faith in Christ. On that theory, there have
been no supernatural revelation, no miracles ;
Christ is not risen, and we are yet in our sins.
It is not thus that this matter is regarded
abroad. The Christians of Germany say that
the only alternative these theories leave us,
is Heathenism or Christianity ; ‘‘ Heidenthum
oder Christenthum, Die Frage der Zeit.’

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 105

Janet.

Janet, a professor of philosophy, is the au-
thor of a book on the Materialism of Biichner.'
The greater part of the last chapter of his
work is devoted to Darwinism. He says, “ Dr.
Biichner invoked (Darwin’s book) as a striking
confirmation of his doctrine.” (p.154) What
Biichner’s doctrine is has been shown on a
previous page. The points of coincidence be-
tween Darwin’s system and his are, that both
regard mind as a mere function of living mat-
ter ; and both refer all the organs and organ-
isms of living things to the unconscious, unin-
telligent operation of physical causes. Biich-
ner’s way of accounting for complicated organs
was, “that the energy of the elements and
forces of matter, which in their fated and acci-
dental occurrence must have produced innu-
merable forms, which must needs limit each
other mutually, and correspond, apparently,
the one with the other, as if they were made
for that purpose. Out of all those forms, they

1 The Materialism of the Present Day: a Critique of Dr.
Biichner’s System. By Paul Janet, Member of the Institute of
France, Professor of Philosophy at the Paris Faculté des Let-

tres. Translated from the French, by Gustave Masson, B. 4
London and Paris, 1867.

106 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

only have survived which were adapted, -in
some manner, to the conditions of the medium
in which they were placed.” (p. 30) This is
very clumsy. No wonder Biichner preferred
Darwin’s method. The two systems are, in-
deed, exactly the same, but Mr. Darwin has a
much more winning way of presenting it.

Professor Janet does not seem to have much
objection to the doctrine of evolution in itself;
it is the denial of teleology that he regards as
the fatal element of Mr. Darwin’s theory. “Ac-
cording to us,” he says, “the true stumbling-
block of Mr. Darwin’s theory, the perilous and
slippery point, is the passage from artificial to
natural selection ; it is when he wants to estab-
lish that a blind and designless nature has been
able to obtain, by the occurrence of circum-
stances, the same results which man obtains by
thoughtful and well calculated industry.” (p.
174)

Towards the end of his volume he says:
“ We shall conclude by a general observation.
Notwithstanding the numerous objections we
have raised against Mr. Darwin’s theory, we do
not declare ourselves hostile to a system of
which zodlogists are the only competent judges.
We are neither for nor against the transmu-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 107

tation of species, neither for nor against the
principle ofnatural selection. The only positive
conclusion of our debate is this: no principle
hitherto known, neither the action of media,
nor habit, nor natural selection, can account
for organic adaptations without the interven-
tion of the principle of finality. Natural selec-
tion, unguided, submitted to the laws of a pure
mechanism, and exclusively determined by ac-
cidents, seems to me, under another name,
the chance proclaimed by Epicurus, equally
barren, equally incomprehensible ; on the other
hand, natural selection guided beforehand by a
provident will, directed towards a precise end
by intentional laws, might be the means which
nature has selected to pass from one stage of
being to another, from one form to another, to
bring to perfection life throughout the universe,
and to rise by a continuous process from the
monad to man. Now, I ask Mr. Darwin him-
self, what interest has he in maintaining that
natural selection is not guided — not directed ?
What interest has he in substituting accidental
causes for every final cause? I cannot see.
Let him admit that in natural, as well as in
artificial selection, there may be a choice and
direction; his principle immediately becomes

108 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

much more fruitful than it was before. His
hypothesis, then, whilst having the advantage
of exempting science from the necessity of
introducing the personal and miraculous inter-
vention of God in the creation of each species,
yet would be free from the banishing out of
the universe an all-provident thought, and
of submitting everything to blind and brute
chance.” (pp. 198, 199) Professor Janet asks
far too much of Mr. Darwin. To ask him to
give up his denial of final causes is like asking
the Romanists to give up the Pope. That prin-
ciple is the life and soul of his system.

M. Flourens.

M. Flourens, recently dead, was one of the
earliest and most pronounced opponents of
Darwinism. He published in 1864 his “ Exa-
men du Livre de M. Darwin sur l’Origine des
Espéces.”” His position as Member of the
Académie Frangaise, and Perpetual Secretary
of the Académie des Sciences, or Institut de
France, vouch for his high rank among the
French naturalists. His connection with the
Jardin des Plantes gave him enlarged oppor-
tunities for biological experiments. The result
of his own experience, as well as the expe-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 109

rience of other observers, was, as he expresses
it, his solemn conviction that species are fixed
and not transmutable. No ingenuity of device
could render hybrids fertile. ‘They never es-
tablish an intermediate species.” It is, there-
fore, to the doctrine of evolution his attention
is principally directed. Nevertheless, he is
no less struck by Darwin’s way of excluding
all intelligence and design in his manner of
speaking of nature. On this point he quotes
the language of Cuvier, who says: “ Nature
has been personified. Living beings have
been called the works of nature. The general
bearing of these creatures to each other has
become the laws of nature. It is thus while
considering Nature as a being endowed with
intelligence and will, but in its power limited
and secondary, that it may be said that she
watches incessantly over the maintenance of
her work ; that she does nothing in vain, and
always acts by the most simple means..... It
is easy to see how puerile are those who give
nature a species of individual existence distinct
from the Creator, and from the law which He
has impressed upon the movements. and pecul-
iarities of the forms given by Him to living
things, and which He makes to act upon their

110 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

bodies with a peculiar force and reason.” Older
writers, says Flourens, in speaking of Nature,
“ gave to her inclinations, intentions, and views,
and horrors (of a vacuum), and sports,” ete.
He says that one of the principal objects of his
book is to show how Mr. Darwin “ has deluded
himself, and perhaps others, by a constant
abuse of figurative language.” “ He plays with
Nature as he pleases, and makes her do what-
soever he wishes.” When we remember that
Mr. Darwin defines Nature to be the aggregate
of physical forces, we see how, in attributing
everything to Nature, he effectually excludes
the supernatural.

In his volume of “Lay Sermons, Reviews,”
etc., Professor Huxley has a very severe critique
on M. Flourens’s book. He says little, however,
in reference to teleology, except in one para-
graph, in which we read: “ M. Flourens cannot
imagine an unconscious selection ; it is for him
a contradiction in terms.” Huxley’s answer
is, “The winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay
have not much consciousness, and yet they have
with great care ‘selected,’ from an infinity of
masses of silex, all grains of sand below a cer-
tain size and have heaped them by themselves
over a great area..... A frosty night selects

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 111

the hardy plants in a plantation from among
the tender ones as effectually as if the intelli-
gence of the gardener had been operative in
cutting the weaker ones down.” If this means
anything, it means that as the winds and waves
of the Bay of Biscay can make heaps of sand,
so similar unconscious agencies can, if you only
give them time enough, make an elephant or
aman; for this is what Mr. Darwin says nat-
ural selection has done.

Rev. Walter Mitchell, M. A., Vice-President of
the Victoria Institute.

The Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Soci-
ety of Great Britain, under the presidency of
the Earl of Shaftesbury, includes among its
members many of the dignitaries of the Church
of England, and a large number of distin-
guished men of different professions and de-
nominations. Its principal object is, “To
investigate fully and impartially the most im-
portant questions of philosophy and science,
but more especially those that bear on the
great truths revealed in Holy Scripture, with
the view of defending these truths against the
opposition of Science, falsely so called.” The

1 Lay Sermons, p- 347.

112 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Institute holds bi-monthly meetings, at which
papers are read on some important topic, and
then submitted to criticism and discussion.
These papers, many of which are very elabo-
rate, are published in the Transactions of the
Institute, together with a full report of the dis-
cussions to which they gave rise. Six volumes,
replete with valuable and varied information,
have already been published.

Very considerable latitude of opinion is al-
lowed. Hence we find in the Transactions,
papers for and against evolution, —for and
against Darwinism. It would be easy to quote
extracts, pertinent to our subject, more than
enough to fill a volume much larger than the
present. We must content ourselves with a
few citations from the discussion on a paper
in favor of the credibility of Darwinism,’ and
another in favor of the doctrine of evolution.’
In summing up the debates on these two topics,
the chairman, Rev. Walter Mitchell, presented
with great clearness and force his reasons for
regarding Darwinism as incredible and impos-
sible. In his protracted remarks he contrasts

1 The Credibility af Darwinism. By George Warington, Esq.,
F.C. 8, M.V. 1

2 On certain Analogies between the Methods of Deity in Nature
and Revelation. By Rev. G. E. Henslow, M. A., F.L. S., M.
V.1.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 113

the Scriptural doctrine, that of the Vestiges of
Creation, and that of Darwin on the origin of
species. He thus states the doctrine of the
Bible on the subject: “If,” he says, “ science
be another name for real knowledge; if science
be the pursuit of sound wisdom ; if science be
the pursuit of truth itself; I say that man has
no right to reject anything that is true be-
cause it savors of God. Well, what is this
hypothesis — older than that of Darwin —
which does, and does alone, account for all the
observed facts, or all that which we can read,
recorded in the book of Nature? It is, that
God created all things very good; that He
made every vegetable after its own kind; that
He made every animal after its own kind;
that He allowed certain laws of variation, but
that He has ordained strict, though invisible
and invincible barriers, which prevent that va-
riation from running riot, and which includes
it within strict and well defined limits. This
is a hypothesis which will account for all that
we have learnt from the works of Nature. It
admits an intelligent Being as the Author of all
the works of creation, animate as well as in-
animate ; it leaves no mysteries in the animate

world unaccounted for. There is one thing
8

114 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

which the animate, as well as the inanimate
world declares to man, one thing everywhere
plainly recorded, if we will only read it, and
that is the impress of design, the design of in-
finite wisdom. Any theory which comes in
with an attempt to ignore design as manifested
in God’s creation, is a theory, I say, which at-
tempts to dethrone God. This the theory of
Darwin does endeavor to do. If asked how
our old theory accounts for such uniformity of
design in the midst of such perplexing variety
as we find in nature, we reply, that this can
only be accounted for on one admission, that
the whole is the work of one Author, built
according, as it were, to one style; that it
represents the unity of one mind with the in-
finite power of adapting all its works in the
most perfect manner for the uses for which
they were created.” “Whewell has boldly
maintained, and he has never been contro-
verted, that all real advances in the sciences
of physiology and comparative anatomy, —
such as that made by Harvey in discovering
the circulation of the blood, — have been made
by those who not only believed in the existence
of design everywhere manifested in the ani-
mate world, but were led by that belief to
make their discoveries.”

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 115

When discussing the paper of Mr. Henslow
on evolution, he says: “In speaking of this
paper I must commend the exceeding reverent
tone in which the author has discussed the sub-
ject, and I should like to see all such subjects
discussed in a similar tone. The view which
Mr. Henslow brings forward, however, does
not appear to be a very original one. It was
the first view ever brought forward on the
doctrine of evolution, and I was the first one
to point out that the whole doctrine was one
of retrograde character. The whole tone and
character of this paper, except that which re-
lates to the attributes and moral government
of God,' is nothing more or less than the same
view of the doctrine of evolution which created
such a sensation in this country when that
famous book came out, ‘The Vestiges of Crea-
tion.” So far as I can understand the argu-
ments of Mr. Darwin, they have simply been
an endeavor to eject out of the idea of evolu-
tion the personal work of the Deity. His
whole endeavor has been to push the Creator
farther and farther back out of view. The

1 The second part of Mr. Henslow’s paper concerns ‘the
methods of the Deity as revealed to us in the Bible.” The

same is substantially true of his work, The Theory of Evolu-
tion.

116 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

most laborious part of Darwin’s attempt at rea-
soning, —for it is not true reasoning, — the
most laborious part of his logic and reasoning,
is intended to eliminate, as perfectly as any of
the atheistical authors have endeavored to do,
the idea of design. Now, setting revelation
aside, the manner in which the unknown
author of the ‘ Vestiges of Creation’ treated
this subject, satisfactorily showed that the doc-
trine of evolution was not in itself an atheistical
doctrine, nor did it deny the existence of de-
sign. So faras I could understand and make
out, having carefully read the book at the time
it came out and afterwards, and having care-
fully analyzed and compared it and Mr. Dar-
win’s book with each other, so far asI could
understand it, the doctrine of the author of
the ‘Vestiges of Creation’ was simply, that
God created all things, and that when He
created matter He impressed on it certain
laws; that matter, being evolved according to
those laws, should produce beings and organs
mutually adapted to one another and to the
world; and that every successive development
which should be produced was essentially fore-
seen, foreknown, and predetermined by the
Deity. His idea, for instance, of the evolution

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 117

of an eye from a more simple organ was that
the ultimate eye — man’s eye, for instance —
was to be a perfect optical instrument, and
that its perfection depended on the previous
design by the Creator, that at a certain period
it should appear in a body quite adapted for
its purposes. There is one question, — and not
the only one, but we must consider it as an
important question, — whether you can main-
tain a doctrine of evolution which shall not be
atheistical, and which shall admit the great ar-
gument of design? That is one thing; but the
next thing is, does such a doctrine as that ac-
cord either with revelation or with the facts of
science? I do not believe that it can be made
to agree with what we believe to be the re-
vealed Word of God, and I do not believe that
it has in the least degree been proved that the
doctrine is consistent with sound science.”

As to Mr. Darwin’s theory, it is obvious
from the passages already quoted that he con-
siders its characteristic feature is not evolution,
nor even natural selection, but the denial of
teleology, or of intelligent control. Mr. Dar-
win admits the original creation of one or a
few forms of life ; and Mr. Mitchell, in his com-
ments on Mr. Warington’s defence of his theory,

118 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

asks, “‘ Why am I to limit the work of the Cre-
ator to the simultaneous or successive creations
of ten or twelve commencements of the ani-
mate creation? Why, simply for the purpose
of evading the evidence of design as manifested
in the adaptation of all the organs of every
animate creature to its wants, which can only
be done by so incredible an hypothesis as
that of Mr. Darwin. I say fearlessly, that any
hypothesis which requires us to admit that the
formation of such complex organs as the eye,
the ear, the heart, the brain, with all their
marvellous structures and mechanical adapta-
tions to the wants of the creatures possessing
them, so perfectly in harmony, too, with the
laws of inorganic matter, affords no evidence
of design ; that such structures could be built
up by gradual chance improvements, perpetu-
ated by the law of transmission, and perfected
by the destruction of creatures less favorably
endowed, is so incredible, that I marvel to find
any thinking man capable of adopting it for a
single moment.” It is useless to multiply quo-
tations. Darwinism is never brought up either
formally or incidentally, that its exclusion of
design in the formation of living organisms
is not urged as the main objection against the
whole theory.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 119

Principal Dawson.

Dr. Dawson, as we are informed, is re-
garded as the first paleontologist, and among
the first geologists, in America. In his “Story
of Earth and Man,”' he passes in review the
several geological periods recognized by geolo-
gists ; describes as far as knowable the distri-
bution of land and water during each period,
and the vegetable and animal productions by
which they were distinguished. His book from
beginning to end is anti-Darwinian. In com-
mon with other naturalists, his attention is
directed principally to the doctrine of evolu-
tion, which he endeavors to prove is utterly un-
tenable. That Mr. Darwin’s theory excludes
teleology is everywhere assumed as an uncon-
troverted and uncontrovertible fact. “ The
evolutionist doctrine,” he says, “is itself one
of the strangest phenomena of humanity. It
existed, and most naturally, in the oldest
philosophy and poetry, in connection with the
crudest and most uncritical attempts of the

1 The Story of Earth and Man. By J. W. Dawson, LL. D.,
F. BR. S., F. G. S., Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill
University, Montreal. Author of Archaia, Acadian Geology, etc.
Second edition. London, 1873, pp. 397.

120 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

human mind to grasp the system of nature;
but that in our day a system destitute of any
shadow of proof, and supported merely by
vague analogies and figures of speech, and by
the arbitrary and artificial coherence of its own
parts, should be accepted as philosophy, and
should find able adherents to string on its
thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty
stores of knowledge, is surpassingly strange.
. . . . In many respects these speculations are
important, and worthy the attention of think-
ing men. They seek to revolutionize the re-
ligious belief of the world, and if accepted
would destroy most of the existing theology
and philosophy. They indicate tendencies
among scientific thinkers, which, though prob-
ably temporary, must, before they disappear,
descend to lower strata, and reproduce them-
selves in grosser forms, and with most serious
effects on the whole structure of society. With
one class of minds they constitute a sort of
religion, which so far satisfies the craving for
truth higher than those which relate to imme-
diate wants and pleasures. With another and
perhaps larger class, they are accepted as af-
fording a welcome deliverance from all scruples
of conscience and fears of a hereafter. .In the

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 121

domain of science evolutionism has like ten-
dencies. It reduces the position of man, who
becomes a descendant of inferior animals, and
a mere term in a series whose end is unknown.
It removes from the study of nature the ideas
,of final cause and purpose; and the evolution-
ist, instead of regarding the world as a work
of consummate plan, skill, and adjustment, ap-
proaches nature as he would a chaos of fallen
rocks, which may present forms of castles, and
grotesque profiles of men and animals, but
they are all fortuitous and without signifi-
cance.” (pp. 317, 318)

“Taking, then, this broad view of the subject,
two great leading alternatives are presented
to us. Either man is an independent product
of the will of a Higher Intelligence, acting
directly or through the laws and materials of
his own institution and production, or he has
been produced by an unconscious evolution
from lower things. It is true that many evo-
lutionists, either unwilling to offend, or not
perceiving the logical consequences of their
own hypothesis, endeavor to steer a middle
course, and to maintain that the Creator has
proceeded by way of evolution. But the bare,
hard logic of Spencer, the greatest English

122 WHAT 1S DARWINISM?

authority on evolution, leaves no place for
this compromise, and shows that the theory,
carried out to its legitimate consequences, ex-
cludes the knowledge of a Creator and the
possibility of his work. We have, therefore,
to choose between evolution and creation,
bearing in mind, however, that there may be
a place in nature for evolution, properly lim-
ited, as well as for other things, and that the
idea of creation by no means excludes law and
second causes.” (p. 321)

“Tt may be said, that evolution may be held
as a scientific doctrine in connection with a
modified belief in creation. The work of act-
ual creation may have been limited to a few
elementary types, and evolution may have
done the rest. Evolutionists may still be the-
ists. We have already seen that the doctrine,
as carried out to its logical consequences, ex-
cludes creation and theism. It may, however,
be shown that even in its more modified form,
and when held by men who maintain that they
are not atheists, it is practically atheistic, be-
cause excluding the idea of plan and design,
and resolving all things into the action of un-
intelligent forces. It is necessary to observe
this, because it is the half-way-evolutionism,

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 133

which professes to have a creator somewhere
behind it, that is most popular; though it is,
if possible, more unphilosophical than that
which professes to set out with absolute and
determined nonentity, or from self-existing star-
dust containing all the possibilities of the uni-
verse.”

In reference to the objection of evolutionists,
that the origin of every new species, on the
theistic doctrine, supposes “a miracle,” an in-
tervention of the divine efficiency without the
agency of second causes, Principal Dawson
asks, ‘What is the actual statement of the
theory of creation as it may be held by a mod-
ern man of science? Simply this: that all
things have been produced by the. Supreme
Creative will, acting either directly, or through
the agency of the forces and material of his
own production.” (p. 340)

He thus sums up his argument against the
doctrine of evolution, specially in its applica-
tion to man: “ Finally, the evolutionist picture
wants some of the fairest lineaments of human-
ity, and cheats us with the semblance of man
without the reality. Shave and paint your
ape as you may, clothe him and set him up
upon his feet, still he fails greatly of the ‘hu-

124 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

man form divine ;’ and so it is with him mor-
ally and spiritually as well. We have seen
that he wants the instinct of immortality, the
love of God, the mental and spiritual power of
exercising dominion over the earth. The very
agency by which he is evolved is of itself sub-
versive of all these higher properties; the
struggle for existence is essentially selfish, and,
therefore, degrading. Even in the lower ani-
mals, it is a false assumption that its tendency
is to elevate ; for animals, when driven to the
utmost verge of the struggle for life, become
depauperated and degraded. The dog which
spends its life in snarling contention with its
fellow curs for insufficient food, will not be a
noble specimen of its race. God does not so
treat his creatures. There is far more truth
to nature in the doctrine which represents Him
as listening to the young ravens when they cry
for food. But as applied to man, the theory
of the struggle for existence, and survival of
the fittest, though the most popular phase of
evolutionism at present, is nothing less than
the basest and most horrible of superstitions.
It makes man not merely carnal but devilish.
It takes his lowest appetites and propensities,
and makes them his God and Creator. His

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 125

higher sentiments and aspirations, his self-
denying philanthropy, his enthusiasm for the
good and true, all the struggles and sufferings
of heroes and martyrs, not to speak of that
self-sacrifice which is the foundation of Chris-
tianity, are, in the view of the evolutionist,
mere loss and waste, failure in the struggle of
life. What does he give us in exchange? An
endless pedigree of bestial ancestors, without
one gleam of high and holy tradition to enliven
the. procession ; and for the future, the pros-
pect that the poor mass of protoplasm, which
constitutes the sum of our being, and which is
the sole gain of an indefinite struggle in the
past, must soon be resolved again into -inferior
animals or dead matter. That men of thought
and culture should advocate such a philosophy,
argues either a strange mental hallucination,
or that the higher spiritual nature has been
wholly quenched within them. It is one of
the saddest of many sad spectacles which our
age presents.” (p. 395)

Relation of Darwinism to Religion.
The consideration of that subject would lead
into the wide field of the relation between sci-
ence and religion. Into that field we lack com-

126 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

petency and time to enter; a few remarks, how-
ever, on the subject may not be out of place.
Those remarks, we would fain make in a
humble way irenical. There is need of an
Trenicum, for the fact is painfully notorious
that there is an antagonism between scientific
men as a class, and religious men as a class.
Of course this opposition is neither felt nor ex-
pressed by all on either side. Nevertheless,
whatever may be the cause of this antagonism,
or whoever are to be blamed for it, there can
be no doubt that it exists and that it is an
evil.

The first cause of the alienation in question
is, that the two parties, so to speak, adopt dif-
ferent rules of evidence, and thus can hardly
avoid arriving at different conclusions. To un-
derstand this we must determine what is meant
by science, and by scientific evidence. Sci-
ence, according to its etymology, is simply
knowledge. But usage has limited its mean-
ing, in the first place, not to the knowledge of
facts or phenomena, merely, but to their causes
‘and relations. It was said of old, “6éz7u scientise
fundamentum, dott fastigium.”” No amount of
materials would constitute a building. They
must be duly arranged so as to make a sym-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 127

metrical whole. No amount of disconnected
data can constitute a science. Those data must
be systematized in their relation to each other
and to other things. In the second place, the
word is becoming more and more restricted to
the knowledge of a particular class of facts, and
of their relations, namely, the facts of nature
or of the external world. This usage is not
universal, nor is it fixed. In Germany, espec-
ially, the word Wissenschaft is used of all kinds
of ordered knowledge, whether transcendental
or empirical. So we are accustomed to speak
of mental, moral, social, as well as of natural
science. Nevertheless, the more restricted use
of the word is very common and very influ-
ential. It is important that this fact should
be recognized. In common usage, a scientific
man is distinguished specially from a metaphy-
sician. The one investigates the phenomena
of matter, the other studies the phenomena of
mind, according to the old distinction between
physics and metaphysics. Science, therefore,
is the ordered knowledge of the phenomena
which we recognize through the senses. A
scientific fact is a fact perceived by the senses.
Scientific evidence is evidence addressed to the
senses. At one of the meetings of the Victoria

128 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Institute, a visitor avowed his disbelief in the
existence of God. When asked, what kind of
evidence would satisfy him? he answered, Just
such evidence as I have of the existence of
this tumbler which I now hold in my hand.
The Rev. Mr. Henslow says, “By science is
meant the investigation of facts and phenomena
recognizable by the senses, and of the causes
which have brought them into existence.” ?
This is the main root of the trouble. If science
be the knowledge of the facts perceived by the
senses, and scientific evidence, evidence ad-
dressed to the senses, then the senses are the
only sources of knowledge. Any conviction
resting on any other ground than the testi-
mony of the senses, must be faith. Darwin ad-
mits that the contrivances in nature may be ac-
counted for by assuming that they are due to
design on the part of God. But, he says, that
would not be science. Haeckel says that to
science matter is eternal. If any man chooses
to say, it was created, well and good; but that
is a matter of faith, and faith is imagination.
Ulrici quotes a distinguished German physiolo-

1 Science and Scripture not Antagonistic, because Distinct in
their Spheres of Thought. A Lecture, by Rev. George Henslow,
M. A., F.L.S., F.G.S. London, 1878, p. 1.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 129

gist who believes in vital, as distinguished
from physical forces; but he holds to sponta-
neous generation, not, as he admits, because it
has been proved, but because the admission of
any higher power than nature is unscientific.’
It is inevitable that minds addicted to scien-
tific investigation should receive a strong bias
to undervalue any other kind of evidence ex-
cept that of the senses, 7. ¢., scientific evidence.
We have seen that those who give themselves
up to this tendency come to deny God, to
deny mind, to deny even self. It is true that
the great majority of men, scientific as well as
others, are so much under the control of the
laws of their nature, that they cannot go to
this extreme. The tendency, however, of a
mind addicted to the consideration of one kind
of evidence, to become more or less insensible
to other kinds of proof, is undeniable. Thus
even Agassiz, as a zodlogist and simply on
zoological grounds, assumed that there were
several zones between the Ganges and the At-
lantic Ocean, each having its own flora and
fauna, and inhabited by races of men, the same
in kind, but of different origins. When told
by the comparative philologists that this was

1 Gott und Natur, p. 200.
9

130 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

impossible, because the languages spoken
through that wide region, demonstrated that
its inhabitants must have had a common de-
scent, he could only answer that as ducks
quack everywhere, he could not see why men
should not everywhere speak the same lan-
guage.

A still more striking illustration is furnished
by Dr. Lionel Beale, the distinguished English
physiologist. He has written a book of three
hundred and eighty-eight pages for the express
purpose of proving that the phenomena of life,
instinct, and intellect cannot be referred to any
known natural forces. He avows his belief that
in nature “ mind governs matter,” and “in the
existence ofa never-changing, all-seeing, power-
directing and matter-guiding Omnipotence.”
He avows his faith in miracles, and “ those mir-
acles on which Christianity is founded.” Nev-
ertheless, his faith in all these points is provi-
sional. He says that a truly scientific man, “ if
the maintenance, continuity, and nature of life
on our planet should at some future time be
fully explained without supposing the existence
of any such supernatural omnipotent influence,
would be bound to receive the new explana-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 131

tion, and might abandon the old conviction.” ?

That is, all evidence of the truths of religion
not founded on nature and perceived by the
senses, amounts to nothing.

Now as religion does not rest on the testi-
mony of the senses, that is on scientific evi-
dence, the tendency of scientific men is to
ignore its claims. We speak only of tendency.
We rejoice to know or believe that in hundreds
or thousands of scientific men, this tendency is
counteracted by their consciousness of man-
hood — the conviction that the body is not the
man, —by the intuitions of the reason and
the conscience, and by the grace of God. No
class of men stands deservedly higher in public
estimation than men of science, who, while re-
maining faithful to their higher nature, have
enlarged our knowledge of the wonderful
works of God.

A second cause of the alienation between
science and religion, is the failure to make the
due distinction between facts and the explana-
tion of those facts, or the theories deduced
from them. No sound minded man disputes

1 Protoplasm; or, Matter and Life. By Lionel S. Beale, M.
B., F. R. S. Third edition. London & Philadelphia, 1874,
p- 845; and the whole chapter on Design.

132 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

any scientific fact. Religious men believe with
Agassiz that facts are sacred. They are reve-
lations from God. Christians sacrifice to them,
when duly authenticated, their most cherished
convictions. That the earth moves, no relig-
ious man doubts. When Galileo made that
great discovery, the Church was right in not
yielding at once to the evidence of an experi-
ment which it did not understand. But when
the fact was clearly established, no man sets
up his interpretation of the Bible in opposition
to it. Religious men admit all the facts con-
nected with our solar system ; all the facts of
geology, and of comparative anatomy, and of
biology. Ought not this to satisfy scientific
men? Must we also admit their explanations
and inferences? If we admit that the human
embryo passes through various phases, must
we admit that man was once a fish, then a bird,
then a dog, then an ape, and finally what he
now is? If we admit the similarity of struc-
ture in all vertebrates, must we admit the evo-
lution of one from another, and all from a
primordial germ? It is to be remembered
that the facts are from God, the explanation
from men ; and the two are often as far apart
as Heaven and its antipode.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 133

These human explanations are not only
without authority, but they are very mutable.
They change not only from generation to gen-
eration, but almost as often as the phases of
the moon. It is a fact that the planets move.
Once it was said that they were moved by
spirits, then by vortexes, now by self-evolved
forces. Itis hard that we should be called upon
to change our faith with every new moon. The
same man sometimes propounds theories almost
as rapidly as the changes of the kaleidoscope.
The amiable Sir Charles Lyell, England’s
most distinguished geologist, has published
ten editions of his “ Principles of Geology,”
which so differ as to make it hard to believe
that it is the work of the same mind. “ In all
the editions up to the tenth, he looked upon
geological facts and geological phenomena as
proving the fixity of species and their special
creation in time. In the tenth edition, just
published, he announces his change of opinion
on this subject and his conversion to the doc-
trine of development by law.”? “Inthe eighth
edition of his work,’ says Dr. Bree, “Sir
Charles Lyell, the Nestor of geologists, to

1 Fallacies in the Hypothesis of Mr. Darwin, by C. R. Bree,
M.D., F. Z. 8. London, 1872, p. 290. %

134 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

whom the present generation is more indebted
than to any other for all that is known of geol-
ogy in its advanced stage, teaches that species
have a real existence in nature, and that each
was endowed at the time of its creation with
the attributes and organization by which it is
now distinguished.” The change on the part
of this eminent geologist, it is to be observed,
is a mere change of opinion. There was no
change of the facts of geology between the
publication of the eighth and of the tenth edi-
tion of his work, neither was there any change
in his knowledge of those facts. All the facts
relied upon by evolutionists, have long been
familiar to scientific men. The whole change
is a subjective one. One year the veteran
geologist thinks the facts teach one. thing,
another year he thinks they teach another.
It is now the fact, and it is feared it will con-
tinue to be a fact, that scientific men give
the name of science to their explanations as
well as to the facts. Nay, they are often, and
naturally, more zealous for their’ explanations
than they are for the facts. The facts are
God’s, the explanations are their own.

The third cause of the alienation between
religion and science, is the bearing of scientific

WHAT 1S DARWINISM? 135

men towards the men of culture who do not
belong to their own class. When we, in such
connections, speak of scientific men, we do not
mean men of science as such, but those only
who avow or manifest their hostility to relig-
ion. There is an assumption of superiority,
and often a manifestation of contempt. Those
who call their logic or their conjectures into
question, are stigmatized as narrow-minded,
bigots, old women, Bible worshippers, etc.
Professor Huxley’s advice to metaphysicians
and theologians is, to let science alone. This is
his Irenicum. But do he and his associates let
metaphysics and religion alone? They tell the
metaphysician that his vocation is gone ; there
is no such thing as mind, and of course no
mental laws to be established. Metaphysics
are merged into physics. Professor Huxley
tells the religious world that there is over-
whelming and crushing evidence (scientific
evidence, of course) that no event has ever
occurred on this earth which was not the effect
of natural causes. Hence there have been no
miracles, and Christ is not risen.’ He says that

1 When Professor Huxley says, as quoted above, that he does
not deny the possibility of miracles, he must use the word mir-
acle in a sense peculiar to himself.

136 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

the doctrine that belief in a personal God is
necessary to any religion worthy of the name,
is a mere matter of opinion. Tyndall, Carpen-
ter, and Henry Thompson, teach that prayer is
a superstitious absurdity ; Herbert Spencer,
whom they call their “ great, philosopher,”
i. €., the man who does their thinking, labors
to prove that there cannot be a personal God,
or human soul or self; that moral laws are mere
“ generalizations of utility,” or, as Carl Vogt
says, that self respect, and not the will of God,
is the ground and rule of moral obligation. If
any protest be made against such doctrines, we
are told that scientific truth cannot be put
down by denunciation (or as Vogt says, by
barking). So doubtless the Pharisees, when
our blessed Lord called them hypocrites and a
generation of vipers, and said: “ Ye compass
sea and land to make one proselyte ; and when
he is made, ye make him twofold more the
child of hell than yourselves,” doubtless
thought that that was a poor way to refute
their theory, that holiness and salvation were
to be secured by church-membership and
church-rites. Nevertheless, as those words
were the words of Christ, they were a thun-
derbolt which reverberates through all time and

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 137

space, and still makes Pharisees of every name
and nation tremble. Huxley’s Irenicum will
not do. Men who are assiduously poisoning
the fountains of religion, morality, and social
order, cannot be let alone.

Haeckel’s Irenicum amounts to much the
same as that of Professor Huxley. He forbids
the right to speak on these vital subjects, to all
who are not thoroughly versed in biology, and
who are not entirely emancipated from the
trammels of their long cherished traditional be-
liefs.1 This, as the whole context shows, means
that a man in order to be entitled to be heard
on the evolution theory, must be willing to re-
nounce his faith not only in the Bible, but in

1 Jenaer Literaturzettung, January 3, 1874. In this number
there is a notice by Doctor Haeckel of two books, — Descend-
enzlehre und Darwinismus, von Oscar Schmidt, Leipzig, 1873;
and Die Fortschritte des Darwinismus, von J. W. Spengel, Coln
and Leipzig, 1874 ; in which he says: “ Erstens, um in Sachen
der Descendenz-Theorie mitreden zu kénnen, ein gewisser Grad
von tieferer biologischer (sowohl morphologischer als physiolo-
gischer) Bildung unentbehrlich, den die meisten von jenen
Auctoren (the opposers of the theory) nicht besitzen. Zweitens
ist fiir ein klares und zutreffendes Urtheil in diesem Sachen
eine riicksichtslose Hingabe an vernunftgemisse Erkenntniss
und eine dadurch bedingte Resignation auf uralte, liebgewor-
dene und tief vererbte Vorurtheile erforderlich, zu welcher sich
die wenigsten entschliesen konnen.”

138 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

God, in the soul, in a future life, and become a
monistic materialist.’

It is very reasonable that scientific men,
in common with lawyers and physicians and
other professional men, should feel themselves
entitled to be heard with special deference on

1 In his Natiirlische Schépfungsgeschichte, Haeckel is still more
exclusive. When he comes to answer the objections to the evo-
lution, or, as he commonly calls it, the descendence theory, he
dismisses the objections derived from religion, as unworthy of
notice, with the remark that all Glaube ist Aberglaube; all faith
is superstition. The objections from a priori, or intuitive truths,
are disposed of in an equally summary manner, by denying that
there are any such truths, and asserting that all our knowledge
is from the senses. The objection that so many distinguished
naturalists reject the theory, he considers more at length. First,
many have grown old in another way of thinking and cannot be
expected to change. Second, many are collectors of facts,
without studying their relations, or are destitute of the genius for
generalization. No amount of material makes a building. Others,
again, are specialists. It is not enough that a man should be
versed in one department; he must be at home in all: in Botany,
Zodlogy, Comparative Anatomy, Biology, Geology, and Paleon-
tology. He must be able to survey the whole field. Fourthly,
and mainly, naturalists are generally lamentably deficient in
philosophical culture and in a philosophical spirit. ‘‘ The im-
movable edifice of the true, monistic science, or what is the same
thing, natural science, can only arise through the most intimate
interaction and mutual interpenetration of philosophy and obser-
vation (Philosophie und Empirie).’’? pp. 638-641. It is only
a select few, therefore, of learned and philosophical monistic
materialists, who are entitled to be heard on questions of the
highest moment to every individual man, and to human society.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 139

subjects belonging to their respective depart-
ments. This deference no one is disposed to
deny to men of science. But it is to be
remembered that no department of human
knowledge is isolated. One runs into and
overlaps another. We have abundant evidence
that the devotees of natural science are not
willing to confine themselves to the depart-
ment of nature, in the common sense of that
word. They not only speculate, but dogma-
tize, on the highest questions of philosophy,
morality, and religion. And further, admitting
the special claims to deference on the part of
scientific men, other men have their rights.
They have the right to judge of the consistency
of the assertions of men of science and of the
logic of their reasoning. They have the right to
set off the testimony of one or more experts
against the testimony of others; and espe-
cially, they have the right to reject all specu-
lations, hypotheses, and theories, which come
in conflict with well established truths. It is
ground of profound gratitude to God that He
has given to the human mind intuitions which
are infallible, laws of belief which men cannot
disregard any more than the laws of nature,
and also convictions produced by the Spirit of

140 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

God which no sophistry of man can weaken.
These are barriers which no man can pass with-
out plunging into the abyss of outer darkness.
If there be any truth in the preceding re-
marks, then it is obvious that there can be no
harmony between science and religion until
the evils referred to be removed. Scientific
men must come to recognize practically, and
not merely in words, that there are other kinds
of evidence of truth than the testimony of the
senses. They must come to give due weight
to the testimony of consciousness, and to the
intuitions of the reason and conscience. They
must cease to require the deference due to es-
tablished facts to be paid to their speculations
and explanations. And they must treat their
fellow-men with due respect. The Pharisees
said to the man whose sight had been restored
by Christ, “ Thou wast altogether born in sin,
and dost thou teach us!” Men of science
must not speak thus. They must not say to
every objector, Thou art not scientific, and
therefore hast no right to speak. The true
Irenicum is for all parties to give due heed to
such words as these, “If any man would be
wise, let him become a fool, that he may be

wise ;”’ or these, “ Be converted, and become

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 141

as little children;” or these, “The Spirit of
Truth shall guide you in all truth.” We are
willing to hear this called cant. Nevertheless,
these latter words fell from the lips of Him
who spake as never man spake.

So much, and it is very little, on the general
question of the relation of science to religion.
But what is to be thought of the special rela-
tion of Mr. Darwin’s theory to the truths of
natural and revealed religion? We have al-
ready seen that Darwinism includes the three
elements, evolution, natural selection, and the
denial of design in nature. These points, how-
ever, cannot now be considered separately.

It is conceded that a man may be an evolu-
tionist and yet not be an atheist and may admit
of design in nature. But we cannot see how
the theory of evolution can be reconciled with
the declarations of the Scriptures. Others may
see it, and be able to reconcile their allegiance
to science with their allegiance to the Bible.
Professor Huxley, as we have seen, pronounces
the thing impossible. As all error is antagonis-
tic to truth, if the evolution theory be false, it
must be opposed to the truths of religion so far
as the two come into contact. Mr. Henslow, in-
deed, says Science and Religion are not antag-

142 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

onistic because they are in different spheres of
thought. This is often said by men who do not
admit that there is any thought at all in relig-
ion; that it is merely a matter of feeling. The
fact, however, is that religion is a system of
knowledge, as well as a state of feeling. The
truths on which all religion is founded are
drawn within the domain of science, the nature
of the first cause, its relation to the world,
the nature of second causes, the origin of life,
anthropology, including the origin, nature, and
destiny of man. Religion has to fight for its
life against a large class of scientific men. All
attempts to prevent her exercising her right
to be heard are unreasonable and vain.

It should be premised that this paper was
written for the single purpose of answering
the question, What is Darwinism? The dis-
cussion of the merits of the theory was not
within the scope of the writer. What follows,
therefore, is to be considered only in the light
of a practical conclusion.

1. The first objection to the theory is its
prima facie incredibility. That a single plant
or animal should be developed from a mere cell,
is such a wonder, that nothing but daily obser-
vation of the fact could induce any man to be-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 143

lieve it. Let any one ask himself, suppose
this fact was not thus familiar, what amount
of speculation, of arguments from analogies,
possibilities, and probabilities, could avail to
produce conviction of its truth. But who can
believe that all the plants and animals which
have ever existed upon the face of the earth,
have been evolved from one such germ? This
is Darwin’s doctrine. We are aware that this
apparent impossibility is evaded by the be-
lievers in spontaneous generation, who hold
that such germ cells may be produced any-
where and at all times. But this is not Dar-
winism. Darwin wants us to believe that all
living things, from the lowly violet to the giant
redwoods of California, from the microscopic
animalcule to the Mastodon, the Dinotherium,
—monsters the very description of which fill us
with horror, — bats with wings twenty feet in
breadth, flying dragons, tortoises ten feet high
and eighteen feet long, etc., etc., came one and
all from the same primordial germ. This de-
mand is the more unreasonable when we re-
member that these living creatures are not
only so different, but are, as to plants and ani-
mals, directly opposed in their functions. The
function of the plant, as biologists express it, is

144 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

to produce force, that of the animal to expend
it. The plant, in virtue of a power peculiar to
itself, which no art or skill of man can imitate,
transmutes dead inorganic matter into organic
matter, suited to the sustenance of animal life,
and without which animals cannot live. The
gulf, therefore, between the plant and animal
would seem to be impassable.

Further, the variations by which the change
of species is effected are so trifling as often to
be imperceptible, and their accumulation of
them so slow as to evade notice, — the time
requisite to accomplish any marked change must
be counted by millions, or milliards of years.
Here is another demand on our credulity.
The apex is reached when we are told that all
these transmutations are effected by chance,
that is, without purpose or intention. Taking
all these things into consideration, we think it
may, with moderation, be said, that a more
absolutely incredible theory was never pro-
pounded for acceptance among men.

2. There is no pretence that the theory can
be proved. Mr. Darwin does not pretend to
prove it. He admits that all the facts in the
case can be accounted for on the assumption of
divine purpose and control. All that he claims

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 145

for his theory is that it is possible. His mode
of arguing is that if we suppose this and that,
then it may have happened thus and so.
Amiable and attractive as the man presents
himself in his writings, it rouses indignation, in
one class at least of his readers, to see him by
such a mode of arguing reaching conclusions
which are subversive of the fundamental truths
of religion.

3. Another fact cannot fail to attract atten-
tion. When the theory of evolution was pro-
pounded in 1844 in the “ Vestiges of Creation,”
it was universally rejected; when proposed by
Mr. Darwin, less than twenty years afterward, it
was received with acclamation. Why is this?
The facts are now what they were then. They
were as well known then as they are now. The
theory, so far as evolution is concerned, was
then just what it is now. How then is it, that
what was scientifically false in 1844 is scien-
tifically true in 1864? When a drama is in-
troduced in a theatre and universally con-
demned, and a little while afterward, with a
little change in the scenery, it is received with
rapturous applause, the natural conclusion is,
that the change is in the audience and not in

the drama.
10

146 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

There is only one cause for the fact referred
to, that we can think of. The “ Vestiges of Cre-
ation’ did not expressly or effectually exclude
design. Darwin does. This is a reason as-
signed by the most zealous advocates of his
theory for their adoption of it. This is the rea-
son given by Biichner, by Haeckel, and by
Vogt. It is assigned also in express terms by
Strauss, the announcement of whose death has
diffused a feeling of sadness over all who were
acquainted with his antecedents. In his last
work, “‘ The Old Faith and the New,” he admits
“that Darwin’s doctrine is a mere hypothesis ;
that it leaves the main points unexplained
(Die Hupt- und Cardinal-punkte noch unerklart
sind); nevertheless, as he has shown how
miracles may be excluded, he is to be ap-
plauded as one of the greatest benefactors of
the human race.” (p. 177) By “ Wunder,”
or miracle, Strauss means any event for which
natural causes are insufficient to account. ‘“ We
philosophers and critical theologians,” he says,
“have spoken well when we decreed the abo-
lition of miracles; but our decree (macht-
spruch) remained without effect, because we
could not show them to be unnecessary, inas-
much as we were unable to indicate any nat-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 147

ural force to take their place. Darwin has
provided or indicated this natural force, this
process of nature; he has opened the door
through which a happier posterity may eject
miracles forever.” Then follows the sentence
just quoted, “He who knows what hangs on
miracle, will applaud Darwin as one of the
greatest benefactors of the human race.” With
Strauss and others of his class, miracles and
design are identical, because one as well as
the other assumes supernatural agency. He
quotes Helmholtz, who says, ‘‘ Darwin’s theory,
that adaptation in the formation of organisms
may arise without the intervention of intelli-
gence, by the blind operation of natural law ;”
and then adds, “As Helmholtz distinguishes
the English naturalist as the man who has ban-
ished design from nature, so we have praised
him as the man who has done away with mir-
acles. Both mean the same thing.’ Design is
the miracle-worker in nature, which has put
the world upside down ; or as Spinoza says, has
placed the last first, the effect for the cause,
and thus destroyed the very idea of nature.

1 This short but significant sentence is omitted in the excel-
lent translation of Strauss’s book, by Mathilde Blind, republished
in New York, by Henry Holt & Company, 1873.

148 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Design in nature, especially in the department
of living organisms, has ever been appealed to
by those who desire to prove that the world is
not self-evolved, but the work of an intelligent
Creator.” (p. 211) On page 175, he refers to
those who ridicule Darwin, and yet are so far
under the influence of the spirit of the age as
to deny miracles or the intervention of the Cre-
ator in the course of nature, and says: “ Very
well; how do they account for the origin of
man, and in general the development of the
organic out of the inorganic? Would they as-
sume that the original man as such, no matter
how rough and unformed, but still a man,
sprang immediately out of the inorganic, out
of the sea or the slime of the Nile? They
would hardly venture to say that; then they
must know that there is only the choice be-
tween miracle, the divine hand of the Creator,
and Darwin.” What an alternative; the Cre-
ator or Darwin! In this, however, Strauss is
right. To banish design from nature, as is done
by Darwin’s theory, is, in the language of the
Rev. Walter Mitchell, virtually “to dethrone
the Creator.”

Ludwig Weis, M. D., of Darmstadt, says it
is at present “the mode” in Germany (and

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 149

of course in a measure here), to glorify Bud-
dhism. Strauss, he adds, says, “ Nature knows
itself in man, and in that he expresses the
thought which all Idealism and all Materialism
make the grand end. To the same effect it is
said, ‘In Man the All comprehends itself as
conscious being (comes to self-consciousness) ;
or, in Man the absolute knowledge (Wissen,
the act of knowing) appears in the limits of
personality.’ This was the doctrine of the
Buddhist and of the ancient Chinese.” Thus,
as Dr. Weis says, “in the nineteenth century
of the Christian era, philosophers and scientists
have reached the point where the Chinese were
two thousand years ago.”

The only way that is apparent for account-
ing for evolution being rejected in 1844, and
for its becoming a popular doctrine in 1866,
is, that it happens to suit a prevailing state of
mind. It is a fact, so far as our limited knowl-
edge extends, that no one is willing to acknowl-
edge himself, not simply an evolutionist, but
an evolutionist of the Darwinian school, who
is not either a Materialist by profession, or a
disciple of Herbert Spencer, or an advocate of
the philosophy of Hume.

There is another significant fact which goes

150 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

to prove that the denial of design, which is
the “creative idea” of Darwinism, is the main
cause of its popularity and success. Professor
Owen, England’s greatest naturalist, is a deri-
vationist. Derivation and evolution are con-
vertible terms. Both include the denial that
species are primordial, or have each a dif-
ferent origin; and both imply that one spe-
cies is formed out of another and simpler form.
Professor Owen, however, although a deriva-
tionist, or evolutionist, is a very strenuous anti-
Darwinian. He differs from Darwin as to two
points. First, as to Natural Selection, or the
Survival of the Fittest. He says that is in-
consistent with facts and utterly insufficient to
account for the origin of species. He refers
the origin of species to an inherent tendency
to change impressed on them from the begin-
ning. And second, he admits design. He
denies that the succession and origin of species
are due to chance, and expresses his belief
in the constant operation of creative power in
the formation of species from the varied de-
scendants of more generalized forms.’ He
believes “ that all living things have been pro-
duced by such law (of variation) in time, their

1 The Fallacies of Darwinism, by C. R. Bree, M. D., p. 308.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 151

position and uses in the world having been
preordained by the Creator.” * Professor Owen
says he has taught the doctrine of derivation
(evolution) for thirty years, but it attracted
Jittle attention. As soon, however, as Darwin
leaves out design, we have a prairie-fire. A
prairie-fire, happily, does not continue very
long; and while it lasts, it burns up little else
than stubble.

4, All the evidence we have in favor of
the fixedness of species is, of course, evidence
not only against Darwinism, but against evolu-
tion in all its forms. It would seem idle to dis-
cuss the question of the mutability of species,
until satisfied what species is. This, unhappily,
is a question which it is exceedingly difficult
to answer. Not only do the definitions given
by scientific men differ almost indefinitely,
but there is endless diversity in classification.
Think of four hundred and eighty species of
humming-birds. Haeckel says that one natu-
ralist makes ten, another forty, another two
hundred, and another one, species of a certain
fossil ; and we have just heard that Agassiz had
collected eight hundred species of the same
fossil animal. Haeckel also says (p. 246), that

1 The Fallacies of Darwinism, p. 305.

152 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

there are no two zodlogists or any two bot-
anists who agree altogether in their classifi-
cation. Mr. Darwin says, “No clear line of
demarcation has yet been drawn between spe-
cies and sub-species, and varieties.” (p. 61)
It is absolutely necessary, therefore, that a
distinction should be made between artificial
and natural species. No man asserts the int-
mutability of all those varieties of plants and
animals, which naturalists, for the convenience
of classification, may call distinct species.
Haeckel, for example, gives a list of twelve
species of man. So any one may make fifty
species of dogs, or of horses. This is a mere
artificial distinction, which amounts to noth-
ing. There is far greater difference between a
pouter and a carrier pigeon, than between a
Caucasian and a Mongolian. To call the for-
mer varieties of the same species, and the
latter distinct species, is altogether arbitrary.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the arbitrary
classifications of naturalists, it remains true
that there are what Professor Dana calls
“units” of the organic world. “ When in-
dividuals multiply from generation to genera-
tion, it is but a repetition of the primordial
type-idea, and the true notion of the species is

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 153

not in the resulting group, but in the idea or
potential element which is the basis of every
individual of the group.”? Dr. Morton’s defi-
nition of species as “ primordial organic forms,”
agrees with that given by Professor Dana; and
both agree with the Bible, which says that
God created plants and animals each after its
kind. A primordial form is a form which was
not evolved out of some other form, but which
began to be in the form — subject to such va-
rieties as we see in the dog, horse, and man —
in which it continued during the whole period
of its existence.

The criteria of these primordial forms or
species of nature, are, (1.) Morphological.
Animals, however, may approach very nearly
in their structure, and yet belong to different
species. It is only when the peculiarities of
structure are indicative of specialty of design,
that they form a safe ground of classification.
If the teeth of one animal are formed to fit it
to feed on flesh, and those of another to fit it to
feed on plants; if one has webbed feet and an-
other not; then, in all such cases, difference of
structure proves difference of kind. (2.) Phys-
iological ; that is, the internal nature, indicated

1 Bibliotheca Sacra, 1857, p. 861.

154 WHAT IS DARWINISM ?

by habits and instincts, furnishes another safe
criterion. (3.) Permanent fecundity. The
progenitors of the same species reproduce their
kind from generation to generation ; the prog-
eny of different species, although nearly allied,
do not. Itis a fixed law of nature that species
never can be annihilated, except by all the
individuals included in them dying out; and
that new species cannot be produced. Every
true species is primordial. It is this fact, that
is, that no variety, with the essential charac-
teristics of species, has ever been produced,
that forces, as we saw above, Professor Huxley
to pronounce Mr. Darwin’s doctrine to be an
unproved hypothesis. Species continue ; vari-
eties, if let alone, always revert to the normal
type. It requires the skill and constant atten-
tion of man to keep them distinct.

Now that there are such forms in nature, is
proved not only from the testimony of the
great body of the most distinguished natural-
ists, but by all the facts in the case.

First, the fact that such species are known
to have existed unchanged, through what ge-
ologists consider almost immeasurable periods
of time. Palzontologists tell us that Trilobites
abounded from the primordial age down to the

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 155

Carboniferous period, that is, as they suppose,
through millions of years. More wonderful
still, the little animals whose remains consti-
tute the chalk formations which are spread
over large areas of country, and are sometimes
a hundred feet thick, are now at work at the
bottom of the Atlantic. Principal Dawson
tells us, with regard to Mollusks existing in a
sub-fossil state in the Post-pliocene clays of
Canada, that “after carefully studying about
two hundred species, and of some of these,
many hundreds of specimens, I have arrived
at the conclusion that they are absolutely un-
changed..... Here again we have an abso-
lute refusal, on the part of all these animals, to
admit that they are derived, or have tended
to sport into new species,” *

On the previous page he says, “ Pictet cata-
logues ninety-eight species of mammals which
inhabited Europe in the Post-glacial period.
Of these fifty-seven still exist unchanged, and
the remainder have disappeared. Not one can
be shown to have been modified into a new
form, though some of them have been obliged,
by changes of temperature and other condi-
tions, to remove into distant and now widely
separated regions.”

1 The Story of Earth and Man, p. 358.

156 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

A second fact which attests the primordial
character and fixedness of species is, that every
species as it first appears, is not in a transition
state between one form and another, but in
the perfection of its kind. Science has indeed
discovered an ascending order in creation,
which agrees marvellously with that given in
the book of Genesis: first, vegetable produc-
tions ; then the moving creatures in the sea;
then terrestrial animals; and finally man. Nat-
uralists, who utterly reject the Scriptures as a
divine revelation, speak with the highest ad-
miration of the Mosaic account of the creation,
as compared with any other cosmogony of the
ancient world. While there is in general an
ascending series in these living forms, each
was perfect in its kind.

Agassiz says that fishes existed contempora-
neously with species of all the invertebrate
sub-kingdoms in the Taconic, or sub-Cambrian
strata. This is the extreme limit of known
geological strata in which life is found to have
existed. As the evolution of one species out of
another requires, according to Darwin, millions
of years, it is out of the question to trace these
animals beyond the strata in which their re-
mains are now found. Yet “ crabs or lobsters,

WHAT 18 DARWINISM? 157

worms, cuttle-fish, snails, jelly-fish, star-fish,
oysters, the polyps lived contemporaneously
with the first known vertebrate animals that
ever came into being —all as clearly defined
by unmistakable ordinal or special characters
as they are at the present moment.’’?

The foot of the horse is considered by zodlo-
gists as “ one of the most beautiful contrivances
in nature.’ The remains of this animal found
in what is called the Pliocene Period, show the
foot to have been as perfect then as it is now.

Mr. Wallace says that man has existed on
the earth a hundred thousand years, and that
it is probable that he existed four hundred
thousand years ago. Of course we do not be-
lieve this. We have little faith in the chronol-
ogy of science. It gives no sure data for the
calculation of time, hence we find them differ-
ing from four thousand to four hundred thou-
sand years as to the time required for certain
formations. The most trustworthy geologists

1 Dr. Bree, p. 275. We presume geologists differ in the terms
which they use to designate strata. Agassiz calls the oldest
containing fossil, the sub-Cambrian. Principal Dawson calls the
oldest the Laurentian, and places the first vertebrates in the
Silurian. This is of no moment as to the argument. The im-
portant fact is that each species is distinct as soon as it appears ;
and that many have remained to the present time.

158 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

teach that all that is known of the antiquity
of man falls within the limits of Biblical chro-
nology. The further, however, Darwinians
push back the origin of man, the stronger, as
against them, becomes the argument for the
immutability of species. The earliest remains
of man show that at his first appearance, he
was in perfection. The oldest known human
skull is that called the “ Engis,” because found
in the cave of Engis in Belgium. Of this skull
Professor Huxley says it may have belonged
to an individual of one of the existing races of
men. Principal Dawson, who has a cast of it,
on the same shelf with the skulls of some Al-
gonquin Indians, says it might be taken for
the skull of an American Indian. Indeed, Daw-
son seems to think that these fossil human re-
mains go to show that the earliest men were
better developed than any of the extant races.
Thirdly. The historical evidence accessible
all goes to prove the immutability of species.
The earliest historical records and the oldest
monuments prove that all extant animals were
what they now are thousands of years ago.
Fourthly. The fact that hybrids cannot be
perpetuated, that no device of man can pro-
duce a new species, is proof that God has fixed

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 159

limits which cannot be passed. This Huxley
himself admits to be an insuperable objection.
So long as it exists, he says, Darwin’s doctrine
must be content to remain a hypothesis; it
cannot pretend to the dignity of a theory.
Another fact of like import is that varieties
artificially produced, if let alone, uniformly
revert to the simple typical form. It is only
by the utmost care they can be kept distinct.
All the highly prized varieties of horses, cattle,
sheep, pigeons, etc., without human control,
would be merged each class into one, with only
the slight differences occasioned by diversities
of climate and other external conditions. If in
the sight of man it is important that the words
of a book should-be kept distinct, it is equally
evident that in the sight of God it is no less
important that the “units of nature” should
not be mixed in inextricable and indistinguish-
able confusion.

Fifthly. The sudden appearance of new kinds
of animals is another fact which Palzontologists
urge against the doctrine of evolution. Ac-
cording to the view of geologists great changes
have, at remote periods, occurred in the state
of the earth. Continents have been sub-
merged and the bottom of the sea raised above

160 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

the surface of the waters. Corresponding
changes have occurred in the state of the at-
mosphere surrounding the globe, and in the
temperature of the earth. Accompanying or
following these revolutions new classes of plants
and animals appear, adapted to the new condi-
tion of the earth’s surface. Whence do they
come? They have, as Dawson expresses it,
neither fathers nor mothers. Nothing pre-
cedes them from which they could be derived ;
and nothing of the same kind follows them.
They live through their appointed period ; and
then, in a multitude of cases, finally disappear,
and are in their turn followed by new orders
or kinds. In other words, the links or con-
necting forms of this assumed regular succes-
sion or derivation are not to be found. This
fact is so patent, that Hugh Miller, when argu-
ing against the doctrine of evolution as pro-
posed in the “ Vestiges of Creation,” says, that
the record in the rocks seems to have been
written for the very purpose of proving that
such evolution is impossible.

We have the explicit testimony of Agassiz,
as a Paleontologist, that the facts of geology
contradict the theory of the transmutation of
species. This testimony has been repeatedly

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 161

given and in various forms. In the last pro-
duction of his pen, he says: “ As a Paleontol-
ogist I have from the beginning stood aloof
from this new theory of transmutation, now
so widely admitted by the scientific world. Its
doctrines, in fact, contradict what the animal
forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth
tell us of their own introduction and succession
upon the surface of the globe.” ‘“ Let us look
now at the earliest vertebrates, as known and
recorded in geological surveys. They should,
of course, if there is any truth in the transmu-
tation theory, correspond with the lowest in
rank or standing. What then are the ear-
liest known vertebrates? They are Selachians
(sharks and their allies) and Ganoids (garpikes
and the like), the highest of all living fishes,
structurally speaking.” He closes the article
from which these quotations are taken with the
assertion, “that there is no evidence of a di-
rect descent of later from earlier species in the
geological succession of animals.” * It will be
observed that Agassiz is quoted, not as to mat-
ters of theory, but as to matters of fact. The
only answer which evolutionists can make to
this argument, is the imperfection of the geo-

1 Atlantic Monthly, January, 1874.
EL

162 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

logical record. When asked, Where are the
immediate predecessors of these new species ?
they answer, They have disappeared, or, have
not yet been found. When asked, Where are
their immediate successors? the answer again
is, They have disappeared.’ This is an objec-
tion which Mr. Darwin, with his usual candor,
virtually admits to be unanswerable. We have
“already seen, that he says, “Every one will
admit that the geological record is imperfect ;
but very few can believe that it is so very im-
perfect as my theory demands.”

Such are some of the grounds on which
geologists and paleontologists of the highest
rank assert that the theory of evolution has
not the slightest scientific basis; and they sup-
port their assertion with an amount of evi-
dence of which the above items are a misera-
ble pittance.

Sixthly. There is another consideration of

1 We have heard a story of a gentleman who gave an artist a
commission for a historical painting, and suggested as the sub-
ject, the Passage of the Israelites over the Red Sea. In due time
he was informed that his picture was finished, and was shown
by the artist a large canvas painted red. “What is that?” he
asked. “Why,” says the artist, “that is the Red Sea.” “But
where are the Israelites?’’ ‘* Oh, they have passed over.’? And
where are the Eeyptians?’’ “They are under the sea.”’

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 163

decisive importance. Strauss says, there are
three things which have been stumbling-blocks
in the way of science. First, the origin of life ;
second, the origin of consciousness; third, the
origin of reason. These are equivalent to the
gaps which, Principal Dawson says, exist in the
theory of evolution. He states them thus:
1. That between dead and living matter.
2. That between vegetable and animal life.
“These are necessarily the converse of each
other: the one deoxidizes and accumulates,
the other oxidizes and expends.” 3. That
“between any species of plant or animal, and
any other species. It was this gap, and this
only, which Darwin undertook to fill up by
his great work on the origin of species, but,
notwithstanding the immense amount of mate-
rial thus expended, it yawns as wide as ever,
since it must be admitted that no case has been
ascertained in which an individual of one spe-
cies has transgressed the limits between it and
another species.” 4. “ Another gap is between
the nature of the animal and the self-conscious,
reasoning, and moral nature of man.” (pp. 325-
328) ;

First, as to the gap between death and life ;
this is what Dr. Stirling calls the “ gulf of all

164 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

gulfs,. which Mr. Huxley’s protoplasm is as
powerless to efface as any other material ex-
pedient that has ever been suggested.” * This
gulf Mr. Darwin does not attempt to bridge
over. He admits that life owes its origin to
the act of the Creator. This, however, the
most prominent of the advocates of Darwinism
say, is giving up the whole controversy. If
you admit the intervention of creative power
at one point, you may as well admit it in any
other. If life owes its origin to creative
power, why not species? If the stupendous
miracle of creation be admitted, there is no
show of reason for denying supernatural inter-
vention in the operations of nature. Most
Darwinians attempt to pass this gulf on the
imaginary bridge of spontaneous generation.
In other words, they say there is no gulf
there. ‘The molecules of matter, in one com-
bination, may as well exhibit the phenomena
of life, as in other combinations, any other
kind of phenomena. The distinguished Sir
William Thomson cannot trust himself to that

1 As Regards Protoplasm in Relation to Professor Huzxley’s
Essay on the Physical Basis of Life. . By Dr. James H. Stirling.
See, also, Physiological Anatomy and Physiology of Man, by L.
S. Beale; also, The Mystery of Life in Reply to Dr. Gull’s Attack
on the Theory of Vitality. By L. S. Beale, M. D., 1871.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 165

bridge. “Dead matter,” he says, “cannot
become living matter without coming under
the influence of matter previously alive. This
seems to me as sure a teaching of science as
the law of gravitation. .... I am ready to
adopt, as an article of scientific faith, true
through all space and through all time, that
life proceeds from life, and nothing but life.’’?
He refers the origin of life on this earth to
falling meteors, which bring with them from
other planets the germs of living organisms ;
and from those germs all the plants and ani-
mals with which our world is now covered
have been derived. Principal Dawson thinks
that this was intended as irony. But the
whole tone of the address, and specially of the
closing portion of it, in which this idea is ad-
vanced, is far too serious to admit of such an
explanation.

No one can read the address referred to with-
out being impressed, and even awed, by the
immensity and grandeur of the field of knowl-
edge which falls legitimately within the domain
of science. The perusal of that discourse pro-
duces a feeling of humility analogous to the

1 The address delivered by Sir William Thomson, as Presi-
dent of the British Association at its meeting in Edinburgh, 1871.

166 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

sense of insignificance which every man expe-
riences when he thinks of himself as a speck
on the surface of the earth, which itself is but
a speck in the immensity of the universe.
And when a man of mere ordinary culture
sees Sir William Thomson surveying that field
with a mastery of its details and familiarity
with all the recondite methods of its investi-
gation, he feels as nothing in his presence.
Yet this great man, whom we cannot help
regarding with wonder, is so carried away by
the spirit of his class as to say, “Science is
bound, by the everlasting law of honor, to face
fearlessly every problem which can fairly be
brought before it. If a probable solution, con-
sistent with the ordinary course of nature, can
be found, we must not invoke an abnormal act
of Creative Power.” And, therefore, instead
of invoking Creative Power, he accounts for
the origin of life on earth by falling meteors.
How he accounts for its origin in the places
whence the meteors came, he does not say.
Yet Sir William Thomson believes in Creative
Power; and in a subsequent page, we shall
quote his explicit repudiation of the atheistic
element in the Darwinian theory. ‘
Strauss quotes Dubois-Reymond, a distin-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 167

guished naturalist, as teaching that the first of
these great problems, viz. the origin of life, ad-
mits of explanation on scientific (7. ¢., in his
sense, materialistic) principles; and even the
third, viz. the origin of reason ; but the second,
or the origin of consciousness, he says, “ is
perfectly inscrutable.” Dubois-Reymond holds
that “the most accurate knowledge of the es-
sential organism reveals to us only matter in
motion ; but between this material movement
and my feeling pain or pleasure, experiencing
a sweet taste, seeing red, with the conclusion
‘therefore I exist,’ there is a profound gulf;
and it ‘remains utterly and forever inconceiva-
ble why to a number of atoms of carbon, hy-
drogen, etc., it should not be a matter of in-
difference how they lie or how they move ; nor
can we in any wise tell how consciousness
should result from their concurrent action.’
Whether,” adds Strauss, “these Verba Mag-
istri are indeed the last word on the subject,
time only can tell.” ? But if it is inconceivable,
not to say absurd, that sense - consciousness
should consist in the motion of molecules of
matter, or be a function of such molecules, it
can hardly be less absurd to account for
1 The Old Faith and the New. Prefatory Postscript, xxi.

168 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

thought, conscience, and religious feeling and
belief on any such hypothesis. It may be said
that Mr. Darwin is not responsible for these
extreme opinions. That is very true. Mr.
Darwin is not a Monist, for in admitting crea-
tion, he admits a dualism as between God and
the world. Neither is he a Materialist, inas-
much as he assumes a supernatural origin for
the infinitesimal modicum of life and intelli-
gence in the primordial animalcule, from which
without divine purpose or agency, all living
things in the whole history of our earth have
descended. All the innumerable varieties of
plants, all the countless forms of animals, with
all their instincts and faculties, all the varie-
ties of men with their intellectual endowments,
and their moral and religious nature, have,
according to Darwin, been evolved by the
agency of the blind, unconscious laws of nat-
ure. This infinitesimal spark of supernatu-
ralism in Mr. Darwin’s theory, would inevitably
have gone out of itself, had it not been rudely
and contemptuously trodden out by his bolder,
and more logical successors.

The grand and fatal objection to Darwinism
is this exclusion of design in the origin of spe-
cies, or the production of living organisms

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 169

By design is meant the intelligent and volun-
tary selection of an end, and the intelligent
and voluntary choice, application, and control
of means appropriate to the accomplishment of
that end. That design, therefore, implies in-
telligence, is involved in its very nature. No
man can perceive this adaptation of means to
the accomplishment of a preconceived end,
without experiencing an irresistible conviction
that it is the work of mind. No man does
doubt it, and no man can doubt it. Darwin
does not deny it. Haeckel does not deny it.
No Darwinian denies it. What they do is to
deny that there is any design in nature. It is
merely apparent, as when the wind of the
Bay of Biscay, as Huxley says, “selects the
right kind of sand and spreads it in heaps upon
the plains.” But in thus denying design in
nature, these writers array against themselves
the intuitive perceptions and irresistible convic-
tions of all mankind, —a barrier which no man
has ever been able to surmount. Sir William
Thomson, in the address already referred to,
says: “I feel profoundly convinced that the
argument of design has been greatly too much
lost sight of in recent zodlogical speculations.
Reaction against the frivolities of teleology,

170 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

such as are to be found, not rarely, in the notes
of the learned commentators on ‘ Paley’s Nat-
ural Theology,’ has, I believe, had a temporary
effect of turning attention from the solid irre-
fragable argument so well put forward in that
excellent old book. But overpowering proof
of intelligence and benevolent design lie all
around us, and if ever perplexities, whether
metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from
them for a time, they come back upon us with
irresistible force, showing to us through nature
the influence of a free will, and teaching us
that all living beings depend upon one ever-
acting Creator and Ruler.”

It is impossible for even Mr. Darwin, incon-
sistent as it is with his whole theory, to deny
all design in the constitution of nature. What
is his law of heredity? Why should like be-
get like? Take two germ cells, one of a plant,
another of an animal; no man by microscope
or by chemical analysis, or by the magic power
of the spectroscope, can detect the slightest
difference between them, yet the one infallibly
develops into a plant and the other into an
animal. Take the germ of a fish and of a bird,
and they are equally indistinguishable; yet
the one always under all conditions develops

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 171

into a fish and the other into a bird. Why is
this? There is no physical force, whether
light, heat, electricity, or anything else, which
makes the slightest approximation to account-
ing for that fact. To say, as Stuart Mill would
say, that it is an ultimate fact, and needs no ex-
planation, is to say that there may be an effect
without an adequate cause. The venerable R.
E. Von Baer, the first naturalist in Russia, of
whom Agassiz speaks in terms of such affection-
ate veneration in the “ Atlantic Monthly” for
January, 1874, has written a volume dated
Dorpat, 1873, and entitled “Zum Streit iiber
den Darwinismus.” In that volume, as we
learn from a German periodical, the author
says: “The Darwinians lay great stress on
heredity ; but what is the law of heredity but
a determination of something future? Is it not
in its nature in the highest degree teleologi-
cal? Indeed, is not the whole faculty of re-
production intended to introduce a new life-
process? When a man looks at a dissected
insect and examines its strings of eggs, and
asks, Whence are they? the naturalist of our
day has no answer to give, but that they were
of necessity gradually produced by the changes
in matter. When it is further asked, Why are

172 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

they there? is it wrong to say, It is in order
that when the eggs are mature and fertilized,
new individuals of the same form should be
produced.”

It is further to be considered that there are
innumerable cases of contrivance, or evidence
of design in nature, to which the principle of
natural selection, or the purposeless changes
effected by unconscious force, cannot apply ; as
for example, the distinction of sex, with all
that is therein involved. But passing by such
cases, it may be asked, what would it avail to
get rid of design in the vegetable and animal
kingdom, while the whole universe is full of
it? That this ordered Cosmos is not from ne-
cessity or chance, is almost a self-evident fact.
Not one man in a million of those who ever
heard of God, either does doubt or can doubt
it. Besides how are the cosmical relations of
light, heat, electricity, to the constituent parts
of the universe, and especially, so far as this
earth is concerned, to vegetable and animal
life, to be accounted for? Is this all chance
work? Is it by chance that light and heat
cause plants to carry on their wonderful oper-
ations, transmuting the inorganic into the or-
ganic, dead matter into living and life sustain-

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 173

ing matter? Is it without a purpose that water
instead of contracting, expands at the freezing
point? —a fact to which is due that the
earth north of the tropic is habitable for man
or beast. It is no answer to this question to
say that a few other substances have the same
peculiarity, when no good end, that we can see,
is thereby accomplished. No man is so foolish
as to deny that his eye was intended to enable
him to see, because he cannot tell what the
spleen was made for. It is, however, useless
to dwell upon this subject. If a man denies
that there is design in nature, he can with
quite as good reason deny that there is any
design in any or in all the works ever executed
by man.

The conclusion of the whole matter is, that
the denial of design in nature is virtually the
denial of God. Mr. Darwin’s theory does deny
all design in nature, therefore, his theory is.
virtually atheistical; his theory, not he him-
self. He believes in a Creator. But when
that Creator, millions on millions of ages ago,
did something,— called matter and a living
germ into existence, — and then abandoned the
universe to itself to be controlled by chance
and necessity, without any purpose on his

174 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

part as to the result, or any intervention or
guidance, then He is virtually consigned, so far
as we are concerned, to non-existence. It has
already been said that the most extreme of
Mr. Darwin’s admirers adopt and laud his
theory, for the special reason that it banishes
God from the world; that it enables them to
account for design without referring it to the
purpose or agency of God. This is done
expressly by Bitichner, Haeckel, Vogt, and
Strauss. The opponents of Darwinism direct
their objections principally against this ele-
ment of the doctrine. This, as was stated by
Rev. Dr. Peabody, was the main ground of the
earnest opposition of Agassiz to the theory.
America’s great botanist, Dr. Asa Gray, avows
himself an evolutionist; but he is not a Dar-
winian. Of that point we have the clearest
possible proof. Mr. Darwin, after explicitly
denying that the variations which have re-
sulted in “ the formation of the most perfectly
adapted animals in the world, man included,
were intentionally and specially guided,” adds:
“However much we may wish it, we can
hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief
‘that variation has been led along certain
beneficial lines’ like a stream ‘along definite

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 175

and useful lines of irrigation.’”! If Mr. Dar-
win does not agree with Dr. Gray, Dr. Gray
does not agree with Mr. Darwin. It is as to
the exclusion of design from the operations of
nature that our American, differs from the Eng-
lish, naturalist. This is the vital point. The
denial of final causes is the formative idea of
Darwin’s theory, and therefore no teleologist
can be a Darwinian.

Dr. Gray quotes from another writer the sen-
tence, “It is a singular fact, that when we can
find how anything is done, our first conclusion
seems to be that God did not do it;”’ and then
adds, “I agree with the writer that this first
conclusion is premature and unworthy; I
will add, deplorable. Through what faults of
dogmatism on the one hand, and skepticism on
the other, it came to be so thought, we need
not here consider. Let us hope, and I confi-
dently expect, that it is not to last; that the
religious faith which survived without a shock
the notion of the fixedness of the earth itself,
may equally outlast the notion of the absolute
fixedness of the species which inhabit it; that
in the future, even more than in the past, faith

1 Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication. New
York, 1868, vol. ii. pp. 515, 516.

176 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

in an order, which is the basis of science, will
not — as it cannot reasonably — be dissevered
from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of
religion.” We thank God for that sentence.
It is the concluding sentence of Dr. Gray’s
address as ex-President of “The American
Association for the Advancement of Science,”
delivered August, 1872.

Dr. Gray goes further. He says, “ The
proposition that the things and events in nat-
ure were not designed to be so, if logically car-
ried out, is doubtless tantamount to atheism.”
Again, “To us, a fortuitous Cosmos is simply
inconceivable. The alternative is a designed
Cosmos... .. If Mr. Darwin believes that the
events which he supposes to have occurred
and the results we behold around us were un-
directed and undesigned; or if the physicist
believes that the natural forces to which he
refers phenomena are uncaused and undi-
rected, no argument is needed to show that
such belief is atheistic.” ?

We have thus arrived at the answer to our

1 Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. Cambridge, 1873, p. 20.

2 The Atlantic Monthly for October, 1860. The three articles
in the July, August, and October numbers of the Ailantic, on
this subject, have been reprinted with the name of Dr. Asa
Gray as their author.

WHAT IS DARWINISM? 177

question, What is Darwinism? It is Atheism.
This does not mean, as before said, that Mr.
Darwin himself and all who adopt his views
are atheists; but it means that his theory is
atheistic; that the exclusion of design from
nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to
atheism.

Among the last words of Strauss were these :
“We demand for our universe the same piety
which the devout man of old demanded for his
God.” “In the enormous machine of the uni-
verse, amid the incessant whirl and hiss of its
jagged iron wheels, amid the deafening crash
of its ponderous stamps and hammers, in the
midst of this whole terrific commotion, man, a
helpless and defenceless creature, finds himself
placed, not secure for a moment that on an
imprudent motion a wheel may not seize and
rend him, or a hammer crush him to a powder.
This sense of abandonment is at first some-
thing awful.” *

1 Strauss says that as he has arrived at the conclusion that
there is no personal God, and no life after death, it would seem
to follow that the question, Have we still a religion? “must be
answered in the negative.” But as he makes the essence of
religion to consist in a sense of dependence, and as he felt him-
self to be helpless in the midst of this whirling universe, he had
that much religion left.

12

178 WHAT IS DARWINISM?

Among the last words of Paul were these:
“T know whom I have believed, and am per-
suaded that He is able to keep that which I
have committed unto Him against that day.
. ... The time of my departure is at hand. I
have fought a good fight, I have finished my
course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there
is laid up for me a crown of righteousness,
which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give
me at that day: and not to me only, but unto
all them also that love his appearing.”

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