Natural science and religion; two lectures delivered to the Theological School of Yale College

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Natural science and religio

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NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION

TWO LECTURES

DELIVERED TO THE

THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF YALE COLLEGE

By ASA GRAY

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRTBXER'S SONS

743 and 745 Broadway

1880

Copyright, 1880,
By Asa Gkay.

Cambridge :
University Press : John Wilson & Son.

NATUKAL SCIENCE AND KELIGION

LECTURE I. — SCIENTIFIC BELIEFS.

AM invited to address you upon the rela-
tions of science to religion, — in reference,
as I suppose, to those claims of natural science
which have been thought to be antagonistic to
supernatural religion, and to those assumptions
connected with the Christian faith which scien-
tific men in our day are disposed to question or
to reject.

While listening weekly— I hope with edifi-
cation — to the sermons which it is my privilege
and duty to hear, it has now and then occurred
to me that it might be well if an occasional dis-
course could be addressed from the pews to the
pulpit. But, until your invitation reached me,
I had no idea that I should ever be called upon
to put this passing thought into practice. I am
sufficiently convinced already that the members

4 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

of a profession know their own calling better
than any one else can know it ; and in respect
to the debatable land which lies along the bor-
ders of theology and natural science, and which
has been harried by many a raid from both
sides, I am not confident that I can be helpful
in composing strifes or in the fixing of bounda-
ries; nor that you will agree with me that some
of the encounters were inevitable, and some of
the alarm groundless. Indeed upon much that
I may have to say, I expect rather the chari-
table judgment than the full assent of those
whose approbation I could most wish to win.

But I take it for granted that you do not

wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from

the theological class-room. You ask a layman

to speak from this desk because you would have

a layman's thoughts, expressed from a layman's

point of view ; because you would know what

a naturalist comes to think upon matters of

common interest. And you would have him

liberate his mind frankly, unconventionally, and

with as little as may be of the technicalities of

our several professions. Frankness is always

commendable ; but outspokenness upon delicate

and unsettled problems, in the ground of which

cherished convictions are rooted, ought to be

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 5

tempered with consideration. Now I, as a lay-
man, may claim a certain license in this regard ;
and any over-free handling of sensitive themes
should compromise no one but myself.

As a student who has devoted an ordinary
lifetime to one branch of natural history, in
which he is supposed to have accumulated a fair
amount of particular experience and to have
gained a general acquaintance with scientific
methods and aims, — as one, moreover, who
has taken kindly to the new turn of biological
study in these latter years, but is free from par-
tisanship, — I am asked to confer with other and
younger students, of another kind of science, in
respect to the tendencies of certain recently
developed doctrines, which in schools of theology
are almost everywhere spoken against, but which
are everywhere permeating the lay mind —
whether for good or for evil — and are raising
questions more or less perplexing to all of us.

But our younger and middle-aged men must
not think that such perplexities and antagonisms
have only recently begun. Some of them are
very old ; some are old questions transferred to
new ground, in which they spring to rankness
of growth, or sink their roots till they touch
deeper issues than before, — issues of philosophy

6 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION

rather than of science, upon which the momen-
tous question of theism or non-theism eventually
turns. Some on the other hand are mere sur-
vivals, now troublesome only to those who are
holding fast to theological positions which the
advance of actual knowledge has rendered un-
tenable, but which they do not well know how
to abandon ; yet which, in principle, have mostly
been abandoned already.

To begin with trite examples. Among the
questions which disquieted pious souls in my
younger days, but which have ceased to disquiet
any of us, are those respecting the age and
gradual development of the earth and of the
solar system, which came in with geology and
modern astronomy. I remember the time when
it was a mooted question whether geology and
orthodox Christianity were compatible ; and I
suppose that when, in these quarters, the bal-
ance inclined to the affirmative, it was owing
quite as much to Professor Silliman's transpar-
ent Christian character as to his scientific abil-
ity. One need not be an old man to know that
Laplace was accounted an atheist because he
developed the nebular hypothesis, and because
of his remark that he had no need to postulate
a Creator for the mathematical discussion of a

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. J

physical theorem; for a venerable and most
religious astronomer, still living, who adopted
this hypothesis in his "Exposition of certain
Harmonies of the Solar System/' published only
five years ago, thought it needful to add an
appendix, asking the question, " Is the nebular
hypothesis, in any form, essentially atheistical in
its character ? " He answered it in the negative,
but with the salvo, that " this hypothesis, having
to do with a strictly azoic period, enforces no
connection with 'the development theory' of
the beginning or of the progress of life."

The great antiquity of the habitable world
and of existing races was the next question.
It gave some anxiety fifty years ago ; but
is now, I suppose, generally acquiesced in, — in
the sense that existing species of plants and
animals have been in existence for many thou-
sands of years ; and, as to their associate, man,
all agree that the length of his occupation is not
at all measured by the generations of the bibli-
cal chronology, and are awaiting the result of
an open discussion as to whether the earliest
known traces of his presence are in quaternary
or in the latest tertiary deposits.

As connected with this class of questions,
many of us remember the time when schemes

8 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

for reconciling Genesis with Geology had an
importance in the churches, and among thought-
ful people, which few if any would now assign
to them ; when it was thought necessary — for
only necessity could justify it — to bring the
details of the two into agreement by extraneous
suppositions and forced constructions of lan-
guage, such as would now offend our critical and
sometimes our moral sense. The change of view
which we have witnessed amounts to this. Our
predecessors implicitly held that Holy Scripture
must somehow truly teach such natural science
as it had occasion to refer to, or at least could
never contradict it ; while the most that is now
intelligently claimed is, that the teachings of
the two, properly understood, are not incompati-
ble. We may take it to be the accepted idea
that the Mosaic books were not handed down to
us for our instruction in scientific knowledge,
and that it is our duty to ground our scientific
beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed
with considerations of a different order. Then,
when fundamental principles of the cosmogony
in Genesis are found to coincide with established
facts and probable inferences, the coincidence
has its value ; and wherever the particulars are
incongruous, the discrepancy does not distress us,

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 9

I may add, does not concern us. I trust that
the veneration rightly due to the Old Testament
is not impaired by the ascertaining that the
Mosaic is not an original but a compiled cos-
mogony. Its glory is, that while its materials
were the earlier property of the race, they were
in this record purged of polytheism and Nature-
worship, and impregnated with ideas which we
suppose the world will never x outgrow. For its
fundamental note is, the declaration of one God,
maker of heaven and earth, and of all things,
visible and invisible, — a declaration which, if
physical science is unable Jo establish, it is
equally unable to overthrow.

But, leaving aside for the present all ques-
tions of this sort, I proceed with the proper
subject of this discourse ; namely, the further
changes in scientific belief, which have occurred
within my own recollection, even since the time
when I first aspired to authorship, now forty-
five years ago.

There will be no need to go much beyond
the line of subjects which it has been my busi-
ness to study, in order to bring before you, in a
cursory review, not indeed all the disturbing
topics of the time, but quite enough of them
for our purpose. For the changes which we

10 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

have to consider are all more or less connected
with the evolutionary theories which are now
uppermost in the popular mind. In this pres-
entation, it is best to set them forth in their
simplest or most general form, divested of all
theological or philosophical considerations, which
have been or may be attached to them. I
should rather say, to some of them. For the
foundations, or at least the buttresses, of the
now prevalent doctrine of the derivative origin
of species mainly rest upon researches inde-
pendently made, without speculative bias, being
the general contributions to biological science
in this century ; the results of which have been
accepted as far as made out without apprehen-
sion or other than scientific controversy.

Upon no one of these particular points has
there been a completer change of view than
upon the distinctness of the animal and vege-
table kingdoms. The former conviction that
these two kingdoms were wholly different in
structure, in function, and in kind of life, was
not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which
the naturalist encountered when he undertook
to define them. It was always understood that
plants and animals, though completely contrasted
in their higher representatives, approached each

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. H

other very closely in their lower and simpler
forms. But they were believed not to blend.
It was implicitly supposed that every living
thing was distinctively plant or animal ; that
there were real and profound differences be-
tween the two, if only they could be seized ;
and that increased powers of investigation —
microscopical and chemical — might be expected
to discover them. This expectation has not
been fulfilled. It is true that the ambiguities
of a hundred years ago are settled now. The
zoophytes are all remanded to their proper
places, though the animal kingdom at first
claimed more than belonged to it. But other,
more recondite and insurmountable, difficulties
arose in their place. The best, I am disposed
to say the settled, opinion now is, that there
are multitudinous forms which are not suffi-
ciently differentiated to be distinctively either
plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary
plants and animals, the difficulty of laying
down a definition has become far greater than
ever before. In short, the animal and vege-
table lines, diverging widely above, join below
in a loop. Naturalists may help classification,
but do not alter these facts, when they sever
this loop arbitrarily at what they deem the

12 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

lowest point, or when they cut away the whole
loop, and form of it a separate kingdom — the
Protista of Haeckel. The only objection to the
latter is that the definition of this tedium quid
from plant on the one hand and animal on the
other is equally impracticable. One difficulty
is removed only to have two in its place. The
fact is, that a new article has recently been
added to the scientific creed, — the essential
oneness of the two kingdoms of organic nature.
I crave your patience while I enter somewhat
into particulars.

Not many years ago it was taught that plants
and animals were composed of different mate-
rials : plants, of a chemical substance of three
elements, — carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen ; ani-
mals of one of four elements, nitrogen being
added to the other three. The plant substance,
named cellulose, because it formed the cell-walls,
was supposed to constitute the whole vegetable
fabric. It was known that all plants produced
nitrogenous matter in the form of a compound
of four elements ; but this was thought to be
merely a contained product, in a structureless
condition, and to be not so much essential to
the plant's life as to that of the animals which
the plants nourished. It was known to be struc-

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 13

ture-building material for animals : it was not
known to be essential plant-structure also. But
it was soon ascertained that this quaternary
matter of the animal body was chemically the
same in the plant, was elaborated there, and
only appropriated by the animal. Next it was
found that it was physiologically and struc-
turally the same in the plant, that it was the
living part of the plant, that which manifested
the life and did the work in vegetable as well
as in animal organisms. This substance, which
is manifold in its forms and protean in its trans-
formations, has, in its state of living matter, one
physiological name which has become familiar,
that of protoplasm. The statement that " proto-
plasm is the physical basis of life " must be
accepted as true. As Professor Allman puts it,
" wherever there is life, from its lowest to its
highest manifestations, there is protoplasm ;
wherever there is protoplasm, there too is life,1'
or has been. The cellulose or solid material
which composes the bulk of a tree or herb did
not produce the protoplasm contained in its
living parts, as was formerly supposed, but the
protoplasm produced the cellulose : the semi-
liquid and mobile matter within produced the
cell- walls which enclose it. The walls or solid

14 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

parts are to the protoplasm what the shell is to
the oyster. The contents not only preceded
the protective investment, but can exist and
prosper apart from it, as many a mollusk does,
as many a simple plant does throughout the
earlier and most active period of its life. In-
deed this slimy matter lives before and apart
from any thing which can be called a living
being. A' formless, apparently diffluent and
structureless mass is seen to exhibit the essen-
tial phenomena of life, — to move, to feed, to
grow, to multiply. We have spoken of beings
so low in the scale that the individuals through-
out their whole existence are not sufficiently
specialized to be distinctively plant or animal :
yet these are definite in form and fixed in
phase, are individual beings, though we may
not determine to which kingdom they belong.
But there is life in simpler shape,

" If shape it might be called that shape has none,
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,"

there is vital activity in that which has not
attained even the semblance of individuality.
Little lumps of protoplasm are these, with out-
line in a state of perpetual change, divisible
into two or three or more, or two or three com-

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 15

billing into one mass, either way without hin-
dering or altering their manifestations. This
living matter — of which Bathybius, if there be
a Bathybius, or if it be any thing more than pro-
toplasm of sponges, is one example — is said to
have nothing more than molecular structure.
It would be safer to say that the microscope
has as yet revealed no organic structure.

The natural history of protoplasm has re-
cently been well expounded by Professor All-
man, late President of the British Association,
a most judicious naturalist, of conservative
tendency; and his address, which you have
read or should read, saves me from further de-
tails, and enables me to proceed to other evi-
dences of the substantial oneness of the two
kingdoms of organic nature.

Cellulose makes up the bulk of a vegetable,
and was thought to be its true element. But it
is now known to be not even peculiar to it : it
enters largely into the fabric of certain ani-
mals, not of the very lowest grade. Starch
was equally regarded as a purely and charac-
teristically vegetable production ; and its pres-
ence, in ambiguous cases, has been taken as a
test. But it follows the example of cellulose.
Being a prepared material from which cellulose

16 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

in the plant is made by a molecular change,
we are not now surprised to learn that starch-
grains of animal origin have been found. We
cannot conceive any thing more characteristic
of a vegetable than chlorophyll, the green of
herbage ; for in it the special work of the plant
is done, — namely, the transformation of mine-
ral matter into organic, under the light of the
sun, this being the prerogative of vegetation.
Now, not only does chlorophyll abound in many
ambiguous microscopical organisms of fresh and
salt water, which except for this would be taken
for animals, but it has recently been detected in
hydras and sea-anemones and planarias, which
are as certainly animals as are oysters and
clams. Nor can it be thought that they possess
something merely resembling chlorophyll ; for
it performs the characteristic work of that pe-
culiar substance, which, as I have said, is the
characteristic work of vegetation. For the
index and essential accompaniment of this
work (t. e., of the conversion of mineral into
organic matter) is the evolution of oxygen gas
from the decomposition of carbonic acid, water,
&c, in which, if in any thing, vegetation con-
sists. Now, the proof that what these animals
possess is chlorophyll itself is demonstrated

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 17

by their performance of the same function.
They decompose carbonic acid and evolve oxy-
gen gas, just as a green leaf does. Moreover,
the chlorophyll has been extracted and identi-
fied by the spectroscopic test. Here, then,
animals, undoubted animals, in addition to their
own proper functions, take on the essential func-
tion of plants. There is no avoiding the con-
clusion that such animals are doing the duty
of vegetables.

Although I make little account of it, I should
not overlook a more empirical distinction be-
tween the two kingdoms which has also failed.
The characteristic features of an animal were
mouth and stomach. This is the normal cor-
relation of an animal with its conditions. Hav-
ing to feed on vegetable matter, or what has been
vegetable matter, in solid as well as liquid form,
a mouth opening into an internal cavity of
some sort was the natural pattern, to which
all animals were supposed to conform. But
Nature, with all her fondness for patterns, will
not be arbitrarily held to them. Entozoa feed
like rhizophytes; and turbellarias and their
relatives have no alimentary canal, — the food
taken by what answers to mouth passing as
directly into the general tissue as does the

18 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

material which a parasitic root imbibes from its
host, or an ordinary root from the soil.

While animals are thus overpassing the
oundary in one direction, vegetables are mak-
ing reprisals on the other. The rule is, that
vegetables create organic matter, and animals
consume it, producing none. But, while some
animals produce some organic matter, some
plants even among those of the highest grade
feed wholly upon other plants, or even upon
animals or their products. Like animals, some
are herbivorous and some are carnivorous.
That certain plants live parasitically upon
other plants or upon animals, has long been too
familiar to be remarkable. But that plants of
the highest grade could capture or in some way
take possession of small animals, extract and
feed upon their juices, and appropriate these
as nourishment, is essentially a recent wonder
and a recently ascertained fact. Yet some of
the facts which point to this conclusion are old
enough; and the conclusion would probably
have been reached years ago, except for the
preconception that plants and animals were too
distinct for interchange of functions. Now that
we know they are not, and that the living
structure in the two is fundamentally identi-

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 19

cal, what were formerly regarded as freaks of
Nature are no longer mere wonderments, but
parts of a system, and capable of being cor-
related with the rest by investigation. And
investigation soon ascertained that this carnivo-
rous attachment to the vegetable organism in
Dioncea and Drosera was an organ for digesting
as well as capturing animal food. Juices are
imbibed by it directly, as in animals from the
stomach ; and nourishing solid parts are ren-
dered soluble and assimilable by imbuing them
with peptones or digestive ferments, analogous
in composition and in action to the gastric juice
of the higher animals.

Perhaps nothing in Nature can be more won-
derful than all this ; and nothing is more char-
acteristic of the change which has come over
scientific mind in our day than the manner in
which such a discovery is received. The lead-
ing facts were well known a hundred years ago,
and more. But, until recently, these phenomena
were regarded as altogether anomalous ; and
such anomalies appear to have troubled no-
body, except the framers of definitions. " Zusus
naturce " was a convenient phrase, and stood in
the place of explanation, — as if the play of
Nature was something apart from her work.

J

20 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

No one seems to have had any difficulty in
believing that a few particular plants were en-
dowed with faculties of which no other plants
were sharers. The thoughtful naturalist of our
day is in a different frame of mind. He ex-
pects to find that the extraordinary is only an
extreme case of the ordinary ; and he looks for
instances leading up from the one to the other.
I cannot tarry to explain how this expectation
has directed observation and stimulated research
in this particular field, and reached the result
that these wonderful plants are distinguished
only by higher degrees and more prominent
manifestations of a power which is in some sort
common to many or to all their brethren. We
learn, even, that the germinating embryo of a
grain of corn feeds upon and digests the solid
maternal nourishment which surrounds it, and
the humblest mould appropriates the organic
matter which it attacks, by the aid of a peptone
or inversive ferment, not different in nature and
office from the gastric and other juices by aid of
which we appropriate our daily meals.

It does appear also that the lowest organ-
isms, which live a kind of scavenger life, by
using over again dead or effete organic matter
running to decay — but to some of which living

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 21

juices come not amiss — have also the power,
certain salts being given, of creating organic
matter, and building up a fabric without sun-
light and without chlorophyll. Here, then, is
the simplest organic life, — in which, germs be- \
ing given, i, e. first individuals of the sort sup-
plied and placed in favorable surroundings,
they increase and multiply into more, each to
multiply again, and so on, in geometrical pro-
gression. From such lowly basis the two king-
doms may be conceived to rise, diverging as
they ascend in separate lines, — the one devel-
oping close relations with sunlight and becom-
ing the food-producing vegetable realm ; the
other, the food-consuming animal realm, which,
dispensed from the labor of assimilation, and
from the fixity of position which generally at-
tends it, may rise to higher and freer mani-
festations of life. Such, at least, appear to be
the relations of the two kingdoms to each
other and to their common base ; and such
is the conception through which we may attain
to an explanation of how it may be that mem-
bers of each line possess so many characteristics
of the other.

I have said, " germs being given," the forms
increase and multiply. If asked, Whence the

22 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

germs, and were they everywhere and always
prerequisite ? the scientific answer must be yes,
so far as we know. Thus far, spontaneous
generation, or abiogenesis, — the incoming of
life apart from that which is living, — is not
supported by any unequivocal evidence, though
not a little may be said in its favor. However
it may be in the future, here scientific belief
stands mainly where it did forty-five years ago,
only on a better-tried and firmer footing.

It remains to mention two supposed distinc-
tions between vegetables and animals which
were until recently prominent, but which are
no longer criteria, even as between the higher
forms of the two.

The first is the faculty of automatic move-
ment, or — to take up the question only on
the highest plane — the faculty of making
movements in reference to ends. This is
affirmed of animals, and is an undoubted faculty
of all of them, but was long denied to plants,
perhaps from a notion that such movements
argued consciousness. But consciousness, in
any legitimate sense of the term, pertains only
to the higher animals. To show the breaking
down of the distinction, it would suffice to con-
trast the rooted fixity and vegetative growth of

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 23

very many lower animals with the free loco-
motion of most microscopic aquatic plants and
of the germs of those not microscopic ; but
plants of the highest organization furnish ob-
vious examples better suited to our purpose.
Is there not an independent movement, in re-
sponse to an external impression, and in refer-
ence to an end, when the two sides of the trap
of Dionwa suddenly enclose an alighted fly,
cross their fringe of marginal bristles over the
only avenue of escape, remain quiescent in this
position long enough to give a small fly full
opportunity to crawl out, soon open if this hap-
pens, but after due interval shut down firmly
upon one of greater size which cannot get out,
then pour out digestive juices, and in due time
re-absorb the whole ? So, when the free end of
a twining stem, or the whole length of a ten-
dril, outreaches horizontally and makes circular
sweeps, and secures thereby a support, to which
it clings by coiling; when a tendril, having
fixed its tip to a distant support, shortens itself
by coiling, so bringing the next tendril nearer
the support ; when a free revolving tendril
avoids winding up itself uselessly around the
stem it belongs to, and m the only practicable
way, namely, by changing from the horizontal

24 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

to the vertical position until it passes by it,
and then rapidly resumes its horizontal sweep,
to result in reaching a distant support, — is it pos-
sible to think that these are not movements in
reference to ends ? You may say that all such
movements are capable of explanation, or in
time will be so ; are the result of mechanism,
and adjustments, and of common physical forces.
No doubt; and this is equally true of every
animal movement, not excepting those insti-
gated by volition. " Still it moves," as the
humbled Galileo said of the earth ; and the
idea that such movements are in reference to
ends is not superseded by any yet devised ex-
v— planation of the mechanism.

A remaining distinction between plants and
animals was based on the relations they respec-
tively sustain to the air we breathe. This has
already been stated, and the exceptions noted ;
but the topic is resumed in order to bring to
view the substantially different relations of the
two kingdoms to physical force.

Plants give out oxygen gas, and thus purify
the air for the respiration of animals. Animals,
consuming this oxygen, breathe it back to the air
in the form of carbonic acid. But the putting of
this contrast is only another way of saying that

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 25

plants produce organic matter and animals de-
compose it. The oxygen gas given out by sun-
lit foliage is just what is left over when carbonic
acid is decomposed and the carbon enters into
the composition of the vegetable matter then
produced. This elaborated matter, more com-
plex and unstable than the materials of which
it was made, is the food of animals, is first ap-
propriated, then decomposed by them, and in the
decomposition the carbon is given back to the
air recombined with the oxygen they inhale,
the carbon again taking the oxygen which was
separated from it by the plant. So respiration
means decomposition ; and this decomposition
in the animal economy means organic material
used up, work done, energy degraded. It means
that the clock-weight which was wound up by
the sun in the plant has run down. It means
that, very much as the sun, shining on the earth
and ocean, converts water into vapor and lifts it
into the upper air, so the same luminary, shining
upon the plant, there raises mineral matter to a
higher and unstable state, in what we call organic
products, — in both cases endowing the affected
matter with a certain energy. The exalted
matter in the one case falls at length as rain,
perhaps directly into the ocean from which it

26 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

was lifted, perhaps upon a mountain summit,
where as snow or glacier-ice it may long remain
poised and comparatively stationary. But sooner
or later it falls into the rivulet and the river,
and in its fall and flow it expends its endow-
ment of energy, and does ivorJc, — turns wheels
and spins or forges, if man so directs, — and,
when it has reached stable equilibrium at the
level of the ocean, it will have expended just
the energy which was imparted to it in the rais-
ing. So the energy with which the sun endowed
vegetable matter when it was raised to the or-
ganic state may be given up as heat when this
matter is restored to its original condition by
burning, or falls slowly back to the same con-
dition in the process of natural decay ; or the
heat, like the falling water, may do mechanical
work.

But also the organic material may be con-
sumed in the plant itself. For the plant, like
the animal, is a consumer. The only difference
is that, whereas the animal is always and only
a consumer and decomposer, the plant creates
or composes likewise, and it produces vastly
more than it consumes or decomposes. It de-
composes only when it does mechanical work.
But all its processes, all movements; all trans-

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 27

formations, are work done at the expense of
organized material and accumulated energy.
Even the act of storing up solar force in the
green herbage, or rather the changes connected
with it, can only be done at a certain cost,
though the cost is small in comparison with the
gain. But every transference of material from
one place or one state to another is done only
by the decomposition and loss of some portion
of it, — one part suffering that another may be
changed and saved. When the germ feeds
upon the maternal store in the seed, a consid-
erable part is consumed in order to make the
rest available ; and the loss is made manifest,
just as in the breathing of an animal or in the
combustion of fuel, by the evolution of carbonic
acid and of heat. The same thing in its measure
occurs in the upbuilding of the fabric, the car-
rying of material high into the air, — into a
tree-top, for instance ; and in all the processes
of flowering, and in storing up in the seed the
richest products as an outfit for a new genera-
tion. Where visible movements take place, the
quicker action is at equivalent cost. The sen-
sitive tendril, which will coil promptly after the
first brushing with my finger, will coil again
only after an interval of rest, and upon the

28 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

third or fourth excitation, or after a certain
number of spontaneous revolutions, it falls ex-
hausted.

But material endowed with energy in the
plant is largely transferred as food to animals.
It brings to them an energy which they may
use, but did not originate.

Not many years ago, it was taken for granted
that living things moved and had their being,
and did their work, by strength of their own ;
that the power by which I strike a blow, or
write on my paper, or move my lips in articu-
late speech, was somehow an original contribu-
tion to, rather than a directed use of, the
common forces of physical nature. To all who
have familiarized themselves with the facts of
the case, the contrary is now substantially cer-
tain. The sun is the source of all motion and
force manifested in life on the earth, and plants
are the medium in which energy is exalted to the
most serviceable state. The work clone by liv-
ing beings is at the expense of, and is measured
by, the passage of so much matter from an un-
stable to a relatively stable equilibrium, by the
coming together of molecules into closer and
firmer positions, and by the attendant fall of so
much energy from an exalted to a relatively

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 29

degraded condition. So plants, animals, men,
in all their doings, add nothing to and take
nothing from the sum of physical force. Their
prerogative is, each in its measure, to direct
the application of physical force, and to direct
it to ends.

The idea of ends involves that of individuality.

The higher animals, and men among them,
are complete individuals. We cannot make the
idea of individuality any clearer than by adduc-
ing them as examples of it. In the lowest form
of life, in those amorphous or indefinitely poly-
morphous " little lumps of protoplasm " which
the biologists have made known to us, and even,
perhaps, in a stratum or mass which takes the
form of whatever bounds it, it is said that we
may contemplate the phenomena of life in that
which has no manifest individuality. What
have we between these two extremes?

The first and simplest individuality is that of
cells. Cell-doctrine, or the cellular composition
of plants and animals, belongs wholly to the
biological science of the last half-century, al-
though the name is older, and some knowledge
of the structure in plants is as old as the micro-
scope. The homologizing of animals with plants

30 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

in this regard began about forty years ago ; and
the doctrine of the individual life of cells is re-
cent. Unfortunately the rather inappropriate
name cell came into use before the structure
was rightly understood, and may be misleading.
It was given, naturally enough, to the walls cir-
cumscribing cavities in ordinary plant-tissue,
before it was understood that the walls were
not made and then filled, — before it was known
that the contents are the living thing, and the
wall an encasement or shell.

The substance of our recent knowledge is,
that a plant is an aggregate of organic units,
mostly of very small size ; that these are to the
herb or tree what the bricks and stones of this
chapel are to the edifice. Only they " are living
stones, fitly framed together " in organic growth,
and their walls answer to the cement. Animals
do not differ materially, except that the mortar
is mostly of the same nature as the bricks, and
there is a greater or at length complete fusion
or confluence of the cells. The component mate-
rial, the protoplasm, is essentially the same, as
has already been stated.

But each aggregate, each ordinary plant or
animal, begins as one cell, which is then the sim-
ple individual. This in growth and propagation

;M

) ^

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 31

divides itself into two, these two into four, these
into sixteen, and so on, thus building up the
structure, — a whole, of which the individual
cells are component parts. The simplest plant
begins in the same way with an initial cell, but
this, instead of multiplying with cohesion into
a structure, multiplies with separation into pro-
geny. Other simple plants go on without sep-
aration to form a row of similar cells, which
may casually fall apart into individuals or may
remain connected ; but in either case each has
its own life, and does what the others do, so that
the separation or the continued connection is a
matter of indifference. But when, higher in the
scale, structures are built up, what were indi-
viduals become parts or organs, or the thou-
sandth or millionth part of an organ ; then the
life of the cells is their own no less, but their
individuality blends in the common life of the
aggregate. By increasing complexity of or-
ganization, with increasing subordination of
parts and specialization of office, the highest
plants and animals are composed. In them each
unit or cell has its own life and its own nutri-
tion, while also contributing to the common
weal, — some by this function, some by that ; but
in the higher forms all are somehow controlled

32 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

by a pervasive life and directed to common
ends, — ends the more various, complex, and
special, in proportion to the rank of the organ-
ism in the scale of being. So, too, the compo-
nent cells become effete and die, while the
aggregate life continues; and the continued
structure, which is nothing but an aggregate,
is somehow informed, animated, and operated
by a common life of higher grade than that of
any or all its components.

In numerous lower plants and animals we
cannot definitely determine what are organisms
and what are organs ; in the herb or tree, and
in the coral polypidom, organ, individual, colony
are inextricably blended ; in the higher animals
subordination of parts to a whole is completely
attained. All along the ascent that which con-
trols and subordinates parts aggrandizes its man-
ifestations. The lowest animals add very little
to merely vegetative life, except greater sensi-
tiveness to external impressions and more free
and varied response ; a step higher brings in a
greater range of unconscious feeling ; the higher
brute animals have attained unto specific desires,
affections, imagination, and the elements of
simple thought ; the highest, gifted with reflect-
ive reason, may make their own thoughts the

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION 33

subject of thought. So, our conception of indi-
viduality is from ourselves, conscious beino-s:
it is carried down unqualified to the brute
animals with which we are associated; it be-
comes vague and shadowy in plants, but still,
somehow, the idea inheres throughout all organ-
isms. The beginning of organization is indi-
viduation or tendency to individualize. The
completed self is man.

/ K

Here let me interject a remark in correction
of a common misapprehension as regards the
nature of the simplicity of the lowest organisms.
An animalcule and a unicellular plant, or the cel-
lular components of common plants or animals,
are simple indeed, comparatively. But the recent
science which has brought out the close connec-
tion of the lower with the higher forms (and
showed that through all " one increasing purpose
runs ") is also showing, in all the latest micro-
scopic work, that the plant-cell and the animal-
cell are really very complex structures, and the
processes through which one cell becomes two,
instead of being a simple bisection, prove to be
very elaborate and wonderful. The further the
investigation is carried under the modern micro-
scope, the more complex and recondite does

3

rJ

34 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

their structure and behavior appear to be. They
seemed to be simple because they are small;
but much of the simplicity vanishes upon inti-
mate acquaintance. Wherefore, in view of re-
cent discoveries of this sort, it is premature to
conclude that the "little lumps of protoplasm "
described by Hseckel are really destitute of
organic structure. It is an illusion to fancy that
the mystery of life is less in an amoeba or a
blood-corpuscle than in a man.

From individuals in themselves, let us pass to
questions relating to their succession and kinds.
Plants and animals, each propagating their
kind, produce lines of individuals, sustaining to
each other the relation of parent and progeny.
These lines are the species of the naturalist.
Have the species come down from the begin-
ning of life, unaltered or altered; or have there
been successive creations ?

Taking first the vegetable and animal king-
doms as a whole, it has long been well under-
stood that ages upon ages have passed since the
earth was stocked with living beings of numerous
sorts. Kind after kind has appeared, nourished,
and disappeared; and, in the long succession,
species of progressively higher rank have come

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 35

into existence, the forms more and more ap-
proximating those which now exist. There is
good reason to believe that at more than one
epoch the earth has been as fully stocked with
species as it is now, and in equal diversity,
except as to the highest types. What relation
- have these beings of the earlier and of the suc-
ceeding times sustained to each other and to
the present inhabitants of the earth ?

Half a century ago, when I began to read
scientific books and journals, the commonly re-
ceived doctrine was, that the earth had been
completely depopulated and repopulated over
and over, each time with a distinct population;
and that the species which now, along with man,
occupy the present surface of the earth, belong
to an ultimate and independent creation, having
an ideal but no genealogical connection with
those that preceded. This view, as a rounded
whole and in all its essential elements, has very
recently disappeared from science. It died a
royal death with Agassiz, who maintained it
with all his great ability, as long as it was tena-
ble. I am not aware that it now has any scien-
tific upholder. It is certain that there has been
no absolute severance of the present from the
nearer past ; for while some species have taken

36 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

the place of other species, not a few have sur-
vived unchanged, or almost unchanged. And
it is most probable that this holds throughout ;
for certain species appear to have bridged the
intervals between successive epochs all along
the line, surviving from one to another, and
justifying the inference that species — however
originated — have come in and gone out one by
one, and that probably no universal catastrophe
has ever blotted out life from the earth. Life
seems to have gone on, through many and great
vicissitudes, now with losses, now with renewals,
and everywhere at length with change; but
from first to last it has inhered in one system
of nature, one vegetable and one animal king-
dom, which themselves show indications of a
common starting-point. As respects the vege-
tation, from which I should naturally draw illus-
trations, the nature and amount of the likeness
between the existing flora and that of a preced-
ing geological period has recently been summed
up by Saporta in the statement that there is
not a tree nor a shrub in Europe or North
America which has not recognizable relatives
in the fossil remains of the tertiary period. It
is like visiting a country church-yard, where
"The rude forefathers of the hamlet deep,"

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 37

and spelling out, one by one, from mossed and
broken gravestones, the names of most of the
living inhabitants of the parish, — names differ-
ing it may be in orthography from those on
the village signs ; but, as of the people, so of theV
trees, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the
later are descendants of the earlier.

The same holds true of animals; and the
facts therefore point toward the conclusion that
existing species in general are descended from
tertiary ancestors. But if so they have mostly
undergone change, and great change as we go
farther back with the comparison. And there
are many existing forms of which no fossil an-
cestor is known. What relation, if any, can
these sustain to a by-gone flora or fauna ? And
with what reason do we predicate change of
species in former times if they are not change^
able now ? This brings up the question of the
fixity or variability of species.

Scientific opinion upon this point is not what
it was thirty or forty years ago. Then it was gen-
erally, though not universally, believed that spe-
cies are perfectly definite and stable; capable of
variation, indeed, but only within circumscribed
limits. Wherever it was difficult or impractica-
ble to discriminate them, the difficulty was pre-

38 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION

sumed to be, not in the things themselves, but
in the imperfection of the naturalist's knowl-
edge or acumen. There was the evidence of a
good number of cases to show that species had
not perceptibly altered in four or five thousand
years, and of some having lasted for a vastly
longer time. Hence it was an article of scien-
tific faith that species on the whole were fixed
now, and that probably they have come down
essentially unaltered from the beginning, — a be-
ginning which was wholly beyond the ken and
scope of science, which is concerned with ques-
tions about how things go on, and has nothing
to say as to how they absolutely began. The
naturalists of that day might suppose — cer-
tainly many of them did suppose — that exist-
ing species may have come into being by other
than direct supernatural origination, and, indeed,
the foremost of them were well aware that the
question of origin would have to be reargued
at no distant day. But, so far, the various specu-
lative attempts at explaining the mystery of the
incoming of species had not been encouraging,
and eminent naturalists deprecated all general
theories of the sort, as at the best a waste of
time. So the fixity and inscrutability of species
— though silently doubted by some, and con-

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 39

troverted by a few — was still the postulate of
natural history; and more than one laborious
naturalist has been known to declare that, if this
fixity was not complete, natural history was not
worth pursuing as a science.

There is now a different attitude toward this
class of questions. First, the absoluteness of
species is no longer taken for granted. That
species have a stability, that every form repro-
duces after its kind, is obvious ; but it is equally
obvious that the similarity of its individuals is
not complete. It had been assumed that the
differences brought about by variation are al-
ways comparatively small, unessential, and lim-
ited. This is now partly doubted, and partly
explained away.

In the first place, much of the popular idea of
the distinctness of all species rests on a fallacy,
which is obvious enough when once pointed
out. In systematic works, every plant and ani-
mal must be referred to some species, every
species is described by such and such marks,
and in the books one species is as good as
another. The absoluteness of species, being
the postulate of the science, was taken for
granted to begin with; and so all the forms ,

which have been named and admitted into the

40 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

systematic works as species, are thereby assumed
to be completely distinct. All the doubts and
uncertainties which may have embarrassed the
naturalist when he proposed or admitted a
particular species, the nice balancing of the pro-
babilities and the hesitating character of the
judgment, either do not appear at all in the
record or are overlooked by all but the critical
student. Whether the form under consideration
should be regarded as a new species, or should
be combined with others into a more general-
ized and variable species, is a question which a
naturalist has to decide for the time being,
often upon insufficient and always upon incom-
plete knowledge ; and increasing knowledge and
wider observation generally raise full as many
doubts as they settle. This may not be so de-
cidedly the case in zoology as in botany ; but I
incline to the opinion that there is no wide dif-
ference in this respect. The patient and plod-
ding botanist spends much of his time in the
endeavor to draw specific lines between the
parts#of a series the extremes of which are pa-
tently different, while the means seem to fill
the interval. When he is addressed by the
triumphant popular argument, " if one form and
one species has been derived from another,

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 41

show us the intermediate forms which prove it,"
he can only ejaculate his wish that this ideal
vegetable kingdom was the one he had to deal
with. Moreover when he shows the connecting

o

links, he is told, " Then these are all varieties
of one species; species are fixed, only with
wider variation than was thought." And when
he points to the wide difference between the
extremes, as being greater than that between
undoubted species, he is met with the rejoinder,
" Then here are two or three or more species
which undoubtedly have true distinctions, if
only you would find them out." That is quite
possible, but it is hardly possible that such fine
differences are supernatural.

Some one when asked if he believed in ghosts,
replied, No, he had seen too many of them. So
I have been at the making and unmaking of far
too many species to retain any overweening
confidence in their definiteness and stability. I
believe in them, certainly. I do not exactly /
agree that they " are shadows, not substantial
things," but I believe that they have only a
relative fixity and permanence.

You will ask if lack of capacity to interbreed
is not a criterion of species. I must answer, No.
As a matter of course individuals of widely di-

42 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

verse species cannot interbreed ; those of re-
lated species not uncommonly do ; but it is said
that when they do interbreed the hybrid pro-
geny is sterile. Commonly it is so, sometimes
not. The rule is not sufficiently true to serve as
a test, either in the vegetable or in the animal
kino-dom. The only practical use of the test is
for the discrimination of the higher grade of
varieties from species. Now in fapt some varie-
ties of the same species will hardly interbreed
at all; while some species interbreed most
freely, and produce fully fertile offspring. So
the supposed criterion fails in the only cases in
which it could be of service. All that can be
said is, that whereas known varieties tend to
interbreed with unimpaired and sometimes with
increased fertility, distinct species of near re-
semblance tend not to interbreed at all ; and
between the two extremes there are all inter-
mediate conditions. Here, as throughout or-
ganic nature, the extremes are far apart ; the
interval is filled with gradations.

What then is the substantial difference be-
tween varieties and species ? Just here is the
turning-point between the former view and the
present. The former doctrine was that varieties
come about in the course of nature, but species

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 43

not ; that varieties became what they are, but
that species were originally made what they are.
I suppose that, even before the day of Darwin-
ism, most working naturalists were reaching the
conviction that this distinction was untenable ;
that the same rule was applicable to both ; and
therefore that either. varieties did not come in
the course of nature, or that species did.

Perfectly apprehending the alternative and
its consequences, Agassiz took the ground that
varieties as well as species were primordial, or
rather that the more marked forms called va-
rieties by most naturalists were species, and
therefore original creations. Rightly to un-
derstand his view, it must be taken along with
his conception of species, as consisting from the
very first of a multitude of individuals.

Other naturalists were looking to the opposite
alternative, and were coming to the conclusion
that species as well as varieties were natural
developments. In botany, this conclusion was
reached more than sixty years ago, through
observation and experiment, by an English
clergyman and naturalist, Herbert, afterward
Dean of Manchester. He announced his con-
viction that "horticultural experiments have
established, beyond the possibility of doubt,

44 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

that botanical species are only a higher and
more permanent class of varieties/' and, con-
sequently, that the genus is the progenitor of
the species belonging to it. Others have
reached the same conclusion by more specula-
tive routes, and have deduced the theoretical
consequences. But no marked impression was
made until the hypothesis of natural selec-
tion, or the preservation of favored races
in the struggle for life was promulgated, and
supplied a scientific reason for the diversifica-
tion of varieties into species. The principle
brought to view is too obvious to have been
wholly overlooked. It is interesting to notice
that the earliest known anticipation of that
principle which Darwin and Wallace developed
almost simultaneously, was published sixty years
ago, by Dr. Wells, the sagacious author of the
theory of dew, who hit upon the idea of natu-
ral selection while resident in America. As
abstracted by Mr. Darwin, who evidently takes
delight in the discovery of these anticipations,
the points which Dr. Wells made were substan-
tially these : —

All animals vary more or less : agriculturists
improve domesticated animals by selection.
What is thus done by art is done with equal

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 45

efficacy, though more slowly, by Nature, in
the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted
for the country which they inhabit, and in this
way : Negroes and mulattoes enjoy immunity
from certain tropical diseases, and white men a
comparative immunity from those of cold cli-
mates. Under the variation common to all
animals, some of the darker would be better
adapted than the rest to bear the diseases of a
'warm country, — say, of tropical Africa. This
race would consequently multiply, while the
others would decrease, directly, because the
prevalent diseases would be more fatal to them,
and indirectly, by inability to contend with
their more vigorous neighbors. Through the
continued operation of the same causes, darker
and darker races would prevail over the less
dark, and in time would monopolize the region
where they originated or into which they had
advanced. Similarly would white races, to
the exclusion of dark, be developed and prevail
in cooler regions.

Now, this simple principle, — extended from
races to species ; from the present to geological
ages ; from man and domesticated animals to all
animals and plants ; from struggle with disease
to struggle for food, for room, and against the

46 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

diverse hardships which at times beset all living
things, and which are intensified by the Malthu-
sian law of the pressure of population on sub-
sistence,— population tending to multiply in
geometrical progression, while food can increase
only in a much lower ratio, and room may
not be increasable at all, so that out of multi-
tudinous progeny only the few fittest to the
special circumstances in each generation can
possibly survive and propagate, — this is Dar-
winism; that is, Darwinism pure and simple, free
iA> L. ^rom a^ speculative accretions.

Here, it may be remarked that natural selec-
tion by itself is not an hypothesis, nor even a
theory. It is a truth, — a catena of facts and
direct inferences from facts. As has been hap-
pily said, it is a truth of the same kind as that
which we enunciate in saying that round stones
will roll down a hill further than flat ones.
There is no doubt that natural selection oper-
ates ; the open question is, what do its opera-
tions amount to. The hypothesis based on
this principle is, that the struggle for life and
survival of only tjie fittest among individu-
als, all disposed to vary and no two exactly
alike, will account for the diversification of
the species and forms of vegetable and ani-

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 47

mal life, — will even account for the rise, in the
course of countless ages, from simpler and lower
to higher and more specialized living beings.

We need not here enter into any further ex-
planation of this now familiar but not always
well-understood hypothesis ; nor need I here
pronounce any judgment of my own upon it.
No doubt it may account for much which has
not received other scientific explanation ; and
Mr. Darwin is not the man to claim that it will
account for every thing. But before we can
judge at all of its capabilities, we need clearly
to understand what is contained in the hypothe-
sis ; for what can be got out of it, in the way of
explanation, depends upon what has gone into
it. So certain discriminations should here be
attended to.

Natural selection we understand to be a sort
of personification or generalized expression for
the processes and the results of the whole in-
terplay of living things on the earth with their
inorganic surroundings and with each other.
The hypothesis asserts that these may account,
not for the introduction of life, but for its di-
versification into the forms and kinds which
we now behold. This, I suppose, is tantamount
to asserting that the differences between one

48 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

species and another now existing, and between
these and their predecessors, has come to pass in
the course of Nature ; that is, without miracle.
In these days, all agree that a scientific inquiry
whether this may be so — that is, whether there
are probable grounds for believing it (no thought-
ful person expects to prove it) — is perfectly
legitimate ; and, so far as it becomes probable, I
imagine that you might safely accept it. For the
hypothesis, in its normal and simplest form, —
when kept close to the facts, and free from ex-
traneous assumptions — is merely this : —

Given the observed capacity for variation as
an inexhaustible factor, assuming that what has
varied is still prone to vary (and there are
grounds for the assumption), and natural selec-
tion will— so to say — pick out for preservation
the fittest forms for particular surroundings,
lead on and diversify them, and, by continual
elimination of the less fit, segregate the sur-
vivors into distinct species. This, you see, as-
sumes, and does not account for, The impulse to
variation, assumes that variation is an inherent
and universal capacity, and is the efficient cause
of all the diversity ; while natural selection is
the proximate cause of it. So it is the selection,
not the creation of forms that is accounted for.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 49

Darwinism does not so much explain why we
have the actual forms, as it does why we have
only these and not all intermediate forms, — in
short, why we have species. There is of course
a cause for the variation. Nobody supposes
that any thing changes without a cause ; and
there is no reason for thinking that proximate
causes of variation may not come to be known ;
but we hardly know the conditions, still less the
causes now. The ■ point I wish to make here is
that natural selection — however you expand
its meaning — cannot be invoked as the cause
of that upon which it operates, i e., variation.
Otherwise, if by natural selection is meant the
totality of all the known and unknown causes
of whatever comes to pass in organic nature,
then the term is no longer an allowable person-
ification, but a sheer abstraction, which mean-
ing every thing, can explain nothing. It is like
saying that whatever happens is the cause of
whatever comes to pass.

We may conclude, therefore, that natural
selection, in the sense of the originator of the
term, and in the only congruous sense, stands
for the influence of inorganic nature upon living
things, along with the influence of these upon
each other; and that what it purports to ac-

'*'

50 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

count for is the picking out, from the multitude
of incipient variations, of the few which are to
survive, and which thereby acquire distinctness.

There is a further assumption in the hypo-
thesis which must not be overlooked ; namely,
that the variation of plants and animals, out of
which so much comes, is indefinite or all-direc-
tioned and accidental. This, I would insist, is
no fundamental part of the hypothesis of the
derivation of species, and is clearly no part of
the principle of natural selection. But it is an
assumption which Mr. Darwin judges to be war-
ranted by the facts, and in some of its elements
it is unavoidable. Evidently if the innate ten-
dency to vary upon which physical circum-
stances operate is indefinite, then the variations
which the circumstances elicit, and which could
not otherwise amount to any thing, must be ac-
cidental in the same sense as are the circum-
stances themselves. Out of this would imme-
diately rise the question as to what can be the
foundation and beginning of this long and won-
derful chapter of accidents which has produced
and maintained, not only for this time but
through all biological periods, an ever-varying
yet ever, well-adapted cosmos.

But the facts, so far as I can judge, do not

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 51

support the assumption of every-sided and in-
different variation. Variation "is somehow and
somewhere introduced in the transit from parent
to offspring. The actual variations displayed
by the progeny of a particular plant or animal
may differ much in grade, and tend in more
than one direction, but in fact they do not ap-
pear to tend in many directions. It is generally
agreed that the variation is from within, is an
internal response to external impressions. All
that we can possibly know of the nature of the
inherent tendency to vary must be gathered
from the facts of the response. And these, I
judge, are not such as to require or support the
assumption of a tendency to wholly vague and
all-directioned variation.

Let us here correct a common impression
that Darwinian evolution predicates actual or
necessary variation of all existing species, and
counts that the variation must be in some de-
finite ratio to the time. That is not the idea,
nor the fact. " Evolution is not a course of
hap-hazard and incessant change, but a continu-
ing re-adjustment, which may or may not, ac-
cording to circumstances, involve considerable
changes in a given time." Every form is in a
relatively stable equilibrium, else it would not

52 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

exist. Forms adjusted to their surroundings
ought by the hypothesis to remain unchanged
until the circumstances change. Only those of
their variations could come to any thing which
happened to be equally well adapted to the
unchanged circumstances ; and this may be
what we have when two or more nearly re-
lated species inhabit similar stations in the
same area.

From this point of view you see how wide
of the mark are those who imagine that Dar-
winian evolution supposes that the organic
world was in early times, or at any time, out of
joint or in ill relations to the surroundings. On
the contrary, it is of the very nature of natural
selection, that, while inducing changes eventu-
ally immense, it should preserve throughout all
time a condition of harmonious adaptation. Ca-
tastrophes must destroy ; but gradual modifica-
tion, under the long and silent struggle which
never hastes and never rests, preserves while it
renovates and diversifies the races.

I ought here to state that there are eminent
naturalists (one of them of your own university)
who accept the doctrine of evolution, but who
think little of natural selection as a modus oper-
andi in the diversification of species ; and there

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 53

are distinguished writers, not naturalists, who,
from other points of view are ready to accept
" the doctrine of the successive evolution from
ancestral germs of higher and higher forms of
life and mind," * while they profess to have
buried the principle of natural selection and
with it the Malthusian theory of population in
one common grave. These are evolutionists, in
their way, because the probability of evolution-
ary theories springs from the very various lines
of facts, otherwise inexplicable, which they
harmonize and explain : — in geology, the pre-
vious existence of forms more and more like
those now existing, and at length coalescing in
them; in geography, the actual distribution of
species and genera over the earth's surface ; in
systematic natural history, the reason why spe-
cies and genera and orders are so variously
related, are here connected by transitions and
there separated by wide gaps; in morphology
why the same functions may be assumed by
different organs, or the same kind of organ may
perform here one function and there another,
or again exist as a vestige, of no service at all ;
in anatomy and biology, the transition from one
element of structure to another, the gradual
* Bowen in " The North American Review," November, 1S79.

54 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

specialization of organs, and the remarkable co-
incidence between the order of the development
in the individual animal and that of the rise
from low to high in the scale of being, and that
of the successive appearance of the grades in
time ; finally in psychology, the gradations be-
tween beings endowed with rudimentary sensa-
tion and beings endowed with mind.

Here, where the " touch of Nature makes the
whole world kin," we reach the sensitive point.
Man, while on the one side a wholly exceptional
being, is on the other an object of natural his-
tory, — a part of the animal kingdom. If you
agree with Quatrefages that man is a kingdom
by himself, you must agree with him that this
kingdom is solely intellectual ; that he is as cer-
tainly and completely an animal as he is cer-
tainly something more. We are sharers not
only of animal but of vegetable life, sharers with
the higher brute animals in common instincts
and feelings and affections. It seems to me that
there is a sort of meanness in the wish to ignore
the tie. I fancy that human beings may be
more humane when they realize that, as their
dependent associates live a life in which man has
a share, so they have rights which man is bound
to respect.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 55

Man, in short, is a partaker of the natural as
well as of the spiritual. And the evolutionist
may say with the apostle : "Howbeit that was not
first which is spiritual, but that which is natural,
and afterward that which is spiritual." Man,
" formed of the dust of the ground," endowed
with "the breath of life," "became a living
soul." Is there any warrant for affirming that
these processes were instantaneous ?

As has just been intimated, the characteristic
of that particular theory of evolution which is
now in the ascendant is that, by taking advan-
tage of "every creature's best" for bettering
conditions, it has made strife work for good,
throughout an immensely long line of adjust-
ments and readjustments, in a series ascending
as it advanced ; that it supposes a process, not
from discord to harmony, but from simpler to
fuller and richer harmonies, conserving through-
out the best adaptations to the then existing
conditions. So while its advocates nowhere
contemplate a state

" When Nature underneath a heap,
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,"

they may appropriate Dryden's closing lines, —

56 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

11 From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began,
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man."

I have now indicated, at more than sufficient
length for one discourse, some of the principal
recent changes and present tendencies in scien-
tific belief, especially in biology. Even the most
advanced of the views here presented are held
by very many scientific men, — some as estab-
lished truths, some as probable opinions. There
is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific
theories, and more, are held as ascertained facts,
and as the basis of philosophical inferences which
strike at the root of theistic beliefs.

It remains to consider what attitude thought-
ful men and Christian believers should take
respecting them, and how they stand related to
beliefs of another order. That will be the topic
of a following lecture.

LECTURE II. — THE RELATIONS OF SCIEN-
TIFIC TO RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

TN a preceding discourse I brought to your
notice a series of changes in view and
opinion which have taken place among scien-
tific men within my own remembrance. I
restricted the survey to the biological sciences
(with merely a reference to the principle of the
conservation of energy in its application to the
organic world), and in these to the supposed
facts and immediate inferences, to what may be
called their natural-historical interpretation.

These new views are full of interest of a kind
which you cannot expect a naturalist to under-
value. For they have greatly exalted his call-
ing. In the days of Linnoeus, who died only
a hundred and two years ago, and throughout
a long generation of his followers, species were

58 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

looked upon as " simple curiosities of Nature,"
to be inventoried and described ; and striking
phenomena in plants and animals, as something
to be wondered at, but not to be explained.
With the advent of Morphology, the precursor
and parent of Evolution, Natural History devel-
oped from a curious pursuit, training the observ-
ing powers, to that of a true science, engaging
the reason in the search for causes. According
to one definition, "Science is the labor of mind
applied to Nature." In this sense, modern bot-
any and zoology have certainly become scien-
tific. They are at least attempting great labors.
But in widely extending, as they now do, the
operation of natural causes in the organic world,
they make close connections between biology
and physics, or what used to be called, and I
think deserves to be called, natural philoso-
phy. And the connection brings in, or brings
up afresh, considerations which affect the ground
of natural and revealed religion. Under this
aspect, they properly excite your anxious atten-
tion.

I used throughout the phrase " scientific be-
lief," as the one best suited to the occasion.
The term is comprehensive and elastic, cover-
ing many degrees of conviction or assent, from

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 59

moral certainty down to probable opinion. In
this respect, scientific and theological beliefs are
similar; as they also are in being mainly states
of mind toward that which is incapable of dem-
onstration,— either because, as in the case of
ultimate beliefs (on which all science and knowl-
edge are based) it is impossible to go beyond
them, or else because the subject-matter is not
positively known, and certainty is unattainable
from the nature or the present conditions of the
case. The proofs upon which both biological
and theological investigations have to rely are
largely probabilities, some of a higher, some
of a lower order, and much that is accepted for
the time is taken on trial or on prima facie evi-
dence. Much also is or should be held under
suspense of judgment, a state of mind emi-
nently favorable to accurate investigation. As
to those who can forthwith assort the contents
of their minds into two compartments, one for
what they believe and the other for what they
disbelieve, neither their belief nor their denial
can be of much account. In all subjects of
inquiry, those only are to be trusted who dis-
criminate between inevitable beliefs, established
convictions, probable opinions, and hypotheses
on trial.

60 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

Now, our general inquiry in this lecture is,
What should be the attitude, I will not say of
theological students, but of thoughtful men,
in respect to scientific beliefs, tendencies, and
anticipations, such as we have been consid-
ering ?

To a certain extent it may well be a waiting
attitude. The strictly scientific matters must
necessarily be left mainly to the experts, whose
very various and independent investigations,
pursued under every diversity of bias, must in
time reach reasonably satisfactory conclusions.
But the naturalists claim no monopoly in the
consideration of the great problems which now
interest us, in which indeed most of them de-
cline to take any part. Perhaps theological
students and divines might be asked to wait
until views and hypotheses still ardently con-
troverted among scientific investigators are
brought nearer to a settlement. But the dis-
position to discount expected results, either for
or against supernatural religion, has always pre-
vailed. The theologians at least have never
waited, and cannot be expected to wait; and
while some of their contributions to the subject
have been inconsiderate, others have been most
valuable.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 61

In any case, there is no call to wait on the
ground that the disturbing views are only
hypotheses. For, in the first place, we should
have long to wait for demonstration one way or
the other; and one crop of hypotheses is the
fertile seed of another. Besides, hypothesis is
the proper instrument for dealing with this class
of questions ; indeed, it is the essential precursor
of every fruitful investigation in physical na-
ture. You can seldom sound with the plum-
met while standing on the shore. To do this
to any purpose, you must launch out on the sea,
and brave some risks. Nearly all valuable re-
sults have been gained in this way. Newton's
theory of gravitation was a typical hypothesis,
and one which happened to be capable of early
and sufficient verification. The unclulatory the-
ory of light was another. The nebular hypoth-
esis, or portions of it, and the kinetic theory
of gases, less verifiable, are accepted willingly
because of the success with which they explain
the facts. Evolution is a more complex, loose,
and less provable hypothesis, or congeries of
hypotheses, which can at most have only a rela-
tive, though perhaps continually increasing prob-
ability from its power of explaining a great
variety of facts. Its strength appears on com-

62 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

paring it with the rival hypothesis — for such
it is — of immediate creation, which neither ex-
plains nor pretends to explain any.

How the more exact physical sciences are
becoming more reconditely hypothetical, espe-
cially in the imagination of entities of which
there can be no possible proof beyond their
serviceability in explaining phenomena, we
must not stop to consider. Only this may be
said, that the adage, " Where faith begins sci-
ence ends" is now well nigh inverted. For
faith, in a just sense of the word, assumes as
prominent a place in science as in religion. It
is indispensable to both.

Let it be noted, moreover, that the case we
have to consider does not come before the tri-
bunal of reason with antecedent presumptions
all on one side, as theologians generally suppose.
They say to the naturalists, not improperly, we
will think about adopting your conclusions,
contrary as they are to all our prepossessions,
when they are thoroughly and irrevocably sub-
stantiated, and not till then. Your theory may
prove true, but it seems vastly improbable.
Here the naturalist is ready with a rejoinder :
In this world of law you cannot expect us to
adopt your assumption of specific creations by

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 63

miraculous intervention with the course of Na-
ture, not once for all at a beginning, but over
and over in time. We will accept intervention
only when and where you can convincingly es-
tablish it, and where we are unable to explain
it away, as in the case of absolute beginning.
If the naturalist starts with the presumption
against him when he broaches the theory of the
descent of later from preceding forms in the
course of Nature, so no less does the theologian
when in a world governed by law he asserts a
break in the continuity of natural cause and
effect.

But, indeed, you are not so much concerned
to know whether evolutionary theories are
actually well-founded or ill-founded, as you
are to know whether if true, or if received as
true, they would impair the foundations of re-
ligion. And, surely, if views of Nature which
are incompatible with theism and with Christi-
anity can be established, or can be made as
tenable as the contrary, it is quite time that we
knew it. I£ on the other hand, all real facts
and necessary inferences from them can be ad-
justed to our grounded religious convictions, as
well as other ascertained facts have been ad-
justed, it may relieve many to be assured of it.

64 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

The best contribution that I can offer towards
the settlement of these mooted questions may
be the statement and explanation of my own
attitude in this regard, and of the reasons which
determine it.

I accept substantially, as facts, or as appar-
ently wTell-grounded inferences, or as fairly
probable opinions, — according to their nature
and degree, — the principal series of changed
views which I brought before you in the pre-
ceding lecture. I have no particular predilec-
tion for any of them ; and I have no particular
dread of any of the consequences which legiti-
mately flow from them, beyond the general awe
and sense of total insufficiency with which a
mortal man contemplates the mysteries which
shut him in on every side. I claim, moreover,
not merely allowance, but the right to hold
these opinions along with the doctrines of natu-
ral religion and the verities of the Christian
faith. There are perplexities enough to bewil-
der our souls whenever and wherever we look
for the causes and reasons of things ; but I am
unable to perceive that the idea of the evolu-
tion of one species from another, and of all from
an initial form of life, adds any new perplexity
to theism.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 65

In unfolding my thoughts upon the subject,
I wish to keep as close " to the solid ground of
Nature " as I possibly can, even where the dis-
course must rise from the ground of science into
the finer air of philosophy. Specially I must
heed the injunction : " If thou hast any tidings,
prithee, deliver them like a man of this world,"
and not trouble myself, nor you, with meta-
physical refinements and distinctions which,
however needful in their way and place, are
unnecessary to our purpose. I take for granted,
"like a man of this world," the objective reality
and substantiality of what we see and deal
with, though I am told it cannot be proved;
and I assume, — although demonstration is
impossible, — that what I and my fellow-men
cannot help believing we ought to believe, or
at least must rest content with. I suppose you
will agree with me that it is not science, at least
not natural science, which raises the most for-
midable difficulties to Christian theism, but
philosophy, and that it is for philosophy to sur-
mount them.

The question which science asks of all it
meets is, What is the system and course of
things, and how is this or that a part of it in
the fixed sequence of cause and effect? Philos-

5

66 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

ophy asks whence the system itself, and what
are causes and effects. Theology is partly his-
torical science, and partly philosophy. Now I,
as a" scientific man, might rest in the probability
of evolution as a general inference from the
facts or a good hypothesis, and relegate the
questions you would ask to the philosophers
and theologians. But I am not one of those
who think that scientific men should not con-
cern themselves with such matters ; and having
gone so far as to say that the evolution which I
accept does not seem to me to add any new
perplexity to theism, and well knowing that
others are of a contrary opinion, I am bound to
further explanation and argument.

But I have not the presumption to suppose
that I can make any new contribution to this
discussion ; and what I may suggest must not
be expected to cover the ground widely nor
penetrate it deeply. I am sure that you will
not look to me for the rehanclling of insoluble
problems and inevitable contradictions, into
which the philosophical consideration of the
relations of Nature and man to God ultimately
lands us. Certainly they are not peculiar to
evolution. So, in so for as we may fairly refer
any of its perplexities to old antinomies, which

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 67

can neither be reconciled nor evaded, the bur-
den will be off our shoulders. It might suffice
to show that evolution need raise no other nor
greater religious or philosophical difficulties
than the views which have already been ac-
cepted, and held to be not inimical to religion.

But, indeed, our universal concession that
Nature is, and that it is a system of fixed laws
and uniformities, under which every thing we
see and know in the inorganic universe, and
very much in the organic world, have come to
be as they are, in unbroken sequence, implicitly
gives away the principle of all ordinary objec-
tion to the evolution of living as well as of life-
less forms, of species as well as of individuals.
It leaves the matter simply as one of fact and
evidence. Indeed, mediate creation is just
what the thoughtful and thorough observer of
the ways of God in Nature would expect, and
is what some of the most illustrious of the phi-
losophic saints and fathers of the church have
more or less believed in.

In saying that the doctrine of the evolution
of species has taken its place among scientific
beliefs, I do not mean that it is accepted by
all living naturalists; for there are some who
wholly reject it. Nor that it is held with equal

68 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

conviction and in the same way by all who re-
ceive it ; for some teach it dogmatically, along
with assumptions, both scientific and philosoph-
ical, which are to us both unwarranted and
unwelcome ; more accept it, with various confi-
dence, and in a tentative way, for its purely
scientific uses, and without any obvious refer-
ence to its ultimate outcome ; and some, look-
ing to its probable prevalence, are adjusting
their conditional belief in it to cherished beliefs
of another order. One thing is clear, that the
current is all running one way, and seems
unlikely to run dry; and that evolutionary
doctrines are profoundly affecting all natural
science.

Here you remark that your objection is not
so much to the idea of mediate creation as to
the form it has assumed ; that the mediate pro-
duction of species may indeed be completely
theistic. But that, whereas their immediate
creation directly asserts Divine action, their in-
coming under Nature only implies it. To those
who already believe in a Supreme Being the
two views may religiously amount to the same
thing. But, you continue, living beings were
thought to afford a kind of demonstration of a
supernatural creator. Science, in taking this

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 69

away, leaves us only the assurance that if we
bring the idea of God to Nature we may find
Nature wholly compatible with that idea. Well,
what is lost in directness may perhaps be gained
in breadth and depth. It is certain that the
whole progress of physical science tends, in
respect to Divine action, to consider that me-
diate, general, and in a sense indirect, which
had been thought to be immediate and special.
Youth is ever taught by instances, manhood by
laws.

You go on to say : The evolution of species
now so commended to us by science, not long
ago seemed as improbable to scientific as to or-
dinary minds. What assurance can we unscien-
tific people have that science will not reverse
its present judgments? None, perhaps, except
that, while many particular judgments have
been reversed or altered, the general course of
thought has run in one direction. And theolo-
gians, like naturalists, must be content with the
best judgments they can form upon the present
showing, and be ready to modify them upon
better.

Finally, and to reach the present point, you
pertinently commend to scientific men their
own saying : " Science asks of every thing how

70 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

it is a part of the system of Nature, of the chain
of cause and effect." An hypothesis must give
the how and why, and from its own resources,
before it is worth attending to. A credible hy-
pothesis should assign real and known causes,
and ascertain their actual operation somewhere
before assuming their operation everywhere. A
complete hypothesis should assign not only real
but sufficient causes for all the effects; and
when it assumes them in invisible and intangi-
ble forms, such as molecules and molecular
movements, it is bound to show that all the ob-
served consequences flow from the assumption.
Now to declare that species come through evo-
lution, without either proving it by facts or
clearly conceiving the mode and manner how,
is only supporting a thesis which was until lately
deemed scientifically improbable by hypotheses
of a kind which have always been regarded as
invalid.

Just here Darwinism comes in with a modus
operandi, in which lies all its essential value. As
the conception of the derivation of one form
from another is the only distinctly-pointed alter-
native to specific supernatural creation, so the
principle of natural selection, taken in its fullest
sense, is the only one known to me which can

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. *J\

be termed a real cause in the scientific sense
of the term. Other modern hypotheses assign
metaphysical, vague, or verbal causes, such
as development, anticipation, laws of molecular
constitution, without indicating what the special
constitution is, — none of which have much
advantage over the " nisus formatimis " of earlier
science.

I have no time to recapitulate what I briefly
said of natural selection in a former lecture ; nor
to analyze the applications of the principle by
Darwin, Wallace, and others to critical instances ;
nor to specify its limitations and apparent fail-
ures. The discussion or even the presentation
of these would fill the hour, and divert me from
my particular task. Instead of this, I will merely
give my impression of the present state of the
case as respects the points now before us.

You will remember the distinction which I
pointed out between the principle of natural se-
lection, which I take to be a true one, and the
Darwinian hypothesis founded on it, which I take
to be to a considerable extent probable. That
is, I think that the influences and actions which
the term "natural selection" stands for, give a
sufficient scientific explanation of the way in
which smaller differences among plants and

72 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

animals may rise into greater, varieties into
species. Given differences and an internal ten-
dency to differ more, i.e., given variation as an
inexhaustible factor, and natural selection should
suffice for the preservation and increase of the
select few as a consequence of the destruction
of the intermediate many. Surely there is
nothing either improbable or irreligious in the
idea that lines of individuals or races, once in
existence, should be subject to the conditions
of Nature, and that the fittest for particular
conditions should thereby be preserved. As to
variation, that really occurs as a fact, though we
know not how ; and, if we frame explanations
of the mode and get conceptions of the causes
of the variation of living things, still we proba-
bly shall never be able to carry our knowledge
very much further back ; for in each variation
lies hidden the mydery of a beginning. We cannot
tell why offspring should be like unto parent ;
how then should we know why it should some-
times be different ?

So then Darwinism has real causes at its foun-
dation, viz., the fact of variation and the inevi-
table operation of natural selection, determining
the survival only of the fittest forms for the
time and place. It is therefore a good hypothe-

\

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 73

sis, so far. But is it a sufficient and a complete
hypothesis ? Does it furnish scientific explana-
tion of [i.e., assign natural causes for) the rise
of living forms from low to high, from simple to
complex, from protoplasm to simple plant and
animal, from fish to flesh, from lower animal to
higher animal, from brute to man? Does it
scientifically account for the formation of any
organ, show that under given conditions sensi-
tive eye-spot, initial hand or brain, or even a
different hue or texture, must then and there
be developed as the consequence of assignable
conditions? Does it explain how and why so
much, or any, sensitiveness, faculty of response
by movement, perception, consciousness, intel-
lect, is correlated with such and such an organ-
ism? I answer, Not at all! The hypothesis
does none of these things. For my own part I
can hardly conceive that any one should think
that natural selection scientifically accounts for
these phenomena.

Let us here discriminate. To account scien-
tifically for phenomena, or for complex series
of phenomena, by assigning real and sufficient
natural causes, is one thing. To believe that
the phenomena have occurred in the course
of nature, and have natural causal connection,

74 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

is another. It is not natural selection which
has led Mr. Darwin and many others to believe
that life was " originally breathed by the Creator
into a few forms or into one," and " that the
production and extinction of the past and pres-
ent inhabitants of the world has been clue to
secondary causes ; " but it is the observed fact of
likenesses and that of gradation from form to
form which suggested the idea of an actual
evolution from form to form having somehow
taken place. Variation and natural selection are
now assigned as causes or reasons of the evolu-
tion. Variation originates all the differences.
Natural selection, determining which forms shall
survive, reduces their number and intensifies
their character. But Darwin may likewise
consistently speak of his favorite principle as
a cause of the evolution, it being that in the
absence of which the evolution could not take
effect. A cause of variation it certainly is not,
but it is a necessary occ'astoii of it, or of its
progress. Because without natural selection to
pave the way, the wheels of variation would
at once be clogged and all progress be ar-
rested. Variation provides that upon which
natural selection operates ; the operation of
natural selection makes room for further varia-

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 75

tion, gives opportunity for variability to change
its fashions and display its novelties; and so
the two go on, hand in hand. But, although
thus conjoined, there is always this difference
between the two, that natural selection works
externally, with known natural agencies, and in
the light of common clay ; variation works in-
ternally, in darkness, and its agencies and ways
are recondite and past finding out. Or, when
we find out something, — as we may hope to
do, — we only resolve a before unexplained
phenomenon into two factors, one of them a now
ascertained natural process, the other a some-
thing; which still eludes our search. But we
suppose it to be natural, although as yet un-
known. Surely we are not to suppose that nat-
ural agencies cease just where we fail to make
them out.

To proceed : what Darwinism maintains is
that variation, which is the origination of small
differences, and species-production, which repre-
sents somewhat larger differences, and genus-
production, which represents still greater
differences, are parts of a series and differ
only in degree, and therefore have common
natural causes whatever these may be ; and
that natural selection gives a clear conception

76 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION

of a way in which continually or occasionally
arising small differences may be added up into
large sums in the course of time. This is a
legitimate and on the whole a good working
hypothesis. The questionable point is whether
the sum of the differences can be obtained from
the individually small variations by simple addi-
tion. I very much doubt it. I doubt especially
if simple addition is capable of congruously
adding up such different denominations. That
is, while I see how variations of a given organ
or structure can be led on to great modification,
I cannot conceive how non-existent organs come
thus to be, how wholly new parts are initiated,
how any thing can be led on which is not there
to be taken hold of. Nor am I at all helped in
this respect by being shown that the new organs
are developed little by little.

The doubt is not whether the organs and
forms were actually evolved in the course of
Nature. I agree with Darwin that they prob-
ably were, and if so then doubtless under nat-
ural selection. And I cannot help thinking that
Darwin would agree with me that the principle
of natural selection does not account for it. That
is, we both account for it all, only by assuming
as an inexplicable fact that variation does occur

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 77

to the whole extent of the extreme differences.
All appears to have come to pass in the course
of Nature, and therefore under second causes;
but what these are, or how connected and inter-
fused with first cause, we know not now, per-
haps shall never know.

Now views like these, when formulated by
religious instead of scientific thought, make
more of Divine providence and fore-ordination
than of Divine intervention ; but perhaps they
are not the less theistical on that account. Nor
are they incompatible with "special creative
act," unless natural process generally is incom-
patible with it, — which no theist can allow.
No Christian theist can eliminate the idea of
Divine intervention any more than he can that
of Divine ordination ; neither, on the other
hand, can he agree that what science removes
from the supernatural to the natural is lost to
theism. But, the business of science is with the
course of Nature, not with interruptions of it,
which must rest on their own special evidence.
Still more, it is the business of science to ques-
tion searchingly all seeming interruptions of it,
and its privilege, to refer events and phenomena
not at the first but in the last resort to Divine
will.

/

78 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

Moreover, " special creative act " is not ex-
cluded by evolutionists on scientific ground, is
not excluded at all on principle, except by those
who adopt a philosophy which antecedently
rules out all possibility of it. Darwin postu-
lates one creative act and a probability of more,
and so in principle is at one with Wallace and
with Dana, who insist on more.

But it has been said, and indeed is said over
and over, even by thoughtful men, that, al-
though Darwinism is not necessarily atheistic,
yet, when once started it dispenses with further
need of God. "Given [it is said] the laws
which we find, then there is no more use for
God, and all things have come out as we find
them with none of his supervision. There may
have been — we' do not know — a God once;
but law and not God, is the great Creator." A
few words should dispose of this. First, by
what right is it assumed that the Darwinian
differs from the orthodox conception of law?
In the next place, this line of argument applies
equally to a series of creative acts separated by
intervals, during which it could with the same
reason (or unreason) be said that there is no
use for God, that there may have been a God at

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 79

times ! So it cuts away the ground from under
the Christian evolution which the writer quoted
from allows, as well as from that which he
deprecates. And it equally dispenses with use
for God in Nature for the several thousand years
which have passed since creation under the
biblical view was finished, and the Creator
" rested from all the work which he had made."
There is no more validity in the argument in
the one case than in the others.

A word or two upon the subject of creative
acts occurring in time may not be out of place.
These, when spoken of in the present connec-
tion, do not usually refer to the making of a
new form of plant or animal ins tauter out of the
dust of the ground. However it might have
been when there was only one act of creation
to think of, the enormous crudeness of such a
conception when applied to a long succession of
animals would now be seriously felt by every
one. It is a phrase most used by those who
accept the idea of the evolution of one species
from another, but who feel the utter incom-
petence of known natural causes to account for
it. In the absence of such causes, they, being
theists, naturally (and I cannot say unphilo-
sophically) assign the simpler and seemingly

80 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

easier part of evolution to recondite natural
causes which they are unable to specify, the
more difficult or inscrutable to a diviner and
more direct or supernatural act, which they
liken to creation. I suppose they do not feel
the necessity, as they have not the ability, to
draw any definite line between what they think
mere Nature may accomplish, and what they
believe she cannot. Probably what they have
in mind is mediate creation and not miracle.
Perhaps they are convinced that if they could
behold the birth of a species, they would see
nothing more miraculous than in the birth of
an individual. They mean that the springs of
Nature are somehow touched by a new form or
instance of force directed to some new end.
Yet so they must be in a degree in the origi-
nation of a new race or variety. This whole
conception of mediate creation is logically car-
ried out to its extreme by my philosophical col-
league, Professor Bowen, when he concludes
that " not only every new species but that each
individual living organism, originated in a
special act of creation." *

So the difference between pure Darwinism

* Korth American Review for November, 1879, p. 463.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 81

and a more theistically expressed^ evolution is
not so great as it seemed. Both agree in the
opinion that species are evolved from species,
and that evolution somehow occurs in the course
of Nature. Darwinism opines that the whole
is a natural result of general causes such as we
know of and in a degree understand, such as
we recognize under the concrete terms of va-
riability, heredity, and the like, — terms which
we can estimate and limit only by reference to
what we see coming to pass, — along with com-
plex physical interactions which are more meas-
urable and predictable. The very much that
it has not accounted for by these causes and
processes, it assumes may be in time accounted
for by them, or by as yet unrecognized general
causes like them. The specially theistic evolu-
tion referred to judges that these general causes
cannot account for the whole work, and that the
unknown causes are of a more special character
and higher order. I think it does not declare
that these are not secondary causes, and whether
they would be ranked as natural causes would
depend upon the sense in which the term Nature
was at the moment used. Probably such evo-
lutionists, if they had to give form to their con-
ceptions, would vary in all degrees between

82 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

the direct interposition of a supernatural hand
at certain stages or crises, and that extreme
extension of the Supernatural into and through
the Natural which Professor Bowen reaches
in the assertion that each individual living
organism, as well as every new species, origi-
nated in a special act of creation. This, the
complete assimilation of specific to individual
origination, is simply Darwinism, expressed
in less appropriate language. What the one
calls " special act" the other, along with the
rest of mankind, calls general process. The
common principle of the Divine ordination of
Nature, which the philosopher here asserts in a
paradoxical way, the Darwinian implies, or even
postulates, on appropriate occasions. The Dar-
winian Naturalist, I mean, not the monistic and
agnostic philosopher, — from whom, so far, we
have kept as clear as has Mr. Darwin in every
volume and every line.

Suppose now that we are shut up to Nature
for the evolution of the forms of living things.
As theists, we are not debarred from the sup-
position of supernatural origination, mediate or
immediate. But suppose the facts suggest and
inferentially warrant the conclusion that the

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION 83

course of natural history has been along an

unbroken line ; that — account for it or not

the origination of the kinds of plants and ani-
mals comes to stand on the same footing as the
rest of Nature. As this is the complete outcome
of Darwinian evolution, it has to be met and
considered.

The inquiry, what attitude should we, Chris-
tian theists, present to this form of scientific
belief, should not be a difficult one to answer
In my opinion, we should not denounce it as
atheistical, or as practical atheism, or as absurd.
Although, from the nature of the case, this con-
ception can never be demonstrated, it can be
believed, and is coming to be largely believed ;
and it falls in very well with doctrine said to
have been taught by philosophers and saints,
by Leibnitz and Malebranche, Thomas Aquinas,
and Augustine. So it may possibly even share
in the commendation bestowed by the Pope, in a
recent sensible if not infallible allocution, upon
the teaching of " the Angelic Doctor," and
make a part of that genuine philosophy which
the Pope declares to stand in no real opposition
to religious truth. Seriously it would be rash
and wrong for us to declare that this conception
is opposed to theism. Our idea of Nature is

84 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

that of an ordered and fixed system of forms
and means working to ultimate ends. If this is
our idea of inorganic nature, shall we abandon
or depreciate it when we pass from mere things
to organisms, to creatures which are themselves
both means and ends ? Surely it would be sui-
cidal to do so. We may, and indeed we do,
question gravely whether all this work is com-
mitted to Nature; but we all agree that much
is so done, far more than was formerly thought
possible; we cannot pretend to draw the line
between what may be and what may not be so
done, or what is and what is not so done ; and
so it is not for us to object to the further ex-
tension of the principle on sufficient evidence.

I trust it is not necessary to press this consid-
eration, though it is needful to present it, in
order to warn Christian theists from the folly
of playing into their adversary's hand, as is too-
often done.

But I am aware that we have not yet reached
the root of the difficulty. We are convinced
theists. We bring our theism to the interpre-
tation of Nature, and Nature responds like an
echo to our thought. Not always unequivo-
cally : broken, confused, and even contradictory
sounds are sometimes given back to us ; yet as

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 85

we listen to and ponder them, they mainly har-
monize with our inner idea, and give us reason-
able assurance that the God of our religion is
the author of Nature. But what of those —
you will say — who are not already convinced
of His existence ? We thought that we had an
independent demonstration of His existence,
and that we could go out into the highways of
unbelief and " compel them to come in ; " that
" the invisible things of Him from the creation
of the world were clearly seen, being under-
stood by the things that are made," " so that
they are without excuse." We could shut them
up to the strict alternative of Divinity or
Chance, writh the odds incalculably against
Chance. But now Darwinism has given them
an excuse and placed us on the defensive. Now
w^e have as much as we can do, and some think
more, to reshape the argument in such wise as
to harmonize our ineradicable belief in design '
with the fundamental scientific belief of conti-
nuity in nature, now extended to organic as
wrell as inorganic forms, to living beings as well
as inanimate things. The field which we took
to be thickly sown with design seems, under
the light of Darwinism, to yield only a crop
of accidents. Where we thought to reap the
golden grain, we find only tares.

86 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

The outlook is certainly serious, yet not alto-
gether disheartening. Perhaps we cannot now
safely separate the wheat from the tares, but
must let them grow together unto the harvest.
Nobody expects in this world to ascertain the
limits between design and contingency. Nobody
expects to demonstrate any design, except his
own to himself by consciousness ; he cannot
really prove his own to his bosom friend;
though his assertion may give his friend, and
his actions may give his enemy, convincing
reasons for inferring it. But we are sure that
every intellectual being has designs, that the
reach and pervasiveness of design must be in
proportion to the wisdom ; and that the designs
of the Author of Nature, if any there be, must
be all-pervading and fathomless. Yet if they
be wrought into a system of adaptations, some
of the adaptations themselves may be such as
irresistibly to suggest their reason to our minds.
At least they suggest reason, even if we fail to
apprehend, or wrongly apprehend, the reason.
The sense that there is reason why is as innate in
man, as that there is cause whereby.

Now, to adopt the apt words of Francis New-
man,* " after stripping off all that goes beyond

* In Contemporary Review, 1S78, p. 445, &c.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 87

the mark of sober and cautious thought, there
remain in this world fitnesses innumerable on
the largest and the smallest scale, in which
alike common sense and uncommon sense see
design, and the only mode of evading this be-
lief is by carrying out the cumbrous Epicurean
argument to a length of which Epicurus could
not dream. We cannot prove, we are told, that
the eye was intended to see, or the hand to
grasp, or the fingers to work delicately. Of
course we cannot. But what is the alternative ?
To believe that it came about by blind chance.
No science has any calculus or apparatus to
decide between the two theories. Common
sense, not science, has to decide, and the most
accomplished physical student has in the deci-
sion no advantage whatever over a simple but
thoughtful man."

Arrangements innumerable, extending through
all nature, subserving all ends, of course involve
innumerable contingencies. The theist is not
expected to have any definite idea of the re-
spective limits of these. He can only guess at
the limits of intention and contingency in the
actions of his nearest neighbor. The non-theist
gains nothing by eliminating instances, unless
he can eliminate all design from the s/stem.

A

G

88 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Until he does this, he gains nothing by showing
that particular fitnesses come to pass little by
little, and under natural causes. He cannot
point to a time where there were no fitnesses,
apparent or latent, and if he argues that all
fitnesses were germinal in the nebulous matter
f our solar system, he does not harm our case.
The throwing of design ever so far back in time
does not harm it, nor deprive it of its ever-
present and ever-efficient character. For, as
has been acutely said, " If design has once
operated in rerum natura (as in the production
of a first life -germ), how can it stop operating
and undesigned formation succeed it ? It can-
not, and intention in Nature having once ex-
isted, the test of the amount of that intention
is not the commencement but the end, not the
first low organism, but the climax and consum-
mation of the whole." #

I am not going to re-argue an old thesis of
my own that Darwinism does not weaken the
substantial ground of the argument, as between
theism and non-theism, for design in Nature.!

* Mozley, Essays, ii. 412. See also Lord Blachford in The
Nineteenth Century, June, 1879, p. 1035.

f Darwinian a : Essays and Reviews pertaining to Darwin-
ism. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1876.

\i

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 89

I think it brought in no new difficulty, though
it brought old ones into prominence. It must
be reasonably clear to all who have taken pains
to understand the matter that the true issue as
regards design is not between Darwinism and
direct Creationism, but between design and
fortuity, between any intention or intellectual
cause and no intention nor predicable first
cause. It is really narrowed down to this, and
on this line all maintainers of the affirmative
may present an unbroken front. The holding
of this line secures all ; the weakening of it
in the attempted defence of unessential and
now untenable outposts endangers all.

I have only to add a few observations and
exhortations addressed to Christian theists.

If intention must pervade every theistic sys-
tem of Nature, if we give credit to Mr. Darwin
when in this regard he likens his divergence
from the orthodox view to the difference be-
tween general and particular Providence, is it
safe to declare that his theory, and his denial
that particular forms were specially created,
are practically atheistical? I might complain
of this as unfair: it is more to my purpose to
complain of it as suicidal. It is in effect hold-
ing a theistic conception of Nature for our pri-

90 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

vate use, but acting on the opposite when we
would discredit an unwelcome theory. Or else
it is trusting so little to our own belief that we
abandon it as soon as any weight is laid upon
it. As soon as you do this, by conceding that
the evolution of forms under natural laws mili-
tates against design in Nature, you are at the
mercy of those reasoners, who, looking at the
probabilities of the case from their own point
of view, coolly remark that : —

" On the whole, therefore, we seem entitled
to conclude that, during such time as we have
evidence of, no intelligence or volition has been
concerned in events happening within the range
of the solar system, except that of animals liv-
ing on the planets." #

You may say that implicit belief of intention
in Nature affords an insufficient foundation for
theism. But you are not asked to ground your
theism upon it, nor upon the whole world of
external phenomena.

You may reiterate that you cannot believe
that all these events have occurred under
natural laws. Nothing hinders your assuming
what you need from the supernatural ; but

* Clifford, Sunday Lectures, quoted in The Spectator.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 91

allow that the need of other minds may not be
identical with yours.

As I have said before, what you want is, not
a system which may be adjusted to theism, nor
even one which finds its most reasonable inter-
pretation in theism, but one which theism only
can account for. That, it seems to me, you
have. An excellent judge, a gifted adept in
physical science and exact reasoning, the late
Clerk-Maxwell, is reported to have said, not
long before he left the world, that he had scru-
tinized all the agnostic hypotheses he knew of,
and found that they one and all needed a God
to make them workable.

When you ask for more than this, namely,
for that which will compel belief in a personal
Divine Being, you ask for that which He has
not been pleased to provide. Experience proves
that the opposite hypothesis is possible. Some
rest in it, but few I think on scientific grounds.
The affirmative hypothesis gives us a workable
conception of how "the world of forms and
means" is related to "the world of worths and
ends." The negative hypothesis gives no men-
tal or ethical satisfaction whatever. Like the
theory of the immediate creation of forms, it
explains nothing.

92 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

You inquire, whither are we to look for inde-
pendent evidence of mind and will " concerned
in natural events happening within the range
of the solar system." Certainly not to the court
of pure physical science. For that has ruled this
case out of its jurisdiction by assuming a fixed
dependence of consequent upon antecedent
throughout its domain. There are plenty of
phenomena to which it cannot assign known
causal antecedents ; but it supplies their place
at once, either by assuming that there is a phys-
ical antecedent still unguessed, or by inventing
one in an hypothesis. It deals in effects and
causes, and knows nothing of ends. It has no
verdict to render against our case, for it does
not entertain it, and has no jurisdiction under
which to try it. But its wiser judges do not
insist that theirs is the only court in the realm.

We have not to go beyond Nature for a
jurisdiction, which may be likened to that of
Equity, since it enforces specific performance,
and which adds to causes and effects the consid-
eration of ends. Biology takes cognizance of the
former, like physics, of which it is on one side a
part, but also of ends ; and here ends (which
mean intention) become a legitimate scientific
study. The natural history of ends becomes

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 93

consistent and reasonably intelligible under the
lio-ht of evolution. As the forms and kinds rise
gradually out of that which was well-nigh form-
less into a consummate form, so do biological
ends rise and assert themselves in increasing
distinctness, variety, and dignity. Vegetables
and animals have paved the earth with inten-
tions. The study and the estimate of these is
quite the same, under whatever view of the
mode in which the structures and beings that
exemplify them came to be.

The highest of these exemplars is himself
conscious of ends. He pronounces that critical
monosyllable I. I am, I will, I accomplish ends.
I modify the outcome of Nature. Here, at
length, is something " on the planets " which
" has been concerned in events ; " and in my
opinion it is just now a good and useful theistic
view which connects this something with all the
lower psychological phenomena that preceded
and accompany it. Our wills, in their limited
degree, modify the course of Nature, subservi-
ent though that be to fixed laws. By our will
we make these laws subserve our ends. We
momently violate the uniformity of Nature.
But we do not violate the law of the uniformity
of Nature. Is it not legitimate, is it not inev-

94 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

itable, that a being who knows that he is a will,
and a power, and a successful contriver, should
explain what he sees around and above him by
the hypothesis of a higher and supreme will?
A will which has disposed things in view of
ends in establishing Nature, and which may, it
need be, dispose to particular and timed ends,
either with or without perceptible suspension of
the law of the uniformity of Nature.

The question I ask has been adversely an-
swered, substantially as follows : It may be that
in the first instance men can hardly avoid pred-
icating a being who has done and is doing all
this. Nevertheless a trained mind soon reaches
the incongruity of it, at least " as concerns any
events which have happened within the range
of the solar system." For the belief that a
supernatural power has so acted contradicts that
very belief in the uniformity of Nature upon
which all scientific reasoning and practical judg-
ments rest.

To this it is well rejoined, that the ultimate
scientific belief on which our reason reposes " is
that belief in the uniformity of Nature which is
equivalent to a belief in the law of universal
causation ; which again is equivalent to a belief
that similar antecedents are always followed by

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 95

similar consequents. But this belief is in no
way inconsistent with a belief in supernatural
interference." # If the principle of the uni-
formity of Nature asserted that every natural
effect is, and has ever been, preceded by natu-
ral causes, then it would be in terms inconsistent
with supernatural interference and with super-
natural origination of the system. But science
does not give us nor find any such principle.
All scientific beliefs " are in themselves as true
and as fully proved if supernatural interference
be possible as they are if such interference be
impossible. A law does no more than state that
under certain circumstances (positive and nega-
tive) certain phenomena will occur. If on some
occasions these circumstances, owing to super-
natural interference, do not occur, the fact that
the phenomena do not follow proves nothing as
to the truth or falsehood of the law." # If such
interference violates the law of the uniformity
of Nature, the human will, and all wills, and all
direction of material forces to ends, are every
day violating it.

It is also urged that giving particular direc-

* Balfour (Arthur). A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, p.
329. The note on the Discrepancy between Religion and Science
is particularly pertinent.

96 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

tion in a special act would be an addition to the
plenum of force in the universe, and therefore a
contradiction to the recently acquired scientific
principle of the conservation of energy. The
answer may be this. It is not at all certain
that all direction given to force expends force ;
it is certain that, under collocations, a minute
use of force (as pulling a hair-trigger or jostling
a valve) may bring about immense results ;
and, finally, increments of force by Divine ac-
tion in time, of the kind in question, if such
there be, could never in the least be known to
science.

The only remaining supposition that I now
think of is the crude one that thought and
will are functions of the body, secretions as it
were of the organ through which they are mani-
fested, " psychical modes of motion." Then, as
has well been said, they must be correlated
with physical modes of motion, at least in
conception ; but it is conceded by all sensible
thinkers that thought cannot be translated into
extension, nor extension into thought. Now,
since the only conceivable source of physical
force is supernatural power, still more must this
be the only conceivable source of thought.

There is an old objection which threatens to

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 97

undermine the ground on which we infer Divine
will from the analogy of human ; namely, that
our wills, being a part of the course of Nature
and amenable to its laws, their movements,
though seemingly free, are as fixed as physical
sequences. Upon this insoluble problem we have
nothing practical to say, except to admit that so
much of choice is determined by antecedent
conditions and the surroundings, by hereditary
bias, by what has been made for the individual
and inwrought into his nature, that, granting the
will has an element of freedom, it may be in
effect a small factor. I can only urge that it is
not an insignificant factor. As to this, a pertinent
although homely suggestion came to me in the
remark of a humble but shrewd neighbor, to
the effect that he found the difference between
people and people he dealt with was really very
little, but that what there is was very important.
So facts and reasonings may shut us up to the
conclusion that the will, sovereign as it seems
to the user, is practically a small factor in the
determination of events. But what there is
makes all the difference in the world in man !

And now, as to man himself in relation to evo-
lution. I have no time left for the discussion

98 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

of questions which naturally interest you more
than any other, but which, even with time at dis-
posal, are not easy to treat. I will not undertake
to consider what your attitude should be upon a
matter which connects itself with grave ulterior
considerations ; but I will very briefly and frank-
ly intimate what views I think a scientific man,
religiously disposed, is likely to entertain.

To pursue the illustration just ventured upon :
The anatomical and physiological difference be-
tween man and the higher brutes is not great
from a natural-history point of view, compared
with the difference between these and lower
grades of animals ; but we may justly say that
what corporeal difference there is is extremely
important. The series of considerations which
suggest evolution up to man, suggest man's evo-
lution also. We may, indeed, fall back upon Mr.
Darwin's declaration, in a case germane to this,
that " analogy may be a deceitful guide." Yet
here it is the only guide we have. If the alter-
native be the immediate origination out of
nothing, or out of the soil, of the human form
with all its actual marks, there can be no doubt
which side a scientific man will take. Mediate
creation, derivative origination will at once be
accepted ; and the mooted question comes to be

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION 99

narrowed clown to this : Can the corporeal dif-
ferences between man and the rest of the animal
kingdom be accounted for by known natural
causes, or must they be attributed to unknown
causes ? And shall we assume these unknown
causes to be natural or supernatural ? As to the
first question, you are aware, from my whole
line of thought and argument, that I know no
natural process for the transformation of a brute
mammal into a man. But I am equally at a
loss as respects the processes through which any
one species, any one variety, gives birth to an-
other. Yet I do not presume to limit Nature by
my small knowledge of its laws and powers. I
know that a part of these still occult processes
are in the every-day course of Nature ; I am
persuaded that it is so through the animal kino--
dom generally; I cannot deny it as respects the
highest members of that kingdom. I allow,
however, that the superlative importance of
comparatively small corporeal differences in this
comsummate case may justify any one in re-
garding it as exceptional. In most respects,
man is an exceptional creature. If, however, I
decline to regard man's origin as exceptional in
the sense of directly supernatural, you will un-
derstand that it is because, under my thoroughly

100 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

theistic conception of Nature, and my belief in
mediate creation, I am at a loss to know what I
should mean by the exception. I do not allow
myself to believe that immediate creation would
make man's origin more divine. And I do not
approve either the divinity or the science of
those who are prompt to invoke the super-
natural to cover our ignorance of natural causes,
and equally so to discard its aid whenever natu-
ral causes are found sufficient.*

It is probable that the idea of mediate crea-
tion would be more readily received, except for
a prevalent misconception upon a point of ge-
nealogy. When the naturalist is asked, what
and whence the origin of man, he can only an-
swer in the words of Quatrefages and Virchow,
" We do not know at all." We have traces of
his existence up to and even anterior to the
latest marked climatic change in our temperate
zone : but he was then perfected man ; and no
vestige of an earlier form is known. The be-
liever in direct or special creation is entitled to
the ad van ta ore which this negative evidence
gives. A totally unknown ancestry has the
characteristics of nobility. The evolutionist

* See Baden Powell, On The Order of Nature, p. 163.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 101

can give one satisfactory assurance. As the
wolf in the fable was captious in his complaint
that the lamb below had muddied the brook he
was drinking from, so those are mistaken who
suppose that the simian race can have defiled
the stream along which evolution traces human
descent. Sober evolutionists do not suppose
that man has descended from monkeys. The
stream must have branched too early for that.
The resemblances, which are the same in fact
under any theory, are supposed to denote collat-
eral relationship.

The psychological differences between man
and the higher brute animals you do not expect
me now to discuss. Here, too, we may say
that, although gradations abridge the wide in-
terval, the transcendent character of the super-
added must count for more than a host of
lower similarities and identities; for, surely,
what difference there is between the man and
the animal in this respect is supremely impor-
tant.

If we cannot reasonably solve the problems
even of inorganic nature without assuming; ini-
tial causation, and if we assume for that su-
preme intelligence, shall we not more freely
assume it, and with all the directness the case

102 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

may require, in the field where intelligence at
length develops intelligences ? But while, on
the one hand, we rise in thought into the su-
pernatural, on the other we need not forget
that one of the three old orthodox opinions, —
the one held to be tenable if not directly favored
by Augustine, and most accordant to his the-
ology, as it is to observation, — is that souls as
well as lives are propagated in the order of
Nature. Here we may note, in passing, that
since the " theologians are as much puzzled to
form a satisfactory conception of the origin of
each individual soul as naturalists are to con-
ceive of the origin of species,' ' and since the
Darwinian and the theologian (at least the Tra-
ducian) take similar courses to find a way out
of their difficulties, they might have a little
more sympathy for each other. The high Cal-
vinist and the Darwinian have a goodly number
of points in common.*

View these high matters as you will, the out-
come, as concerns us, of the vast and partly
comprehensible system, which under one aspect
we call Nature, and under another Providence,

* See an article on Some Analogies between Calvinism and
Darwinism, by Rev. G. F. Wright, in the Bibliotheca Sacra,
January, 1880.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 103

and in part under another, Creation, is seen in
the emergence of a free and self-determining
personality, which, being capable of conceiving
it, may hope for immortality.

"May hope for immortality." You ask for
the reasons of this hope upon these lines of
thought. I suppose that they are the same as
your own, so far as natural reasons go. A beino*
who has the faculty — however bestowed — of
reflective, abstract thought superadded to all
lower psychical faculties, is thereby per sattum
immeasurably exalted. This, and only this,
brings with it language and all that comes from
that wonderful instrument ; it carries the germs
of all invention and all improvement, all that
man does and may do in his rule over Nature
and his power of ideally soaring above it. So
we may well deem this a special gift, the gift
beyond recall, in which all hope is enshrined.
None of us have any scientific or philosophi-
cal explanation to offer as to hoiv it came to be
added to what we share with the brutes that
perish ; but it puts man into another world
than theirs, both here, and — with the aid
of some evolutionary ideas, we may add — here-
after.

104 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

Let us consider. It must be that the Eternal
can alone impart the gift of eternal life. Bat
He alone originates life. Now what of that life
which reaches so near to ours, yet misses it
so completely? The perplexity this question
raises was as great as it is now before evolu-
tion was ever heard of; it has been turned into
something much more trying than perplexity
by the assurance with which monistic evolu-
tionists press their answer to the question ; but
a better line of evolutionary doctrine may do
something toward disposing of it. It will not
do to say that thought carries the implication
of immortality. For our humble companions
have the elements of that, or of simple ratiocina-
tion, and the power of reproducing conceptions
in memory, and — what is even more to the
present purpose — in dreams. Once admit this
to imply immortality and you will be obliged to
make soul coextensive with life, as some have
done, thereby well-nigh crushing the whole doc-
trine of immortality with the load laid upon it.
At least this is poising the ponderous pyramid
on its apex, and the apex on a logical fallacy.
For the entire conception that the highest brute
animals may be endowed with an immortal prin-
ciple is a reflection from the conception of such

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 105

a principle in ourselves ; and so the farther down
you carry it, the wider and more egregious the
circle you are reasoning in.

Still, with all life goes duality. There is the
matter, and there is the life, and we cannot get
one out of the other, unless you define matter
as something which works to ends. As all agree
that reflective thought cannot be translated into
terms of extension (matter and motion), nor the
converse, so as truly it cannot be translated into
terms of sensation and perception, of desire and
affection, of even the feeblest vital response
to external impressions, of simplest life. The
duality runs through the whole. You cannot
reasonably give over any part of the field to the
monist, and retain the rest.

Now see how evolution may help you ; — in
its conception that, while all the lower serves
its purpose for the time being, and is a stage
toward better and higher, the lower sooner or
later perish, the higher, the consummate, sur-
vive. The soul in its bodily tenement is the
final outcome of Nature. May it not well be
that the perfected soul alone survives the final
struggle of life, and indeed " then chiefly lives,"
— because in it all worths and ends inhere ;
because it only is worth immortality, because

106 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

it alone carries in itself the promise and poten-
tiality of eternal life ! Certainly in it only is
the potentiality of religion, or that which aspires
to immortality.

Here I should close ; but, in justice to myself
and to you, a word must still be added. You
rightly will say that, although theism is at the
foundation of religion, the foundation is of
small practical value without the superstruc-
ture. Your supreme interest is Christianity;
and you ask me if I maintain that the doc-
trine of evolution is compatible with this. I
am bound to do so. Yet I have left myself
no time in which to vindicate my claim ; which
I should wish to do most earnestly, yet very
deferentially, considering where and to whom
I speak. Here we reverse positions: you are
the professional experts; I am the unskilled
inquirer.

I accept Christianity on its own evidence,
which I am not here to specify or to justify;
and I am yet to learn how physical or any other
science conflicts with it any more than it con-
flicts with simple theism. I take it that religion
is based on the idea of a Divine Mind revealing
himself to intelligent creatures for moral ends.

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 107

We shall perhaps agree that the revelation on
which our religion is based is an example of
evolution ; that it has been developed by de-
grees and in stages, much of it in connection
with second causes and human actions; and
that the current of revelation has been mingled
with the course of events. I suppose that the
Old Testament carried the earlier revelation
and the germs of Christianity, as the apostles
carried the treasures of the gospel, in earthen
vessels. I trust it is reverent, I am confident it
is safe and wise, to consider that revelation in
its essence concerns things moral and spiritual ;
and that the knowledge of God's character and
will which has descended from the fountain-
head in the earlier ages has come down to us,
through annalists and prophets and psalmists, in
a mingled stream, more or less tinged or ren-
dered turbid by the earthly channels through
which it has worn its way. The stream brings
down precious gold, and so may be called a
golden stream; but the water — the vehicle of
transportation — is not gold. Moreover the
analogy of our inquiry into design in Nature
may teach us that we may be unable always
accurately to sift out the gold from the earthy
sediment.

108 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

But, however we may differ in regard to the
earlier stages of religious development, wTe shall
a°ree in this, that revelation culminated, and
for us most essentially consists, in the advent of
a Divine Person, who, being made man, mani-
fested the Divine Nature in union with the
human ; and that this manifestation constitutes
Christianity.

Having accepted the doctrine of the incar-
nation, itself the crowning miracle, attendant
miracles are not obstacles to belief. Their
primary use must have been for those who wit-
nessed them ; and we may allow that the record
of a miracle cannot have the convincing force
of the miracle itself. But the very reasons on
which scientific men reject miracles for the
carrying on of Nature may operate in favor of
miracles to attest an incoming of the super-
natural for moral ends. At least they have
nothing to declare against them.

If now you ask me, What are the essential
contents of that Christianity which is in my
view as compatible with my evolutionary con-
ceptions as with former scientific beliefs, it may
suffice to answer that they are briefly summed
up in the early creeds of the Christian Church,
reasonably interpreted. The creeds to be taken

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 109

into account are only two, — one commonly called
the Apostles', the other the Nicene. The latter
and larger is remarkable for its complete avoid-
ance of conflict with physical science. The
language in which its users " look for the resur-
rection of the dead " bears — and doubtless at
its adoption had in the minds of at least some
of the council — a worthier interpretation than
that naturally suggested by the short western
creed, namely, the crude notion of the revivi-
fication of the human body, against which St.
Paul earnestly protested.

Moreover, as brethren uniting in a common
worship, we may honorably, edifyingly, and
wisely use that which we should not have for-
mulated, but may on due occasion qualify, —
statements, for instance, dogmatically pronounc-
ing upon the essential nature of the Supreme
Being (of which nothing can be known and
nothing is revealed), instead of the Divine
manifestation. We may add more to our con-
fession : we all of us draw more from the ex-
haustless revelation of Christ in the gospels;
but this should suffice for the profession of
Christianity. If you ask, must we require that,
I reply that I am merely stating what I ac-
cept. Whoever else will accept Him who is

110 NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

himself the substance of Christianity, let him
do it in his own way.

In conclusion, we students of natural science
and of theology have very similar tasks. Na-
ture is a complex, of which the human race
through investigation is learning more and more
the meaning and the uses. The Scriptures are
a complex, an accumulation of a long series of
records, which are to be well understood only
by investigation. It cannot be that in all these
years we have learned nothing new of their
meaning and uses to us, and have nothing still
to learn. Nor can it be that we are not free to
use what we learn in one line of study to limit,
correct, or remodel the ideas which we obtain
from another.

Gentlemen of the Theological School, about
to become ministers of the gospel, receive this
discourse with full allowance for the different
point of view from which we survey the field.
If I, in my solicitude to attract scientific men to
religion, be thought to have minimized the
divergence of certain scientific from religious
beliefs, I pray that you on the other hand will
never needlessly exaggerate them ; for that may
be more harmful. I am persuaded that you, in

NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. Ill

your day, will enjoy the comfort of a much
better understanding between the scientific and
the religious mind than has prevailed. Yet
without doubt a full share of intellectual and
traditional difficulties will fall to your lot. Dis-
creetly to deal with them, as well for your-
selves as for those who may look to you for
guidance, rightly to present sensible and sound
doctrine both to the learned and the ignorant,
the lowly and the lofty-minded, the simple be-
liever and the astute speculatist, you will need
all the knowledge and judgment you can
acquire from science and philosophy, and all
the superior wisdom your supplications may
draw from the Infinite Source of knowledge,
wisdom, and grace.

Theological Semmary-Sp

1 1012 01082 1363

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