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THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

DE VI PHYSICA.

QUIDQUID enim ex phenomenis non deducitur, hypothesis
vocanda est : et hypotheses seu metaphysics seu physicse
seu qualitatum occultarum seu mechanics in philosophia
experimentali locum non habent. In hac philosophia pro-
positiones deducuntur ex phenomenis, et redduntur generales
per inductionem.

NEWTON'S PRINCIPIA.

Nee perfecte unquam intelliget scientiarum theoremata
quicunque est Logics omnino expers. Itaque jure optimo
Aristoteles hujus artis ignorationem veteribus philosophis
exprobavit : et procul dubio si nunc viveret longe plures
et longe acriiis eo nomine incusaret.

JULIUS PACIUS IN ORGANO.

DE VI PHYSICA

ET

IMBECILLITATE DARWINIANA

DISPUTAVIT

FRANCISCUS GULIELMUS BAIN,

ARTIUM MAGISTER.

SCIENDUM TAMEN, QUOD CUJUSLIBET REI REALITAS
PRESUPPONIT POTENTIAM, SINE QUA NON DATUR
ESSE : QUIA SECUNDUM PHILOSOPHUM IN OCTAVO
PHYSICORUM, NON FIUNT IMPOSSIBILIA.

Guilhelmus de Ockam sup. libros Sentm.

Jf antes Barker anft C0.

27 BROAD-STREET, OXFORD;

AND 31 BEDFORD -STREET, STRAND, LONDON.
1903.

NOSTRI saeculi homines, dum Naturse artus et membra,
Bacchantum ritu, divellunt in fragmenta, Totius interim
compositionem organicam et animam et ut ita dicam punc-
tum saliens et principians non agnoscunt et nihili faciunt
et omittunt ex ratiuncula. Quse negligentia et scientias et
philosophiam et literas, barbaris jam iterum ingruentibus,
pessum dejicere minatur, et dejicit, nemine contradicente.
Hoc igitur opusculum illis prsesertim scriptor voluit com-
mendare lectoribus, inter rariores rarissimis, quibus Natura
ipsa et Scientia solida et vera Inquisitio physica magis
cordi et curse sunt, quam auctorum quorundam auctoritas
et vulgi vana opinio et res ilia teste Domino de Veru-
lamio omnium pessima, errorum apotheosis.

: Utrum Natura saltus facit in parlibus
animaliuin generandis. Quod

NEGAT Darwinius, ore suaviloquo re tamen prejudicata
pronuntians ultro, NATURAM SALTARE NON-
POSSE: et miraculum sapere contrariam opinio-
nem. Quse dogmata probare male nititur viam
ingressus physico vetitam : FINGIT enim hypo-
theses et entia COMMINISCITUR, avi sinistra !

ASSERIT Contra hie, Naturae secutor et Philosophi, obji-
ciens, luminibus plane carentis esse, negare vim
Naturae saltatoriam : cum saltus haud infitiandos
et FECIT et FACIT et ipsa se coacta COGIT
facere, suae ipsius NECESSITATE et Parens et
Filia. Quod ex phcnomenis deducitur, more
Newtoniano, duce et auspice Natura.

SUB . JUDICE . LIS . EST . CLIENS . NATURA . PATRONUS .
CLIENTI . SI . FRAUDEM . FECERIT . SACER . ESTO.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. The Principium Principiorum : that every
Principle must have POWER to do what

it is required to explain . . 5

II. The Principle of Continuous Increment . 7

III. Lyell . . 10

IV. Darwin ..... 15
V. Some cases of organisation . . 23

VI. Causes of Darwin's success . . 32

VII. Our debt to Darwin or others . . 43

VIII. Natura Saltatrix . . , 52

IX. Geology and the Vis Creatrix Natura . 61

X. The origin of man and the ' Missing

Link' ..... 85

XL The Apotheosis of Impotence . . 89

APPENDIX. On Darwin's theory of Coral Is-
lands ... .95

EPILOGUS . 99

DE VI PHYSICA ET
IMBECILLITATE DARWINIANA,

Quid possit oriri,
Quid nequeat.

LUCRETIUS.

IN the beginning, says Goethe, was the
Act; but he is wrong: there is something
prior even to the act — the POWER. For
nothing can begin to be, which had not first
the power to be : the POWER-TO-BE must
necessarily and inevitably, always and
everywhere, precede the BEING, otherwise
there can be no BECOMING. What is im-
potent, cannot generate : and what is im-
possible, does not happen. Therefore it is.
that, as Aristotle alone of all the philosophers
understood, Power and Possibility are the
root and core of all Nature.
B

De ViPhysica

And Nature shows her power nowhere
more clearly or more admirably than in the
parts of animals. In their eyes, as those
of hawks and owls ; their ears, as those of
hares or bats ; in the foot of the camel or
the polar bear, the wing of the humming
bird, of the dragon fly, or the condor ; in
the trunk of the elephant, or the vertebral
column of the boa-constrictor ; in the tongue
of the woodpecker, or the battery of the
electric eel ; in the claws, jaws, wings,
weapons, and all the marvellous organis-
ations of insects, and briefly, in all the in-
numerable parts of animals, as well as in
the knowledge, generally intuitive, which
every animal possesses, of how to use its
peculiar organs so as to employ them to
the best advantage : we see the Power of
Nature, in actual existence and operation.

What is this power ? What do we mean by
Nature, the Natura-Naturans ? Or in other

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana.

words, how do the parts of animals, and
the entire animals, which are combinations
of parts, come to be ? A question which
Aristotle was the first to raise, and scien-
tifically seek to answer.

The experience of Aristotle was limited.
And yet, in endeavouring to answer the
question in modern times, some eminent
philosophers, far better furnished than he
was with data, compare most unfavourably
with that old sagacious inquisitor in judg-
ment and the power of analysis. With the
animals of the whole world ranged before
them, they totally ignore the obvious and
necessary significance of many of the most
familiar organisations, as he was careful not
to do. A necessary deduction from even a
few facts cannot be upset by no matter how
many more. Nay, even a single fact will
sometimes furnish Archimedes with a lever
wherewith to move the world. The moon

De Vi Physica

alone was for Newton, whose astronomical
knowledge was very scanty in extent, the
stepping-stone to the discovery of a law
extensive as the universe. But facts are
thrown away upon those who do not possess
sufficient analytical power to deduce and
extract from them their meaning by subtle
interrogation. Still more useless is a fact
to one that will not see : blinded by pre-
judice, or it may be, by a theory that pre-
occupies the mind, and closes the eye to
all but what supports it, begetting the most
desperate special pleading in its favour, till
at length scientific reputations and the credit
of great names are involved : then other
motives come into play, and facts claim
recognition in vain. Quoi! il me faudra
renoncer aux dogmes d? Epicure ?

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana.

I.

The necessary foundation of science is,
rigorous exactitude in elements and prin-
ciples.

And since all scientific explanation essen-
tially consists in referring the phenomena
of Nature to causes, forces, agencies, prin-
ciples, &c., that are ABLE to produce and
explain them : whoever comes forward to
offer us any such cause, force, agency, &c.,
as an explanatory principle is scientifically
bound to satisfy himself beforehand that his
principle does actually possess the power to,
effect those results which he employs it to
explain. As, e.g., a teacup of water spilt
in Abyssinia will not account for the rise
of the Nile at Cairo : an ounce of gunpowder
will not produce an earthquake of Lisbon.
The cause must be adequate^ in kind and
degree, to the effect. And if, without the

De Vi Physica

necessary preliminary verification and scru-
tiny, any one should bring forward a principle
of explanation intrinsically impotent both in
kind and degree to effect the results in
question, it will not make matters any the
better, if he should subsequently ransack
heaven and earth in search of facts that only
seem to support it but never can : for no
amount of evidence can establish an impos-
sibility. It is futile to accumulate piles of
evidence to prove that two straight lines can
enclose a space. He ought to have begun
by testing the power and possibility, mathe-
matical or physical, of his principle, before
he set out. For to appeal to an adequately
powerful principle is truly scientific proce-
dure : to ascertain, with rigorous severity,
that it is adequate, before resorting to it,
is the mark of a really scientific thinker:
to explain power by impotence, supposed, by
reason of a want of analysis, to be potent, is

et Imbecillitate Darwinian a.

unscientific : to explain Nature by impos-
sibility, in pure unconsciousness of what you
are doing, is ridiculous.

II.

Any Quantity or Magnitude, considered in
a purely mathematical or quantitative way,
may be regarded as the outcome of a series of
continuous, successively accumulated minute
quantities or increments of which it is the
limit. And conversely, any such Quantity,
by the inverted process, continuous decrementy
will become as small as we please, till it
vanishes, or differs by no appreciable magni-
tude from zero, or nothing.

It is this principle, variously manipulated
and applied, which has given such power
to modern mathematical analysis. It is
the potent instrument of discovery and in-
vestigation in its own sphere, the sphere of

8 De Vi Physic*

abstract calculation, and all spheres legiti-
mately subordinate to it, in which things can
be treated in a purely quantitative way*.
But in the domain of Nature and Reality,
there are limits to the power and efficacy of
this principle of continuous increment. Its
omnipotence tends to disappear, in propor-
tion to the degree in which things cease to
be able to be considered as purely quantita-
tive magnitudes, and we enter the field of
qualitative and other real distinctions in
the economy of Nature. In the organic
world, where quantity is not everything, this
principle has explanatory value only within
very definite limits, and we require to be
very careful in attending to those limits,

a e.g. Newton proved that a particle outside a hollow
sphere is attracted by it as if the spherical material were
collected at its centre : the same is true of a solid sphere,
because it may be legitimately considered, in a mechanical
point of view, as consisting of an infinite number of hollow
spheres one within the other.

et Imbecillitate Darwinian**

otherwise we should fall into serious error.
As, for example, the continuous successive
accumulation of minute grains of sand, one
by one, will and must, given only time
enough, ultimately form, and so account for,
a pyramid, mound, or layer of sand. Here
is a case of the power of accumulated incre-
ment. But no successive accumulation of
minute forces, no matter how long continued,
would or could ever elevate, and thus scien-
tifically explain the elevation of, an enormous
mass of matter, requiring for its elevation the
instantaneous application of an adequately
powerful force. Let the fly try every day
to raise the elephant, it will never do it.
Accumulation here is powerless, and con-
tinuity, impotent. And so, generally, though
the principle of explanation by continuous
accumulation is potent in cases where it
applies, yet in Nature, there are distinctions :
quantity is not everything : some things can,

10 De Vi Physica

and others cannot, be scientifically explained,
on the principle of accumulated continuous
increment.

III.

That school of geological explanation, of
which Hutton was the originator, and Lyell
the most celebrated exponent, based all its
scientific interpretations on this principle of
accumulated increment, this continuous ad-
dition of minute operations. Inspired by
a horror of ' catastrophe ' and ' creation by
fiat3 (the two things are not necessarily as-
sociated, but the school was apt to confound
them together, and ban all catastrophe as
miraculous15), it aimed at accounting for all
the phenomena of geology by the accumu-
lation, in enormous periods of time, of slight,
successive, scarcely perceptible increments

b See below, § VIII. on this point.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. \ I

and decrements, 'without violence and with-
out miracles' It scouted the resort to causes
different in kind or degree from those now
to be observed in operation around us : it
invoked ' causes now in action.' For any
great, abrupt, sudden, or 'catastrophic' agen-
cies seemed to it not only touched with the
miraculous, but superfluous and unnecessary
(on Ockam's principle, non est ponenda plura-
litas), since it credited its minute agents and
forces with the necessary power, by accumu-
lation, to do the work, granting them only
sufficient time : and time, in the eyes of this
school, was practically unlimited c. Thus, in
its hands, Geology was practically identified
with Physical Geography, because it held,
that in studying the present operations of
Nature we are in fact studying also theflast:
the two being only temporally different, but

6 See below, § IX.

12 De Vi Physica

dynamically the same. Hence Lyell gave
the name of Principles of Geology, and De
la Beche that of the Geological Observer, to
works devoted to the study of present phy-
sical operations : a study in itself the most
fascinating in the world.

But how far this geological uniformitarian-
ism was scientifically sound : how far, since
Lyell's day, experience has confirmed or
rejected it : how far its drafts upon the bank
of time can be honoured : how far its minute
agents have actually the power attributed to
them : how far land is or is not, slowly and
imperceptibly, actually rising or sinking :
how far earthquakes have or have not power
to produce permanent slight alterations in
the level of continental areas : how far run-
ning water actually has or has not the power
of erosion in rock, soft or solid, naked or
covered, level or inclined : how far ice- has
or has not the power of scooping : how far

e t Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 1 3

waves have or have not the power of destroy-
ing cliffs and shores : what is or is not,
generally, the power, the actual, positive
power, destructive or creative, of superficial
agents, and how far that power, such as it
is, is modified or neutralised by differences of
climate, material, or position : how far it is
or is not true to identify Geology with Phy-
sical Geography: it is not here necessary to
inquire. It is sufficient for the purpose in
hand to note carefully two things : I. That
the essential characteristic of the Lyellian
school was the endeavour to explain and
account for all, even the most colossal, phe-
nomena of geology, on the principle of slow
successive increments, minute operations ac-
cumulated in vast periods of time. II. That
the school, notwithstanding its industry in
other directions, took the power of its minute
agents generally for granted, and made no
serious investigation, no experimental veri-

14 De Vi Physica

fication, into the power of ice, water, waves,
&c. : still less did it inquire, to what extent
it was possible to add up and accumulate
forces. Had it actually looked carefully to
see, what, in point of fact, its little agents
and forces could do, it would have found,
that on the one hand, they are in many cases
altogether impotent to produce the effects
attributed to them : while on the other, many
natural geological phenomena (as can be
irrefutably demonstrated) could not possibly
have come about save by the application of
colossal force, instantaneously applied. But
the school of Lyell, preoccupied by its dog-
ma, was not careful to verify the power of
its little agents. In this, it violated the car-
dinal principle of that Baconian philosophy,
to which it was always loudly appealing ;
and failed to follow in the steps of Newton.
It explained Nature by the cumulative effect
of little agents, of whose power it was not

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 1 5

assured by rigorous observation or experi-
ment : a method very different from that
of Newton in establishing the law of gravi-
tation. When Newton said : hypotheses non
fingo : he was not, as some absurdly now
imagine, speaking ironically : he meant what
he said : videlicet : that if he appealed to a
power, he first made sure that it was one.
But in the nineteenth century, figmentary
hypotheses, euphemistically termed 'working'
hypotheses, were the logical fashion and the
order of the day : fleeting shadows, coming
only to go away again : speculative bubbles
beautiful to look at, formed in one moment
only to burst and be forgotten in the next.

IV.

Now Darwin was a Lyellian of the Lyel-
lians. This would be sufficiently obvious to
any student of his writings, even if he had

16 Df Vi Physica

not expressly acknowledged the filiation in
the dedication to the most popular and most
attractive of his works. " To Charles Lyell,
"Esq., this edition is dedicated with grate-
" ful pleasure, as an acknowledgment that
" the chief part of whatever scientific merit
" this Journal and the other works of the
" author may possess, has been derived from
" studying the well known and admirable
" Principles of Geology" It was to harmonise
with Lyellian principles of Geology that
Darwin invented, not only his famous theory
of the Origin of Species, but also the less
known, but not less noteworthy theory of
the origin of Coral Reefs. Darwin builds on
Lyell, and they stand or fall together : an
interdependence not sufficiently understood.
It deserves, further, to be noticed, that few
things ever gave Lyell more pleasure than
Darwin's theory as to the origin of Coral
Reefs. "On receiving from its author a

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. \ 7

" sketch of the new theory, Lyell was so
" overcome with delight, that he danced
" about and threw himself into the wildest
" contortions, as was his manner when ex-
" cessively pleased d." A most interesting
geological phenomenon ! Lyell eagerly em-
braces the theories of Darwin, just as Dar-
win did his, neither of them perceiving the
scientific illegitimacy of purely gratuitous
hypothesis : of which more anon.

The step that Darwin took, in further
extension of Lyellian principles, a step that
covered him with glory, though it ought to
have covered him with ridicule, was this.

If, with Lyell, and his school, we elect to
explain the 'rocks' by accumulated minute
increments, then there remain over, as anom-
alies in the scheme, the fauna and flora.
How, now, as to them ? It would manifestly

d Judd : Introduction to Darwin's Coral Reefs. (See
Appendix to this book.)

1 8 De Vi Physica

be futile and systematically inconsequent to
deny catastrophe and creative fiat in the
inorganic, if they are to be retained in the
organic world. Or in other words : if the
' rocks ' have been formed by accumulated
increment in vast periods of time, could not
plants and animals have been so too ? This
is Darwin's conclusion, and the genesis of his
* discovery ' of ' Natural Selection ' : which
is simply the further extension of the Lyel-
lian principle. * Natural Selection ' is no-
thing but Lyellian accumulation applied to
biology : the theory, that the organic parts
of plants and animals have originated, little
by little, by slight successive increments, or
variations, continuously added up by sur-
vival of the fittest, i.e., ' Natural Selection/
Lyell accepted it, after an interval, just as
he welcomed Darwin's other ' discovery/ the
theory as to Coral Islands e, because it dove-

e See Appendix.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 19

tailed precisely with his own scheme of the
nature of things : being in truth that very
identical scheme in other clothes.

But if, now, Darwin had really been, what
many believe him to have been, a profound
thinker, an intuitively scientific, systematic,
organising mind : had he been, as every true
thinker is, conscious of the enormous differ-
ence obtaining between a scientific hypothe-
sis founded on induction and a purely specu-
lative conjecture : the first thing he would
have done, in proposing to himself to account
for the origin of the parts of animals by
< Natural Selection,5 by accumulated incre-
ment, would have been, to verify the power
of his agent. He would have asked himself:
Has my principle the power which I am
attributing to it ? Is it possible to account
for all the parts of animals by successively
accumulated increments ? Are there not parts
which could not possibly have originated in

2O De Vi Physica

this way ? What are, if any, the limits of the
power of accumulated increment ? Is there,
in organic parts and systems of parts, any
element irreducible to the principle : any-
thing which, from the nature of the case,
accumulated increment cannot possibly ex-
plain ?

But Darwin never did anything of the
kind. To question the power of Natural
Selection ; to doubt, whether organic parts
could be produced by continuous accumu-
lation, never entered his head. There is not,
in all his writings, a single line even be-
traying a suspicion, that such a preliminary
consideration was even necessary. So far
from doubting that accumulated increments
could produce the parts of animals, there
never even seemed to him to be any question
about it. Had any one told him, that accu-
mulated increments could not possibly have
produced the parts of animals, it would have

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 2 1

struck him dumb with surprise. He simply
took it for granted that they could : follow-
ing the ordinary method of his school. Just
as neither Lyell nor any of his school
thought it necessary to verify the power
of their minute agents : just as Darwin him-
self invented — a pure figment — the sinking
of the whole floor of the ocean to account
for Coral Islands, not because, in the lan-
guage of Newton, he had deduced it from
phenomena^ but simply because the assump-
tion would enable him to explain Coral
Islands in a Lyellian way : so here, in pre-
cisely the same spirit, he invokes successive
slight variations to account for the origin
of all organic forms, without thinking it in
the least degree necessary to enquire, whe-
ther in point of fact his agent could do
the work, and whether there was not some-
thing in Nature's instruments which it was
beyond the power of accumulated incre-

22 De Vi Physica

ments to produce or explain. He treats
the ANIMAL precisely as if it were a ROCK,
capable of being arrived at by the accu-
mulation of minute increments in immense
periods of time. The essential difference be-
tween a living animal, and a dead mechanical
mass of matter, escaped his attention. The
false analogy of artificial selection led him
astray. He saw it producing great cumu-
lative effect by the addition of slight varia-
tions : but wholly failed to perceive two
things : I. That this addition depends on
the devices of art, and is impossible under
nature. II. That no organ has ever been
produced by artificial selection, which only
varies the form and size of those existing.
He most unaccountably overlooks a fact,
sufficiently obvious, that in the hands of
art, the animal has its life preserved for it,
under all its transmogrifications ; whereas
under Nature, it has to preserve its own.

et ImbeciUitate Darwiniana. 23

This vital difference is all in all. For under
Nature it must live by its form, and must
DIE, unless it can at all times keep itself
alive : but under art, it need not die, but
may live, whether its organs are good or
bad, useful or useless. Such forms as many
of those produced by art could not exist
for a day in a state of Nature. For under
art, useless or incipient structures can be
added up, cumbrous, futile, or even positively
injurious though they should be : but under
Nature, not so : it is IMPOSSIBLE.

V.

Consider, for example, the organisation,
' hippopotamus,' which is the type of a class.

Animals that live by inhaling and ex-
haling air, and yet pass much of their time
under water, MUST NECESSARILY possess
organs peculiarly constructed so as to enable

24 De Vi Physica

them to do this with impunity. Submerge
an ox or a sheep, and it will speedily cease
to be an -animal at all. We find, accord-
ingly, that all such animals — as the whale,
seal, crocodile, walrus, hippopotamus, &c.,
possess apparatus guarding their interior
against the fatal consequences that would
otherwise instantly result from going under
water. " When the crocodile dives, the nos-
" trils are closed by valves, a transparent
" membrane is drawn over the eyes, and
" the ear, which is a horizontal slit, is shut
" up by a moveable flap of the skin."

Go to the Zoological Gardens, and watch
the organisation * hippopotamus ' at work.
Possibly on arriving at his cage, you will
find him * at home,' under water. Presently
you will see his huge head rise to the sur-
face and emerge : at that moment the two
great nostrils (great, but small relatively to
his bulk) open, and discharge a blast of

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 25

air : the next instant they are again tightly
closed, and down he goes again.

Now, consider this matter. How is it
POSSIBLE for such an organ as this nostril to
come into being gradually, little by little,
by the accumulation of increments ? Is it
not clear, certain, necessary, inevitable, un-
deniable, that to be efficient, to gain its
object, it must have arisen, not piecemeal,
but all at once, and abruptly? Is it not
mathematically evident, that slight succes-
sive increments could never have formed
this organ, for in incipient stages it would
have involved the instant death of its owner?

The difficulty, for Darwin, is insuperable,
but no glimpse of it ever entered his head.
Whenever, for example, it was objected to
him, that any given organ, as, e.g., the eye,
could not have originated by * Natural Se-
lection,' his invariable answer was, to look
about in Nature for gradations in eyes : an

26 De Vi Physica

answer which only shows how curiously
unable he was to see the point of his own
theory. Putting aside the ignoratio elenchi —
for even if there are gradations in eyes, that
does not prove in the least degree, that they
came about by ' Natural Selection,' — the
irrelevance and futility of the reply escaped
his attention, simply by reason of this par-
ticular instance. With many organs it is
not readily apparent, because it is not ob-
vious that in an incipient state they would
involve the instant death of their owner.
But the truth is beyond denial in the case
before us. How could any hippopotamus
exist under water for a moment with an
' incipient J nostril ? It is obvious that a
' hole ' cannot begin gradually : the moment
that there is a hole, there is a hole : the
water must rush in. Nostrils that open in
air, and close in water, could not possibly
originate gradually : they must have arisen

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 27

abruptly. There is no escape : the neces-
sity is absolute. And as with the hippo-
potamus, so with the- other animals of the
kind, whose means of attaining the same
end f are often far more elaborate. As, e.g.,
the whale.

A similar, but otherwise very different,
case, is the epiglottis, which in animals that
have it is a sort of trapdoor, preventing
foreign bodies from entering the windpipe.
What happens when, as occasionally takes
place, they do, everybody knows by expe-
rience. And now, again, how is it POSSIBLE
for such an organ to arise, except abruptly ?
How could ' Natural Selection/ or slight
successive increments accumulated by the
survival of the fittest, have originated an
organ, without which in its complete con-

f Thus J. G. Wood expressly compares the water beetles,
in this respect to the whales and seals among mammalia.
(Insects Abroad, p. 70. )

28 De Vi Physica

dition its owner could not have survived
for three days ?

Advance, now, another step ; consider,
not any single organ, but one of the innu-
merable cases of organisation, where several
organs combine to effect a common end :
as, e.g., the very commonest of all common
animals, the garden spider. A man coming
forward with a theory claiming to account
for the origin of all organisations, a theory
based on the meditation of a lifetime, which
breaks to pieces on the spider, can scarcely
be acquitted of philosophical insolvency.
And yet, what is a spider ? A combination
of organs, each without the other worse than
useless : a combination that cannot continue
to exist, deprived of any one component
part : for one part produces the raw ma-
terial, which another spins into threads,
which again are manipulated by others (in
a way impossible to any other animal ; for

et Imbecillitate Danvmiana. 29

only the spider can handle its own threads) ;
while still others deal suitably with the prey
craftily captured by the web. The whole
organisation lives by the mutual co-operation
of its several parts, each of which is as
absurd without the other as a key without
a lock, or a corkscrew without a bottle.
Take away one, and the others must die.
And how in the name of common sense
is it POSSIBLE for slight successive variations
to add up into a combination of which each
part presupposes the others * ?

To this * deduction from phenomena] ne-
cessary and inevitable, Darwin's only possible
and wholly conjectural answer is an abuse
of scientific method : the hypothetical as-

% Nothing would be easier than to expanft these instances
into a volume. But a vast accumulation of superfluous
facts adds nothing to the strength of a good argument,
though it may, and often does, browbeat a timid reader
into accepting a bad one by the material brutality of quan-
tity rather than quality.

30 De Vi Physica

sumption, that a long chain of incipient and
relatively imperfect organisations led up to
e.g. our spider. This proceeding is disguised
under an expression resembling scientific
modesty ; ' the imperfection of the geological
' record! But in the first place, there is not
a particle of evidence that such a chain
or series of creatures ever existed. They
are a pure figment : an imaginary line of
beings conjured up out of nothing to support
a theory impossible without them. But this
is not all. It is mathematically impossible
that such a series can ever have existed h.
For parts reciprocally presupposing each
other can never have existed alone. And
yet, although Darwin knew well enough
that, if any organs existed which could not

h As will be shown still more irrefutably on a future page.
Observe, that on Darwin's theory, such a series is absolutely
necessary. But it happens to be impossible, which is very
awkward for the theory.

et hnbecillitate Darwiniana. 3 1

possibly have arisen by means of ' Natural
Selection,' his theory was out of court, he
seemed constitutionally incapable of com-
prehending, what the slightest meditation
on mutually implicated organs ought to
have taught him.

His theory is palpably impossible, in it-
self. Yet passing by this, ask him for evi-
dence, and what does he do ? He replies by
I. conjuring up a long line of fictitious beings
that could never have existed, covering this
absurdity by a euphemism, ' the imperfection
* of the geological record ' : and II. by point-
ing to the results of artificial selection. He
supports impossibility by imagination and
ignoratio elenchi : by facts that are either
fictitious or irrelevant. The breeder, as Dar-
win knew better than any one — the marvel is,
that he could be so blind to the significance
of his own facts — the breeder could effect
absolutely nothing, could accumulate no

32 De Vi PJiysica

variations, if he copied Nature, and allowed
all his animals to mix freely together, by
which all incipient variations would be, as
they actually are in Nature, obliterated
in the germ. They never get any further,
in Nature, than the preliminary appearance.
And yet, he actually sees no harm, nothing
unscientific, in adducing artificial in proof
of 'Natural* Selection: in arguing, that
because man achieves cumulative results, by
carefully preventing Nature from having her
way, therefore her way and man's way are
the same ! And to this kind of logic the
world erects statues.

VI.

Yet this theory ; this explanation of facts
by figments, power by impotence, coexis-
tence by succession, Nature by impossibility ;
this theory, which is in reality a pure scienti-

et Imbecillitate Darzviniana. 33

fie absurdity, was nevertheless, such was the
low state of logic in its day, a gigantic
success. Four things combined to secure
for it the favour of the world, and to elevate
its originator to the rank of a scientific
deity.

I. It fitted exactly, as we have already
seen,- into fashionable theories of geology,
being in fact nothing else than the further
application of those theories, the comple-
tion of their scheme, by subjecting the plants
and animals to the same treatment as the
rocks i. All things in Nature, even man
himself, were now placed upon the same
footing: all alike were held to have arisen
by slight successive increments accumulated
in vast periods of time. Thus the theory
found, in one aspect, its battle half won.

1 Even the rocks cannot be explained on Lyellian prin-
ciples : but the absurdity of endeavouring to account on
those principles for organic forms is infinitely greater.

D

34 De Vi Physica

Geologists who were busy explaining all
geological phenomena by accumulated in-
crement received ' Natural Selection ' into
their bosoms as if it were, as indeed it was,
their own child. They saw, in the theory,
their own face in the glass.

II. But further, Darwin presented his
theory mixed up and confounded with an-
other, which has nothing whatever in com-
mon with it, and was not originated by him.
This is, the hypothesis of a filiation in or-
ganic forms, the theory that the later arose
out of the earlier by natural descent. This
theory, an inevitable deduction from the
broad facts of geology k, is in a manner ren-
dered compulsory by the resemblance of
earlier to later forms, closer in proportion
to their approximation in time: and was

k It is quite impossible for any one not blinded by pre-
conceived theories to consider the large facts of geology
without having the theory forced upon his mind.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 3 5

originated in modern times by Lamarck.
The weak point of Lamarck's theory was,
that he could not give a satisfactory ex-
planation of the modus mutandi : show how
the metamorphosis was effected, how one
animal became another, how a new organ
could actually arise.

Now this how is just what Darwin claimed
to solve, by his theory of ' Natural Selection.1
He himself thought that he had discovered
the solution, and for a while the world was
persuaded to think so too. Hence his dei-
fication. But it was a mere delusion on both
sides.

When Darwin published his Origin of
Species, as the book itself, as well as his
letter to Lyell, apropos of being 'anticipated'
by his ' co-discoverer', Wallace1, shows, he

1 Who has recently cast a strong light on the scientific
quality of his own mind by some astronomical vagaries that
have staggered his admirers. The ravings of an old woman

36 De Vi Physica

obviously believed that he really had, in
' Natural Selection,' made the great dis-
covery. But after his ' discovery ' had been
for some time before the world, there came
to him, mainly, as it should seem, from
the perusal of a single article in a review,
a dim suspicion that his ' Natural Selection '
was not all that he originally took it for.
His position was a little awkward. Having
announced to the world a great discovery,
the ripe fruit of twenty years of laborious
meditation, to announce that it was all a
mistake would be a step from the sublime
to the ridiculous. But he was far, even now,
from realising the intrinsic futility of his
theory. Nevertheless, he attempted to
change his ground, and withdrew a little
from his 'creative idea' This was indeed
to kick away the ladder by which he had

in a lunatic asylum would be wisdom in comparison with
the latest views of this eminent philosopher.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 37

risen. ' Natural Selection ' made his fortune
and raised him to the skies, and bytit he
stood or fell. But in the sixth edition of
his Origin, he says : " As my conclusions
" have lately been much misrepresented, and
" it has been . stated that I attribute the
" modification of species exclusively to Na-
"tural Selection, I may be permitted to
" remark, that in the first edition of this
" work, and subsequently, I placed in a
" most conspicuous position, namely, at the
" close of the Introduction, the following
" words: I am convinced that Natural Se-
" lection has been the main, but not the
" exclusive means of modification. This has
" been of no avail. Great is the power of
" steady misrepresentation, but the history
" of science shows that fortunately this power
" does not long endure."

It is a thousand pities that criticism could
not induce Darwin to reflect a little on the

38 De ViPhysica

power of his own principle, instead of reflect-
ing on the power of misrepresentation which
was no misrepresentation at all. For

A. Though a single line at the tail of
the Introduction was no doubt in a most
conspicuous position, there was. another place,
far more conspicuous, which unfortunately
did not occur to him — the title-page ; on
which we read, in large capitals, on all
editions of his book, the words : On the
Origin of Species, BY MEANS OF NATURAL
SELECTION. What does this mean? It
means, as every page of his book shows,
that Natural Selection was Darwin's trump
card, his great idea, his passport to immor-
tality. Yet here we find him adopting a
tone of injured innocence, because, with
absolute justice, people judge him by his
great idea. The thing is utterly prepos-
terous. He announces " Natural Selection,"
and the world falls in adoration at his feet :

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 39

then, when wicked people begin to canvas
his great idea, and pick holes in it, he ex-
claims : O, that is not my position at all :
that is misrepresentation. But you cannot
both eat your cake and have it. If you
mount to heaven by means of Natural Se-
lection, you must fall with it too. It is lu-
dicrous to suppose that a man is to be
worshipped as a creative genius on the
strength of an idea from which he subse-
quently endeavours to withdraw. If ' Na-
tural Selection' is nonsense, what becomes
of Darwin and his Origin of Species? The
theory turns out to be a gigantic blunder :
he has discovered nothing at all : we are
thrown back upon Lamarck. For

B. The real irony of his complaint is
that notwithstanding his partial disclaimer
of ' Natural Selection,' he has still no sus-
picion of the truth as to that theory. He
still holds it to be the main agent. For to

40 De Vi Physica

the very end of his life, he never saw the
point of the absurdity, being deceived him-
self, as others are still, by a confusion of
thought due to a want of analysis.

III. For the third cause of his success
was, and still is, the deceptive snare in
the phrase ' Natural Selection/ which is at
once a mere truism and an absurd fallacy:
most people, including Darwin himself, swal-
lowing the fallacy in the truism.

The truism is, that in any struggle for
existence, the fittest survive : the survivors
being, ipso facto^ the fittest : truly a mar-
vellous discovery ! Then, it being first laid
down that the fittest survive, a thing which
nobody can deny, the term fittest is illegiti-
mately narrowed in meaning, and those forms
are always assumed to be the fittest, that
possess, and because they possess, some in-
finitesimal variation. This infinitesimal vari-
ation is arbitrarily supposed to bestow upon

et hnbecitlitate Darwiniana. 41

its possessor the qualification of being fittest
in every struggle, and decisively to determine
his survival in all struggles throughout life
(against all other contingencies or endow-
ments whatever), and then, notwithstanding
intercrossing (which is quietly disregarded),
to be handed down to his descendants, and
necessarily determine their survival in the
same way, in scecula scsculorum^ increasing
like a snowball as it rolls on, till ultimately,
after aeons of survival determined by the
infinitesimal, there arises a new organic and
specific form — the spider, for example. Poor
little arachnid ! how did you manage to sur-
vive during all those aeons while your organs
were ' accumulating ' ? And what were you
like? And were the flies, your future prey,
'accumulating'' along parallel lines, so as to
be ready to jump into your web exactly
when it was made ? What an astounding
coincidence ! Yet there is something still

42 De Vi Physica

more astounding, and that is, the simplicity
of a world, in which the author of such a
theory can be regarded as a scientific genius.

IV. Finally, Darwin's cause was greatly
served by the rancour of the theological
opposition. Hence arose the idea, still
obtaining in certain circles, that the only
objections to his theory were dictated by
theological considerations : * science ' being
on his side. Yet no theological dogma
was ever more absurd than Darwin's 'Na-
tural Selection.' Credo, quia absurdum
might be written on his tomb.

And yet, even now, in books, and news-
papers, and magazines, and society, people
speak of Darwin, as if he had invented geo-
logy and created biology ! as if, till he ap-
peared, no one had ever heard of evolution !
as if his ' master thought ' and ' creative origi-
nality ' had produced all the intellectual stir
in the nineteenth century ! Whereas, in

et Imbecillitatc Darwinian a. 43

truth, all the essential facts of geology, and
their evolutionary significance, were known
and proclaimed, before the Origin of Species
had ever seen daylight. Darwin is ridi-
culously and most unjustly credited with
the ideas and discoveries of other men
(some of which he did not even understand),
and made the intellectual fons et origo of
a movement, which was not due to him,
which he did not cause, but only exem-
plified, and which would have come about
as it did, even if he had never been born.
Against this immolation of other men's re-
putations on Darwin's altar, it is high time
to protest.

VII.

For what, in point of fact, does the world
owe to Darwin ? It was long ago said by
Bruno, that Aristotle owed more to the Uni-

44 De \/i PJiysica

versitym, than the University to Aristotle.
But with far greater justice, with literal truth,
we may say, that Darwin owes far more to
the world, than the world does to Darwin.

Are we obliged to Darwin for the idea
of evolution ? Not at all. By one of those
freaks of historical caprice in which For-
tune delights, just as America immortal-
ises the name, not of Columbus, but of that
commonplace pilot, Amerigo Vespucci0, so
the New World of evolution is christened
Darwinism, and by reason of the temporary
success of his ' Natural Selection,' Darwin
gets the credit of discoveries that he not
only never made, but did not even under-
stand.

I. Evolution, properly so called : that
constant and universal unfolding of the po-

m Of Paris.

n The only thing off beaten tracks that Amerigo Vespucci
has a doubtful claim to have discovered is New Georgia.
See Karl Prickers' Antarctic Regions.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 45

tential and latent into the actual and appa-
rent : that realisation of the embryonic which
is the soul of Nature and the core of phi-
losophy, was discovered — the greatest dis-
covery that was ever made by man — by
ARISTOTLE : and Darwin, so far from dis-
covering it, never even seems to have
heard of it, does not understand it, and
contradicts it: his 'Natural Selection,' in-
stead of explaining the actual by the pos-
sible and potential, being a ridiculous en-
deavour to explain what is actual and
natural by what is impossible. This is
what that great anatomist, Owen, meant,
though he did not explain his meaning well,
in opposing Darwin, yet maintaining what
he called Derivation. According to Owen,
who was not wholly ignorant of animal or-
ganization, Darwin's theory was only fit to
be "foisted on poor working men " .• it was,
that is to say, an Idol of the Market Place,

46 De Vi Physica

Huxley its mob-orator : seeing that it was
founded in flat opposition to the obvious
and necessary significance of the reciprocity
and mutual interdependence of related parts
of organisation : a theory that Owen felt pro-
foundly, as Cuvier and Aristotle did before
him. But what did * Darwin's bull - dog,'
Huxley, or his audiences know or care
about Aristotle or potentiality ? As if they
had anything to do with nineteenth century
' science ' !

II. But if, improperly, we employ the
term Evolution to denote the theory, that
species originate by descent from earlier
forms, or the mutability of species as op-
posed to the theory of their fixity, then its
name is not Darwinism, but Lamarckism.
And surely it is enough to make Lamarck
rise from the dead, to see that very theory
which got him in his own day little but
abuse, now quietly credited to another man.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 47

But Lamarck could not explain the modus
originis ? Neither could Darwin : nay, his
attempt at explanation is worse than La-
marck's. For while Lamarck's is only un-
intelligible, Darwin's is impossible. And
why, simply for having made an absurd
attempt to explain Lamarck's theory, Dar-
win should get the credit .of originating it
to the extent of supplanting Lamarck alto-
gether, it is not easy to understand.

III. But there is another man, who has
been unjustly thrown into the shade by the
over-valuation of Darwin, and that is the
author, originally anonymous, of the Ves-
tiges of the Natural History of Creation :
Robert Chambers. Chambers was a literary
philosopher, rather than a man of science.
Nevertheless, this is an instance of the old
adage, that reforms must come from without :
for it was Chambers and his Vestiges which
really did what Darwin is popularly sup-

48 De Vi Physica

posed to have done. It was the Vestiges
which first laid the axe to the tree, which
cut at the root, and decisively determined
the fall, of the old traditionary * creation by
fiat' and sowed in the public mind the seed
of evolutionary ideas. After Chambers and
his Vestiges, the real work was done : he
showed the way. " When the diamond pin"
says Kalidas, "has made the hole, even the
cotton thread can get through" Chambers
was the pin. He bored a hole in the wall,
and light broke into the dense darkness of
the early Victorian era. The rest was only
a question of time. And, moreover, though
he was not a professional man of science,
which is one reason why the men of science
first opposed and pooh-poohed him, and
subsequently passed him over in favour of
one of their own fraternity; and though his
book exhibited a certain amiable enthu-
siasm that led him to countenance rash

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 49

speculations, nevertheless on a les defauts
de ses qualites, and his book has two solid
claims on the esteem of posterity. Cham-
bers was the first writer, not only in Eng-
land, but in the world, to gather up the
scattered rays of science and speculation —
nebular hypothesis, geology, ethnology — and
announce that they converged to a point,
which he called Development, the upward
march from low to high. Moreover, Cham-
bers' notion of evolution was truer than
Darwin's : it recognises what Darwin dog-
matically denies — the organic power of Na-
ture. For Chambers, perceiving the fact of

development, but not caricaturing it, in-

i

vented no theories : whereas Darwin owed
his reputation to a fiction that transmogrifies
the truth into error. Hypotheses non fingo was
not the motto of Darwin. He supplanted
Chambers by grafting on the certainty — geo-
logical development — a figment. According

50 De Vi Physica

to Chambers, the geological record, the stone-
book, as he called it, exhibits a continuous
rise, a ladder-like ascent, a constant gain in
organisation : and so in fact it does. But Dar-
win's theory, so far from harmonising with
geology, is at variance with it: a difficulty
which Darwin, more Darwiniano, surmounts,
by cutting his geology to suit his theory. The
geological series exhihits great gaps in con-
tinuity ° : but it is essential to Darwin that
there should be no gaps: therefore he fills
up the gaps by imaginary chains of fictitious
beings that never had or could have had
any existence : exactly as the old Pytha-
goreans invented an avTi^B^v to make up
the complement of their Ten Bodies. This
is the ' science ' that enabled Darwin to
eclipse Chambers.

The Vestiges will always remain, what it

0 And it must do so : see below, § VIII.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 5 1

was, a real stepping-stone, a book marking a
great stride in the education of the world. It
was the Vestiges, and not the Origin of Spe-
cies, that broke the spell and awoke the world
from its long sleep. The clear and definite
statement of development, minus ' Natural
Selection,' is what we owe to Robert Cham-
bers, who standing by and looking on, was the
first to see, what none of the men of science
of his day could see. They fell upon him,
tooth and nail : and now they are all preach-
ing his doctrine, and crediting its discovery
to one of themselves ; exactly as the politi-
cians who abused Disraeli in his lifetime are
now making great fame by leaves taken from
his book. But though it may be news to
many, it is the historical fact, that it was
not ' science,' but philosophy, the scientific
outsider, that discovered evolution and pro-
claimed it in England : and so far from
initiating it, ' science ' opposed it, when it

5 2 De Vi Physica

first appeared, as fiercely as ( religion ' did.
The Vestiges aroused, in the scientific world,
first hostility, and then jealousy : for women
are far from monopolising that animal pas-
sion. The only difference is, that women
hate each other, for love : but men, for
fame.

IV. What, then, do we owe to Darwin ?
What is Darwin's own? What is Darwinism?
' Natural Selection ' : a scientific and philo-
sophical absurdity. Darwin laboured all his
life, with unwearied diligence, to accumulate
evidence in support of his theory : what that
evidence establishes is not what he meant
it to establish, but its contradictory opposite :
that Natura facit saltus.

VIII.

It has been said, and said very well in-
deed, of the * higher science' of Darwin's

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 53

day, that under a surface of excessive humi-
lity, it really consisted of the most arrogant,
shallow, and uneducated dogmatism. Loudly
professing to follow Nature, it really pre-
scribed to her a priori the law that she was
to follow, on pain of being denied and
abused. A large number of savoury scien-
tific professors, including some of the very
highest eminence, went, and still go, to
Nature, with a dogma. They said to her :
You shall be nothing, if not mechanical :
only a purely mechanical is a natural ex-
planation. Nature is mechanics, and all else
is miracle. Hence they strove to reduce
everything in Nature to mechanical prin-
ciples, because those they thought they could
exhaustively understand. Hence all the lu-
dicrous efforts constantly made to reduce
forces, and especially that of gravitation,
to impact. To philosophers of this kind,
there are a larger number of natural facts

54 De Vi Physica

which must by hook or crook be denied
altogether or explained away : for what is
not mechanical and mechanically intelligible^
is miracle. Darwin, for example, is bold
enough to declare, that the only alternative
to his * Natural Selection ' is miracle : that
to believe in or recognise abrupt or sudden
modifications of structure is to abandon
science and resort to miracles p. An argu-
ment for miracles which can be strongly
recommended to the theologian : the natural
is the miraculous ! For nothing is more
absolutely certain than that such abrupt
origination I. has actually occurred ; as
Darwin has abundantly proved himself. II.
must necessarily occur, by reason of the
nature of things. For, to begin with, as we
have already seen, organs that mutually
presuppose each other could not possibly

P Origin of Species, cap. 7, end.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 5 5

exist apart, nor come into being successively,
otherwise than together. But to pass this
over : there is something more : something
that Darwin never saw : and yet it is a thing
so simple, that his failure to understand it,
his want of insight, here alone, involves his
credit as a thinker.

Had he, ceasing for an instant his Sisy-
phean labour of everlastingly accumulating
superfluous or irrelevant facts, stopped to
THINK, a very little consideration might
have shown him, that the abrupt method
which he brands as miraculous and unnatural
is the ONLY way in which a new principle
of organisation can or could possibly be
introduced : the only possible way is the
way which, from a want of analysis, he
pronounces miraculous and throws aside.
For gradual transition from one thing to
another is possible, only when those two
things have a common principle : otherwise,

56 De Vi Physica

impossible. To change a principle, to in-
troduce a new principle, a jump is absolutely
necessary : by gradual transition, it cannot
be done. A principle cannot originate
gradually. For example, you can have
sledges and you can have wheeled vehicles,
and any number of transitional variations
on either principle, within its limits. But
you cannot pass by gradation, by accumu-
lated increment, from the principle of sledge
to that of wheel: you must jump: no vari-
ation of sledges will ever produce a wheel.
Just so, you cannot pass by gradation from
sails to steam, in the navigation of ships.
No variety of sails will ever bring you to
steam. And so it is universally in Nature.
You cannot bridge the gap between different
principles of organisation. Intermediate
gradations cannot possibly exist. Darwin's
supposition that they could : his expectation
to find them, but for the imperfection of the

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 57

geological record : in other words, his whole
theory of * Natural Selection/ which supposes
the possibility of an impossibility, infinitesi-
mal gradations between all the forms in
Nature past and present : his identification
of abrupt origination with miracle : all this
only proves to demonstration that neither
he himself nor his disciples know what
thinking means. Every new principle of
organisation in Nature must have come in
with a jump, and cannot have originated
in any other way. As, for example, to
revert to our former illustration ; the water-
defying apparatus of animals that live by
breathing air could not possibly have arisen
by degrees. This is so obvious that it is
difficult to understand how any one could
avoid perceiving it : but there are countless
cases of organisation, the commonest things
in Nature, to which Darwin never paid at-
tention. And really, it is almost to insult

58 De Vi Physica

the intelligence of the reader to multiply
instances. How did the wings of birds and
bats and insects originate ? By degrees ? The
very notion is ridiculous. With wings 'in
the incipient stage ' (to borrow the nonsen-
sical ' Darwinism ' based upon nothing in
Nature, for nothing in Nature is ' incipient/
or ever has been), wings that were no wings,
the animal would never have ' survived ' :
still less could it ever have left off trusting
to good legs and turned for its safety, during
' the period of transition/ to ' incipient '
wings. The life of winged beings absolutely
depends on the power of their wings, as,
e.g., bats or bees or butterflies : and often
their prey flies nearly as fast as they do
themselves.

1 And so it is universally. There is, in
Nature, infinite variety. But whenever you
get back to the principle, the fundamentum
varietatis, of which the varieties are all

et Imbecillitate Danviniana. 59

exemplifications, then there is an end of
gradation, actual or possible : then comes
a blank and a gap : and necessarily : for a
jump was then obligatory, and it must have
taken place. There is no passage from
organisation on one principle to organisation
on another by degrees. Nature cannot do
it : she must jump : ergo, she does. NATVRA
FACIT SALTVS. Darwin denies it : for it
would destroy his theory : but he is obliged
forcibly to shut his eyes to facts adduced by
himself. Moreover, it is useless to deny it :
for whatever is, is : and what is impossible,
does not happen.

And therefore, if we know, beyond all
possibility of denial, A. That jumps have
actually occurred, as Darwin knew himself.
B. That they must occur, Nature being im-
possible without them : which Darwin did
not understand : it is mere puerility to de-
nounce as miraculous that which is nattiral,.

60 De Vi Physica

because it does not harmonise with your
a priori scheme of what Nature is to be.
Such a * scientific ' method, which under a
show of humility is that of Darwin and his
school, and especially of Weismann, is sim-
ply to deny ex cathedra that organic POWER
of Nature, which is really above and beyond
all denial, merely because you do not under-
stand it : it is to make your limited insight
and information the standard of Nature's
power and possibilities. But Nature laughs
at such philosophical incompetence, masquer-
ading in the garb of science. What she is, she
is : what she can, she can : true Science will
hold up to her a pure mirror : but * Science '
which will not, must get another name. Of
all amazing scientific assumptions, the most
amazing is that which underlies the creed
of Darwin and his school : that we are in
full possession of all the principles by which
Nature is to be explained, and therefore in

et Imbecillitale Darwiniana. 61

a position to ban as miraculous every power
which we do not understand. But that
which can only be effected by power cannot
be explained by impotence. Darwin denies
Nature : but Nature gives the lie to Darwin :
and she will endure longer than his reputa-
tion, which rests only on the sand of a logi-
cally uneducated public opinion.

IX.

Let us look without prejudice at this
matter, this question of the origin of the
inhabitants of the earth, in the light of what
we actually do KNOW.

We know (thanks chiefly to William
Smith) that during a long series of ages,
of unknown duration, many different kinds
of animals and plants have successively ap-
peared and disappeared. And from certain
similarities and resemblances and other in-

62 De Vi Physica

dications, we argue, that there is between
them a real family relationship, a true
genealogical filiation : that the later were
lineal descendants of the former ; reasoning
inductively from some cases when we seem
to see, though dimly, the line of descent,
to all the others, the vast majority, where
we cannot see it at all. But when we at-
tempt to go into details, the way is blocked
as it were by a door of iron. As if on pur-
pose to mock us, in exactly the two points
of all the most interesting, the most vital
to be known, geology is dumb. What is the
meaning, and what were the causes, of those
mysterious periods of discontinuity, the geo-
logical BREAKS? By what organic alchemy,
and under what conditions, assuming that
the later forms issued from the loins of the
earlier, was the actual metamorphosis per-
formed ? For by heaven and earth ! it is
very strange. Who ever saw an animal give

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 63

birth to some creature other than itself.
They breed so true. And yet, somehow or
other, somewhen or otherwhen, the thing
must have occurred, if descent has been un-
broken since the beginning. And it is cer-
tain, that the secret is somehow or other
connected with those weird blanks in the
record, the geological breaks. For after a
blank, we see that a change, sometimes
prodigious, has taken place in the life : new
forms have replaced the old : and we stand
before them with a feeling difficult to ana-
lyse, but akin to awe. How came those old
Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous periods
to begin or end ? By what natural magic
were produced in order the fishes, reptiles,
birds, and mammals, to say nothing of insects,
the most perfect, the most various, the most
incomprehensible of all q?

i Observe that insects appear very early : in the Silurian
age. See Goss On the Geological Antiquity of Insects, p. 6.

64 De Vi Physica

Darwin's almost superhuman reputation
rested on the fact that he was popularly
believed to have discovered the answer to
these questions. Pure delusion ! Not only
was he as ignorant of the answer as the
rest of the world, but worse : for pure ig-
norance is better than the false conceit of
knowledge. Darwin both went himself, and
led others, astray, and has to a melancholy
degree perverted scientific endeavour : teach-
ing his disciples to look for the solution
of natural problems in a wholly erroneous
direction : thus it is that at present we see
almost everybody desperately striving to
force all the facts of Nature into harmony
with 'Natural Selection/ ignoring the organic
power that really effects the result. Nature
does her work in one way : Darwin and his
pupils strenuously labour to explain it, in
the most far-fetched, round-about, and per-
verse manner, in another. Nothing can cure

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 65

this disease, but the extirpation of the bacil-
lus > — the exposure of the Darwinian myth.

So far from solving the problem of the
origin of species, Darwin did not even cor-
rectly approach it. He came to it, by
reason of a want of philosophical education,
and a deficiency in logical power, with two
fundamental misconceptions, which futilised
all his endeavours beforehand. He was wrong
a priori in two points : I. The conditions of
the process of origination. II. The essence
of Nature, the organic power which does
the work.

I. Darwin was a Lyellian, and was there-
fore, like all Lyellians, doomed to failure
in his geological solutions by reason of a
radical error in his conception of geological
time. Lyell conceived time as two parallel
lines, along which, however far you might
go back, you never got any nearer to the
beginning: thus the present was but the
¥

66 De Vi Physica

type and model of the past, both being, as
it were, merely loci, points at which you might
cut infinite time. For according to Lyell,
geological time was practically infinite : he
expressly compares it to astronomical space,
overlooking the essential objection (that
space is all, whereas the earth is only a very
little one). Hence he threw back present
conditions into all past periods, and sought
to explain the past as though but another
present. This is the essence of Lyellian
geology. The old man is identified with the
child. What Lyell did not understand, and
Darwin followed him, was, that the geo-
logical process is, not a mathematical and
infinite, but an organic process, like the life
of an animal or a tree, a thing which
runs a course, with a beginning, a middle,
and an end : not comparable to parallel
lines, but rather to a cone, lines starting
from a point and diverging ; or to a spiral,

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 67

such as we see in celestial nebulae and sea
shells : so that the true geological concep-
tion is not that of a constant identity of
conditions, which is impossible^ but on the
contrary, and this is necessary, a constantly
changing development or unfolding of the
implications of the definitely determined
starting point : and thus the present era is
not only not the same as the past, but be-
yond a doubt and by an inevitable necessity,
utterly unlike it : the unlikeness growing
greater, the further back we go into the
chronological abyss. And from this it fol-
lows : first, that our ignorance of the ori-
ginal and early conditions must inevitably
make all speculation as to earlier periods
conjectural : and secondly, that the efforts
of Lyell, Darwin, and others of their school
to explain the past on present principles
are essentially vicious in their heart, and pre-
determined to be erroneous. To insist, as

68 De Vi PJiysica

the necessary scientific preliminary, that the
past shall and must be explained in terms
of the present, because we know the present
and not the past, sounds at first like the
truth : but it is in reality the antipodes of
science : it is precisely analogous to the de-
mand, that true science requires the child
to be explained in terms of the old man,
because we know only the old man. But
on the contrary, if we really have no know-
ledge, save of the old man, then instead of
ridiculously endeavouring to get an expla-
nation of the child in terms of the old
man, and calling this science, let us rather
frankly say at once, that science is here
unattainable, and that knowledge of the
child is beyond our ken. The wildest con-
jectures, though wholly unscientific, may
possibly be true, or near the truth : but
logical reasoning on Lyellian principles
must issue in what is false : because it is

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 69

mathematically certain, by the nature of
things (which forbids any heated combi-
nation of dements in colder surroundings
to remain in the same condition, but com-
pels it to change), that the past was, not like
the present, but wholly unlike it. For the
earth, though not, as the old Stoics thought,
an animal, yet resembles an animal in pos-
sessing a quasi-organic existence, a begin-
ning, and a fated end determined by the
beginning, and a period of ordered passage,
through change after change, from one to the
other. This is the true evolutionary view,
discovered as a philosophical principle by
Aristotle : and to ignore it is to stumble on
the threshold, which is just what Darwin
did. Darwin belongs to the pre- Aristotelian
period : he attempts to explain, without un-
derstanding the philosophy of origination,
like the early Greek philosophers. He mis-
understood the potentiality of the geological

7O De Vi Physica

process, having learned from Lyell to regard
it as a permanent mechanical uniformity.
Thus he cut himself off a priori from the
possibility of reaching the truth.

II. But Darwin fell into a still more
fundamental error in another point. Just
as he misconceived the essentially organic
nature of the geological process, so in
exactly the same way he arbitrarily denied
and ignored the organic power of Nature
herself. His theory is an endeavour to ex-
plain Nature per impossibile, to refer organi-
sation to the mechanical accumulation of
successive increments, impotent to produce
it: he treats animals as if they were rocks,
lumps of matter : he will not admit the for-
mative power of Nature. For him, there is
no organic power : there are only mechanical
powers. Like nearly all scientific men in
the nineteenth century, whose master of
method was that unfortunate being J. S.

et Imbecillitate Danviniana. 71

Millr, Darwin was not aware, that to ex-
plain Nature it is not sufficient to be al-
ways accumulating her facts : you must,
above all, make a thorough preliminary
analysis of the causes and principles to
which you propose to refer them. You
must thoroughly comprehend her back-
ground, before you can satisfactorily inves-
tigate her particulars. But this is ' meta-
physics ' : and therefore, though it is a scien-
tific sine qua non, though science cannot
exist without it, it is tabooed by ' scientific '
men, mutually applauding each other, and
never perceiving how much they are doing
to discredit their own cause. For nothing

r I consider the authority of J. S. Mill, and the fact
that his Logic and Political Economy were and still are
text-books in the University of Oxford, to be a national
disaster, and almost equivalent to destroying English in-
telligence in the germ. A generation which learned its
logic from Mill was well prepared to receive Darwin's
speculative guessing as a new revelation.

72 De Vi Physica

injures the cause of science so much as the
want of a philosophical basis in its own
champions : science loses credit and autho-
rity, when scientific men cannot even at-
tempt to discuss the principles of science
without betraying their want of training in
their own business. The mere accumula-
tion of facts without any critical insight into
principles and causes is just as likely to lead
men wrong as right. So it was with Darwin,
who seems to have had no philosophical
education of any kind : except what he
could pick up from the perusal of J. S. Mill.
All his familiarity with the facts of Nature
did not save him, accordingly, from falling
into a gigantic error as to the essence of
Nature herself: an error which is not the
less an error because most of his contem-
poraries shared it.

Nature — not in that sense of the word in
which it is synonymous with the Universe,

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 73

All ; but in the sense of the Power which
we see exhibited above all in the organisa-
tion of animals and plants, and generally in
every process that starts from a beginning,
passes through a series of changes, and ends
with an end completing the process, as e.g.
from the egg to the owl — this Nature is not
a mechanical power, and cannot be ex-
plained on purely mechanical principles. It
works to an end. There is, in the process,
mechanics and mechanism : but this does
not exhaust it : there is something more.

Nature, as Natura Naturata, to borrow
an old expressive barbarism, is a vast accu-
mulation of organisations, instruments, organs
that effectuate ends : as Natura Naturans,
she is the creative process of their genera-
tion, and the power that does the work.

Now I say, with Aristotle, that this power
is not mechanical, but organic. The mis-
take of Darwin, of Lamarck, and of most

74 De Vi Physica

modern scientific theorists is, that, preoccu-
pied by mechanical problems, they refuse
to see, deny, nay, scoff at the very idea of
such an organic power5, because they do
not understand it. They ban it, as miraculous.
But let us consider the question. The first
principle of science is to recognise facts :
and there is more in Nature than is dreamed
of by these philosophers.

There is, in the process of organic origi-
nation, an element that lies beyond and out-
side any possible mechanical explanation.
The mechanism of the process does not and
cannot explain the process itself: it ex-
plains its action within limits, but not
its raison d'etre: as, for example, the me-
chanism of the clock does not explain its
origin, the wherefore of its being : it can-

8 The reason is, that they are biassed against theology.
But theology has nothing to do with it. Theology or
no theology, let us recognise what Nature is.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 75

not tell us what it is. To know this re-
quires an appeal to something other than
the mechanism : to time. Similarly, the
raison d'etre of every organ, and of all or-
ganic origination such as terminates in an
end, lies in its totality, and that totality
cannot be explained, and cannot have arisen,
piecemeal. No organ, the essence of whose
operation lies in it as a whole : no combi-
nation of organs, the essence of whose oper-
ation lies in their mutual, reciprocally pre-
supposing interdependence, can possibly have
arisen or be explained by the mechanical
accumulation of a series of successive in-
crements. The attempt of Darwin argues
nothing but his own lack of philosophical
insight.

Let us, for example, suppose, that he had
succeeded in giving a satisfactory mechani-
cal explanation of the origin of specific
forms in time. Yet it never seems to cross

76 De Vi Physica

his mind, that he has still to reckon with
the origin of the individual animal, going
on around us every day. Is that mechani-
cal ? The spider or the elephant alike arise
from an imperceptible speck of matter, or
more exactly, from the momentary contact
of two imperceptible specks, which leaves
one endowed with a Power that it did not
possess before. Now what is this Power ?
It is beyond denial, that the perfect form,
the spider or elephant, is determined before-
hand in the originating speck. Let that
process be, as such, as mechanical as you
please, the question still arises : does me-
chanics exhaust the explanation ? Is there,
or is there not, a power working to an end ?
It has been admirably observed (by Car-
penter) that what, in ordinary generation, the
father and mother produce, is not a new form,
structure, or animal, but only the potentiality
of such a new form : which, in suitable cir-

et Imbecillilate Darwiniana. 77

cumstances, builds itself up out of surround-
ing inorganic and organic material. What
a speck is this potentiality, and what gigantic
formative power it contains ! It converts into
organs the appropriate material supplied to
it : it works towards its own specific end.
And who knows how far chemical or other
changes, by slightly altering some initial
principle, giving it a new turn, might not
determine its formative energy in quite a
new direction. Observe, now, what a power-
ful and peculiar influence altered climatic
and other conditions have upon wild or even
tame animals. See how many refuse to
breed at all, and how anomalous and irre-
gular becomes the offspring of many that do.
Take a long-haired cat to tropical Africa :
it loses its hair : the breed changes. Under
the necessary evocative conditions, Nature
internally does what is wanted to meet the
case, and suit the animal to its surroundings.

78 De Vi Physica

Thus the potentiality, the power, can respond
to conditions in some degree. Nature can,
then, transmute her creatures : she has the
power. How much has she got ? How far
can she go ? Is any man of science in a
position positively to assert that this power
which can do things that we see, could not
in the past under other [conditions have ori-
ginated the structures which it continues to
perpetuate ? The perpetuation is a common
fact : even the modification, up to a certain
point, is a fact, rare, yet not unknown : then
why not origination, in this manner, but
much greater in degree in the past ? LIKE
generally produces LIKE : but even now,
LIKE can disobey its own rules : is it then
so certain that under conditions favourable
to the case, like could not produce unlike ?

Darwin looked for the origin of species in
a wholly wrong direction. Falsely conceiv-
ing both the power of Nature and the process

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 79

of geology, gratuitously and dogmatically
denying, in the teeth of his own evidence,
the possibility of direct modification, he
sought to explain the origin of animal and
other forms by the roundabout and impos-
sible accumulation of infinitesimal increments
under conditions similar to those now obtain-
ing. But we live in relatively cold and un-
generative conditions. The hints that we
gather from our own time justify us in
ascribing the appearance of new forms to
the self-acting organic power of Nature re-
sponding to conditions constantly changing,
by what we might call, though not quite
adequately, Atmospheric Evolution. Since
the beginning, there has been, for there
must have been, going on, a continuous,
never ceasing atmospheric change, a chemical
alteration of the medium of life/ consisting
essentially in purification, rarefaction, sic-
cification, frigidification, segregation, differ-

80 De Vi Physica

entiation — a constant passage from potential
to actual, synthetic to evolved, atmospheric
conditions : from a state relatively thick,
mephitic, hot, miasmatic, pestilential, dark,
to one relatively purer and ever purer,
drier, cooler, lighter, and more various. The
* lower ' any animal is, the more ' poisonous '
the conditions under which it can live. If
a reptile, a bird, and a mammal are shut
up in a close chamber with but little air,
the bird will be the first, and the reptile
the last, to die. And if tadpoles are kept
without light, they will never become frogs.
Such facts as these give us, as it were,
glimpses of the past history of the world.
And when we combine with this much
evidence that shows how Nature instantly
responds to the call of circumstances, how
animals change and mysteriously assume
colour or coating suited to new localities :
the conclusion almost seems necessary, that

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 8 1

the evolution of species was determined by
the progressive evolution of the atmosphere,
calling into operation that organic power
of Nature which we see now actually repro-
ducing and occasionally altering species :
which we know to be a fact, and which de-
termines in the germ and is able to produce
forms that answer to and can effect ends.
That we do not comprehend this power is
no sufficient reason for denying it.

For if it be granted, as it cannot be
denied, that under peculiar conditions ani-
mals have the power of producing children
to a certain extent unlike them, the only
question is one of degree. How far could
this power go ? A question to which no
answer can be returned. We simply do not
know. But certainly, a power which can
produce a spider or an elephant from
an undifferentiated potentiality cannot be
brushed aside and pronounced a priori,
G

82 De Vi Physica

as Darwin pronounces it, incapable of ori-
ginating fresh starts and departures. Darwin
attempts to make out, that each animal
form must have arisen slowly, by accidental
increment in a vast period of time, simply
because he holds that Nature cannot produce
them abruptly, except by a miracle. But
his denial of Nature's power is pure gra-
tuitous dogmatism : as Ockam said of an-
other such assertion, simpliciter falsa et
absurda.

Yet it is palpable, from the very nature
of the case, that we never can expect to
know the details : how each particular form
arose : because it is impossible to reconstruct
the conditions. Cases where we can trace a
genealogy as e.g. the foot of the horse, really
tell us nothing : because a horse might
exist well enough with feet constructed on
twenty different plans. I myself possessed
a turkey which was born with feet crumpled

et Ivibccillitate Darwiniana. 83

into balls. Yet after a while, this turkey
learned how to use them, and it ran about
on its stumps like Sir Hugh Witherington,
better than its brothers and sisters. But
this could not happen with a spider. Un-
less we had been there to see, we could
never understand the genesis of species in
cases where organisation is closely correlated
in its parts. A horse could exist with other
feet, but not a spider: it could not exist
without just the feet it has and no others.
Large animals are susceptible of consider-
able alteration in parts without any vital
consequences : and this is one of the things
that deceived Darwin : but not insects.
They are far more strictly and undeni-
ably instruments for the performance of
ends. In insects, above all, Nature shows
her power, and in them above all appears
the ineffable absurdity of ' Natural Selec-
tion.' A little investigation of insects is

84 De Vi Physica

worth more than all Darwin's accumulated
labour on domesticated animals. How could
the humming-bird moth exist without its
proboscis ? How could the grub of the ant-
lion fc originate by accumulated increment ?
How could the jaws of the caterpillar come
into being piecemeal ? The theory of Dar-
win is the ne plus ultra of human stupidity.
It never could have occurred, except to one
incapable of understanding the corollaries of
organisation : but once having occurred, it
never could have been retained and defended,
except by one who was capable of systema-
tically ignoring whole classes of animal or-
ganisation, and attending only to instances

1 The Ant-lion pupa has a pair of powerful jaws which
it uses to gnaw a hole in the sand-cemented walls of its
cocoon and escape. These jaws are used only in that
operation, once and once only, and are then cast off like
an old hat. Did these jaws, forsooth ! originate by ac-
cumulated increment ? How could an Ant-lion come into
existence without them ?

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 85

that prove nothing at all. All the domes-
tic and artificial selection in the world is
utterly worthless to support a theory about
Nature which the nearest insect alone is
sufficient to destroy.

• X.

The proper comprehension of the forego-
ing arguments places the origin of man in
a light wholly different from that in which
it is regarded by the Darwinian.

According to Darwin, man is .descended
from an ape-like form in a Darwinian way,
i.e. by imperceptible increments. Thus
there must have existed a long chain of
intermediate forms, from the ape-like pro-
genitor to man as we know him. Hence
the demand for a missing link. But now,
not only has no such link ever been found,
but it may be unhesitatingly asserted, that it

86 De Vi Physica

never can have existed. Between apes and
man, there is a gulf; and just as we saw,
that in introducing a new principle, Nature
must jump : so it is here. I deny that
language can originate gradually ex infantia.
Once in being, it is true, it can improve,
and rise to higher powers, like all other
principles. But in all the innumerable dis-
cussions of speech and language that have
seen the light in the nineteenth century, no
one has ever produced a particle of evidence,
rational or experimental, to show that, or
how, speech could originate out of speech-
lessness. And the truth is, that it is im-
possible : the problem is insoluble. There
is no gradual passage from the one con-
dition to the other.

Therefore, without denying that man is-
sued from a lower form, we may and must
wholly dissent from Darwin and his friends
as to how it was done. And observe, that

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 87

this makes all the difference. Man has not
been mechanically accumulated out of a
monkey ; he never was a monkey : the
monkey was never man : and when the
necessary jump came, we know not how or
when, man was not a monkey : he never
was one. A new principle was introduced,
when man in his lowest form — 6 TT^WTO?
avOpwTros — appeared upon the earth. It is
impossible that it can have been other-
wise. The confident assertions of the Dar-
winians on this head rest on nothing what-
ever but belief; they are guesses, not only
without evidence, but implying a radical
failure to understand, what is involved in
the gap between man and lower forms.
All men possess speech, language, the power
of rational communication. You may be-
lieve, if you please, that this power could
originate gradually from its negative : but

88 De Vi Phystca

this belief is not science : it is mere philo-
sophical absurdity. There is no potentiality
of language in an animal that does not
possess it. The faculty of speech, i.e. the
externality of reason and its vehicle, is one
of the necessary jumps of Nature, and no man
knows, or ever will know, when or how it
began. But man in his lowest form must
have been a rationally communicating ani-
mal : and before that, there were no men.
And this, I wish the reader to observe, is
not a theological, it is a logical necessity.
For things can develop only from potentia-
lities : and out of the incapacity of speaking,
speech can never come.

Therefore the true evolutionary view is, not
that man either is, or ever was, a monkey :
but on the contrary, that he neither is, nor
ever was. The origin of speech and reason
cannot be scientifically explained, without

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 89

a jump. The supposition that they can, is
only a mark of analytical incompetence u.

XI.

When Darwin died, I was a Westminster
boy, and hence it came about that I had
ex officio to play a minor part in his funeral
ceremony. Such a crowd, qualitatively
speaking, I have never seen again. The
King himself, then Prince of Wales, trod —
long life to him ! upon my toe : for Queen
Victoria was represented, if I remember
rightly, by Lord Thurlow, and the Prince
walked in the procession on his right hand.
At that time, Darwin was but a name to
me, vaguely associated in my mind, as in

u Darwin's attempt to explain man by * natural selection '
is his own scientific self-condemnation. It is sheer phi-
losophical ineptitude, naked and not ashamed : he simply
did not know what he was doing. But parmi les aveugles,
borgne est rot.

go De Vi Physica

that of most people now, with ' evolution,'
' monkeys,' and the ' missing link.' And as
I stood in the dense throng, surrounded by
all the celebrities of Europe, I said to my-
self: Here is a chance for the Anarchists x
that will never occur again. If they blew
up the Abbey now, they would, like Tarquin,
cut off the heads of all the tallest poppies
at one fell swoop. And I asked myself in
astonishment: WHAT WAS DARWIN, that
all this assembly of notables should come
to do him honour ? For the whole world
seemed to have congregated together in the
Abbey, to worship at his tomb. And I
made a resolution, that I would solve the
problem in the years to come.
* And now, whenever I can, I go and
worship in another Temple, that of Nature,
— the British Museum of Natural History

* At that time, London was in excitement by reason
of the outrages of dynamiters.

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 9 1

in South Kensington, to whose founders
and perpetuators and organisers, great and
small, from Sir Hans Sloane down, we all
of us owe a debt of gratitude greater than
we can ever repay. For here every man
who chooses can master for nothing the
rudiments and principles of Nature. But
as often as I go in, I am suddenly seized
with trembling, and a divine impulse. I feel
within me a very great laughter: je suis

comme bourre de rire

Right opposite the door, on the stairs,
about thirty feet high, or it may be more,
towers a colossal statue. Not of the Founder,
not of Aristotle : not of the man, who called
all the particular sciences out of nonentity
into being, and created the logical method
of science in general that constitutes their
unity : not of the man, who, two thousand
years before Newton, strove without data
and without mathematics to obtain an ex-

92 De Vi Physica

planation of the Universe in terms of
gravitation, and saw that Physics was the
science of motion : not of the man, who
discovered and defined the true evolutionary
process, and laid the foundation of natural
history by zoological collections and com-
parative anatomy : not of the man, to whom,
through the medium of the Schoolmen his
disciples, Europe owes its intellectual resur-
rection, and any philosophical education
that it possesses ; for since Ockam, men
have pulled down Aristotle's Parthenon to
build their little barbarous huts : not, I say,
of the true deity, the Incarnation of Science :
but of Darwin —

And what was Darwin ?
As a man, Darwin possessed a personal
charm and kindly geniality that make
us all his friends : and as an industrious
accumulator of material in the field of
natural history, serving to disprove his own

et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 93

theories, he is unrivalled. As a discoverer,
he discovered absolutely nothing that was
not well known and publicly proclaimed
before him : as a scientific thinker, he saw
no harm in explaining Nature by purely
gratuitous hypotheses, imaginary figments,
and impossibility, simply paying no at-
tention at all to facts that stood in the
way : as a geologist, he totally misunderstood
the nature of the geological process, dog-
matically postulating permanence and un-
changing uniformity where reason and ob-
servation combine to demonstrate progressive
alteration and perpetual change, and de-
manding, in the interest of his theory, that
the geological record shall be twisted into
proving the exact reverse of what it actually
does prove : as an interpreter of Nature,
he misinterpreted her so monstrously, in
defiance of all his own accumulated facts,
as strenuously to endeavour, all his life long,

94 De Vi Physica, etc.

to reduce and degrade her power to impo-
tence, to account for her inseparable simulta-
neous correlations by mechanical succession,
to prove her animated tools, instruments,
and weapons mere things of accidentally
selected variation and accumulated incre-
ment, creatures of chance, like rocks, or
clouds, or pyramids of sand, or heaps of
snow.

And it is this curious incarnation of phi-
losophical poverty and unscientific perver-
sity, who is elevated into a scientific deity.
A theory-blinded and arbitrary denier of
Nature's organic and creative power is wor-
shipped as a god in her own temple, every
object in which gives the lie to his creed.
Si ARGUMENTUM QUARTS, CIRCUMSPICE !

APPENDIX.

On Darwin's theory of Coral Islands.

THE psychological origin of this theory of Darwin casts
a strong light on the scientific quality of his own mind.

If we examine the essay in which he presents his theory,
we find, that he invokes, to explain Coral Islands, the
subsidence of the ivhole oceanic area in which they are
found. And if we ask, what are his grounds for making
this assumption, objecting to acquiesce in his astonishing
demand, he tells us, that "as whole regions are now
"rising, for instance, in Scandinavia and South America,
" and as no reason can be assigned why subsidences should
" not have occurred in some parts of the earth on as great
" a scale both in extent and amount as those of elevation,
"objections" (to the amount of the subsidence) "strike
"me as of little force." That is to say, that because he
believes, on evidence so scanty as to be positively ridicu-
lous*, in slow continuous rising in one place, he invents
subsidence, on a far more colossal scale, in another, to
account for Coral Islands. But then, subsidence was one

a The Scandinavian elevation of Lyell has turned out doubtful
in the extreme, not to say fictitious : while the S. American elevation
was based on a handful of misinterpreted earthquake phenomena on
the coast. From a little dubious almost imperceptible alteration on
the shore, Darwin leaped joyfully to the conclusion that the uhole
continent was in process of being permanently elevated !

Appendix.

of the accredited Lyellian agents. And Darwin says him-
self elsewhere, of his own Coral Island theory: " No other
" work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this,
"for the whole theory was thought out on the •west coast
"of South America before I had seen a true coral reef. I
' ' had therefore only to verify and extend my views by
" a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be
" observed that I had during the two previous years been
" incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of South
"America of the intermittent alteration of the land, to-
gether with the denudation and deposition of sediment.
" This necessarily led me to reflect much on the effects
' ' of subsidence, and it was easy to replace in imagination
" the continued deposition of sediment by the upward
' ' growth of corals. To do this was to form my theory of
(( the formation of barrier reefs and atolls*1."

This is what he calls beginning a work in a deductive
spirit ! The naivete with which Darwin shows us his hand
here is really delicious. Deduction indeed ! He comes to
the Coral Islands with his theory ready made, a theory of
gradual subsidence in one place based upon gradual eleva-
tion (wholly imaginary) in another : this is what he calls
deduction ! Wherever he looks, he sees, because he wishes
to see, subsidence, not because it is there, but because he
brings it with him : it is in his eye. And for similar
reasons, his theory was eagerly caught up by Lyell, Jukes,
Dana, and others of the school. Nothing is so curiously
astonishing as the blindness of these physical investigators
to the necessary corollaries of their own theories. Can
any human being in his senses really suppose that con-

b The Italics are mine.

Appendix. 97

tinuous subsidence could go on for ages in areas widely
inhabited without arousing attention ? It is the one thing,
if true, that people must notice, whether they will or no.

Nevertheless, Darwin's theory reigned in the Lyellian
school, for a while. Later on, after the criticism of Karl
Semper (1863), some others, but especially Murray of the
' Challenger expedition c ' (a voyage which was fatal to many
a preconceived scientific idea), doubts began to creep in.
Now, observe what Darwin wrote in this connection :
" If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head
" the better. But it still seems to me a marvellous thing that
" there should not have been much and long continued sub-
" sidence in the beds of the great oceans" See, now, what
a light this throws upon his mind. It is not a question
of particular evidence : it is, with him, a question of antici-
pation, expectation to find something dictated by the Lyellian
creed. Subsidence here, elevation there ; such is the Lyellian
dogma. Why not invoke it to explain Coral Islands ?

This is just what Darwin did. And now, his theory of
the Origin of Species was formed in exactly the same
way. Examine the language in which he presents it.
"There may have been," — "Why should there not have
"been?" — "I can see no reason why there should not
" have been," — these and similar phrases constantly recur
and make up his exposition. He has absolutely nothing
to offer in support of his theory but conjecture and false
analogy. To argue from facts drawn from one sphere
(South America, artificial selection) to results in another
(Coral Islands, Nature) was the essence of his procedure.

c Of which a most delectable popular account is the Log Letters
of Lord George Campbell.

H

98 Appendix.

Not having any facts in their own spheres to go on, he is
obliged to rest his theories on facts taken from another.
He deduces the sinking of the floor of the Pacific from the
rising of South America ; a fact which is itself only the
wildest of conjectures from no evidence at all : he deduces
' Natural Selection ' from the results of artificial breeding,
results only attainable when Nature is scrupulously pre-
vented from having her way. And this is the logic, this
is the science, for which he is canonised !

Darwin's scientific method is, in short, nothing whatever
but the outrageous abuse of hypothesis : hypotheses fingere.
What proof is, what science is, is a question to which, like
other scientific idols in the nineteenth century, he could
have given no answer, for it is not the fashion now-a-days
for scientific men to meddle with * metaphysics.' The con-
sequence is, that instead of Science, we get, under the name
of Science, conjectural hypothesis ; imaginary supposition
of possible or even impossible agents, to whose existence
nothing testifies, not even the facts which they are invented
to explain.

E P I L O G U S.

UBIQUE DAEMON.

IL y a du diable 1& dessous : ubique daemon. Com-
ment ! qu'est ce que vous dites la ? Ce n'est pas moi, c'est

Aristote lui-meme, notre maitre a tous, qui 1'a dit : T\ fyvais
Sa.iij.ovia, aAA ov defa. Mon ami, autrefois, quand Aris-
tote faisait des siennes, cel& pouvait bien etre vrai : mats
nous avons change tout cela : le diable est mort, et pour

nous, le bon Dieu, la bonte divine Ah ! vous parlez

comme tout le monde de votre ' Dieu,' et ne 1'aimez guere :
ma deesse a moi, mon idole, mon Egerie, c'est la Nature.
Vous autres, vous discutez, doutez de votre Dieu : moi,
comme Napoleon, j'aime la mienne : j^aime mieux ma mie,
au gtte ! vivre seul avec elle, ne rien faire que la regarder,
voila pour moi le summum bonum, le bonheur supreme.
Aussi y a-t-il vingt ans que je le fais. Et a la fin, j'ai vu,

j'ai vu ce que tous les docteurs es-sciences physiolo-

giques, biologiques, hippocratiques et autres ne voient pas

aujourd'hui. Et qu'est ce que c'est que cela? Vous le

dirai-je ? Ecoutez done : elle danse, la Nature : c'est une

bayardere, pantomima. Ha ! ha ! comme vous brodez !

la plaisante idee ! mais cela ne se peut pas : c'est impossible.

Impossible ! Quand je vous dis que moi-meme je 1'ai

vue danser, sauter, bondisser, jusqu'a ce que chut ! dans

1'oreille -faipu m$me entrevoir ses jarretieres. Oui, c'est

une bayardere, comme 1'a tres bien dit, il y a trois mille

ans, le vieux sage Kapila. Ah ! je vous comprends :

vous faites de la poesie : a d'autres, s'il vous plait : ce

IO2 Ubique Daemon.

n'est pas mon affaire : je ne me mele qu' a la science.

He ! mon ami, que vous avez les oreilles longues ! Ainsi,
bonne poesie, science mauvaisc> c'est la done votre devise?
Eh ! parceque MM. les professeurs font de tres mauvais vers
vous croyez que MM. les poetes ne pourront faire de la bonne
science ? Vous en etes bien sur ? Mais souvenez vous, qitil ne
fautjurer de rien. Et puis, comme vous connaissez mal la
Nature ! Quoi ! vous ne savez pas qu' Elle est Femme, et que
femme et poete s'entreaiment ? Je vous le dis : Mademoiselle

Natura car elle est a la fois Madre et Signora, Mere

et Vierge, Demeter et Kore montrera a ses amants ce

qu'elle ne montrera jamais aux MM. severes de 1'Ecole
Normale des Sciences positives, qui la regardent de haut
en bas en fron^ant le sourcil, a travers de grosses lunettes
coloriees a faire peur, mais ne lui font pas de 1'amour,
comme elle veut absolument qu'on le lui fasse. La Nature !
Tenez, voulez vous Camadouer, la faire folle de vous, la
voir a sa toilette, en deshabille, meme en toute sa nudite
divine, sachez le bien, il faut V aimer > mais 1'aimer pour
elle-meme, et non pas, comme le font les ologistes, avec
des vues ulterieures, pour ce qu'elle pourrait vous donner
apres coup, pour 1'utile. Car elle est jalouse, meme tres
jalouse ; mais mercenaire, non ! jamais ! elle se donnera
plut6t pour rien, mais a cet homme seul, qui de sa part
sacrifiera tout, rien que pour yivre aupres d'elle. Uessentiel,
c'est F amour. II n'y a pas un homme sur cent mille qui
comprend, ce que c'est que 1'amour. Mais qui le lui donne,

elle le lui rendera et alors ! Alors, helas ! pour tout

jamais, il est ensorcele, possede : comme le Tanhaliser, il a
goute le breuvage enivrant de 1'infini, il a bu du calice
defendu du diable ; son ame s'est noyee dans 1'etrange
ye\a<Tfj.a de la vieille, eternellement jeune Venus

Ubique Daemon. 103

paienne du soir, de la mer, et de son ecume : il est des-
ormais homme perdu, fini, vaurien dans le monde, qui le
tient pour fou : et comment ne pas le croire ? N'est il
pas, en effet, obsede par un reve ? Parlez lui : il vous re-
garde sans entendre : il est ailleurs : Ih-bas^ avec elle, celle
qu'il aime, la prince sse lointaine : il ecoute, entend chuchot-

ter dans le vent c'est le son de sa voix et le frou-frou de

sa robe : il voit sans cesse flotter dans 1'air le courbe du
sourire du coin de ses levres infernales, rouges comme rien
au monde : partout, toujours, elle est lei, derriere le rideau :
jamais elle ne le laissera tranquille, jamais ne lui donnera

conge et quand elle le lui donnat, a quoi bon ? Que

faire ? N'est libre qui veut, mais qui peut, et il ne peut pas
Qu'il essaie, qu'il s'en aille : a merveille ! mais il a le feu
dans le cceur, et dans la tete il entend bourdonner, bour-
donner, reviens I reviens ! Le voila, qui va et vient, libre,
affranchi, echappe ! Et tout a coup, il n'en peut mais.
La furie le saisit : les hommes 1'etouffent : reveillent la soif

intarissable, 1'inextinguible desir, dahin ! dahinl

il plante la tout, et court dans les bois, les plages, les
paysages lointains, retrouver sa maitresse.

printefc bs James parfcer anb Co., Crown l£art>, ©rforfc.