Creation and Its Records Part 5

So clear does this seem to me, that I cannot help surmising that we should never have heard of any objection to Divine creation and providential direction, if it had not been for a prevalent fixed idea, that by "creation" _must_ be meant a final, one-act production _(per saltum)_ of a completely developed form, where previously there had been nothing. Such a "creation" would of course militate against _any_ evolution, however cautiously stated or clearly established. And no doubt such an idea of "creation" was and still is prevalent, and would naturally and almost inevitably arise, while nothing to the contrary in the _modus operandi_ of Creative Power was known. What is more strange is that the current objection should not now be, "Your _idea of creation_ is all wrong," rather than the one which has been strongly put forward (and against which I am contending), "There is no place for a Creator."

(5) This is the only other _general_ point that remains to be taken up in connection with the theory that all living forms are due to the gradual acc.u.mulation of small favourable changes without creative intervention. The objection is that we cannot obtain the inconceivably long time required for the process of uncontrolled and unaided evolution.

I am not here concerned to argue generally for the shortness or longness of the periods of geological time; let us, for the purposes of argument, admit a very wide margin of centuries and ages; but _some_ limit there must be. The sun's light and heat, for one thing, are necessary, and though the bulk of combustible material in the sun is enormous, there must be some end to it. Sir William Thomson has calculated (and his calculations have never been answered) that on purely physical grounds, the existence of life on the earth must be limited to some such period as 100 millions of years; and this is far too short for uncontrolled evolution.

We know from fossils, that species have remained entirely unaltered since the glacial epochs began, and how many generations are included even in that! If no change is visible in all that time, how many more ages must have elapsed before a primitive _Amoeba_ could have developed into a bird or a Mammal?

In Florida Mr. Aga.s.siz has shown that coral insects exist unchanged, and must have been so for 30,000 years.

When we remember also the enormous destruction of life that takes place, supposing that in a given form a few creatures underwent accidental changes which were beneficial and likely to aid them--still what chances were there that the creatures which began to exhibit the right sort of change should have died before they left offspring! the chances against them are enormous: and the chances have to be repeated at every successive change before the finally perfected or advanced creature took its place in the polity of nature. Moreover, there is the chance of small changes being lost by intercrossing: our own cattle-breeders have most carefully to select the parents, or else the favourable variety soon disappears.

How then, seeing the power of stability which at least some forms are found to exhibit--seeing too the enormous chances against the survival of the particular specimens that begin to vary, and the further chances of the loss of variety by intercrossing; how can we get the millions of millions of years necessary to produce the present extreme divergence of species? The fact is that the force of this objection is likely to be undervalued, from the mere difficulty of bringing home to the mind the immeasurable time really demanded by uncontrolled evolution.

Nor is the question of time left absolutely to be matter of belief or speculation. For here and there in the geological records of the rocks, we _have_ certain intermediate forms--or forms which we may fairly argue to be such. But looking at the very considerable differences between the earlier and the later of these forms--differences greater than those which now separate well-defined species, it seems questionable whether any of the divisions of Tertiary time, taking all the circ.u.mstances into consideration, could be lengthened out sufficiently to accomplish the change.

At any rate, if any particular example be disallowed, the general objection must be admitted to be weighty.

Now the intervention of any system of created designs of animal form--however little its details be understood--and the production of variations under _divine guidance_ which would lead more directly to the accomplishment of such forms as the complicated flowers of orchids above described, would unquestionably tend to shorten the requisite time.

There would, by a process of reasoning easily followed, be an immediate reduction of the ages required, within practicable limits, though the time must still remain long. More than that is not necessary. The Ussherian chronology is not of Divine revelation, though some persons speak of it as if it was. There is not the shadow of a reason to be gleaned from the Bible, nor from any other source, that the commencement of orderly development, the separation of land and water, earth and sky, and the subsequent provision of designs for organic forms of life and the first steps that followed the issue of the design, began six thousand years ago, or anything like it. It can be shown, indeed, that _historical_ man, or the specific origin of the man spoken of as Adam, dates back but a limited time; and it is calculable with some degree of probability how far; but that is all. We are therefore in no difficulty when ample time is demanded; but we are in the greatest straits when the illimitable demands of a slowly and minutely stepping development, perpetually liable to be checked, turned back, and even obliterated, have to be confronted with other weighty probabilities and calculations regarding the sun's light and heat, and the duration of particular geologic eras.

CHAPTER VII.

_THE DESCENT OF MAN_.

We now approach a special objection which always, has been (and I shall be pardoned, perhaps, for saying _always will be_) the _crux_ of the theory of unaided, uncreated evolution--the advent of reasoning, and not only reasoning, but self-conscious and G.o.d-conscious MAN.

Here again the lines of argument are so numerous, and the details into which we might go so varied, that a rigid and perhaps bald selection of a few topics is all that can be attempted.

But I may remark that naturalists are far from being agreed on this part of the subject. Aga.s.siz rejects the evolution of man altogether. Mr. St.

G. Mivart, while partly admitting, as every one else now does, the doctrine of evolution, denies the descent of man. Mr. Wallace, the great apostle of evolution, opposes Darwin, and will have none of his views on the descent of man; and Professor Huxley himself says that, while the resemblance of structure is such that if any "process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, the process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of man," still he admits that the gulf is vast between civilized man and brutes, and he is certain that "whether _from_ them or not, man is a.s.suredly not _of_ them."

The first difficulty I shall mention is, however, a structural one.

Supposing that an ape-like ancestor developed into man, on the principles of natural selection; then his development has taken place in a manner directly contrary to the acknowledged law of natural selection.

He has developed backwards; his frame is in every way weaker; he is wanting in agility; he has lost the prehensile feet; he has lost teeth fitted for fighting or crushing or tearing; he has but little sense of smell; he has lost the hairy covering, and is obliged to help himself by clothes.[1] If this loss was ornamental it is quite unlike any other development in this respect, since no other creature has the same; for ornamental purposes the fur becomes coloured, spotted, and striped, but not lost. It is easy to reply that man being _intelligent_, his brain power enables him to invent clothes, arms, implements, and so forth, which not only supply all deficiencies of structure, but give him a great superiority over all creatures. But how did he get that intelligence? By what natural process of causation (without intelligent direction) is it conceivable that, given a species of monkey, all at once and at a certain stage, structural development should have been r.e.t.a.r.ded and actually reversed, and a development of brain structure alone set in? Nor, be it observed, has any trace of _man_ with a rudimentary brain ever been discovered. Savages have brains far in excess of their requirements, and can consequently be educated and improved. The skull of a prehistoric man found in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf is of average brain capacity, showing that in those remote ages man was very much in capacity what he is at present.

[Footnote 1: It is remarkable that the loss of the hairy covering is most complete when it is most wanted: the back, the spine, and the shoulders are in nearly all races unprotected; and yet the want of a covering from the heat or cold is such that the rudest savages have invented some kind of cloak for the back.]

It must, however, be admitted that the special difficulties of the origin of man are not purely structural. We do not know enough of the Divine plan to be able to understand why it is that there is a certain undeniable unity of form, in the two eyes, ears, mouth, limbs and organs generally of the animal and man. Moreover, much is made of the fact, as stated by a recent "Edinburgh Reviewer," that "the physical difference between man and the lowest ape is trifling compared with that which exists between the lowest ape and any brute animal that is not an ape.[1]" This fact no doubt negatives the idea put forward by Bishop Temple and others, that if there was an evolution of man, it must have been in a special branch which was foreseen and commenced very far back in the scale of organic being. For the structural difference might not require such a separate origin; while the mental difference, affording objections of a different cla.s.s, will not allow of _any_ such evolution at all. That there is _some_ connection between man and the animal cannot be denied, and consequently, in the absence of fuller information, very little would be gained by insisting on the purely _physical_ development question. The Bible states positively that the man Adam (as the progenitor of a particular race, at any rate) was a separate and actual production, on a given part of the earth's surface.

All that we need conclude regarding that is that there is nothing known which ent.i.tles us to say, "This is not a fact, and therefore is not genuine revelation."

[Footnote 1: No. 331, July, 1885, p. 223.]

Moreover, as to the question of the possibility of human development generally, there are certain considerations which directly support our belief. For example, directly we look to the characteristic point, the gift of intellect, we can reasonably argue that the action of a Creator is indispensable. The entrance of consciousness and of reason, however elementary, marks something out of all a.n.a.logy with the development of physical structure, just as much as the entrance of Life marked a new departure in no a.n.a.logy with the "properties" of inorganic matter.

From the first dawn of what looks like _will_ and _choice_ between two things, and something like a _reason_ which directs the course of the organism in a particular way for a particular object, we have an altogether new departure. The difficulty commences at the outset, and even in the animal creation; it is merely continued and rendered more striking when we take into consideration the higher development of intellect into power of abstract reasoning, self-consciousness and G.o.d-consciousness.

It is perfectly true that the difference between the "instinct" of animals and the reason and mind of man, is one of degree rather than kind. As Christians, we have no objection whatever to a development of reason from the lowest reason solely concerned with earthly and bodily affairs to the highest powers searching into deep and spiritual truths.

But such a development, though it is parallel to a physical development--as spiritual law appears to be always parallel (as far as the nature of things permits) to physical laws--still is a development which cannot under any possible circ.u.mstances dispense with an external spiritual order of existence, and one which cannot be physically caused.

Nor is it conceivable that man should develop a consciousness of G.o.d, when no G.o.d really exists externally to the consciousness.[1]

[Footnote 1: For our consciousness of G.o.d is obviously very different from a figment of the imagination, or the sort of reality experienced in a dream. This is not the place to develop such an argument, but it seems to me more than doubtful whether we can even _imagine_ something _absolutely_ non-existent in nature. When the artist's imagination would construct, e.g., a winged dragon, the concept is always made up of _parts which are real_--eyes like an alligator, bat-wings, scales of a fish or crocodile, and so forth. All the members or parts are real, put together to form the unreal. I do not believe that any instance of a human conception can be brought forward which on a.n.a.lysis will not conform to this rule.]

The main objection, then, that I would press is, that admitting any possibility of the development of man from a purely physical and structural point of view, admitting any inference that may be drawn fairly from the undoubted connection (increasingly great as it is as we go upwards from the lower animal to the ape) between animals and man, that inference never can touch the descent of man as a whole; because no similarity of bodily structure can get over the difficulty of the mental power of man. We have to deal not with a part of man, but with the whole. The difficulty cannot be got over by denying _mind_ as a thing _per se_; for all attempts to represent mind as the _mere_ product of a physical structure, the brain, utterly fail.

n.o.body wishes to deny what Dr. H. Maudsley and others have made so plain to us, that mind has (in one aspect, at any rate) a physical basis--that is, that no thought, imagination, or combination of thought, is known to us _apart from_ change and expenditure of energy in the brain. Nor can we, by any process of introspection or observation of other subjects, separate the mind from the brain and ascertain the existence of "pure mind," or soul, experimentally. But still, there is no possibility of getting the operations of mind out of mere cell structure, unless an external Power has added the mind power, as a faculty of His endowing; then He may be allowed to have connected that faculty ever so mysteriously with physical structure; we are content. And I must insist on the total failure of all a.n.a.logy between the development of bones or muscles and the development of mind; and even if we grant a certain stage of instinct to have arisen, we are still in the dark as to how that could develop into intellect such as man possesses, including a belief in G.o.d. On this subject let us hear Professor Allman. Between a development of material structure and a development of intellectual and moral features, the Professor says, "there is no conceivable a.n.a.logy; and the obvious and continuous path, which we have hitherto followed up, in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter to those of living form, here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between _unconscious_ life and _thought_ is deep and impa.s.sable, and no transitional phenomena are to be found by which, as by a bridge, we can span it over.[1]"

There can be _life_ or _function_ without _consciousness_ or _thought;_ therefore, even if we go so far as to admit that life is only a property of protoplasm, there can be no ground for saying that _thought_ is only a property of protoplasm.

[Footnote 1: British a.s.sociation Address.]

"If," says Professor Allman, "we were to admit that every living cell were a conscious and thinking thing, are we therefore justified in a.s.serting that its consciousness with its irritability is a property of the matter of which it is composed? The sole argument on which this view is made to rest is a.n.a.logy. It is argued that because the life phenomena, which are invariably found in the cell, must be regarded as a property of the cell, the phenomena of consciousness by which they are accompanied must also be so regarded. The weak point in the argument is the absence of all a.n.a.logy between the things compared: and as the conclusion rests solely on the argument from a.n.a.logy, the two must fall to the ground together."

Try and a.s.sign to matter all the properties you can think of, its impenetrability, extension, weight, inertia, elasticity, and so forth, by no process of thought (as Mr. Justice Fry observes in an article in "The Contemporary Review [1]") can you get out of them an adequate account of the phenomena of mind or spirit. We just now observed that consciousness, thought, and so forth, are never exhibited apart from the action of the brain; some change in the brain accompanies them all. We do not deny that. But it is obvious that thought being manifested in the presence of cerebral matter or something like it, is a very different thing from thought being a _property_ of such matter, in the sense in which polarity is the property of a magnet, or irritability of living protoplasm.

[Footnote 1: October, 1880, p. 587.]

To all this I have seen no answer. The way in which the opponents of Christian beliefs meet such considerations appears to be to ignore or minimize them, so as to pa.s.s over to what seems to them a satisfactory if not an easy series of transitions. If Life is after all only a "property" of matter, then given life, a brain may be produced; and as mind is always manifested in the presence of (and apparently indissolubly united with) brain structure, it is not a much greater leap to accept _life_ as a property of _matter_ than it is to take _thought_ as a property of a certain _specialized physical structure_. It is true that the distance is great between the instinct of an animal and the abstract reasoning power of a Newton or a Herbert Spencer; but (as we are so often told) the difference is of degree not of kind, and as the brain structure develops, so does the power and degree of reason. As to the difference in man, that he is the only "religious" animal--the one creature that has the idea of G.o.d--that is a mere development of the emotions in connection with abstract reasoning as to the cause of things. No part of our mental nature is more common to the animal and the man than the emotional; and if in the one it is mere love and hatred, joy and grief, confidence and fear, in the other the emotions are developed into the poetic sense of beauty, or the awe felt for what is grand and n.o.ble; and this insensibly pa.s.ses into _worship_, the root of the whole being fear of the unknown and the mysterious. That is the general line of argument taken up.

Even accepting the solution (if such it maybe called) of the two first difficulties--life added spontaneously or aboriginally to matter, and thought and consciousness added to organism--still the rest of the path is by no means so easy as might at the first glance appear. Development in brain structure certainly does not always proceed _pari pa.s.su_ with a higher and more complex reasoning. In actual fact we find high "reasoning" power, quite unexpectedly here and there, up and down the animal kingdom. Some _insects_, with very little that can be called a brain at all, exhibit high intelligence; and some animals with smaller brains are more docile and intelligent than others with a much larger development. The ape, in spite of his close physical approach to the structure of man, and his still greater relative distance from the other animal creation, is not superior (if he is not decidedly inferior) in reason or intelligence to several animals lower down in the scale.

Savages, again, have a brain greatly in excess of their actual requirements (so to speak). Hence the mere existence of brain, however complex, does not indicate the possession of mental power.

There is reason to believe that all thought and exercise of the mind--in fact, every step in the process of "Education," whereby an ignorant person is brought at last to apprehend the most abstract propositions--is accompanied by some molecular (or other) change. So that a person who has been carefully educated has the brain in a different state from that of an exactly similarly const.i.tuted person whose brain has been subjected to no such exercise. But even if this action could be formulated and explained, it would not follow that thought is the _product_ of the molecular change; or that, _vice versa_, if we could artificially produce certain changes, in the brain, certain thoughts and perceptions would thereon coexist with the changes, and arise in the mind of the subject forthwith. And if not, then no process of physical development accounts for grades of intellect; we have only mind developing as mind. But the theory of evolution will have nothing to do with any development but physical; or at any rate with mental development except as the result of physical: it knows nothing of pure mind, or spiritual existence, or anything of the sort.

In the nature of things we can have neither observation nor experiment in this stage. We cannot by any process develop the lower mind of an animal into the higher mind of man, and prove the steps of the evolution.[1] It is important to remember that the power of _directing the attention by a voluntary process of abstraction_, is one that distinctively belongs to man. It is an effort of will, of a kind that no animal has any capacity for. By it alone have we any power of abstract reasoning, and it is intimately concerned with our self-consciousness and memory, and with our language. I am quite aware that animals possess something a.n.a.logous to a language of their own; they can indicate certain emotions and give warning, and so forth, to their fellows. But that language could never develop into human language, or the animal will (such as it is) ever rise to a human will, or animals become endowed with self-consciousness, unless they could acquire the power of voluntarily abstracting the mind from one subject or part of a subject and fixing the attention on another. We cannot formulate any process of change whereby the lower state could pa.s.s on to or attain to the higher in this respect.

[Footnote 1: We can of course follow the sort of mental development which is traceable when we consider the origin of our own sagacious and faithful dogs in the wild prairie dog: but this development is always in contact with the mind of man, and is, as it were, the result of man's action, as man's development in mind and soul is the result of G.o.d's action.]

Therefore again we conclude that the higher reason is a gift _ab externo_.

If we take a step further to the "spiritual" or "moral" faculties of man, we have the same difficulty intensified, if indeed it does take a new departure. To examine the question adequately would require us to go into the deep waters of psychology; and here we should encounter many matters regarding which there may be legitimate doubt and difference of opinion, which would obscure and lead us away from our main line of thought.

This I would willingly avoid. But it is quite intelligible, and touches on no dangerous ground, when we a.s.sert that there is a distinct ascent--an interval again raising developmental difficulties, directly we pa.s.s from the intellectual to the moral. We may wonder at the high degree of intelligence possessed by some animals; but we are unable to conceive any animal possessing a power of abstract reasoning, having ideas of beauty (as such), or of manifesting what we call the poetic feeling. And still more is this so when we look at the further interval that lies between any perception of physical phenomena, any reasoning in the abstract, or investigation of mathematical truth, and the overmastering sense of obligation to the "moral law," or the action of the soul in its instinctive possession of the conception of a Divine Existence external to itself. It is because of this felt difference that we talk of the "spiritual" as something beyond and above the "mental."

The distinction is real, though we must not allow ourselves to be led too far in attempting to scan the close union that, from another point of view, exists between the one and the other.

In a recent number of "The Edinburgh Review,[1]" the author complains of Bishop Temple thus: "He uses the word spiritual in such a way that he might be taken to imply that we had some other faculty for the perception of moral truths, in addition to, and distinct from, our reason." And the writer goes on to make an "uncompromising a.s.sertion of reason as the one supreme faculty of man. To depreciate reason (he says) to the profit of some supposed 'moral' illative sense, would be to open the door to the most desolating of all scepticisms, and to subordinate the basis of our highest intellectual power to some mere figment of the imagination."