The Making of Arguments Part 21

The formal debates of school and college are of necessity barren of practical result; yet even here your discussions have a potent effect in molding your opinions. It is a habit of mankind to start idly talking on a subject, and as idly taking sides; then, when the talk grows warmer, in the natural desire to carry a point to talk themselves into belief.

This is a human, though not a very reasonable way of framing your views on public questions; and it does not make either for consistency or for usefulness as a voter. It is not good to back one's self into opinions of what makes for the common weal.

Furthermore, debate is something very different from dispute: to talk round and round a subject, contradicting blindly and a.s.serting without bringing forward facts, has its place in our life with our friends, so long as it is good-natured; but it does not bring illumination. The essence of debate, whether in a cla.s.sroom, in a city council, or in Congress, should be to throw light into dark corners, and to disentangle the view that most makes for the general good. For us in America _n.o.blesse oblige_ applies to every educated man. The graduate of a high school, and, even more, the graduate of a college, has taken exceptional benefits from the community. This obligation he can in part repay by helping all citizens to a better understanding of the issues on which the progress of the nation turns.

Finally, debating should share the zest that comes of any good game that means hard work and an honorable struggle with opponents one respects and likes. It is preeminently a social occupation. The House of Commons has long been noted as the best club in England; and this sense of fellowship, of continuing friendship and intimacy, gives a charm to English parliamentary life which is hardly possible with the unwieldy numbers and huge hall of our own House of Representatives, but does spring out of the smaller and continuing membership of the Senate. A cla.s.s in debating should have the sense of comradeship which comes of hard work together and the trying out of one's own powers against one's equals and betters, and from the memory of hard-fought contests; and intercollegiate and interscholastic contests should be carried on in the same spirit of zest in the hard work, of a sane desire to win, and of comradeship with worthy opponents.

EXERCISES

1. Name three questions in national affairs which have been debated within a month, on which you could profitably debate; three in state affairs; three in local affairs.

2. Name two subjects affecting your school or college which are under debate at the present time.

3. Name two subjects on which you could write an argument, but which would not be profitable for debate. Explain the reason.

4. Name two good subjects for a debate drawn from athletics; two from some current academic question; two from local or munic.i.p.al affairs.

5. Find a proposition in which the two sides to a debate might in good faith pa.s.s each other without meeting. Make it over so that the issue would be unavoidable.

6. Frame a proposition in which the burden of proof would not be on the affirmative. Make it over so that the burden of proof would fall on the affirmative.

7. Draw up a scheme for a debate on one of the propositions in Exercise 4, with a tentative a.s.signment of points to three debaters on a side.

8. Draw up a set of instructions to judges for an intercollegiate or interscholastic debate, so framed as to produce a decision on the points which seem to you the most important.

9. Prepare yourself for a five-minute extemporaneous speech on a subject on which you have written an argument.

10. Name three questions on which you could not, without violence to your convictions, argue on more than one side.

APPENDIX I

EXAMPLES OF ARGUMENT

THE THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING THE HISTORY OF NATURE[67]

THOMAS H. HUXLEY

This is the first of three lectures which make a continuous argument, which were delivered in New York. September 18, 20, and 22, 1876. It should therefore be regarded as the introductory part of the argument; and as a matter of fact it does not get to Huxley's positive proof, but is occupied with disposing of the other theories. This refutation finished, Huxley was then at liberty to go ahead with the affirmative argument, as he indicates in the last paragraph of the lecture.

The argument is a notable piece of reasoning on a scientific subject, in terms which make it intelligible to all educated men. When Huxley spoke, the heat which had been kindled by the first announcement of the theory of evolution in Darwin's "Origin of Species" was still blazing; and there were many church people who held that the theory was subversive of religion, without giving themselves the trouble to understand it. This timid frame of mind explains Hurley's mode of approach to the subject.

We live in and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature; and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the const.i.tution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point: in duration but a fleeting shadow: he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But, as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labor to enable man to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged.

But, once originated, the conception of the constancy of the order of Nature has become the dominant idea of modern thought. To any person who is familiar with the facts upon which that conception is based, and is competent to estimate their significance, it has ceased to be conceivable that chance should have any place in the universe, or that events should depend upon any but the natural sequence of cause and effect. We have come to look upon the present as the child of the past and as the parent of the future; and, as we have excluded chance from a place in the universe, so we ignore, even as a possibility, the notion of any interference with the order of Nature. Whatever may be men's speculative doctrines, it is quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order of Nature is constant, and that the chain of natural causation is never broken.

In fact, no belief which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. It is based upon the broadest induction, and it is verified by the most constant, regular, and universal of deductive processes. But we must recollect that any human belief, however broad its basis, however defensible it may seem, is, after all, only a probable belief, and that our widest and safest generalizations are simply statements of the highest, degree of probability. Though we are quite clear about the constancy of the order of Nature, at the present time, and in the present state of things, it by no means necessarily follows that we are justified in expanding this generalization into the infinite past, and in denying, absolutely, that there may have been a time when Nature did not follow a fixed order, when the relations of cause and effect were not definite, and when extranatural agencies interfered with the general course of Nature.

Cautious men will allow that a universe so different from that which we know may have existed; just as a very candid thinker may admit that a world in which two and two do not make four, and in which two straight lines do inclose a s.p.a.ce, may exist. But the same caution which forces the admission of such possibilities demands a great deal of evidence before it recognizes them to be anything more substantial. And when it is a.s.serted that, so many thousand years ago, events occurred in a manner utterly foreign to and inconsistent with the existing laws of Nature, men, who without being particularly cautious, are simply honest thinkers, unwilling to deceive themselves or delude others, ask for trustworthy evidence of the fact. Did things so happen or did they not?

This is a historical question, and one the answer to which must be sought in the same way as the solution of any other historical problem.

So far as I know, there are only three hypotheses which ever have been entertained, or which well can be entertained, respecting the past history of Nature. I will, in the first place, state the hypotheses, and then I will consider what evidence bearing upon them is in our possession, and by what light of criticism that evidence is to be interpreted.

Upon the first hypothesis, the a.s.sumption is, that phenomena of Nature similar to those exhibited by the present world have always existed; in other words, that the universe has existed from all eternity in what may be broadly termed its present condition.

The second hypothesis is, that the present state of things has had only a limited duration; and that, at some period in the past, a condition of the world, essentially similar to that winch we now know, came into existence, without any precedent condition from which it could have naturally proceeded. The a.s.sumption that successive stales of Nature have arisen, each without any relation of natural causation to an antecedent state, is a mere modification of this second hypothesis.

The third hypothesis also a.s.sumes that the present state of things has had but a limited duration; but it Supposes that this state has been evolved by a natural process from an antecedent state, and that from another, and so on; and, on this hypothesis, the attempt to a.s.sign any limit to the series of past changes is, usually, given up.

It is so needful to form clear and distinct notions of what is really meant by each of these hypotheses that I will ask you to imagine what, according to each, would have been visible to a spectator of the events which const.i.tute the history of the earth. On the first hypothesis, however far back in time that spectator might be placed, he would see a world essentially, though perhaps not in all its details, similar to that which now exists. The animals which existed would be the ancestors of those which now live, and similar to them; the plants, in like manner, would be such as we know; and the mountains, plains, and waters would foreshadow the salient features of our present land and water.

This view was held more or less distinctly, sometimes combined with the notion of recurrent cycles of change, in ancient times; and its influence has been felt down to the present day. It is worthy of remark that it is a hypothesis which is not inconsistent with the doctrine of Uniformitarianism, with which geologists are familiar. That doctrine was held by Hutton, and in his earlier days by Lyell. Hutton was struck by the demonstration of astronomers that the perturbations of the planetary bodies, however great they may be, yet sooner or later right themselves; and that the solar system possesses a self-adjusting power by which these aberrations are all brought back to a mean condition. Hutton imagined that the like might be true of terrestrial changes; although no one recognized more clearly than he the fact that the dry land is being constantly washed down by rain and rivers and deposited in the sea; and that thus, in a longer or shorter time, the inequalities of the earth's surface must be leveled, and its high lards brought down to the ocean.

But, taking into account the internal forces of the earth, which, upheaving the sea bottom, give rise to new land, he thought that these operations of degradation and elevation might compensate each other: and that thus, for any a.s.signable time, the general features of our planet might remain what they are. And inasmuch as, under these circ.u.mstances, there need be no limit to the propagation of animals and plants, it is clear that the consistent working out of the uniformitarian idea might load to the conception of the eternity of the world. Not that I mean to say that either Hutton or Lyell held this conception--a.s.suredly not; they would have been the first to repudiate it. Nevertheless, the logical development of their arguments lends directly towards this hypothesis.

The second hypothesis supposes that the present order of things, at some no very remote time, had a sudden origin, and that the world, such as it now is, had chaos for its phenomenal antecedent. That is the doctrine which you will find stated most fully and clearly in the immortal poem of John Milton,--the English _Divina Commedia,_--"Paradise Lost." I believe it is largely to the influence of that remarkable work, combined with the daily teachings to which we have all listened in our childhood, that this hypothesis owes its general wide diffusion as one of the current beliefs of English-speaking people. If you turn to the seventh book of "Paradise Lost," you will find there stated the hypothesis to which I refer, which is briefly this: That this visible universe of ours came into existence at no great distance of time from the present; and that the parts of which it is composed made their appearance, in a certain, definite order, in the s.p.a.ce of six natural days, in such a manner that, on the first of these days, light appeared; that, on the second, the firmament, or sky, separated the waters above, from the waters beneath the firmament; that, on the third day, the waters drew away from the dry land, and upon it a varied vegetable life, similar to that which now exists, made its appearance; that the fourth day was signalized by the apparition of the sun, the stars, the moon, and the planets; that, on the fifth day, aquatic animals originated within the waters; that, on the sixth day, the earth gave rise to our four-footed terrestrial creatures, and to all varieties of terrestrial animals except birds, which had appeared on the preceding day; and, finally, that man appeared upon the earth, and the emergence of the universe from chaos was finished. Milton tells us, without the least ambiguity, what a spectator of these marvelous occurrences would have witnessed. I doubt not that his poem is familiar to all of you, but I should like to recall one pa.s.sage to your minds, in order that I may be justified in what I have said regarding the perfectly concrete, definite picture of the origin of the animal world which Milton draws. He says:

"The sixth, and of creation last, arose With evening harps and matin, when G.o.d said, 'Let tine earth bring forth soul living in her kind, Cattle and creeping things, and beast of the earth, Each in their kind!' The earth obeyed, and, straight Opening her fertile womb, teemed at a birth.

Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, Limbed and full-grown. Out of the ground uprose, As from his lair, the wild beast, where he wons In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den: Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked; The cattle in the fields and meadows green; Those rare and solitary; these in flocks Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung.

The gra.s.sy clods now calved; now half appears The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts--then springs, as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, The river-horse and scaly crocodile.

At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm."

There is no doubt as to the meaning of this statement, nor as to what a man of Milton's genius expected would have been actually visible to an eyewitness of this mode of origination of living things.

The third hypothesis, or the hypothesis of evolution, supposes that, at any comparatively late period of past time, our imaginary spectator would meet with a state of things very similar to that which now obtains; but that the likeness of the past to the present would gradually become less and less, in proportion to the remoteness of his period of observation from the present day: that the existing distribution of mountains and plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself to be the product of a slow process of natural change operating upon more and more widely different antecedent conditions of the mineral framework of the earth; until, at length, in place of that framework, he would behold only a vast nebulous ma.s.s, representing the const.i.tuents of the sun and of the planetary bodies. Preceding the forms of life which now exist, our observer would see animals and plants not identical with them, but like them: increasing their differences with their antiquity, and at the same time becoming simpler and simpler; until, finally, the world of life would present nothing but that undifferentiated protoplasmic matter which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all vital activity.

The hypothesis of evolution supposes that in all this vast progression there would be no breach of continuity, no point at which we could say "This is a natural process," and "This is not a natural process"; but that the whole might be compared to that wonderful process of development which may be seen going on every day under our eyes, in virtue of which there arises, out of the semifluid, comparatively h.o.m.ogeneous substance which we call an egg, the complicated organization of one of the higher animals. That, in a few words, is what is meant by the hypothesis of evolution.

I have already suggested that in dealing with these three hypotheses, in endeavoring to form a judgment as to which of them is the more worthy of belief, or whether none is worthy of belief--in which case our condition of mind should be that suspension of judgment which is so difficult to all but trained intellects,--we should be indifferent to all _a priori_ considerations. The question is a question of historical fact. The universe has come into existence somehow or other, and the problem is, whether it came into existence in one fashion, or whether it came into existence in another; and, as an essential preliminary to further discussion, permit me to say two or three words as to the nature and the kinds of historical evidence.

The evidence as to the occurrence of any event in past time may be ranged under two heads, which, for convenience' sake, I will speak of as testimonial evidence and as circ.u.mstantial evidence. By testimonial evidence I mean human testimony; and by circ.u.mstantial evidence I mean evidence which is not human testimony. Let me ill.u.s.trate by a familiar example what I understand by these two kinds of evidence, and what is to be said respecting their value.

Suppose that a man tells you that he saw a person strike another and kill him; that is testimonial evidence of the fact of murder. But it is possible to have circ.u.mstantial evidence of the fact of murder; that is to say, you may find a man dying with a wound upon his head having exactly the form and character of the wound which is made by an ax, and, with due care in taking surrounding circ.u.mstances into account, you may conclude with the utmost certainty that the man has been murdered; that his death is the consequence of a blow inflicted by another man with that implement. We are very much in the habit of considering circ.u.mstantial evidence as of less value than testimonial evidence, and it may be that, where the circ.u.mstances are not perfectly clear and intelligible, it is a dangerous and unsafe kind of evidence; but it must not be forgotten that, in many cases, circ.u.mstantial evidence is quite as conclusive as testimonial evidence, and that, not unfrequently, it is a great deal weightier than testimonial evidence. For example, take the case to which I referred just now. The circ.u.mstantial evidence may be better and more convincing than the testimonial evidence; for it may be impossible, under the conditions that I have defined, to suppose that the man met his death from any cause but the violent blow of an ax wielded by another man. The circ.u.mstantial evidence in favor of a murder having been committed, in that case, is as complete and as convincing as evidence can be. It is evidence which is open to no doubt and to no falsification. But the testimony of a witness is open to mult.i.tudinous doubts. He may have been mistaken. He may have been actuated by malice.

It has constantly happened that even an accurate man has declared that a thing has happened in this, that, or the other way, when a careful a.n.a.lysis of the circ.u.mstantial evidence has shown that it did not happen in that way, but in some other way.

We may now consider the evidence in favor of or against the three hypotheses. Let me first direct your attention to what is to be said about the hypothesis of the eternity of the state of things in which we now live. What will first strike you is, that it is a hypothesis which, whether true or false, is not capable of verification by any evidence.

For, in order to obtain either circ.u.mstantial or testimonial evidence sufficient to prove the eternity of duration of the present state of nature, you must have an eternity of witnesses or an infinity of circ.u.mstances, and neither of these is attainable. It is utterly impossible that such evidence should be carried beyond a certain point of time; and all that could be said, at most, would be, that so far as the evidence could be traced, there was nothing to contradict the hypothesis. But when you look, not to the testimonial evidence--which, considering the relative insignificance of the antiquity of human records, might not be good for much in this case--but to the circ.u.mstantial evidence, then you will find that this hypothesis is absolutely incompatible with such evidence as we have; which is of so plain and so simple a character that it is impossible in any way to escape from the conclusions which it forces upon us.

You are, doubtless, all aware that the outer substance of the earth, which alone is accessible to direct observation, is not of a h.o.m.ogeneous character, but that it is made up of a number of layers or strata, the t.i.tles of the princ.i.p.al groups of which are placed upon the accompanying diagram.[68] Each of these groups represents a number of beds of sand, of stone, of clay, of slate, and of various other materials.

On careful examination, it is found that the materials of which each of these layers of more or less hard rock are composed are, for the most part, of the same nature as those which are at present being formed under known conditions on the surface of the earth. For example, the chalk, which const.i.tutes a great part of the Cretaceous formation in some parts of the world, is practically identical in its physical and chemical characters with a substance which is now being formed at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and covers an enormous area; other beds of rock are comparable with the sands which art; being formed upon seash.o.r.es, packed together, and so on. Thus, omitting rocks of igneous origin, it is demonstrable that all these beds of stone, of which a total of not less than seventy thousand feet is known, have been formed by natural agencies, either out of the waste and washing of the dry land, or else by the acc.u.mulation of the exuviae of plants and animals.

Many of these strata are full of such exuviae--the so-called "fossils."

Remains of thousands of species of animals and plants, as perfectly recognizable as those of existing forms of life which you meet with in museums, or as the sh.e.l.ls which you pick up upon the seabeach, have been embedded in the ancient sands, or muds, or limestones, just as they are being embedded now, in sandy, or clayey, or calcareous subaqueous deposits. They furnish us with a record, the general nature of which cannot be misinterpreted, of the kinds of things that have lived upon thy surface of the earth during the time that is registered by this great thickness of stratified rocks. But even a superficial study of these fossils shows us that the animals and plants which live at the present time have had only a temporary duration; for the remains of such modern forms of life are met with, for the most part, only in the uppermost or latest tertiaries, and their number rapidly diminishes in the lower deposits of that epoch. In the older tertiaries, the places of existing animals and plants are taken by other forms, as numerous and diversified as those which live now in the same localities, but more or less different from them; in the Mesozoic rocks, these are replaced by others yet more divergent from modern types; and in the Paleozoic formations the contrast is still more marked. Thus the circ.u.mstantial evidence absolutely negatives the conception of the eternity of the present condition of things. We can say with certainly that the present condition of things has existed for a comparatively short period; and that, so far as animal and vegetable nature are concerned, it has been preceded by a different condition. We can pursue this evidence until we reach the lowest of the stratified rocks, in which we lose the indications of life altogether. The hypothesis of the eternity of the present state of nature may therefore be put out of court.