It has been a life-work of more than one to devise a mode of accounting for the world we are in with no agency of any intelligent power above nature, or with as little as possible. This is done, of course, “in the pure interests of science;” at any rate all desire of advocating atheism is disavowed. Some who labor in this line are naturalists; more are not. When the anonymous Vestiges of Creation appeared, the book was received as the work of some profound student of the natural sciences. But the zoologist wished he had known more of zoology; the botanist wondered at his botanical mistakes; and so through the circle. All found him weakest where they themselves were strongest. And the book, which was a nine-days’ wonder, has exerted no permanent influence on either natural history or theology.
It is a little remarkable to see a metaphysician like Herbert Spencer volunteering his aid in generalizing the truths which the botanists and zoologists have discovered, and which they are still tracing out to new discoveries. Is it that he supposes their minds so cramped by their investigations that they cannot or dare not go on to general principles? The amount of acute reasoning that has been expended on the flower of an orchis [sic] or a silkweed, is little suspected by most who are familiar with the subtleties involved in the consideration of an abstruse point in law. Men like Robert Brown and Richard Owen may be safely left to their own work. Nou tali auzilio. We know that there has been men who compiled an Encyclopaedia professedly out of zeal for the diffusion of knowledge, while among themselves they did not hesitate to avow it as the great task of their lives “to crush the wretch;” and that “wretch” was Jesus of Nazareth!
But we have less to do with the motives of Herbert Spencer than with his assumptions and conclusions. And in the outset let it be understood that they refute none of the teachings of the Bible. Could he but find evidence for them he would weaken certain arguments in natural theology, and take off something from the palpable absurdity of every atheistic scheme, but nothing more. It would remove certain results from the immediate to the mediate agency of the divine Contriver. The man who lets loose the ferret against the rats sends his design far beyond where his hands can reach. The zoologist who lays the head of a bird on an anthill uses the voluntary agency of other beings to free the bones form [sic] putrescible [sic] matters.
So, if it be not absurd to thank God for any event whereat we rejoice, how shall we limit his indirect agency? It may be that there is a sense in which he made the Pyramids and the Crystal Palace. And no one can prove that it is beyond the reach of Omniscience to wind up a machine as complicated as this world, so that each casual cog shall mesh in with one of effect even to the determination of where each leaf shall fall in all the life of every primeval forest. And intelligent beings might form part of the vast machine, seemingly as free in their agency as are the bees that swarm into the empty hive which their owner has made fragrant with hickory leaves. This is not our chosen way of explaining what we see, but it is less preposterous than a complicated code of self-enacted laws, and an eternal series of organic beings, which down to this winter, is seen to be in full career of rapid progress. But this interpretation of the Creator’s work excites the same disappointment as if what is treasured as an autograph should proved not a forgery, but the writing of an amanuensis. God is still the author of nature.
Our positive philosopher is very positive in his assertions. The patient naturalist who has sacrificed thousands of eggs in investigating the steps by which the yolk is developed into a chick, does not speak with more confidence of his conclusions from comparison of different eggs of the same hen at known intervals in the process of incubation, than our author does of the development of one species into another, assuming that unknown ages are competent to produce the change. But his whole scheme is unsupported by a single animal change that can be proved outside of human influences.
At the first glimpse any positive evidence of secular change in species might appear unattainable. It is not so. The entire history of many a species, from its origin to its extinction, can be studied in the strata of rock that were formed in part of their remains. None of them began in any other species, none ended in another. So far then as facts are concerned, the geographical discoveries of Lemuel Gulliver are on a level with the biological science of Herbert Spencer.
It is the first step that costs. The benighted traveler often has found as much difficulty in securing the first faint flame as in making all the rest of his watch fie. “Protoplasm, manifesting life, and yet showing no signs of organization,” is his starting point. Where do we find it? Who has seen it? Does it belong to the organic world–without organization? We wish to know more about this life without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life. Is its life that of a crystal? Or is it merely geometricity, like the movements of animated oats, or the rose of Jericho? It is certainly a pity that this important abutment, whence the flying bridge must start, was not made firm beyond a peradventure. True it is sufficient that the protoplasm should have lived seventy million years ago. But are not the causes which then originated it still in action? Its very next door neighbors, protophytes and protozoa, are now by no means scares nor is their existence problematical. Strange that this protoplam should be so little known!
From these simple living cells, the theorist’s course in comparatively easy. Each living thing is an assemblage of facts; the prototype of scores, the humming bird of thousands or millions. A very skil[l]ful selection and arr[a]ngement is made of many that carry conviction with them. Grand that the Creator did make protoplasm and no other living thing, that he further enacted a complicated code of laws that execute themselves in some incomprehensible ways, and the order of being and development, may as well be, as Mr. Spencer would have it, as in any other way.
But that wonderful code of laws! Here are the yolks of two eggs. One is from the nest of an eagle, there other from that of a grouse. They are almost a liquid, but are, in fact, a conglomeration of delicate cells. But of course thee can be no very essential difference between them. The anatomist can find none at all. Outside influences must determine the shape of the creatures to come from them. No so. From one shall be developed a fierce eye, a hooked beak, and terrible talons; from the others a timid, defenseless bird. Nay, more; the offspring shall bear individual resemblance, not only to the parent within whose body its original substance took shape, but also to another parent with whom its connection must have been infinitesimal. The atheistic philosopher would have it that all the causes of these developments were wrapped up in that semi-fluid globe which cannot even keep its shape when laid on a plate. All the markings of a million of feathers in the egg of a peahen! For an uncreated law this is indeed wonderful–incredible.
But the development theory implies that accidental differences between parent and offspring may be perpetuated to succeeding generations. If any such peculiarity favor fecundity, tenacity of life, facility of securing food or escaping from enemies, it increases the number of descendants; and if the contrary, it diminishes the number of the survivors. And when the law of the survival of the fittest shall have culminated in an omnivorous animal of the size of the whale, that can leap as many times its length as a flea, with the cuirass of the crocodile, the tenacity of life of the tortoise, capable of outflying the condor and outswimming the salmon, as prolific as the rab[b]it, as cunning as the fox, with the intellectual power of Aristotle, the pertinacity of Grand, the eloquence of Demosthenes and the piety of Brainard, this globe will have reached maturity. We do not understand why this has not happened may millions of years since.
The absence of this all-prevailing supremus is not the only thing inexplicable in our theory. Of plants there should be just as many species as there are combinations of temperature, soil, moisture and other modifying circumstances; and, as two climates shade into each other, so should every two neighboring species. It should be as impossible to arrange them into distinct species as to classify absolutely the lumps of coal in a bin.
And there are some special difficulties. Does the working-bee transmit no sterility to her offspring? Ad did she inherit it from her prolific royal mother? The worker-ant is a similar puzzle. A still more remarkable one is the honey-making ant of Mexico. Certain neutrals secrete hone till they become shapeless living honey-bags. These the rest of the colony regularly destroy for food when other supplies fail. But their parents had no such peculiarity, and they transmit it to no descendants. By what modification of her wondrous law of descent–partus NON sequiter ventrem–is this peculiarity of the aunts transmitted to their nieces? Mr. Spencer finds no difficulty in arranging the animal creation into groups and imaginary series, each species of which might look like an improvement on the one supposed to have preceded it. But he makes no effort to prove that these species came into existence in any such order. And just here the facts are dead against him. For, granting that the creation of the present world was simultaneous, there is no question previous worlds had existed on this globe: they were furnished with life very different from ours. But it is far from true that there can be perceived any course of improvement from the “‘prentice hand” to the wonderful perfection ultimately displayed. The very reverse might be shown with much more plausibility.
The earliest of animals known till lately was a shell-fish called lingula prima. But it was not a poor helpless thing like the oyster. The Brachopods[sic], of which it was one, is the highest of mollusks, and after a wide prevalence in successive worlds is now almost extinct. The first reptiles that lived on this globe were not limbless snakes doomed to wriggle and crawl as they might, but mighty lizards before whom our creation would tremble. They walked, they swam, they flew. Birds to which the ostrich was but a chicken, have left their tracks in the sandstone. The elephant genus once traversed the snows of Siberia and Alaska; now it is reduced to two tender species in India and Africa. In short, it appears rather as if this globe had been spectator of successive interferences of creative power, as each organic form waxed old and ready to vanish away. And in each we love to trace, not the result of blind animal antagonism, but the mind of a Creator, a revelation of God to man. God grant that we read not the book of revelation in vain!–Zion’s Herald.