Chapter IV. Darwinism In General.
Darwinism, which was originally a technical theory of the biological schools, has long since become a veritable tangle of the most diverse problems and opinions, and seems to press hardly upon the religious conception of the world from many different sides. In its theory of blind “natural selection” and the fortuitous play of the factors in the struggle for existence, it appears to surrender the whole of this wonderful world of life to the rough and ready grip of a process without method or plan. In the general theory of evolution and the doctrine of the descent of even the highest from the lowest, it seems to take away all special dignity from the human mind and spirit, all the freedom and all the nobility of pure reason and free will; it seems to reduce the higher products of religion, morality, poetry, and the æsthetic sense to the level of an ignoble tumult of animal impulses, desires and sensations. Purely speculative questions relative to the evolution theory, psychological and metaphysical, logical and epistemological, ethical, æsthetic, and finally even historical and politico-economical questions have been drawn into the [pg 086] coil, and usually receive from the Darwinians an answer at once robust and self-assured. A zoological theory seems suddenly to have thrown light and intelligibility into the most diverse provinces of knowledge.
But in point of fact it can be shown that Darwinism has not really done this and cannot do it. It leaves unaffected the problem of the mind with its peculiar and underivable laws, from the logical to the ethical. Whether it be right or wrong in its physiological theories, its genealogical trees and fortuitous factors, preoccupation with this theory is a task of the second order. Nevertheless it is necessary to study it, because the chief objections to the religious interpretation of the world have come from it.