B.
To many persons the conclusion that man is the naturally modified descendant of ape-like ancestors appears to be destructive of the belief in an immortal soul, and in the teachings of Christianity; and accordingly they either reject Darwinism altogether, or claim for man a special exemption from the mode of origin admitted for other animals.
It seems worth while, in order to secure a calm and unprejudiced consideration for the teachings of Darwinism, to point out to such persons that, as a matter of fact, whatever views we may hold with regard to a soul and the Christian doctrines, they cannot be in the smallest degree affected by the admission that man has been derived from ape-like ancestors by a process of natural selection, so long as the demonstrable fact, not denied by any sane person, is admitted, namely, that every individual man grows by a process of natural modification from a homogeneous egg-cell or corpuscle. Assuredly it cannot lower our conception of man’s dignity if we have to regard him as “the flower of all the ages,” bursting from the great stream of life which has flowed on through countless epochs with one increasing purpose, rather than as an isolated, miraculous being, put together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by such portentous origin from his fellow animals, and from that gracious Nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, knowing her, in spite of fables, to be his dear mother.
A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the development of man’s body by natural processes from ape-like ancestry, but believe in the non-natural intervention of a Creator at a certain definite stage in that development, in order to introduce into the animal which was at that moment a man-like ape, something termed “a conscious soul,” in virtue of which he became an ape-like man. It appears to me perfectly legitimate and harmless for individuals to make such an assumption if their particular form of philosophy or of religion requires it. Such an assumption does not in any way traverse the inferences from facts to which Darwinism leads us; at the same time zoological science does not, and cannot be expected to, give any support to such an assumption. The gratuitous and harmless nature of the assumption so far as zoological science is concerned, and accordingly the baselessness of the hostility to Darwinism of those who choose to make it, may be seen by the consideration of a parallel series of facts and assumptions, which puts the matter clearly enough in its true light.
No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every human being grows from the egg in utero, just as a dog or a monkey does; the facts are before us and can be scrutinised in detail. We may ask of those who refuse to admit the gradual and natural development of man’s consciousness in the ancestral series, passing from ape-like forms into indubitable man, “How do you propose to divide the series presented by every individual man in his growth from the egg? At what particular phase in the embryonic series is the soul with its potential consciousness implanted? Is it in the egg? in the fœtus of this month or of that? in the new-born infant? or at five years of age?” This, it is notorious, is a point upon which Churches have never been able to agree; and it is equally notorious that the unbroken series exists—that the egg becomes the fœtus, the fœtus the child, and the child the man. On the other hand we have the historical series—the series, the existence of which is inferred by Darwin and his adherents. This is a series leading from simple egg-like organisms to ape-like creatures, and from these to man. Will those who cannot answer our previous inquiries undertake to assert dogmatically in the present case at what point in the historical series there is a break or division? At what step are we to be asked to suppose that the order of nature was stopped, and a non-natural soul introduced? The philosopher or theologian of this or that school may arbitrarily draw an imaginary line here or there in either series, and the evolutionist will not raise a finger to stop him. As long as truth in the statement of fact, and logic in the inference from observed fact are respected, there need be no hostility between evolutionist and theologian. The theologian is content in the case of individual development from the egg to admit the facts of individual evolution, and to make assumptions which lie altogether outside the region of scientific inquiry. So, too, it would seem only reasonable that he should deal with the historical series, and frankly accept the natural evolution of man from lower animals, declaring dogmatically, if he so please, but not as an inference of the same order as are the inferences of science, that something called the soul arrived at any point in the series which he may think suitable. At the same time, it would appear to be sufficient, even for the purposes of the theologian, to hold that whatever the two above-mentioned series of living things contain or imply, they do so as the result of a natural and uniform process of development, that there has been one “miracle” once and for all time. It should not be a ground of offence to any school of thinkers, that Darwinism, whilst leaving them free scope, cannot be made actually contributory to the support of their particular tenets.
The difficulties which the theologian has to meet when he is called upon to give some account of the origin and nature of the soul, certainly cannot be said to have been increased by the establishment of the Darwinian theory. For from the earliest days of the Church, ingenious speculation has been lavished on the subject. As to the origin of the individual soul, Tertullian tells us as follows:—De Anima, ch. xix.—“Anima velut surculus quidam ex matrice Adami in propaginem deducta, et genitalibus semine foveis commodata. Pullulabit tam intellectu quam et sensu.”
Whilst St. Augustine says:—“Harum autem sententiarum quatuor de anima, utrum de propagine veniant, an in singulis quibusque nascentibus mox fiant, an in corpora nascentium jam alicubi existentes vel mittantur divinitus, vel sua sponte labantur, nullam temere affirmari oporteret: aut enim nondum ista quæstio a divinorum librorum catholicis tractatoribus, pro merito suæ obscuritatis et perplexitatis, evoluta atque illustrata est; aut si jam factum est, nondum in manus nostras hujuscemodi litteræ provenerunt.”