The Present Disputes in Philosophy and Science.
By Dr. Chauffaid, of The Imperial Academy Of Medicine.
I.
Philosophy or rather philosophical discussions are being renewed. On the one hand, materialism rages like a tempest over the regions of science; menacing our scientific, intellectual, and moral past and future with destruction. On the other side, we behold noble efforts, beautiful works, and eloquent protestations, on the part of reason and liberty, in favor of the dignity of human nature against the debasing tenets of positivism. We know what shall be the result of this struggle. Materialistic doctrines and hypotheses can never conquer the best aspirations and real glory of humanity. But if final triumph is certain, when will it take place? Immediately, or only after a passing victory of the great philosophical error of the day? This is a serious question; for a temporary victory by materialism would be a fatal sign of our time, and humiliate our race beyond anything that can be imagined. The philosophical discussions, therefore, which have been raised around us are not a mere useless noise; but they are the most important subject for our consideration, bearing with them great destinies—those of science, and perhaps of national life.
To appreciate the true character of the materialistic movement which is stirring every layer of society, and whose action the learned and the ignorant equally feel, we must examine all the remote and proximate, latent and manifest, causes which influence the currents, the ebb and flow of materialism. It would be well to determine how actual materialism has its exclusive origin and its new sources in the bowels of modern science; what new support it has met with in recent scientific discoveries, and what are the value and bearing of those discoveries.
In beholding the tumult which the partisans of the experimental method in philosophy create, the enthusiasm which they show, and the passionate defence of their theory, one would suppose they had made a new conquest of the human mind, and made some astounding discovery. Yet we know what the exact value of the experimental method is. Why, then, so much nervous excitement over it? Yet the excitement is probably only artificial; still it has an aim. The experimental method is clamorously extolled for the purpose of covering with its authority sophisms destructive of all philosophy and of all science. This method is a great flag under which all causes that are not science are sheltered. M. Caro, in his excellent book, Materialism and Science, has endeavored to dispel all confusion on this subject, and to re-establish facts and the truth. Positivism—which must not be confounded with positive science—tries to unite its destiny with that of the experimental method; calling itself the necessary fruit of the latter, the systematized result of a method which subjects all visible nature to man. Positivism concludes from the premises that it has the same certainty as the experimental method.
M. Caro, with a strong hand, upsets all such pretensions. He demonstrates that, if positivism has skilfully stolen the name and some of the processes of positive science, the experimental school, to which the positive sciences owe so much, owes nothing to positivism. Taking for guide, in the study of the experimental method, one of the savants who understands it best, and who, after practising it successfully, has exposed its precepts with incomparable authority, M. Caro proves that this method is not bound by the tyranny of positivism. "Nothing is less evident to my eyes," he writes, "than the agreement of M. Cl. Bernard's manner of thinking with certain essential principles of positivism. His independence is clearly manifested especially in regard to two points: Firstly, in opposition to the spirit of the positive doctrine, he gives place to the idea a priori in the constitution of science. Secondly, contrary to one of the most decided dogmas of the positivist school, he leaves a great many open questions, and thus allows his readers to revert to metaphysical conceptions for their solution."
In the thought of M. Cl. Bernard, the a priori element loses all absolute sense and becomes a purely relative and accidental fact. It has no longer any of those eternal forms of the understanding, of those necessary conceptions through the aid of which the human mind sees and judges the things of nature, contingent facts, and phenomena which happen before our eyes. It is not that power, obscure yet admirable reflection of the divine power, which enables us to apprehend the immutable relations of things, and establishes science by compelling us, by an irresistible attraction, to seek in their cause the reason of phenomena. No; M. Cl. Bernard does not rise directly to that alliance of the infinite and finite, of cause and effect, which takes place in the active depths of the human mind. To this great experimentalist the idea a priori is revealed only in face of experience; it is an instinct, a sudden illumination which strikes and seizes the mind, when the senses act and perceive, as impassible and mute witnesses. "Its apparition is entirely spontaneous and individual. It is a particular sentiment, a quid proprium, which constitutes the originality, the invention, and genius of every man. It happens that a fact—that an observation—remains for a long time before the eyes of a savant without inspiring him with anything, when suddenly a ray of light flashes on him. The new idea appears then with the rapidity of lightning, as a sort of sudden revelation." This flash, this ray of light, is well known to medical tradition, and often called tact, sense, and medical skill. These expressions will exist notwithstanding the denials of a narrow science, which thinks to ennoble itself by suppressing art. There are physicians who, in face of the obscure manifestations of a disease, perceive, with a rapid and sure intuition, the hidden relations of the malady, its nature buried in the living depths of the organization, its future tendencies and probable solutions. This intuition has nothing mysterious in it, and is not the play of a capricious fancy; it is the flash of light, the new idea, the sudden revelation, of which M. Cl. Bernard, the learned savant and most severe of experimentalists, writes. This, then, is what M. Cl. Bernard calls the idea a priori; certainly he does not pretend nor think that he is writing metaphysics. Nevertheless, when we attentively consider it, is not this idea a priori a species of prolongation or consequence of the necessary ideas, the true ideas a priori, of the human mind? Is not the idea a priori a perception of a cause through its effects; at one time the perception of a contingent and particular cause; and again the perception of a cause in itself—of the supreme, necessary, and infinite cause? Does not M. Cl. Bernard himself seem to admit metaphysical conceptions, when, after considering the spontaneity of the intellect under a general aspect, he writes as follows, "It may be said that we have in the mind the intuition or sentiment of the laws of nature, but we do not know their form"?
The experimental school has not, however, determined this point of doctrine; it has so confusedly felt and expressed it that the positivist school could not avoid refuting those rather vague aspirations, and admit, without denying its own principles, those soarings of the understanding in presence of facts. But the experimental school, of which M. Cl. Bernard is the interpreter, puts itself in opposition to positivism. He allows those high truths which cannot be demonstrated by sensible phenomena to have some place in science. He tells us that true science suppresses nothing, but always seeks and considers, without being troubled, those things which it does not understand. "Deny those things," says M. Cl. Bernard, "and you do not suppress them; you shut your eyes and imagine that there is no light." Positivism could not be more formally condemned by positive science.
Will it be pretended that, although the experimental school accepts the order of metaphysical truths, it rejects, them disdainfully when there is question of the natural sciences; and that thus rejected by science they cannot be counted among the serious knowledge of humanity? Nothing could be more unjust than such a condemnation; for nothing proves that there is not another knowledge besides that of experience. M. Cl. Bernard discovers, even in the order of biological truths, capital truths which are not at all experimental, susceptible of a real determinism, to use the expression of which he is so fond. When he tries to define life by using a word which expresses exactly the idea, he calls it creation. In every living germ he admits a creating idea, which is developed by organization, and is derived neither from chemistry nor physical nature. In fine, the experimental school, such as tradition presents it to us and its ablest expounders teach it, must not be confounded with positivism, which tries to steal its name and flag.
The experimental school, healthy and fruitful, gives to metaphysical truths their legitimate influence, their superior and imperishable sight, and does not suppress them by a violent and arbitrary decision. Especially, it does not resolve difficulties by denying all other causes and activity than what is purely material. The experimental school is not fatally materialism.
Materialism is the legitimate consequence of positivism. The positivist sect, at the beginning of its career, pretended to take hold of materialism with a superb indifference and dogmatic insolence, in presence of those eternal problems which, to the honor of humanity, have always puzzled and tormented it. But it is easy to show that most of the definitions and teaching of positivist philosophy correspond with the materialist dogmas, from which positivism pretended to hold itself aloof. How could it be otherwise? Those supreme questions and their answers are not isolated facts, distinct from our particular knowledge, regarding the things of this world. They penetrate necessarily into all our cognitions; become incarnate and visible under the form of all the particular existences which we analyze. We cannot give the character of one of those existences, without this definite character implying a corresponding solution of the primary truths, which were supposed to be entirely forgotten. All the special science of positivism is identical with materialistic interpretation; and one would have wished that the human mind had not tried to ascend from these special sciences to general and primary science and explain it like them. Was this possible? No; and hence illusion is no longer possible. Positivism has logically terminated in materialism.
To demonstrate this inevitable fusion, M. Caro examines one of the absolute precepts of positivism, namely, the subjection of psychology to cerebral physiology. He proves that this subjection is only an indirect method of resolving both psychology and cerebral physiology by materialism. Stuart Mill has been rejected by the positivists for not having followed the founder of the positivist school, resumed in the principle that there is no psychology outside of biology. "Psychology, we are told," writes M. Caro, "is identical with biology; faculties, consciousness which observes them, attention which analyzes them, and, thanks to memory, classes them; all these are in the dependence of the organs on each other. This dependence is called by a very expressive word: the affective and intellectual faculties become, in positivist language, the cerebral faculties. The rest follows. We are assured that there is identity between those two relations: the intellectual and moral manifestations are to the nervous substance what weight is to matter, that is to say, an irreducible phenomenon, which in the actual state of our knowledge is its own explanation. 'Just as the physician observes that matter is heavy, so the physiologist proves that the nervous substance thinks, without either of them being able to explain why the one is heavy and the other thinks.'" [Footnote 107]
[Footnote 107: M. Littré, préface au livre intitulé Matérialisme et Spiritualisme.]
"Let it be so," continues M. Caro; "yet which of the materialists has ever pretended to explain why the nervous substance thinks? They merely attest the existence of the fact. The real question is to know if it is the nervous substance which thinks, and if it can think. To affirm that it thinks is to close the question. I take as witness M. Moleschott, whose teaching is not doubtful, and which has been published with applause. What does he say in a discourse recently delivered at Zurich? 'The identification of spirit and matter is not an explanation; it is a fact, neither more nor less simple, more nor less mysterious, than any other fact; it is a fact like weight. No one assuredly pretends to explain gravitation by means of distinctions between it and matter.' Is there, I ask, an appreciable difference on this question between the language of the present chief of the positivists and that of the most decided positivists?"
A journal, devoted to the defence and propagation of scientific materialism, La Pensée Nouvelle, proclaimed the same doctrine: "The positivist school is a sect which proceeds from materialism; it has no value or aim except through materialism."
II.
Materialism absorbs, therefore, the positivist school. It tries to resolve the important questions regarding the origin and end of man. It does not proscribe metaphysics on the pretence that it wishes to know the eternal unknown, and approach the inaccessible. It admits neither unknown nor inaccessible. It substitutes for the primary causes of metaphysics, considered as pure chimeras, other causes the reality of which it pretends to prove. This is a bold but frank attitude, and preferable in every respect to the constrained position of positivism.
How has materialism tried to solve the questions it proposes? It cannot appeal to pure reason or to the revealing faculties of the human understanding, affirming or denying God as primary cause of existences, and the soul as secondary cause of the human person. Where would be the authority of materialism if its process of demonstration, if its methods were not separated from the process and methods of traditional spiritualism? The latter cannot be conquered on its own ground; it would always find there the height of its moral inspirations, and the power of its demonstrations. Materialism has felt this, and pretends to repudiate both the methods and the doctrines of the old metaphysics. Instead of asking the understanding for imaginary means of demonstration, it proclaims its adherence to infallible experience, its belief in the senses alone, and the analysis of sensations. Just like positivism, it calls itself the immediate production of the experimental method, and attributes to itself the certitude which belongs to the positive and experimental sciences. The old doubt should thus be dissipated, and man would enjoy the full brightness of this universe, whose secrets would no longer be redoubtable, and whose eternal and necessary laws would be opposed to all idea of a higher origin, and government regulated by any exterior will.
But let us leave aside for a moment the examination of those sad illusions and past solutions and the part which experience has in them. Let us consider at first, from the stand-point of method alone, those problems of origin which materialism pretends to resolve. How are those problems capable of being solved by the experimental method? Such is the true question, and it is this one the study of which completes the beautiful book of M. Caro. "We shall not be opposed," says the eloquent author of the Idée de Dieu, "by any unprejudiced savant, when we assert that, in the actual state of science, no positivist dogma authorizes conclusions like those of materialism on the problem of the origin and ends of beings, on that of substances and causes; that to give exact knowledge on these points is contrary to the idea of experimental science; that this science gives us the actual, the present, the fact, not the beginning of things; at most, the immediate how, the proximate conditions of beings, and never their remote causes; finally, that from the moment materialism becomes an express and doctrinal negation of metaphysics, it becomes itself another metaphysics; it falls immediately under the control of pure reason, which may be freely used to criticise its hypotheses, as it uses them itself to establish them and bind them together."
This a priori dogmatism imposes itself as a necessity on materialism, and destroys the experimental character which it loves. The learned, devoted to the worship of positive science, are obliged to admit this, and M. Caro cites, on this point, the precious admission of an illustrious savant, M. Virchow, whom the materialists claim as one of themselves. "No one, after all," says M. Virchow, "knows what was before what is. … Science has nothing but the world which exists. … Materialism is a tendency to explain all that exists, or has been created, by the properties of matter. Materialism goes beyond experience; it makes itself a system. But systems are more the result of speculation than of experience. They prove in us a certain want of perfection which speculation alone can satisfy; for all knowledge which is the result of experience is incomplete and defective."
It is not a metaphysician who speaks thus; it is a savant, who, in Germany, ranks at the head of experimental biology, who leans to materialism, and admits, nevertheless, that materialism has no other root than an undemonstrable a priori; consequently M. Caro has the right with ironical good sense to draw these conclusions: "Until materialism leaves that vicious circle which logic traces around its fundamental conception; until it succeeds in proving experimentally that that which is has always been as it is in the actual form of the recognized order of phenomena; so long as it cannot strip those questions of their essentially transcendental character, and subject its negative solutions to a verification of which the idea alone is contradictory; until then—and we have good reason to think that period far distant—materialism will keep the common condition of every demonstration that cannot be verified. It may reason, after a fashion, on the impossibility of conceiving a beginning to the system of things, to the existence of matter and its properties, but it will prove nothing experimentally, which is, according to its principles, the only way of proving anything; it will speculate, which is very humiliating for those who despise speculation; it will recommence a system of metaphysics, which is the greatest disgrace for those who profess to despise metaphysics. We are continually reproached with the a priori character of our solutions concerning first causes. Materialism must necessarily accept its share of the blame, no matter how full it may be of illusions regarding its scientific bearing and value, no matter how intoxicated with the conquest of positive science with which it essays in vain to identify its fortune and right."
We have just seen, with M. Caro, whether materialism can call itself the faithful representation and direct product of the experimental method. M. Janet, in one of those little volumes, Le Matérialisme Contemporain, destined to a happy popularity, and in which high reason and good science are made clear and simple to convince better, shows us what is the value of the solutions proposed, even nowadays, by materialism. The two works of MM. Caro and Janet thus complete each other: the one discusses the question of methods, and judges materialism in face of its own work, and systematic development; the other asks it, after its labors, whither the method it has used has led it, and interrogates it on those questions of origin and end which it treats and so boldly resolves.
III.
Materialism has two grand problems to solve: matter and life. No one would hesitate to say that the first of these is within its scope, and the solution easy for it. What should be better able to teach us what matter is than a system which recognizes nothing but matter? Has matter in itself the reason of its existence, the reason especially of the motion which impels and moves it, causes all its changes, and what seems now to be the only origin of all its properties and of all its manifestations? M. Janet, in a chapter particularly original, La Matière et le Mouvement, demonstrates that matter cannot present the conditions of absolute existence which are necessary to it if we admit nothing above it. Materialism, instead of arriving at a substantial and freed matter, has nothing ever before it but an intangible unknown. To find nothing for basis of its affirmations but the unknown, and pretend on this basis to build a philosophical belief, seat the destinies of humanity on the unknown, is an outrage on reason and good sense. What a chimerical enterprise! "What would signify, I ask," writes M. Janet, "the pretensions of materialism in a system in which one would be obliged to confess that matter is reduced to a principle absolutely unknown? Is it not the same to say that matter is the principle of all things, in this hypothesis; and to assert that x, that is, any unknown quantity, is the principle of all things? It would be as if one should say, 'I do not know what is the principle of things.' What a luminous materialism this is!" But let us leave pure matter aside; although it touches and bounds us on every side, it does not seem to contain the peculiar secret of our origins and destinies. Let us go further and interrogate materialism regarding life and living beings, among which we are counted, and the study of which penetrates so deeply into our own life.
Materialism pretends to explain the mysterious origin and first appearance of life; and imagines that it can establish by experience the conditions and cause of the formation of simple and rudimentary organizations. The theory of spontaneous generation answers these experimental conditions, and is the proximate and sufficient cause of the existence of life. Having obtained those primary organic forms, materialism explains the immense multiplicity of living species by the gradual transformation of the rudimentary organic forms, produced by spontaneous generation; a transformation effected by natural conditions. Spontaneous generation is consequently a primary thesis of materialism.
"We see," says Lucretius, "living worms come out of fetid matter when, having been moistened by the rain, it has reached a sufficient degree of putrefaction. The elements put in motion and into new relations produce animals." The whole theory and all the errors of spontaneous generation are contained in these phrases.
The progress of the natural sciences gradually extinguished the belief in spontaneous generation. In proportion as science studied this pretended generation it disappeared, and ancestral generation became evident. M. Pouchet has reawakened the discussion of the question by transporting it into the study of those lives of only an instant in duration, which the immense multitude of animalcula presents. Those lives, still so little known and so hard to observe in their rapid evolution, offered a favorable field for confusion, premature assertion, and arbitrary systems. To affirm their spontaneous generation, or demonstrate their generation by germs detached from infinitely small organizations in their complete development, was a task equally obscure and apparently impenetrable to experimentation. The one theory was opposed to all the known laws of life, while the other was in conformity with those laws. It seemed, therefore, that unless demonstrated by all the force of evidence, the spontaneous generation of animalcula should find no legitimate place in science. But not only was evidence always wanting, but thanks to the wonderful ability displayed by M. Pasteur; thanks to the beauty, precision, clearness, and variety of the experiments performed by him; thanks to the penetrating sagacity with which he has exposed the defects of the contrary experiments of M. Pouchet and M. Jolly, all the evidence is in favor of ancestral generation; and the Academy of Science, so prudent and ordinarily so reserved in its judgments, has not hesitated to pronounce openly in this sense. Let us hear the eminent M. Cl. Bernard, judging spontaneous generation; even that which, not daring to maintain the complete generation of the being, sought refuge in the spontaneous generation of the ovulum or germ, which being evolved produced the entire being:
"That generation," says M. Cl. Bernard, "which governs the organic creation of living beings has been justly regarded as the most mysterious function of physiology. It has been always observed that there is a filiation among living beings, and that the greatest number of them proceed visibly from parents. Nevertheless there are cases in which this filiation has not been apparent, and then some have admitted spontaneous generation, that is, production without parentage. This question, already very old, has been investigated in recent times and subjected to new study. In France, many savants have rejected the theory of spontaneous generation, particularly M. Pouchet, who defended the theory of spontaneous ovulation. M. Pouchet wished to prove that there was no spontaneous generation of the adult being, but of its egg or germ. This view seems to me altogether inadmissible even as a hypothesis. I consider, in fact, that the egg represents a sort of organic formula, which resumes the evolutive conditions of a being determined by the fact that it proceeds from the egg. The egg is egg only because it possesses a virtuality which has been given to it by one or several anterior evolutions, the remembrance of which it in some sort preserves. It is this original direction, which is only a parentage more or less remote, which I regard as being incapable of spontaneous manifestation. We must have necessarily a hereditary influence. I cannot conceive that a cell formed spontaneously and without ancestry can have an evolution, since it has had no prior state. Whatever may be thought of the hypothesis, the experiment on which the proofs of spontaneous generation rested were for the most part defective. M. Pasteur has the merit of having cleared up the problem of spontaneous generation, by reducing the experiments to their just value and arranging them according to science. He has proved that the air was the vehicle of a multitude of germs of living beings, and he has shown that it was necessary before all to reduce the argument to precise and well-formed observations.
"In order to express my thought on the subject of spontaneous generation, I have only to repeat here what I have already said in a report which I have had to make on this question; that is to say, that in proportion as our means of investigation become more perfect, it will be found that the cases of supposed spontaneous generation must be necessarily classed with the cases of ordinary physiological generation. This is what the works of M. Balbiani and of MM. Coste and Gerbe have recently proved in reference to the infusory animalcula."
These latter works, especially those of M. Balbiani, [Footnote 108] completely overturn the basis of the doctrine of spontaneous generation. Those infusory animalcula which were supposed to be produced by a silent self-formation are really produced by sexual generation, and those germs floating in the atmosphere are real eggs, the laying of which M. Balbiani discovered.
[Footnote 108: Balbiani "Sur l'Existence d'une Reproduction sexuelle chez les Infusoires.">[
Nevertheless, spontaneous generation has still some decided partisans. Some, like Messrs. Pouchet and Jolly, still believe the theory as savants. The observations which they trusted in affirming spontaneous generation or ovulation still preserve their value for them. It is not easy to give up one's ideas and works. The children of our mind are often dearer to us than the offspring of our blood. It requires a species of heroism for a savant to immolate what he has conceived with labor, protected and defended against all assailers. But besides these illusions and attachments which may be respected, interested passion arose and transformed into aggression and violent quarrel the peaceful discussions of science. The Origin of Life, [Footnote 109] such is the title of a recent publication on spontaneous generation; such is the problem which those who nowadays maintain a cause scientifically lost pretend to resolve.
[Footnote 109: L'Origine de la Vie: Histoire de la Question des Générations spontanées. Par le docteur George Pennetier, avec une préface par le docteur Pouchet.]
The origin of life! Observe the general meaning of the terms; there is question of life in itself, of the essence of all living beings. Human life is a particular case of this general problem; the solution of both is the same. Behind the animalcula and their spontaneous apparition is man. The higher origin, the high aspirations, the predestined end of which man thought he had the right to feel proud—all these vanish like vain dreams and puffs of pride in presence of the origin of primary life through the energy of matter alone. It alone is the true creator, the only cause, and it alone contains our end; beyond it there is nothing; science shows it, at least that science which places spontaneous generation at the top of its conceptions. The importance of the consequences explains the reason why the partisans of materialism have been so ardent in defence of their principles. If a simple problem of chemistry had no more proofs in its favor than the theory of spontaneous generation, no savant worthy of the name would have maintained it or founded on so fragile a basis a multitude of scientific deductions. But there was question of the order and constitution of the world, of the reason, of the being of every creature, and hence the proofs seemed good and sufficient to a materialism which calls itself scientific and experimental. An aggressive polemic represented even as enemies of progress, as retrograde spirits, all those who rejected errors to which too easy a popularity had been given.
IV.
Spontaneous generation gave materialism a point of departure at once rash and weak; bold if one looked behind, almost miserable if one looked ahead! What efforts to draw out of some rudimentary animalcula the regular development of the whole animal kingdom, man included—that being who thinks and wills, who is conscious of its acts and liberty, who possesses the notion of good and evil, who aspires after the true and the beautiful, who feels himself as cause and admits other causes in nature! How can the abyss which separates those two extremities of living creation be bridged? What omnipotence will be able to produce from these infusoria the prodigious number, the infinite variety of those animated beings, all those living species which, no matter how profoundly or how far the world may be investigated, are almost like each other, as it were immutable in their precipitate succession, stationary even in motion!
The same science which affirmed spontaneous generation has not balked before this enterprise, and it has pretended to prove the hidden mechanism which, from the egg spontaneously laid, produces the fearful immensity of animate forms! There have been found naturalists, eminent savants in other respects and possessing great authority, like Lamarck and Darwin, who have imagined that they discovered the laws of the transformation of species.
M. Paul Janet, in the book which we cited above, has made a sharp and searching criticism of the theories of Lamarck and Darwin. He asks, in the first place, in what the hypothesis of a plan and of a design of nature, otherwise called the doctrine of final causes, would be contrary to the spirit of science. We must not undertake phenomenal analysis with the premeditated design of finding the phenomena conformable to an object decreed in advance; this preconceived object should never take the place of reason and be the explanation of the facts observed; such a manner of proceeding is hardly scientific, and leads fatally to arbitrary and erroneous conceptions. But does it follow that the facts observed and analyzed in themselves should not, by their collection and connection, express to the human intelligence a superior design, a progressive and ascending harmony, which are its final reason and vivifying spirit? To refuse in advance every final cause is an error similar to that of imagining it altogether and before the observation of the phenomena. Flourens has well said: "We must proceed not from the final causes to the facts, but from the facts to the final causes." These are the fruitful principles, and this is true natural philosophy.
"The naturalists," says M. Janet, "imagine that they have destroyed final causes in nature when they have proved that certain effects result necessarily from certain given causes. The discovery of efficient causes appears to them a decisive argument against the existence of final causes. We must not say, according to them, "that the bird has wings for the purpose of flying, but that it flies because it has wings." But in what, pray, are these two propositions contradictory? Supposing that the bird has wings to fly, must not its flight be the result of the structure of its wings? And from the fact that the flight is a result, we have not the right to conclude that it is not an end. In order, then, that your materialists should recognize an aim and a choice, must there be in nature effects without a cause, or effects disproportioned to their causes? Final causes are not miracles; to obtain a certain end the author of things must choose secondary causes precisely adapted to the intended effect. Consequently, what is there astonishing in the fact that in the study of those causes you should be able to deduce mechanically from them their effects? The contrary would be impossible and absurd. Thus, explain to us as much as you please that, a wing being given, the bird must fly; that does not at all prove that the wings were not given to it for the purpose of flying. In good faith we ask, If the author of nature willed that birds should fly, what could he do better than give them wings for that object?
The demonstration of the reality of final causes, and of a decreed and premeditated plan in nature, furnishes a primary and powerful refutation of the systems which pretend to explain the successive formation of organized beings by the sole action of natural forces, acting fatally, petrifying, modifying, transforming living matter in an unconscious and blind manner. Lamarck and Darwin, as we have said, are the two naturalists who have substituted most successfully a fatal, necessary, and in some sort mechanical plan, instead of a premeditated plan, realized by an intelligent and spontaneous cause. Lamarck appealed especially to the action of means, habit, and want. The combined action of those agents sufficed to him to conclude from the rudimentary cell to man himself.
The action of means, exterior conditions, can modify the form and the functions of living beings; this is a fact of which the domestication of animals offers the most striking examples. But does it follow that because we can modify certain animal and vegetable species, we can therefore create their species? Can we imagine the possibility of modifications so active and powerful that they arrive at the most complex creations, at the construction of the great organs of animal life, and of those organs of the senses, so diverse and so marvellously adapted to their functions? "For instance," says M. Janet, "certain animals breathe through their lungs, and others by the bronchial tubes, and these two kinds of organs are perfectly adapted to the two means of air and water. How can we conceive that these two means should be able to produce so complicated and so suitable organizations? Is there a single fact among all those proved by science which could justify so great an extension of the action of means? If it is said that by means we must not understand merely the element in which the animal lives, but every kind of exterior circumstance, then, I ask, let the materialists determine what is precisely the circumstance which has caused such an organ to take the form of the lung, and such another to take the form of the bronchia; what is the precise cause which has created the heart—that hydraulic machine so powerful and so easy, and whose movements are so industriously combined to receive the blood which comes from all the organs to the heart and send it back through the veins; what is the cause, finally, which binds all these organs together and makes the living being, according to the expression of Cuvier, "a closed system, all of whose parts concur to a common action by a reciprocal reaction?" What will it be if we pass to the organs of sense; to the most marvellous of them, the eye of man or that of the eagle? Is there one of those savants who have no system who would dare to maintain that he sees in any way how light could produce by its action the organ which is appropriated to it? Or, if it is not light, what is the exterior agent sufficiently powerful, sufficiently ingenious, sufficiently skilled in geometry, to construct that marvellous apparatus which has made Newton say: "Can he that made the eye be ignorant of the laws of optics?" Remarkable expression, which, coming from so great a master, should make the forgers of systems of cosmogony reflect an instant, no matter how learnedly they may dilate on the origin of planets, and who pass with so much complacency over the origin of conscience and life!
If the action of means is incapable by itself of explaining the formation of organs and the production of species—what Lamarck calls the power of life, namely, habit and want—how can they give us the sufficient reason for those great facts? According to Lamarck, necessity produces organs, habit develops and fortifies them. But what is this necessity and this habit which are appealed to so complacently, and who proves their strange power? Let us take the necessity of breathing, of which M. Janet wrote as we have quoted. Whence comes this necessity? From the necessity of giving to the blood the oxygen which is necessary for it; and this latter necessity is derived from the necessity of keeping up the organic combustion, and furnishing the nervous system with an appropriate stimulant. Who does not see that there is here a connection of functions and organs which requires a simultaneous creation, which displays a preconceived plan, and not a successive growth of organs according to wants which find in each other the principle of their being, and which cannot be perceived and satisfied separately? What unheard-of aberration, what decadence of the scientific spirit, to transform necessity into a sort of effective and creative power; to make of a sentiment, ordinarily vague and obscure, a new and active entity, which not only animates the created being, but actually creates it!
Lamarck, it is true, admits that observation cannot demonstrate the producing power which he attributes to want; but if a direct proof is wanting, he considers an indirect proof sufficient by appealing to custom. What does he mean? Habit can develop and fortify existing organs by an appropriate and sustained exercise; but how does that prove that want can create them? How can habit develop an organ which does not exist? How can the development of an organ be compared to the creation of this organ, or make us realize the mode of creation of the organ? We can conceive want as the reason not of the creation but of the development of an organ, and habit as excited and sustained by this need; but the need of an organ which is absolutely wanting cannot be born of itself, cannot produce the organ, cannot excite habit. How can an animal deprived of every organ of seeing or hearing experience the want of sight or hearing, or acquire the habit of either? What chimerical hypotheses!
Let us hold to the judgment of Cuvier on all these hypotheses, whose authority is very great:
"Some naturalists, more material in their ideas, and relying on the philosophical observations of which we have just spoken, have remained humble followers of Maillet, (Talliamed,) [Footnote 110] seeing that the greater or less use of a member increases or diminishes its force and volume, have imagined that habits and exterior influences, continued for a long time, could change by degrees the forms of animals so as to make them attain successively all those shapes which the different species of animals now have. No more superficial and foolish idea could be imagined. Organized bodies are considered as a mere mass of paste or clay, which could be moulded by the fingers. Consequently, the moment these authors wish to enter into detail, they fall into absurdities. Whoever dares to advance seriously that a fish by keeping on dry land could change its scales into feathers and become a bird, or that a quadruped by passing through narrow places would become elongated like a thread and transformed into a serpent, only proves his profound ignorance of anatomy."
[Footnote 110: Benoit de Maillet was the predecessor of Lamarck.]
The forms of scientific error change rapidly; only the principle always remains. But this principle requires to be clothed from time to time in new garments, which rejuvenate and disguise it. The system of Lamarck, for a moment popular on account of the philosophic ideas to which it gave support, could not maintain itself in lasting honor in science. It was as it were buried in deep oblivion, when Darwin undertook to awaken it from its ashes by substituting for the antiquated conceptions new ones, destined to give a similar satisfaction to the passions which had applauded the enterprise of Lamarck.
The work of Darwin—we must do him the justice to say it—is an important work, and displays rare science. The author, gifted with great penetration, employs to the greatest advantage what he knows to deduce from it what he does not know; and if he goes beyond experience, it is always in appealing to experience; so that he seems to remain faithful to observation even when he ventures far beyond its limits. Nevertheless so much science and sagacity can hardly blind us to the radical weakness of the system; and it would not have met with so favorable a reception if all the prejudices of the materialists whom it satisfied had not become its ardent champions. A first fact strikes one who studies impartially the theory of Darwin, namely, the incalculable disproportion between the means of demonstration and the immense problem to be resolved. There is question, let it be remembered, of the origin of living species. Darwin tries to explain this origin by the action of a natural selection, incessantly at work, which draws the collection of organisms out of one or several primitive, simple, and rudimentary types formed by the simple action of forces proper to matter. This natural selection is the image of the method according to which new races of domestic animals have been created, as the modern doctors maintain. In order that this, natural selection should produce the powerful effects which Darwin gives to it, he imagines two agents always active—changes in the conditions of existence, and especially vital concurrence. The changes in the conditions of existence, the accidental characters acquired by a living individual and transmitted by inheritance to its descendants, create certain varieties of type. Vital concurrence, the battle of life, the struggle of animated beings to subsist, allow only some of those varieties to last on the scene of the world; the others are vanquished and disappear. These transformations, continued and accumulated from age to age, increased by the indefatigable labor of an immense number of ages, have produced all the animal species actually existing; which are imperceptibly their predecessors in a continuous line of transformation, under the permanent influence of the same natural forces.
The notion of species as well as that of variety and race disappear in this order of ideas, or at least lose the determined sense which the naturalists had attributed to them. Variety and race become species in the way of transformation, in course of development. The living form passes insensibly and by eternal motion from the one to the other, from the species to the variety, from the variety to the race, and from the latter to a new species which appears only to disappear in its turn. It is only an affair of time. The living kingdom is in perpetual transformation. No one can tell what it will become naturally.
Such is the essence of the Darwinian theory. It begins by the hypothesis of a natural selection which no direct fact proves or confirms. But can the method of selection as Darwin explains it be the foundation of such a hypothesis? But in this artificial election, due to the labor of man, man is the agent who chooses, who works; he becomes the final and active cause of the transformation undergone by the species; he takes care that the character of the races which he has obtained should be maintained by an ever-vigilant election. Can anything of this kind be invoked in the natural selection of Darwin? Who replaces the choice of man? If the natural selection is made according to a plan decreed and premeditated by the omnipotence which has created nature, this selection changes its character; it is no longer anything but one of the forms of creation; it is an interpretation of the mode of acting of the creating cause, it is no longer the negation of this cause. Darwinism, which consists in conceiving the order of things without any superior intervention, under the simple action of accidents passing fortuitously to permanence; Darwinism, hostile to all finality, disappears if the idea of plan is perceptible in the natural selection. Can vital concurrence replace the intelligent action, and assure to the natural selection that fecundity and power which are not in it, and which must come to it from without? But can "vital concurrence, the battle of life," be the means of creation; can they engender directly organic modifications, varieties, animal species? Evidently not the battle of life can make subjects; it is an agent of elimination for weak and defective species; it cannot produce by itself a new species. Natural selection remains always delivered up to itself, to its blind resources, which nothing directs or regulates, which acquire fecundity only by chance. To imagine that the harmonic and infinite collection of living species can be legitimately referred to a given agent, even by granting to it thousands of years to manifest its action, seems to me arbitrary and sterile rashness, which has nothing in common with a noble rashness of science, with the intuitions of a genius which sometimes forestalls experience and the proofs which it adduces.
M. Janet has given a general refutation of the theories of Darwin, and sufficiently strong to show their folly. General facts have their own light, but it does not shine the less far or the less brilliantly for being general. Nevertheless, in a question obscured by so many prejudices, and by the assertions of a science which calls itself entirely experimental, that is to say, entirely particular, particular facts acquire a singular eloquence and power of demonstration which the most audacious systematizers cannot refuse to acknowledge.
Those facts embrace the infinite individualities of the living kingdom continued across the known ages. The source of information is inexhaustible. What does it teach us? Do particular facts confirm the ideas of Darwin regarding the gradual mutability of species; do they even furnish the sketch of a demonstration limited to certain determined points, to certain animal or vegetable species; do they finally show us some of those transformations which are the foundation of the system? Man has been observing and studying nature for centuries: tradition, the ruins preserved from the past, permit us to remount far up the stream of time; have they apprehended in nature any traces of those great changes which incessantly and fatally transform the vegetable and animal species? Or, on the contrary, does not everything go against those supposed transformations, and prove the fixity in time and space of those real species; a fixity which is not contradictory, which rather adapts itself to a certain normal physiological variability, which always allows to subsist and be perceptible through it the type of the species, the essential and primary form? We easily conceive the importance that a sincere response to these questions may acquire. They strike at the experimental foundation of Darwin's theory; if this experimental basis is wanting, what becomes of those theories? Are they not mere personal and arbitrary conceptions; brilliant plays of an imagination strong and creative, it is true, but which cannot be substituted for Nature herself and her direct teachings?
A learned professor of the faculty of science of Lyons, M. Ernest Faivre, has just undertaken this particular and experimental study of the origin of species, of their variability and essentiality; and we signalize his work to our readers—La Variabilité des Espèces et les Limites. It is impossible to write, on so complex and obscure a question, a book more rich in facts, more clear in its developments, or more authoritative in its conclusions. It seems to us the condemnation without appeal of the system of Darwin.
The vegetable kingdom is considered less rebellious than the others to the theories of Darwin; variety has more extended limits in it, less fixed than in the animal; generation, increase, the exterior conditions, present the occasion of many changes often profound in appearance. M. Faivre shows that the true species exists through all these changes, and that it is reproduced of itself from modified types, when circumstances or the artificial selection of man no longer supports the latter. Nowhere has man been able to create a real and durable species; and the species from the most remote times to our days are maintained with a fixity which has become one of the essential characters of species. The ancient land of Egypt is full of moving revelations on this subject: the animals, the plants, the grains buried in the caves, are the same as the plants and animals which cover the borders of the Nile at the present time. All the naturalists have proved this identity of a considerable quantity of animal and vegetable species. Hence, Lamarck and Darwin, to lessen the value of an experience of more than three thousand years' duration, have pretended that the conditions of life and the conditions of the exterior medium had not changed in Egypt from the historical times, and that the permanency of the species became consequently an ordinary and logical fact. But history, geography, the study of the soil, prove that the situation of Egypt has been profoundly modified. The level of the Nile, the limits of the desert, the extent of the cultivated lands, the culture of the soil, the number of populous cities, the proximity or distance of the sea, the great public works, everything which transforms a country under the action of men, all have changed in Egypt as much if not more than in other countries, and nothing is found changed in the productions of this soil, in the living beings which it supports and nourishes. But we may go further than the historical period. The permanence of species is proved to-day from the glacial period; the bogs of Ireland, the submarine forests of England and of the United States, conceal in their depths relics of mammifera or of vegetable species exactly comparable to the vegetable and animal species actually living in those same countries. We could not enumerate all the proofs which establish the great fact of the permanency of species; the number of these proofs is immense, and no fact seriously contradicts them, and yet it is in the name of experience that the partisans of natural selection pretend to speak! The accidental, temporary, and superficial varieties which they produce become for them a sufficient warrant of absolute and permanent varieties which they cannot produce, but of which they impudently suppose the formal existence; thus destroying species by a mere hypothesis.
Natural selection has artificial selection for its ideal godfather, but what has the latter produced? Not only no species, but not even a permanent race definitively fixed and acquired. All the races made by the hand of man die if they are left to themselves, unsupported by an artificial selection constantly at work. It is a fact which M. Faivre supports with superabundant demonstration, taken from both the vegetable and animal kingdoms. The collection of those facts is truly irresistible. What! the continued transformation of species is given to us as a law, and yet we cannot find a solitary transformed species! The transformation of races, which must not be confounded with that of species, is itself conditional and relative, is soon effaced if nothing disturbs the return of the race to the pure type of the species, and yet we are told of the power of natural selection and of the battle of life which consecrates this power! This selection, this vital concurrence, this action of means, have been all employed to modify the proximate species, as the horse and the ass; domestication offered here all its resources; the hand of man could choose, ally, and cross the types at will.
"Assuredly," says M. Flourens, "if ever a complete reunion of all the conditions most favorable to the transformation of one species into another could be imagined, this reunion is found in the species of the ass and horse. And, nevertheless, has there been a transformation? … Are not those species as distinct to-day as they have always been? Among all the almost innumerable races which have been produced by them, is there one which passed from the species of the horse to that of the ass, or, reciprocally, from the species of the ass to that of the horse?" Why, say we with M. Faivre, pay no attention to such simple facts, and take so much trouble to seek outside of evidence explanations which do not agree with the reality?
The theories of Darwin have become the chief support of those who attribute to man a monkey origin. "I prefer to be a perfect monkey to a degenerate Adam," says one of the partisans of these theories. But why can they not perfect an ass so as to make a horse of it? There is not between these two latter species the profound anatomical difference which exists between the monkey and man—a difference so well established by Gratiolet, a great mind and a true savant. On what, then, can be founded the theory of our descent from the monkey species, since the slightest change resists all fusion, all transition from one neighboring species to another?
The book of the Variabilité des Espèces is the answer of facts to the spirit of system. Calm and severe, rigorous and cold, this book admits only the testimony of nature. It will instruct and convince those who doubt on those questions. The author terminates by those conclusions which we willingly reproduce because they allow us to divine something else besides the indifferent study of facts; they are perhaps the only lines of the work where the sentiment of the moral dignity of man is apparent. "This hypothesis (namely, of the mutability of species) is not authorized," says M. Faivre, "either by its principle, which is a mere conjecture; or by its deductions, which the reality does not confirm; or by its direct demonstrations, which are hardly probabilities; or by its too extreme consequences, which science as well as human dignity forbid us to accept—the theory of spontaneous generation, the intimate and degrading relationship between man and the brute."
Notwithstanding the ability—we may almost say the genius—which illustrious savants have employed in defending the doctrine, reason and experience have not weakened the reserved and just judgment which Cuvier has passed upon it, and which will serve as the conclusion to this essay: "Among the different systems on the origin of organized beings, there is none less probable than that which causes the different kinds of them to spring up, successively, by developments or gradual metamorphosis."
One word more before quitting the subject. All these great forms of scientific error spring up in our old Europe, where they find at the same time numerous and passionate adherents, and firm and eloquent opponents. The attack and the struggle are kept up incessantly in the press, in our books, in our learned bodies, in our teaching faculties. If we examine the general character of these conflicts, we find in them truth almost intimidated, certainly less bold and less respected than error. Truth is self-conscious, and that is sufficient to prevent it from becoming weak or yielding to fatigue and discouragement; but it has not popular favor; it is tolerated, but hardly ever greatly encouraged. If we quit this tormented Europe, which is drawn only toward new errors, and cast our eyes toward those great United States of America, that fertile land appears to us as favorable to truth as to liberty. Let us listen an instant to that illustrious savant who has no superior in the domain of natural science, M. Agassiz; let us follow his teaching in the University of Cambridge. What elevation and what sincerity! How all those systems which seduce so many minds in these cisatlantic regions are brought to their true proportions—judged in their profound disregard of the laws of nature! Let us take, for instance, the influence of exterior conditions and of physical agents on animals—the basis of the system of Lamarck, and one of the principal conditions of the mutability of species in Darwinism. M. Agassiz, on this point, uses again the firm language which from the days of Cuvier natural science has not spoken in France:
"In so far as the diversity of animals and plants which live in the same physical circumstances proves the independence as to the origin of organized beings, from the medium in which they reside, so far does this independence become evident anew when we consider that identical types are found everywhere on the earth in the most varied conditions. Let all those different influences be united—all the conditions of existence, under the common apellation of cosmic influences, of physical causes, or of climates—and we shall always find in this regard extreme differences on the surface of the globe, and nevertheless we shall see living normally together under their action the most similar or even identical types. … Does not all this prove that organized beings manifest the most surprising independence of the physical forces in the midst of which they live, an independence so complete that it is impossible to attribute it to any other cause than to a supreme power governing, at the same time, physical forces and the existence of animals and plants, maintaining between both a harmonical relation by a reciprocal adaptation in which we can find neither cause nor effect? … It would be necessary to write a volume on the independence of organized beings of physical agents. Almost everything which is generally attributed to the influence of the latter must be considered as a simple correlation between them and the animal kingdom resulting from the general plan of creation." [Footnote 111]
[Footnote 111: Revue des Cours scientifique, Mai 2, 1868.]