The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

With us also, the purely religious cosmogony has long been accepted as an article of faith. What was called science was confounded with dogma, itself relying upon interpretations of the Bible in harmony with the knowledge of the time.

Science, properly so called, is entirely the creation of modern times. The rapidity, the grandeur of its developments, fill one of the most magnificent pages of human history. Relying entirely upon experiment and observation, it could not fail to contradict certain beliefs, which were drawn from a book written in an entirely different sense to its own, and explained by the aid of data which were incomplete or false. Between the representatives of the past and those of the new era, the struggle was inevitable. It needed to be sharp, and it was so. It is now keener than ever.

Circumstances of every kind have destroyed in many minds the old faith of our ancestors. Carried away by the general stream, many in the matter of religious belief, have arrived at absolute denial. The need of an explanation of the universe is still felt by these uneasy minds; and since they have no belief in the Bible, they have turned their attention to science.

The latter has already given them magnificent answers in astronomy and in geology. Before irrefutable facts, the later upholders of the ancient biblical interpretations have either been obliged to withdraw, or to be silent. No one believes in the immobility of the earth, in creation having taken place in six days of twenty-four hours each, or in the simultaneous appearance of all animals, or all plants. Astronomy has made known to us the genesis of worlds; geology has taught us how continents and seas, valleys and mountains are formed, thus evolving some of the grandest results due to the action of second causes in the inorganic empire.

There remains the organic empire, plants, animals, and man himself. Here curiosity is excited, and the want of explanation becomes more pressing, but unfortunately observation and experiment are equally at fault.

Some men, eminent in science and in the richness of their imaginations, have thought themselves able to do without it. Reviving the methods of the Greek philosophers, they have thought it possible to explain living nature and the entire universe, by connecting certain facts with conceptions, which are almost entirely intellectual. Once started in this path, they are readily elated at their own thoughts. When the positive knowledge which has been accumulated by the long-continued labours of their illustrious predecessors, has embarrassed their speculations, they have at once, so to speak, thrown it overboard; they have pushed to the utmost the more or less logical development of their à priori, and have nothing but irony and disdain for those who hesitate to follow them.

These men could not but excite admiration. They spoke in the name of science alone; by its means they replied to aspirations perfectly justifiable on such a topic; they produced theories which charmed by their fulness and the apparent precision of their explanations. They were able consequently to influence even those men of science who had not gone to the bottom of things, and much more so the general public, who are always satisfied to believe what they are told.

The nature of the resistance which they have met with from time to time was calculated to increase the splendour of their triumph. Men as imprudent as ill-judged have attacked them in the name of dogma. Scientific discovery has degenerated into controversy; both parties have become excited, and in the two camps it has been considered necessary to deny all the statements of the enemy; they have vied with each other in violence, and savants, who pretended to speak in the name of free thought, have not shown themselves the less intolerant.

I will only remind the one party of the trial of Galileo, and the other of the theories of Voltaire denying the existence of fossils.

Others have resisted the impulse of the time; they have remained faithful to method, the mother of modern science; they have carefully preserved their inheritance of solid and precise knowledge, acquired from past centuries. They cannot on that account be accused of acting from routine or be considered as retrograding. As warmly as the most ardent partisans of the so-called advanced theories, they have applauded all the progress, and have received with equal favour new ideas, on the condition of exposing them to experiment and observation. But when they meet with questions the solution of which is at present impossible, and will perhaps always be so, they have not hesitated to answer:—WE DO NOT KNOW;—and when they find purely metaphysical theories are being imposed upon them, they have protested in the name of experiment and observation.