Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and not long since to many, have so possessed the minds of the naturalists of the present day that hardly a discourse can be pronounced or an investigation prosecuted without reference to them. I suppose that the views here taken are little, if at all, in advance of the average scientific mind of the day. I cannot regard them as less noble than those which they are succeeding. An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, has recently and truthfully said:[V-8]
"It is a singular fact that, when we can find out how anything is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did not do it. No matter how wonderful, how beautiful, how intimately complex and delicate has been the machinery which has worked, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for millions of ages, to bring about some beneficent result, if we can but catch a glimpse of the wheels its divine character disappears."
I agree with the writer that this first conclusion is premature and unworthy—I will add, deplorable. Through what faults or infirmities of dogmatism on the one hand, and skepticism on the other, it came to be so thought, we need not here consider. Let us hope, and I confidently expect, that it is not to last; that the religious faith which survived without a shock the notion of the fixity of the earth itself may equally outlast the notion of the fixity of the species which inhabit it; that, in the future even more than in the past, faith in an order, which is the basis of science, will not—as it cannot reasonably—be dissevered from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion.
VI
THE ATTITUDE OF
WORKING NATURALISTS
TOWARD DARWINISM [VI-1]
(The Nation, October 16, 1873)
That homely adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison," comes to mind when we consider with what different eyes different naturalists look upon the hypothesis of the derivative origin of actual specific forms, since Mr. Darwin gave it vogue and vigor and a raison d'être for the present day. This latter he did, not only by bringing forward a vera causa in the survival of the fittest under changing circumstances—about which the question among naturalists mainly is how much it will explain, some allowing it a restricted, others an unlimited operation—but also by showing that the theory may be made to do work, may shape and direct investigations, the results of which must in time tell us whether the theory is likely to hold good or not. If the hypothesis of natural selection and the things thereto appertaining had not been capable of being put to useful work, although, like the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," it might have made no little noise in the world, it would hardly have engaged the attention of working naturalists as it has done. We have no idea even of opening the question as to what work the Darwinian theory has incited, and in what way the work done has reacted upon the theory; and least of all do we like to meddle with the polemical literature of the subject, already so voluminous that the German bibliographers and booksellers make a separate class of it. But two or three treatises before us, of a minor or incidental sort, suggest a remark or two upon the attitude of mind toward evolutionary theories taken by some of the working naturalists.
Mr. Darwin's own expectation, that his new presentation of the subject would have little or no effect upon those who had already reached middle-age, has—out of Paris—not been fulfilled. There are, indeed, one or two who have thought it their duty to denounce the theory as morally dangerous, as well as scientifically baseless; a recent instance of the sort we may have to consider further on. Others, like the youth at the river's bank, have been waiting in confident expectation of seeing the current run itself dry. On the other hand, a notable proportion of the more active-minded naturalists had already come to doubt the received doctrine of the entire fixity of species, and still more that of their independent and supernatural origination. While their systematic work all proceeded implicitly upon the hypothesis of the independence and entire permanence of species, they were perceiving more or less clearly that the whole question was inevitably to be mooted again, and so were prepared to give the alternative hypothesis a dispassionate consideration. The veteran Lyell set an early example, and, on a reconsideration of the whole question, wrote anew his famous chapter and reversed his former and weighty opinion. Owen, still earlier, signified his adhesion to the doctrine of derivation in some form, but apparently upon general, speculative grounds; for he repudiated natural selection, and offered no other natural solution of the mystery of the orderly incoming of cognate forms. As examples of the effect of Darwin's "Origin of Species" upon the minds of naturalists who are no longer young, and whose prepossessions, even more than Lyell's, were likely to bias them against the new doctrine, two from the botanical side are brought to our notice through recent miscellaneous writings which are now before us.[VI-2]