While we grant, then, that man is the last stage in the development of life and that he has a brute ancestry, we regard him also as the offspring of God. The same God who was the author of the brute became in due time the creator of man. Though man came through the brute, he did not come from the brute, but from God, the Father of spirits and the author of all life. Œdipus' terrific oracle: “Mayst thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art!” might well be uttered to those who believe only in the brute origin of man. Pascal says it is dangerous to let man see too clearly that he is on a level with the animals unless at the same time we show him his greatness. The doctrine that the brute is imperfect man is logically connected with the doctrine that man is a perfect brute. Thomas Carlyle: “If this brute philosophy is true, then man should go on all fours, and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral.” G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human Race, lecture IX—“One or other of the lower animals may exhibit all the faculties used by a child of fifteen months. The difference may seem very little, but what there is is very important. It is like the difference in direction in the early stages of two separating curves, which go on forever diverging.... The probability is that both in his bodily and in his mental development man appeared as a sport in nature, and leaped at once in some single pair from the plane of irrational being to the possession of the higher powers that have ever since characterized him and dominated both his development and his history.”
Scripture seems to teach the doctrine that man's nature is the creation of God. Gen. 2:7—“Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—appears, says Hovey (State of the Impen. Dead, 14), “to distinguish the vital informing principle of human nature from its material part, pronouncing the former to be more directly from God, and more akin to him, than the latter.” So in Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him”—the soul is recognized as distinct in nature from the body, and of a dignity and value far beyond those of any material organism. Job 32:8—“there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding”; Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it.” A sober view of the similarities and differences between man and the lower animals may be found in Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence. See also Martineau, Types, 2:65, 140, and Study, 1:180; 2:9, 13, 184, 350; Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 8:23; Chadbourne, Instinct, 187-211; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 384, 386, 397; Bascom, Science of Mind, 295-305; Mansel, Metaphysics, 49, 50; Princeton Rev., Jan. 1881:104-128; Henslow, in Nature, May 1, 1879:21, 22; Ferrier, Remains, 2:39; Argyll, Unity of Nature, 117-119; Bib. Sac., 29:275-282; Max Müller, Lectures on Philos. of Language, no. 1, 2, 3; F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 21; Le Conte, in Princeton Rev., May, 1884:238-261; Lindsay, Mind in Lower Animals; Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals; Fiske, The Destiny of Man.
(d) Comparative physiology, moreover, has, up to the present time, done nothing to forbid the extension of this doctrine to man's body. No single instance has yet been adduced of the transformation of one animal species into another, either by natural or artificial selection; much less has it been demonstrated that the body of the brute has ever been developed into that of man. All evolution implies progress and reinforcement of life, and is unintelligible except as the immanent God gives new impulses to the process. Apart from the direct agency of God, the view that man's physical system is descended by natural generation from some ancestral simian form can be regarded only as an irrational hypothesis. Since the soul, then, is an immediate creation of God, and the forming of man's body is mentioned by the Scripture writer in direct connection with this creation of the spirit, man's body was in this sense an immediate creation also.
For the theory of natural selection, see Darwin, Origin of Species, 398-424, and Descent of Man, 2:368-387; Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 241-269, Man's Place in Nature, 71-138, Lay Sermons, 323, and art.: Biology, in Encyc. Britannica, 9th ed.; Romanes, Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. The theory holds that, in the struggle for existence, the varieties best adapted to their surroundings succeed in maintaining and reproducing themselves, while the rest die out. Thus, by gradual change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life, man has been evolved. We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the important features of God's method. We concede the partial truth of his theory. We find it supported by the vertebrate structure and nervous organization which man has in common with the lower animals; by the facts of embryonic development; of rudimentary organs; of common diseases and remedies; and of reversion to former types. But we refuse to regard natural selection as a complete explanation of the history of life, and that for the following reasons:
1. It gives no account of the origin of substance, nor of the origin of variations. Darwinism simply says that “round stones will roll down hill further than flat ones”(Gray, Natural Science and Religion). It accounts for the selection, not for the creation, of forms. “Natural selection originates nothing. It is a destructive, not a creative, principle. If we must idealize it as a positive force, we must think of it, not as the preserver of the fittest, but as the destroyer, that follows ever in the wake of creation and devours the failures; the scavenger of creation, that takes out of the way forms which are not fit to live and reproduce themselves” (Johnson, on Theistic Evolution, in Andover Review, April, 1884:363-381). Natural selection is only unintelligent repression. Darwin's Origin of Species is in fact “not the Genesis, but the Exodus, of living forms.” Schurman: “The survival of the fittest does nothing to explain the arrival of the fittest”; see also DeVries, Species and Varieties, ad finem. Darwin himself acknowledged that “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.... The cause of each slight variation and of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions” (quoted by Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 280-301). Weismann has therefore modified the Darwinian theory by asserting that there would be no development unless there were a spontaneous, innate tendency to variation. In this innate tendency we see, not mere nature, but the work of an originating and superintending God. E. M. Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881—“Spirit was the moulding power, from the beginning, of those lower forms which would ultimately become man. Instead of the physical derivation of the soul, we propose the spiritual derivation of the body.”
2. Some of the most important forms appear suddenly in the geological record, without connecting links to unite them with the past. The first fishes are the Ganoid, large in size and advanced in type. There are no intermediate gradations between the ape and man. Huxley, in Man's Place in Nature, 94, tells us that the lowest gorilla has a skull capacity of 24 cubic inches, whereas the highest gorilla has 34-½. Over against this, the lowest man has a skull capacity of 62; though men with less than 65 are invariably idiotic; the highest man has 114. Professor Burt G. Wilder of Cornell University: “The largest ape-brain is only half as large as the smallest normal human.” Wallace, Darwinism, 458—“The average human brain weighs 48 or 49 ounces; the average ape's brain is only 18 ounces.” The brain of Daniel Webster weighed 53 ounces; but Dr. [pg 471]Bastian tells of an imbecile whose intellectual deficiency was congenital, yet whose brain weighed 55 ounces. Large heads do not always indicate great intellect. Professor Virchow points out that the Greeks, one of the most intellectual of nations, are also one of the smallest-headed of all. Bain: “While the size of the brain increases in arithmetical proportion, intellectual range increases in geometrical proportion.”
Respecting the Enghis and Neanderthal crania, Huxley says: “The fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the modification of which he has probably become what he is.... In vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been sought: not a single one is there to show. The so-called Protanthropos who should exhibit this link has not been found.... None have been found that stood nearer the monkey than the men of to-day.” Huxley argues that the difference between man and the gorilla is smaller than that between the gorilla and some apes; if the gorilla and the apes constitute one family and have a common origin, may not man and the gorilla have a common ancestry also? We reply that the space between the lowest ape and the highest gorilla is filled in with numberless intermediate gradations. The space between the lowest man and the highest man is also filled in with many types that shade off one into the other. But the space between the highest gorilla and the lowest man is absolutely vacant; there are no intermediate types; no connecting links between the ape and man have yet been found.
Professor Virchow has also very recently expressed his belief that no relics of any predecessor of man have yet been discovered. He said: “In my judgment, no skull hitherto discovered can be regarded as that of a predecessor of man. In the course of the last fifteen years we have had opportunities of examining skulls of all the various races of mankind—even of the most savage tribes; and among them all no group has been observed differing in its essential characters from the general human type.... Out of all the skulls found in the lake-dwellings there is not one that lies outside the boundaries of our present population.” Dr. Eugene Dubois has discovered in the Post-pliocene deposits of the island of Java the remains of a preeminently hominine anthropoid which he calls Pithecanthropus erectus. Its cranial capacity approaches the physiological minimum in man, and is double that of the gorilla. The thigh bone is in form and dimensions the absolute analogue of that of man, and gives evidence of having supported a habitually erect body. Dr. Dubois unhesitatingly places this extinct Javan ape as the intermediate form between man and the true anthropoid apes. Haeckel (in The Nation, Sept. 15, 1898) and Keane (in Man Past and Present, 3), regard the Pithecanthropus as a “missing link.” But “Nature”regards it as the remains of a human microcephalous idiot. In addition to all this, it deserves to be noticed that man does not degenerate as we travel back in time. “The Enghis skull, the contemporary of the mammoth and the cave-bear, is as large as the average of to-day, and might have belonged to a philosopher.” The monkey nearest to man in physical form is no more intelligent than the elephant or the bee.
3. There are certain facts which mere heredity cannot explain, such for example as the origin of the working-bee from the queen and the drone, neither of which produces honey. The working-bee, moreover, does not transmit the honey-making instinct to its posterity; for it is sterile and childless. If man had descended from the conscienceless brute, we should expect him, when degraded, to revert to his primitive type. On the contrary, he does not revert to the brute, but dies out instead. The theory can give no explanation of beauty in the lowest forms of life, such as molluscs and diatoms. Darwin grants that this beauty must be of use to its possessor, in order to be consistent with its origination through natural selection. But no such use has yet been shown; for the creatures which possess the beauty often live in the dark, or have no eyes to see. So, too, the large brain of the savage is beyond his needs, and is inconsistent with the principle of natural selection which teaches that no organ can permanently attain a size unrequired by its needs and its environment. See Wallace, Natural Selection, 338-360. G. F. Wright, Man and the Glacial Epoch, 242-301—“That man's bodily organization is in some way a development from some extinct member of the animal kingdom allied to the anthropoid apes is scarcely any longer susceptible of doubt.... But he is certainly not descended from any existing species of anthropoid apes.... When once mind became supreme, the bodily adjustment must have been rapid, if indeed it is not necessary to suppose that the bodily preparation for the highest mental faculties was instantaneous, or by what is called in nature a sport.”With this statement of Dr. Wright we substantially agree, and therefore differ from [pg 472]Shedd when he says that there is just as much reason for supposing that monkeys are degenerate men, as that men are improved monkeys. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 1:1:249, seems to have hinted the view of Dr. Shedd: “The strain of man's bred out into baboon and monkey.” Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was related to an ape on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. Huxley replied that he should prefer such a relationship to having for an ancestor a man who used his position as a minister of religion to ridicule truth which he did not comprehend. “Mamma, am I descended from a monkey?” “I do not know, William, I never met any of your father's people.”
4. No species is yet known to have been produced either by artificial or by natural selection. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 323—“It is not absolutely proven that a group of animals having all the characters exhibited by species in nature has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural”; Man's Place in Nature, 107—“Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional, so long as one link in the chain of evidence is wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile with one another, that link will be wanting.” Huxley has more recently declared that the missing proof has been found in the descent of the modern horse with one toe, from Hipparion with two toes, Anchitherium with three, and Orohippus with four. Even if this were demonstrated, we should still maintain that the only proper analogue was to be found in that artificial selection by which man produces new varieties, and that natural selection can bring about no useful results and show no progress, unless it be the method and revelation of a wise and designing mind. In other words, selection implies intelligence and will, and therefore cannot be exclusively natural. Mivart, Man and Apes, 192—“If it is inconceivable and impossible for man's body to be developed or to exist without his informing soul, we conclude that, as no natural process accounts for the different kind of soul—one capable of articulately expressing general conceptions,—so no merely natural process can account for the origin of the body informed by it—a body to which such an intellectual faculty was so essentially and intimately related.” Thus Mivart, who once considered that evolution could account for man's body, now holds instead that it can account neither for man's body nor for his soul, and calls natural selection “a puerile hypothesis” (Lessons from Nature, 300; Essays and Criticisms, 2:289-314).