The spectra perceived before epileptic fits vary widely. They may be stars or sparks, spherical luminous bodies, or mere flashes of light, white or coloured, still or in movement. Often they are more elaborate, distinct visions of faces, persons, objects, places. They may be combined with sensations from the other special senses, as with hearing and smell. In one case a warning, constant for years, began with thumping in the chest ascending to the head, where it became a beating sound. Then two lights appeared, advancing nearer with a pulsating motion. Suddenly these disappeared and were replaced by the figure of an old woman in a red cloak, always the same, who offered the patient something that had the smell of Tonquin beans, and then he lost consciousness. Such warnings may be called psychovisual sensations. The psychical element may be very strong, as in one woman whose fits were preceded by a sudden distinct vision of London in ruins, the river Thames emptied to receive the rubbish, and she the only survivor of the inhabitants.
Had a man of lesser renown and mental calibre than Mr. Wallace thrown the weight of his testimony into the scales in favour of spiritualism, there would have been neither necessity nor excuse for this digression. But both these pleas prevail when we find the co-formulator of the Darwinian theory among mediums and their dupes. The respectful attention which his words command: the tremendous claims which he makes on behalf of the phenomena at séances as proving the existence of soul apart from body after death, and as revealing the conditions under which it lives, have made incumbent the foregoing attempt to indicate what other explanation is given of those phenomena, showing how these fall in with all we know of man’s tendencies to imperfect observation and self-deception, and with all that history tells of the persistence of animistic ideas.
A salutary lesson on the use and misuse of the imagination is thus taught. That which, under wholesome restraint, is the initiative and incentive of inquiry, of enterprise, and of noble ideas; unrestricted, leads the dreamer and the enthusiast into ingulfing quicksands of illusions and delusions. Hence the necessity of curbing a faculty so that in unison with reason, it works toward definite ends within the domain, marking man’s limits of service. As Dr. Maudsley reminds us in his sane and sober book on Natural Causes and Supernatural Seeming, “not by standing out of Nature in the ecstasy of a rapt and over-strained idealism of any sort, but by large and close and faithful converse with Nature and human nature in all their moods, aspects, and relations, is the solid basis of fruitful ideas and the soundest mental development laid. The endeavour to stimulate and strain any mental function to an activity beyond the reach and need of a physical correlate in external nature, and to give it an independent value, is certainly an endeavour to go directly contrary to the sober and salutary method by which solid human development has taken place in the past, and is taking place in the present.”
The story of Darwin’s work must now be resumed. Shortly after the Linnæan meeting, he prepared a series of chapters which, always regarded by him as an “Abstract,” ultimately took book form, and was published, under the title of the Origin of Species, on the 24th of November, 1859.
The story of the reception of the work is admirably told by Huxley in the chapter which he contributed to Darwin’s Life and Letters, and it may be commended as useful reading to a generation which, drinking-in Darwinism from its birth, will not readily understand how such storm and outcry as rent the air, both in scientific as well as clerical quarters, could have been raised. “In fact,” says Huxley, “the contrast between the present condition of public opinion upon the Darwinian question; between the estimation in which Darwin’s views are now held in the scientific world; between the acquiescence, or, at least, quiescence, of the theologian of the self-respecting order at the present day, and the outburst of antagonism on all sides in 1858-59, when the new theory respecting the origin of species first became known to the older generation to which I belong, is so startling that, except for documentary evidence, I should be sometimes inclined to think my memories dreams.” The like reflection arises when we consider the indifference with which books of the most daring and revolutionary character, both in theology and morals, are treated nowadays, in contrast to the uproar which greeted such a brutum fulmen as Essays and Reviews. As for Colenso’s Pentateuch, and books of its type, orthodoxy has long taken them to its bosom.
So far as the larger number of naturalists, and of the intelligent public who followed their lead, were concerned, there was an absolutely open mind on the question of the mutation of species. There had been, as the foregoing sections of this book have shown, a long time of preparation and speculation. We certainly find the keynote of Evolution in Heraclitus, and more than two thousand years after his time Herbert Spencer, above all men, had removed it from the empirical stage, and placed it on a base broad as the facts which supported it. But it needed the leaven of the human and personal to stir it into life, and touch man in his various interests; and not all that Mr. Spencer had done in application of the theory of development to social questions and institutions could avail much till Darwin’s theory gave it practical shape. Dissertations on the passage of the “homogeneous to the heterogeneous”; explanations of the theory of the evolution of complex sidereal systems out of diffused vapours of seemingly simple texture, interested people only in a vague and wondering fashion. But when Darwin illustrated the theory of the modification of life-forms by familiar examples gathered from his own experiments and observations, and from intercourse with breeders of pigeons, horses, and dogs, this went to men’s “business and bosoms,” and if the vulgar interpreted Darwinism, as some, who should know better, interpret it even now, as explaining man’s descent from a monkey, or how a bear became a whale by taking to swimming, the thoughtful accepted it as a master-key unlocking not the mystery of origins or of causes of variations, but the mystery of the ceaselessly-acting agent which, operating on favourable variations, has brought about myriads of species from simple forms.
As Huxley reminds us in the passage quoted above, the attitude of the clergy toward the theory of Evolution has undergone an astounding change. Dr. Whewell remarked that every great discovery in science has had to pass through three stages. First, people said, “It is absurd”; then they said, “It is contrary to the Bible”; finally, they said, “We always knew that it was so.” Thus it has been with Evolution. It is calmly discussed; even claimed as a “defender of the faith,” at Church Congresses nowadays. It was not so in the sixties. Here and there a single voice was raised in qualified sympathy—Charles Kingsley showed more than this—but both in the Old and the New World the “drum ecclesiastic” was beaten. Cardinal Manning declared Darwinism to be a “brutal philosophy, to wit, there is no God and the ape is our Adam.” Protestant and Catholic agreed in condemning it as “an attempt to dethrone God”; as “a huge imposture,” as “tending to produce disbelief of the Bible,” and “to do away with all idea of God,” as “turning the Creator out of doors.” Such are fair samples to be culled from the anthology of invective which was the staple content of nearly every “criticism.” Occasionally some parody of reasoning appears when the “argument” is advanced that there is “a simpler explanation of the presence of these strange forms among the works of God in the fall of Adam,” but even this pseudo-concession to logic is rare; and one divine had no hesitation in predicting the fate of Darwin and his followers in the world to come. “If,” said a Dr. Duffield in the Princeton Review, “the development theory of the origin of man shall, in a little while, take the place—as doubtless it will—with other exploded scientific speculations, then they who accept it with its proper logical consequences will, in the life to come, have their portion with those who in this life ‘know not God and obey not the Gospel of His Son.’” But the most notable attack came from Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford, in the Quarterly Review of July, 1860. “It is,” said Huxley, in his review of Haeckel’s Evolution of Man, “a production which should be bound in good stout calf, or better, asses’ skin, by the curious book-collector, together with Brougham’s attack on the undulatory theory of light when it was first propounded by Young.” The bishop declared “the principle of natural selection to be absolutely incompatible with the word of God” and as “contradicting the revealed relations of creation to its Creator.” If by “revealed relations” and the “word of God” the Bible is intended, the evolutionist is in agreement with the bishop. But, at this time of day, it seems scarcely worth while to shake the dust off articles which have gone the way of all purely controversial matter, and justification for reference to them lies only in the fact that the contest between the biologists and the bishops is not yet ended.
In contrast to all this, and in evidence of the compromise by which theology is vainly striving to justify itself, are these vague sentences from Archdeacon Wilson’s address at the Church Congress at Shrewsbury in the autumn of 1896: “It is scarcely too much to say that the Theistic Evolutionist cannot be otherwise than a practical Trinitarian, and cannot find a difficulty in the Incarnation or in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.” “Christian doctrine, apart from the statement of historical facts, is the attempt to create out of Christ’s teaching, a philosophy of life which shall satisfy these needs (i. e., the needs of humanity), and it will therefore remain the same in substance. But the form in which that doctrine will be presented must change with man’s intellectual environment. The bearing of Evolution on Christian doctrine is, therefore, in a word, to modify, not the doctrine, but the form in which it is expressed.”
Postponing the story of the famous debate between Wilberforce and Huxley, the reception accorded to the Origin of Species by Darwin’s scientific contemporaries may be noted. Herbert Spencer’s position, as will be shown later on, was already distinctive: he was a Darwinian before Darwin. Hooker, Huxley,—who said that he was prepared to go to the stake, if needs be, in support of some parts of the book,—Bates, and Lubbock were immediate converts; so were Asa Gray and Lyell, but with reservations, for Lyell, whose creed was Unitarian, never wholly accepted the inclusion of man, “body, soul, and spirit,” as the outcome of natural selection. Henslow and Pictet went one mile, but refused to go twain; Agassiz, Murray, and Harvey would have none of the new heresy; neither would Adam Sedgwick, who wrote a long protest to Darwin, couched in loving terms, and ending with the hope that “we shall meet in heaven.” The attitude of Owen, if apparently neutral or tentative in open conversation, was, as an anonymous critic, deadly hostile. Although it is not included in the list of his writings given in the Life by his grandson, he is known to have been the author of the critique on the Origin of Species in the Edinburgh Review of April, 1860.
At the outset of the article he speaks of Darwin’s “seduction” of “several, perhaps the majority of our younger naturalists” by the homœopathic form of the transmutation of species presented to them under the phrase of natural selection.... “Owen has long stated his belief that some pre-ordained law or secondary cause is operative in bringing about the change ... we therefore regard the painstaking and minute comparison by Cuvier of the osteological and every other character that could be tested in the mummified ibis, cat, or crocodile with those of species living in his time; and the equally philosophical investigation of the polyps operating at an interval of thirty thousand years in the building-up of coral reefs by the profound palæontologist of Neuchâtel (Agassiz is here referred to), as of far truer value in reference to the inductive determination of the question of the origin of species than the speculations of Demailler, Buffon, Lamarck, ‘Vestiges,’ Baden Powell, or Darwin” (p. 532).