While fully recognising these dangers, I nevertheless feel that the Jesuit Father Wasmann, and his colleagues, have—unwittingly—done a very great service to the progress of pure science. The Catholic Church, the most powerful and widespread of the Christian sects, sees itself compelled to capitulate to the idea of evolution. It embraces the most important application of the idea, Lamarck and Darwin's theory of descent, which it had vigorously combated until twenty years ago. It does, indeed, mutilate the great tree, cutting off its roots and its highest branch; it rejects spontaneous generation or archigony at the bottom, and the descent of man from animal ancestors above. But these exceptions will not last. Impartial biology will take no notice of them, and the religious creed will at length determine that the more complex species have been evolved from a series of simpler forms according to Darwinian principles. The belief in a supernatural creation is restricted to the production of the earliest and simplest stem-forms, from which the "natural species" have taken their origin; Wasmann gives that name to all species that are demonstrably descended from a common stem-form; in other words, to what other classifiers call "stems" or "phyla." The 4,000 species of ants in his system, which he believes to be genetically related, are comprised by him in one "natural species." On the other hand, man forms one isolated "natural species" for himself, without any connection with the other mammals.
The Jesuitical sophistry that Wasmann betrays in this ingenious distinction between "systematic and natural species" is also found in his philosophic "Thoughts on Evolution" (chap. viii.), his distinction between philosophic and scientific evolution, or between evolution in one stem and in several stems. His remarks (in chap. vii.) on "the cell and spontaneous generation" are similarly marred by sophistry. The question of spontaneous generation or archigony—that is to say, of the first appearance of organic life on the earth, is one of the most difficult problems in biology, one of those in which the most distinguished students betray a striking weakness of judgment. Dr. Heinrich Schmidt, of Jena, has lately written an able and popular little work on that subject. In his Spontaneous Generation and Professor Reinke (1903), he has shown to what absurd consequences the ecclesiastical ideas lead on this very question. The botanist Reinke, of Kiel, is now regarded amongst religious people as the chief opponent of Darwinism; for many conservatives this is because he is a member of the Prussian Herrenhaus (a very intelligent body, of course!). Although he is a strong evangelical, many of his mystic deductions agree surprisingly with the Catholic speculations of Father Wasmann. This is especially the case with regard to spontaneous generation. They both declare that the first appearance of life must be traced to a miracle, to the work of a personal deity, whom Reinke calls the "cosmic intelligence." I have shown the unscientific character of these notions in my last two works, The Riddle of the Universe, and The Wonders of Life. I have drawn attention especially to the widely distributed monera of the chromacea class—organisms of the simplest type conceivable, whose whole body is merely an unnucleated, green, structureless globule of plasm (Chroococcus); their whole vital activity consists of growth (by forming plasm) and multiplication (by dividing into two). There is little theoretical difficulty in conceiving the origin of these new simple monera from inorganic compounds of albumen, or their later transformation into the simplest nucleated cells. All this, and a good deal more that will not fit in his Jesuitical frame, is shrewdly ignored by Wasmann.
In view of the great influence that Catholicism still has on public life in Germany, through the Centre party, this change of front should be a great gain to education. Virchow demanded as late as 1877 that the dangerous doctrine of evolution should be excluded from the schools. The Ministers of Instruction of the two chief German States gratefully adopted this warning from the leader of the progressive party, forbade the teaching of Darwinian ideas, and made every effort to check the spread of biological knowledge. Now, twenty-five years afterwards, the Jesuits come forward, and demand the opposite. They recognise openly that the hated theory of evolution is established, and try to reconcile it with the creed! What an irony of history! And we find much the same story when we read the struggles for freedom of thought and for the recognition of evolution in the other educated countries of Europe.
In Italy, its cradle and home, educated people generally look upon the papacy with the most profound disdain. I have spent many years in Italy, and have never met an educated Italian of such bigoted and narrow views as we usually find amongst educated German Catholics—represented with success in the Reichstag by the Centre party. It is proof enough of the reactionary character of German Catholics that the Pope himself describes them as his most vigorous soldiers, and points them out as models to the faithful of other nations. As the whole history of the Roman Church shows, the charlatan of the Vatican is the deadly enemy of free science and free teaching. The present German Emperor ought to regard it as his most sacred duty to maintain the tradition of the Reformation, and to promote the formation of the German people in the sense of Frederick the Great. Instead of this we have to look on with heavy hearts while the Emperor, badly advised and misled by those in influence about him, suffers himself to be caught closer and closer in the net of the Catholic clergy, and sacrifices to it the intelligence of the rising generation. In September, 1904, the Catholic journals announced triumphantly that the adoption of Catholicism by the Emperor and his Chancellor was close at hand.[5]
The firmness of the belief in conventional dogmas, which hampers the progress of rational enlightenment in orthodox Protestant circles as well as Catholic, is often admired as an expression of the deep emotion of the German people. But its real source is their confusion of thought and their credulity, the power of conservative tradition, and the reactionary state of political education. While our schools are bent under the yoke of the creeds, those of our neighbours are free. France, the pious daughter of the Church, gives anxious moments to her ambitious mother. She is breaking the chains of the Concordat, and taking up the work of the Reformation. In Germany, the birthplace of the Reformation, the Reichstag and the Government vie with each other in smoothing the paths for the Jesuits, and fostering, instead of suppressing, the intolerant spirit of the sectarian school. Let us hope that the latest episode in the history of evolution, its recognition by Jesuitical science, will bring about the reverse of what they intend—the substitution of rational science for blind faith.
[CHAPTER II]
THE STRUGGLE OVER OUR GENEALOGICAL TREE
OUR APE-RELATIVES AND THE VERTEBRATE-STEM