[CHAPTER II]
HISTORY OF THE IDEA
Among the few stray principles that the future will probably be able to save from the wreck of Spencer's philosophy, is the advisability of looking into the genealogy of an idea. What has been its surroundings? What is its family history? Does it come of good stock, or is its family low and not very respectable?
This is especially true in the case of a scientific idea, which above all others needs to have a clean bill of health and a good family record. But, unfortunately, the idea we are here considering has a bad record, very bad in fact; for the whole family of Cosmogonies, of which this notion is the only surviving representative, were supposed to have been banished from the land of science long ago, and were all reported dead. Some of them had to be executed by popular ridicule, but most of them died natural deaths, the result of inherited taint, in the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is perfectly astonishing how any of the family could have survived over into the twentieth century, in the face of such an antecedent record.
For one of the chief traits of the family as a whole is that of mental disorder of various stages and degrees. Some of them were raving crazy; others were mild and comparatively harmless, except that their drivel had such a disturbing effect on scientific investigations that they had to be put out of the way. It seems such a pity that when this last fellow, early in life, was up before Doctors Huxley and Spencer for examination, he was not locked up or put in limbo forthwith. This is especially unfortunate, because this survivor of an otherwise extinct race has since then produced a large family, some of which it is true have already expired, while the eldest son, Darwinism, was reported in 1901 to be "at its last gasp,"[4] and was even said last year to have had its "tombstone inscription" written by von Hartmann of Germany. But the succession of life idea itself, the father of all this brood, is still certified by those in authority to be healthy and compos mentis.
The Cosmogony Family is a very ancient one, running back to the time of Plato and Thales of Miletus. Indeed the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia seem to indicate that a tribe with very similar characteristics existed several millenniums before the Christian era. But discarding all these, the first men that we need to mention are perhaps Burnet and Whiston, who knew no other way of arriving at geological truth than to spin a yarn about how the world was made. Woodward seems to have had a little better sense, and is named along with Hooke and John Ray as one of the real founders of the science.
Unfortunately the brood of Cosmogonists was not dead, for Moro and De Maillet were at this same period spinning their fantastic theories about the origin of things; or as Zittel puts it, "accepted the risks of error, and set about explaining the past and present from the subjective standpoint."[5] This tendency we will find to be a birthmark in the family, and will serve to invariably identify any of them wherever found. We must remember this, and apply the test to the modern survivors.
Buffon seems to have been really the founder of the family in the modern form. He is credited with the sarcastic remark that "geologists must feel like the ancient Roman augurs who could not meet each other without laughing;" though in view of his fantastic scheme of seven "epochs," in which he endeavors to portray "the beginning, the past, and the future (sic) of our planet,"[6] one is reminded of the common symptom which manifests itself in thinking all the rest of the world crazy.
The "Heroic Age of Geology" succeeded this period, and was characterized largely by a determination to discard speculation, and to seek to build up a true science of actual fact and truth.
We have already seen from Spencer's remarks that A. G. Werner, who was, however, one of the leaders in Germany at this time, was very far from following true inductive methods. And the following language of Sir Arch. Geikie shows that in him the family characteristics were decidedly prominent:
"But never in the history of science did a stranger hallucination arise than that of Werner and his school, when they supposed themselves to discard theory and build on a foundation of accurately-ascertained fact. Never was a system devised in which theory was more rampant; theory, too, unsupported by observation, and, as we now know, utterly erroneous. From beginning to end of Werner's method and its applications, assumptions were made for which there was no ground, and these assumptions were treated as demonstrable facts. The very point to be proved was taken for granted, and the geognosts, who boasted of their avoidance of speculation, were in reality among the most hopelessly speculative of all the generations that had tried to solve the problem of the theory of the earth."[7]