Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

Sophereus. Will you begin this conference by stating the evolution theory of the origin of the human mind?

Kosmicos. Most willingly. I have thus far spoken of the hypothesis of evolution as affording an explanation of the origin of distinct animals, regarded simply as living organisms, differentiated from each other by the slow process of development from a common stock, by the operation of certain physical causes. I am now to account to you for the origin of the human mind, upon the same hypothesis, namely, that man is a development from some previous and lower organism. I acknowledge that what we call mind, or intellect, has to be accounted for; and that we who hold the evolution theory of the origin of man as an animal must be able to suggest how his intellect became developed by the operation of the same natural causes which produced his physical organization. It is not material, in this inquiry, whether we agree with Darwin in assuming some one distinct living organism of a very low type, as the original stock from which all the other animal organisms have been derived, or whether we go with Spencer back to the primal molecules of organizable matter, and suppose that from a single cell have been developed all the organisms possessing life, in a regular order of succession. Upon either supposition, the doctrine of evolution explains the origin of the human mind. For, upon either supposition, there was a point in the long series of new forms, each descending from a pre-existing form, at which the manifestations of what we call mind may be said to have begun. This link in the connected chain of organisms occurred where nervous organization began to act with some spontaneous movement, with some power of voluntary exertion, as distinguished from the involuntary exertions of a substance that acted only in a certain and fixed way, although that substance was endowed with life. The substance of nervous organization is alike in all animals. In some it acts in a limited manner, and without volitional control; in others, it acts in more varied modes, and it manifests some power of volitional control and volitional rest, as well as of involuntary movement. But in all animals the substance of which nervous organization is composed—the substance which acts in producing movement, whether voluntary or involuntary—is the same kind of physical structure. In the higher animals, the great nerve-center is the organ called the brain. To this organ proceed the impressions produced upon one set of nerves by external objects, or by light or heat. From the same organ proceed, by another set of nerves, those movements which the animal is endowed with the power of making from within. Contemplating, then, the whole animal kingdom as one great connected family, but divided into different species, all of which have a nervous organization, we find that each species is endowed with the power of generating other individuals of the same species and of the same nervous organization. In the long course of development of the several species, or forms of animal life, there comes about a nervous organization which acts freely within certain limits, but in a fixed and invariable mode, so that the movements are uniformly the same, and not in any proper sense volitional. To such an animal we should not attribute any mind, for mind implies some power of comparison and variation, some ability to act in more than a prescribed way. This animal, which I have just supposed to possess a very limited power of nervous action, transmits that power to its descendants; and in some of the successive generations the power remains always at the same fixed point. But the laws of natural and sexual selection are perpetually operating among those descendants. In progress of time there comes to be developed another organism, which has a wider range of nervous action; and, as this ceaseless process of modification and improvement goes on, there is developed still another nervous organization which acts with still more varied movements. As the different species of animals become evolved out of those that have gone before, the expansion of nervous organization goes on; and as each new and higher and more complex stage is gained, individuals of the species have the power to transmit it to their descendants by ordinary generation. At length, as in some of the mammalia, a nervous organization is attained, whose action exhibits manifestations of what we call mind. There appears to be a power of something like reasoning and volition, because the nervous actions are so various and so much adapted to outward circumstances. Thus, before we reach the human animal, we find nervous organizations widely separated from those of the remote progenitor species, because they can do so much more, and can do it with an apparent power of voluntary variation. At last, this process of modifications accumulating upon modifications culminates in an animal in whose nervous organization we find the freest, the most complex, and the most various power of receiving into his brain the impressions derived from the external world, and of transmitting from his brain to the different organs of his body those movements which the external circumstances of his life, or his internal efforts, cause him to strive for and to effect. This animal was the primeval man.[113]

Looking back, then, to the primal source of all nervous organization, in the remote animal in which the nervous structure and action were at the crudest state of development, and remembering that there was a power of transmitting it to offspring, and that natural and sexual selection were unceasingly operating to expand and perfect it, we may trace the successive stages of its modification and growth, from the lowest to the highest, until we reach in the primeval man the highest development that it had yet attained. But throughout all its stages, from the lowest to the highest, the system of nervous organization and action is the same in kind. We do not call its manifestations or action mind, or speak of them as indicating mind, until we find it developed into a condition of some voluntary activity and power of variation, as it is in many of the animals inferior to man. But in all the animals, man included, mind is the action of the nervous organization when it evinces a superior power of variation; and we speak of the brain of such animals as the seat of mind because that organ is the source to and from which nervous action proceeds.

Let me now illustrate this view by the acquisition of articulate speech and the formation of language. In many of the lower animals with which we are acquainted there is a power of uttering vocal sounds, and of understanding them when uttered by their fellows. It must have been a power possessed by those animals which were the progenitors of man in the long line of descent of one species from another. But in them it was a very limited power. It increased as the nervous organization and the vocal organs became in the successive species capable of a more varied action. The sounds of the external world impressed themselves upon the brains of the primeval men more forcibly than they did upon the brains of the other animals, and excited the nervous organization to reproduce or imitate them. Those emotions and desires which originated in the brain itself—the impressions of pain or the sensations of pleasure experienced in the nervous system—sought expression through the vocal organs. Certain sounds repeated alike by the same individual, or by numerous individuals, for a long time, became associated in their brains with certain feelings or sensations. What are called words were thus formed; which, at first, could have been nothing but the utterance of certain sounds by the vocal organs, expressing the sensations felt by the nervous organization, or the imitations of external noises. At length these vocal sounds are gathered in the memory, multiplied and systematized, and a rude language is formed. But, all the while, the first crude human language was nothing but the result of nervous action excited to greater activity than in the other animals, accompanied by nicer and more capable vocal organs and a greater power of using them. This acquisition, obtained by the primeval men, was transmitted to their descendants as an improved physical organization, and in those descendants it finally reached the marvelous development of the most perfect languages of antiquity.

Let us now retrace our steps back to the time when nervous organization, in the successive generations of the whole animal series regarded as one great family of kindred animals successively developed out of a common stock, began to act in such a way as to evince the presence of what we call mind. Once attained, this improved nervous organization would be transmitted by the parents to new individuals; and so on through countless generations, just as the offspring would inherit the same physical structure as the parents in other respects.

Mental phenomena are the products of nervous organization. We have no means of knowing that mind is an organism or an entity. If it is an existence capable of surviving the death of the body, which evolution neither affirms nor denies, you must go to revelation for the grounds of belief in its immortality. There is no conflict between the evolution theory of the nature of mind and the doctrine of immortality as taught by revealed religion.

Sophereus. I am not disposed to constitute myself a champion of revealed religion. I have lately read in the writings of some well-meaning persons, whose positions and convictions made them anxious about the truths of revelation, expressions of the opinion that there is no necessary conflict between the hypothesis of a revelation and the teachings of evolution. I have been rather surprised by such concessions. But through all our discussions, and throughout all my reflections and inquiries, I have excluded revealed religion from the number of proofs of our immortality. But it seems to me that, as to the possibility of a survival of the mind after the death of the body, you have stated yourself out of court, not because you have propounded something that is inconsistent with revelation, although it certainly is, but because you have made mind to consist in nothing but the action of nervous organization, and when that has perished what can remain? You may say that science does not undertake to determine that mind is or is not a special existence capable of surviving the body. But, observe that you attribute to nervous action the production of phenomena to which you give the name of mind, when the nervous action evinces some power of volitional variation and control. Now, when and where did this begin, in the long series of animal organisms which you assume have been successively evolved out of one another? Remember that, according to the system of evolution, there are supposed to have been countless forms of animal organisms, graduating by slow improvements into higher and higher organisms. Where and when and what was the first animal that possessed a nervous organization which would manifest the power of variation in so marked a degree as to render it proper to speak of the animal as possessing or evincing mind? Are not the works of naturalists of the evolution school filled with comparisons of the minds of different animals, and do they not contend that in many of them there are manifestations of mental power, of the exercise of reason and comparison, and a volitional action according to varying circumstances? Did, then, these manifestations of something like mental power begin in the anthropomorphous ape from whom we are supposed to be descended, or who is supposed to be of kin to us? Or did it begin in any one and which of the innumerable intermediate forms between that ape-like creature and the primeval man? And when once this improved and improving nervous organization had been developed and put into a condition to be transmitted to descendants, until in the primeval man it had attained its highest development, what was it but a more sensitive, more various, and complex condition of the substance of which all nervous tissues are composed? And when these tissues are decomposed and resolved into their original material elements, where and what is the mind, whether of man or beast? It is nowhere and nothing, unless you suppose that the improved and improving action of the nervous organization at last developed an existence which is not in itself material or physical, and which may be imperishable and indestructible, while the material and physical organs by and through which it acts for a time perish daily in our sight. If this is a possible, it is a very improbable hypothesis, because the nature of the human mind points to a very different origin.

I surely do not need to tell you that like produces like. If the mind of man is now a spiritual essence, it is a wild conjecture to suppose that it was generated out of the action of a material substance, in whatever animal, or supposed species of animal, its genesis is imagined to have begun. We must therefore determine, from all the evidence within our reach, whether the mind is a spiritual existence. If it is, it is not difficult to reach a rational conclusion that its Creator contrived a means of connecting it for a season with the bodily organs, and made the generative production of each new individual body at the same time give birth to a new individual mind, whenever a new child is born into the world. We can not discover the nature of the connection, or the process by which generative production of a new body becomes also generative production of a new mind. These are mysteries that are hidden from us. But the fact of the connection—the simultaneous production of the new body and the new mind—is a fact that the birth of every child demonstrates. Whether the union takes place at any time before birth, or whether it is only at birth that the mind, the spiritual essence, comes into existence, and so may become capable of an endless life, we can not know. But that this occurs at some time in the history of every human being, we are justified in saying that we know.

I shall now contrast your hypothesis of the origin of the human mind with another and a very different one; and, in stating it, I shall borrow nothing from the Mosaic account of the creation of Adam and Eve. I shall not assert, on the authority of Moses, that God breathed into Adam a living soul, for that would be to resort to a kind of evidence which, for the present, I mean to avoid, and which would bring into consideration the nature of the means by which the Hebrew historian was informed of the fact which he relates, and which he could have known in no other way. It would also give rise to a question of what was meant by "a living soul." But I shall assume that there is a spiritual and a material world; that a spiritual existence is one thing and a material existence is another. I shall assume that there is a spiritual world, because all our commonest experience, our introspection and consciousness, our observation of what the human mind can do, its operations and its productions, its capacity to originate thought and to send it down the course of ages, its power to recognize and obey a moral law as a divine command, the monuments of every kind which attest that it is something which is not matter or material substance, prove to us that the human mind is essentially a spiritual existence; and that while it acts and must act by and through bodily organs, so long as it acts in this world, it is a being quite distinct from all the physical substance and physical organism with which it is connected for a time. Physiology alone can teach us this much at least, that mind is not matter; and experience, consciousness, and observation teach us that while the action of the mind may be suspended for a time when the nervous organization can not normally act, from disease or injury, the mind itself is not destroyed, but its action may be restored with the restoration of the brain to its normal condition.

I am going to assume another thing—the existence of the Creator, the Supreme Governor of the universe, having under his control the whole realms of the spiritual and the material world; alike capable of giving existence to spiritual entities and to material organisms, and capable of uniting them by any connection and for any purpose that might seem to him good. I shall assume this, because some of you evolutionists concede, if I understand rightly, the existence and capacities of the Supreme Being, since you assume, and rightly, that the whole question relates to his methods; and you believe that he chose the method of evolution instead of the method of special creation for all the types of animal life excepting the aboriginal and created lowest form, out of which all the others have been evolved. With these two assumptions, then, the nature of a spiritual existence, and the existence and capacities of the Creator, I now state to you the opposite hypothesis of the origin and nature of the human mind.