Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

A pair of human beings, male and female, is created by the hand and will of the Almighty; and to each is given a physical organism, and a spiritual, intellectual self, or mind, which is endowed with consciousness and capable of thought. Why is this a rational supposition, aside from any evidence of the fact derived from its assertion by an inspired or a divinely instructed witness? It is so, because, when this aboriginal pair of human creatures fulfill the law of their being, by the procreation of other creatures of the same kind, the offspring must be supposed to possess whatever the parents possessed of peculiar and characteristic organization. This law of transmission is stamped upon all the forms of organic life; and we may well apply it to the first pair of human beings. Its operation must have begun in them and their offspring. Every law that proceeded from the will of the Supreme Being began to operate at some time; and this law, like all others, must have been put in operation by the Creator at some definite period. He created in the first pair a bodily organization, and he created in each of them the spiritual entity that we now call mind, and established its connection with their bodily organs. He established in them also the power of procreating offspring; and this included the production of a new individual of the same species, in whom would be united, by the same mysterious bond, the same kind of physical organization and the same kind of spiritual or intellectual existence, which is not matter, and could not have been generated out of matter alone. The beginning of this connection of body and mind in the first parents was an occasional and special exercise of the divine power. It was not a miraculous exercise of power, because a miracle, in the proper sense, implies some action aside from a previously established course of things. It was simply a first exercise of the power in the case of the creation of the first human pair; that is, it was the establishment in them, specially, of the union of the body and soul. Its repetition in the offspring, for all time, and through successive generations, was left to the operation of the laws of procreation and heredity. The nature and operation of those laws are wrapped in mystery; but about the fact of their existence, and of the compound procreation of a new body and a new mind at every new birth, there can be no doubt whatever.

It seems to me that this hypothesis has in its favor a vast preponderance of probability, because—

1. The generation of mind or spirit out of matter is inconceivable.

2. The creation of mind by the Almighty is just as conceivable as his creation of a material organism; and the latter is conceded by all naturalists who admit that there was a first animal organism; and even some of the evolutionists hold that the first animal organism was directly fashioned by the Creator, although all the succeeding organisms were formed, as they contend, by natural and sexual selection.

3. The nature of mind—of the human mind—is the same in all individuals of the race. They may differ in mental power, but they all possess an intellectual principle that is the same in kind. To the production of mind, or its formation, the process of evolution was not necessary. Not only was it unnecessary, but in the nature of things it was not adapted to do what it is supposed to have done in the production of physical organisms. To suppose that the Creator, instead of the direct exercise of his power of creation, left it to the material laws of natural and sexual selection to produce a mind, is to suppose him to have resorted to a method that was both unnecessary and indirect, and was furthermore incapable of effecting that kind of product. In reasoning about the methods of the Creator, it is certainly irrational to suppose him to have resorted to one that was so ill adapted to the accomplishment of his object. In the accomplishment of some physical objects, we may well suppose that they have been brought about by physical agencies that have operated very slowly and indirectly; and we can see that this has often been the case in regard to many material products. But for the production of mind, for the accomplishment of a spiritual existence, there can be imagined no secondary agencies, no gradual growth out of antecedent existences or substances, no evolution out of some other and that other a material organism. The first mind, the first human soul, must have come direct from the hand and will of God. The succeeding minds may well have been left to owe their existence to the laws of procreation, by a process which we can not understand, but of which we have proof in the birth of every child that has been born of woman.

Kosmicos. We now have the two hypotheses of the origin and nature of the human mind fairly before us; and here I must point out to you wherein you do injustice to my side of the question. In the first place, your assumption of one pair of progenitors of the human race from whom have diverged all the varieties of the race, does not encounter the evolution process of man's descent as an animal. It is either an arbitrary assumption, or it is derived from the Mosaic account of the creation, which, in a scientific point of view, and aside from the supposed authority of that story, is just as arbitrary an assumption as if the book of Genesis had never existed. Take, therefore, Darwin's hypothesis of the zoölogical series: First, a fish-like animal, of course inhabiting the water; next, the amphibians, capable of living in the water and on the land; next, the ancient marsupials; next, the quadrumana and all the higher mammals, among whom are to be classed the Simiadæ or monkeys; and out of these came the hairy, tailed quadruped, arboreal in its habits, from which man is descended. This long line of descent is filled with diversified forms, intermediate between the several principal forms which are known to us, and which were successively the progenitors of man. Now, hear Darwin on the subject of one pair of progenitors:

"But since he [man] attained to the rank of manhood he has diverged into distinct races, or, as they may be more fitly called, sub-species. Some of these, such as the negro and European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species. Nevertheless, all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only by inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterized would probably deserve to rank as man. It must not be supposed that the divergence of each race from the other races, and of all from a common stock, can be traced back to any one pair of progenitors. On the contrary, at every stage in the process of modification all the individuals which were in any way better fitted for their conditions of life, though in different degrees, would have survived in greater numbers than the less well fitted. The process would have been like that followed by man, when he does not intentionally select particular individuals, but breeds from all the superior individuals and neglects the inferior. He thus slowly but surely modifies his stock, and unconsciously forms a new strain. So with respect to modifications acquired independently of selection, and due to variations arising from the nature of the organism and the action of the surrounding conditions, or from changed habits of life, no single pair will have been modified much more than the other pairs inhabiting the same country, for all will have been continually blended through free intercrossing."[114]

The meaning of this is that if you go back to the period when an animal, by the slow process of modification which was continually operating among the preceding organisms, had been raised to the present state of man, and then follow out the divergencies into the distinct races of men, those divergencies would not have occurred in consequence of any one pair having been modified much more than the other pairs inhabiting the same country, but all the individuals would have undergone a continually blending process through unrestrained intercrossing; and those individuals of both sexes, who became in a superior degree fitted for their conditions of life, would have survived in greater numbers than the less well fitted, and would have transmitted to their posterity those peculiarities which tended at last to produce different races of the human family. So that the notion of a single pair of the negro variety, or of a single pair of the Caucasian variety, formed and completed as an independent stock, is not necessary to account for these varieties.

To apply this, now, to the slow production of man's intellectual faculties, we must, if we would do justice to Darwin's hypothesis of the method in which he was developed as an animal, bear in mind that his mental powers, like his animal structure, have been the necessary acquirement of new powers and capacities by gradation, through the perpetual process of modification, and retention and transmission of the new acquisitions. Darwin, indeed, does not professedly undertake the genealogy of the human mind; but he appears to hold the opinion that in future psychology will be based on the gradual acquisition of each mental power and capacity, as distinguished from their complete production in any one pair, or in any one being; and he refers to Herbert Spencer as having already securely laid the foundation for this new psychology.[115]

I take, therefore, the great English naturalist as the person who has most satisfactorily explained the origin of man as an animal, and the great English philosopher as the person who has propounded the most satisfactory theory of the origin of the human mind. The two hypotheses run parallel to and support each other. Man, as respects his mere animal structure, is an organism developed by a slow process of modification out of preceding organisms. His mental faculties have one by one grown out of the operation of the same physical agencies that have formed his animal structure, and they have not been bestowed at once upon any one pair, or upon any one individual of the race. After they have all been acquired, as we now know and recognize them, they have descended to the successive generations of the race.