Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

"The revolutions of such grand bodies could not take place, in the opinion of the Pythagoreans, without producing a loud and powerful sound; and as their distances from the central fire were supposed to be arranged in musical ratios, so the result of all these separate sounds was full and perfect harmony. To the objection, Why were not the sounds heard by us? they replied that we had heard them constantly and without intermission from the hour of our birth; hence they had become imperceptible by habit."

Beautiful as was this theory—the origin of the phrase, "the music of the spheres"—it owed its perfection as a theory to a pure invention, resorted to in order to carry out the hypothesis of the sacred number Ten, of which all the greater numbers were only compounds and derivatives. This perfect and normal Ten, as a basis on which to rest a bold astronomical hypothesis, required the imagination of the Antichthon, or counter-earth, in order, with the other bodies, to make up the primordial number to whose generative force the whole of these bodies owed their origin. The resort to this conception of number, as a formative and active agent, was doubtless due to the fact that the Pythagoreans were the earliest cultivators of mathematical science. We are told, in fact, that they paved the way for Euclid and Archimedes, notwithstanding their symbolical and mystical fancies, and from their mathematical studies they were led to give exclusive supremacy to arithmetical and geometrical views of Nature. But what is curious about this whole speculation is, that in the invention or substitution of certain facts in order to make a perfect theory, it resembles some modern hypotheses, in which facts have been assumed, or argued as existing from analogies, when there is no evidence which establishes them. Modern instances of this will appear hereafter.

Enough has now been said about the speculations of the "early Greeks" to show the extravagance of Lord Macaulay's assertion that the discoveries of modern astronomy have placed the modern philosopher in no better situation to make safe deductions in natural theology than that occupied by the Hellenic philosophers from Thales to Plato. The evidences of design in the formation of the solar system—of that kind of design which acts in direct and specific exertions of a formative will—have been enormously multiplied by the discoveries of modern astronomy. Those discoveries, instead of leaving us to grope among theories which require the invention or imagination of facts, relate to facts that are demonstrated; and they tend in the strongest manner to establish the hypothesis of an infinite Creator, making laws to govern material objects, and then creating a system of objects to be governed by those laws. In a future chapter I shall endeavor to show why this hypothesis in regard to the solar system is most conformable to the rules of rational belief.

Not to anticipate what will be said hereafter concerning the modern discoveries in anatomy and in comparative zoölogy, it is enough to say here that in the writings of the Greek philosophers, especially of Plato and Aristotle, we may discover what the Greeks knew or did not know, and may therefore compare their knowledge with what is now known. What was known about the human anatomy to the Greeks of Plato's time is probably pretty well reflected in his "Timæus," the celebrated dissertation in which he developed his theory of the Kosmos; for, although Plato in that superb philosophical epic made use of the organs of the human body for ethical and theological purposes, and did not make a special study of matters of fact, it is not probable that in his mode of using them he so far departed from the received ideas of his time respecting the human anatomy that his treatise would have been regarded by his contemporaries as an absurdity. Indeed, Mr. Grote considered that Plato had that anatomical knowledge which an accomplished man of his time could hardly fail to acquire without special study.[8] Moreover, even Galen, who came five centuries after Plato, and whose anatomical knowledge was far greater than could have been commanded in Plato's day, was wholly wrong in respect to the functions of some of the human organs. He agreed with Plato's ethical view of the human organism, but not in his physiological postulates. He considered, according to Mr. Grote, that Plato had demonstrated the hypothesis of one soul to be absurd; he accepted Plato's triplicity of souls, but he located them differently. He held that there are three "originating and governing organs in the body: the brain, which is the origin of all the nerves, both of sensation and motion; the heart, the origin of the arteries; the liver, the sanguifacient organ, and the origin of the veins which distribute nourishment to all parts of the body. These three are respectively the organs of the rational, the energetic, and the appetitive soul."[9] Plato, on the other hand, had placed the rational soul in the cranium, the energetic soul in the thoracic cavity, and the appetitive soul in the abdominal cavity; he connected them by the line of the spinal marrow continuous with the brain, making the rational soul immortal, and the two inferior souls, or two divisions of one inferior soul, mortal. Galen did not decide what is the essence of the three souls, or whether they are immortal. Plato assigned to the liver a very curious function, or compound of functions, making it the assistant of the rational soul in maintaining its ascendency over the appetitive soul, and at the same time making it the seat of those prophetic warnings which the gods would sometimes vouchsafe to the appetitive soul, especially when the functions of the rational soul are suspended, as in sleep, disease, or ecstasy.

But while there was much scientific progress from Plato to Galen, and while Galen's physiological ideas of the functions of the brain, the heart, and the liver held their place until Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century, that discovery and the subsequent investigations proved that Galen, although not far wrong as to the brain, was wholly wrong as to the liver, and partially wrong as to the heart. Yet Galen's physiological theories concerning these organs were founded on many anatomical facts and results of experiments, such as could then be made.

There is another fact which marks the state of anatomical knowledge among the Greeks in the time of Plato, and of Aristotle, who belonged to the same century. The "Timæus" of Plato shows that there were physicians at that period, and that he was acquainted with the writings of Hippocrates. The important fact is, as stated by Mr. Grote, that "the study and practice of medicine was at that time greatly affected by the current speculations respecting Nature as a whole; accomplished physicians combined both lines of study, implicating cosmical and biological theories."[10]

It is now only needful to say that modern anatomy and physiology afford aids to sound deductions in natural theology in reference to the structure of the human body as an animal organism, and all the functions of its different organs, which immeasurably transcend all that was known or assumed among the early Greeks, or in the time of Plato and Aristotle, or in the time of Galen. Notwithstanding the dispute whether the origin of man as an animal is to be referred to a special act of creation, or to the process of what has been called evolution, there can be no controversy on one point, namely, that modern anatomy and physiology have vastly increased our knowledge of the structure of the human frame, and the means of rational speculation upon the nature of intellect, as compared with any means that were possessed by the most accomplished and learned of the Greeks of antiquity. It matters little on which side of the controversy, between creation and evolution, the great anatomists of the present day range themselves. It is upon the facts which their investigations have revealed that we have to judge of the probable truth of the one hypothesis or the other. The probable destiny of man as an immortal being is an inquiry that has certainly lost nothing by our increased knowledge of the facts in his animal structure which tend to support the hypothesis of design in his creation.

Lord Macaulay attributes an utter failure to the efforts of the philosophers, from Plato to Franklin, to "prove" the immortality of the soul without the help of revelation. What did he mean by proof? Revelation is, of course, the only direct proof. It is so, because it is direct testimony of a fact, proceeding from the only source that can have direct and certain knowledge of that fact. When the evidences which are supposed to establish the existence and authority of the witness have become satisfactory to us, we are possessed of proof of our immortality, and this proof is the only direct evidence of which the fact admits, and it constitutes all that should be spoken of as proof. But there is collateral although inferior evidence—inferior, because it consists in facts which show a high degree of probability that the soul of man is immortal, although this kind of evidence is not like the direct testimony of a competent witness. Is all this presumptive evidence, with its weighty tendency to establish the probable truth of immortality, to be pronounced of no value, because it belongs to a different order of proof from that derived from the assertion of a competent witness to the fact? It is one of the advantages of our situation in this life, that the collateral evidence which tends to show the high probability of a future state of existence is not withheld from us. As a supplemental aid to the direct teaching of revelation, it is of inestimable importance if we do not obscure it by theories which pervert its force, and if we reason upon it on sound philosophical principles. What we have to do in estimating the probable truth of our immortality, as shown by the science of natural religion, is to give the same force to moral evidence in this particular department of belief, that we give to the moral evidence which convinces us of many things of which we have no direct proof, or of which the direct proof lies in evidence of another kind.