and has hauled him up for our inspection. Mr. Laing is before all else an evolutionist, with an unshaken belief in spontaneous generation. He is quite confident that force and atoms will explain everything. He seems to mean force, pure and simple, without any intelligent direction; atoms, ultimate, homogeneous, undifferentiated. No doubt, if the subsequent evolution depends on the kind and direction of force, or on the nature of the atoms; then there is a remoter question for physics to determine; but if, as he implies, force and atoms are simple and ultimate, then evolution is as fortuitous as a sand-storm, or more so. All prior to force and atoms is "behind the veil." "The material universe is composed of ether, matter, and energy." [58] Ether is a billion times more elastic than air, "almost infinitely rare," [59] its oscillations must be at least seven hundred billions per second, "it exerts no gravitating or retarding force;" in short, Mr. Laing has to confess some uncertainty about his original dogma as to the triple constituents of the universe, and say "that it may be almost doubted whether such an ether has any real material existence, and is anything more than a sort of mathematical [why 'mathematical'?] entity." [60] "It is clear that matter really does consist of minute particles which do not touch," and even these we must conceive of as "corks as it were floating in an ocean of ether, causing waves in it by their own proper movement," [61]—an explanation which loses some of its helpfulness when we remember that the ethereal ocean is only a mathematical entity. "A cubic centimetre contains 21,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules," "the number of impacts received by each molecule of air during one second will be 4,700 millions. The distance traversed between each impact averages 95/1000000 of a millimetre," and so on with lines of ciphers to overawe the gaping millions with Mr. Laing's minute certainty as to the ultimate constitution of matter. [62]
As to how atoms came into existence, he can only reply, "Behind the veil, behind the veil;" for it is at this point at last that he becomes agnostic.[63] The notion of creation is rejected (after Spencer) as inconceivable, because unimaginable, as though the origination of every change in the phenomenal world were not just as unimaginable; we see movement in process, and we see its results, but its inception is unimaginable, and its efficient cause still more so.
The evolution of man is practically taken for granted, the only question being the when.
We have the old argument from embryonic transformism brought forward without any hint that later investigation tends to show differentiation further and further back, prior to segmentation and, according to some, in the very protoplasm itself. Nothing could be more inaccurate than to say "every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of a mammal and finally of man." [64] All that can be truly said is that the embryonic man is at certain stages not superficially distinguishable from the embryonic fish—quite a different thing, and no more significant than that the adult man possesses organs and functions in common with other species of the animal genus.
Mr. Laing's own conclusions from skulls and human remains which he takes to be those of tertiary man, show man to be as obstinately unlike the "dryopithecus" as ever, in fact, the reputedly oldest skulls [65] are a decided improvement on the Carnstadt and Neanderthal type. Even then man seems to have been the same flint-chipping, tool-making, speaking animal as now. So convinced is he of this essential and ineradicable difference in his heart, that seeing traces of design in palaeolithic flint flakes, and so forth, he has "not the remotest doubt as to their being the work of human hands,"—"as impossible to doubt as it would be if we had found clasp-knives and carpenters adzes." [66] Perhaps Professor Boyd-Dawkins, who credits the "dryopithecus" with these productions, is a more consistent evolutionist; but at present Mr. Laing is defending a thesis as to man's antiquity. Yet he has just said that these flint instruments are "only one step in advance of the rude, natural stone which an intelligent orang or chimpanzee might pick up to crack a cocoa-nut with." Truly a very significant step, though it be only one. How hard this is to reconcile with what Mr. Laing ascribes to dogs and ants elsewhere, or with what he says on page 173, "These higher apes remain creatures of very considerable intelligence…. There is a chimpanzee now in the Zoological Gardens … which can do all but speak" [either it speaks, or it does not. It is precisely a case of the "only one step" quoted above. Here if anywhere a "miss is as good as a mile">[, "which understands almost every word the keeper says to it, and when told to sing will purse out its lips and try to utter connected notes." [How on earth do we know what it is trying to do?] "In their native state they (apes) form societies and obey a chief." [The old fallacy of metaphors adverted to in relation to ants and dogs.] Yet "no animal has ever learned to speak," "no chimpanzee or gorilla has ever been known to fashion any implement." [67] Their nearest approach to invention is in the building of huts or nests, in which they "are very inferior to most species of birds, to say nothing of insects." On the other hand, "as regards tool-making, no human race is known which has not shown some faculty in this direction." [68] "The difference is a very fundamental one," and "may be summed up in the words 'arrested development.'" Words, indeed! but what do they mean? They mean that these animals have not developed the faculties of speech and tool-making, which would have been most useful to them in the struggle for existence, the reason being that they did not; and this reason is exalted into a cause or law of "arrested development." Who or what arrested it? The advantage of the term is that it implies that they were on the point of developing, that they could "all but speak," were "trying to utter connected notes," were "but one step" behind flint axes, when some cosmic power said, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no further."
If the dog had organs of speech or an instrument like the hand by which to place himself in closer relation to the outer world, he would doubtless be on a footing of mental equality with man, according to Mr. Laing. [69] The elephant's trunk accounts for his superior sagacity, and the horse suffers by his hoof-enclosed forefoot. [70] "Given a being with man's brain, man's hand, and erect stature, it is easy to see how intelligence must have been gradually evolved." [71] Now honestly it seems to us that many animals are as well provided as man is with a variety of flexible organs of communication with the outward world (for example, the antennae of insects, the prehensile tails of some monkeys, whose hands are as lithe as man's and articulated bone for bone and joint for joint). But letting this pass, we thought evolutionists allowed that structure is determined by function, rather than the converse; and so the confession that "it is not so easy to see how this difference of the structure arose," [72] surprises us, coming from Mr. Laing; though why this difference should exist at all, on evolution principles, is a far greater difficulty. Yet he confesses that "the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape, [73] is too great to admit of one being possibly the direct descendant of the other." The ape, then, is not a man whose development is arrested. "The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation, … still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or gorilla. Even the idiot is … an arrested man and, not an ape." [74]
Nearly all these (higher intellectual and moral) faculties appear in a rudimentary state in animals…. Still there is this wide distinction that even in the highest animals these faculties remain rudimentary and seem incapable of progress, while even in the lowest races of man they have reached a much higher level [75] and seem capable of almost unlimited development. [76] Why does he not seek out the reason of this, or is he satisfied with the words "arrested development"? If I find a child who can repeat a poem of Tennyson's, am I to be puzzled because it cannot originate one as good, or go on even to something better? Am I to ascribe to it a rudimentary but arrested poetic faculty? Surely the same poem proceeding from the lips of the poet and of the child he has taught, are essentially different effects, though outwardly the same. If there were a true living germ, it would most certainly develope. If the savage developes through contact with the civilized man after centuries of degradation, why have not domesticated dogs, who are, according to Laing, their intellectual and moral equals, developed long ago?
However, as "evolution has become the axiom of science and is admitted by every one who has the slightest pretensions to be considered a competent authority," [77] it is preposterous to suppose man an exception, whatever be the difficulties. [78] And so Mr. Laing, assuming axiomatically that man and the ape have a common ancestor, is interested to make the differences between them deeply marked, and that, as far back as he can, for thereby "Human Origins" are pushed back by hundreds of thousands of years. If miocene man is as distinct from the ape as recent man, the inference is that we are then as far from the source as ever. Hence it is to geology he looks for the strongest basis of his position. One thought till lately that geology was a tentative science, hardly credited with the name of science, but Mr. Laing wisely and boldly classes it among the "exact sciences," whose subject-matter is "flint instruments, incised bones, and a few rare specimens of human skulls and skeletons, the meaning of which has to be deciphered by skilled experts." [79] "The conclusions of geology," up to the Silurian period, "are approximate facts, not theories." [80]
If he means that the only legitimate data of geologists are facts of observation, classified and recorded, well and good; but to deny that they deal largely in hypotheses, and use them constantly as the premisses for inferences which are equally hypothetical, is palpably absurd. First of all we are to "assume the principle of uniformity" which Lyell is said to have established on an unassailable basis and to have made the fundamental axiom of geological science. He "has shown conclusively that while causes identical with … existing causes will, if given sufficient time, account for all the facts hitherto observed, there is not a single fact which proves the occurrence of a totally different order of causes." [81] This, however, is (1) limited to the period of geology which gives record of organic life, and not to the earlier astronomical period; nor (2) does it exclude changes in temperature, climate, distribution of seas and lands; nor (3) does it "affirm positively that there may not have been in past ages explosions more violent than that of Krakatoa; lava-streams more extensive than that of Skaptar-Jokul, and earthquakes more powerful than that which uplifted five or six hundred miles of the Pacific coast of South America six or seven feet." [82] Now, seeing that all these cataclysms have occurred within the brief limits of most recent time, compared with which the period of pretended uniformity is almost an eternity, what sort of presumption or probability is there that such occurrences should have been confined to historical times; and is not the presumption all the other way? Again, it is largely on the supposition of this antecedently unlikely uniformity, that Mr. Laing argues to the antiquity of life on earth; whereas Lyell's conclusion warrants nothing of the kind, being simply: that present causes, "given sufficient time," would produce the observed effects. [83]
Our tests of geologic time are denudation and deposition. We are told "the present rate of denudation of a continent is known with considerable accuracy from careful measurements of the quantity of solid matter carried down by rivers." [84] Now it is a considerable tax on our faith in science to believe that the débris of the Mississippi can be so accurately gauged as to give anything like approximate value to the result of one foot of continental denudation in 6,000 years. We cannot of course suppose this to be the result of 6,000 years registered observations, but an inference from the observations of some comparatively insignificant period; and we have also to suppose that the very few rivers which have been observed form a sufficient basis for a conclusion as to all rivers. In fact, a more feebly supported generalization from more insufficient data it is hard to conceive. To speak of it as "an approximation based on our knowledge of the time in which similar results on a smaller scale have been produced by existing natural laws within the historical period," [85] is a very inadequate qualification, especially when we have just been told that "here, at any rate, we are on comparatively certain ground, … these are measurable facts which have been ascertained by competent observers." [86]