It would be interesting to obtain a glimpse of the mental representation of Evolution in the scientific brain of a Materialist. What is Evolution? If asked to define the full and complete meaning of the [pg 690] term, neither Huxley nor Hæckel will be able to do so any better than does Webster:
The act of unfolding; the process of growth, development; as the evolution of a flower from a bud, or an animal from the egg.
Yet the bud must be traced through its parent-plant to the seed, and the egg to the animal or bird that laid it; or at any rate to the speck of protoplasm from which it expanded and grew. And both the seed and the speck must have the latent potentialities in them for the reproduction and gradual development, the unfolding of the thousand and one forms or phases of evolution, through which they must pass before the flower or the animal is fully developed? Hence, the future plan—if not a design—must be there. Moreover, that seed has to be traced, and its nature ascertained. Have the Darwinians been successful in this? Or will the Moneron be cast in our teeth? But this atom of the Watery Abysses is not homogeneous matter; and there must be something or somebody that had moulded and cast it into being.
Here Science is once more silent. But since there is no self-consciousness as yet in speck, seed, or germ, according to both Materialists and Psychologists of the modern school—Occultists agreeing in this for once with their natural enemies—what is it that guides the force or forces so unerringly in this process of Evolution? “Blind force”? As well call “blind” the brain which evolved in Hæckel his Pedigree of Man and other lucubrations. We can easily conceive that the said brain lacks an important centre or two; for whoever knows anything of the anatomy of the human, or even of any animal, body, and is still an Atheist and a Materialist, must be “hopelessly insane,” according to Lord Herbert, who rightly sees in the frame of man's body and the coherence of its parts, something so strange and paradoxical that he holds it to be the “greatest miracle of nature.” Blind forces and “no design” in anything under the Sun! When no sane man of Science would hesitate to say that, even from the little he knows and has hitherto discovered of the forces at work in Kosmos, he sees very plainly that every part, every speck and atom, are in harmony with their fellow atoms, and these with the whole, each having its distinct mission throughout the life-cycle. But, fortunately, the greatest, the most eminent Thinkers and Scientists of the day are now beginning to rise against this “Pedigree,” and even against Darwin's Natural Selection theory, though its author had never, probably, contemplated such widely stretched conclusions. The Russian scientist N. T. Danilevsky, [pg 691] in his remarkable work, Darwinism, a Critical Investigation of the Theory, upsets such Darwinism completely and without appeal, and so does de Quatrefages in his last work. Our readers are recommended to examine the learned paper by Dr. Bourges, a member of the Paris Anthropological Society, read by its author at a recent meeting of that society and called “Evolutionary Psychology; the Evolution of Spirit, etc.” In it he completely reconciles the two teachings—namely of physical and spiritual evolution. He explains the origin of the variety of organic forms—which are made to fit their environments with such evidently intelligent design—by the existence and the mutual help and interaction of two Principles in manifested Nature, the inner conscious Principle adapting itself to physical Nature and the innate potentialities of the latter. Thus the French scientist has to return to our old friend Archæus, or the Life-Principle—without naming it—as Dr. Richardson has done in England in his Nerve-Force. The same idea was recently developed in Germany by Baron Hellenbach, in his remarkable work, Individuality in the Light of Biology and Modern Philosophy.
We find the same conclusions arrived at in yet another excellent volume by a deep thinking Russian, N. N. Strachof, who says in his Fundamental Conceptions of Psychology and Physiology:
The most clear, as the most familiar, type of development may be found in our own mental or physical evolution, which has served others as a model to follow.... If organisms are entities ... then it is only just to conclude and assert that the organic life strives to beget psychic life; but it would be still more correct and in accordance with the spirit of these two categories of evolution to say, that the true cause of organic life is the tendency of spirit to manifest in substantial forms, to clothe itself in substantial reality. It is the highest form which contains the complete explanation of the lowest, never the reverse.
This is admitting, as Bourges does in the Mémoire above mentioned, the identity of this mysterious, integrally acting and organizing Principle with the Self-Conscious and Inner Subject, which we call the Ego and the world at large the Soul. Thus all the best Scientists and Thinkers are gradually approaching the Occultists in their general conclusions.
But such metaphysically inclined men of Science are out of court and will hardly be listened to. Schiller, in his magnificent poem on the Veil of Isis, makes the mortal youth who dared to lift the impenetrable covering fall down dead, after beholding the naked Truth in the face of the stern Goddess. Have some of our Darwinians, so tenderly [pg 692] united in natural selection and affinity, also gazed at the Saïtic Mother bereft of her veils? One might almost suspect it after reading their theories. Their great intellects must have collapsed while gauging too closely the uncovered face of Nature, leaving only the grey matter and ganglia in their brains to respond to “blind” physico-chemical forces. At any rate Shakspere's lines apply admirably to our modern Evolutionist, who symbolizes that “proud man,” who—
Drest in a little brief authority;
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,