But the law of sexual selection, as treated by the evolutionists, is not scientifically accurate, nor is it true in fact. The loving tendency of nature is to opposites, not likes. The positive and negative poles are those that play into each other with most marvellous effect. Each repels its like and rushes to the embrace of its opposite. Extremes lovingly meet everywhere. A brunette selects a blonde and a blonde a brunette, as a general rule in matrimony. A tall man or woman, with rare exceptions, chooses a short companion for life. Dark eyes delight in those that are light, and vice-versa. Everywhere nature seeks diversity, not similitude. The gayest and brightest feathered songster craves companionship in modest and unobtrusive colors. Diversity is the law of life, as equality, or versimilitude, is that of death. Neither natural selection, nor sexual selection, runs counter to this law. If Mr. Darwin's theory were true, that likes selected likes, then the two marked extremes which should have characterized the race, soon after its emergence from the semi-human state, should have been giants and pigmies, Gargantuas and Lilliputs. Otherwise "sexual selection," as treated by its author, plays no intelligible part in the economy of nature, except to counterbalance variability, not to propagate it.
But the Darwinian assumption that the primeval man, or his immediate ape-like progenitor, came through "natural selection," that is, through the "survival of the fittest," is subject to one or two other objections which we shall briefly notice. And the first objection is not altogether a technical one. The term "fittest," as applied to a monkey, has at once a definite and comprehensive significance to us. It implies the presence of whatever is most perfect of its kind in the monkey as a monkey, and not in the monkey as something else than a monkey. They are all admirably adapted for climbing trees; and it is this adaptation that secures them safety, or complete immunity, in shelter from their enemies. To say that nature selects the fittest for them--for any species of monkey--by converting their forefeet into rudimentary hands, with a loss of prehension and no corresponding advantages in locomotion, is to use language without any appreciable significance to us. We can only say that what is fittest for the monkey is ill-fitted for man, and the reverse. This is all we can definitely predicate of them, from what we know of their anatomical structure, and the diversified uses to which it may be put.
The fact is, as the Bible genesis shows, that every living thing is perfect of its kind, and whatever is perfect admits of no Darwinian variations or improvements for the better. And the simple statement of this undeniable proposition is, we submit, a complete refutation of Darwinism. When the waters and the earth were commanded to bring forth abundantly of every living creature and every living thing, "it was so, and God saw that it was good," that is, everything perfect of its kind, and in its kind. With this single limitation as to kind, a rattlesnake is no less perfect than a Plato or a John Howard.
When we consider man's upright position; the firmness and steadiness with which he plants his foot upon the earth; when we examine the mechanism of his hand, and the wonderful and almost unlimited range it possesses for diversified use; when we see how ill-fitted he is for climbing trees, yet how express and admirable for climbing among the stars, even to the outermost milky-way, the idea that what is fittest for him is fit for the chattering monkey, is too absurd to give us pause. And yet how does Mr. Darwin know that the monkey has been climbing up, all these hundred thousand or million years, into man, as one of the congenital freaks of nature, and not man shambling down into the monkey as a reverse congenital freak. Children have sometimes been born with a singular resemblance to the ape family, but no ape has ever, to Mr. Darwin's knowledge, produced issue more manlike than itself. The divergencies run the wrong way to meet the conditions of the development theory. We have had nearly five thousand years in which to mark these transitional changes, and yet the monkey of to-day is identical with that painted on the walls of ancient Meroe. In all this time he has made no advance in the genetic relation; and if we turn back the lithographic pages of nature for a hundred times five thousand years, we shall find no essential departure from aboriginal types.
But the Darwinian hypothesis admits of a more conclusive answer than we have yet given. Past time, it will be conceded, is theoretically if not actually infinite; and in all past time, nature has been tugging away at Mr. Darwin's problem of the "survival of the fittest." It is no two hundred and fifty thousand years, nor two hundred and fifty millions, but an infinite duration of past time that covers the period in which she has been wrestling with this problem. How successfully has she solved it? In the Darwinian sense of the term "fittest," she has not so much as stated her first equation or extracted the root of her first power. She is manifestly as much puzzled over the problem as Mr. Darwin himself. He fails to see that the "survival of the fittest," necessarily implies, or carries with it, the correlative proposition,--the "non-survival of the unfit." And when such a law has been operative for an infinite duration of past time, the "unfit," however infinitely distributed at first, should have disappeared altogether, many thousands, if not millions, of years ago. If the evolutionists are dealing with vast problems, and assigning to nature, unlimited factors to express the totality of her unerring operations, they must be careful to limit the time in which any one of her given labors is to be accomplished. If she makes any progress at all, an infinite duration of past time should enable her to complete her work just as effectually as an infinite duration of time to come.
But by what law of "natural selection," appertaining to a single pair of old world monkeys, have their offspring advanced to this regal state of manhood, while all other pairs have remained stationary, or precisely where they were two hundred and fifty thousand years ago or more? Why this exceptional divergence in the case of a single pair of monkeys? Why this anomalous, aberrant, and thoroughly eccentric movement on the part of nature? We had supposed that her operations were uniform--conformable to fixed laws of movement. The doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" implies this. Why then, should nature, in her unerring operations, have selected the fittest in respect to a single pair of Catarrhine monkeys, and at the same time rejected the fittest in the case of a million other pairs? If she had selected only the fittest in respect to this old world stock of monkeys, the entire Catarrhine family should have disappeared in the next higher or fitter group--a group nowhere to be found in geological distribution. The break between man and this Catarrhine monkey covers quite a series of links in the genetic vinculum;[[37]] and yet between the two we find no high form of a low type fitting into a low form of a high type, as we manifestly should, to account for all the diversified changes that must have taken place in the interim. And what is true of the types is measurably true of the classes within the types, as well as of the orders within the classes. Wide deviations in forms, as in characteristics, would seem to be the invariable rule; the blending of type into type, except perhaps in remote relationships, is nowhere visible.
But if "variation" and "natural selection" have played important parts in the economy of nature, why may not "specific creation" have played its part also? Positive science can hardly flatter itself with the belief that it is rolling back the mystery of the universe to a point beyond which "specific creation" might not have commenced, or the divine fiat been put forth. To believe in the possibility of a rational synthesis, limited to sensible experience, or phenomenal facts within our reach, that shall climb from law to law, or from concrete fact to abstract conception, until it shall reach the Ultima Thule of all law, is to carry the faith of the scientist beyond the most transcendental belief of the theologian, and make him a greater dupe to his illusions than was ever cloistered in a monastery or affected austerity therein as a balm to the flesh. We may substitute new dogmatisms for old ones, but we can never postulate a principle that shall make the general laws of nature any less mysterious than the partial or exceptional, or that shall in the long run, render "natural selection" any more comprehensible, or acceptable to the rational intuition, than "specific creation." For while one class of scientists is climbing the ladder of synthesis, by assigning a reason for a higher law that may be predicated of a lower, we shall find the broader and more analytical mind accepting the higher mystery for the lower, and, by divesting its faith of all metaphysical incumbrance, landing in the belief of an all-encompassing law, which shall comprehend the entire assemblage of known laws and facts in the universe. And the natural drift of the human mind is ever towards this abstract conception--this one all-encompassing law of the universe. It steadily speculates in this direction, and some of the highest triumphs of our age, in physical as well as metaphysical science, are measurably due to this tendency. The scientific mind is not confined wholly to experimental research. It is stimulated to higher contemplations, and is constantly disposed to make larger and more comprehensive groupings of analogous facts. It is fast coming to regard light, heat, electricity, magnetism, gravitation, chemical affinity, molecular force, and even Mr. Darwin's little whirligig, as only so many manifestations or expressions of one and the same force in the universe--that ultimate, all-encompassing, divine force (not to speak unscientifically) that upholds the order of the heavens, "binds the sweet influences of the Pleiades, brings forth Mazzaroth in his season, and guides Arcturus with his suns."
It is the boast of the Darwinian systematizers that their development theory not only harmonizes with, but admirably supplements and out-rounds the grander speculation of Laplace, termed the "Nebular Hypothesis," which regards the universe as having originally consisted of uniformly diffused matter, filling all space, which subsequently became aggregated by gravitation, much after the manner of Mr. Darwin's little whirligig, into an infinite number of sun-systems, occupying inconceivably vast areas in space. Of the correctness of this hypothesis it is unnecessary to speak. It is to the Darwinian speculation what the infinite is to the infinitessimal, and we only refer to it to bring out the vastness of the conception as compared to the latter theory, and to predicate thereon the more conclusive induction that an Infinite Intelligence directs and superintends all.
In an area in the Milky-way not exceeding one-tenth of the moon's disc, Mr. Herschel computes the number of stars at not less than twenty thousand, with clusters of nebulae lying still beyond. As we know that no bodies shining by reflected light could be visible at such enormous distances, we are left to conclude that each of these twinkling points is a sun, dispensing light and heat to probably as many planets as hold their courses about the central orb in our own system. From the superior magnitude of many of the stars, as compared with the sun, we may reasonably infer that many of these vast sun-systems occupy a much larger field in space than our own. This would give an area in space of not less than six thousand millions of miles as the field occupied by each of these sun-systems. And as the distance between each of these systems and its nearest neighbor is probably not less than that of our sun from the nearest star, we have the enormous and inconceivable distance of not less than nineteen billions of miles separating each one of these twenty thousand stars or sun-systems, occupying a space in the heavens apparently no bigger than a man's hand. And yet Infinity, as we apprehend the term, lies beyond this vast cluster of constellated worlds! Where is Mr. Darwin's little whirligig in the comparison, or Mr. Emerson's vegetal stomach, or Mr. Herbert Spencer's "potential factors," to express the sum-total of all this totality,--this gigantic assemblage of stars clustered about a single point in the Milky-way? The human mind absolutely reels--staggers bewildered and amazed--under the load of conceptions imposed by these few twinkling stars, and is ready to exclaim,--
"Oh, star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there,
To waft us back a message of despair?"