But though the experience argument is of no real force, and, as shown by the beliefs of the higher order of minds, of no real effect, when brought to bear against miracles supported by the proper testimony, it is of great force and effect when brought to bear, not against miracles, but against some presumed law. It is experience, and experience only, that determines what is or is not law, and it is law, and law only, that constitutes the subject-matter of ordinary experience. Experience, in determining what is really miracle, does so simply through its positive knowledge of law: by knowing law, it knows also what would be a violation of it. And so miracle cannot possibly form the subject-matter of experience in the sense of Hume. For did miracle constitute the subject-matter of experience, the law of which the miracle was a violation could not: most emphatically, in this case, were there “no law” there could be “no transgression;” and so experience would be unable to recognize, not only the existence of the law transgressed, but also of the miracle, in its character as such, which was a transgression of the law. We determine from experience that there exists a certain fixed law, known among men as the law of gravitation; and that, in consequence of this law, if a human creature attempt standing upon the sea, he will sink into it; or if he attempt rising from the earth into the heavens, he will remain fixed to the spot on which the attempt is made. Such, in these cases, would be the direct effects of this gravitation law; and any presumed law antagonistic in its character could not be other than a law contrary to that invariable experience by which the existence of the real law in the case is determined. But certain it is—for the evidence regarding the facts cannot be resisted, and by the greatest minds has not been resisted—that a man did once walk upon the sea without sinking into it, and did once ascend from the earth into the sky; and these miracles ought not to be tested—and by earnest inquirers after truth really never have been tested—by any experience of the uniformity of the law of which they were professed transgressions, seeing it was essentially and obviously necessary that, in order to serve the great moral purpose which God intended by them, the law which they violated should have been a uniform law, and that they should have been palpable violations of it. But while the experience argument is thus of no value when directed against well-attested miracle, it is, as I have said, all-potent when directed against presumed law. Of law we know nothing, I repeat, except what experience tells us. A miracle contrary to experience in the sense of Hume is simply a miracle; a presumed law contrary to experience is no law at all. For it is from experience, and experience only, that we know any thing of natural law. The argument of Hume and La Place is perfect, as such, when directed against the development visions of the Lamarckian.
THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS IN ITS EMBRYONIC STATE.
OLDER THAN ITS ALLEGED FOUNDATIONS.
When Maillet first promulgated his hypothesis, many of the departments of natural history existed as mere regions of fable and romance; and, in addressing himself to the Muscadins of Paris, in a popular work as wild and amusing as a fairy tale, he could safely take the liberty, and he did take it very freely, of exaggerating the marvellous, and adding fresh fictions to the untrue. And in preparing them for his theory of the metamorphoses of a marine into a terrestrial vegetation, he set himself, in accordance with his general character, to show that really the transmutation did not amount to much. “I know you have resided a long time,” his Indian Philosopher is made to say, “at Marseilles. Now, you can bear me witness, that the fishermen there daily find in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them; and though these fruits are not so large and so well nourished as those of our earth, yet the species of these plants is in no other respect dubious. They there find clusters of white and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, prune-trees, apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers. When in that city, I saw, in the cabinet of a curious gentleman, a prodigious number of those sea-productions of different qualities, especially of rose-trees, which had their roses very red when they came out of the sea. I was there presented with a cluster of black sea-grapes. It was at the time of the vintage, and there were two grapes perfectly ripe.”
Now, all this, and much more of the same nature, addressed to the Parisians of the reign of Louis the Fifteenth, passed, I doubt not, wonderfully well; but it will not do now, when almost every young girl, whether in town or country, is a botanist, and works on the algæ have become popular. Since Maillet wrote, Hume promulgated his argument on Miracles, and La Place his doctrine of Probabilities. There can be no doubt that these have exerted a wholesome influence on the laws of evidence; and by these laws, as restricted and amended,—laws to which, both in science and religion, we ourselves conform,—we insist on trying the Lamarckian hypothesis, and in condemning it,—should it be found to have neither standing in experience nor support from testimony,—as a mere feverish dream, incoherent in its parts and baseless in its fabric. Give, we ask, but one well-attested instance of transmutation from the algæ to even the lower forms of terrestrial vegetation common on our sea-coasts, and we will keep the question open, in expectation of more. It will not do to tell us—as Cuvier was told, when he appealed to the fact, determined by the mummy birds and reptiles of Egypt, of the fixity of species in all, even the slightest particulars, for at least three thousand years—that immensely extended periods of time are necessary to effect specific changes, and that human observation has not been spread over a period sufficiently ample to furnish the required data regarding them. The apology is simply a confession that, in these ages of the severe inductive philosophy, you have been dreaming your dream, cut off, as if by the state of sleep, from all the tangibilities of the real waking-day world, and that you have not a vestige of testimony with which to support your ingenious vagaries.
But on another account do we refuse to sustain the excuse. It is not true that human observation has not been spread over a period sufficiently extended to furnish the necessary data for testing the development hypothesis. In one special walk,—that which bears on the supposed transmutation of algæ into terrestrial plants,—human observation has been spread over what is strictly analogous to millions of years. For extent of space in this matter is exactly correspondent with duration of time. No man, in this late period of the world’s history, attains to the age of five hundred years; and as some of our larger English oaks have been known to increase in bulk of trunk and extent of bough for five centuries together, no man can possibly have seen the same huge oak pass, according to Cowper, through its various stages of “treeship,”—
“First a seedling hid in grass;
Then twig; then sapling; and, as century rolls
Slow after century, a giant bulk,