The scheme of creation, moreover, implied in the development theory, proceeds, as it appears to us, upon an inconsistency of assumption that is completely at variance with its own leading cardinal principle, namely, a continuous progression from the less to the more perfect forms of organic existence. If this be true with the particulars, why not also in the generals of all that is endowed with the mystery of life? Every great type or class of being, whose remains are detected in the most ancient rocks of the earth, has still its representatives in living nature. The two ends of the chain, the infusorial and mammalian families, are still produced distinct, and each perfect after its kind. The course of creation is thus always, through indefinite time, returning upon itself like the fallacy in dialectics of reasoning in a circle, instead of advancing from the successively higher standards of the perfected models to still more varied and perfect degrees of excellence. The circumstances and conditions, too, of the planet are different from what they were in the palæozoic times, and yet the tribes developed then are all developed still; different in the species and genera, but of the same forms and families; not larger, but more frequently less, in size, and not of better or more complex workmanship. The principle is, therefore, inconsistent with itself, while it leaves unexplained its own assumption of progression in one particular direction only, instead, as it ought to be, in all the primitive types of organic existence. The theory is imperfect beside, in attempting no explanation of the inorganic structures of creation; for the original molecules of matter which assimilated, aggregated, and produced the primary rocks of granite, gneiss, schist, limestone, should have had their law in this direction as well as in the other, of progressive perfection. But these rocks, in no such sense as this, have been repeated or reproduced: matter, essentially the same, according to the theory of the “Vestiges,” whether organic or inorganic, has here retrograded rather than progressed; and if we would contemplate its most elaborate and beautiful forms, either igneous or sedimentary, we must go, not to the secondary and tertiary formations for our specimens, but to the crystalline groups of the primary epoch.
Whatever it may have been with Lamarck, it is certain, in the case of the author of the “Vestiges,” that the speculations originating in the nebular hypothesis lie at the foundation of all his philosophy. This Essay would never have been executed, as it could not even have been imagined, but for the data so abundantly supplied by a universal star-dust lettering, filling all space and inscribed over all time. But change the names, and it is only the atoms of Democritus and the vortices of Descartes that constitute the elements, one and all, of the modern cosmogony. Cicero in his first and second books “De Natura Deorum,” has given a full and ample refutation of the former; and his merit is the greater, when it is considered that the inductive methods of philosophizing were not in use nor even guessed at in his time. The argument, as quaintly translated in Ray’s “Wisdom of Creation,” is thus stated—“If the works of nature are better, more exact and perfect, than the works of art, and art effects nothing without reason, neither can the works of nature be thought to be effected without reason; for is it not absurd and incongruous, that when thou beholdest a statue or curious picture, thou shouldst acknowledge that art was used to the making of it; or, when thou seest the course of a ship upon the waters thou shouldst not doubt but the motion of it is regulated and directed by reason and art; or, when thou considerest a sun-dial or clock, thou shouldst understand presently, that the hours are shown by art and not by chance; and yet imagine or believe, that the world, which comprehends all these arts and artificers, was made without counsel or reason? If one should carry into Scythia or Britain such a sphere as our friend Posidonius lately made, each of whose conversions did the same thing in the sun and moon and other five planets, which we see effected every night and day in the heavens, who among those barbarians would doubt that that sphere was composed by reason and art?”
The inhabitants of this island are no longer the “barbarians.” The Scythians still are so, and have ever been. Upon the development hypothesis, might we not pause to ask, has our intellectual, and moral, and social progress affected our physical condition so as in aught to change the organic relation of the two nations, barbarous both in the time of Cicero?
But we proceed:—“A wonder then it must needs be,” continues the philosopher, “that there should be any man found so stupid and forsaken of reason, as to persuade himself that this most beautiful and adorned world was or could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. He that can prevail with himself to believe this, I do not see why he may not as well admit, that if there were made innumerable figures of the one-and-twenty letters,—in gold suppose or any other metal,—and these well shaken and mixed together, and thrown down from some high place to the ground, they, when they lighted upon the earth, would be so disposed and ranked, that a man might see and read in them Ennius’s Annals; whereas, it were a great chance if he should find one verse thereof among them all: for if this concourse of atoms could make a whole world, why may it not sometimes make, and hath it not somewhere or other in the earth made, a temple, or a gallery, or a portico, or a house, or a city? which yet it is so far from doing, and every man so far from believing, that should any one of us be cast, suppose upon a desolate island, and find there a magnificent palace, artificially contrived according to the exactest rules of architecture, and curiously adorned and furnished, it would never once enter into his head that this was done by an earthquake, or the fortuitous shuffling together of its component materials, or that it had stood there ever since the construction of the world, or first cohesion of atoms; but would presently conclude that there had been some intelligent architect there, the effect of whose art and skill it was. Or, should he find there but one single sheet of parchment or paper, an epistle or oration written full of profound sense, expressed in proper and significant words, illustrated and adorned with elegant phrase,—it were beyond the possibility of the wit of man to persuade him that this was done by the temerarious dashes of an unguided pen, or by the rude scattering of ink upon the paper, or by the lucky projection of so many letters at all adventures; but he would be convinced, by the evidence of the thing at first sight, that there had been not only some man, but some scholar, there.”
Now, here let there be but the substitution of a few terms—“fortuitous concourse” for the “nucleated vesicle”—“atoms” that whirl in mazy dance through indefinite time, for the “stardust” revolving through infinite space—“transmutation of species” for “the lucky projection of so many letters”—and the overthrow of the one hypothesis is as ruinously complete as the demolition of the other.
Thus geology, while it reveals a succession of animal types, pronounces each after its kind perfect in its own degree and measure of organic development. The oldest known fossil fish (the Onchus Murchisoni, and inhumed in the lowest fossiliferous beds), belongs to the highest type of the Cestraciont division of the vertebrata. What they were made at first, they all vindicate their capacity of continuing to the end. The various tribes and orders had their own limits of organization, their own sphere within which the functions of each were to be performed, and adapted to the condition in which they were placed, each reaped the full enjoyment that divine benevolence had appointed. Man was the last in the course of successive creation, endowed with the highest and most enlarged capacities, and, allied to none, was constituted the priest of nature, that he might collect the silent praises of the universe, and offer them to the Creator in intelligent devotion.
But here it is, when we have reached this link of the chain, that the most vitiating element in the whole doctrine of progressive development is manifested. The anti-theism and materialism, involved inevitably and undisguisedly in the noxious dogma, are brought out in bold relief. This dogma implies, that the cosmical arrangements and all the organic transmutations of living types, are none of them directly the result of any personal, immediate creative actings on the part of Deity. These arrangements, from the beginning, are all dependent on one unchanging law, applicable alike to organic and inorganic bodies, to the mysterious principle of life, and to things inanimate,—to mind as to matter. The simple effect of this may appear to be, the removal of the Creator merely a step farther from his own works, which he can still hold in the hollow of his hand, and bend whither He will. But the statement goes a great deal farther. It strikes directly at the root of all moral distinctions as well as of all revealed truth. The creature man, upon this hypothesis, the last link in the terrestrial chain, comes not from his Maker’s hands “made in his own likeness.” He too is the product of a natural law, evolved after a long series of metamorphoses, to whose operation the moral and the physical are equally subject,—the soul and the body alike the result of its rigid inflexible agency. Front the fire-mist and electro-nebulous matter, which is assumed to have originally filled all space, Man, along with suns and stars, and all planetary bodies, derived the first germ of his being. At first gaseous, it became in process of time concrete. There was no life until the electric spark, struck in some mysterious way from the dance of atoms and wild whirl of the elements, vivified the germ with this newly-developed principle. Then the germinal vesicle became a self-moving, self-acting thing—not at first, but after a series of changes, adapted into the type of the human family, whose life was but the life for ages of the animals that have perished, and are now fossilized in their various formations. The principle of life, in short, as implied in this account of its origin, is the same essentially with the light and heat that sparkle and glow in the rolling orbs which deck the firmament!
Much of the development theory is built upon the influence of the instincts as manifested in the lower tribes. Let its abettors listen to the indignant cry of the whole family of man against this theory of his origin; and say, if there is not an instinct here, peculiar and distinct, to vindicate his claim to a separate and distinct position in the great system of being. “Quanta ad eam rem vis,” says Cicero, “ut in suo quoque genere permaneat.”
The continental philosophy, at no time for the last century, has partaken of a religious, healthy tone. It has been profoundly subtile in its speculations and analysis, but never truly spiritual. The author of the “Vestiges,” from his own turn of mind, has been all the more enamored of it, and, unwittingly dragged into its vortex, has been carried far beyond the ken of all rightful philosophies. These are not the subjects of legitimate investigation. Man has no plummet-line, in all his armory of science, wherewith to sound them. Grant that in the manner now described, the human race originated, and became living creatures—destined, it may be, to undergo new changes and to ascend into new orders of being—the animal nature to be perfected in the progressive modifications of his type. But the divine ethereal spark, as men vulgarly dream of themselves, what account is given of this? The soul, what? and whence derived? The thinking principle of mind,—where its place, and what provision made for its efflux, in the nebulous ether? The inference unquestionably is, that if such be its source, the human understanding must be of the essence of matter out of which it evolved,—glorious as the sun and fair as the moon,—but not the heavenly element, animate with the immaterial, incorruptible being of Divinity. But this is not the teaching of geology. Through all the story of its undefinable epochs, and in the myriad sarcophagi of its extinct generations, there is no record, no trace of man. He stands, utterly and far apart, from every fossilized thing, while—
“The most distant star’s invisible beam,