"Assuredly it cannot lower our conception of man's dignity if we have to regard him as 'the flower of all the ages' bursting from the great stream of life which has flowed on through countless epochs with one increasing purpose, rather than as an isolated miraculous being, put together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by such portentous origin from his fellow animals and from that gracious nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, knowing her, in spite of fables, to be his dear mother."
"A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the development of man's body by natural processes from ape-like ancestry, but believe in the non-natural intervention of a Creator at a certain definite stage in that development, in order to introduce into the animal which was at that moment a man-like ape, something called 'a conscious soul' in virtue of which he became an ape-like man."
"No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every human being grows from the egg in utero, just as a dog or a monkey does; the facts are before us and can be scrutinised in detail. We may ask of those who refuse to admit the gradual and natural development of man's consciousness in the ancestral series, passing from ape-like forms into indubitable man, 'How do you propose to divide the series presented by every individual man in his growth from the egg? At what particular phase in the embryonic series is the soul with its consciousness implanted? Is it in the egg? in the fœtus of this month or that? in the new-born infant? or at five years of age?' This, it is notorious, is a point upon which churches have never been able to agree; and it is equally notorious that the unbroken series exists—that the egg becomes the fœtus, the fœtus the child, and the child the man. On the other hand we have the historical series—the series, the existence of which is inferred by Darwin and his adherents. This is a series leading from simple egg-like organisms to ape-like creatures, and from these to man. Will those who cannot answer our previous inquiries undertake to assert dogmatically in the present case at what point in the historical series there is a break or division? At what step are we to be asked to suppose that the order of nature was stopped, and a non-natural soul introduced?... The theologian is content in the case of individual development of the egg to admit the fact of individual evolution, and to make assumptions which lie altogether outside the region of scientific inquiry. So, too, it would seem only reasonable that he should deal with the historical series, and frankly accept the natural evolution of man from lower animals, declaring dogmatically, if he so please, but not as an inference of the same order as are the inferences of science, that something called the soul arrived at any point in the series which he may think suitable. At the same time, it would appear to be sufficient even for the purposes of the theologian, to hold that whatever the two above-mentioned series of living thing contain or imply, they do so as the result of a natural and uniform process of development, that there has been one 'miracle' once and for all time....
"The difficulties which the theologian has to meet when he is called upon to give some account of the origin and nature of the soul certainly cannot be said to have been increased by the establishment of the Darwinian theory. For from the earliest days of the Church, ingenious speculation has been lavished on the subject.
"St. Augustine says (I give a translation of the Latin original): 'With regard to the four following opinions concerning the soul—viz. (1) whether souls are handed on from parent to child by propagation; or (2) are suddenly created in individuals at birth; or (3) existing already elsewhere are divinely sent into the bodies of the new-born; or (4) slip into them of their own motion—it is undesirable for anyone to make a rash pronouncement, since up to the present time the question has never been discussed and decided by catholic writers of holy books on account of its obscurity and perplexity—or, if it has been dealt with, no such treatises have hitherto come into my hands.'"
There must be many who will be glad to shake off the illusion of explanation which is no explanation, and to escape from the futile discussion of the possible behaviour of spirits and ghosts born in the dreams of primæval savages. They will gladly accept the conclusion that the marvellous qualities and activities of living things and that inscrutable wonder, the mind of man, are outcomes of the orderly process of Nature no less than are the miracles which we call a buttercup, a rock crystal, a glacier, the noon-day sun! We can trace, by observation and inference, the orderly growth and development of these things from simpler things; we can discover continuity and common properties determining their diverse existence. But we find no explanation of them; we cannot account for the properties of matter which determine them, nor for the existence of anything—whether it be a drop of water, or human thought and consciousness. There are no special and exceptional "incomprehensibles" requiring us to assume that special "principles" or "spirits" are concerned with them whilst the rest are to be accounted for and explained in a more general way. Wherever we push our inquiries we come equally and inevitably, as did primæval man, to that of which there is no explanation—the perpetual miracle, the miracle of the nature of things, of existence itself. The man of science bows his head in the presence of this all-pervading mystery. He is called arrogant by those who arrogate to themselves the right to "explain" things and to deal in vital spirits and metaphysical nostrums for that purpose. From time to time they fill with their proclamations the great silence which he has learnt to accept with reverence and humility. As the years roll on their hollow phrases are less frequent, and acquire the pathetic interest which belongs to all such decaying remnants of the thought and effort of the childhood of man.
It seems still to be necessary to insist that it is not reasonable to assume as an indisputable fact that man can arrive at an "explanation" of existence and the nature of things. This assumption has been made in the past, and, by a well-known trick of advocacy, it has been argued that since science fails to "explain" these things, the old prehistoric fancies as to spirits—even though they "explain" nothing and have themselves to be "explained"—hold the field and must be accepted as true. There is an alternative, and that is to admit our ignorance. No man has ever seen or knows what is on the other side of the moon, that which does not face our earth. There are few amongst us who, in this admitted and complete state of ignorance, would persist in declaring that we must accept as true the suppositions of ancient races of men as to the existence there of men-like creatures, or would be deluded by the argument that since we do not know what is there the suppositions in question must be accepted as true. We cannot, as a matter of observation, assert that these supposed beings are not there, but we can find no reason to make it appear even probable, nor any means of proving by experiment, that they are. We refuse to entertain such suppositions.
[10] This subject is discussed and some account of the chemical nature of protoplasm given in my book, "Science from an Easy Chair" (Methuen, 1910), which consists of a first series of papers similar to those which are collected in the present volume as a "Second Series." The chapters in the earlier volume to which I wish to direct the reader's attention are those entitled "The Universal Structure of Living Things," "Protoplasm, Life and Death," "Chemistry and Protoplasm," "The Simplest Living Things."