The Story of the Earth and Man

by Sir John William Dawson

[AV] Parsons, Owen.

[AW] Mivart, Ferris.

[AX] Hyatt and Cope.

[AY] Lamarck, etc.

[AZ] Darwin, etc.

On the other hand, those who believe in the independent origin of man admit the above causes as adequate only to produce mere varieties, liable to return into the original stock. They may either hold that man has appeared as a product of special and miraculous creation, or that he has been created mediately by the operation of forces also concerned in the production of other animals, but the precise nature of which is still unknown to us; or lastly, they may hold what seems to be the view favoured by the book of Genesis, that his bodily form is a product of mediate creation and his spiritual nature a direct emanation from his Creator.

The discussion of all these rival theories would occupy volumes, and to follow them into details would require investigations which have already bewildered many minds of some scientific culture. Further, it is the belief of the writer that this plunging into multitudes of details has been fruitful of error, and that it will be a better course to endeavour to reach the root of the matter by looking at the foundations of the general doctrine of evolution itself, and then contrasting it with its rival.

Taking, then, this broad view of the subject, two great leading alternatives are presented to us. Either man is an independent product of the will of a Higher Intelligence, acting directly or through the laws and materials of his own institution and production, or he has been produced by an unconscious evolution from lower things. It is true that many evolutionists, either unwilling to offend, or not perceiving the logical consequences of their own hypothesis, endeavour to steer a middle course, and to maintain that the Creator has proceeded by way of evolution. But the bare, hard logic of Spencer, the greatest English authority on evolution, leaves no place for this compromise, and shows that the theory, carried out to its legitimate consequences, excludes the knowledge of a Creator and the possibility of His work. We have, therefore, to choose between evolution and creation; bearing in mind, however, that there may be a place in nature for evolution, properly limited, as well as for other things, and that the idea of creation by no means excludes law and second causes.

Limiting ourselves in the first place to theories of evolution, and to these as explaining the origin of species of living beings, and especially of man, we naturally first inquire as to the basis on which they are founded. Now no one pretends that they rest on facts actually observed, for no one has ever observed the production of even one species. Nor do they even rest, like the deductions of theoretical geology, on the extension into past time of causes of change now seen to be in action. Their probability depends entirely on their capacity to account hypothetically for certain relations of living creatures to each other, and to the world without; and the strongest point of the arguments of their advocates is the accumulation of cases of such relations supposed to be accounted for. Such being the kind of argument with which we have to deal, we may first inquire what we are required to believe as conditions of the action of evolution, and secondly, to what extent it actually does explain the phenomena.

In the first place, as evolutionists, we are required to assume certain forces, or materials, or both, with which evolution shall begin. Darwin, in his Origin of Species, went so far as to assume the existence of a few of the simpler types of animals; but this view, of course, was only a temporary resting-place for his theory. Others assume a primitive protoplasm, or physical basis of life, and arbitrarily assigning to this substance properties now divided between organised and unorganised, and between dead and living matter, find no difficulty in deducing all plants and animals from it. Still, even this cannot have been the ultimate material. It must have been evolved from something. We are thus brought back to certain molecules of star-dust, or certain conflicting forces, which must have had self-existence, and must have potentially included all subsequent creatures. Otherwise, if with Spencer we hold that God is “unknowable” and creation “unthinkable,” we are left suspended on nothing over a bottomless void, and must adopt as the initial proposition of our philosophy, that all things were made out of nothing, and by nothing; unless we prefer to doubt whether anything exists, and to push the doctrine of relativity to the unscientific extreme of believing that we can study the relations of things non-existent or unknown. So we must allow the evolutionist some small capital to start with; observing, however, that self-existent matter in a state of endless evolution is something of which we cannot possibly have any definite conception.