The Substance of Faith Allied with Science (6th Ed.) / A Catechism for Parents and Teachers

by Sir Oliver Lodge

The popular misconception concerning the biological origin of man, that he is descended from monkeys like those of the present day, is a trivial garbling of the truth. The elevated and the degraded branches of a family can both trace their descent from a parent stock; and though the distant common ancestor may now be lost in obscurity, there is certainly in this sense a blood relationship between the quadrumana and the bimana: a relationship which is recognised and is practically useful in the investigations of experimental pathology.

Lower Forms of Animal Life.—The existence of single cells and other low microscopic forms (like amœbæ), and the analysis or dissection of a more complex structure (say rhubarb) into the cells of which it is in a sense composed, together with some indication of the vital processes occurring in similar but isolated cells (such as yeast or protococcus) which lead us to consider them as possessing life—of a form so fundamental that there is in some cases no clear discrimination between animal and vegetable—may be spoken of and exhibited in the microscope.

From a not very different-looking minute germinal vesicle, or nucleus of a cell, the chick is developed.

The lower forms of animal life, spoken of in the clause as ancestral, may be understood to go back to forms even as low as these,—indeed, to the lowest and minutest forms which in dim and distant ages can have possessed any of the incipient characteristics of life at all: down, perhaps, to some unknown process whereby the earthy particles began to coalesce under a vivifying influence. And as the race springs from lowly forms of cell life, so does the individual,—the body of each individual was once no more than a microscopic cell-nucleus or germinal vesicle. Therein was the germ of life: and the complex aggregate of cells we now possess has all been put together by the directive power latent in, or initially manifested by, that germ. So it is also with a seed—an apple pip, an acorn, or a grain of mustard seed.

But there are many forms of animal life not in the direct line of our ancestry—side branches, as it were, of the great terrestrial family. At present the earth is dominated by man, but at one time it was mastered by gigantic reptiles, larger than any land creature of to-day, the remains of which are occasionally found fossilised into stone and embedded in the rocks; fit to be collected and preserved in museums.

For millions of years the earth was inhabited by creatures no higher than these; the progress upwards has been slow and patient: time is infinitely long, and the great history of the world is still working itself out.

Still do lower forms exist side by side with higher; and many of them are suited to their surroundings, and in their place are beautiful and sane and perfect of their kind. But a few of the lower forms are lower because they have failed to reach the standard of their race, they are very far from any kind of perfection, they are at war with their environment; and for these, the only alternatives are extinction or improvement. In such a species as man the variety or range of achievement and of elevation is enormous. Among men and their works we find, on the one hand, cathedrals and oratorios and poems, and faith and charity and hope; on the other, slums and ugliness and prisons, and spite and cruelty and greed. And we must not forget that want of harmony with environment may in some cases be the fault, not of the individual, but of the environment: a fault which it is specially likely to possess when man-made. For every now and then is born an individual far above the average of the race, amid surroundings which he finds deadly and depressing. He may be despised and rejected by his fellows, and nevertheless may be the precursor or herald of a nobler future.

The problem, the main human problem, is how to deal with the earth now—now that we have at length attained to conscious control—so as to cease perpetuating the lower forms, and to encourage the production of the higher; by giving to all children born on the planet a fair chance of becoming, each in its own way, a noble specimen of developed humanity.

Struggle and Suffering.—Children should realise the bleak and unprotected state through which their remote ancestors must have begun a human existence, the great dangers which they had to overcome, the contests with beasts and with the severities of climate, the hardships and perils and straits through which they passed; and should be grateful to those unknown pioneers of the human race, to whose struggles and suffering and discoveries and energies our present favoured mode of existence on the planet is due.

The more people realise the effort that has preceded them and made them possible, the more are they likely to endeavour to be worthy of it: the more pitiful also will they feel when they see individuals failing in the struggle upward and falling back towards a brute condition; and the more hopeful they will ultimately become for the brilliant future of a race which from such lowly and unpromising beginnings has produced the material vehicle necessary for those great men who flourished in the recent epoch which we speak of as antiquity; and has been so guided, since then, as to develop the magnificence of a Newton and a Shakespeare even on this island in the northern seas.