It is hardly worth while, perhaps, to refer now again to the difference—here, however, once more incidentally suggested—between protoplasm and protoplasm. Mr. Huxley, that is, almost in his very last word on this part of the argument, seems to become aware of the bearing of this on what relates to materiality, and he would again stamp protoplasm (and with it life and intellect), into an indifferent identity. In order that there should be no break between the lowest functions and the highest (the functions of the fungus and the functions of man), he has “endeavored to prove,” he says, that the protoplasm of the lowest organisms is “essentially identical with, and most readily converted into that of any animal.” On this alleged reciprocal convertibility of protoplasm, then, Mr. Huxley would again found as well an inference of identity, as the further conclusion that the functions of the highest, not less than those of the lowest animals, are but the molecular manifestations of their common protoplasm.
Plainly here it is only the consideration, not of function, but of the alleged reciprocal convertibility that is left us now. Is this true, then? Is it true that every organism can digest every other organism, and that thus a relation of identity is established between that which digests and whatever is digested? These questions place Mr. Huxley’s general enterprise, perhaps, in the most glaring light yet; for it is very evident that there is an end of the argument if all foods and all feeders are essentially identical both with themselves and with each other. The facts of the case, however, I believe to be too well known to require a single word here on my part. It is not long since Mr. Huxley himself pointed out the great difference between the foods of plants and the foods of animals; and the reader may be safely left to think for himself of ruminantia and carnivora, of soft bills and hard bills, of molluscs and men. Mr. Huxley talks feelingly of the possibility of himself feeding the lobster quite as much as of the lobster feeding him; but such pathos is not always applicable; it is not likely that a sponge would be to the stomach of Mr. Huxley any more than Mr. Huxley to the stomach of a sponge.
But a more important point is this, that the functions themselves remain quite apart from the alleged convertibility. We can neither acquire the functions of what we eat, nor impart our functions to what eats us. We shall not come to fly by feeding on vultures, nor they to speak by feeding on us. No possible manure of human brains will enable a corn-field to reason. But if functions are inconvertible, the convertibility of the protoplasm is idle. In this inconvertibility, indeed, functions will be seen to be independent of mere chemical composition. And that is the truth: for functions there is more required than either chemistry or physics.
It is to be acknowledged—to notice one other incidental suggestion, for the sake of completeness, and by way of transition to the final consideration of possible objections—that Mr. Huxley would be very much assisted in his identification of differences, were but the theories of the molecularists, on the one hand, and of Mr. Darwin, on the other, once for all established. The three modes of theorizing indicated, indeed, are not without a tendency to approach one another; and it is precisely their union that would secure a definitive triumph for the doctrine of materialism. Mr. Huxley, as we have seen—though what he desiderates is an auto-plastic living matter that, produced by ordinary chemical processes, is yet capable of continuing and developing itself into new and higher forms—still begins with the egg. Now the theory of the molecularists would, for its part, remove all the difficulties that, for materialism, are involved in this beginning; it would place protoplasm undeniably at length on a merely chemical level; and would fairly enable Mr. Darwin, supplemented by such a life-stuff, to account by natural means for everything like an idea or thought that appears in creation. The misfortune is, however, that we must believe the theory of the molecularists still to await the proof; while the theory of Mr. Darwin has many difficulties peculiar to itself. This theory, philosophically, or in ultimate analysis, is an attempt to prove that design, or the objective idea, especially in the organic world, is developed in time by natural means. The time which Mr. Darwin demands, it is true, is an infinite time; and he thus gains the advantage of his processes being allowed greater clearness for the understanding, in consequence of the obscurity of the infinite past in which they are placed, and of which it is difficult in the first instance to deny any possibility whatever. Still it remains to be asked, Are such processes credible in any time? What Mr. Darwin has done in aid of his view is, first, to lay before us a knowledge of facts in natural history of surprising richness; and, second, to support this knowledge by an inexhaustible ingenuity of hypothesis in arrangement of appearances. Now, in both respects, whether for information or even interest, the value of Mr. Darwin’s contribution will probably always remain independent of the argument or arguments that might destroy his leading proposition; and it is with this proposition that we have here alone to do. As said, we ask only, Is it true that the objective idea, the design which we see in the organized world, is the result in infinite time of the necessary adaption of living structures to the peculiarities of the conditions by which they are surrounded?
Against this theory, then, its own absolute generalization may be viewed as our first objection. In ultimate abstraction, that is, the only agency postulated by Mr. Darwin is time—infinite time; and as regards actually existent beings and actually existent conditions, it is hardly possible to deny any possibility whatever to infinitude. If told, for example, that the elephant, if only obliged infinitely to run, might be converted into the stag, how should we be able to deny? So also, if the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck were hypothetically attributed to a succession of dearths in infinite time that only left the leaves of trees for long-necked animals to live on, we should be similarly situated as regards denial. Still it can be pointed out that ingenuity of natural conjecture has, in such cases, no less wide a field for the negation than for the affirmation; and that, on the question of fact, nothing is capable of being determined. But we can also say more than that—we can say that any fruitful application even of infinite time to the general problem of difference in the world is inconceivable. To explain all from an absolute beginning requires us to commence with nothing; but to this nothing time itself is an addition. Time is an entity, a something, a difference added to the original identity: whence or how came time? Time cannot account for its own self; how is it that there is such a thing as time? Then no conceivable brooding even of infinite time could hatch the infinitude of space. How is it there is such a thing as space? No possible clasps of time and space, further, could ever conceivably thicken into matter. How is it there is such a thing as matter? Lastly, so far, no conceivable brooding, or even gyrating, of a single matter in time and space could account for the specification of matter—carbon, gold, iodine, etc.—as we see and know it. Time, space, matter, and the whole inorganic world, thus remain impassive to the action even of infinite time; all these differences remain incapable of being accounted for so.
But suppose no curiosity had ever been felt in this reference, which, though scientifically indefensible, is quite possible, how about the transition of the inorganic into the organic? Mr. Huxley tells us that, for food, the plant needs nothing but its bath of smelling-salts. Suppose this bath now—a pool of a solution of carbonate of ammonia; can any action of sun, or air, or electricity, be conceived to develop a cell—or even so much lump-protoplasm—in this solution? The production of an initial cell in any such manner will not allow itself to be realized to thought. Then we have just to think for a moment of the vast differences into which, for the production of the present organized world, this cell must be distributed, to shake our heads and say we cannot well refuse anything to an infinite time, but still we must pronounce a problem of this reach hopeless.
It is precisely in conditions, however, that Mr. Darwin claims a solution of this problem. Conditions concern all that relates to air, heat, light, land, water, and whatever they imply. Our second objection, consequently, is, that conditions are quite inadequate to account for present organized differences, from a single cell. Geological time, for example, falls short, after all, of infinite time; or, in known geological eras, let us calculate them as liberally as we may, there is not time enough to account for the presently-existing varieties, from one, or even several, primordial forms. So to speak, it is not in geological time to account for the transformation of the elephant into the stag from acceleration, or for that of the stag into the elephant from retardation, of movement. And we may speak similarly of the growth of the neck of the giraffe, or even of the elevation of the monkey into man. Moreover, time apart, conditions have no such power in themselves. It is impossible to conceive of animal or vegetable effluvia ever creating the nerve by which they are felt, and so gradually the Schneiderian membrane, nose, and whole olfactory apparatus. Yet these effluvia are the conditions of smell, and, ex hypothesi, ought to have created it. Did light, or did the pulsations of the air, ever by any length of time, indent into the sensitive cell, eyes, and a pair of eyes—ears, and a pair of ears? Light conceivably might shine for ever without such a wonderfully complicated result as an eye. Similarly, for delicacy and marvellous ingenuity of structure, the ear is scarcely inferior to the eye; and surely it is possible to think of a whole infinitude of those fitful and fortuitous air-tremblings, which we call sound, without indentation into anything whatever of such an organ.
A third objection to Mr. Darwin’s theory is, that the play of natural contingency in regard to the vicissitudes of conditions, has no title to be named selection. Naturalists have long known and spoken of the “influence of accidental causes;” but Mr. Darwin was the first to apply the term selection to the action of these, and thus convert accident into design. The agency to which Mr. Darwin attributes all the changes which he would signalize in animals is really the fortuitous contingency of brute nature; and it is altogether fallacious to call such process, or such non-process, by a term involving foresight and a purpose. We have here, indeed, only a metaphor wholly misapplied. The German writer who, many years ago, said “even the genera are wholly a prey to the changes of the external universal life,” saw precisely what Mr. Darwin sees, but it never struck him to style contingency selection. Yet, how dangerous, how infectious, has not this ungrounded metaphor proved! It has become a principle, a law, and been transferred by very genuine men into their own sciences of philology and what not. People will wonder at all this by-and-by. But to point out the inapplicability of such a word to the processes of nature referred to by Mr. Darwin, is to point out also the impossibility of any such contingencies proceeding, by graduated rise, from stage to stage, into the great symmetrical organic system—the vast plan—the grand harmonious whole—by which we are surrounded. This rise, this system, is really the objective idea; but it is utterly incapable of being accounted for by any such agency as natural contingency in geological, or infinite, or any time. But it is this which the word selection tends to conceal.
We may say, lastly, in objection, here, that, in the fact of “reversion” or “atavism,” Mr. Darwin acknowledges his own failure. We thus see that the species as species is something independent, and holds its own insita vis naturæ within itself.
Probably it is not his theory, then, that gives value to Mr. Darwin’s book; nor even his ready ingenuity, whatever interest it may lend: it is the material information it contains. The ingenuity, namely, verges somewhat on that Humian expedient of natural conjecture so copiously exemplified, on occasion of a few trite texts, in Mr. Buckle. But that natural conjecture is always insecure, equivocal, and many-sided. It may be said that ancient warfare, for example, giving victory always to the personally ablest and bravest, must have resulted in the improvement of the race; or that, the weakest being always necessarily left at home, the improvement was balanced by deterioration; or that the ablest were necessarily the most exposed to danger, and so, etc., etc., according, to ingenuity usque ad infinitum. Trustworthy conclusion is not possible to this method, but only to the induction of facts, or to scientific demonstration.