Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays

by Thomas Henry Huxley; George F. Barker; E. D. Cope; James Hutchison Stirling; John Tyndall

But this is parenthetical; and the gist of our present inquiry regarding the introduction of life is this: Does it belong to what we call matter, or is it an independent principle inserted into matter at some suitable epoch—say when the physical conditions become such as to permit of the development of life? Let us put the question with all the reverence due to a faith and culture in which we all were cradled—a faith and culture, moreover, which are the undeniable historic antecedents of our present enlightenment. I say, let us put the question reverently, but let us also put it clearly and definitely.

There are the strongest grounds for believing that during a certain period of its history the earth was not, nor was it fit to be, the theater of life. Whether this was ever a nebulous period, or merely a molten period, does not much matter; and if we revert to the nebulous condition, it is because the probabilities are really on its side. Our question is this: Did creative energy pause until the nebulous matter had condensed, until the earth had been detached, until the solar fire had so far withdrawn from the earth’s vicinity as to permit a crust to gather round a planet? Did it wait until the air was isolated, until the seas were formed, until evaporation, condensation, and the descent of rain had begun, until the eroding forces of the atmosphere had weathered and decomposed the molten rocks so as to form soils, until the sun’s rays had become so tempered by distance and by waste as to be chemically fit for the decompositions necessary to vegetable life? Having waited through those æons until the proper conditions had set in, did it send the fiat forth, “Let life be!”? These questions define a hypothesis not without its difficulties, but the dignity of which was demonstrated by the nobleness of the men whom it sustained.

Modern scientific thought is called upon to decide between this hypothesis and another; and public thought generally will afterwards be called upon to do the same. You may, however, rest secure in the belief that the hypothesis just sketched can never be stormed, and that it is sure, if it yield at all, to yield to a prolonged siege. To gain new territory, modern argument requires more time than modern arms, though both of them move with greater rapidity than of yore.

But however the convictions of individuals here and there may be influenced, the process must be slow and secular which commends the rival hypothesis of natural evolution to the public mind. For what are the core and essence of this hypothesis? Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion that not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but that the human mind itself—emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena—were once latent in a fiery cloud. Surely the mere statement of such a motion is more than a refutation. But the hypothesis would probably go even further than this. Many who hold it would probably assent to the position that at the present moment all our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael—are potential in the fires of the sun.

We long to learn something of our origin. If the evolution hypothesis be correct, even this unsatisfied yearning must have come to us across the ages which separate the unconscious primeval mist from the consciousness of to-day. I do not think that any holder of the evolution hypothesis would say that I overstate it or overstrain it in any way. I merely strip it of all vagueness, and bring before you, unclothed and unvarnished, the notions by which it must stand or fall.

Surely these notions represent an absurdity too monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind. Let us, however, give them fair play. Let us steady ourselves in front of the hypothesis, and, dismissing all terror and excitement from our minds, let us look firmly into it with the hard, sharp eye of intellect alone. Why are these notions absurd, and why should sanity reject them? The law of relativity, of which we have previously spoken, may find its application here. These evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intellectual gibbet in relation to the ideas concerning matter which were drilled into us when young. Spirit and matter have ever been presented to us in the rudest contrast, the one as all noble, the other as all vile. But is this correct? Does it represent what our mightiest spiritual teacher would call the eternal fact of the universe? Upon the answer to this question all depends.

Supposing, instead of having the foregoing antithesis of spirit and matter presented to our youthful minds, we had been taught to regard them as equally worthy and equally wonderful; to consider them, in fact, as two opposite faces of the self-same mystery. Supposing that in youth we had been impregnated with the notion of the poet Goethe, instead of the notion of the poet Young, looking at matter, not as brute matter, but as “the living garment of God;” do you not think that under these altered circumstances the law of relativity might have had an outcome different from its present one? Is it not probable that our repugnance to the idea of primeval union between spirit and matter might be considerably abated? Without this total revolution of the notions now prevalent the evolution hypothesis must stand condemned; but in many profoundly thoughtful minds such a revolution has already taken place. They degrade neither member of the mysterious duality referred to; but they exalt one of them from its abasement, and repeal the divorce hitherto existing between both. In substance, if not in words, their position as regards spirit and matter is: “What God hath joined together let not man put asunder.”

I have thus led you to the outer rim of speculative science, for beyond the nebula scientific thought has never ventured hitherto, and have tried to state that which I considered ought, in fairness, to be outspoken. I do not think this evolution hypothesis is to be flouted away contemptuously; I do not think it is to be denounced as wicked. It is to be brought before the bar of disciplined reason, and there justified or condemned. Let us hearken to those who wisely support it, and to those who wisely oppose it; and let us tolerate those, and they are many, who foolishly try to do neither of these things.

The only thing out of place in the discussion is dogmatism on either side. Fear not the evolution hypothesis. Steady yourselves in its presence upon that faith in the ultimate triumph of truth which was expressed by old Gamaliel when he said: “If it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; if it be of man, it will come to naught.” Under the fierce light of scientific inquiry this hypothesis is sure to be dissipated if it possess not a core of truth. Trust me, its existence as an hypothesis in the mind is quite compatible with the simultaneous existence of all those virtues to which the term Christian has been applied. It does not solve—it does not profess to solve—the ultimate mystery untouched. At bottom it does nothing more than “transport the conception of life’s origin to an indefinitely distant past.”

For, granting the nebula and its potential life, the question, whence came they? would still remain to baffle and bewilder us. And with regard to the ages of forgetfulness which lie between the conscious life of the nebula and the conscious life of the earth, it is but an extension of that forgetfulness which preceded the birth of us all. Those who hold the doctrine of evolution are by no means ignorant of the uncertainty of their data, and they yield no more to it than a provisional assent. They regard the nebular hypothesis as probable, and in the utter absence of any evidence to prove the act illegal, they extend the method of nature from the present into the past. Here the observed uniformity of nature is their only guide. Within the long range of physical inquiry they have never discerned in nature the insertion of caprice. Throughout this range the laws of physical and intellectual continuity have run side by side. Having thus determined the elements of their curve in this world of observation and experiment, they prolong that curve into an antecedent world, and accept as probable the unbroken sequence of development from the nebula to the present time.