Secondly, That his history has occupied a series of years which, compared with geological periods, may be regarded as very brief and limited.
Here opens the “Argument from Geology”—and with it Chapter VI.
That the existence of man upon the earth is an event of an order quite different from any previous part of the earth’s history; and that there is no transition from animals to MAN, in even his most degraded, barbarian, and brutish condition, the Essayist demonstrates, with affecting eloquence, and with great argumentative power. No doubt there are kinds of animals very intelligent and sagacious, and exceedingly disposed and adapted to companionship with man; but by elevating the intelligence of the brute, we do not make it become that of the man; nor by making man barbarous, do we make him cease to be man. He has a capacity, not for becoming sagacious, but rational,—or rather he has a capacity for PROGRESS, in virtue of his being rational.
After adverting to Language, as an awful and mysterious evidence of his exalted endowments, and felicitously distinguishing instinct from reason, the Essayist observes that we need not be disturbed in our conclusions by observing the condition of savage and uncultivated tribes, ancient or modern—the Scythians and Barbarians, the Australians and Negroes. The history of man, in the earliest times, is as truly a history of a wonderful, intellectual, social, political, spiritual creature, as it is at present.[[24]] The savage and ignorant state is not the state of nature out of which civilised life has everywhere emerged: their savage condition is one rather of civilisation degraded and lost, than of civilisation incipient and prospective. And even were it to be assumed to be otherwise, that man, naturally savage, had a tendency to become civilised, that TENDENCY is an endowment no less wonderful than those endowments which civilisation exhibits.
When, however, we know not only what man is, but what he may become, both intellectually and morally, as we have already seen; when we cast our mind’s eye over the history of the civilised section of our race, wherever authentic records of their sayings and doings exist, we find repeated and radiant instances of intellectual and moral greatness, rising into sublimity—such as compel us to admit that man is incomparably the most perfect and highly endowed creature which appears to have ever existed on the earth.
“How far previous periods of animal existence were a necessary preparation of the earth as the habitation of man, or a gradual progression towards the existence of man, we need not now inquire. But this, at least, we may say, that man, now that he is here, forms a climax to all that has preceded—a term incomparably exceeding in value all the previous parts of the series—a complex and ornate capital to the subjacent column—a personage of vastly greater dignity and importance than all the preceding line of the procession.”[[25]]
If we are thus to regard man as the climax of the creation in space, as in time, “can we point out any characters,” finally asks the Essayist, “which may tend to make it conceivable that the Creator should thus distinguish him, and care for him—should prepare his habitation, if it be so, by ages of chaotic and rudimentary life, and by accompanying orbs of brute and barren matter? If man be thus the head, the crowned head, of the creation, is he worthy to be thus elevated? Has he any qualities which make it conceivable that, with such an array of preparation and accompaniment”—the reader will note the sudden introduction of these elements of the question, the “accompanying orbs!”—“he should be placed upon the earth, his throne? Does any answer now occur to us, after the views which have been presented to us? That answer,” continues the Essayist, “is the one which has been already given:” “the transcendent intellectual, moral, and religious character of man—such as warrants him in believing that God, in very deed, is not only mindful of him, but visits him.”[[26]]
This may be, the objector is conceived to say; but my difficulty haunts and harasses me: that, while man’s residence is, with reference to the countless glistening orbs revealed by Astronomy, scarcely in the proportion of a single grain of sand to the entire terraqueous structure of our globe, I am required to believe that the Almighty has dealt with him, and with the speck in which he resides, in the awfully exceptional manner asserted in the Scriptures. Let us here remind the reader of a coarser, and an insolent and blasphemous, expression of this “difficulty,” by Thomas Paine, already quoted:—[[27]]
“The system of a plurality of worlds renders the Christian faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air: the two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind.” With such an opponent Dr Whewell expressly states that he has no concern; he deals with a “‘difficulty’ felt by a friend:” wishing “rather to examine how to quiet the troubled and perplexed believer, than how to triumph over the dogmatical and self-satisfied unbeliever.”
“Let the difficulty,” he says, “be put in any way the objector pleases.”