Consumpta in ventis.
Though the philosophy of Agassiz and the rest has not, however, been dissipated in thin air, we have an idea, nevertheless, that it has failed, like the Trojan’s arrow. We “cannot away with” that notion of making a species of man for every extreme climate of the globe, and do not think they have at all made the matter clear. They argue analogically. Their opponents argue analogically too. Pritchard and others support their views of the unity of the human species by the analogy of animals. They bring forward a very strong argument in the fact, that hybrids of plants or animals—the offspring of different species—are sterile, as a general law of nature. The offspring of the most dissimilar races of men are never hybrid—but capable of continuing the kind. Pritchard says the difference between the skull of the domestic hog and that of the wild boar is as great as that between the European and Negro skulls; and Blumenbach says there is more difference between the skulls of the Neapolitan and Hungarian breed of horses, respectively, than between the most dissimilar human heads.
But those who agree with Agassiz rely a good deal upon the assertions of Dr. Morton, of Philadelphia, and adduce several instances in which hybrids were found to be fruitful—mostly, however, in conjunction with an animal of pure stock. Still, these cases are so exceptional, or so uncertain, that no general conclusion can be drawn from them, sufficient to make head against Pritchard, Buffon, Cuvier, Hunter, and those who argue with them, on the matter. The general law is the true one. A man has suckled an infant, and a heifer, that never calved, has given milk; but such things cannot tell against the order of Nature.
Taking higher ground in this argument, we are the more strongly of opinion that the analogical mode of reasoning is a wrong one. We do not perceive how the analogies can be made good in the business. It seems fallacious to conclude, with Professor Agassiz, that, because plants and animals—as is generally believed—have not originated in a common centre, our race could not have so originated. To argue from the fact that such “inconsistencies” do not occur in the laws of nature is bad philosophy, after all. He does not clearly or fully know what Nature, or the power we are agreed to call Nature, intends for laws. He takes a department of the material world—a section embracing the Marsupiata, the Edentata, fishes of cartilagenous type, certain plants, flowers, and so forth; and, circumscribing it, he seems to look upon it as the proper sphere for the laws of nature to work in. But it is possible—indeed we believe it to be the truth—that Nature has laws ten millions of miles beyond and above that little circle, and that we do not know or even suspect one half of them. By what law of nature was the ball we cling upon launched into space, and man, “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting,” put upon it? Certainly by one of those laws which we, not comprehending them, call miracles. Coming down a little from the summit of such high positions, we find that man is not the analogue of reptiles, fishes, animals, plants, and so forth—that he differs from them in something out of the rule—something miraculous—the “reasonable soul” which St. Athanasius speaks of. The philosophy of analogy is at fault here, and must be. Man enters none of the categories; he is neither an animal, a reptile, nor a fish. The laws of these are not the laws of Nature—the whole book—nor the laws of man. It is nonsense, therefore, to talk, with such an air, of “inconsistencies.” Even supposing that man may, on the Lamarckian principle, at any time of his development, have been a sponge and lived on salt water, he is, as he stands now—the laughing, the exchanging, the believing animal—not the less an exception and a miracle, and as such philosophers must deal with him.
It is not improbable, after all, that our materialist philosophers may be going astray. The doctrines of Bacon and Locke were noble pronunciamentos in their way and day, and fulfilled in a memorable degree one of the great laws of human progression. They displaced Aristotle, Ptolemy, and those other ancients who were the Bacons and Lockes of the earlier generations. It is not improbable that the founders of the English school of philosophy may, in time, yield to new teachers of men and obey the supreme laws of mutation. Nothing is permanent; every thing tends to something newer and higher. Bacon and Locke may yet abdicate their supremacy, and go away with the other mental and physical Megatheriums of the world—having lived their appropriate and necessary lives. They have built a noble materialist edifice; but they who come after them and strive to raise a metaphysical superstructure from it are probably building upon the wrong foundation. There is nothing any where to show that mind and matter are subject to the same laws—that the development and destiny of one belong, at all, to the other. We may yet be fated to know something more of the origin and end of man than we have been able to gather, ever since the first syllable of recorded time; but it must be by some means widely different from the circumscribed and earth-grubbing; philosophies which have risen amongst us of late, and which sometimes make us regard with a feeling of preference the transcendentalisms, infinite misty soarings, and so forth, of the Kantean school. We are so tired of Aristides Bacon, Aristides Locke, and those other solid thinkers, so repeatedly called the Just and the True, that we feel ourselves at times disposed to ostracise them.
We cannot bend man to the laws of Linnæus, Lamarck, or any one else. The arguments against the unity of his species, drawn from the unreasoning creation, are not at all convincing. They are very violent and clumsy. Messrs. Agassiz, Amringe, and others, desire to make a simple and consistent theory—one which shall have nothing miraculous in it. And yet to avoid one miracle, they adopt a dozen. They turn their backs upon their own development doctrine, and refuse to believe that the material of the human structure could undergo its changes in process of time, and under the various elemental influences. They argue that there must have been originally several creations of men, to suit the varying localities of the earth. Following their views, and taking the divisions of race made by different philosophers, we should find our beliefs blown about a good deal. For Blumenbach, Cuvier, and Latham, hold that the Deity made three species; Martin and Lawrence that he made five; Dumenil and Lesson that he made six; Fischer and others that he made seven; and Desmoulins and Pickering that he made eleven. But, in the midst of the confused indecision in which we are left, where would be the unreasonableness of taking the subdivisions of these divisions and asking why we may not look on these as distinct species also—why, in fact, should there not have been creations equal in number to the twenty-four subdivisions? If these philosophers go on, making distinctions, (in which no two of them will be found to agree with the others,) where are they to stop? There are varieties enough in the osteology and general appearance of the races to warrant a hundred distinctions—therefore, a hundred creations. Why should we stop at three creations—or six, or eleven? It is as easy and more consistent to suppose half a hundred creations than half a dozen. Then those who contend for only three or four creations, admit a great number of varieties; and thus admit the principle that climate and other accidents can, after all, change the race from the exact condition of a type. Thus the principle of their argument is compromised—the philosophy of it is in a loose and untenable condition. It is a very clumsy hypothesis altogether:
How smiles
The gazer’s eye in philosophic mirth
To see the weak design!
Here we have the Deity forming several pairs of the race, to suit the several hills, plains, and peculiar configuration of the earth just rising above the slush and slime of the Saurian period. This shocks our ideas of divine wisdom. Our reason, such as it is, teaches us, and it seems to be generally received that creative power works with simplicity and not in repetitionary ways. And, taking another view of the case, we cannot conceive why the great Artificer should make different species expressly for different places. The argument that, because many plants are, or seem to be, proper to their peculiar habitats, man should be so to one place, is a feeble one. Man is not rooted, but biped; legs were given him for locomotion; unlike the other animals, he has got a mind and the adductor pollicis, and can build coracles, caravels, cunarders. The Supreme Being did not surely design that man should stay in any particular place. The children of men have been nomade from the beginning, moving over the surface of the globe, hither and thither, like the waves on the sea. If God did really produce three, or six, or a dozen distinct species—each for its own place, it was labor in vain and without foresight—a very ridiculous conclusion to come to.