So much for the atheism, materialism, and fatalism, we do not say of Darwin—for we have reason to believe that that gentleman himself is none of these—but of Mr. Chapman’s version of evolution. There is one very important point, however, on which Mr. Darwin, the man of science, and the compiler, Mr. Chapman, are at one—a point of very great consideration because of its bearings on revelation—the doctrine that the difference between man and the lower animals is not one of “kind,” but of “degree.” We do not wish to argue this point here in full. What we wish to say is that men of the school of Darwin, etc., should be the very last persons in the world to make an assertion of this character, for the reason that they confine our knowledge to appearances, to phenomena. The question, however, whether man and the lower animals differ in “kind” or only in “degree” is not a question of phenomena or appearances: it is a question of noumena, of essence, of reality. We do not grant that even appearances warrant the assertion that man differs from the lower animals in nothing essential. There are appearances which forbid any such conclusion. But we maintain that, whether they so differ or not, Darwin and his school are, by the principles of their philosophy, estopped from asserting that they do or do not. They cannot say that the same phenomena imply the same noumena, the same accidents, the same essence, the same appearances, the same reality, because, to assert the identity of nature of two things, both must be known in what constitutes their essence, whereas these men expressly say that of noumena, reality, or essence nothing can be known.
Mr. Chapman is more a disciple of Haeckel than of Darwin, and follows that gentleman in all his vagaries—a course well calculated to increase rather than decrease the amount of prejudice against what there may be of truth in Darwinism. Among the advocates of this, as of almost all theories, there are extremists. Our author seems to have gone to school to all of them, and swallowed all they told him, no matter how paradoxical, no matter how little proof to substantiate it. On the other hand, of all that has been said against pure Darwinism, not a word has been recorded by Mr. Chapman; and of those who, like Prof. Agassiz, do not agree with Mr. Darwin, or who, like St. George Mivart, have, as we think, dealt his theory blows from which it will not recover, he does not make the smallest mention. Yet it cannot be that Agassiz and Mivart are too small to be noticed by Mr. Chapman. Agassiz is too venerable a name in science to need any demonstration that his opinion on scientific matters is entitled to consideration. Mivart is, we take it, a younger man; yet, if he has not made himself an abiding reputation by what he has the modesty to call his “little book,” the Genesis of Species, he has made a name which must live, if Darwin’s, and Lyell’s, and Huxley’s do; since all these men have found in him a foe worthy of their steel—and the latter of the vials of his wrath.
We would not consider this article complete without a condensed history of the controversy between Mr. Huxley and Mr. Mivart, occasioned by the publication by the latter of his admirable work, the Genesis of Species. We give it here for this, as well as for the reason that it will serve as the best general answer it is in our power to give to Mr. Chapman and other writers of his character.
But first a few remarks on Darwin’s theory. It is only a theory, a mere hypothesis. Mr. Darwin does not pretend to have proved it himself; nor does his advocate, Mr. Huxley, who seems to have taken Mr. Darwin and the Darwinian theory under his special protection, pretend that it is proved.
Bearing in mind that the Darwinian theory is only a hypothesis, we must estimate its value as we estimate that of other hypotheses, viz., by its ability to account for all the facts of which it pretends to be the solution.
The Copernican system of astronomy, for instance, is only a hypothesis; yet, as there is no known astronomical fact absolutely contradictory to it, we accept it as true. If there were only one fact which it did not explain and could not explain; above all, if there were one fact at variance with the hypothesis, the hypothesis must give way, and the fact stand; for one fact is worth a thousand hypotheses, and one fact in cases of this kind, as Mr. Huxley says, as good as five hundred.
Are there, then, any facts which the Darwinian theory of development by natural selection should explain and does not? Mr. Huxley himself says there is one set of such facts—the facts of hybridism; and, as we will presently see, there are a great many others.
To St. George Mivart, a scientist, but more than a scientist, a philosopher in a degree, somewhat of a theologian as well, and therefore a man of greater intellectual grasp than either Darwin or Huxley, we are indebted for the fullest presentation of the facts inexplicable by natural selection that has yet been given to the reading world. This that gentleman has done in his book before referred to, The Genesis of Species.
One of Mr. Mivart’s great merits is that he accords to Mr. Darwin’s theory its full meed of praise. He is a scientific man, and as such a good judge of its merits and demerits, therefore competent to acknowledge the one and point out the other.
We are not at all prejudiced against Mr. Darwin or his theory. We agree entirely with Mr. Mivart that it “is perhaps the most interesting theory, in relation to natural science, which has been promulgated during the present century.” Before pointing out, however, why it is the most interesting theory of the kind, let us see in brief what the Darwinian theory of natural selection is.