3. “It could not have evolved from ape sensations the noble virtues of a Marcus Aurelius, or the loving but manly devotion of a S. Louis.
4. “That it alone could not have given rise to the maxim, Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum.
5. “That the interval between material and formal morality is one altogether beyond its power to traverse.”
Mr. Mivart further shows “that the anticipatory character of moral principles is a fatal bar to that explanation of their origin which is offered to us by Mr. Herbert Spencer”; and “that the solution of that origin proposed recently by Sir John Lubbock is a mere version of simple utilitarianism, appealing to the pleasure or safety of the individual, and therefore utterly incapable of solving the riddle it attacks.”
It is hardly necessary that we should dwell on these points. Our Christian readers need no demonstration of them. Knowing, on the one hand, what Christian morality is, and, on the other, what mere animal behavior, they must know the difference between them, and, knowing this difference, that by no possibility could the one be developed from the other, there being no oneness of kind in them.
Just here we would remark that, in addition to his other arguments, Mr. Mivart might have added that from philology against Darwinism, and with good effect. There are those who, from that science, argue the other way. But, in a series of able articles on “Darwinism and the Science of Language,” the Rev. J. Knabenbauer, S. J., has shown that philology points to a diversity of origin for man and the lower animals.
He argues that the ultimate elements, the roots of all language, are expressive of general ideas. Now, general ideas are the products of the intellectual processes known as abstraction and generalization. Hence, before the formation of roots, before the beginnings of language, man was man, since he could abstract and generalize. Hence, also, language is not a development of animal cries, nor man of the brute, since the brute can neither abstract nor generalize.
Finally, Mr. Mivart shows in his chapter on “Evolution and Theology” that evolution and creation by no means exclude one another; and that a Catholic—Mr. Mivart is a Catholic—may accept the theory of evolution, ancient writers of authority in the church having “asserted abstract principles such as can perfectly harmonize with the requirements of modern science,” and, “as it were, provided for the reception of its most advanced speculations.”
In support of this view, Mr. Mivart quotes from S. Augustine, S. Thomas, Cornelius à Lapide, and refers to the Jesuit Suarez, with the doctrines of all of whom it is perfectly consistent to hold that animal species were created only potentially, potentialiter tantum.
By that we do not mean to insinuate that the naked Darwinian theory is compatible with Catholic faith; but of this more hereafter.