The Catholic World, Vol. 17, April, 1873 to September, 1873 / A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science

by Various

And although we can see some force in the general theory of evolution, we cannot accept it till it settles its account with the principle on which the whole inductive method is raised—the constancy of the laws of nature.

The theory of evolution strikes, it seems to us, at the very root of this principle. It proclaims that there is not and has never been any constancy in nature. It devours all other law, or rather destroys it. It means simply change. Permanency, constancy, and their synonymes are opposed to it; and thus the theory of evolution must invalidate all the sciences which are founded on the assumption that nature is constant; in other words, that it does not change, does not evolve. The definition of evolution given by Mr. Spencer makes it simply a change. True, he states the method or law of that change. But the method is discovered by induction. Induction is in turn annihilated by evolution. The fabric as it rises loses its foundation, and floats in the air, a baseless vision.

But if we are in no haste to yield assent to Darwinism or evolution in general; as applied to man’s soul by advocates like Spencer or Chapman, we reject it in toto. It is incompetent to account for the facts, nay, in glaring contradiction to them.

We take our stand against man’s relation to the ape on facts as undeniable as any the zoologist or anatomist advances in its favor. These compare man’s body and the ape, and find no very great superiority of the one over the other as they lie recently dead on the anatomist’s table. Let the two lie there only a little longer, and none at all will be discoverable. A little dust which the winds of heaven will soon scatter to the four points of the compass is all that will be left of either. Shall we therefore infer their oneness of kind? By no means.

We know that man is in some respects not unlike the ape in form; but we know, too, that there are Godlike faculties in man which are not in the ape. We know this, and we know, moreover, that the philosopher through whose brain roll vast choruses of thought; who stands on the heights of Christian philosophy and human speculation, and discourses on death and immortality; who, from the eminence to which Christianity has raised him, looks down, not with indifference and not with contempt, but with deep serenity, on the little loves and little hates of the world, because conscious of his eternal destiny—we know, we have an intuition, which we trust more than we trust Darwin and Huxley, that this philosopher is more than a developed ape.

And when the anatomist tells us there is little anatomical difference between man and the ape, therefore between man as man and the ape as ape there is little difference or a difference only of degree, we reply: Between man and the ape, between a Newton or even a savage and a monkey, there is, in the intellectual order, a vast difference, an infinite difference. This we take as the fact, and draw the conclusion that the amount of anatomical difference between a monkey and a man is no criterion or measure of the real difference.

We treat the argument from embryology in the same way. Because at a certain stage in its development the human embryo cannot be distinguished from that of certain of the lower animals, we are assured that man differs from these only in degree. We grant the fact, we reject the inference; and we reason: notwithstanding you can detect no difference at certain stages between the two, time develops one so great that the one may become a Shakespeare, the other becomes only a Shakespeare’s dog. What follows? Simply this: that there is a something in the human embryo which is not in the other—a something which the sense cannot detect, but the existence of which the mind may infer; that there is more of life than the embryologist can find out by his methods, as there is more of the rose than is found in its ashes—more of life than we would be apt to see in a dissecting-room or a charnel-house.

No; whatever force the special Darwinian theory may have to the student of animal life, to the student of man as an animal, it can have very little to him who views man in his higher manifestations. Whatever else it may account for, it never can throw any light on the facts of man’s moral nature. It never can explain the origin of a being who believes in purity or pity.

Let the Darwinian, indeed, explain, if he can, how, if man owes his existence and his development, physical, moral, and mental, to success in the struggle for existence—in other words, to natural selection—and this success, in turn, to the exercise of the selfish or combative faculties, or to both combined—faculties which, according to this theory, he must have exercised, his present and previous states taken together, for ages unnumbered—so long, indeed, that they ought to have grown into uncontrollable instincts—and which are the only ones he can have exercised from the beginning, to which, therefore, as the most imperious, all others should be subordinate—let him, we say, explain who can how this tendency to battle, inherited through infinite ages, has not taken complete possession of man, nor caused his life to be a continual strife with his fellows; let him explain how, instead of all this, there are men who have learned, not to hate, but to love their enemies, to compassionate the weak, the poor, and the lowly, to nurse the sick and the dying, to care even for the dead; nay, how it comes that there are men who are guided by the sublime command: “Love them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that persecute and calumniate you”; or, further yet, how, in spite of the exercise of the selfish and combative faculties, in the struggle for existence, the tendency of which must have been to strengthen by use the organs of destruction, the same organs should gradually disappear, and that in man not one of them should be left.

Let him explain, again, how out of mere animality, by “natural selection,” out of the mere brute, in a “struggle for existence,” beings should come—men to whom this would be a law: Be pure; for “he that looketh after a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.” There are such men—men to whom this is a law, and who obey it. Will a Vogt or a Büchner believe it? Will a Darwin account for it by “natural selection”?