Another flower has an ingenious arrangement by which it lures an insect into its corolla, and then imprisons it, provided with plenty of food, until its anthers are ripe, when it sheds their pollen over the insect; after which, by a special organic arrangement, it opens the prison door and lets its visitor emerge, charged with pollen, to visit another similar flower, which will inevitably be in a condition to receive fertilization from its pollen-covered body.
Thousands of other instances might be given.
Now we know perfectly the mutability of flowers. It is highly probable that the visiting insect and the visited flower were wholly unlike, in some instances, what they now are, twenty thousand years ago; and it is equally improbable that they will be what they now are, twenty thousand years hence. But that which this great biological law affirms, is, that whatever the changes, and however brought about, past or future, there never has been, there is not, and there never will be, an instant’s cessation of concurrent adaptation:—the operation of the ‘law’ that secures to all that lives adjustment to its environments. That surely must be a method that took its origin in mind; and it must have had its prevised and preordered place potentially assigned, from the earliest creative movement; as it must continue to have unceasing action to the very terminus of all organic existence.
Design, purpose, intention, appear, then, when all the facts of the universe are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to be ineradicable from our view of the creation. Teleology does not now depend for its existence on Paleyean ‘instances;’ but all the universe, its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of teleology. The will and purpose running through it are as incapable of being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties, as its phenomena and their modes are of being rendered wholly imperceptible by our senses.
A ‘mind’ that is not a mind, in any sense as we know it, is, to us, nothing. Will, to be will, to us, must be such as we know of; though it be infinite. Intelligence that is infinite cannot cease to be intelligence. To an infinite intelligence, as to us, in the same conditions, the properties of conic sections must be what we know them to be. But an Infinite Mind would differ absolutely from ours in that there could be nothing tentative, nothing experimental in its methods, through all time and space. Only the right means would ever be employed, or the right ends ever be brought about. But, surely, even an Infinite will, in the realm of matter, must use means. When human power takes a pebble from a great height and places it at the sea-level it has only done what gravity could have done. But when human will by continuity of purpose combines materials to form a calculating machine, we have an evidence of the action of mind; something, which, while it is made and exists by the very laws of nature, yet the laws of nature could not, by themselves, have made.
Similar results must be due, then, to similar conditions. The teleology, that is the inseverable motive, as it were, of all the activities and interactions of nature, must be the product of mind.
Then was man, as a physical being, the terminal link in the great progressive chain of living forms that had peopled the earth through countless ages? Or does he, in physical origin, stand apart? Is he a being from whose existence a new creative epoch dates? Or is he the final product of the vast ancestral line of life that ran through all the ages? Did God make man ‘of the dust of the ground’ by some process of which we can form no conception, and can discover no trace? Or is there evidence that the Creator made man of the dust of the ground by majestic laws, acting over vast epochs, until he had become meet for the inbreathing of a higher nature?
That is a question of profoundest interest. But if the authoritative and final demonstration were given either way to-morrow, we, in ourselves, should remain unaltered. We should be conscious of no uplifting and of no fall. Immediate or mediate creation, if God be the author, must be alike Divine. To fear the consequences of honest truth seeking research on this momentous question, is to manifest little love of truth for its own sake, on the one hand; and little stalwartness of personal conviction, as to the security of the foundation of professed beliefs, on the other. Whether we will or not, the whole matter will be searched to its deepest depths. But amidst all the conflict of opinion as to details, in one thing all are agreed, and that is, that the gulf between man and the noblest apes is such as to be practically without comparison. Whatever science may be able to show ultimately as to the relation of man to the anthropoid apes, there is to-day no biologically demonstrated and direct kinship. That the anthropoid apes, as we know them, were in any proper sense the direct ancestors of man, is not a serious contention of even extreme evolutionists. The facts before us do not justify it. The highest ape is still an ape; and whilst the oldest human remains, such as the Eugis and Neanderthal skulls, discovered in association with evidences of immense antiquity, have remarkable characteristics, pointing in some respects in the direction of the great apes, they are still the crania of men. After a critical and exhaustive examination of the two skulls above referred to, Professor Huxley says concerning the Eugis skull: ‘Its measurements agree equally well with those of some European skulls. And assuredly there is no mark of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.’[35] And in summing up the results of an equally critical examination of the far more remarkable Neanderthal skull, the same unquestionable authority says: ‘In no sense, then, can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being intermediate between men and apes. At most they demonstrate the existence of a man whose skull may be said to revert somewhat towards the pithecoid type.... And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of known human skulls, the Neanderthal cranium is by no means so isolated as it appears to be at first, but forms in reality the extreme term of a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed of human crania.’[36] Nothing has arisen to seriously modify these authoritative statements. No thorough anatomist practically familiar with the structure of the anthropoids on the one side, and man on the other, could attempt to argue that man can be directly a descendant of chimpanzee, gorilla, or orang. ‘I may say,’ says Huxley, ‘that the fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he has probably become what he is.’[37]
But let us beware of mistaking, or even distorting, the true meaning of this, as understood by the philosophical evolutionist. It does not for a moment place the physical nature of man outside the range of the great creative law of natural selection. No arrangement of the monkeys can present us with a rational order of development, of which man is physically the latest and highest outcome. But the precursor of man, of whose actual existence no direct proof has yet arisen, is assumed, on the evidence of absolutely innumerable details, the full value of which is only to be clearly seen by experts, to have ascended, not from any anthropoid,—chimpanzee, gorilla, nor orang,—but these apes are found to form the nearest branch existing, produced by the same trunk, out of which, physically, man’s nature was, by the law of descent, evolved.
That the embryological and anatomical resemblances between man and the highest apes are of a profound and striking character, no sane educated man would attempt to traverse; and that this involves close biological relationship, and proves the operation on each, of the same organic laws of development, so far as physical origin is concerned, is also certain.