VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. THIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an inclement region for the growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it. Through the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate; through savagery and barbarism his civilisation; and through illusion and persecution his knowledge of nature, including that of his own frame. The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the world before Knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. Such thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have met a deep and general want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor their abiding power so strong. This general need-this hunger for the ideal and wonderful-led eventually to the differentiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread alone, but in a mental world. peopled with forms answering to his capacities and needs. As time advanced-in other words, as the savage opened out into civilised man-these forms were purified and ennobled, until they finally emerged in the mythology and art of Greece:— Where still the magic robe of Poesy Wound itself lovingly around the Truth.1 As poets the priesthood would have been justified, their deities, celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and appliances, being more or less legitimate symbols and personifications of the aspects of nature and the phases of the human soul. The priests, however, or those among them who were mechanics and not poets, claimed ob ''Da der Dichtung zauberische Hülle Sich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand.'-Schiller. 4 jective validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external evidence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man. It is against this objective rendering of the emotions-this thrusting into the region of fact and positive knowledge, of conceptions essentially ideal and poetic-that science, consciously or unconsciously, wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on its subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But when, manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed with imperfect or inaccurate historic data, and moulded by misapplied logic, this feeling traverses our knowledge of nature, science, as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than against the life and substance of religion, that Science enters her protest. Sooner or later among thinking people, that scenery will be taken for what it is worth-as an effort on the part of man to bring the mystery of life and nature within the range of his capacities; as a temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terms of knowledge of that which transcends all knowledge, and admits only of ideal approach. The signs of the times point in this direction. It is, for example, the obvious aim of Mr. Matthew Arnold to protect, amid the wreck of dogma, the poetic basis of religion. And it is to be remembered that under the circumstances poetry may be the purest accessible truth. In other influential quarters a similar spirit is at work. In a remarkable article published by Professor Knight of St. Andrews in the September number of the Nineteenth Century, amid other free utterances, the following is to be found: If matter is not eternal, its first emergence into being is a miracle beside which all others dwindle into absolute insignificance. But, as has often been pointed out, the process is unthinkable; the sudden apocalypse of a material world out of blank nonentity cannot be imagined 2; its emergence into order out of chaos when ‘without form and void' of life, is merely a poetic rendering of the doctrine of its slow evolution. These are all bold words to be spoken before the moral philosophy class of a Scotch university, while those I have underlined show a remarkable freedom of dealing with the sacred text. They repeat in fuller language what I ventured to utter four years ago regarding the Book of Genesis. 'Profoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful; in the latter it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful.' My agreement with 2 Professor Knight will have to reckon with the English Marriage Service, one of whose collects begins very naïvely thus: O God, who by thy mighty power hast made all things of nothing.' Professor Knight extends still further. Does the vital,' he asks, 'proceed by a still remoter development from the non-vital? Or was it created by a fiat of volition? Or '-and here he emphasises his question has it always existed in some form or other as an eternal constituent of the universe? I do not see,' he replies, how we can escape from the last alternative.' With the whole force of my conviction I say, Nor do I; though my mode of regarding the C eternal constituent' might differ from that of Professor Knight. When matter was defined by Descartes, he deliberately excluded the idea of force or motion from its attributes and from his definition. Extension only was taken into account. And, inasmuch as the impotence of matter to generate motion was assumed, its observed motions were referred to an external cause. God, resident outside of matter, gave the impulse. In this connection the argument in Young's Night Thoughts will occur to most readers :— Who Motion foreign to the smallest grain Shot through vast masses of enormous weight? Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John Toland, whose The evolution of That matter is not itself alive' Professor Knight seems to regard as an axiomatic truth. Let us place in contrast with this the notion entertained by the philosopher Ueberweg, one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced. What occurs in the brain would, in my opinion, not be possible, if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity of these latter possessed by the first pair is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last must feel more feebly than the first. The sensations and feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale it is true, and not concentrated as they are in the brain.3 We may not be able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling, pre-existing, but diluted in the food. 4 6 Definitions,' says Mr. Holyoake, grow as the horizon of experience expands. They are not inventions, but descriptions of the state of a question. No man sees all through a discovery at once.' Thus Descartes's notion of matter, and his explanation of motion, would be put aside as trivial by a physiologist or a crystallographer of the present day. They are not descriptions of the state of the question. And yet, it may be said in passing, a desire sometimes shows itself in distinguished quarters to bind us down to conceptions which passed muster in the infancy of knowledge, but which are wholly incompatible with our present enlightenment. Mr. Martineau, I think, errs when he seeks to hold me to views enunciated by Democritus and the mathematicians.' That definitions should change as knowledge advances is in accordance both with sound sense and scientific practice. When, for example, the undulatory theory was started, it was not imagined that the vibrations of light could be transverse to the direction of propagation. The example of sound was at hand, which was a case of longitudinal vibration. Now the substitution of transverse for longitudinal vibrations in the case of light involved a radical change of conception as to the mechanical properties of the luminiferous medium. But though this change went so far as to fill space with a substance, possessing the properties of a solid, rather than those of a gas, the change was accepted, because the newly discovered facts imperatively demanded it. Following Mr. Martineau's example, the opponent of the undulatory theory might effectually twit the holder of it on his change of front. 'This æther of yours,' he might say, 'alters its style with every change of service. Starting as a beggar, with scarce a rag of "property" to cover its bones, it turns up as a prince when large under Letter to Lange: Geschichte des Materialismus, zweite Aufl., vol. ii. p. 521. takings are wanted. You had some show of reason when, with the case of sound before you, you assumed your æther to be a gas in the last extremity of attenuation. But now that new service is rendered necessary by new facts, you drop the beggar's rags, and accomplish an undertaking, great and princely enough in all conscience; for it implies that not only planets of enormous weight, but comets with hardly any weight at all, fly through your hypothetical solid without perceptible loss of motion.' This would sound very cogent, but it would be very vain. Equally vain, in my opinion, is Mr. Martineau's contention that we are not justified in modifying, in accordance with advancing knowledge, our notions of matter. Before parting from Professor Knight, let me commend his courage as well as his insight. We have heard much of late of the peril to morality involved in the decay of religious belief. What Mr. Knight says under this head is worthy of all respect and attention. I admit that were it proved that the moral faculty was derived as well as developed, its present decisions would not be invalidated. The child of experience has a father whose teachings are grave, peremptory, and august; and an earthborn rule may be as stringent as any derived from a celestial source. It does not even follow that a belief in the material origin of spiritual existence, accompanied by a corresponding decay of belief in immortality, must necessarily lead to a relaxation of the moral fibre of the race. It is certain that it has often done so." But it is equally certain that there have been individuals, and great historical communities, in which the absence of the latter belief has neither weakened moral earnestness, nor prevented devotional fervour. I have elsewhere stated that some of the best men of my acquain tance-men lofty in thought and beneficent in act-belong to a class who assiduously let the belief referred to alone. They derive from it neither stimulus nor inspiration, while I say it with regret -were I in quest of persons who, in regard to the finer endowments of human character, are to be ranked among the unendowed, I should find some characteristic samples among the noisier defenders of the orthodox belief. These, however, are but hand-specimens' on both sides; the wider data referred to by Professor Knight constitute, therefore, a welcome corroboration of my experience. Again, my excellent critic, Professor Blackie, describes Buddha as being a great deal more than a prophet; a rare, exceptional, and altogether transcendental incarnation of moral perfection.' And yet, what Buddha preached was a gospel of pure human ethics, divorced not only from Brahma and the Brahminic Trinity, but even from the existence of God.' These civilised and gallant voices from the North contrast pleasantly with the barbarous whoops which sometimes come to us 6 Is this really certain? Instead of standing in the relation of cause and effect, may not the 'decay' and 'relaxation' be merely coexistent, both, perhaps, flowing from common historic antecedents? • Natural History of Atheism, p. 136. 'Ibid. p. 125. |