Evolution and religion

Preface

I am afraid I shall lay myself open to the charge of having adopted a very ambitious title for this book ; but the size alone is sufficient to convince any one that it is not intended to cover the extensive fields of Evolution and Religion. My object is not to teach evolution, far less theology ; but, by placing some of the leading facts of each subject side by side, to call attention to their natural connection.

Through the labours of Wolff, Lamarck, and especially Darwin, belief in creation has given place to the idea of gradual development in the world of life ; as had previously been the case *in regard to the inorganic world. Since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the theory of evolution has invaded every department of thought and enquiry, and has revolutionized men's views upon many of the most important subjects. Scientifically, creation is a word now almost without meaning. The smallest particle of matter, the smallest unit

Vlll PREFACE.

of force, cannot be created or annihilated ; when they disappear from our perception they have but changed their form to reappear in some other form. All human institutions, down to the most trivial custom, every belief and thought, are the outgrowth of previously existing forms. Everywhere throughout the world we see an incessant change in the direction of greater complexity ; but nowhere do we find any act of creation, in the old sense.

Under this all-embracing law it was inevitable that theology must sooner or later fall, however powerful might be the human interests involved. Evolutionary thought has conquered all along the line, and is now busily at work in the secret recesses of the mind, with the most vital elements of the Christian religion. Disintegration is rapidly going on and men and women inwardly feel what they have not the courage to avow. This is manifest in the change of method observable in the most intelligent of the religious bodies. Few now dwell upon the personality of the Devil, the eternal torments of Hell, or the pleasures of psalm singing in Heaven ; and many are even silent upon the divinity of the founder of Christianity.

Evolutionary thought is gradually transforming the old views of man and his place in Nature ; and tending towards the belief that the soul, like the

PREFACE. IX

body, is a physical product, and dependent for its existence upon material organization. This feeling is at present vague and unacknowledged ; but it is deep down in the heart of the age, and gives rise to the intellectual unrest, alternating in hope and fear, which is so characteristic of our day. There is reason to believe that in due course the intellect will shape this feeling into a definite belief and conviction ; and that step by step with such development the social energies will evolve a higher, better, happier system of human life.

Theology, with all its miserable, degrading dogmas, has separated the heart from the intellect ; and by causing an incessant warfare between the two has impoverished both. To reconcile them, theology must be eliminated ; and this is the aim and tendency of the best intellectual work of the present century. Theology has divided man's nature by introducing a being more or less incomprehensible and monstrous, and has said to the heart, " love this being," while the intellect has persisted in repudiating him. When the two parts are brought into harmony, there will still remain the problem of man's relation to the Unknown Power ; but it must be wrought out, if at all, by the intellect alone, and the heart left free to expend its love, in a natural way, upon things of flesh and blood. Only thus

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can we reap the full measure of human sympathy and love.

If, by my humble efforts, I can contribute in ever so small a degree towards this grand reconciliation, I shall be amply rewarded ; for I believe it is essential to the preservation of the balance between the intellect and the emotions, on which our happiness and future progress so greatly depend.

ARTHUR J. DADSON.

Merton Park, Surrey.

Contents

I. Ancient Evolutionary Thought

II. Principles of Evolution .

III. Darwinian Theory .

Chapter I. Ancient Evolutionary Thought

About fifty years ago, the author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation began that famous work by referring to the size of the earth as being familiar knowledge. In like manner we may now say in regard to the age of the earth, it is common knowledge that, so far from being some six thousand years old, we must reckon it by many millions at least. The vast age of our globe few now dispute ; and we may fairly assume that the theory of gradual development is now accepted by the majority of thoughtful, educated people.

The Doctrine of Evolution is not an original product of modern science ; it was an important feature in ancient Greek philosophy ; and we meet with it as far back as 460 B.C., in the writings of Democritus and others. Only a few fragments of the works of that eminent thinker have come down to us ; but from them we learn his theory of the Universe. He taught that there is nothing in Nature but atoms and space. Atoms are the ultimate material of all things — including all the faculties and affections of mind or spirit, throughout the animal kingdom. They possess, as an inseparable quality of their nature, motion, which like the atoms themselves, is eternal. Both are self-existent, uncaused, and have existed from eternity. The atoms are invisible, but solid and impenetrable ; and by their infinite combinations, all things are produced — mineral, vegetable, and animal. Not a single atom in the Universe can be at rest for the smallest fraction of time : such a state would destroy its character, which is eternal. Motion imparts to the atoms a tendency to combine in certain aggregates, but under all forms of combination motion persists. Every state of existence, organic and inorganic, is the result of special concurrence of the atoms, appropriate to each state ; and as the totality of Nature is due to the atoms, and their infinite variety of combination alone, it follows that what we call life and death are changes of form only — distribution and combination of the atoms, reproduction and decay ; and every organic existence is continuously passing through one or the other of these states. The condition known as life, is one in which the atoms are combining ; that of death in which they are disuniting ; but in both conditions, the nature of the atoms remains unchanged. There is no such thing as qualitative change ; all growth and decay are merely the compounding and separating of atoms. No organism can possess any powers which are not derived from the motion of the atoms, and their infinite complexity of structure. It follows from the foregoing that at birth no new force can be brought

ANCIENT EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT. 3

into existence, neither can any be annihilated at death. The popular notions, therefore, which jegard the human soul as an entity are erroneous, since they presuppose the creation of a new force at birth, and the vanishing of that entity and force from the earth at death. Matter is a constant quantity, so also is force. Both are incapable of diminution or augmentation.

Everything happens from necessity, under the pressure of atomic force ; and worlds, infinite in number, are ever in process of growth or decay. By a mechanical necessity, everything that is, is as it is, and could not be otherwise. Democritus would not admit that the formation of worlds and all they contain was in any way due to reason ; and absolutely denied the necessity for pre-supposing the existence of an ordaining Intelligence. He was of course opposed to the popular theology of his day, and was looked upon as an extreme skeptic, and reviled accordingly. The theology has long since passed away, but his philosophy has lived, and is bearing fruit to-day in various departments of Philosophy and Science. "The theory of chemistry, as it now exists, essentially includes his views."

During this period, and down to the time of the Christian era, the intellectual activity of the Greeks was very great ; and in the monumental works which those illustrious thinkers gave to the world the subject of evolution occupies a prominent place. 1 The crude notions of the priests regarding the origin and constitution of the Universe, which satisfied the people, could not of course find any favour with

1 See article on " Evolution " in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

men so intellectually endowed as were the sages of Greece.

The prevailing belief of the structure of the world was similar in regard to magnitude and character to that given by Moses. Man was surrounded by all sorts of invisible agencies, and supernatural wonders ; and his chief object in life was to protect himself against their evil influence. A few miles above the earth was situated Olympus, the abode of the principal god Zeus, who, surrounded by his inferior gods and their wives and mistresses, indulged in various acts of human crime and passion. The stars were supposed to be the light of heaven shining through the rents in the floor. The gods occasionally came down from their abodes and mixed with the daughters of men, and kings and chiefs, in consequence, claimed celestial descent on the paternal side.

This theological explanation of the Universe was held from time immemorial in great veneration by the inhabitants of the islands of the Mediterranean and the surrounding countries. And great was the wrath of the people, led by the theologians, against the philosophers of Greece, for daring to question the religion of their forefathers. Many were despoiled of their goods as a punishment, and others banished or put to death.

Belief in such a system necessarily precluded all enquiry and progress among the people ; but the intellectual horizon was widening in all directions, when Aristotle appeared, 384 B.C. Before his time, Greek philosophy had been purely speculative. He was the first to practise the true method of scientific research by patient observation of the facts of Nature

ANCIENT EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT. 5

around him. He is called the founder of the Inductive method. He accepted the Evolutionary theory in principle, and by his labours in every known field of enquiry he collected an immense number of facts bearing upon and supporting the Theory of Universal Development. Dr. Draper 1 truly says all the modern advances in science are due to the Inductive philosophy established by Aristotle. For his fundamental views of Nature, Aristotle was greatly indebted to Democritus, and invariably speaks of him with great respect.

The idea of the organic arising from the inorganic was familiar to him. In his treatise On the Parts of Animals, he explains the distinction beween tissues and organs, and shows how the latter are built up from the former, and the former from the simple elements, heat and cold, etc. " Out of the elements are formed the homogeneous substances or tissues ; out of these are formed the organs ; out of the organs the organized being." Next he treats of the soul or " vital principle," which he asserts to be common to all living beings, including man. And even what we call inanimate nature is endowed with the same principle. The soul is not a separate entity, dwelling in the body during life, and leaving it for an eternal existence at death ; but is rather a part of the universal soul or "vital principle," which, though it lives in the race — the universal — it dies in the individual-— the particular. The Ethical end of man he believed to be happiness, which was to be attained by Justice and Culture. He was acquainted with over five hundred species of animals, and by 1 Conflict between Religion and Science, p. 23.

close observation and dissection had discovered many rudimentary organs and their causes. The germs of the Origin of Species are plainly discernible in his works. He believed in the gradual development of all things, and rejected the notion that Nature works by fits and starts, or what in recent years have been called catastrophes. "He concluded that everything is ready to burst into life, and that the various organic forms presented to us by Nature are those which existing conditions permit ; should the conditions change, the forms will also change. . Hence there is an unbroken chain from the simple elements through plants and animals up to man, the different groups merging by insensible shades into each other." l " With regard to the history of Evolution, it is especially noticeable that Aristotle traced it in the most diverse classes of animals, especially in connection with the lower animals, with several of the most remarkable facts which we have re-discovered only towards the middle of the present century. Some of his theoretical thoughts are of special interest, because they indicate a right fundamental principle of the nature of the processes of evolution. He conceives the evolution of the individual to be a new formation, in which the several parts of the body develop one after the other. According to him when the human or animal individual developes either within the mother's body, or out of it in the egg, the heart is formed first, and is the beginning and the centre of the body. After the heart is formed the other organs appear ; of them the interior precede the 1 Dr. Draper, Conflict between Religion and Science, p. 23.

ANCIENT EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT. 7

exterior, and the upper, or those above the diaphragm, precede the lower or those below it. The brain is formed at a very early stage, and out of it grow the eyes. This assertion is indeed quite accurate. On trying to obtain from these statements of Aristotle an idea of his conception of the processes of evolution, we find that they indicate a faint presentiment of that theory of evolution which is now called Epigenesis, and which Wolff, some two thousand years later, first proved. It is especially remarkable that Aristotle altogether denied the eternity of the individual. He admitted that the kind of species, formed from individuals of the same kind, might possibly be eternal ; but asserted that the individual itself was transient, that it came into being anew in the act of generation, and perished at death." x These are indeed grand results to have arrived at nearly 2,200 years ago ; and yet only within the present century have they borne any fruit.

The evolutionary idea was present to many of the great minds of antiquity, as may be seen from isolated expressions scattered through their writings. Cicero says, " One eternal and immutable law embraces all things and all times." In this we have the scientific conception of modern times, as opposed to the anthropomorphical ideas of the theologians, that a personal will directly superintends every event, however small.

In the writings of Zeno, the founder of the ethical school of philosophy in Greece, we find the most comprehensive and advanced views : —

1 E. Haeckel, The Evolution and Man, vol. i. pp. 27, 28, 29.

"We must remember," he says, "that everything around us is in Mutation ; decay follows reproduction, and reproduction decay, and it is useless to repine at death in a world where everything is dying. As a cataract shows from year to year an invariable shape, though the water composing it is perpetually changing, so the aspect of Nature is nothing more than a flow of matter, presenting an impermanent form. The Universe, considered as a whole, is unchangeable. Nothing is eternal but space, atoms, force. The forms of Nature that we see are essentially transitory, they must all pass away.

"We must bear in mind that the majority of men are imperfectly educated, and hence we must not needlessly offend the religious ideas of our age. It is enough for us ourselves to know that though there is a Supreme Power there is no Supreme Being. There is an invisible principle, but not a personal God, to whom it would be not so much blasphemy as absurdity to impute the forms, the sentiments, the passions of man. All revelation is necessarily a mere fiction. That which men call chance is only the effect of an unknown cause. Even of chance there is a law. There is no such thing as Providence, for Nature proceeds under irresistible laws, and in this respect the Universe is only a vast automatic engine. The vital force which pervades the world the illiterate call God. The soul of man is a spark of the vital flame, the general vital principle. Like heat, it passes from one to another, and is finally reabsorbed or reunited in the universal principle from which it came. Hence we must not expect annihilation, but reunion ; and as the tired man looks forward to the insensibility of sleep, so the philosopher, weary of the world, should look forward to the tranquillity of extinction." He further says, however, that, "of these things we can have no certain knowledge, since it is not only unphilosophical but futile to enquire into first causes ; we can deal only with the phenomenal. Man cannot ascertain absolute truth, we are incapable of perfect knowledge ; and even if the truth be in our possession, we cannot be sure of it." 1

It will be noticed that Zeno uses the words annihilation and extinction in two different senses. No part of us can be annihilated, but simply changed

1 Dr. Draper's Conflict between Religion and Science, pp. 24, 25.

ANCIENT EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT. Q

in form. The bodily part at death rejoins the matter of the world from which it was taken and built up, while the vital force, according to him, in like manner goes back to the universal force and is reabsorbed. This change of form produces extinction of consciousness ; and this appears to be the sense in which he uses the word " extinction " or its equivalent.

Everything about the individual becomes reabsorbed in the universal. The Greek thinker here foreshadows the modern doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, supposing the " vital energy " to be a manifestation of general physical force.

So far then we see that the universal law of Development, by which worlds and all they contain are produced, was known to the ancients. Beginning with matter and force, they had evolved the theory that from these two elements all Nature has arisen, in one continuous, unbroken chain, the last link of which is man.

All the forms of Nature have arisen by imperceptible degrees, the higher from the lower, without the slightest break in the whole series of being, both organic and inorganic. This beautiful and true conception was given to the world in the early days of recorded history. It died like every other great discovery of ancient times, and lay buried for over 1,800 years. Not a trace of it being discernible during that long interval. The rediscovery was reserved for the latter part of the 18th century.

Chapter II. Principles Of Evolution

It is to Casper Friedrich Wolff, who was born in Berlin, in 1733, that we are indebted for the true theory of evolution. Previous to his discovery it was believed that the germ contained the whole individual, and that it grew by an unfolding, as it were, of the various parts. According to this theory all the organs are existent in the germ, and as the embryo grows, the organs all undergo a process of development simultaneously. The word evolution really accurately describes this process, and is more properly applicable to it than to the process established by Wolff, and known as Epigenesis. This, which is now known to be the true method of growth, is exactly the reverse of the germ development idea described above. Wolff discovered that the germ is primitively homogeneous, and grows by additions from without, the various organs becoming formed and differentiated step by step until the animal or plant is complete in form. The process is precisely similar in both animal and vegetable. The primitive germ is, in plain language, nothing but a tiny speck of undifferentiated matter too small to be seen by the naked eye ; to this speck are added others of similar character, and, as it grows in

PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION. II

size, the formation and differentiation of the organs go on, until they are all fully formed, and the structure of the animal or plant is completed.

"The special novelty of Wolffs discovery consisted mainly in this, that he showed that the germinal part of the bird's egg forms a layer of united granules or organized particles (cells of the modern histologist) presenting at first no semblance of the form or structure of the future embryo, but gradually converted by various morphological changes in the formative material, which are all capable of being traced by observation, into the several rudimentary organs and systems of the embryo. Wolff further showed that the growing parts of plants owe their origin to organized particles or cells, so that he was led to the great generalization that the processes of embryonic formation and of adult growth and nutrition are all of a like nature in both plants and animals." 1

Wolffs discovery shared the fate of other great discoveries : it was rejected for many years by those whose special business it should have been to investigate and recognise its truth. It was not until sixty years after he first published it that it gained acceptance, and was finally established. The slow growth of knowledge is nowhere more painfully shown than in the fact that scientific men even will passionately resist and reject for a time new discoveries which upset any theory that they have come to regard as true. Fortunately for progress, however, the scientific man's objection ceases the moment his reason is convinced. With him the objection is intellectual rather than emotional ; with the theologian it is exactly the reverse. The latter feels, the former thinks ; hence the never-ending conflict between religion and science.

1 Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. viii. p. 165.

While, however, censuring the scientific man for allowing his preconceived opinions and beliefs to close his mind to a certain extent against the reception of new truth, we must bear in mind that his intellect, like that of all others, is under the control of physical conditions ; and that although his mechanism is more finely adjusted and co-ordinated than that of the ordinary mind, and is therefore more susceptible and open to impressions, and more easily moved by them ; it nevertheless requires an extraordinarily powerful brain to enable a man to at once throw off old and cherished views, and recognise and accept new truths which are opposed to them.

In 1733 Kant, the great German philosopher, published his General History of Nature, and Theory of the Heavens. In this work Kant makes a bold attempt to explain the mechanical origin of the Universe, according to Newton's principles, by a natural course of development, to the exclusion of all miracles. His Cosmological Gas Theory has since been fully established by Laplace and Herschel. Kant held that in inorganic nature there was no necessity to conceive of any directing intelligence, that mechanical laws were alone sufficient to account for everything. All phenomena, he maintains, are explicable by mere mechanism, and require no intervention of a will or final purpose. That is to say, in the world of not-living matter — as it appears to us — we can explain all phenomena by the action alone of well-known mechanical laws, which act of necessity, under the pressure of persistent force ; and that it is needless to introduce into this part of nature at least, any intervention whatsoever from a Superintending Intelligence, which people generally call God. Kant admitted, and indeed insisted on the all-sufficiency of this mechanism to produce the whole of inorganic nature. But when we come to living, or organic nature, Kant doubted if a Newton would ever arise to reduce the mysterious complexity of living forms to mechanical laws. He could not conceive it possible for the mind of man to penetrate into Nature's workshop, and discover the processes by which a blade of grass, for example, is made to grow otherwise than by an intelligent principle working for the accomplishment of a specific end — or, in other words, by the will of God. He did not deny to human reason the right to investigate and explain, if possible, all phenomena mechanically ; but he believed that the limited power of man precluded all possibility of conceiving of organic nature otherwise than from a teleological point of view.

While, however, expressing his inability to imagine that the mechanical laws of form and growth in organic nature would ever be discovered, if indeed they existed, he is forced by the necessity of thought on the subject into views which plainly foreshadow, if they do not distinctly contain, the theory of descent. The most important and remarkable of these passages occurs in his Methodical System of the Teleological Faculty of Judgment, which appeared in 1790 in the Criticism of the Faculty of Judgment.

" It is," he says, " desirable to examine the great domain of organized nature by means of a methodical comparative anatomy, in order to discover whether we may not find in it something resembling a system, and that, too, in connection with the mode of generation, so that we may no longer be compelled to stop short with a mere consideration of forms as they are — which gives us no insight into their generation — and need no longer give up in despair all hope of gaining a full insight into this department of Nature. The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common plan of structure, which seems to be visible not only in their skeletons, but also in the arrangement of the remaining parts — so that a wonderfully simple typical form, by the shortening and lengthening of some parts, and by the suppression and development 'of others, might ^be able to produce an immense variety of species — gives us a ray of hope, though feeble, that here perhaps some result may be obtained, by the application of the principle of the mechanism of Nature, without which, in fact, no science can exist. This analogy of forms (in so far as they seem to have been produced in accordance with a common prototype, notwithstanding their great variety) strengthens the supposition that they have an actual blood relationship due to origination from a common parent,- — a supposition which is arrived at by observation of the graduated approximation of one class of animals to another, beginning with the one in which the principle of purposiveness seems to be most conspicuous, that is man, and extending down to the polyps, and from this even down to mosses and lichens, and arriving finally at raw matter, the lowest stage of Nature observable by us. From this matter and its forces the whole apparatus of Nature seems to have descended according to mechanical laws (such as those which she follows in the production of crystals) ; yet this apparatus, as seen in organic beings, is so incomprehensible to us, that we feel ourselves compelled to conceive for it a different principle. But it would seem that the archaeologist of Nature is at liberty to regard the great Family of creatures (for as a Family we must conceive it, if the above-mentioned continuous and connected relationship has a real foundation) as having sprung from the immediate results of her earliest revolutions, judging from all the laws of their mechanism known to or conjectured by him."

In this passage Kant explicitly expresses himself in favour of the view that the mechanical laws prevailing in the formation of inanimate nature will ultimately be found to be the efficient cause in the production of the organic world. Subsequent research and observation have proved the sagacity and depth of his penetration.

The theory of evolution by epigenesis was now becoming a subject of enquiry ; and in the works of many eminent Biologists of this period there are numerous isolated passages which express in more or less definite language a knowledge of the true process. But there was no systematic study of the subject as an organic whole, embracing the unity of Nature, until the great French scientist, Jean Lamarck appeared. He was born in 1744, and stands at the head of the men of his period as a biologist and a thinker. And perhaps even at the present day no name, except that of our immortal Darwin, stands higher than his. In 1801, he published his theory, but treated it more fully in his Philosopkie Zoologique, published in 1809. Haeckel says : " This admirable work is the first connected exposition of the Theory of Descent carried out strictly into all its consequences." Cuvier was his great opponent, and in consequence of the authority he exercised as a naturalist Lamarck's discoveries made no progress for nearly half a century. Naturalists were still under the influence of the Biblical History of Creation ; and the whole force of social pressure was brought to bear upon Lamarck and his " impious " theory. It is a mere truism to say that had he lived a few years earlier he would have been burnt alive at the stake, as the noble-hearted Bruno and many others had been before him.

The following quotation from Haeckel, will enable the reader to judge of the great value of Lamarck's labours.