More Science From an Easy Chair Part 13

The circulation of the blood and the breathing of whales (including in that term the smaller kinds known as dolphins and porpoises) is still a matter which is not properly understood. When a Greenland whale is struck by the harpoon it dives vertically downward to a depth of 400 fathoms and more (nearly half a mile), and occasionally wounds the skin and bones of its snout by violently striking it on the sea-bottom. It remains below as long as forty minutes. Physiologists wish to know how the sudden compression of the air in the lungs in plunging to this depth and the equally sudden expansion of it in rising from such a depth is dealt with in the whale's economy, so as to prevent the absolutely deadly results which would ensue were any ordinary air-breathing animal subjected to such changes of pressure.

Man can endure without suffering an increase of pressure of the gases in his body amounting to three or four times that to which he is accustomed, as, for instance, when working in the compressed air of "caissons." But the whale goes suddenly to a depth at which the pressure is eighty times that at the surface! Then, too, man (and other terrestrial animals), after being subjected (for instance, in a caisson) to a pressure of four times that which exists on the free surface of the earth, is liable to be killed by suddenly pa.s.sing from that high pressure into the ordinary air. The gases dissolved in his blood expand like the gas in a bottle of soda-water when the cork is drawn, and the bubbles interfere with the circulation of the blood in the finer blood-vessels (of especial importance being those of the brain and spinal cord), and the serious illness and the death of workmen has frequently resulted from this cause. Accordingly, the men who work in such "compressed atmospheres" are now made to pa.s.s slowly through a series of three chambers, in each of which the pressure is diminished and brought nearer to that of the normal atmosphere. By spending twenty minutes in each chamber successively, the workman is gradually brought to the pressure of the outer world, and his blood prevented from "effervescing." But what must be the condition of the gases in the blood of a whale which suddenly rises from 400 fathoms to the surface? The whale suddenly goes, not from a pressure of four times the normal ("four atmospheres," as it is called), but from eighty times the normal, to the normal pressure.

Whales, and also seals, are provided with remarkable special networks of blood-vessels in various parts of the body (called "retia mirabilia" by the old anatomists,) and also with a thick layer of fat under the skin, the "blubber" (some feet deep in a large whale), full of blood-vessels. It has been suggested that these networks of blood-vessels are related in some way both to the power of keeping long (forty minutes!) under water without breathing, and also to the freedom of these marine monsters from the deadly effects of rapid pa.s.sage from great to little gas-pressure. But it is only a suggestion; no one has shown how the networks can act so as to effect these results, and I am quite unable to say how they do so. Another suggestion worth considering is that the whale completely empties the gas out of its lungs by muscular compression of the body-wall before diving, so that there is no gas left in the body to be acted on by the increased pressure resulting from its sinking into deep water. I am unable to deal with this puzzle myself, and I have not been able to find any naturalist or physiologist who can throw light on the matter.

The toothed whales are nearer to the ancestral primitive whales than are the whalebone whales. The latter are the more peculiar, and specially adapted with their huge heads and mouths (a third the length of the whole animal in the Greenland whale), and their palisades of 350 whalebone planks, some 12 ft. long, on each side of the mouth. I may mention in parenthesis that, whilst whalebone has been largely superseded by light steel in the making of umbrellas and corsets, its value remains, or rather increases, on account of its being the only material for making certain kinds of large brushes which are used in cleaning machinery. The whalebone whales have, when first born, very minute teeth hidden in their jaws; they disappear. Some of the toothed whales have teeth only in the lower jaw (the cachalot), others (the beaked whales, Ziphius, etc.) have only one pair or two pairs of teeth. These are tusk-like, and placed in the lower jaw. Others (the dolphins and porpoises) have very numerous peg-like teeth in each jaw.

Some of them feed on fish, pursuing the shoals of fish in parties or "schools."

A truly terrible toothed whale is the large porpoise called the killer (known to zoologists as _Orca gladiator_). He is the wolf of the sea, far more active and formidable than any shark, about 10 ft. long, and strangely marked in black, white, and yellow. He has jaws bigger than those of the largest Mugger crocodile, and a tremendous array of fang-like teeth. These killers hunt the Right (or whalebone) whales in all parts of the world, in parties of three to twelve. They hang on to the lips of their enormous "quarry," and once they get a hold, in twenty minutes tear it into pieces. Often they satisfy themselves with tearing out and devouring the gigantic tongue of their victim, leaving the carcase untouched.

The narwhal and the white whale, or Beluga, which furnishes "porpoise-hide" for boots and laces, are both caught in northern seas, and form a closely allied pair, similar to one another in shape and colour (the one white, the other grey), and of moderate size, about 12 ft. long. They both feed on cuttle-fish and minute shrimps, but the Beluga has many teeth and the narwhal (with the exception of some rudimentary ones) only a single pair, and these in the front of the upper jaw. In the female narwhal their pair of teeth remain permanently concealed in the jaw bone, and so does the right side one of the male. But the left side tooth of the male grows to an enormous size, projecting horizontally in front of the narwhal to a length of seven or eight feet. It is a powerful weapon, and is formed of ivory spirally grooved on the surface. The narwhal was called "the unicorn fish" or "Monoceras" in ancient times, and its spirally marked tooth was confused with the horn of the terrestrial unicorn--the rhinoceros.

Very rarely the right tooth of the male narwhal grows to full size side by side with the left tooth. A specimen showing this double-toothed condition is in the Natural History Museum. A most curious fact, quite unexplained as yet, is that the spiral grooving on both the teeth turns in the same direction; in both it is like a spiral staircase in mounting which (starting from the base implanted in the jaw) you continually turn to the right. Now, in all other animal structures which have a spiral growth and are paired--one belonging to the right side of the animal, the other to the left, as, for instance, the spirally marked horns of antelopes and the more loosely coiled horns of sheep and cattle--one of the pair forms a right-handed and the other a left-handed spiral. They are "complementary"; one is the reflection, as in a mirror, of the other.

Why the narwhal's tooth does not conform to this rule is a mystery.

It is a remarkable fact that only a few whales and porpoises eat fish or the flesh of other whales. The large toothed-whales, including the cachalot or sperm whale, and also the Ziphius-like beaked whales, live upon cuttle-fish. And it seems that they know where to hunt for this special article of diet and how to find it in quant.i.ty (probably at great depths in the ocean), which naturalists do not. Many new kinds of cuttle-fish have been discovered by examining the contents of the stomach of captured whales. The sperm whale feeds on monster squid and poulp such as we rarely, if ever, see alive or washed up on the sh.o.r.e. The hide of these cuttle-fish-eating whales and porpoises is scratched and scarred by the hooks attached to the suckers on the arms of the great cuttle-fish, and a test of the genuine character of ambergris which forms as a concretion in the intestine of the sperm-whale is that it contains fragments of the h.o.r.n.y beaks and hooks of the cuttle-fish digested by the whale. The food of the whalebone whales consists of minute crustacea and of the little floating molluscs known as _Clio borealis_, as big as the last joint of one's little finger, which float by millions in the Arctic Ocean. The whalebone whales, after letting their huge mouths fill with the sea-water in which these creatures are floating, squeeze it out through the strainer formed by the whalebone palisade on each side--by raising the tongue and floor of the mouth. The water pa.s.ses out through the strainer, and the nouris.h.i.+ng morsels remain.

Some fossil jaws and skulls of whales from miocene and older tertiary strata are known which tend to connect the toothed whales with those mammals not modified for marine life. But the approach in that direction does not go very far. The extinct whales called Squalodon have tusk-like front teeth and molars which have the outline of a leaf with a coa.r.s.ely "serrated" edge. The bones of the face are also, in them, more like those of an ordinary mammal than is the case with modern toothed whales. The snout is not so long, and the bones which form it are a little more like those of a fox's snout than are those of the dolphin's "beak." But on the whole it is astonis.h.i.+ng how little we know of fossil whales. We have yet to discover ancestral forms possessing small hind legs, but whale-like in other features. Some day a lucky "fossil-hunter" will come upon the remains of a series of whale-ancestors probably of Eocene age, and we shall know the steps by which a quadruped was changed into a cetacean--just as we have recently learned the history of the development of elephants. We know even less about the ancestry of bats and the steps by which they acquired their wings than we do about the history of whales. These discoveries await future generations of men when "cuttings" and "pits"

and quarries shall have been made in the rest of the earth's surface to the same extent as they have been in Europe and in parts of the American continent.

CHAPTER XXVII

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE

I submit, as the final chapter of this little volume of miscellaneous diversions, a few words intended to meet what has become a recurrent misrepresentation and absurdity for which the annual congress of the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science furnishes the opportunity. Glib writers in various journals regularly seize this occasion to pour forth their lamentations concerning the incapacity of "science" and the disappointment which they experience in finding that it does not do what it never professed to do. They deplore that those engaged in the making of that new knowledge of nature which we call "science" do not discover things which they never set out to discover or thought it possible to discover, although the glib gentlemen who write, with a false a.s.sumption of knowledge, pretend that these things are what the investigations of scientific inquirers are intended to ascertain. We read, at that season of the year, articles upon "What Scientists do not know" and "The Bankruptcy of Science," in which it is pretended that the purpose of science is to solve the mystery, or, as it has been called, the "riddle," of the universe, and it is pointed out, with something like malicious satisfaction, that, to judge by the proceedings of the congress of scientific investigators just concluded, we are no nearer a solution of that mystery than men were in the days of Aristotle: and it is added that false hopes have been raised, and that matters which were once considered settled have again pa.s.sed into the melting-pot!

This kind of lamentation is not only (if I may use an expressive term) "twaddle," but is injurious misrepresentation, dangerous to the public welfare. The actual att.i.tude of the investigators and makers of new knowledge of nature is stated in a few words which I wrote ten years ago: "The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless matter--from man to gas--is a network of mechanism, the main features and many details of which have been made more or less obvious to the wondering intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of scientific investigators. But no sane man has ever pretended, since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by science and never can be."

So much for those who reproach science with the non-fulfilment of their own unwarranted and perfectly gratuitous expectations.

When, however, having created in their readers' minds an unreasonable sense of failure and a mistrust of science, such writers go on to make use of the want of confidence thus produced, in order to throw doubt upon the real conquests of science--the new knowledge actually made and established by the investigators of the last century--it becomes necessary to say a little more. The public is told by these false witnesses that science has "dogmas," and that men of science are less satisfied than they were with the "dogmas" of the last century.

Science has no dogmas; all its conclusions are open to revision by experiment and demonstration, and are continually so revised. But science takes no heed of empty a.s.sertion unaccompanied by evidence which can be weighed and measured. "_Nullius in verba_" is the motto of one of the most famous Societies for the promotion of the knowledge of nature--the Royal Society of London.

It is especially in the area of biology--the knowledge of living things--that the enemies of science make their most audacious attempts to discredit well-ascertained facts and conclusions. They tell their readers that those greater problems of the science (as they erroneously term them), such as the nature of variation among individuals, the laws of heredity, the nature of growth and reproduction, the peculiarities of s.e.x, the characteristics of habits, instinct, and intelligence, and the meaning of life itself, have advanced very little beyond the standpoint of the first and greatest biologist, Aristotle. This statement is vague and indefinite; the conclusion which it suggests is absolutely untrue. Aristotle knew next to nothing about the mechanism of the processes in living things above cited. At the present day we know an enormous amount about it in detail. But when men of science are told that they do not know the "nature" of this and the "meaning" of that, they frankly admit that they do not know the real "nature" (for the expression is capable of endless variety of significance) of anything nor the real "meaning"

not only of life, but of the existence of the universe, and they say, moreover, that they have no intention or expectation of knowing the ultimate "nature" or the ultimate "meaning" (in a philosophical sense) of any such things. These are not problems of science--and it is misleading and injurious to pretend that they are.

I recently read an essay in which the writer is good enough to say that, owing to the work of Darwin, the fact that the differences which we see between organisms have been reached by a gradual evolution, is not now disputed. That, at any rate, seems to be a solid achievement.

But he went on to declare that when we inquire by what method this evolution was brought about biologists can return no answer. That appears to me to be a most extraordinary perversion of the truth. The reason why the gradual evolution of the various kinds of organisms is not now disputed is that Darwin showed the method by which that evolution can and must be brought about. So far from "returning no answer," Darwin and succeeding generations of biologists do return a very full answer to the question, "By what method has organic evolution been brought about?" Our misleading writer proceeds as follows: "The Darwinian theory of natural selection acting on minute differences is generally considered nowadays to be inadequate, but no alternative theory has taken its place." This is an entirely erroneous statement. Though Darwin held that natural selection acted most widely and largely on minute differences, he did not suppose that its operation was confined to them, and he considered and gave importance to a number of other characteristics of organisms which have an important part in the process of organic evolution. The a.s.sertion that the theory of natural selection as left by Darwin "is now generally held to be inadequate" is fallacious. Darwin's conclusions on this matter are generally held to be essentially true. It is obvious that his argument is capable of further elaboration and development by additional knowledge, and always was regarded as being so by its author and by every other competent person. But that is a very different thing from holding Darwin's theory of natural selection to be "inadequate." It is adequate, because it furnishes the foundation on which we build, and it is so solid, complete and far-reaching that what has been added since Darwin's death is very small by comparison with his original structure.

Lastly, we are told by the anonymous writer already quoted that at the present time discussion is chiefly concentrated on the question as to whether life is dependent only on the physical and chemical properties of the living substance, protoplasm, or whether there is at work an independent vital principle which sharply separates living from non-living matter! And the obvious and common-place conclusion is announced that "the ultimate problems of biology are as inscrutable as of old." All ultimate problems are, I admit, inscrutable. It is, on the other hand, the business, and has been the glory and triumph, of science, to examine and solve problems which are scrutable! It is certainly not the case that, at the present time, discussion is concentrated on the question of the existence of a vital principle.

There is absolutely no discussion in progress on the subject. No one even knows or attempts to state what is meant by "a vital principle."

It is a phrase which belongs to "the dead past," when men of science had not discovered that you get no nearer to understanding a difficult subject by inventing a name to cover your ignorance. Thirty-five years ago the word "vitality" was used as some few philosophising writers are now using the term "vital principle." Huxley at that time attacked the views of Dr. Lionel Beale, who called in the aid of a mystical "principle," which he named "vitality," in order to "account for" some of the remarkable properties of protoplasm. As Huxley pointed out, this supposed principle "accounted for" nothing, since it was merely a name for the phenomena for which it was supposed to account. Huxley pointed out that many chemical compounds have remarkable properties--as a.s.suredly have the chemical compounds which are present in protoplasm--but men of science have not found it to help them in investigating the mechanism of those properties to ascribe them to mystical intangible "principles" differing from the agencies at work in other less exceptional substances.

Thus, for instance, water, though a very common and abundant chemical compound formed by the union of two chemical elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which, at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface, are gaseous, offers many strange properties to our consideration not shared by other compounds of gaseous elements. For instance, hydrogen, when it combines with gaseous elements other than oxygen, does not form a compound which is liquid at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface. Its combinations with nitrogen, with chlorine, with fluorine, and even some with the solid element carbon, are under those conditions gaseous. What a special character, therefore, has water!

Moreover, water, though a liquid, yet behaves in a most peculiar way when either cooled below ordinary temperatures or heated above them.

It becomes solid when cooled, but expands at the same time, so that it is less dense when solid than when liquid--a most unusual proceeding!

And when heated it is converted into vapour, but with a loss or "making latent" of heat, which, like its behaviour when solidifying, indicates that water is endowed with a very peculiar structure or mechanism in the putting together of its molecules. We might call these combined peculiarities of water "aquosity," and as we certainly cannot say why water should possess the lot of them, whilst other compounds of either hydrogen or of oxygen, or, in fact, of any other elements, do not possess this combination, we might say that their presence is due to "the aqueous principle," or "aquosity," which enters into water when it is formed, but does not exist in other natural bodies, and, indeed, "sharply separates aqueous from non-aqueous matter."

Happily, though such a view would have been considered high philosophy 200 years ago, no one is deluded at the present day into the belief that by calling the remarkable properties of water "aquosity" you have added anything to our knowledge of them. Yet those who invoke "a vital principle" or "vitality" in connection with protoplasm should, if they were consistent, apply their method to the mystery of water. Let us see how it would run. Though we may (the "vitalists" or "aquosists"

would say) experiment with water, determine exactly the temperature and pressure at which these remarkable phenomena are exhibited, though we may determine its surface tension and its crystalline form, and even though we may weigh exactly the proportion of hydrogen to oxygen in its composition, yet when we look at a drop of water, there it is, a wonder of wonders, endowed with "aquosity," the ultimate nature of which is as inscrutable now as it was to Aristotle! It is perfectly true (we concede to the "aquosists") that the properties of water are not accounted for by science; that is to say that, though we can imagine the molecular and atomic mechanism necessary for their exhibition, we cannot offer any suggestion as to how it is that that particular mechanism is present in the chemical compound which the chemist denotes as H_{2}O, and is not present in other compounds, still less can we say "why" these remarkable properties are present--that is to say, for what purpose, although we know that if they were not present the whole history and economy of our globe would be utterly different from what it is. Nevertheless, in spite of their ignorance about the real nature of water, men of science do not invent an "aqueous principle" or "aquosity" with the notion of "explaining"

water. And I have yet to hear of any duly trained and qualified biologist who is prepared at the present moment to maintain the existence of a "vital principle," or of a force to be called "vitality," supposed to be something different in character and quality from the recognised physical forces, and having its existence alongside, yet apart from, the manifestations of those forces.

Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton recently said: "The advance in science takes the workers in science more and more beyond the ken of the ordinary public, and their work grows to be a little understood and much misunderstood; and I have felt that, as in many other cases, the need would come for interpreters between those who are carrying on scientific research and the public, in order to explain and justify their work." Probably everyone will agree with the Lord Justice: but what are we to say of those responsible owners of great journals who not only abstain from providing such interpretation but allow anonymous and incompetent writers to mislead the public? Is the literary critic of a prosperous journal employed to write the City article?

There has been a repet.i.tion this year (1912) of the usual misrepresentation on the occasion of the meeting of the British a.s.sociation. The President, Professor Schafer, had let it be known that his address would be concerned with the chemistry of living processes, the gradual pa.s.sage of chemical combinations into the condition which we call "living," and the possibility of bringing about this pa.s.sage in the chemical laboratory without the use of materials already elaborated by previously existing "living" material.

The announcement was immediately made in some "newspapers" that "startling revelations" were to be made by the President, that he was "to throw a bomb-sh.e.l.l" into the camp, etc. He did nothing of the kind. He gave an admirable and clear statement of the progress during recent years towards the realisation of the construction in the laboratory by chemical methods of the complex chemical combination which exhibits those "activities"--essentially movements, unions, disruptions and re-unions of extremely minute particles--which we call "living." The conclusion that such a gradual building up has taken place in past ages of the history of our earth was formulated more than forty years ago by Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel, and others, and has not been seriously attacked in the interval, but, on the contrary, generally accepted as a legitimate inference from the facts ascertained and the theory of the evolution or gradual development of what we call the material universe.

Professor Schafer expressed the opinion, antic.i.p.ated and shared by many other investigators, that the progress of chemical experiment renders it probable that further steps, culminating in the successful construction of "living" matter in the laboratory, are not beset by any insurmountable obstacles and will sooner or later be accomplished.

There was no "bomb-sh.e.l.l" in this statement, and no excitement as its result among scientific workers nor amongst those who do not neglect to study the writings of the "interpreters" desired by Lord Justice Moulton. There are still some such interpreters carrying on the work of Huxley and of Tyndall, those great interpreters whose writings should be studied and treasured as cla.s.sics.

The most interesting result of the attempt to treat the discussions at Dundee as a newspaper "sensation," comparable to the reports relating to motor-car bandits or the p.r.o.nouncements of political factions, has been its complete failure. Serious thinkers of all schools seem to have adjusted themselves to the more modern way of regarding natural processes even when these relate to matters of such age-long interest to mankind as the inception of "living" organisms and of conscious humanity itself. There are fewer now than there were forty years ago who insist on the older barbaric "explanations" of these marvels. Few indeed venture to a.s.sert the existence of "spirits"--ghostly essences of various grades and capacities which enter the bodies of living things and escape from them like so much gas when they die.[10] The vegetable soul, the animal soul and the human soul are no longer imagined and described to us as definite "things" supposed to "explain" the complex processes which go on respectively in plants, animals and men.

Seventy years ago the facts which were known as to that changing state of material substances which we describe by the words "hot" and "cold," were held to be "explained" by the existence of a ghostly thing called "caloric," which was believed to enter various bodies and make them hot and then to escape from them and so make them cold.

Primitive man multiplied such ways of explaining each and every process going on in the world around him and in himself. Mere words or names lost their first simple signification and acquired permanent a.s.sociation with imaginary spirits, demons, and haunting intangible ghosts, by reference to which our ancestors in their earliest "reasoning" explained to their own satisfaction the strange and sudden events fraught to them with the daily experience of pain or pleasure.

The whole world was held by them to be "bewitched," and it was only by slow and painful steps that some knowledge of the persistent order of Nature was obtained, whilst the phantastic imagery which had served in its place, bit by bit disappeared. "Caloric" was a late lingerer, and was only got rid of when what had been so called was shown to be a vibration of particles--a mode or kind of motion--a "state," and not a mysterious fluid existing as a thing in itself.

Just as "caloric" no longer serves and is no longer possible as the supposed "explanation" of the behaviour of bodies in the hot or the cold state, so we no longer require the supposition of "spirits" of one kind or another as "explanations" of the living state of those products of our mother earth which are called plants, animals and men.

In neither case do such "spirits" really "explain" the state in question; they are only names for the activity which it was imagined that they served to explain. These states or affections of matter remain as wonderful and important to us as they were before. But by giving up the prehistoric notions about them which have been handed on until the present day we can think of them in a more satisfactory way--a way which avoids the multiplication of unnecessary imaginary agencies and the conception of an intermittent and hesitating Creative Power, and subst.i.tutes for it the operation of continuous orderly and preordained forces.

It is true that we can neither ascertain nor imagine either the beginning or the end of the orderly process which we discover in operation to-day. We can trace it back by well-established inference into a remote past, but a beginning of it is not within the possibilities of human thought. We can, with reasonable probability of being correct, foretell the changes and developments which time will bring in many combinations and dispositions which are the manifestations of that process at this moment of time, but we cannot even think of a cessation of that process.

Should we ask, "Why does this process exist?" there is no answer.

Nature does not reply; an awful silence meets our inquiry. The reproach is often urged against science--the knowledge of the order of nature--that it does not tell us "why we are here." Man inevitably desires to know why he is here; but "science," as that word is now understood, does not profess or even seek to answer that question, although the false hope has been raised in ignorant minds, sometimes by knavery, sometimes by honest delusion, that it could do so. By knowledge of nature mankind can escape much suffering and gain the highest happiness, but that is all that we can hope for from it. We shall never satisfy our curiosity; we shall never know in the same way as we know the order of nature, why--to what end, for what purpose--that order and not another order exists.

It is very generally supposed that it is the business and profession of science "to explain" things--that is to say, to show how this or that must and does come about in consequence of the operation of the great general properties of matter, known as the "laws" of chemistry and physics. This is true enough, but it is equally the work of science to a.s.sert that of many things for which mankind demands "an explanation," there is no explanation. It is further the work and the service of science to destroy and to remove from men's minds the baseless and pretended "explanations" which are no explanations but causes of error, blindness, and suffering.

Science, the destroyer of "explanations," is the purifier of the human mind, its cleanser from the crippling infection of prehistoric error and from domination by the terrifying nightmares of our half-animal ancestry.

Finally, in reference to the very ancient attempt to "explain" life and consciousness by the a.s.sertion that they are due to "spirits"

which enter the bodies of animals and men, I must caution the reader against supposing that--for those who do not accept the belief that such spirits exist--the gravity and mystery of the manifestations of life and consciousness are in any way lessened. Those who reject the belief in "spirits" do not in consequence reject the ethical and moral doctrines which have too long been rendered "suspect" by the shadow cast over them by ancient superst.i.tion. The disappearance of that shadow will reveal friends where enemies were supposed to be entrenched.

At the meeting of the British a.s.sociation in 1879 I delivered an address on "Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism." In the printed version of that address, published in the same year, there are some statements bearing on the matter above discussed which I reproduce here, since I can still make them with conviction.

"a.s.suredly it cannot lower our conception of man's dignity if we have to regard him as 'the flower of all the ages' bursting from the great stream of life which has flowed on through countless epochs with one increasing purpose, rather than as an isolated miraculous being, put together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by such portentous origin from his fellow animals and from that gracious nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, knowing her, in spite of fables, to be his dear mother."

"A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the development of man's body by natural processes from ape-like ancestry, but believe in the non-natural intervention of a Creator at a certain definite stage in that development, in order to introduce into the animal which was at that moment a man-like ape, something called 'a conscious soul' in virtue of which he became an ape-like man."

"No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every human being grows from the egg _in utero_, just as a dog or a monkey does; the facts are before us and can be scrutinised in detail. We may ask of those who refuse to admit the gradual and natural development of man's consciousness in the ancestral series, pa.s.sing from ape-like forms into indubitable man, 'How do you propose to divide the series presented by every individual man in his growth from the egg? At what particular phase in the embryonic series is the soul with its consciousness implanted? Is it in the egg? in the foetus of this month or that? in the new-born infant? or at five years of age?' This, it is notorious, is a point upon which churches have never been able to agree; and it is equally notorious that the unbroken series exists--that the egg becomes the foetus, the foetus the child, and the child the man. On the other hand we have the historical series--the series, the existence of which is inferred by Darwin and his adherents. This is a series leading from simple egg-like organisms to ape-like creatures, and from these to man. Will those who cannot answer our previous inquiries undertake to a.s.sert dogmatically in the present case at what point in the historical series there is a break or division? At what step are we to be asked to suppose that the order of nature was stopped, and a non-natural soul introduced?... The theologian is content in the case of individual development of the egg to admit the fact of individual evolution, and to make a.s.sumptions which lie altogether outside the region of scientific inquiry. So, too, it would seem only reasonable that he should deal with the historical series, and frankly accept the natural evolution of man from lower animals, declaring dogmatically, if he so please, but not as an inference of the same order as are the inferences of science, that something called the soul arrived at any point in the series which he may think suitable. At the same time, it would appear to be sufficient even for the purposes of the theologian, to hold that whatever the two above-mentioned series of living thing contain or imply, they do so as the result of a natural and uniform process of development, that there has been one 'miracle' once and for all time....

"The difficulties which the theologian has to meet when he is called upon to give some account of the origin and nature of the soul certainly cannot be said to have been increased by the establishment of the Darwinian theory. For from the earliest days of the Church, ingenious speculation has been lavished on the subject.

"St. Augustine says (I give a translation of the Latin original): 'With regard to the four following opinions concerning the soul--viz.

(1) whether souls are handed on from parent to child by propagation; or (2) are suddenly created in individuals at birth; or (3) existing already elsewhere are divinely sent into the bodies of the new-born; or (4) slip into them of their own motion--it is undesirable for anyone to make a rash p.r.o.nouncement, since up to the present time the question has never been discussed and decided by catholic writers of holy books on account of its obscurity and perplexity--or, if it has been dealt with, no such treatises have hitherto come into my hands.'"

There must be many who will be glad to shake off the illusion of explanation which is no explanation, and to escape from the futile discussion of the possible behaviour of spirits and ghosts born in the dreams of primaeval savages. They will gladly accept the conclusion that the marvellous qualities and activities of living things and that inscrutable wonder, the mind of man, are outcomes of the orderly process of Nature no less than are the miracles which we call a b.u.t.tercup, a rock crystal, a glacier, the noon-day sun! We can trace, by observation and inference, the orderly growth and development of these things from simpler things; we can discover continuity and common properties determining their diverse existence. But we find no explanation of them; we cannot account for the properties of matter which determine them, nor for the existence of anything--whether it be a drop of water, or human thought and consciousness. There are no special and exceptional "incomprehensibles" requiring us to a.s.sume that special "principles" or "spirits" are concerned with them whilst the rest are to be accounted for and explained in a more general way.

Wherever we push our inquiries we come equally and inevitably, as did primaeval man, to that of which there is no explanation--the perpetual miracle, the miracle of the nature of things, of existence itself. The man of science bows his head in the presence of this all-pervading mystery. He is called arrogant by those who arrogate to themselves the right to "explain" things and to deal in vital spirits and metaphysical nostrums for that purpose. From time to time they fill with their proclamations the great silence which he has learnt to accept with reverence and humility. As the years roll on their hollow phrases are less frequent, and acquire the pathetic interest which belongs to all such decaying remnants of the thought and effort of the childhood of man.