Ex Librit 
 O. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES

 
 A 
 
 1 vvw 
 
 EVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY AND 
 COMMON SENSE
 
 EVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY 
 
 AND 
 
 COMMON SENSE 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. JOHN GERARD, SJ. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 ' SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS," " SCIENCE OR ROMANCE ? " ETC 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY 
 
 69 SOUTHWARK BRIDGE ROAD, S.E. 
 1904
 
 Q.H 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 "THE COMFORTABLE WORD 'EVOLUTION'" . . .1 
 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF EVOLUTION . . . I? 
 
 THE MECHANICS OF EVOLUTION . . . . -29 
 
 EVOLUTION AND EXACT THOUGHT . . . .41 
 
 AGNOSTICISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE . . -57 
 
 EVOLUTION AND DESIGN . . . . . -73 
 
 UN-NATURAL HISTORY . . . . . .97 
 
 11)26104
 
 "THE COMFORTABLE WORD 
 'EVOLUTION'"* 
 
 IT is much to be wished that some of our scientific men, or 
 of that section to whom the title is commonly attributed, 
 would publish a glossary of the terms they employ, with 
 the exact meaning to be attached to each ; for thus would 
 be avoided much vain beating of the air and many a game 
 of cross purposes, from which at present there appears to 
 be no escape when an outsider ventures to discuss the 
 subjects of their predilection. 
 
 What, for example, are we to understand by the word 
 "Evolution"? We are constantly assured that, whatever 
 else may be dark and doubtful, " Evolution " is an indis- 
 putable fact ; this mode of accounting for it, and that, and 
 the other, may indeed be unsatisfactory and improbable 
 but, for all that, the question as to whether Nature has 
 worked through " Evolution " has long since passed beyond 
 the phase of discussion among scientific thinkers ; t the 
 Darwinian system of Natural Selection is sinking more and 
 more below the range even of hypothesis, while Evolution 
 itself is almost beyond the range of doubt. " The theory 
 of descent is safe," declares Professor von Hartmann, " but 
 Darwinism has been weighed and found wanting." J 
 
 It is obvious, however, that to the term " Evolution " 
 very different significations may be attached. It is unques- 
 tionably by a process of " Evolution " that an oak comes 
 
 * Lord Salisbury ; Address to British Association, 1894. 
 
 t Nature, September 10, 1891. 
 
 \ Annalen der Natur philosophic > vol. ii. (1903). 
 
 I. B
 
 2 " The Comfortable Word "Evolution" 
 
 from an acorn, a butterfly from a caterpillar, or both from 
 an egg. When we say that there has been " Evolution " in 
 nature, are we to understand Evolution of this kind, the 
 only kind whereof we have practical experience ? Are we 
 to say that one life-form produced another, inevitably and 
 because " it was its nature to," as the seed produces the 
 plant? Or, are we rather to say that there was no pre- 
 determination in the original forms of life towards one 
 development rather than another, and that extrinsic causes 
 have governed the production of those we now observe? 
 It is obvious that the two things are not the same ; they 
 are, in fact, as different as possible. On the one supposition, 
 given the original form, Evolution is secured, just as we 
 secure salmon or trout for a river by getting the ova ; the 
 after-development being as much part and parcel of an 
 organism as the initial state. But in the other case the 
 original form has no more tendency to become anything 
 else than has the ore in an iron-mine to become a steam- 
 engine ; if it is to do so, it must be wrought on by forces 
 altogether independent of itself. We may style the one or 
 the other process " Evolution," but does it serve any useful 
 purpose to turn the word loose on the world till we have 
 determined which it means? To say that "Evolution" 
 is established, but that we have no knowledge as to the 
 mode in which it has been worked, is merely to declare, 
 after the manner of the king's astrologer in the ballad, our 
 power to divine that something has occurred, but not what 
 that something may be. 
 
 It will doubtless be answered that we know the fact of 
 Evolution by evidence altogether independent of the pro- 
 cess which has ruled it. We find in life-forms a certain 
 orderly gradation of types, one pointing to another, like 
 footprints in sand ; and, as from such footprints we can 
 assure ourselves that a man or animal has passed that way, 
 can learn what has been the course of the march of life. 
 But the point to remark is, that in the one case we know 
 of a force that can cause motion from point to point, and 
 in the other we do not. We must know that creatures 
 walk before understanding the meaning of their tracks.
 
 " The Comfortable Word 'Evolution'* 3 
 
 Mere sequence does not necessarily imply connection. We 
 have amongst crystals, for example, a wonderful progression 
 of forms, the same general type being worked up, in the 
 case of different elements, to greater and greater com- 
 plexity. It has been observed by Mr. Ruskin,* that if 
 crystals were endowed with the power of reproduction, we 
 should be taught to conclude that those of galena, gold, 
 and oxide of iron were developed from a common ancestor, 
 because they are all octohedric ; and we should certainly 
 be tempted to argue that the extreme complication of con- 
 struction exhibited by certain crystals, requiring a portentous 
 terminology to describe,! must have been arrived at 
 through the simpler figures upon which they are based. 
 But, as crystals do not breed, we know this not to be the 
 case, and that whatever be the true explanation of their 
 phenomena, it is not Evolution : the basis of our judgment 
 being the obvious absence of any force or cause capable of 
 bridging the interval between form and form, and so 
 leading from one to another. So long as there is nothing 
 to do this, it matters not how much alike these forms may 
 be, nor how well graduated a series they compose ; develop- 
 ment does not explain their production. In the case of 
 living things we are not certified of the absence of such a 
 force, and therefore may conceive of development as 
 possible ; but till we are certified of its presence, we cannot 
 be sure that development there has been. To be justified 
 in proclaiming it as established, we should therefore be 
 possessed of some certain knowledge as to the mode in 
 which it has been operated. 
 
 To take another instance. The truth of Evolution is 
 frequently assumed on the strength of the existence of what 
 are called " rudimentary," or " vestigial " organs organs, 
 that is, so minute or incomplete as to be of no use what- 
 ever to their possessors. The only explanation of their 
 existence, we are assured, is that the possessor's ancestors 
 had and used the same organs in their full form, but that 
 
 * Love's Meinie, p. 56. 
 
 t As the Tetrakisdodecahedron, Hexakisoctohedron, or Icositetra- 
 hedron.
 
 4 " The Comfortable Word ' Evolution 
 
 in course of time change of habits and conditions having 
 thrown them out of work they have dwindled away, existing 
 now as a mere trace of the past. This is doubtless a 
 possible, we may even say a plausible, explanation : but is 
 it the only explanation that can exist? To say that it is 
 so, we ought to be possessed of a very thorough knowledge 
 of the processes and principles of Nature ; in other words, 
 we should be sure that we understand how the life-forms 
 in question have been produced, the very problem we are 
 attempting to solve. That we possess no such knowledge 
 is evident. We allow ourselves the widest possible latitude 
 in framing explanations of what we see, declaring, for 
 example, that the sole explanation of the complicated 
 adornments of a peacock is the superior attractiveness he 
 thereby gains in the eyes of pea-hens, though we have no 
 evidence at all that their judgment in such matters agrees 
 with ours ; and equally pronouncing the warts on the face 
 of a baboon to be decorative adjuncts, though appearing 
 to us disfigurements. We satisfy ourselves with such ex- 
 planations because no others are forthcoming, conceiving 
 their validity to be thereby proved. In spite, however, 
 of this facile mode of procedure, there are cases, not a few, 
 where we cannot even imagine an explanation, and this in 
 the case of organs not rudimentarily but fully developed. 
 Such an instance is afforded by the strange and complicated 
 shields borne on the heads of certain working ants, the use 
 of which is an absolute mystery. Who has any idea of 
 the practical utility of the spots and stripes wherewith 
 some caterpillars are adorned, which cannot justify them- 
 selves on the ground of sexual attraction as they do not 
 breed in that stage; or of the tuft of hair on a turkey's 
 breast ? 
 
 It would therefore appear, to come back to the original 
 point, that until we know something of the manner in 
 which the present state of life has been brought about, we 
 can mean nothing particular in talking about " Evolution," 
 and it is not worth while to talk much about it without 
 a meaning. Yet, as has been said, writers are found in 
 plenty to imply, if not to declare, that not knowing what
 
 " The Comfortable Word ' Evolution'" 5 
 
 the process has been, or what forces have been at work, 
 we can yet be scientifically certain of the fact of " Evolu- 
 tion." They speak as if the word had a strict and definite 
 meaning, and are impatient of any hesitation as to its 
 acceptance, allowing no explanation of such hesitation save 
 unscientific bigotry. Thus, as has been well observed with 
 regard to rudimentary organs, they not only suggest an 
 explanation, but proceed to declare it to be the sole ex- 
 planation possible, and if any one demurs, they accuse him 
 of dogmatizing. 
 
 They go in fact much further, and assume that in 
 admitting " Evolution " we have to admit a great deal 
 about its secret history, whereof they have professed to 
 claim no knowledge. The word, as we have seen, would 
 apply to a process of development from a germ pre-ordained 
 to develop ; and it is obvious that such pre-ordination is 
 at least compatible with the idea of a pre-ordaining mind. 
 But " Evolution " being taken as granted, we are straight- 
 way led off on lines of argument resting on the supposition 
 that the notion of Design is now finally disposed of, that 
 " Evolution " must mean an automatic and unintelligent 
 process, subject to none but material laws. 
 
 It may, in fact, be suggested that if we wish to under- 
 stand what " Evolution " may signify, no example will be 
 so instructive as that of the term itself. Until the period 
 of Mr. Darwin's appearance, although the relationships of 
 living things one to another were fully recognized at least 
 in their broader features which is, indeed, the basis of any 
 "natural" system of classification, the idea that community 
 of descent furnished the explanation was not adopted, 
 simply because there appeared to be no means by which 
 transformation could have been effected. Mr. Darwin 
 came, with his theory of Natural Selection, claiming to 
 supply this deficiency, and to show that there was a 
 force in nature capable of doing what was needed by 
 changing one species into another. His system, elaborated 
 with much ingenuity and immense industry, appeared so 
 satisfactory that the conclusion was widely and enthusiasti- 
 cally adopted that he had succeeded fully in his attempt,
 
 6 " The Comfortable Word ' Evolution ' ' 
 
 and made clear what had hitherto been dark : " Evolution" 
 being now accepted as proved, not because of the pheno- 
 mena previously known, but on account of the meaning 
 put upon these phenomena by him. Time went on, and 
 further investigation has been unfavourable to these first 
 conclusions ; serious objections have presented them- 
 selves, difficulties have accumulated, till now, as we have 
 been told, the Natural Selection theory has sunk beneath 
 the rank even of an hypothesis. Meanwhile, no other 
 theory that has been proposed to take its place has suc- 
 ceeded in obtaining any acceptance, even provisional, at all 
 comparable with that which Darwinism once received ; so 
 much so that this system has never been dethroned in the 
 popular imagination, simply from the want of a substitute, 
 it being still commonly supposed that the " Evolution " 
 theory and the "Natural Selection" theory are one and the 
 same, and the belief in the former is based on the argu- 
 ments of Mr. Darwin. 
 
 It thus appears that the grounds on which the doctrine 
 of "Evolution" originally rested have disappeared, and that 
 we are just where we were before Mr. Darwin published 
 his Origin of Species. To recur to an illustration already 
 employed, we may indeed in the meantime have discovered 
 numerous fresh footprints in the track, but are as far as 
 ever from knowledge of a force capable of taking a single 
 step. Yet, while this is so, it seems to be assumed that 
 the value of the final conclusion is nowise impaired, and 
 that the validity of the " Evolution " theory is quite in- 
 dependent of that of the other theory whereon it was 
 originally founded. The Darwinian hypothesis is made, in 
 fact, to do the work which a nest does for a young bird, 
 who requires to be sustained by "it for a time, but presently 
 spreads his wings and soars away self-supported, serenely 
 indifferent to the fate of his early cradle. 
 
 There has thus been effected a complete change of front 
 in the evolutionary army. Their original position was this : 
 "We believe in Evolution, because Mr. Darwin's theory, 
 which is a theory of Evolution, explains the phenomena : " 
 whereas now they say, " We believe in ' Evolution ' because
 
 " The Comfortable Word 'Evolution'" 7 
 
 of the phenomena, though unable to construct a theory 
 which shall explain them." 
 
 Considerations such as these afford at least some justifi- 
 cation for the attitude of those who ask for fuller informa- 
 tion before they pin their faith to the popular creed ; and, 
 unless it can be shown that the state of the case has been 
 here wrongly exhibited, other motives than unreasoning 
 bigotry may account for the position they assume. They 
 wish to know what it is precisely that they are asked to 
 believe. They do not wish to accept the doctrine con- 
 tained in a word capable of many meanings, without 
 knowing which of these is to be attached to it, and why 
 it is to be accepted ; not because of such acceptation to 
 find themselves involved in a system of beliefs resting on 
 nothing more substantial than the unsettled nature of the 
 terminology employed. 
 
 Our review of the situation would, however, be incom- 
 plete without further inspection of the evolutionists' position 
 according to themselves, and of the line of argument on 
 which they would justify their unshaken belief in their 
 cardinal dogma, despite their forced abandonment of the 
 substructure on which it originally rested. The chain of 
 progression in organic life, from lower to higher types, is, 
 they say, undeniable. Whatever be the forces at work in 
 organic nature, it is evident that as a matter of fact those 
 forms were first produced wherein the various organs were 
 less developed, and gradually through many stages of de- 
 velopment its fullest perfection has been reached. Such 
 facts naturally suggest the evolution of one form from 
 another, although we have not yet discovered how that 
 evolution was effected. The marks in the sand bear so 
 unmistakably the stamp of connection that we must per- 
 force link them together, and we can do so only in this 
 manner. On any other hypothesis than that of " Evolu- 
 tion," the orderly succession of families, genera, and species 
 is altogether meaningless, while "Evolution" explains it all: 
 "Evolution" is therefore truly scientific as Professor Marsh 
 has said, " To doubt it is to doubt science." 
 
 Now, although, as I have been contending, such an
 
 8 " The Comfortable Word ' Evolution "' 
 
 argument leaves much to be desired on the score of 
 logical cogency, it undoubtedly appeals strongly to the 
 imagination, and it will therefore be well, prescinding from 
 the previous question of ways and means, to meet it on its 
 own ground and inquire what, so considered, it is worth. 
 What of the succession of life-forms upon the earth ? How 
 does its history, so far as we know it, bear out the doctrines 
 we have heard laid down ? 
 
 The means of answering these questions are supplied by 
 the late Sir J. W. Dawson in his little book Modern Ideas 
 of Evolution ; * wherein we shall find in convenient form, 
 and with the sanction of competent authority, facts enough 
 for our present purpose. 
 
 In the first place, then, we have to begin by assuming 
 the existence of life. On this, the foundation-stone of the 
 whole edifice, Evolutionists do not claim to throw any light. 
 Life, their ablest representatives strenuously declare, can 
 come only from life. Life, on the other hand, by the 
 testimony of the rocks, has not always been upon the 
 earth. It had a beginning, but about that beginning 
 science has no word to say. It may well appear that this 
 deficiency vitiates all possible value in her after-conclusions, 
 for the force producing life must surely have something, if 
 not everything, to do with all its further developments. 
 This, however, is not our question now : we must, with 
 those whose doctrines we are considering, take things as we 
 find them, and proceed to inquire how far the history of 
 Life as we know it accords with the assertion that the 
 " Evolution " theory alone explains the facts. 
 
 In the first place, what of the alleged fact that life began 
 on earth with the simplest forms, and has gradually mounted 
 to greater and greater complexity, from a single generalized 
 organ performing many functions in a less perfect manner, 
 to a multitude of organs, each specialized for the due per- 
 formance of one ? Broadly speaking, we find this to be 
 true, but that there is a most important qualification to be 
 made. The first discovered forms of life were of low 
 grades, indeed, but of high and perfect types within those 
 * London : The Religious Tract Society.
 
 "The Comfortable Word ' Evolution' " 9 
 
 grades ; * that is to say, they were forms to reach which 
 a long process of development would be required. And 
 similarly of the first specimens of the various tribes and 
 families which have succeeded. With regard to the plants 
 of the coal period, Sir William Dawson tells us : t " The 
 land was clothed with an exuberant vegetation, not of the 
 lowest types nor of the highest, but of intermediate forms, 
 such as those of the pines, the club-mosses, and the ferns, 
 all of which attained in those days to magnitudes and 
 numbers of species unsurpassed, and in some cases un- 
 equalled, in the modern world. Nor do they show any 
 signs of an unformed or imperfect state. Their seeds and 
 spores, their fruits and spore-cases, are as elaborately con- 
 structed, the tissues and forms of their stems and leaves as 
 delicate and beautiful, as in any modern plants. Nay more ; 
 the cryptogamous { plants of this age show a complexity 
 and perfection of structure not attained to by their modern 
 successors." 
 
 In like manner with regard to animals : " The compound 
 eyes and filmy wings of insects, the teeth, bones, and scales 
 of batrachians and fishes ; all are as perfectly finished, and 
 many quite as complex and elegant, as in the animals of the 
 present day." Neither is it true to say of these that their 
 earliest representatives represented their lowest orders : for 
 instance, || "Fishes appear, and soon abound in a great 
 variety of species, representing types of no mean rank. . . . 
 On the land batrachian reptiles now abound, some of them 
 being very high in the sub-class to which they belong." At 
 later periods of the geological chronicle the same sort of 
 story is repeated. At one time it is broad-leaved forest- 
 trees that enter upon the scene,ir altogether different from 
 those of the previous chapter : at others lizard-like reptiles, 
 birds, and mammals, each stamped at its first coming with 
 the essential characteristics of its class as we know it to-day, 
 so that " it is impossible, except by violent suppositions, to 
 connect them genetically with any predecessors." But still 
 
 * Modern Ideas of Evolution, p. 93. 
 
 t P. 99- \ ?.e., flowerless. 
 
 Ibid. || P. 98. IT P. 100.
 
 io " The Comfortable Word 'Evolution'" 
 
 more important is it to note the mode of appearance of 
 each succeeding class. On the " Evolution " hypothesis, a 
 new type of life should make its appearance but gradually, 
 and as it were tentatively. Mr. Darwin could not believe 
 that the complex coincidences of many circumstances 
 needed for the production of a new species could occur 
 twice over, and so held that a species once extinct must 
 for ever remain so, the icxact causes which had originally 
 produced it never recurring. Therefore the members of 
 each group of allied forms must, he tells us, have sprung 
 from some one progenitor.* According to this, a new form 
 should have been propagated from the first representatives, 
 elaborated by development, spreading gradually from the 
 centre where these had appeared, to occupy other regions. 
 But, as we read it in the rocks, this is not the account of 
 the matter : on the contrary, " Many new forms appear to 
 have been introduced at one time and apparently suddenly, \ 
 entering upon the scene 'abruptly and in large numbers.'" 
 Such is the case with ferns, club-mosses, horse-tails, and 
 later on with the more perfect fruit-bearing trees; and 
 among animals with corals, lamp-shells, crinoids, amphi- 
 bians, reptiles, and mammals. Thus in what is known to 
 geologists as the Cambrian age we obtain "a vast and 
 varied accession of living things, which appear at once, as 
 if by a sudden and simultaneous production of many kinds 
 of animals,"J the sea swarming with creatures near akin to 
 those which still inhabit it, and nearly as varied. Again, in 
 the latter half of the Palaeozoic period "we find a number 
 of higher forms breaking upon us with the same apparent 
 suddenness as in the case of the early Cambrian animals " : 
 fishes appear, batrachian reptiles, scorpions, spiders, insects, 
 millipedes, and land snails ; and this not in one locality 
 only, but over the whole northern hemisphere. || So we 
 proceed to the Mesozoic, or secondary rocks, with their 
 
 * Origin of Species, p. 303. It may be remarked that he should have 
 said, "from one/a/Vof progenitors," each member of which would 
 have had to be independently developed to the same pattern. 
 
 t Modern Ideas of Evolution, p. 93. \ Ibid., p. 97. 
 
 Ibid., p. 98. |i Ibid., p. 99.
 
 Comfortable Word ' Evolution" n 
 
 dominant reptiles, where also birds and mammals first 
 leave their trace ; and to the Kainozoic, or Tertiary, where 
 mammals displace the reptiles as the ruling class, and show 
 themselves in infinite multiplicity of species. " So greatly 
 indeed did mammalian life abound in this period that in 
 the middle part of the Tertiary most of the leading groups 
 were represented by more numerous species than at pre- 
 sent, while many types then existing have now no repre- 
 sentatives." * 
 
 It is quite true that Mr. Darwin, who could not but see 
 the difficulty thus raised, has set himself to answer it. He 
 tells us f that we continually over-rate the perfection of the 
 geological record, and that, imperfect as it is, types ot 
 plants or animals may well have existed long before we 
 can find evidence of the fact. Moreover, that we do not 
 make sufficient allowance for the enormous times covered by 
 each of our geological periods, so that there may have 
 been an ample sufficiency for the gradual production of 
 forms which appear to us to have been sprung suddenly 
 upon the world. These pleas deserve full consideration 
 but, whatever their value, it has still to be confessed that 
 it is not the facts of geology which inculcate upon us the 
 truth of " Evolution," but, rather, those facts, so far as we 
 know them, have to be explained away in favour of that 
 theory. Nature, so far as we have explored her records, 
 knows as little of the manner in which, according to the 
 evolutionary system, her various life-forms ought to have 
 come on the stage, as she does of the melting of one form 
 into another, not observed facts, but what Sir J. W. 
 Dawson calls "violent suppositions" being in each case 
 the basis of operations. 
 
 Considerations no less important connect themselves with 
 the question of time, on which subject, to judge from the 
 utterances of the highest scientific authorities, there is still 
 the most bewildering uncertainty. Evolutionists were long 
 accustomed to treat the bank of Time as practically un- 
 limited in its resources, and so drew upon it without scruple 
 for millions and thousands of millions of years, wherein the 
 * P. 101. t Origin of Species, p. 303.
 
 12 " The Comfortable Word 'Evolution'" 
 
 transformations required by their system might have been 
 effected ; and the " enormous intervals of time " spoken of 
 above by Mr. Darwin had always played an important part 
 among the postulates of his school, the evidence for their 
 existence being mainly derived from the formation of our 
 various rocks and the rate at which, according to the or- 
 dinary laws of nature, they may be supposed to have been 
 deposited. There are, however, other modes of attacking 
 the problem, and these afford a very different result. It 
 is several years since Lord Kelvin startled the scien- 
 tific world by the announcement that, as the result of 
 calculations based upon three distinct lines of investigation,* 
 all geological history must be limited within a maximum of 
 one hundred million years. This was a mere fraction of the 
 period required for evolutionary purposes, but more recently 
 the same authority has found reason still further to reduce 
 it by eighty per cent., now allowing but twenty million years 
 at most for geological purposes. 
 
 In this state of things it is hard to arrive at fixed and 
 definite opinions on this all-important point, and the state 
 of mind is surely excusable which elects to await fuller 
 information before declaring a system to be indubitably 
 proved, which requires for its justification, an allowance of 
 time in the past practically unlimited. 
 
 But, although thus unable to compute our time, with any 
 certainty, in terms of years, we can form a tolerably accu- 
 rate notion of the relative length of geological periods, com- 
 paring each with the sum-total of them all. This relative 
 computation opens up sundry questions both interesting and 
 important, whereof one may be taken as a typical example. 
 
 To the objection urged by anti-evolutionists that we do 
 not find in nature, either living or fossil, the intermediate 
 forms required to link species, genera, and families together, 
 two answers have been given. The first of these we have 
 already heard, namely, that the geological record is so im- 
 perfect as to make its silence by no means conclusive. But 
 it is further maintained that in certain cases we actually 
 
 * Viz., the action of the tides upon the earth's rotation, the age of 
 the sun, and the temperature of the interior of the globe.
 
 " The Comfortable Word ' Evolution" 13 
 
 have discovered the forms wanted, the links here being no 
 longer " missing " but "found," and on the analogy of these 
 we are invited to believe that fuller knowledge would 
 remove the difficulty in other cases. Of the creatures for 
 which it is claimed that an actual pedigree has thus been 
 supplied none has been made more prominent than the 
 horse. "Of course," says a popular writer,* "everybody 
 knows the wonderful pedigree of the horse and donkey 
 family," and in any work that undertakes to demonstrate 
 " Evolution " we are pretty sure to find a plate representing 
 the comparative anatomy of the various discovered forms, 
 leading gradually up to that with which we are so familiar. 
 The instance is indeed for evolutionary purposes almost an 
 ideal one. The earliest discovered animal in the series was 
 about the size of a fox, had four distinct toes, and even the 
 rudiment of a fifth ; the creature, even at this early stage, 
 having already begun, in the words of the author last cited, 
 "to develop towards the distinctive peculiarity of his race 
 the solid hoof, adapted to free scouring over open grass- 
 grown plains." t After him comes another, rather larger, 
 with four toes only, and then a third, the size of a sheep, 
 with but three, whereof the central is distinctly the largest, 
 portending the ultimate absorption of the others. Then we 
 come to a species which has attained the dimensions of a 
 donkey, with one stout middle toe, much like a modern 
 horse's hoof, and a lateral toe on each side, which does not 
 reach the ground this arrangement being supposed to be 
 adapted for soft and swampy ground. Finally, the full- 
 blown horse himself has a single solid hoof, but retains in 
 his splint-bones a vestige of these his last-lost toes. The 
 chapter is undoubtedly a most interesting one in the history 
 of animal life, but before we are asked to put upon it the 
 meaning for which evolutionists contend, there are sundry 
 important considerations to be weighed. 
 
 In the first place, the forms of which we have spoken, 
 though composing an interesting and tolerably consecutive 
 series, appear certainly not to have been the ancestors of our 
 actual horse. It is in the New World that we find remains 
 
 * Mr. Grant Allen, Vignettes from Nature, p. 191. f Ibid.
 
 14 "The Comfortable Word 'Evolution" 
 
 of the animals above described {Eohippus, Orohippus, Meso- 
 kippus, etc.), and, if these evolved into a horse at all, it 
 was into the aboriginal horse of America, extinct long ago, 
 for the horses now found on that continent are all descended 
 from animals imported from Europe. The genealogy of 
 the extant horse has to be sought in quite a different line, 
 being traced back to a much less promising source, the 
 Pal<zotherium> a creature which would seem to have closely 
 resembled the modern tapir.* Of the American horse, 
 fossil remains have been discovered, and there can there- 
 fore be no doubt that any evolutionary process must con- 
 nect with him the less perfect forms which America has 
 produced. At the same time, as Dawson remarks, it is 
 equally certain that had we not known of the American 
 animal, these lower forms would have been unhesitatingly 
 claimed as ancestors for ours. "This simple considera- 
 tion," he adds, I " is sufficient to show that such genealogies 
 are not of the nature of scientific evidence." The horse, 
 in fact, " has too many imaginary ancestors." 
 
 The American horse suggests another perplexing ques- 
 tion. Traced, as we have seen, to a line of ancestors totally 
 different from those of our genus Equus, he has all the 
 essential characters of that genus. Accordingly, as Dr. 
 Mivart remarks, it would appear that " Evolution " must 
 be conducted on principles the very reverse of those 
 generally assumed, not the starting-point, but the term to 
 be reached ruling development, and diverse lines of organic 
 structure being conducted to meet in one point. 
 
 All this, however, although too important to be 
 altogether neglected, is but incidental to our main point, 
 which is concerned with the question of geological time. 
 For evolutionary purposes it is not enough that the 
 American horse should have been developed from the tiny 
 
 * This fact is quite lost sight of in many popular works on the evolu- 
 tionary side, as those of Mr. Clodd, Mr. Grant Allen, and Dr. Andrew 
 Wilson, from which it would appear that the New and Old World forms 
 compose but one series, and that the members of each are available to 
 fill gaps in the other. 
 
 t Modern Ideas of Evolution, p. no.
 
 "The Comfortable Word ' Evolution" 15 
 
 Eohippu s ; the latter should himself be developed from 
 a long line of mammalian ancestors. For Eohipptis is an 
 Ungulate and the Ungulate family have members and 
 organs so specialized for their peculiar purposes that an 
 enormous period of time must have been required to evolve 
 them, as evolutionists suppose. The fore-limbs of a horse, 
 for instance, are constructed out of materials of which we 
 recognize the exact counterpart in the wing of a bat, the 
 paddle of a whale, the paw of a tiger, or the hand and arm 
 of man. Describing them in terms of the last, a horse does 
 not walk on the palms like a bear or monkey, nor on the 
 fingers only, like a cat or dog, but on the tips of his finger- 
 nails. What we call his knee is really his wrist (just as his 
 hock is the ankle), the portion of his "leg" thence to the 
 pastern is his hand, and the hoof is the nail of the one big 
 finger which has absorbed all the others. What a limitless 
 period must have been needed to elaborate such a member, 
 while, meantime, other creatures were modifying the same 
 raw material for the purposes of flight, or swimming, or 
 digging, or climbing, or as a weapon of offence ! At least 
 ten times the space must have been required which was 
 occupied in the comparatively simple process of changing 
 one Ungulate animal into another. But for this essential 
 operation the geological record allows no time at all. 
 
 The succession of the strata wherein are pressed and 
 preserved the remains of plants and animals has been 
 clearly determined, and they are found to divide themselves, 
 as it were, into three great volumes, laid one upon another, 
 which, beginning from the oldest and lowest, are named 
 Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. It is only at the 
 beginning of the Tertiary series that any trace is found of 
 true or " placental " mammals, the class to which 
 Ungulates belong, and from the common parent of which 
 they have, as we are told, developed, and early in the 
 same Tertiary volume Eohippus comes on the scene, hoofs 
 and all, and with all the essential features of an Ungulate 
 already acquired. Had he been evolved according to the 
 theory we are discussing, the Secondary volume, and 
 even the Primary as well, should bear witness to the
 
 1 6 "The Comfortable Word ' Evolution" 
 
 existence of a stock whence he might descend, and of 
 other branches ramifying from that stock : for it has taken 
 the whole of the Tertiary period to develop his decendants 
 into horses, if such development there has been, the 
 fossils of the latter animal being found only towards the 
 end of the volume. 
 
 This may, I think, be fairly taken as a sample of our 
 experience, should we attempt rigorously to examine the 
 cogency of those arguments by which " Evolution " is 
 commonly held to be established. That they "prove" 
 anything, understanding "proof "as science usually under- 
 stands the term, can hardly be seriously maintained : till 
 scientific proof be produced, to suspend our judgement 
 should not be unscientific.
 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 IN the previous paper * I have endeavoured to show that the 
 fashionable evolutionary creed labours under certain dis- 
 advantages in the eyes of those who, not wishing to adopt a 
 belief merely because it is popular, endeavour to form for 
 themselves a clear idea as to what it is, and why it is to be 
 accepted. In the first place, the terminology is vague and 
 unsettled, so that it is impossible to say what it signifies. 
 Moreover, so much has to be assumed without the pos- 
 sibility of explanation or comprehension, as to deprive the 
 system built on these assumptions of all scientific value. 
 Finally, the proofs adduced in favour of Evolution are 
 vague and inconsequent and do not bear close inspection. 
 Prescinding, however, from all this, there remain other 
 lines on which an inquiry into the claims of the Evolu- 
 tionary theory can be conducted, and it may be worth our 
 while at present to consider one of these. Let us altogether 
 abstract from the biological or geological arguments brought 
 forward by Evolutionists ; let us for the present suppose 
 these to be as cogent as they are said to be ; let us shut our 
 eyes to the difficulties which have been raised on the score 
 of terminology and definition : taking the creed at its own 
 valuation, and admitting its exposition of itself to be com- 
 prehensible and satisfactory, we shall find ourselves still 
 confronted by a problem of insoluble perplexity. 
 * " The Comfortable Word' Evolution." " 
 
 II. c
 
 1 8 The Foundations of Evolution 
 
 It must be borne in mind that " Evolution " claims to be 
 not a fact merely, but a principle. Not only, as we are told, 
 have beings of various kinds been actually evolved, one 
 from another, but there is a law in " Nature" making such 
 evolution imperative, which law is, indeed, supreme and 
 paramount over all others, forcing them all to co-operate 
 towards its own ends, and making its power felt in every 
 department of the universe. Not only has there been 
 organic evolution, producing the various species of plants 
 and animals, but previous to this and preparatory for it 
 there was inorganic evolution of the material world, while 
 subsequently there has been, and still is, mental evolution 
 of individuals and sociological evolution of collective man. 
 Such is the essence of the new gospel promulgated by Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer and incessantly preached and popularized 
 by the multitude of his disciples. New it undoubtedly is, 
 and if it be also true, there is abundant justification of the 
 attitude of mental superiority assumed by its partisans in 
 regard of all other schools of philosophy that have ever 
 been. If this be indeed the great illuminating principle of 
 the nature of things, and if all generations of men up to the 
 present have not even suspected its existence, what is more 
 obvious than that they have all been lost in Egyptian 
 darkness, and that their speculations may without further 
 ado be summarily dismissed as absolutely worthless ? 
 
 It is no less clear that for a principle which makes such 
 enormous claims there should be very solid grounds, and 
 that like other fundamental truths it should be capable of 
 imposing itself imperiously upon the mind. Though too 
 blind to see it for ourselves, we ought, now that it has been 
 discovered for us, to recognize its harmonious power, and, 
 observing how it throws light where hitherto there had 
 been but darkness, to be impressed with the assurance of 
 its truth. 
 
 If we would proceed to a fuller examination of the system 
 which has been briefly outlined, it is undeniable that we 
 may look to find it more clearly illustrated in the inorganic 
 than in the organic world. Life is still even for the most 
 accomplished biologists an acknowledged mystery. Of its
 
 The Foundations of Evolution 1 9 
 
 origin they confessedly know nothing; of its laws they know 
 so little as to be quite unable, with any exactitude, to 
 calculate their course. All that they can pretend to do is to 
 verify the operations of these laws as they occur, and con- 
 jecturally to construct a history for them in the past. But 
 with the inorganic world it is otherwise. There, while the 
 origin of the prevailing laws is utterly unknown, their 
 operation is so clearly understood as to earn for the sciences 
 that deal with them the title of "exact." The natural 
 philosopher, the astronomer, the chemist, the electrician 
 all deal with that which can be not only verified but 
 foretold : knowing the circumstances, we know how matter 
 will inevitably behave when placed in them ; how one body 
 will fall and another rise, how planets will revolve and 
 rotate, what chemical affinities will prove themselves more 
 potent than others, how the needle will be deflected on the 
 passage of an electric current. 
 
 This being so, if there be any province in which we may 
 reasonably expect to find the truth of Evolution unmistak- 
 ably exhibited, it must be that of the material forces with 
 which these exact sciences deal : here we should find it not 
 in the shape of an induction more or less ingenious, and 
 more or less vague, but reducible to a rigid formula, and 
 demonstrable by the methods of mathematics. 
 
 What is the fact ? Do we find in the material history of 
 the world, as known to us, plain evidence of continuous 
 and continual progress towards greater and greater per- 
 fection, fraught with infinite possibilities in the future of 
 ever-evolving life and power ? On the contrary : the pro- 
 cess which we trace is one not of advance but of degra- 
 dation, the term which we are able clearly to foresee is 
 one not of indefinite expansion for the powers of nature, 
 but of absolute extinction of them all ; while no less 
 assuredly do we learn that the condition of things which 
 has rendered possible all the multitudinous laws with which 
 science deals is one for which no merely mechanical theory 
 of Evolution can even attempt to account. 
 
 To understand this we must go back to the beginning of 
 things whence Evolution is to start. Confining ourselves
 
 2O The Foundations of Evolution 
 
 to our own system of sun and planets, we are told, and with 
 every appearance of probability, that the original condition 
 of the matter composing them was a vast " nebula " a sort 
 of cloud or vapour wherein the countless multitude of 
 atoms, now packed together in solid bodies, standing far 
 apart one from another, as an enormous sphere more than 
 seven thousand million miles in diameter, filled at least the 
 whole space between the sun and the outermost of the 
 planets, probably extending far beyond. 
 
 In this condition, which we have to postulate in order to 
 account for what follows, there is one element for which 
 science can nowise account, and to which are due all those 
 operations whereof she takes cognizance the position of 
 the atoms far apart. Had they been close together the 
 world that we know would never have been ; while to drive 
 them apart a force is needed whereof we find absolutely no 
 trace in physical nature. 
 
 That the world should become the theatre of those mani- 
 fold laws which we daily witness in operation, it was 
 absolutely necessary that there should be available a store 
 of power capable of doing the work required, just as to 
 drive a mill by water-power we must have a reservoir higher 
 than the wheel that is to be turned, or to make a clock go 
 the weights must be raised, which in their descent are to 
 supply motive power for the machinery. In these cases, 
 and all others where the operations of nature are performed, 
 we require first that bodies be placed in a condition different 
 from that towards which their own inherent forces tend to 
 bring them ; and it is the play these forces find in reasserting 
 themselves that gives them the opportunity of acting. The 
 water in the mill-dam or the weights of the clock have of 
 themselves no tendency to do anything but descend, the 
 action of gravitation causing all bodies to tend to approach 
 one another, and these therefore to approach the earth. 
 The force expended in putting them in an unstable position 
 is thereby stored up, its exact equivalent being returned 
 as they resume their natural position. Similarly when we 
 bend a bow we forcibly alter its natural shape, and thus 
 allow its elasticity to become available to propel the arrow.
 
 The Foundations of Evolution 2 1 
 
 When we fire a gun we let loose the constituents of the 
 powder from the chemical combinations they have been 
 made to adopt ; we do the like when we burn a piece of 
 coal ; the immediate result in the one case being an 
 expansion which furnishes propulsive power, in the other a 
 supply of heat. 
 
 The original situation of the particles composing the 
 world at a distance one from another, was exactly analogous 
 to that of the clock-weights when raised to their highest 
 point. They were in an unstable position, in a position 
 contrary to that whereto their own forces tend to bring them, 
 and it is their constant running down towards that position 
 that is the main and most essential factor in the work of 
 Nature. Given motion we at once get heat, from the 
 friction or impact of particles and particles. Given varia- 
 tions of heat, we get change of chemical combination ; 
 similarly we get electrical action : all, in brief, that we have 
 in the way of active forces in Nature, we owe to the fact 
 that the world was at starting in a condition to change 
 itself by its own forces. That is to say, I repeat, it was in 
 an unstable, and in what we may call an unnatural, con- 
 dition ; its particles were placed where it would require 
 enormous work to be done against gravitation to replace 
 them in a position from which they have been inevitably 
 departing and must invariably continue more and more to 
 depart. In other words, the weights of the clock are 
 continually running down. 
 
 That is what I mean by saying that the process we find 
 going on is one of degradation, for what is expended can 
 never be recovered. Just as the weights of the clock 
 cannot lift themselves to their first position, and the more 
 work they do are less capable of further work ; just as we 
 cannot twice fire the same powder or burn the same coal, 
 so every exercise of the forces of Nature marks a diminution 
 of the stock on which it is possible to draw. 
 
 The sun, to take the chief example of all, is the great 
 central engine of our planetary system, an engine of illimit- 
 able capabilities. He it is that pumps our water supply 
 from the oceans into the clouds, feeding our lakes and
 
 22 The Foundations of Evolution 
 
 rivers, and irrigating our fields. His rays it is that enable 
 plants to grow, and to assimilate carbon from the atmo- 
 sphere, binding it up in chemical combinations within their 
 tissues for future use. It is because our coal-fields were 
 once growing forests that they are able to furnish fuel ; and 
 when we burn a piece of coal we do no more than let loose 
 the energy stored there of old by the sun. So, also, all 
 animal force is supplied, for either directly or indirectly we 
 all subsist on grass, the ox and sheep directly, and those 
 who eat beef and mutton through them as intermediaries. 
 The enormous work thus done by the sun upon our globe 
 is but an insignificant fraction of that which he is capable 
 of doing, for only those rays do this work which happen to 
 light on our tiny sphere, and it would require more than 
 two thousand million earths, at our distance from him, to 
 catch them all. The small portion of his power thus 
 exerted upon us is, however, so potent that if the land and 
 sea were covered with horses, one to every twenty-five 
 square feet, their united efforts would just avail for the 
 work he does ; while it is calculated that every square yard 
 of his surface has a working-power equal to the steam of 
 eleven of our largest ironclads. 
 
 Still, vast as it may be, this power of the sun is but 
 another instance of energy, requiring a cause to explain its 
 existence, and diminishing as it is exerted. That the sun 
 is hot is undoubtedly an effect of that original position of 
 the particles of matter which we have been considering. 
 It is clearly shown that the impact of large masses rushing 
 together with great velocity or, which is more probable, 
 the shrinkage of the mass amply suffices to explain the 
 phenomena of solar heat, however wonderful. But wonder- 
 ful as they are, the sun can no more than a farthing rush- 
 light burn without being consumed. All this enormous 
 store of energy which he so lavishly throws about space, 
 has to be drawn from his capital ; and he is ever, of neces- 
 sity, hurrying along the road that must inevitably terminate 
 in total extinction. 
 
 Neither is it possible that by conversion of the heat, 
 which has originated as we have seen, back again to motion,
 
 The Foundations of Evolution 23 
 
 things can be restored to their original condition. From 
 its nature heat is incapable of being fully utilized in this 
 manner. Only that portion of it, or of any form of energy 
 which does work can be used ; and to do work it must 
 encounter a body to work upon. But being radiated in all 
 directions, much heat never meets with such a body, but 
 travels vaguely into space, and though never destroyed 
 becomes for ever inoperative, and we have seen how 
 immense a proportion of the sun's heat is thus squandered. 
 Therefore, although from a given amount of motion we 
 can obtain an exact equivalent of heat, we cannot from 
 that heat get back the equivalent of motion. Heat has 
 therefore to be fed at the expense of motion, which being 
 destroyed, as motion, in producing heat, and never ade- 
 quately restored in its original form, is constantly growing 
 less and less throughout the universe. All motion that we 
 know tends constantly to be thus translated into heat. 
 
 Heat is therefore a most wasteful form of energy, and it 
 is that which must inevitably supplant the others. Besides 
 this, heat can do no work except between bodies of different 
 temperature, and the inevitable result of its action, when 
 left to itself, being to produce uniformity of temperature 
 between bodies, it must when there is no more motion, 
 or other form of energy, to feed it, render itself powerless 
 to do work at all, and then, in the words of Professor 
 Balfour Stewart, the universe will no longer be a possible 
 abode for living things. 
 
 Such, in very brief outline, is the doctrine that comes to 
 us with the fullest authority of science, in connection with 
 one of her latest and greatest discoveries, that of the law 
 of the conservation of energy. Imperfect as so summary a 
 sketch must be, it will perhaps suffice for present purposes 
 and enable us to answer the question as to the claim of the 
 Evolutionary theory to explain the history of the universe. 
 Looking forward to the future, we see that even supposing 
 Evolution to be at present a fact, this can at most be but 
 a transitory phase of the world's history. So far from there 
 being any promise of continuous and ever-progressive 
 ascent from height to height of greater and greater Evolu-
 
 24 The Foundations of Evolution 
 
 tionary triumphs, there is no hope : Evolution and all 
 its works must inevitably go down into the pit of the dead 
 lifeless heavens and earth which science has enabled us to 
 foresee, and towards which every exertion of the forces 
 which alone make Evolution possible brings us appreciably 
 nearer. 
 
 Still more instructive is it to look backwards to the past. 
 Let it be again repeated, the original condition of things, 
 that on which everything depended, is one for which no 
 theory of Evolution can account. No forces known to 
 us in physical nature could possibly have produced that 
 original condition : they could not even conserve it when 
 it was given, and if they had left it as it was, the result 
 would have been dead lifeless inactivity, exactly as that 
 other condition to which we are tending. If the weights 
 of the clock are drawn up but not allowed to descend, the 
 result is precisely the same for the timepiece as if they had 
 run down to their lowest, and, in like manner, it was only 
 because there was matter so situated that it could be made 
 to run together, and forces capable of making it do so, 
 that the complex machinery of the universe was rendered 
 possible. Nowhere, outside of poor Robert Montgomery's 
 poem, did a stream ever " meander level with its fount," 
 and the law which forbids such a feat is precisely that 
 which has regulated the whole course of Nature, ordaining 
 that course to be one of steady descent from the most 
 advantageous form in which her constant sum of energy 
 could exist, to other forms ever less and less capable of 
 future work. 
 
 In all this it is hard to discern the presence of Evolution, 
 ruling from end to end and dispensing with the need of 
 anything but itself to explain the totality of things. Yet 
 such, be it remembered, is the claim set up on behalf of 
 the new doctrine. Unless the " great law of Evolution " 
 runs through everything, it is not what it pretends to be, 
 and here in this department of science where more than 
 in any other can precise conclusions be arrived at, we 
 find its claims utterly discredited at both ends of the chain 
 of life.
 
 The Foundations of Evolution 25 
 
 May we not unhesitatingly go further and say that what 
 we do clearly learn is this : That there must have been 
 from the beginning a power in existence, capable of doing 
 all that had to be done in order to make "Nature" 
 possible, a power differing from the forces of physical 
 nature in being independent of accidental conditions for 
 its effective exercise, not requiring to receive energy from 
 another, nor spending it in its exercise a power to which 
 must be ascribed every operation of Nature that we witness, 
 as to the arm that wound it is to be attributed the going 
 of the clock ? If we do not finally arrive at such a power 
 as this, philosophy is no more than an endless game of 
 hunt-the-slipper, and every system of cosmogony does but 
 reproduce, under other names, the series of elephants and 
 tortoises wherein Hindoo astronomy would find a support 
 for the world. But if there be such a power, and if it be, 
 as it must, one that could by no possibility be evolved, for 
 it is the necessary pre-requisite of all processes, what more 
 can Evolution be, if Evolution there is, than part of that 
 system of law which flows from the condition with which 
 the First Power ordained that the operations of Nature 
 should start ? 
 
 It will probably have occurred to the reader that not only 
 in respect of the position in which the particles of the 
 primitive nebula were placed, does the state of things 
 postulated as a starting point by evolutionists demand 
 explanation. Not only were the particles set wide apart 
 against the force of gravitation, but the whole mass they 
 composed was in motion, rotating upon its own axis with 
 immense velocity. Whence came this motion ? Matter 
 cannot move itself, for, as we know from the first of 
 Newton's great laws, a body at rest will continue at rest 
 for ever unless acted upon by some force. It is true that 
 in order to meet the difficulty thus created by the inertia of 
 matter, Voltaire's friend, Baron Holbach, boldly enunciated 
 the principle that motion is an inherent property of matter, 
 which of its own nature tends to move, which unscientific 
 idea has recently been revived by Professor Haeckel. But a 
 doctrine so patently absurd has failed to obtain any accept-
 
 26 The Foundations of Evolution 
 
 ance. Not only does it contradict all experience, but on 
 very slight examination it is seen to have absolutely no 
 meaning. If matter tends to move, it must be in some one 
 definite direction. A tendency to move indifferently in 
 every direction at once would anchor it just to the position 
 actually occupied, like the rope in a "tug-of-war" when 
 the rival parties are equally matched. And why should 
 matter tend to move in one direction rather than the 
 opposite ? The globular nebula, for instance, to which we 
 have been introduced, must have been turning on one 
 particular axis ; and that its movement was from west to 
 east is evidenced by the rotation of the sun and planets 
 composing our solar system, and the revolution of the 
 latter in their orbits, which is traced to the rotation of the 
 mass whence they were thrown off.* How came it, we may 
 ask, that this particular axis came to be selected rather 
 than any other? And why was the rotation from west to 
 east, rather than east to west? Here is another prime 
 factor in the machinery of the universe which has to be 
 accounted for before we can speak of having found an 
 explanation that explains anything. And this initial 
 condition of motion is a factor of the first importance. 
 This it is that furnishes the centrifugal force, but for 
 which the centripetal force of gravitation, or mutual 
 attraction of particles, would straightway draw all together 
 as a solid sphere round the centre of the mass, and had 
 this been, there could be no room for any of these opera- 
 tions which make Nature what she is. By virtue of this 
 initial rotation alone can the mass perform, as it does, the 
 function of a gigantic fly-wheel, capable of keeping the 
 machine going for millions of years after the original 
 impulse has ceased to act. But an initial impulse there 
 must have been, and to it each succession of evening and 
 morning, of winter and summer, bears witness, for, like the 
 sum of available energy throughout the system, so this 
 particular energy of motion can only tend, however slowly, 
 towards its inevitable term. 
 
 The daily rotation of the earth, for example, was once 
 * With the probable exception of the satellites of Mars.
 
 The Foundations of Evolution 27 
 
 supposed to afford an instance of motion absolutely in- 
 variable. More exact observations, however, have shown 
 that this is not so; the action of the tides in a contrary 
 direction act as a drag, and cause retardation, at a rate 
 which, however slight, is nevertheless appreciable, and 
 must, one day, infallibly destroy the motion altogether, 
 reducing the earth to the inert condition already reached 
 by the moon. 
 
 Once more, therefore, the results of science lead us 
 perforce to the recognition of a Power beyond those of 
 physical Nature, from which alone, as Newton declared,* 
 the condition of things which we behold can possibly have 
 originated. 
 
 To sum up. We have seen, as a result of the investi- 
 gation of science, in that department where her knowledge 
 is most truly scientific, that Evolution cannot be spoken 
 of as a law of irresistible progress, sufficient for itself and 
 imperiously working out its own operations : for, far more 
 surely than any progress, there inevitably awaits it the utter 
 extinction of all that it has ever done. Moreover, sup- 
 posing Evolution to be the present law of things, the fact 
 that it is so does not explain itself, but postulates of 
 necessity a force beyond and behind all the forces of 
 physical nature, whence alone can the law of Evolution 
 or any other law derive the powers it has to work at all. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer in his well-known definition 
 describes Evolution as "an integration of matter and 
 concomitant dissipation of motion ; during which the 
 matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity 
 to a definite coherent heterogeneity; and during which 
 the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." t 
 Many will feel that this definition, lucid as it doubtless is, 
 does not altogether remove the mystery which surrounds 
 the subject, but, whatever be obscure and difficult, it is 
 obvious to ask whence came the conditions rendering 
 possible this integration, this dissipation and this trans- 
 
 * Principle, : Scholium generals. 
 t First Principles, 145.
 
 28 The Foundations of Evolution 
 
 formation ; whence came the motion to be dissipated and 
 transformed, the indefiniteness capable of definition and 
 the incoherency capable of being made coherent. Finally 
 if Evolution be really this, how can a process contingent 
 on so many conditions be described as explaining anything 
 how can it with any show of reason be presented to us 
 as the final principle which shall solve the mystery of the 
 universe ?
 
 THE MECHANICS OF 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 EVOLUTION, as I have endeavoured to show/ 1 ' so far from 
 being a living principle capable of explaining the origin 
 and subsequent course of Nature, cannot explain itself, but 
 postulates as a requisite of its own existence a state of 
 things which it could nowise have produced, requiring, as 
 a condition indispensable for the operation of any physical 
 forces, that matter should be given them to work upon, and 
 in a position to which they could never bring it. 
 
 This is, however, but a part of the difficulty, which we 
 shall better understand by further consideration of Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer's definition already quoted. " Evolution," 
 he tells us, " is an integration of matter, and concomitant 
 dissipation of motion ; during which the matter passes 
 from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite 
 coherent heterogeneity ..." This utterance has, by the 
 profane, been likened to the original condition of things, 
 as being indefinite and incoherent ; but it would at least 
 appear to speak plainly on one point, the homogeneous 
 state of the original universe, that " homogeneity " in 
 progress from which towards " heterogeneity " Evolution 
 mainly consists. 
 
 But here again we find that the original condition of 
 things, as reported by science, is fatally at variance with 
 
 * The Foundations of Evolution, 
 III.
 
 30 The Mechanics of Evolution 
 
 such an idea. The atoms composing the material universe 
 cannot, to begin with, have been homogeneously disposed : 
 that is to say, the system made up of these atoms cannot 
 have been of like structure throughout, but, on the contrary, 
 there must have been a most complex heterogeneous 
 arrangement, in order to account for what has actually 
 occurred. We have elsewhere considered * one essentially 
 heterogeneous element, of fundamental importance, which 
 the primitive nebula must be assumed to have exhibited 
 viz., the motion of rotation in one definite direction and no 
 other. And but for this motion of rotation the solar system, 
 with its revolving and rotating planets, could never have 
 existed, and, for want of a centrifugal force to keep them 
 apart, all the particles of matter must long ago have been 
 drawn together by the force of gravitation to form a solid 
 sphere as uniform as a billiard-ball. 
 
 For quite apart from this question of the movements 
 of sun and planets, every operation of Nature tells the 
 same tale. For the due working of her laws it is 
 absolutely necessary that there should be infinite and 
 endless varieties of conditions in her different parts. That 
 heat should do any work there must, as we have seen, 
 be difference of temperature between different bodies, and 
 that there should be difference of temperature, the motions 
 producing heat must be greater in some quarters than 
 in others. Similarly as to chemical combination, the 
 same sort of atom will behave in totally different ways 
 according to difference of circumstance. Thus oxygen 
 exists free in the air, combined with hydrogen in water, 
 combined with calcium in limestone, with carbon and 
 other elements in vegetable and animal tissues, and in 
 countless other forms. Every atom of oxygen is equally 
 ready to play any of these parts, what part it is to play 
 depends wholly on the circumstances in which it is put. 
 These must accordingly be infinitely various if such a world 
 as ours is to be made and maintained. What has been 
 said of one chemical element is true of all ; what has been 
 said in regard of motion, heat, and chemical action, must 
 * The Foundations of Evolution.
 
 The Mechanics of Evolution 3 1 
 
 equally be said of electricity and magnetism and of all the 
 modes in which energy is manifested. 
 
 From this it follows that the primaeval world can by no 
 possibility have been homogeneous, and, moreover, that 
 whatever heterogeneity it was afterwards to develop must 
 have existed from the first, as the plant exists in its seed, in 
 the original arrangement of particles on which all subse- 
 quent operations depended. The evolutionary theory bids 
 us to consider the world from the physical side only, and to 
 regard all its developments as the necessary result of the 
 forces of the matter composing it. The fundamental 
 proposition of Evolution, Professor Huxley tells us,* is 
 " that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of 
 mutual interaction according to definite laws, of the powers 
 possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity 
 was composed." But in a material system, such as is here 
 spoken of, all depends not only upon the forces to which it 
 is subject, but also upon its configuration ; given these and 
 it is at once certain what must happen, the system can 
 have but one future before it. I have already compared the 
 universe to a clock, wherein the weights must first be lifted 
 as an essential condition of motion. But this is not the 
 only condition, the weights can never by themselves make 
 the clock go, still less go right. The works must be cor- 
 rectly constructed, so that, by the various functions of the 
 different parts, the force supplied by the weights may be 
 properly applied. Due provision for this proper application 
 of the force is as essentially requisite as provision of the 
 force itself ; and as in the case of the clock, so, in precisely 
 the same manner, in that of the universe. 
 
 This is a point of supreme importance, which is too 
 frequently altogether ignored. We are often assured, in 
 vague general terms, that the "forces of Nature" are 
 sufficient to account for everything, and that it is futile and 
 unreasonable to demand anything more. But, as Mr. Croll 
 has well contended, t force by itself explains nothing : to 
 
 * Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. ii. 
 
 t The Philosophical Basis of Evolution. London : Edward Stan- 
 ford, 1890.
 
 32 The Mechanics of Evolution 
 
 produce any given effect force must be applied in one given 
 way, and in this only and, to understand the effect, we 
 must understand how it was so applied. The explosive 
 force of gunpowder, for instance, does not explain the 
 hitting of the bull's-eye by a bullet, for it was equally 
 available to send the ball in any one of a myriad different 
 directions. The rifleman gets a prize, not because his gun 
 went off, but because he directed it aright. The steam 
 power of a vessel is equally ready to take it towards any 
 port in the world or on to any rock ; the energy stored in 
 the waters of an upland pool will turn a mill, or drive a 
 dynamo, or irrigate a field, only according as a direction is 
 given to their descent. And similarly in nature, if different 
 atoms of the same substance perform totally different 
 functions, as air or water or rock, it is only because of the 
 different circumstances in which they are placed, of the 
 different direction given to the forces to which they are 
 subjected ; if an electric or magnetic current runs in one 
 direction rather than another ; if one portion of the world is 
 comparatively hot and another comparatively cool ; if the 
 same body exists in one spot as vapour, in another as 
 liquid, in a third as solid, it is all because of the variety of 
 conditions established throughout the universe and this 
 variety is the machinery of the clock. 
 
 What is therefore to be thought of the assertion that 
 Evolution starts from homogeneity ? And to make the 
 matter still more hopeless of comprehension, we are further 
 told that this homogeneity was " indefinite." But regarding 
 the universe as a purely mechanical system, and thus, be it 
 remembered, we are bidden to regard it, nothing is more 
 absolutely certain than that the original arrangement of its 
 parts must have been definite in the extreme, definite down 
 to the minutest particular, so that any alteration in it, 
 however small, would have produced a different world from 
 that in which we live. " It at once follows from the laws of 
 motion," says Professor Tait,* " that a material system left 
 to itself has a perfectly determined future, i.e., that upon its 
 
 * Contemporary Review, January, 1878.
 
 The Mechanics of Evolution 33 
 
 configuration and motion at any instant depend all its 
 subsequent changes ; so that its whole history, past and to 
 come, is to be gathered from one sufficiently comprehensive 
 glance." One particular arrangement of every atom and 
 molecule composing the universe, and one alone, at the 
 moment when the forces of Nature were first let loose, that is 
 when the weights of the clock were at their highest and were 
 started on their descent, can alone account, on evolutionary 
 principles, for the course which the laws of Nature have 
 actually taken : this arrangement must, as has been shown, 
 have been essentially heterogeneous, absolutely definite, and 
 of unimaginable complexity, securing in the sequel the 
 application of every force ever exerted in the universe, so as 
 to produce the effect actually produced, forming a machine 
 of countless millions of wheels, and wheels within wheels, 
 checking and counter-checking one another, and exhibiting 
 as they run those laws of Nature which it is the highest 
 privilege of science to observe. Until we can account not 
 only for the existence of force, but for the mode in which it 
 is thus applied, we have done nothing towards reaching 
 " the final equation of the universe." The claims of 
 " Evolution " to solve that equation are obviously worth- 
 less, for of neither of these unknowns has it anything to 
 tell. 
 
 So much for what is purely material and mechanical. 
 We have seen, however, on the authority of Professor 
 Huxley, that Evolution claims to account not for the life- 
 less only, but for the living world. Into this latter field, 
 after what has been said, it may seem needless to go, but, 
 as this sort of claim is constantly reiterated, a word on the 
 subject will not be irrelevant. It may be said, in the first 
 place, that as regards life, to say that it comes by " Evolu- 
 tion" through the action of mechanical force on matter 
 is the merest and most gratuitous assertion without any 
 warrant of science whatever. "To say," writes Professor 
 Tait,* " that even the lowest form of life can be fully ex- 
 plained on physical principles alone, i.e., by the mere 
 
 * Ubi sup. See also Clerk Maxwell, Life, p. 573.
 
 34 The Mechanics of Evolution 
 
 relations, motions, and interactions of portions of inanimate 
 matter is simply unscientific. There is absolutely nothing 
 known in physical science which can lend the slightest 
 support to such an idea." Leaving this, however, alone, 
 the material structures in which life dwells will, in our 
 present connection, afford a profitable object of study. 
 
 Let us, for example, consider the case of two trees of 
 different kinds, an oak and an ash. They are made up of 
 the same substances, and the molecules which build up 
 one might have been used for the other, just as the same 
 stones might be used to build a cathedral or a factory, and 
 a play of Shakespeare or a cookery-book might be printed 
 with the same types. Each tree is built up molecule by 
 molecule, and each molecule takes up a determined posi- 
 tion which has to be filled that the general plan of the tree 
 may be carried out, just as each stone of the building and 
 each letter in the book has its particular part assigned it, 
 in relation to the whole. A molecule that goes into the 
 oak takes up a different position from that it would have 
 taken up if drawn into the ash, and a position different, 
 moreover, from that taken by all the other molecules which 
 compose the oak. Each takes its place automatically under 
 the influence of forces which make it take that place and 
 no other, and the forces working in the tree to produce its 
 growth are therefore differently directed or determined in 
 regard of every particular molecule on which they act. But 
 the activity of these forces is just as automatic and blind 
 as the passivity of the molecules, they act only as they 
 cannot help acting in each particular condition, every action 
 of theirs is but a necessary sequence from the original con- 
 stitution of the machinery whereof they form a part. What 
 is true of plants is true also of animals, though in their case 
 the processes to be performed are still more complex and 
 wonderful, so that we find that on the original arrangement 
 of the particles of the universe must have depended the 
 correct placing of every molecule in every blade of grass or 
 flower or tree, and in every creature that has moved on the 
 earth from the remotest epoch of geology, down to the 
 present day and onwards to the end of time.
 
 The Mechanics of Evolution 35 
 
 It should further be remarked that we not only believe 
 the laws of Nature to have worked in a satisfactory and 
 orderly mode up to this present moment, but confidently 
 look forward to similar behaviour on their part in the 
 future. We anticipate, for instance, that this next summer, 
 there will not only be evolutions among atoms and mole- 
 cules such as gravitation, electricity, and heat tend to 
 produce, but that these evolutions will take the form of 
 producing roses and strawberries and nightingales, just as 
 has been the case in the past. None of these new products 
 will, in all probability, be the exact facsimile of any of their 
 own kind that has yet existed, but come they will, and 
 of that kind they will be. There must therefore be some 
 power in " Nature " capable of producing them. They will 
 not appear because their like has been before. When 
 Hamlet and Polonius watched a cloud and found it first 
 like a camel, then like a weasel, and then very like a whale, 
 they did not and could not assume that on account of 
 these resemblances which had occurred, others would 
 certainly follow, and that the next change of form would 
 display an elephant or a giraffe. If we believe in orderly 
 production as the necessary sequel, we must believe in 
 some cause or other which produces it. The Evolutionist 
 who traces back everything to the original constitution of 
 the material universe must postulate that its particles were 
 arranged upon a plan which has not only de facto ensured 
 the regular succession of all that has hitherto been, but 
 was and is determined to the production of order and not 
 of chaos. Of the existence of this plan he is bound to 
 offer some explanation if he is to explain anything at all. 
 
 This is no overstatement of the evolutionary position ; it 
 is not one with which evolutionists should quarrel. The 
 existing world, Professor Huxley tells us, lay potentially in 
 the cosmic vapour, and a sufficient intelligence could, from 
 a knowledge of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted 
 the exact constitution of, for instance, the animal kingdom 
 as existing in Britain to-day, with as much certainty as one 
 can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on a 
 cold winter's day.
 
 36 The Mechanics of Evolution 
 
 It is therefore clear that on evolutionary principles we 
 must suppose, as the beginning of things, a precise and 
 definite constitution of matter, of infinite and bewildering 
 complexity, whereby the exercise of all its forces was 
 directed and determined to the production of every result 
 actually produced in the history of the world. But if we 
 have this there is no need of anything else, and no room 
 for anything else in the economy of Nature if the account 
 of the matter we have heard be the true one, everything 
 that happens in Nature is but part of the tune which she 
 was preordained to play, and could by no possibility have 
 been other than it is. Yet so little do evolutionists appear 
 to believe in their own system that they are ever seeking 
 fresh and independent forces, not included in the primaeval 
 machinery, to account for what we find. The utterance of 
 Professor Huxley, for instance, which we have seen above, 
 occurs in a paper devoted to a description of the services 
 rendered to science by Mr. Darwin's theory of the Origin 
 of Species through Natural Selection.* But if the im- 
 perious law of Evolution has done everything that has ever 
 been done on earth, where does Natural Selection come 
 in ? and what has Mr. Darwin done to improve our know- 
 ledge by introducing this new and altogether futile factor 
 into the business ? If all that ever has been came from 
 the original constitution of the cosmic vapour, why trouble 
 ourselves any further about the origin of species which, 
 with all the individuals composing them, were bound from 
 the very first to come just as they have come and not other- 
 wise? Yet, in spite of his professions, Professor Huxley 
 finds no words of praise too high for Mr. Darwin's book ; 
 it " lights the path of the investigator," its ideas are " pro- 
 found," they have become " household words and every- 
 day conceptions," and have " vast and far-reaching^ signifi- 
 cance." And yet, if Mr. Darwin says anything, does he 
 not say this, that what he calls Natural Selection changed 
 the course of natural progress and made things come about 
 otherwise than, but for it, they would have come ? 
 
 * The Genealogy of Animals (Critiques and Addresses), reprinted in 
 the Life of Dai-win, p. 201.
 
 The Mechanics of Evolution 37 
 
 The instance is by no means solitary or singular; on the 
 contrary, every evolutionist would seem to have some pet 
 system of his own which he calls in to supplement Evolu- 
 tion and to account for its processes : we have, for example, 
 Neo-Danvinism, Lamarckism, Neo-Lamarckism, Weismann- 
 ism, physiological-selection, sexual-selection, and a host 
 of other theories, by which to explain that which, if 
 evolutionary theories are true, needs no explanation, and 
 to demonstrate that their respective champions do not 
 really grasp, still less hold, the creed which they profess, 
 and do not believe that the law of Evolution can in fact 
 make things be evolved. 
 
 We appear, indeed, in this matter to have reached the 
 extreme limit of confusion. If Evolution be indeed the 
 supreme and central verity of all science and the ruling 
 principle of Nature, then are all subsidiary systems not 
 merely superfluous but inconsistent, for all that is, one 
 thing no more than another, must be a phase of Evolution. 
 If, on the other hand, we build our arguments and our 
 beliefs on any of the minor forces or processes which we 
 claim to have discovered, we thereby demonstrate our own 
 incredulity in the all-compelling power of Evolution. Yet 
 this is the course usually taken by evolutionists, who would 
 have us yet believe that the truth of Evolution is altogether 
 independent of the validity of their particular systems, the 
 mere assertion of which destroys the basis on which it 
 ought to rest. 
 
 In a word, if we are really bound, as we are so frequently 
 assured, to accept the evolutionary doctrine in the name 
 of reason and science, this must be because it is demon- 
 strated either as an inevitable principle or as an accom- 
 plished fact. Is it demonstrated as a principle? Then what 
 of the store of force it required but could never have 
 provided, and what of the arrangements for the right appli- 
 cations of that force, which it can never have made? What, 
 moreover, on this supposition, is the meaning of arguments 
 that Evolution has worked through Natural Selection, or in 
 any other mode, when there can have been no such thing 
 as selection at all, as nothing can have ever come to pass
 
 38 The Mechanics of Evolution 
 
 except the inevitable and inexorable results towards which 
 Evolution was from the beginning predetermined ? Are we, 
 on the other hand, to accept Evolution on the ground that 
 it is a demonstrated fact ? If so, on what line of argument 
 is it demonstrated ? We cannot say the process has been 
 historically traced, for neither amongst existing, nor amongst 
 extinct species known to us do we find any such series of 
 allied forms as has to be supposed. Are we to say that 
 " Evolution " is to be accepted because we have discovered 
 a process at work in Nature which must produce Evolution ? 
 If so, what is that process ? That called Natural Selection, 
 once so popular, has long been tacitly abandoned, and in 
 its place we find a number of rival systems, each claiming 
 to be the real thing, but none able to secure the adhesion 
 of any but its own inventor and the comparatively small 
 group of his immediate disciples. These systems divide 
 and subdivide in bewildering and antagonistic variety 
 where then is the demonstration they afford ? 
 
 Meanwhile, be it remembered, we have, as far as possible, 
 left out of consideration the gravest and most profound 
 difficulty of all that arising from the existence of life, 
 of volition, of consciousness, for which, as Professor Tait 
 has told us, nothing known to science can pretend to 
 account. What then are we to think of the doctrine 
 so constantly and so aggressively thrust upon us, which 
 dogmatically asserts that the philosophy of Evolution is so 
 manifestly justified by our science as to make us guilty 
 of self-stultification in hesitating to accept it. 
 
 I speak of the philosophy of Evolution as popularly 
 understood. In a sense, no doubt, there is much to be 
 said for Evolution in the light of modern science but, 
 as I began by saying, the term is capable of many signifi- 
 cations, and evolutionists, while never explaining which 
 of them they adopt, are prone to bring arguments which 
 avail only in favour of one sort of Evolution, and then to 
 deduce consequences which would follow only if they had 
 proved it in another. Undoubtedly we find that, speaking 
 broadly, the history of life on the earth has been a history 
 of Evolution that is to say, the scheme of vegetable and
 
 The Mechanics of Evolution 39 
 
 animal life, as we know it, has been gradually unfolded 
 in a progression of types from lower to higher, the same 
 general lines of structure being elaborated to greater and 
 greater perfection. Undoubtedly, also, our acquaintance 
 with the operations of Nature leads us to believe that suc- 
 cessive changes have been wrought by continuous operation 
 of natural laws rather than by constant and abrupt inter- 
 ference with their course. In other words, we judge it more 
 probable that the species of plants and animals have been 
 produced as we see each individual produced, by the deve- 
 lopment of a germ predetermined to develop. But this is 
 not what is meant by Evolutionary Philosophy and it is not 
 of "Evolution" in this sense that I have been speaking. 
 What evolutionists contend for is a process uncontrolled 
 by any power but its own, a process explaining itself and 
 eliminating from the universe every other active principle. 
 Thus Professor Huxley assures us * that the Evolution 
 theory, or Mr. Darwin's Natural Selection theory (it is not 
 quite clear which) has dealt a " death-blow " to the idea 
 that any purpose has operated in Nature that the eye, for 
 example, was made in order to see ; which is to say that we 
 have found Evolution to be so self-sufficient that there 
 can be no power behind it, that it is proved to be not 
 an instrument for the accomplishment of an end, but itself 
 the eternal mainspring of the universe. 
 
 Is it not more true to say that never has a system of 
 philosophy so imperiously endeavoured to impose itself on 
 the world with such arrogant pretensions to a monopoly of 
 truth, while utterly lacking any credentials capable of 
 enforcing the assent of reasoning beings ? 
 
 At the same time it is with no such negative conclusion 
 as this that we must leave the subject. As from the supply 
 of power which the machine of the universe must have 
 required before the laws of Nature could begin to work, 
 we gather a clear evidence of a supreme and self-exist- 
 ing Power transcending all physical forces and working 
 through them all so from the wonderful and unimagin- 
 
 * Reception of the Origin of Species.
 
 4O The Mechanics of Evolution 
 
 able mechanism which the mechanical theory of the world 
 postulates as an essential prerequisite of all that these 
 physical forces have ever been able to produce, we must 
 learn that there was in the beginning a Cause producing 
 order, harmony, and law, constituting the world not as 
 chaos, but as cosmos, establishing those laws the mere 
 recognition of which is so commonly held to constitute 
 the supreme triumph of human intelligence.
 
 EVOLUTION AND EXACT 
 THOUGHT 
 
 OUR modern philosophers, as is well known, feel them- 
 selves qualified to correct the erroneous conclusions of 
 their predecessors, by reason of the improved methods of 
 argument whereon they rely, and in particular they have 
 two weapons in their armoury, the possession of which 
 gives the battle entirely into their hands, enabling them 
 with ease and certainty to shatter all systems but their own. 
 
 In the first place they start, according to Baconian 
 principles, by securing a solid foundation in the observation 
 of fact, the only foundation upon which any knowledge 
 deserving the name can be based. And besides this, 
 while restricting the province of pure reason to deduction 
 from such facts, they have at the same time so improved 
 its methods as to secure for the conclusions at which they 
 arrive a conclusiveness to which the lax argumentation of 
 other days could not pretend. Words used to be employed 
 to veil and disguise the confusion, poverty, or absence of 
 thought, and down to our days men have been unable 
 really to argue, those who pretended to do so having con- 
 fined themselves to a futile exercise of chopping logic, 
 whereby no scientific result could possibly be attained. 
 But now we have changed all that ; thought has become 
 "exact"; as we start not with words but with things, so 
 all our words are but the symbols of realities, symbols 
 definite and precise as those of mathematics, and therefore 
 guiding mankind, for the first time in its history, into the 
 regions of indisputable truth, 
 
 IV.
 
 42 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 It will hardly be denied that claims to this effect are 
 constantly advanced, and still more frequently taken for 
 granted; it may in fact be said that this claim of the 
 modern school to have revolutionized the science of argu- 
 ment, is universal. 
 
 At the same time there are undoubtedly those, trained 
 according to older methods of thought, to whom this 
 claim amongst all the mysteries attending on the evolution 
 theory is by far the most mysterious, land whose main 
 difficulty in accepting its tenets is their utter inability to 
 grasp the processes of reasoning by which they are sup- 
 posed to be established. To such it appears that in no 
 respect is such reasoning so defective as in the utter con- 
 fusion of its phraseology, and the fallacies which such 
 confusion begets ; and moreover that, apart from this, no 
 attempt has yet been made to provide the system with a 
 solid groundwork whereon it may ultimately rest ; without 
 which, were its parts ever so harmoniously jointed, it must 
 ever remain a mere castle in the air. 
 
 These are grave charges to bring against a philosophical 
 system so widely and so devoutly accepted, and there will 
 doubtless be many found to deem it impossible that such 
 men as have proclaimed themselves evolutionists can have 
 overlooked defects like these. It will therefore be necessary 
 to examine with all care and without prejudice some reasons 
 in support. 
 
 Be it, however, first observed, to avoid a species of 
 misconception against which experience strenuously warns 
 us, that no denial is here intended of what are called 
 the facts of evolution. That the progress of organic 
 life on earth has been through a course of develop- 
 ment from lower to higher forms, is certain. That 
 this development has, at least in certain instances, been 
 wrought by natural instruments is most highly probable, 
 far more probable than a contrary supposition. But if 
 that which has not been proved in any one instance should 
 be clearly demonstrated of all, if it could be shown that 
 every species now existing has been evolved from another, 
 and that all species but the first have been evolved from
 
 Evolution and Exact Thought 43 
 
 it, the point now under examination would be just where 
 it is. Our affair is not with evolution as a fact, but with 
 what is styled the evolutionary theory, which is a totally 
 different thing. This theory presents itself not as a 
 chronicle, but as a philosophy, not as giving us to know 
 the course of things alone, but their causes likewise : it 
 comes before us not as a subsidiary system dealing with 
 one department of Nature, but as the great fundamental 
 principle which eliminates from the universe all other 
 forces and agents but its own. It is precisely because it 
 does so that it holds its place before the world. Were it 
 satisfied with saying that one animal has come from another 
 animal, and that environment, or sexual-selection, has 
 been the instrument of the metamorphosis, the world at 
 large would feel but a feeble interest in its teachings. It 
 is otherwise when it builds up a whole cosmogony with 
 natural forces alone, and tells mankind that they need take 
 account of no others here or hereafter. It is because 
 evolutionists undoubtedly claim to do this implicity 
 always and often explicitly as well that their doctrine has 
 for men the importance that it has. 
 
 It is with the claim of " Evolution " to be a philosophy 
 of causes that we are now dealing. There are undoubtedly 
 many and serious points to be considered before we can 
 accept the historical account it gives of the process through 
 which Nature has reached its present position ; but these 
 we are not considering. Let it be supposed, as has been 
 already said, that all has been as its disciples would have 
 us believe the question remains, Where is the prime agent 
 to which we must ascribe its production ? And it is in 
 connection with this that we have to examine the value of 
 evolutionist argument. 
 
 To begin with the matter of phraseology, in which there 
 at once presents itself a notable example, assuredly of im- 
 portance sufficient to justify its employment. If we ask, 
 in regard of the assumed evolution of one species from 
 another, by what means this has been brought about, we 
 are very commonly told that it has been by the operation 
 of the law of Natural Selection. This explanation affords
 
 44 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 an excellent instance of what I mean, for when examined 
 it appears to be a phrase, and a phrase only, and to explain 
 nothing, while it has yet been largely, and at times univer- 
 sally, accepted as the key which shall unlock all the secrets 
 of Nature. 
 
 It is true that an increasing number of scientific men, 
 while firm believers in evolution, do not believe in Natural 
 Selection as the instrument by which it has been effected, 
 but their objections would seem to be grounded rather on 
 facts which appear to be at variance with Mr. Darwin's 
 doctrine, than on more fundamental considerations regard- 
 ing that doctrine in itself : in other words, they believe 
 that Natural Selection might have caused evolution, but 
 that de facto it has not done so. My contention is, on the 
 other hand, that to allow it even this qualified merit is 
 altogether to overlook the radical difficulty. For what is 
 meant by " Natural Selection " ? It is what is otherwise 
 described as the " Survival of the Fittest." Nature, we 
 are told, tries all her creatures by the wager of battle the 
 struggle for existence and awards the prize of Life to the 
 winners. Any member of a species that has organs better 
 fitted than those of its companions to help it in this 
 struggle, will survive when the others die, and handing on 
 its superior equipment to its progeny will advance its race 
 one step upwards. But it is obvious that thus far the 
 theory elucidates nothing beyond the fact that if some 
 creatures are better fitted than others to get on, they will 
 get on better. Things must be in existence before they 
 can be " selected," and creatures must have become more 
 fit than others to survive, before they survive them. But 
 of that modification of organs which is the raw material on 
 which Natural Selection must work, Natural Selection itself 
 throws no light whatever. 
 
 It is undoubtedly true that, as we shall see just now, 
 other agencies are invoked to supply these preliminary 
 conditions, but it is equally certain that not these other 
 agencies but Natural Selection has been so long in the 
 forefront of the battle, and that with its name evolutionists 
 have conjured when difficulties were adduced. How often
 
 Evolution and Exact Thought 45 
 
 have we been told that it is Natural Selection which has 
 converted fins into wings or feet, scales into feathers, 
 swim-bladders into lungs, which has fashioned the hand 
 and the ear, and converted the rudimentary into the perfect 
 eye ? And so far as these things, or the like of them, have 
 been said, we have reason enough to complain that words 
 are used without any definite meaning which can be 
 attached to them. 
 
 And next, as to the agent which is to do the necessary 
 work before Natural Selection can begin. This, we are 
 told is the Law of Variation, which providing that there 
 shall be improvements in structure, rendering survival more 
 easy, will furnish the proper objects for selection. But 
 the " Law of Variation " is only another name for the fact 
 that young animals and seedling plants are not the exact 
 images of their parents, varying from them in degrees more 
 or less minute, some in one direction, others in another. 
 Does this fact afford the slightest ground for believing that 
 any members of the younger generation will be equipped 
 with organs more serviceable than those of their elders ? 
 Unless this be so, Natural Selection will have nothing to 
 work upon. Is it not obvious, however, that variation 
 from one pattern does not of itself and by itself tend to 
 produce another? all that it tends to do is to destroy the 
 one. Mere disarrangement of the types set up to print a 
 page of Martin Tupper has no tendency to produce one 
 of Shakespeare ; nor if ten thousand printer's devils each 
 tried his hand at a shuffle, should we have warrant for 
 anticipating that so much as a solitary emendation would 
 result. It is not variation itself, but the determining 
 force, that rules it, to which must be ascribed the 
 result attained. It is not because a marksman misses a 
 pigeon that he kills a crow, but because his gun is pointed 
 towards the crow. In like manner, it cannot be that, 
 merely because an organ varies from a working model, it 
 must hit on another working better. Yet on the assump- 
 tion that it must be so does the whole system rest which 
 we are considering. 
 
 Here in fact we find a prime example of a fallacy shroud-
 
 46 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 ing itself under confusion of phraseology. Doubtless that 
 one organ should be an improvement upon another it is 
 necessary that the second should vary from the first ; but 
 by no means does it follow that variation is the agent. 
 Purposive variation is one thing, purposeless variation quite 
 another. The first is the method of the inventor, the 
 second of the destroyer, and yet it is to this that Dar- 
 winians look as the power capable of producing all the 
 exquisite machinery we find in* nature. 
 
 To this indeed they are compelled. If there be a force 
 directing successive modifications in one direction, to the 
 production of organs more and more elaborate and efficient, 
 then must this force, and it alone, be credited with the 
 results. The Law of Variation and Natural Selection will 
 no more explain the production of new forces than the 
 fact that the water from Thirlmere has perforce to run to 
 Manchester explains how the pipes came to be laid which 
 take it there. 
 
 It is precisely on the claim to dispense with the necessity 
 of any such directive force that Darwinism takes its stand, 
 and it is in variation altogether purposeless that it professes 
 to find a sufficient instrument. It is, for example, by a 
 succession of " slight accidental variations " in the required 
 direction that Mr. Darwin himself * explains the develop- 
 ment of the eye, from the simple apparatus of an optic 
 nerve coated with pigment and invested by transparent 
 membrane, to the complex organ of " inimitable contriv- 
 ances " I which we now behold. What such an explanation 
 really means it is well worth to inquire. We all know that 
 the various friction to which bodies at the bottom of a river 
 are exposed inevitably changes their form, that is, makes 
 them vary. If we were to throw in amongst the gravel ten 
 thousand or ten million cubes of glass, is there the slightest 
 probability that any one of them would be shaped into a 
 lens fit to use in a telescope, such a lens as the variations 
 wrought by an optician produce every day ? Yet this is 
 exactly what we are asked to believe, that a system of 
 variation equally random has actually done in the eye, and 
 
 * Origin of Species, p. 189. Fifth thousand. t Ibid., p. 186.
 
 Evolution and Exact Thought 47 
 
 might be counted upon to do. It is nothing to the purpose 
 to say that Natural Selection in the one case and not in the 
 other would have preserved the successive approximations 
 to the desirable form ; for, as we have seen, something 
 worth preserving must be produced before Natural Selec- 
 tion can act, and the question is precisely whether anything 
 worth preserving would ever be arrived at in such a fashion. 
 This, the crucial point of the matter, has apparently been 
 ignored by Darwinian writers ; they assume that because 
 improvement implies variation, therefore variation implies 
 improvement, and if there be any of them who have even 
 discussed the validity of this assumption, it would be 
 interesting to know their names. 
 
 It must, moreover, be observed that hitherto we have 
 reduced the problem to its simplest proportions, and con- 
 sidered the capabilities of variation in respect of the easiest 
 task that could be set it. The eye no more than the tele- 
 scope is composed of one piece of mechanism only, but of 
 a multitude, which not only do optical work, but supple- 
 ment one another, the form of each bearing a close and 
 accurate relation with those of the rest. If it is inconceiv- 
 able that one piece of glass should be ground, by the 
 method we have considered, into a lens, what of the 
 chances that two should be shaped so as to satisfy the 
 conditions required respectively for eye-piece and object- 
 glass ? And what then of the supposition that the complex 
 contrivances of the eye, cornea, iris, aqueous humour, 
 crystalline lens, sclerotic, retina, and within this the subtle 
 apparatus of its various sub-divisions, have all simultane- 
 ously " varied " each into the form fitting it to play into the 
 hands of the rest, and do its part in the joint work ? If the 
 eye had been made in the first instance as it now is, and 
 merely been endowed with the power to " vary " in its 
 various parts, could the power of sight have been handed 
 down for one generation ? for a wrong variation anywhere 
 would have thrown the whole out of gear. 
 
 Nor is it only in one organ that we have to accept such a 
 supposition. Everywhere throughout the world of life, in 
 myriads of diversely-fashioned mechanisms amongst animals
 
 48 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 and plants, Nature must in the same haphazard fashion 
 have blundered on those exquisite devices which fill us 
 with wonder when we recognize their functions. And 
 it is the doctrine which so teaches that we find thus 
 described : " An extremely valuable, and in the highest 
 degree probable doctrine, indeed the only extant hypothesis 
 which is worth anything from a scientific point of view." * 
 
 It must further be remarked, that the examples frequently 
 adduced by evolutionists to support their argument combine 
 with the ambiguity of their phraseology to conceal its weak- 
 ness. We are told, for instance, that in very small, solitary 
 islands insects that fly much will be liable to be drowned, 
 being caught by the wind and carried out to sea ; and our 
 attention will be called to the fact that those found in such 
 situations are short-winged and very limited in their powers 
 of flight. Accordingly it is argued that in successive genera- 
 tions some, by the law of variation, have had larger wings, 
 and some shorter ; that the former have been taken and 
 the latter have been left ; and that here we have a clear 
 example of the working of Natural Selection. In reality 
 it is nothing to the purpose. In respect of dimen- 
 sion, things can vary in two directions only the greater 
 and the less. Given variation in size, some must be larger 
 and some smaller. But this is not the work required of the 
 agent that invents new species and invests them with im- 
 proved organs. For this, definite and exact conditions 
 have to be fulfilled, conditions that could be laid down 
 with precision beforehand, for laws have to be satisfied of 
 the most rigorous and definite character, before those 
 results can be attained which alone explain the existence 
 of a creature's organs. That an animal should see, or 
 hear, or fly, depends on the manner in which the require- 
 ments of optics, or acoustics, or pneumatics are met ; and 
 that they should be met, the mechanism must be elaborate 
 and a number of different functions must be efficiently 
 performed by various parts. The possibilities of variations 
 are not restricted to a couple, but multiplied into myriads 
 all wrong but one. The fact that wings which do not 
 * Professor Huxley, Lay Sermons, p. 295. Second Edit.
 
 Evolution and Exact Thought 49 
 
 remain of constant length must be either longer or shorter 
 throws no light whatever on the attainment of such accurate 
 complexity. 
 
 Nor have we as yet by any means sounded the depths of 
 the problem. We are assured that not only has one species 
 been developed from another, but that creatures now most 
 remote from one another in every detail of structure have 
 been similarly produced from a common original ; that, to 
 take an example, birds and reptiles are tolerably near rela- 
 tions, and have descended from a quasi-reptilian ancestor. 
 But if this be so, not only in the various parts of one 
 member or organ, but in all at once, variation must have 
 been constantly hitting on the infinite multiplicity of 
 modifications which make the two classes as unlike each 
 other from head to tail as they possibly could be. 
 
 In truth the law of Evolution, as we find it stated, is 
 absolutely at variance with those other laws of Natural 
 Selection and of Variation which so frequently are supposed 
 to be synonymous with it. If Nature be ever on the march 
 of development, if it be her law that species shall follow 
 from species and genus from genus in ever-evolving variety 
 of artistic finish, then assuredly she is working on very 
 different lines than a mere tendency to abandon the types 
 she has already produced ; and if we believe that in the 
 world of life there is orderly succession, it is that we 
 believe, despite our inconsistent theories and systems, that 
 there is some force at the bottom of all, not aimlessly 
 producing change, like random currents of the air, but 
 shaping for life, forms in which it can better and better 
 dwell. 
 
 Having thus considered evolutionist phraseology, and 
 some of the questions connected with it, there remains the 
 still more important point for all valid reasoning, the basis 
 whereon all rests. This again is a matter in regard of 
 which our philosophers exhibit no false modesty. It is 
 their boast to have founded their system on the solid 
 rock, and, of all things in the world, they find this in 
 the Principle of Causality. Professor Romanes,* to call 
 * Darwin and after Darwin, p. 17. 
 
 E
 
 50 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 a recent witness, bids us regard it as an a priori 
 truth " that Nature is everywhere uniform in respect of 
 method or causation ; that the reign of law is universal ; 
 the principle of continuity ubiquitous." This means, as 
 we are presently told on the same authority, that we 
 have established the fact that Nature from the beginning 
 has worked through causes and effects similar to those 
 which we trace in science; that is to say, all causes 
 have been " natural," or material, and we need no other 
 to explain the totality of things.* Similarly, Professor 
 Huxley informs us,t that the fundamental proposition ot 
 evolution is, that the whole world, living and not living, is 
 the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite 
 laws, of the powers possessed by the molecules of which the 
 primitive universe was composed. And while the first Pro- 
 fessor explicitly asserts that his system of material causes 
 and effects eliminates from our calculation any such First 
 Cause as God, the second concordantly affirms that his 
 fundamental proposition deals a death-blow to the idea that 
 eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. In other 
 words, each is satisfied that science has got to the root 
 of the matter, and traced the origin of things to a final 
 point whereon all that is in the universe may rest without 
 ever an elephant or a tortoise to sustain it. 
 
 This may be fundamental philosophy, but to the ordinary 
 mind it looks very like the architectural system of the 
 Laputans who began the building of their houses at the 
 top. We are told by Professor Romanes that Nature 
 throughout is uniform in respect of method or causation, 
 that is, at no point has her method stopped; back to 
 the very beginning it has operated as it does now. But 
 have we ever yet discovered a Cause in Nature? Is 
 it not the most characteristic feature of her method of 
 working that it depends at each step upon some condition 
 of things, itself depending upon some other, and that as 
 she proceeds she is ever spending her capital of available 
 
 * Darwin and after Darwin^ p. 412. 
 
 t " On the Reception of the Origin of Species," Life of Darwin, 
 vol. ii. p. 201.
 
 Evolution and Exact Thought 51 
 
 energy, to which she can never add the most insignificant 
 fraction ; that accordingly she can by no possibility have 
 furnished herself with the outfit required for the work we 
 find her doing ? That in respect of method or causation 
 she cannot have been uniform from the first is the plainest 
 lesson to be learnt from her phenomena " phenomena," 
 says Professor Huxley,* "the very nature of which demon- 
 strates that they must have had a beginning," and from 
 consideration of which, as Lord Kelvin tells us, t we are 
 made "absolutely certain" that the machinery of the 
 universe cannot have been working for ever. What, indeed, 
 is the possible meaning of eternal evolution? If things 
 have been uniformly progressing for ever along the line 
 of development, how is it that they have got so short a way, 
 and that there are possibilities of development yet remain- 
 ing ? And if they have not been thus everlastingly evolving, 
 where is the a priori truth which we have been told to 
 grasp ? On the one hand, evolution starting from a point 
 does not show the method of Nature to be uniform beyond 
 that point ; on the other hand, evolution without a point 
 to start from is utterly discredited by science, and is, in 
 scientific phrase, " unthinkable." 
 
 But if the " a priori" truth of Professor Romanes affords 
 such a treacherous quagmire for a foundation, what is to be 
 said of Professor Huxley's "fundamental principle"? If 
 it be true that all the marvels of the universe lay ready 
 made in its primaeval constitution, then was that constitution 
 to after-developments, as the acorn is to the oak-tree, or the 
 egg to the chick. But acorns require oaks to produce them, 
 as much as oaks require acorns, nor do we know of any 
 method of getting eggs except from fowls. Whence then 
 came this primordial germ of the universe? what is its 
 parent ? how came it by its powers ? Doubtless if every- 
 thing was in that mystic casket, everything could be got out 
 of it ; but this scarcely explains how everything got in. It 
 is, therefore, hard to see what this fundamental proposition 
 does for us, or can pretend to do, in the way of furnishing 
 
 * Lay Sermons, p. 13. 
 
 t See Balfour Stewart, Conservation of Energy, p. 142.
 
 52 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 a foundation for our knowledge. It tells us no more than 
 that the effects of the causes operating in Nature have been 
 exactly as we find them to be, and that given the conditions 
 in which the forces of Nature have actually worked, the 
 effects could not be different from what they actually are. 
 But as for the arrangement which secured such conditions, 
 we are told absolutely nothing, and have to rest content 
 with the soul-satisfying assurance, "The world is what 
 it is, because in the beginning it was what it was." 
 
 It will not improbably be answered that Professor Huxley 
 has included in his principle the very item here said to be 
 wanting, and that the above criticism is therefore futile. 
 For does he not tell us that all has been worked out 
 " according to definite laws " ? But in truth if there be 
 anything that can make our confusion worse confounded, 
 it is this very phrase. For what are we to understand by 
 this potent term ? What are the " Laws " of which he 
 speaks? To judge from his principle, as it has been 
 quoted, these " laws " should certainly appear to have 
 had something to do with the result, nay, they must have 
 had the chief hand in determining what that result was to 
 be. But leaving aside the not unimportant question as to 
 whence such laws might themselves have originated, we find 
 the same teacher elsewhere laying it down,* that law is but 
 another name for verified experience, and that by calling 
 it law we invest it with no power of domination. To say 
 that things have worked themselves out according to definite 
 laws, sounds at first sight to employ Mr. Ruskin's phrase 
 " rather instructive " : on examination it turns out to mean 
 no more than that they have vaprked themselves out as they 
 have, and not otherwise. It would be equally true to say 
 that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet according to a definite 
 law, for he could not have written it as he did, and yet 
 have written it as he did not : but when this was said 
 we should not have got very far towards a philosophy 
 of the poem. 
 
 This, then, is what was meant when it was said that the 
 evolutionary system is of its very nature a castle in the air. 
 * Lay Sermons, p. 143.
 
 Evolution and Exact Thought 53 
 
 It lacks all foundation more secure than can be afforded 
 by a cloud of words. While it professes to rest upon 
 science, the very nature of the forces with which science 
 deals, clearly indicates, as she has herself discovered, that 
 there must have been a point where they began to act ; and 
 therefore, since nothing can happen without a cause, there 
 must be a source whence they draw their powers, and 
 wherein those powers were all potentially contained, but 
 which does not depend for its operation on those conditions 
 which regulate their play. It is this "non-natural," or non- 
 mechanical, cause that writers such as we have been con- 
 sidering desire to eliminate from the universe, and it is in 
 attempting to do so that they set themselves to a task as 
 hopeless as that of filling sieves with water, under the name 
 of the new philosophy of exact thought. 
 
 We have by no means finished with perplexities. As 
 Professor Huxley's fundamental proposition categorically 
 asserts, everything that was ever to be was potentially con- 
 tained in the universe as originally constituted ; and he 
 goes on to tell us that a "sufficient intelligence" could, 
 from an inspection of the cosmic vapour, have foretold 
 exactly what was to issue from it in each stage of the world's 
 development. But in his sketch of Hume," after in- 
 stituting a comparison of singular infelicity between a 
 miracle and that fabulous creature a centaur, Professor 
 Huxley assures us that " every wise man will admit that 
 the possibilities of Nature are infinite, and include 
 centaurs." Now every wise man, presumably, will also 
 admit the " fundamental proposition " of Evolution. But 
 if he makes both admissions, what does our wise man 
 mean? Either centaurs were contained in the cosmic 
 vapour, or they were not. If they were contained there, 
 they are not only possible but inevitable, as inevitable as 
 buttercups or sparrows. In such a case the world could not 
 possibly exist without them, and they would be just as 
 legitimate an object of scientific research as cray-fish. On 
 the other hand, if they were not contained in the primaeval 
 vapour, what is meant by saying that the possibilities of 
 * English Men of Letters, pp. 135, 136.
 
 54 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 Nature include them ? This can be only on the supposi- 
 tion that the vapour might possibly have been different 
 from what it was. But how so? What was to make it 
 different ? If the actual constitution which that vapour at 
 first possessed be the fundamental verity whereon all others 
 rest, then nothing could ever have been but that which has 
 been. If, on the other hand, Nature's possibilities include 
 anything more, to say nothing of their being "infinite," 
 there must be a power which arranging things in one way, 
 might have arranged them otherwise, and it is to that power 
 that we must apply any proposition pretending to be funda- 
 mental. Such is the not unnatural result of attempting to 
 base a philosophical system upon a vapour. 
 
 The phenomena of astronomy will enable us to see 
 this more clearly. Are we to say that eclipses are pos- 
 sible beyond those calculated at Greenwich ? Given 
 the existing orbits and motions of the planets, we 
 must say that no others are possible. If we say that 
 the possibilities of Nature include others, we say that 
 the mechanism of the heavens might be other than 
 it is. What should we think of the assertion that the 
 way in which the heavenly bodies move is the only way 
 in which they possibly could have moved, but that never- 
 theless other eclipses are possible beyond those which 
 occur ? Yet this is exactly what Professor Huxley does. 
 He does not believe that there ever has been a centaur, or 
 ever will be, and precisely for that reason likens centaurs 
 to miracles. Yet he believes centaurs to be possible, that 
 is, he believes in possibilities not included in the cosmic 
 vapour as originally constituted, and in doing so he denies 
 that his own fundamental proposition is in truth funda- 
 mental. 
 
 There is yet one example more that may be profitably 
 studied to help us to understand the state of mind which 
 such a process begets, and the state of mind described as 
 " scientific." In his " Lay Sermon " on the advisableness of 
 improving natural knowledge,* Professor Huxley has de- 
 
 * Lay Sermons, p. 17.
 
 Evolution and Exact Thought 55 
 
 voted his chief care to an exposition of the habits of 
 thought engendered by the pursuit of science, and their 
 application to various departments of human knowledge. 
 In conclusion, he touches the crucial point of religious and 
 moral belief, and here, he tells us, the great enemy against 
 which science has to fight is the conviction that authority 
 can be a true guide, and that submission to authority can 
 be our duty ; whereas it is the " unquestionable fact " that 
 the improvement of natural knowledge is effected by 
 methods which directly give the lie to such principles, 
 teaching that scepticism is a virtue, and faith a sin. It is 
 not with the substance of this contention that I am now 
 concerned, but with its terms. Among the propositions 
 which science bans is set down the following : " That when 
 good authority has pronounced what is to be believed, and 
 faith has accepted it, reason has no further duty." From 
 this it is clear that even if an authority be " good " it is 
 our duty to criticize its teaching. But what is a "good" 
 authority? Surely it can be nothing but one which we 
 have good reason to trust : one which, as we have reason- 
 ably convinced ourselves, is able to teach us better than 
 we can teach ourselves. To say that in the name of reason 
 we are to doubt its teachings, is to say that in that name 
 we are to doubt our own reasoning, by which alone can 
 the " goodness " of an authority be recognized. To say 
 that we are to call an authority "good" and yet to doubt 
 it, is to say that we are to believe and disbelieve it at the 
 same time. 
 
 It may perhaps be supposed that Professor Huxley 
 means to deny the possibility of truth coming to us by 
 authority which we cannot discover for ourselves. But in 
 the first place we are at present engaged in examining the 
 manner in which he argues, and if this be what he means, 
 why does he not say so, and why does he give us instead 
 a proposition contradicting itself in its own terms ? In the 
 second place the proposition suggested as a substitute for 
 his, and probably implied therein, would assuredly not 
 lack difficulties of its own. It is to authority, and to it 
 alone, that we owe by far the greater portion of whatever
 
 56 Evolution and Exact Thought 
 
 knowledge we possess. If I desire to understand the 
 structure of a cray-fish, I should be a fool if I did not 
 prefer Professor Huxley's book on the subject to what I 
 might gather by my own researches. My faith in his teach- 
 ings would assuredly be the best act of my reason. There 
 is no man but has to rely on the teachings of some other 
 man, in far more points than these wherein he can suffice 
 for himself. And in matters of religious belief, the whole 
 question is whether there be knowledge to be had, beyond 
 what we can ourselves discover; whether our reason is 
 capable of leading us to recognize a teacher whose know- 
 ledge is greater than our own. This is not the place to 
 discuss whether there be such a teacher, or how he is to 
 be found; but if there be, and if our reason can lead us 
 to him, instead of running counter to the methods of 
 acquiring knowledge to which science trains us, it will but 
 repeat the lesson which it teaches us every day, of the 
 narrow limits within which our own faculties are confined, 
 and the illimitable realms of truth beyond.
 
 AGNOSTICISM IN THEORY 
 AND PRACTICE 
 
 ASSUREDLY it ever a school of thought claimed to hold the 
 domain of reason in fee simple, it is that which describes 
 its position as " Agnostic." So completely we are given 
 to understand has this philosophy made right reason its 
 own, that all controversy is at once determined in its 
 favour, if only such reason be accepted as the arbiter, and 
 antagonists are troublesome only so far as they can, by one 
 means or another, guard themselves from being reached by 
 rational argument. Against the fatal possibility of being 
 so assailed they were long assured by the ignoble armour 
 of skulls too thick to be penetrated by scientific truth ; * 
 but this can no longer avail them, and they have in conse- 
 quence become a feeble folk, like the conies which make 
 their dwellings among the rocks, and find safety by bolting 
 rabbit-like into the obscurity of their burrows, when the 
 light becomes painful to their unaccustomed eyes. In 
 consequence, the task of the " philosopher " now resolves 
 itself into one of earth-stopping : all that he has to do is 
 
 * " Since physical science, in the course of the last fifty years, has 
 brought to the front an inexhaustible supply of heavy artillery of a new 
 pattem, warranted to drive solid bolts of fact through the thickest 
 skulls, things have been looking better : though hardly more than the 
 first faint glimmerings of the dawn of the happy day, when superstition 
 and false metaphysics shall be no more, and reasonable folks may ' live 
 at ease,' are as yet discoverable by the enfants perdus of the outposts." 
 (Professor Huxley, " Hume," English Men of Letters, p. 59.) 
 
 V.
 
 58 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 to prevent his antagonist from getting away ; * can he but 
 succeed in this the enemy is delivered helpless into his 
 hands. 
 
 This is, no doubt, a highly satisfactory creed for those 
 who can see their way to profess it, and one eminently 
 calculated to give them that good conceit of themselves 
 for which the Scotch minister prayed. They will, at the 
 same time, of course, be the last to object to any discussion 
 of their position, upon a purely rational basis, for in ventur- 
 ing to face the full light of their principles an adversary can 
 do nothing else but commit the happy despatch. 
 
 The groundwork of the Agnostic system is the existence 
 of " the Unknowable," of that which is not, and under no 
 circumstances can be, the object of knowledge : and 
 Agnostics, we are told, are honourably distinguished from 
 others in this that whereas these profess to know some- 
 thing about what cannot be known, they honestly confess 
 their ignorance. They willingly accept whatever is demon- 
 strated, and are prepared to accept whatever is demonstrable, 
 but there they resolutely stop the scientific habit of their 
 minds forbidding them to feign assent, where assent could 
 be nothing but a feint. Their principle, we are told, is as 
 old as Socrates ; it is the fundamental axiom of modern 
 science, and it is thus formulated by the teacher who has 
 provided Agnosticism with its name. " Positively, the 
 principle may be expressed : In matters of the intellect, 
 follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard 
 to any other consideration. And negatively : In matters 
 of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain 
 which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take 
 to be the Agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and 
 undefined, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in 
 the face, whatever the future may have in store for him." t 
 
 But, if this be all, does it appear as if we were likely to 
 get much further than before, by the aid of this principle ? 
 
 * " The favourite ' earth,' in which the hard-pressed reconciler takes 
 refuge, . . . is stopped in this instance." (Professor Huxley, Nineteenth 
 Century, February, 1889, p. 173.) 
 
 t Ibid., p. 1 86.
 
 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 59 
 
 Confessedly it is as old as the hills. It may further be 
 asked, who are the men who have ever acted, or thought 
 it possible to act on any other ? To bid us go only where 
 reason leads, is like warning us not to write the history of 
 prehistoric peoples. Reason is our only faculty capable of 
 discovering truth, and it follows of necessity, that all truth 
 to which we attain must be arrived at through it. If this 
 be the sum total of the Agnostic's argument and rhetoric, 
 he is but battering at an open door. 
 
 In truth, however, the contention which is uppermost in 
 his thought is one which he has not seen fit to include in 
 his fundamental statement : namely, that reason can lead 
 us to truth in one way only. Agnostic arguments are 
 altogether unmeaning, unless it be first taken for granted, 
 that nothing is reasonably demonstrated or demonstrable 
 but what is known through the senses : in other words, 
 that we can have no true knowledge, save of the material 
 universe and of the forces to which its phenomena bear 
 witness. " Reason," accordingly, becomes, in Agnostic 
 phraseology, a synonym for " the conclusions of physical 
 science," and the creed which we have heard would have 
 been more clearly formulated, as well as more honestly, 
 had it run, " We must believe what we can prove by 
 physical science, and nothing else." 
 
 Thus defined, the battle-ground between Agnostics and 
 their opponents wears a somewhat altered aspect. It is one 
 thing to say that we must believe in nothing but what 
 reason sanctions, and another, to forbid belief in anything 
 not sanctioned by reason in one particular way. The 
 Agnostic, of course, says that it comes to the same thing, 
 for in that one way alone can the sanction of reason be given. 
 But if he would have others to agree with him, he must, in 
 the name of reason, show them plainly wherefore they 
 should do so. And how is this to be done? On what 
 axiom, or on what process of argument, does his assumption 
 rest ? To such a question, it is evident, a clear and cogent 
 answer should be forthcoming, for here is the very corner- 
 stone of the whole system. Where such answer is to be 
 found, or even an attempt to furnish it, is not quite so
 
 60 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 plain. But before entering upon a quest for it some other 
 points have to be considered. 
 
 It is not in regard of Agnostic principles alone that we 
 are apt to be encountered by an obscurity which we should 
 scarcely expect in this temple of light. The objects with 
 which this " reasonable scepticism " deals, are usually indi- 
 cated with at least equal vagueness. At the same time, if 
 we are to gauge the method aright, it is of prime importance 
 to know what are the objects incapable of demonstration, 
 in which there are men so besotted as to profess belief. 
 Undoubtedly the first and foremost of these that from 
 which all the rest depend is God Himself: the God of 
 Theism, eternal, self-existent, Almighty and intelligent, 
 the Creator and Upholder of all things. Disbelief or non- 
 belief in Him, is the primary article of the Agnostic 
 Creed. It is at belief in such a Being that Agnostics gird 
 in all their utterances. We can know nothing of Him, they 
 say, we have no means of knowing ; reason affords no proof 
 of His existence. A profession of belief in Him is, there- 
 fore, a mere futility, which all men possessed of self-respect 
 will reprobate. 
 
 Now, we are not at present considering the arguments 
 by which the existence of God may be proved, but the 
 Agnostic position that no proof is possible. Belief in God, 
 we must remember, is based, not on an acknowledgment 
 that no evidence for it is furnished by reason, but precisely 
 on the contention that the argument from reason is too 
 strong to be resisted. To hear an Agnostic talk, we might 
 well suppose that for believers the absence of reason was the 
 very motive of belief, and that they are so preposterous a 
 race as to claim it as their supreme merit that they give an 
 assent for which they have nothing to show. But from the 
 beginnings of philosophy men have been found, and those 
 not the least worthy to be heard, who have thought with 
 Cicero * that the existence of a God is no less manifest to 
 us than is that of the sun in the heavens. Such an attitude 
 can scarcely be called parallel to that implied in Professor 
 Huxley's illustration of the sort of thing which in the name 
 * De natura deorunt, ii. 2.
 
 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 61 
 
 of Agnosticism he declines to accept. " If a man asks me 
 what the politics of the inhabitants of the moon are, and I 
 reply that I do not know ; that neither I, nor any one else 
 have any means of knowing ; and that, under these circum- 
 stances, I decline to trouble myself about the subject at all, 
 I do not think he has any right to call me a sceptic. On 
 the contrary, in replying thus, I conceive that I am simply 
 honest and truthful, and show a proper regard for the 
 economy of time." * It is surely obvious that in such a 
 statement of the case the only point which is at issue is 
 totally ignored. While it is acknowledged on all hands that 
 we have no means of knowing anything about the man in 
 the moon, it is strenuously asserted that we have means of 
 knowing the existence of God. Professor Huxley, it is true, 
 and those who think with him, declare these means to be 
 no means at all, and so obviously delusive that those who 
 trust in them are intellectually dishonest. But it is equally 
 true that the other side have likewise something to say. 
 According to them, the Agnostic arbitrarily elects to throw 
 away all the means we have of discovering truth, excepting 
 one ; and in resolving that nothing shall be true but what 
 that one discloses, acts no more philosophically than a 
 man would do, who should determine to admit the existence 
 of nothing that he could not touch with his hands, and then 
 declare his inability to know the existence of the stars. 
 
 It therefore appears that when Agnostics speak of them- 
 selves as unlike the rest of men, in that they demand 
 reasons before yielding assent, they mean, in fact, that they 
 alone know a good argument from a bad one, and insist on 
 the genuine article. The one species of argument to which, 
 outside of mathematics, they allow any validity is that 
 furnished by physical science. Professor Huxley quotes 
 with the highest approval the following utterance of 
 Hume's : " If we take in hand any volume of divinity, or 
 school metaphysics, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract 
 reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it 
 contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact 
 and existence ? No. Commit it then to the flames ; for it 
 * Lay Sermons, " On the Physical Basis of Life," p. 144.
 
 62 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." And he 
 thus continues in his own name : " Permit me to enforce 
 this most wise advice. Why trouble ourselves about matters 
 of which, however important they may be, we know nothing 
 and can know nothing." * 
 
 It is therefore plain that the cardinal doctrine of Agnosti- 
 cism, the principle upon which its whole system turns, is 
 the impossibility of arriving at the knowledge of any truth, 
 other than those purely mathematical, save by the means 
 of experimental science, and that all which such science 
 cannot reach is utterly beyond our ken. That this is a 
 proposition somewhat different from the one originally 
 offered to us, is evident ; and now that we have arrived at a 
 clear understanding of its nature it will be well to glance 
 back at the account we have heard as to how the creed has 
 won its way to the imposing position it now holds. 
 
 It is the advance of physical science, as we have been 
 told, that has done it all : to it is due the irresistible artillery 
 against which stupidity itself cannot stand : this it is that 
 has driven false teachers from the open field, and forced 
 them, as Hume declares and Professor Huxley quite agrees, 
 to take to the bush, and lurk like robbers under the shade 
 of forests, where they may lie in wait " to break in upon 
 every unguarded avenue of the mind and overwhelm it with 
 religious fears and prejudices."! 
 
 But here we begin to encounter perplexities. What 
 physical science has done, is to increase our knowledge. 
 By what process of reasoning does it appear that in so doing 
 it has taught us that our knowledge is limited within bounds 
 more narrow than was previously supposed ? Because we 
 can find out much by means of experiment, is it therefore 
 proved that we can find out nothing by any other means ? 
 And unless the advance of physical science scientifically 
 proves this, how are the bolts forged to shatter the thick 
 heads of opponents ? Even were it assumed that science 
 has come to the end of its possible discoveries, and shown 
 
 * Lay Sermons, " The Physical Basis of Life," p. 145. The italics 
 are his. 
 
 t " Hume," English Men of Letters, p. 58.
 
 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 63 
 
 us everything that by its means we shall ever know what 
 bearing can this have on the point in question ? The 
 implied argument is, that because science has not detected 
 God in the world, there is no God to be found. But no 
 one that has ever believed in God, supposed that He could 
 be so discovered. Nay rather, if science had discovered 
 Him, belief in Him would have ceased ; for a God that 
 could be found in a crucible or with a spectroscope would 
 be no God at all. 
 
 It must therefore appear that the question is altogether 
 untouched by the fact that physical science has extended its 
 borders ; being concerned not with what such science can 
 do, but professedly with what it can not. The gulf which 
 yawns between Agnostics and believers, is one not of dis- 
 puted fact, but of principle; and the principle on which 
 they differ was just as clear, as it now is, before any one of 
 the triumphs of modern science had been achieved. Those 
 who at any period found reasons for belief, would find pre- 
 cisely the same reasons existing in undiminished force to 
 say the least of it now as then. Just as they are persuaded 
 that there is another side to the moon, though human eye 
 has never seen it, so are believers convinced that the objects 
 presented to sense inevitably imply the existence of that 
 which to the senses must ever be imperceptible. 
 
 It would undoubtedly be more satisfactory, if instead of 
 assuming that the grounds for such a belief must be al- 
 together worthless, Agnostics would undertake to prove 
 them so. It would be interesting to observe how this is 
 done. On their own principles it should be, either by 
 abstract mathematical reasoning, or by reasoning based on 
 practical experiment. Which is it to be? And if the 
 attempt to find a proof be successful, will its efficacy be 
 restricted to the discrediting of beliefs which they wish to 
 see discredited? Are there none held by Agnostics in 
 company with all the rest of the world, and held beyond 
 the possibility of doubt, which would then appear to be 
 utterly unreasonable ? The argument attributed to the 
 great Napoleon, is hard to meet. " You talk of my genius 
 and firmly believe in it. But which of you has seen it ? "
 
 64 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 Has any of us the smallest doubt that Shakespeare had the 
 mind of a poet, and Newton the acumen of a philosopher ? 
 Yet by what process of reasoning which Agnosticism 
 sanctions can we have any knowledge whatever of the one 
 or the other ? Is the beauty of the Iliad less certain than 
 the chemical constitution of water ? Yet by which of the 
 " ologies " is it disclosed ? Nay, what of moral goodness ? 
 Oddly enough, in his very next sentence after that which 
 endorses Hume's dictum, Professor Huxley continues : 
 'We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, 
 and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make 
 the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable 
 and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered 
 it." But how is any such duty "plain" ? Is it by mathe- 
 matics, or by physical experiment that it is demonstrated ? 
 Or is it that the first principle of Agnosticism serves well 
 enough in theory, especially if not too clearly stated, as a 
 weapon of offence, but in practice is so unworkable that 
 Agnostics themselves do not think of using it, not even 
 while it is upon their lips ? 
 
 To this difficulty succeeds another. According to the 
 Agnostic account of the matter, all belief in what they 
 declare to be unknowable is not merely actually erroneous, 
 but intrinsically foolish, so foolish that it stamps those pro- 
 fessing it as altogether unscientific. How comes it then 
 that, not only in the benighted days of ancient philosophers 
 and schoolmen, but amongst those upon whom beats the 
 full light of science, those, moreover, to whom science is 
 least a stranger, there should be found men who will 
 persist in imagining that they can know what reason proves 
 to be beyond the domain of knowledge ? Sir Isaac Newton 
 assuredly knew something about science, yet does not he 
 declare that to treat of God, as a deduction from what we 
 see, is a necessary part of Natural Philosophy.* Sir John 
 Herschel is of like mind ; so are, to confine ourselves to our 
 own countrymen, Lord Kelvin, Professor Kalfour Stewart, 
 Professor Tait, Sir George Stokes, Sir William Siemens, 
 Sir William Dawson, Lord Rayleigh, Professor Faraday, and 
 * Prinribia : Scholitun gcnerale.
 
 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 65 
 
 Professor Clerk-Maxwell, to mention no others. Are these 
 men of skulls so thick as to be proof against the new artil 
 lery, and that though they stand close to the very mouths 
 of its guns ? 
 
 The Agnostic theory is therefore by no means so plain 
 and simple a matter as at first sight we might be tempted 
 to suppose. What then are we to say of Agnostic practice ? 
 Of this we have already seen a little but much more 
 remains to see, and to do so aright we must attempt to 
 follow the path by which from its initial principle we are 
 to be led to the fullest meed of knowledge attainable by 
 man. For it must by no means be imagined that those 
 who call themselves Agnostics mean that they are " Know- 
 nothings." Quite the reverse. The ignorance to which 
 they plead guilty concerning some things, is most abun- 
 dantly compensated by assured knowledge, in comparison 
 with which all other so-called knowledge must pale its 
 ineffectual fires. All that is worth knowing in the universe 
 is in fact to be known to us by the scientific method alone, 
 and this is nothing else than the method of Agnosticism. 
 " Natural knowledge," we are told," " is a real mother of 
 mankind ; modern civilization rests upon physical science,"! 
 in which the whole of modern thought is steeped, and 
 which has forced its way into the works of "our best 
 poets." { The same science has discovered the ideas which 
 alone can satisfy " spiritual cravings " ; it has laid solid 
 foundations for a new morality, j| and a new religion 
 " cherishing the noblest and most human of man's emotions, 
 by worship, ' for most part of the silent sort,' at the altar 
 of the Unknown and Unknowable."" Moreover, while 
 science thus conducts us to the most sublime philosophy 
 of life, so can she alone guide us to sound the depths and 
 mysteries in which the first beginnings of the universe lie 
 hid. 
 
 The cause of Agnosticism has identified itself with that 
 
 * Professor Huxley, Lay Sermons. " On Improving Natural Know- 
 ledge," p. 10. 
 
 t Ibid., p. 117. I Ibid. I Ibid., p. u. || Ibid. 
 
 T Ibid., p. 1 6. 
 
 F
 
 66 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 of Evolution, and in his character of Evolutionist the 
 Agnostic is undoubtedly acquainted with much which to 
 the ordinary unscientific mind appears quite as unknowable 
 as anything which we have been warned not to fancy we 
 can know. The Agnostic Evolutionist believes devoutly 
 in the cosmic vapour from which all things in heaven and 
 earth have come; in its molecular constitution in which 
 they were all pre-ordained; and in those inevitable laws 
 of Nature according to which they were worked out.* As 
 he believes nothing without a reason, he has, of course, a 
 reason for all this, and a reason that will stand the test 
 of his own principles ; and in examining the process by 
 which his system is built up, we shall have an excellent 
 object-lesson wherefrom to gather instruction as to the 
 scientific method of which we have heard so much. 
 
 It is undoubtedly a little startling to find that the first 
 thing we have to do is to make an act of faith : of faith in 
 that which, " by the very nature of the case, is not sus- 
 ceptible of proof." This " one act of faith in the convert 
 to science," says Professor Huxley, " is the confession of 
 the universality of order, and of the absolute validity, in all 
 times and under all circumstances, of the law of causa- 
 tion." t " It is quite true," he tells us elsewhere, \ " that 
 the ground of every one of our actions, and the validity of 
 all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith, which 
 leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide 
 in our dealings with the present and the future. From the 
 nature of ratiocination it is obvious that the axioms on 
 which it is based cannot be demonstrated by ratiocination." 
 Lest, however, we should be shocked, in view of the prin- 
 ciples to which we have just listened, by this announce- 
 ment, he hastens to reassure us by the declaration, that if 
 this act of faith be not experimentally proved, it is at any 
 rate experimentally verified, and that this is much the same 
 thing. "Such faith," he writes, "is not blind, but 
 
 * Professor Huxley, " On the reception of the ' Origin of Species," " 
 Life of Darwin, vol. ii. p. 201. 
 
 t Ibid.) p. 200. \ Nineteenth Century, February, 1889, p. 185. 
 " Reception of ' Origin of Species,' " ubi sup., p. 200.
 
 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 67 
 
 reasonable ; because it is invariably confirmed by experi- 
 ence, and constitutes the sole trustworthy foundation for all 
 action." 
 
 It is clear that, whatever may be their value for other 
 purposes, these dicta afford abundant material for the exer- 
 cise of our reasoning faculties. In the first place, is it 
 plain what is to be the object of our great and fundamental 
 act of belief? The "universality of order" and the 
 " absolute validity of the law of causation " is scarcely the 
 same thing as the " safe guidance afforded by our experi- 
 ence," yet these are severally presented as the object of the 
 one and only act we have to make. Moreover, as any act 
 of faith must needs deal with that which we have not ex- 
 perienced, it is scarcely obvious how our experience sup- 
 ports it. Experience, for instance, tells me that all the 
 unsupported stones I have ever seen have fallen. What 
 precise bearing has this fact, by itself, on my belief that 
 other stones will fall ? And what, by itself, has it to do 
 with the law of causation ? If, indeed, from the pheno- 
 menon of falling stones I deduce the existence of a force 
 making them fall, then indeed, from the permanence of 
 such cause and its activity, I may be convinced that stones 
 in the future will behave as in the past ; just as I believe 
 there will be trains on our railways to-morrow, not because 
 there were trains yesterday, but because I believe in the 
 existence of railway companies and engine-drivers. But 
 this, apparently, is not the scientific mode of arguing. 
 " What do we know," asks Professor Huxley, "about [this] 
 phenomenon ? Simply that, in all human experience, 
 stones have fallen to the ground under these conditions ; 
 that we have not the smallest reason for believing that any 
 stone so circumstanced will not fall to the ground ; and 
 that we have, on the contrary, every reason for believing 
 that it will so fall. It is very convenient to indicate that 
 all the conditions of belief have been fulfilled in this case, 
 by calling the statement that unsupported stones will fall to 
 the ground, ' a law of nature.' But when, as commonly 
 happens, we change will into must, we introduce an idea of 
 necessity which most assuredly does not lie in the observed
 
 68 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 facts, and has no warranty that I can discover elsewhere. 
 For my part I utterly repudiate and anathematize the in- 
 truder. Fact I know, and law I know ; but what is this 
 necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's 
 throwing ? " * 
 
 It thus appears that, as the first step in our scientific 
 regeneration, we are resolutely to accept the belief that 
 things always proceed in one manner, though nothing 
 compels them to do so ; our reason for so believing being 
 that we have every reason, though such reasons are of too 
 delicate a nature to admit of being stated. 
 
 Meanwhile, as is clear, we have not gained any very clear 
 information as to the place which the law of causation is to 
 hold in our esteem. It must, however, be supposed, that 
 the statement of its claims is latent in the utterances which 
 we have heard ; for, as a prelude to his exposition of the 
 act of scientific faith, which we are considering, Professor 
 Huxley indulges in some very hard words regarding those 
 who have not made this act, expressly on the ground of 
 their blindness to this very principle. " Do they really 
 believe," he asks, " that any event has no cause, and could 
 not have been predicted by any one who had a sufficient 
 insight into the order of Nature? If they do, it is they 
 who are the inheritors of antique superstition and ignorance, 
 and whose minds have never been illuminated by a ray of 
 scientific thought." f 
 
 We must therefore believe that the starting-point of our 
 faith, if we would deserve the name of scientific thinkers, is 
 this. We observe all operations of Nature proceeding from 
 material cause to material effect, each cause being itself the 
 effect of some other cause preceding it. For instance, the 
 falling of a stone is not caused alone by the force of gravity ; 
 it is required that the stone should be in a position whence 
 it can fall ; and that it should find itself in such position 
 there must have been something to lift it ; while again, that 
 it should be raised to any point, it must first have been 
 below it. Seeing the forces of Nature always and every- 
 
 * Lay Sermons. " On the Physical Basis of Life," p. 143. 
 t " Reception of ' Origin of Species,' " ubi sup., p. 200.
 
 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 69 
 
 where producing the same phenomena in like circumstances, 
 we are to conclude, with absolute certainty, that they always 
 have done so, and always will do so ; that the key which 
 alone can unlock the secrets of Nature is a full and frank 
 acceptance of the principle, that there never has been any 
 other process, or at least that we can know nothing at all of 
 any other, and that we obey the dictates of reason in 
 resting satisfied with this explanation of the history of the 
 universe. 
 
 This, I say, seems to be the meaning though I speak 
 with some diffidence. But what then is the "necessity," 
 against admitting which we are so earnestly warned? If 
 unsupported stones will inevitably fall, why is it so very 
 wrong to say that they must do so ? Yet, from the warmth 
 exhibited by our instructor, it is clear that something of 
 prime importance turns on this. Must it not be that the 
 intruder whose appearance is so fiercely resented is a First 
 Cause, arranging the machinery of the universe to go in the 
 way He wishes and not otherwise ? We are to say that the 
 laws of Nature run in one groove, because as a matter of 
 fact it is in that we see them run ; but on no account are 
 we to say that it was made for them to run in. 
 
 This is, I hope, a fair exposition of the system, and if it 
 be so, we have, as is obvious, ample food for thought. At 
 present, however, we are concerned not so much with the 
 system itself as with the method in which it is worked by 
 its votaries, and in which they deduce from it the far-reaching 
 consequences of which we have heard. 
 
 Since all that we see in the phenomena of Nature pro- 
 ceeds from material cause to effect, we have to assume with 
 them that this has ever been the course of things, and that, 
 in the assumption that it has been so, we find the only solid 
 and satisfactory groundwork for any belief concerning 
 Nature ; while " Nature," we are elsewhere told, " means 
 nothing more nor less than that which is ; the sum of 
 phenomena presented to our experience; the totality of 
 events passed, present, and to come." :;: It follows, therefore, 
 
 * Professor Huxley, Hume, p. 1 3 1 . It may be remarked in passing, 
 that " that which is" can scarcely be synonymous with " events," and
 
 70 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 that this principle, scientifically handled, gives us to know 
 all about everything. 
 
 We proceed accordingly in quest of some starting-point, 
 whence these events which make up the universe began to 
 evolve themselves. That there was a starting-point is 
 admitted, for astronomy, we are told, "leads us to contem- 
 plate phenomena the very nature of which demonstrates 
 that they must have had a beginning." * This beginning 
 was the " cosmic vapour " or "primitive nebulosity," by the 
 interaction of whose molecules, according to the laws of 
 matter, everything in heaven and earth has been produced. 
 That this is the case is the " fundamental proposition of 
 Evolution," t and Evolution being the pet theory of Agnos- 
 tics, shedding the only true light on the history of things, it 
 would appear that we are supposed to have arrived in this 
 proposition at something which affords a stable and solid 
 basis whereon to build our edifice of knowledge. But what, 
 meanwhile, of the principle of causation, and its absolute 
 validity in all times and under all circumstances, to which 
 we have been bidden to swear allegiance ? Even if we do 
 not feel inclined to follow the example that has been set us, 
 by calling the cosmic vapour an " event," yet undoubtedly 
 the coming of its molecules into position must be one : nay, 
 so must the production of those molecules themselves, for, 
 as Sir John Herschel says, a molecule is a " manufactured 
 article." What then was the cause of the vapour ? It needs 
 a cause as much as the steam in a boiler, or the gas in our 
 pipes : or at any rate, if we say that it needed none we must 
 flatly contradict the principle of causation, and begin the 
 working of our system by denying its fundamental tenet. 
 Yet, strange to say, not only is no information whatever 
 forthcoming on this vital point, but it seems actually to be 
 implied that none is needed, because the time was so very 
 long ago. " Phenomena," says Professor Huxley, in the 
 passage above quoted, "the very nature of which demon- 
 
 that according to the above definition it should follow that nothing exists 
 but what comes within reach of human sense. 
 
 * Professor Huxley, Lay Sermons, p. 14. 
 
 f Professor Huxley, Lift of Darwin, ii. p. 201.
 
 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 71 
 
 strates that they must have had a beginning, .... but the 
 very nature of which also proves that the beginning was, to 
 our conception of time, infinitely remote." What "our 
 conception of time " can have to do with the business, is 
 not obvious ; yet it would really seem as if we are expected 
 on this ground to dismiss as irrelevant all further inquiry ; 
 nay, we are asked to assent to the proposition that it is the 
 astronomer himself, while he discovers the duration of the 
 universe to be certainly finite, who at the same time dis- 
 covers it to be " practically " infinite. " The astronomer," 
 we are told,* "has set before us .... the practical eternity 
 of the duration of the universe." He " observes the mark 
 of practically endless time set upon the arrangements 
 of the solar system." f In consequence, " men have ac- 
 quired the ideas of the practically infinite extent of the 
 universe and its practical eternity." J Clearly, "practical" 
 is a word to conjure with. But what does it mean? What 
 is a " practical eternity " ? and how does it differ from an 
 eternity of any other species ? In our survey of the past, 
 either we come to a point where we have to bid good-bye 
 to the principle of causation, or we do not. If we do, there 
 is an end of the absolute and everlasting validity of that 
 principle before there is a beginning of it. If we do not, 
 how is the principle to be applied to the beginning of the 
 universe, a beginning requiring a cause just as imperatively 
 as any of the phases through which it has since passed ? 
 
 In plain truth, this wonderful principle, introduced with 
 so much pomp and circumstance as the discovery of 
 " Science," is not only of hoary antiquity, but has actually 
 been the very groundwork whereon philosophers, of the 
 pre-scientific days, have ever rested their belief concerning 
 what Agnostics dub the unknowable. Since reason and 
 experience combine to assure us that there can be no effect 
 without a cause, and since every cause we find in physical 
 nature is the effect of something else, it has ever been 
 argued that Nature cannot have started her own machinery ; 
 that there must be a Cause distinct from her, and in- 
 dependent of her laws ; a Cause which is not an effect, but 
 * Lay Sermons ; p. 15. f Ibid., p. 16. \ Ibid., p. 17.
 
 72 Agnosticism in Theory and Practice 
 
 has its existence of itself, and which contains all the power 
 exhibited by the forces of matter, which can have obtained 
 their efficacy from it alone. And if the researches of 
 physical science have demonstrated that Nature as we 
 know her must have had a beginning, they do no more 
 than confirm what the benighted race of metaphysicians 
 have always told us must have been. 
 
 Being thus speedily brought up by an impassable gulf 
 in attempting to follow the workings of the Agnostic 
 principle even on the physical side, it can scarcely be worth 
 our while to attempt any examination of its claims to satisfy 
 "spiritual cravings," and provide us with a higher and 
 purer morality, and a religion worthy of men. It would 
 indeed be far from easy to pursue such an investigation ; 
 for beyond high-sounding assurances that it does all this, 
 Agnosticism is provokingly reticent as to how it does it : 
 while to the ordinary mind, that it should do so at all seems 
 just as unlikely as that a steam-engine should write poetry. 
 The one contention which seems to glimmer through the 
 utterances we meet on the subject, is that a man must be 
 improved by coming in contact with the facts of Nature, 
 that, as Cardinal Newman puts it, he must be better for 
 having inspected a megatherium. But, in the first place, 
 when we ask what is meant by " better," we are told of our 
 ' ' plain duty " to practise various moral virtues, the mere 
 existence of which no " scientific " process can discover. 
 And besides this, is it not a peculiar method of inducing 
 men to cultivate virtues or anything else, to assure them 
 that they were contained in the cosmic vapour, and can by 
 no possibility be anything else than its constitution ordained 
 them to be ? 
 
 This, then, is the New Philosophy. This it is that shall 
 set the world right. Against accepting this, stupidity alone 
 is proof.
 
 EVOLUTION AND DESIGN 
 
 As has already been remarked, it is exceedingly difficult 
 to determine which of the protean forms assumed by the 
 Evolutionary Creed is to be regarded as its genuine and 
 authentic representative, or to whom, amid the multitude 
 of its teachers, we may listen with confidence, as being 
 warranted to speak on behalf of any one besides himself. 
 The days are long past when Mr. Darwin's doctrines reigned 
 supreme, and those who still speak of him as their master 
 may safely be assumed to have abandoned, tacitly or 
 openly, all that was essential to his system. The theory 
 of Natural Selection which he elaborated with so much 
 care has faded away amid the flood of light evoked by the 
 interest which it aroused, the researches of a host of in- 
 vestigators, whom in great measure he taught to observe, 
 having revealed innumerable phenomena in Nature with 
 which his hypothesis cannot be made to square. His 
 leading disciples, like the officers of Alexander the Great, 
 have accordingly divided his empire amongst them, devis- 
 ing a variety of systems, which, while they differ from his, 
 differ likewise from one another, and as none of these has 
 succeeded in obtaining any general, or even very wide, 
 acceptance, outsiders are naturally at a loss to know to 
 what guide they should entrust themselves if they desire 
 to arrive at the knowledge of evolutionary doctrine pure 
 and undefiled. 
 
 So far as positive doctrine is concerned, this only is 
 common to the various groups amongst which Evolutionists, 
 
 VI,
 
 74 Evolution and Design 
 
 properly so-called, are distributed, that the universe has 
 been " evolved " by some process or other, and in obedi- 
 ence to some law. On the negative side, however, they are 
 more explicitly in unison, the essential backbone of 
 every evolutionary system being the denial of an Intelligence 
 presiding over and directing the processes of Nature, what- 
 ever they have been. " Evolution," as commonly explained, 
 means nothing, if it does not mean that everything has 
 been worked out by blind, automatic forces, and that we 
 find in all Nature no evidence of a designing Mind. This 
 is clearly the cardinal point of the doctrine, which, being 
 granted, all can harmoniously agree to differ. But for the 
 idea that to explain the existence of Nature, as we observe 
 it, is required a First Cause, possessed of Understanding 
 and Free-will, there is no tolerance, and nothing so surely 
 arouses the anger of the more eager partisans of the New 
 Philosophy as to hint that the world bears traces of 
 Design. 
 
 Thus we find that, on the first promulgation of Mr. 
 Darwin's system, to which, however, he never committed 
 himself, Professor Huxley proclaimed it to be the great 
 merit of its author to have dealt a death-blow to the idea 
 that the eye was made for the purpose of sight.* Professor 
 Romanes declared that, in face of Evolutionary Science, the 
 Theist must despair of answering the question " Where is 
 now thy God ? " t Professor Clifford, Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
 Mr. Frederick Harrison, and other leaders of discordant 
 schools, are enthusiastically at one on this fundamental 
 point. 
 
 It would even appear that a man of science, however 
 eminent, who presumes to think otherwise, is held to 
 forfeit all claim to consideration. Some years ago, Sir 
 George Stokes, of whose position in the scientific world 
 nothing need be said, being engaged to deliver the Burnett 
 Lectures before the University of Edinburgh, chose for 
 his subject " The beneficial effects of Light." In treating 
 it, he was led to speak of the structure of the eye, from 
 
 * Reception of the Origin of Species. 
 t Darwin and after Darwin, p. 412.
 
 Evolution and Design 75 
 
 which he gathered the very conclusion which Professor 
 Huxley had pronounced to be for evermore impossible. 
 " When we contemplate all this," he declared, " it seems 
 difficult to understand how we can fail to be impressed 
 with the evidence of design thus imparted to us. But 
 design is altogether unmeaning without a designing mind. 
 The study, then, of the phenomena of Nature leads us to 
 the contemplation of a Being from whom proceeded the 
 orderly arrangement of natural things that we behold." :;: 
 
 Such an utterance could not be suffered to pass without 
 reproof, and straightway Professor Karl Pearson was up 
 in arms, taking the President of the Royal Society to task 
 in the fashion of a schoolmaster dealing with a naughty 
 boy. Sir George, he declared, had " prostituted science " ; 
 he had degraded his high office by "dabbling in the mire 
 of natural theology," and presenting Scotland with a new 
 edition of the rare old "argument from design"; he was 
 "like a resuscitated Paley, who discovers in the eye an 
 evidence of design, and startles the countrymen of Hume 
 with a physico-theological proof of the existence of the 
 Deity"; and so on.f 
 
 It must, however, be remarked that, like some others who 
 assail the argument from Design, the Professor does not 
 seem to have been at the pains of understanding it. His 
 antagonist is a mere man of straw, and the argument he puts 
 in his mouth a manifest absurdity, which no one in his 
 senses ever thought of upholding. Professor Pearson would 
 seem to imagine that believers in Design actually argue in 
 the fatuous style caricatured by Hegel, that the vine was 
 created solely to provide mankind with wine, and that the 
 cork-tree was thoughtfully added to furnish stoppers for 
 their bottles. J 
 
 No doubt, as the German philosopher observes, in arguing 
 thus, we fall into " trifling reflections," but it might seem 
 equally evident that puerilities such as this do not adequately 
 
 Bttrnett Lectures, p. 327. 
 of Sci 
 
 t "The Prostitution of Science"; printed in The Ethics of Free- 
 ought, pp. 33-35. 
 \ Quoted by Pearson, nt sup., p. 41.
 
 76 Evolution and Design 
 
 represent the position, taken up, amongst others, by Sir 
 Isaac Newton, that to treat of God as a deduction from 
 what we see is a necessary part of Natural Science. 
 
 Still more clearly is such misapprehension exhibited by 
 another argument frequently adduced. It is said that we 
 can argue nothing from the actual order of the universe, 
 for had it been different from what it is, we should still 
 have discovered similar reasons to justify a like conclusion. 
 This is rather like Lord Brougham's nai've speculation as to 
 how his character would have been affected had his father 
 married some one else and not his mother. It is quietly 
 assumed that in any case the world must have been a scene 
 of law and order, and the home of intelligent creatures, or 
 else "we" should not be there at all to indulge in any 
 speculation concerning it. But this is the whole question 
 at issue. Those who believe in Design as a deduction from 
 what they see, do so precisely on the ground that there could 
 be no reign of law without a law-giver ; that, as nothing can 
 be got out of a sack but what is in it, if there be intelligence 
 in the world now, it must have been existent from the first ; 
 that, according to Professor Francis Newman's dictum, 
 "he who made man must have had all that man has, 
 and more " ; that all attempts to explain the existence 
 of any order in Nature consistent with organic life, without 
 introducing the element of an Intelligence guiding things 
 towards a definite end, must fail to provide our minds even 
 with what is termed a " working hypothesis." To deserve 
 such an appellation, an hypothesis must "work" that is to 
 say, it must furnish an explanation which our minds may 
 conceive to be the true one, and which is not manifestly 
 inadequate for its purpose. It seems impossible to deny 
 the conceivability of a sufficient intelligence having planned, 
 and a sufficient power having fashioned, all the machinery 
 of Nature. We may go farther and ask, with Bishop Butler, 
 " Will any man in his senses say that it is more difficult to 
 conceive how the world came to be, and to continue as it 
 is, with an intelligent author and governor, than without 
 one ? " We may, accordingly, claim that the doctrine of 
 Design is a "working hypothesis." But can we say as much
 
 Evolution and Design 77 
 
 for any other ? Does any system which excludes this 
 fundamental principle, furnish us with a substitute which 
 even conceivably can suffice to take its place ? This is the 
 question that has to be answered in the affirmative before 
 we can style such a system a " working hypothesis." 
 
 In this inquiry it will be convenient to limit ourselves to 
 the domain of organic life, not because it is here alone that 
 evidence of design may be found, but because its demon- 
 stration is here most simple, and therefore best adapted for 
 popular exposition. ::: 
 
 We begin, therefore, by observing the fact that we con- 
 stantly find in Nature complex mechanisms so admirably 
 adapted to the production of some result, that no terms 
 have yet been discovered by which they may be described, 
 
 * " The argument in favour of a creating and presiding Intelligence 
 may be drawn from the study of physical agency such as the properties 
 of heat, light, and sound; of gravitation and chemical combination; the 
 structure of the globe, the divisions of land and sea, the distributions of 
 temperature ; nay, the mind may rise to the contemplation of the sun 
 and planets, their mutual dependence, and their revolutions ; but as 
 affording proofs, obvious not only to cultivated reason but to plain sense, 
 almost to ignorance, there is nothing to be compared with the mechan- 
 ism of the animal body, and the adaptations which effect the well-being 
 of living creatures." (Notes on Paley's Natural Theology, By Lord 
 Brougham and Sir C. Bell. Charles Knight's Edition, vol. ii. p. 16, 1845.) 
 
 Concerning the ultimate resolution of matter into molecules and atoms 
 by modern chemistry, Sir John Herschell writes: "When we see a 
 great number of things precisely alike, we do not believe this similarity 
 to have originated except from a common principle independent of 
 them ; and that we recognise this likeness, chiefly by the identity of 
 their deportment under similar circumstances, strengthens rather than 
 weakens the conclusion. A line of spinning-jennies, or a regiment of 
 soldiers dressed exactly alike, and going through precisely the same 
 evolutions, gives us no idea of independent existence; we must see them 
 act out of concert before we can believe them to have independent wills 
 and properties, not impressed on them from without. And this con- 
 clusion, which would be strong even were there only two individuals 
 precisely alike in all respects and for ever, acquires irresistible force 
 when their number is multiplied beyond the power of imagination to 
 conceive. If we mistake not, then, the discoveries [of chemistry] destroy 
 the idea of an eternal self-existent matter, by giving to each of its atoms 
 the essential characters, at once of a manufactured article and a sub- 
 ordinate a^eitt." (Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural 
 Philosophy, p. 38.)
 
 7 8 Evolution and Design 
 
 except such as we are accustomed to use of works wherein 
 we detect the hand of man. We style them "contrivances," 
 "devices," or "instruments." In our search for an account 
 of a method by which these have been produced, apart 
 from intelligent design, despite the discrepancy of the 
 views entertained by evolutionists, whereof we have 
 spoken, it would appear that we may confine ourselves 
 to that of Mr. Darwin, and examine the claim of his 
 system to present itself as a "working hypothesis." We 
 prefer to do so for two reasons. First, Mr. Darwin's theory 
 is alone sufficiently tangible and definite for examination, 
 and has far more than any other impressed itself on the 
 imagination of the world at large, so that Professor Weis- 
 mann can speak of it as alone furnishing an alternative to 
 the principle of design. Secondly, apart from the question 
 of first beginnings, about which he has nothing to say or to 
 suggest, Mr. Darwin faces the real question at issue more 
 fairly than do many others. He does not rest his case on 
 " innate " or " inherent " qualities or tendencies, germinat- 
 ing as things go on, as does the embryo within a seed ; and 
 to postulate anything of the sort is only to remove the 
 difficulty further back, not to meet it. It has been well 
 said that a man hearing an organ play, and concluding that 
 there is another man producing the tunes, is radically right, 
 though it should prove that the instrument is played by a 
 spring within itself; and in just the same way, to explain 
 the adaptation of means to ends in Nature, by saying that in 
 the beginning things were so constituted as spontaneously 
 to produce them, is to leave us, so far as a solution of 
 the problem is concerned, precisely where we were. Mr. 
 Darwin, on the other hand, given life once started, in 
 however primitive and rudimentary a form, undertakes to 
 show how the most perfect and complex machinery might 
 be developed, without any guiding lines to determine the 
 process. Variation from an existing type, and not specifi- 
 cally tmvards any other, is the force on which he relies for 
 the purpose. As it seems to be almost universally assumed 
 that such an agent can be sufficient for the work with which 
 we are asked to credit it, we must endeavour to realize the
 
 Evolution and Design 79 
 
 full meaning of such an assertion, and may conveniently 
 find an instance by which to test it in that very organ to 
 which Professors Huxley and Pearson have referred. 
 
 The eye, as we find it in man and vertebrate animals, is 
 an instrument of vast complexity, consisting of an infinity 
 of parts, which must not only do each its own appointed 
 work towards producing vision, but supplement that of the 
 rest, in order to produce one definite result, imperatively 
 conditioned by the laws of light. Cornea, aqueous humour, 
 iris, crystalline lens, vitreous humour, and retina may be 
 roughly spoken of as the parts of this delicate " camera," 
 nicely adjusted to ensure the production of a picture more 
 perfect than was ever formed in that of a photographer; 
 but each of these parts is again built up of others of 
 bewildering complexity and extraordinary construction, * 
 exhibiting fresh marvels and suggesting fresh problems as 
 we succeed in pushing our observations further and 
 further ; while so well do they all subserve one end, that 
 Mr. Darwin himself speaks of the " inimitable contriv- 
 ances " t exhibited in the organ. It therefore appears 
 that we may well say of this, as Mr. Wallace says \ of 
 some structures, that it has " very much the appearance 
 of design by an intelligent designer " ; and we can easily 
 believe the same authority when he tells us that the 
 thought of it, even to the last, gave Mr. Darwin a cold 
 shiver, on account of the conclusion to this effect which 
 it so forcibly suggested. Nevertheless, both Mr. Darwin 
 and Mr. Wallace succeeded in persuading themselves that 
 the eye may have been manufactured by a blind mechanical 
 process in the following manner. 
 
 We must, it is true, take for granted that there was to 
 start with a rude organ of vision, which originated in some 
 unknown manner ; but this may have been as simple and 
 imperfect as we like, the extremity of a nerve which had 
 grown sensitive to light, as other nerves are to touch, and 
 capable only of distinguishing illumination from darkness, 
 
 * See " The Eye and its Making," The Month, June, 1890. 
 t Origin of Species, p. 143. Twelfth thousand. 
 \ Darwinism, p. 113. Ibid., p. 130.
 
 80 Evolution and Design 
 
 as we can when our eyes are shut. Given this, we are told 
 that all is clear. The animal possessing such an organ would 
 hand it on to its progeny, but Nature never copies her own 
 work quite exactly, and the visual apparatus of the young 
 would differ in various particulars from that of the parent. 
 Some of these variations would be in the direction of more 
 perfect vision, and those lucky enough to have acquired the 
 better organs would fare better in the battle of life, and 
 become the progenitors of the next generation ; some 
 members of that generation, on the same principle, would 
 have an outfit still more effective, enabling them to live 
 down all their congeners not possessing similar advantages, 
 and exactly to reverse the lament of Horace : 
 
 " Our parents than their sires were worse ; 
 
 Beneath our sires have we declined ; 
 A generation more perverse 
 We presently shall leave behind." 
 
 Each generation would, in fact, advance, though never so 
 little, upon that preceding it ; the individuals possessing 
 desirable modifications being infallibly picked out for sur- 
 vival by the forces of Nature, amid the jar of which they 
 could subsist while others perished, until something better 
 than themselves had been produced. In living bodies, says 
 Mi. Darwin, * variation will cause the slight alterations, 
 generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and Natural 
 Selection will pick out with unerring skill each improve- 
 ment. Let this process go on for millions of years, and 
 during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds ; 
 and may we not believe that a living optical instrument 
 might thus be found as perfect as that which we find in 
 the eye ? t That is to say, we are to hold it as at least 
 
 * Origin of Species, p. 146. 
 
 t Mr. Darwin's own words are : " A living optical instrument, as 
 superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of 
 man." In his correspondence, however, he expresses regret for having 
 so far truckled to public opinion as to employ the old ' ' Mosaic " terms 
 "Creator" and " Creation," and explains that when he speaks of a 
 thing as having been " created," he means no more than that it has 
 appeared, in some manner of which he knows nothing.
 
 Evolution and Design 81 
 
 conceivable that a process such as we have seen described 
 has resulted in the construction of a delicate and com- 
 plicated optical machine, with its series of lenses of 
 different and intricate structure, throwing a picture upon 
 a yet more complex screen, the functions of which, even 
 when we have with immense labour distinguished something 
 of its various parts, we are still unable to understand. 
 
 It is not easy to find an example which shall help us 
 even partially to realize the magnitude of the demand thus 
 made on our belief. Let us, however, imagine a great 
 multitude of children who have a natural aptitude for 
 drawing, sufficient to ensure that they shall imitate very 
 closely any simple copy set before them, but quite un- 
 trained, so as never to imitate it quite exactly. They have 
 never seen a tree or a flower, and it is proposed to make 
 them delineate one on the principles of casual variation, a 
 lynx-eyed teacher watching over and directing the process. 
 He gives as their first copy a plain straight line, proposing 
 to lead them on to produce amongst them the likeness of a 
 buttercup. Of the first set of drawings made, all will vary 
 in some degree from the austere simplicity of the original ; 
 there will be, at least, the suggestion of curves and protuber- 
 ances, some of which may possibly serve as the first distant 
 approaches towards the delineation of leaves and blossoms. 
 The most likely to serve such a function is picked out from 
 the lot, and being faithfully reproduced to the required 
 extent, is set before the class as their second copy ; they 
 being bidden to represent it exactly as it is. The attempt 
 emphasizes the variations already inaugurated, the most 
 promising of which is again selected to form the model for 
 the third lesson. Is there any possibility that such an 
 experiment, on however large a scale it were tried, and 
 however often it were repeated, should result in producing 
 a single sketch accurately representing a buttercup of the 
 fields ? And yet, the conditions of an optical instrument, 
 like the eye, are as definitely fixed beforehand as the out- 
 lines of the required flower. The laws of light, which were 
 in full force long before the first eye was invented, impera- 
 tively demand the fulfilment of definite conditions before 
 
 G
 
 82 Evolution and Design 
 
 an image can be formed ; while the methods, we are told, 
 on which Nature works have no more purpose in them 
 than the inability of our copyist to reproduce what they 
 imitate. If her only power of producing something new 
 has been her ineradicable tendency to depart from previous 
 types, we may truly say that the eye, and all similar organs, 
 are the monuments of Nature's inaccuracy. We may be 
 allowed to ask whether this appears to be a " working 
 hypothesis," to say nothing of its dealing a death-blow to 
 any other ? 
 
 It must also be remembered that the problem from 
 which an illustration has been sought is, comparatively 
 speaking, very simple. How would the process we have 
 imagined be likely to succeed in providing us with an 
 accurate likeness of " a peacock in his pride," or a Gothic 
 cathedral, or the engines of an ocean steamer, or, let us 
 say, a diagram of the eye itself? Yet must the equally 
 blind operation of random variation be credited with the 
 production, not only of some one work, as accurately fitted 
 and finished as any of them, but of an infinite multitude, 
 adapted to purposes the most diverse, all accurately 
 satisfying the requirements of inexorable laws. It is 
 not only the one organ which we have hitherto con- 
 sidered in which " Nature " shows her craft ; nay, eyes 
 such as our own are not the only instruments she has 
 invented for purposes of sight. There are compound, 
 as well as simple, eyes, constructed on a totally different 
 plan, which we cannot imitate, having not the least idea 
 how it works, but which obviously satisfies the laws of 
 reflection and refraction, enabling the creatures possessing 
 such organs to see, in some respects possibly better than 
 ourselves. In like manner ears are adapted to the laws of 
 sound in a manner perhaps still more marvellous, and fitted 
 with machinery of exquisite manufacture ; the wing of every 
 creature which flies practically solves, though the methods 
 of solution are very different, a problem of pneumatics with 
 which we are unable to grapple even in theory : paw and 
 talon, fin and hoof, the fang of the snake, the sting of the 
 bee, the tongue of the butterfly, each of them, and a count-
 
 Evolution and Design 83 
 
 less multitude of other tools or weapons, is accurately fitted 
 for a special work by an intricate system of most delicate 
 machinery ; nay, there is no part, however seemingly trivial, 
 of any creature, however low in the scale of life, which does 
 not prove on examination to be a structure wonderfully built 
 up so as exactly to satisfy the conditions of its own func- 
 tions that is to say, when we have got so far as to know 
 what those functions are. =:: 
 
 Neither must we forget that it is not in the animal world 
 alone that we meet with this sort of thing. Amongst plants, 
 too, there are innumerable instances of means adapted to 
 definite ends quite as wonderful as those we have been 
 considering. Thus, a genus of orchids \ is provided with 
 a kind of spring-gun, which, when a bee enters a blossom, 
 discharges at him, by means of a very ingenious mechanism, 
 the glutinous pollen-mass, and this adhering to the insect's 
 back, is carried away by him to serve for the fertilization 
 of the next blossom he visits. Another orchid (Coryanthes} 
 secures the same object in an altogether different manner. 
 This sets a trap for the bee, the lower lip of the flower 
 enlarging into a bucket with a spout on one side, while two 
 water-secreting horns above keep this vessel constantly full. 
 A bee visiting the flower occasionally tumbles into the 
 bucket, and then crawls out by the spout, but in doing so 
 has to squeeze his back against a similar sticky mass of 
 pollen, and carries it off with him, to be presently left on 
 precisely the right part of the next Coryanthes he visits, for 
 purposes of fertilization. We find, moreover, that what 
 Mr. Darwin styles the " very curious contrivance " of a mass 
 
 * The author of a delightful book, A Nattiralist on the Prowl, 
 speaks thus of one such organ : ' ' But may not a butterfly have other 
 means of knowing than by seeing or smelling ? Aye, there's the rub. 
 For what a priori reason is there that the phenomena of this world 
 should reach the brain of a butterfly only through the five gates of Man- 
 soul ? And if there are other means of access, how can we even conceive 
 them ? What are antennre of a butterfly ? ' Feelers ' they are called in 
 English, but to overawe the unlearned, we men of science write of them 
 as antennae, which mean the yards of a ship. Under either term we 
 know as much about them as the butterfly knows why I carry a walking- 
 stick." 
 
 f Catasetum.
 
 84 Evolution and Design 
 
 of pollen-grains borne on a footstalk with an adhesive gland, 
 is apparently the same amongst asclepiads as among 
 orchids, though these kinds are about as remote from each 
 other as flowering plants can be; whence it appears that 
 nature has been able to hit upon the same ingenious device 
 twice over. 
 
 What is the meaning of this wealth of inventive power ? 
 When the little girl voyaging in Dreamland heard of an 
 insect whose food was weak tea and bread and butter, and 
 asking what happened if it could not get such fare, was 
 told that then it died, she not unnaturally objected that 
 this must happen very often. " It always happens," was 
 the reply. But here we have a puzzle precisely the reverse. 
 No one of the creatures we find upon the earth could exist 
 unless it happened to be provided with mechanisms of 
 most extraordinary complexity, and equally wonderful 
 efficiency. Yet it always happens that they have got them. 
 To construct a " working hypothesis " as to how this comes 
 to be, we must be able to find within our experience a force 
 which of its nature is capable of doing work analogous in 
 kind. Of one such force alone have we any knowledge 
 that of intelligence co-ordinating means towards an end. 
 Therefore do we say that we find in nature traces of intelli- 
 gence and these we call the argument from Design. It 
 is true that the Intelligence which we thus recognize must 
 be One so immeasurably beyond our own, as to stamp it 
 as of quite another order. It can create what we can but 
 feebly copy, and devise what we cannot fully understand. 
 But this only assures us that in it there is all that is in our 
 own intelligence, and more. We may obtain true notions 
 of a figure though we see its shadow only and not itself. 
 The fact that the mind of Shakespeare is a puzzle to us, 
 does not hinder us from believing that he had a mind. 
 
 Many who have read thus far will doubtless have desired 
 long since to urge an objection, often supposed to be fatal 
 to such an argument, which is founded upon the very 
 example on which most stress has been laid. The eye, 
 it is said, is far from being a perfect instrument for its 
 purposes in fact, it is an exceedingly imperfect one not
 
 Evolution and Design 85 
 
 being properly corrected for chromatic aberration. Has 
 not Professor Helmholtz himself declared that were an 
 optician to send him an instrument so defective, he would 
 at once return it to the maker as a bungling piece of 
 work ? 
 
 To this we might reply that as we have not the faintest 
 conception as to how the eye does the work of seeing, it is 
 somewhat premature to speak of defects in its mode of 
 operating. We know, it is true, that its lenses throw a 
 picture on the retina, as do those of a camera on the screen ; 
 but as to how this produces vision we know nothing at all. 
 It used to be supposed that vision depended on this picture, 
 just as the photograph does, and because rays of different 
 colours penetrated the screen to different depths, it was 
 thought that this must tend to spoil the result in the one 
 case, as it would in the other. But it has since been sug- 
 gested that the process by which the picture is connected 
 with sight is a chemical one, and according to this theory, 
 if the rays did not penetrate to different depths, we should 
 not see at all. More recently, Professor Lodge has again 
 suggested that the process may be electrical, and here again 
 it might well be that what has been represented as a defect 
 should prove to be an essential condition. We do not see 
 the picture on our retina : its formation is but the last step 
 which we can follow in the mechanical process whereby 
 light is translated into sight : and what follows after that is 
 still absolute mystery. 
 
 Let us, however, suppose that things are as the objection 
 assumes. Let the eye be as far from ideal perfection as we 
 like : this nowise diminishes the force of our argument. 
 Whatever it might possibly do, there is no doubt as to what 
 it does. It sees. The telescope used by Galileo was, no 
 doubt, a most primitive and imperfect instrument ; equally 
 faulty was the steam-engine invented by James Watt ; but 
 do we therefore doubt that the one and the other gave 
 proof of design ? We say, not that the eye, or anything 
 else, is the best article of its kind that could possibly be 
 made, but that, as it actually exists, it is what nothing but 
 intelligent design could have produced.
 
 86 Evolution and Design 
 
 Another objection, and one apparently more fundamental, 
 is probably awaiting us. Our argument has proceeded 
 throughout on the assumption that the only force to which, 
 on Darwinian principles, the manufacture of new organs can 
 be attributed, is that of random variation. We shall be 
 reminded that we have failed to reckon with the potent 
 factor of "Natural Selection." Undoubtedly this is con- 
 stantly spoken of as if it were such a force ; but it is equally 
 evident that such it cannot be. Natural Selection, on the 
 showing of its authorized advocates, can never possibly 
 make anything : it cannot even preserve what is made. 
 All that it can do is to remove rivals from the path of a 
 creature which is fit to develop. Let us suppose that 
 there is a pond inhabited in company by gold-fish and by 
 common carp. The latter are the bigger and stronger and 
 get the lion's share of the food, which is, of course, limited in 
 amount, and in consequence the gold-fish are not only few 
 in number, but poor in condition, being stunted in growth 
 and dull in colour. The owner, however, wishes to en- 
 courage the more ornamental species, and for this end at 
 frequent intervals draws a net through the water, the meshes 
 being large enough for them to pass easily through, while 
 at least the mature carp are caught. In consequence of 
 this action of his, the gold-fish increase and multiply, and 
 having the benefit of a far more ample food-supply than 
 previously, become portly of form and brilliant of hue. 
 But though they have to thank the net for the chance of 
 developing, it does not develop them. They must acquire 
 the power of becoming plump and golden from some other 
 quarter, else will they no more improve under their new 
 conditions than do the sticks and straws which pass in 
 their company through the meshes. Natural Selection is 
 the exact analogue of such a net ; it can initiate nothing ; 
 whatever benefits by its operation must be prepared to 
 benefit before it begins to act : the fittest must be the most 
 fit before it survives. 
 
 In this brief survey of the line of argument which seems 
 to lead most easily to the recognition of Design in nature, 
 we have confined our attention, as has already been inti-
 
 Evolution and Design 87 
 
 mated, to one particular feature of the organic world. 
 Were we to stray beyond such limits, and consider pheno- 
 mena of a wider and more complex character, though it 
 would be less easy to draw forth with the same precision 
 the chain of reasoning which they suggest, it would still 
 remain true that intelligent Design is at least a conceivable 
 explanation, and therefore furnishes a "working hypothesis" ; 
 while as to the systems arrayed against it, he would be a 
 bold man who should say that his knowledge of the details 
 of Nature's methods is such as to entitle him to pronounce 
 that any one of them is even possible. Take the following 
 graphic description, by an author already cited, of the pro- 
 vision made by Nature for the work which she requires in 
 one department, and let us ask ourselves whether we can 
 truly imagine any explanation of it, which shall be more 
 than an imagination. The writer has been describing the 
 manner in which beetles drag down manure beneath the 
 earth, to provide for their grubs. He thus continues : 
 
 " It is intensely interesting to watch these little creatures 
 toiling so industriously to make provision for their children, 
 which will never know them or requite their care. But 
 there is a far deeper interest in the thing. Soar above the 
 individual beetle and its private ends, and contemplate all 
 the myriads of beetles scattered over the face of the coun- 
 try, working together to carry out a great purpose which 
 never comes within the scope of their personal aims. What 
 is it they are doing ? They are tilling the ground. These 
 jungles are as all the face of the earth was when Adam was 
 still uncreated, and there was not a man to till the ground. 
 As then, so now, there often comes up a mist which waters 
 the earth. But that is not enough. The ground must be 
 ploughed, that that which is upon the top may go down, 
 and that which is below may come up. 
 
 " The opposite process is for ever going on. Every tree 
 is silently but ceaselessly at work, thrusting its roots, like 
 fingers, down into the earth, and separating and drawing 
 up certain constituents of the soil, and conveying them 
 through the channels of the trunk out to the ends of the 
 branches, and moulding them into leaves. The leaves will
 
 88 Evolution and Design 
 
 wither, and fall to the ground ; or else cattle will eat them, 
 or insects will feed upon them ; but they too will die, and 
 fall to the ground. 
 
 "Thus certain elements of the earth are for ever being 
 brought up from the depths, and laid upon the surface. 
 This cannot continue. They must be taken down again, 
 and restored to the soil, or the foliage of the forest will 
 soon fail, and the earth will be as barren as the moon. To 
 carry out this great work there must be workmen, and 
 millions upon millions there are, working as silently and as 
 ceaselessly as the trees." * 
 
 The writer goes on to describe the process in some 
 detail, telling us how there are different departments, each 
 with its own staff. Wood-boring beetles are told off for 
 old tree-trunks, turning them into powder to mix with the 
 soil. Burying beetles take charge of animal remains, and 
 earth-worms of the leaves, " a countless gang of laborious 
 workmen, appointed to take the dead leaves to the place 
 whence they came, and convert them into soil again, that 
 the earth may be green." 
 
 Moreover, he declares that there are overseers set over 
 these workmen to keep them to their tasks. The birds are 
 ever looking for worms, and the worms have consequently 
 to look out for birds. But for this necessity, they would 
 grow lazy, and live on the surface of the ground, eating the 
 leaves where they found them ; but now they are forced, on 
 pain of death, to live in the bowels of the earth, coming up 
 only at night to draw down leaves. 
 
 Here then we obtain a glimpse of another kind of 
 machinery, incomparably more complicated and bewilder- 
 ing than that previously studied. Not only, as it appears, 
 must a creature develop its organs and faculties so as to 
 satisfy its own immediate purposes, but those purposes 
 must so respond to those of other creatures, quite alien 
 from itself, as to co-operate with them towards a vast 
 result. In a solemn secular process such as we see 
 shadowed forth, how can we find a place for the operation 
 of Natural Selection as we have heard it described ? The 
 * A Naturalist on the Prowl, pp. 86-88.
 
 Evolution and Design 89 
 
 race of beetles which convert old tree-trunks into mould 
 will doubtless ultimately find the benefit of their work in 
 the greater abundance of old trees ; but when an individual 
 introduces an improvement in the process, his distant 
 descendants will have to wait for the benefit, when the 
 seedlings he helps to plant have matured to decay. 
 How, meanwhile, is his improved machinery to be handed 
 on ? to say nothing of its further development. 
 
 And yet, once again, is it not a conceivable explanation 
 that a sufficient intelligence has ordered things to the end 
 which we find actually attained? Such an intelligence 
 could, according to Professor Huxley, have discovered in 
 the constitution of the cosmic vapour every minutest parti- 
 cular of the world which was to issue from it, and all its 
 successive phases. If this be so, may not intelligence have 
 drawn the plan which intelligence can trace? And if 
 nothing that we know except intelligence can draw a plan 
 at all, must not the element of intelligence enter into any 
 explanation which we frame of nature's machinery, if such 
 explanation is to afford us even a "working hypothesis"? 
 Sir Isaac Newton asked, " Was the eye contrived without 
 skill in optics, and the ear without knowledge of sound " ? 
 and may we not go on to question whether the world as we 
 find it, instinct with contrivance at every turn, could be 
 fashioned without knowledge of those myriad-sided laws 
 which had to be dealt with if it were ever to be the abode 
 of life ? 
 
 It is not to be supposed that considerations such as these 
 will have any weight with the more zealous propagators of 
 evolutionary doctrines, for manifestly it is not on the side of 
 reason or cogency of argument that it enlists their sym- 
 pathies. As in their mind the one essential feature of the 
 creed is denial of a personal and intelligent ruler of the 
 world, so undoubtedly its great merit is for them the 
 elimination of such morality as a law superior to any of 
 man's making can alone impose. 
 
 That this is so, we have sufficient evidence in Mr. Edward 
 Clodd's Primer of Evolution* a little book specially in- 
 * Longmans.
 
 9O Evolution and Design 
 
 tended for the instruction of the young one which those 
 into whose hands it will commonly fall must naturally sup- 
 pose to be what it professes, a manual wherein they may 
 find in convenient and compendious form the teaching 
 which science guarantees. 
 
 But the Primer is nothing of the kind. Scientifically con- 
 sidered it is a worthless production, a party tract composed 
 on the principle that the end justifies the means. Its object 
 is to instil into its readers the crudest and baldest materialism, 
 to convince them that a man, a mushroom, and a boulder- 
 stone are but different forms of the same thing ; that, con- 
 sequently, religion is a fable and morality a mistake. This 
 object it endeavours to attain by a sketch of the history of 
 the world which is grossly unscientific, for not only is it 
 hopelessly inaccurate, representing what are mere hypo- 
 theses as established facts, but it abounds in grave errors 
 upon fundamental points, showing that the author is 
 ignorant of much which is essential to his subject. 
 
 Nevertheless, the Primer deserves attention. In the 
 first place it was originally dedicated, by permission, to the 
 late Professor Huxley.* We are frequently told that it is 
 unfair to attribute to real men of science, who are also 
 evolutionists, the extravagances of popular writers like Mr. 
 Clodd and Mr. Grant Allen, who are evolutionists only, and 
 cannot claim to speak with authority. But if such men 
 are permitted or encouraged to place themselves beneath 
 the aegis of greater names, the owners of those names 
 must take the consequences. Moreover, in his dedication 
 Mr. Clodd pronounces the supreme merit of Professor 
 Huxley to lie, not so much in his " luminous treatment 
 of the varied materials with which it is the province of 
 science to deal," as in his " application of those materials 
 to the construction of an all-embracing philosophy of life." 
 Now, Professor Huxley loudly proclaimed himself an 
 " Agnostic," and the essence of Agnosticism, as he ex- 
 plained it, is a confession of blank ignorance as to all 
 which can furnish an ultimate basis of philosophy. At 
 the same time, however, he habitually assumed that what 
 * In 1895.
 
 Evolution and Design 91 
 
 he did not know could have no real existence, and as he 
 chose likewise to assume that knowledge could be gained 
 only through the methods of physical science, while repudi- 
 ating the title of a materialist, he spoke and wrote as 
 though there could be nothing in the universe but matter, 
 no soul within man and no God above. This is enough 
 for Mr. Clodd, and constitutes for him an all-embracing 
 philosophy. It was, we must also presume, the supreme 
 importance of this fundamental negation that reconciled 
 Professor Huxley to the connexion of his name with a 
 work which, had it dealt with any other subject than 
 evolutionary philosophy, must have received as little 
 toleration from any man of science as do those devoted 
 to the squaring of the circle, or demonstrations that the 
 earth is flat. 
 
 For Mr. Clodd's purpose it is necessary to show that 
 the material world is a machine containing within itself 
 the principle of perpetual motion, a self-winding clock 
 which needed no other power than its own to set it agoing, 
 and which will continue for ever to evolve new combina- 
 tions of its elements, and new forms of life. As, however, 
 by the testimony, amongst others, of Professor Huxley 
 himself, science teaches the exact opposite, that the 
 world we know must have had a beginning, and must have 
 an end, it becomes necessary to construct a new system 
 of physics, which he gravely sets forth as though it were 
 the accepted teaching of men of science ; whereas, as 
 Professor Lodge pronounced when the same system 
 appeared previously in a slightly different form,* it is an 
 audacious attempt to reconstruct the laws of Nature as 
 established by Newton, being replete with blunders and 
 misstatements, and an emanation of mental fog. 
 
 This is the kind of instruction which the Primer conveys. 
 " Matter will not move by itself : it needs some agent or 
 cause to start it. Therefore all changes in the position 
 
 * The system of the Primer is a reproduction of that devised some 
 years since by Mr. Clodd and Mr. Grant Allen, but the changes now 
 adopted only make matters worse. Professor Lodge's criticisms are 
 quoted in Science or Romance ? (" The New Genesis "), p. 1 02.
 
 92 Evolution and Design 
 
 of bodies, as also all changes in the position of the mole- 
 cules of which they are made up, and of the atoms which 
 form the molecules, are due to Motion, which works in two 
 opposite ways. In the one it draws the particles of bodies 
 together ; in the other it separates them." 
 
 Such a passage would be hard to match for inaccuracy 
 and confusion. We are given to understand that motion 
 moves matter, that it is an "agent" which "works" 
 in plain English, a force. " Motion," however, is nothing 
 but an abstraction. There is no such thing, apart from 
 moving matter, any more than there is "solidity" apart 
 from solid bodies. Motion is not a force, but the result 
 of force that is to say, force must be exerted to make a 
 body move, or to produce motion. To talk of motion 
 being the cause of movement, is like saying that flight 
 makes birds fly. 
 
 Mr. Clodd proceeds to make statements still more won- 
 derful. After telling us that the "pulling" forces, which 
 draw matter together, are gravitation, cohesion, and chemi- 
 cal affinity, he thus continues : * " The Motion or Energy 
 which separates the particles, or which prevents them from 
 coming closer together, is of two kinds, active or kinetic, and 
 passive or potential. The passive kind is represented by a 
 stone lying on a roof or a mountain side, by a clock wound 
 up but not going, by a seam of coal, and so on. The active 
 kind is represented by the stone falling, the clock going, and 
 the coal burning." 
 
 Therefore, a stone lying on a roof, or a seam of coal, re- 
 presents "passive motion," and that sort of motion which 
 pushes matter apart. What sort of idea will such a state- 
 ment convey to the class of readers who make use of 
 Primers? No doubt, Mr. Clodd is thinking of the doctrine 
 of kinetic and potential energy, according to which, in the 
 above instances, there are forces at work to keep the stone 
 from falling in the one case, and the constituents of the 
 coal from combining with oxygen in the other thus coun- 
 teracting gravitation or chemical affinity. But what has 
 this to do with " passive motion "? And wherefore assume 
 * The italics are his.
 
 Evolution and Design 93 
 
 that all the energy thus held in abeyance is of the "pulling" 
 order, and all the forces which check it of the " pushing " ? 
 The case of gunpowder is precisely similar to that of coal ; 
 will any one say that the forces liberated when powder 
 explodes tend to draw things together ? Or again, a balloon 
 tethered to the ground and straining at the ropes exactly 
 resembles the stone on a roof or mountain side, or for the 
 matter of that, on the ground are we to say that the ropes 
 push the balloon and earth apart, while the particular form 
 of motion which tends to move it, namely, the buoyancy 
 which buoys it up, is bent on pulling them together? 
 
 These, and other statements of like character, are not 
 mere points of detail on which the writer has expressed 
 himself unscientifically. The doctrine underlying this con- 
 fused verbiage is that already indicated as essential to his 
 whole system, for it is on the exact balance of these attrac- 
 tive and repulsive, or "pulling" and "pushing," forces that 
 he depends for the machinery which he wishes his readers 
 to believe will keep things going eternally. As he himself 
 tells us : " If the pulling motions had unresisted play, every 
 particle of matter would gravitate to a common centre and 
 so form a vast solid body, inert and lifeless. And if the 
 pushing motions had unresisted play, every particle of 
 matter would be separated and scattered as an enormous 
 gaseous mass through space; whereas with ti\z push and/w// 
 motions matter is in a state of ceaseless change. ..." 
 
 There is, however, a rather formidable difficulty in the 
 way, for, according to the teaching of science, as conveyed 
 to us by such authorities as Lord Kelvin and Professor 
 Balfour Stewart, the former of the above suppositions is 
 the true one the "pulling" forces have it practically all 
 their own way, and the universe is inevitably tending to 
 become inert and lifeless. This being absolutely fatal to 
 the conclusion he desires to reach, Mr. Clodd is compelled 
 to invent a new system of his own, and to invest his 
 "pushing motions" with powers of which science knows 
 nothing, or rather, which she shows to be non-existent, 
 and this system he gives to the world as though there 
 were no doubt about it.
 
 94 Evolution and Design 
 
 It is needless further to examine his qualifications as an 
 exponent of scientific teaching, or to inquire what weight 
 may be supposed to attach to his dicta concerning an all- 
 embracing philosophy of life, as, for instance, that "the 
 origin of life is not a more stupendous problem to solve 
 than the origin of water " ; or that, " all that is, from fire- 
 fused rock to the genius of man, was wrapped up in 
 primordial matter " ; or again, that " creeds are born and 
 die, remaining only curious relics of illusions over which 
 men wrangled and fought."* 
 
 But, upon one point Mr. Clodd is perfectly explicit and 
 clear that there is no such thing as morality, no dis- 
 tinction between right and wrong, beyond such as the con- 
 ventions of society have agreed to recognize. As he tells 
 us, " Morals are relative, not absolute that is to say, there 
 is no fixed standard of right and wrong by which the actions 
 of men throughout all time are measured. Where there 
 is no society there is no sin." It is true, he contradicts 
 himself by speaking of some impulses of our nature as 
 " higher," and others as " lower," and saying that indulgence 
 of the latter entails remorse, which he tells us signifies 
 "after-bite"; but his main contention is perfectly plain, 
 
 * A sample must, however, be given 01 Mr. Clodd's mode of argu- 
 mentation. To the objection that no intermediate forms have been 
 discovered linking man with the lower animals, he thus rejoins : 
 "Those who ask for the 'missing link' between man and ape only 
 parade ignorance. Both these animals descended from a common 
 ancestry, whence they branched off in different directions, and in any 
 remains of man's progenitors the brain and such-like soft parts as would 
 throw light on their differences from man-like apes would have perished 
 long ago. And further, the ' links ' between the great apes themselves 
 are missing." 
 
 What sense can these words be imagined to convey ? If a link has 
 never been found, it is missing. Where is the parade of ignorance in 
 saying so ? And assuredly no link, whether in a direct line or collater- 
 ally, has ever been found, nor any single specimen of the common 
 ancestry, wherefrom, as Mr. Clodd pronounces, both descend. How, 
 again, is the existence of missing links between man and ape made more 
 probable by the fact that other links are missing too? Mr. Clodd 
 might indeed have added that all the links on which evolutionists so 
 confidently reckon are missing throughout Nature. No single one has 
 yet been discovered.
 
 Evolution and Design 95 
 
 far too plain to escape the young folk for whom be 
 writes namely, that they may give free scope to their 
 passions, so long as they do not shock the ideas of those 
 amongst whom they live. 
 
 Here is the slime of the serpent, which experience teaches 
 us to expect in evolutionary works of this stamp. So con- 
 stantly does it appear as to suggest that such writers take 
 up Evolution so hotly, not on any scientific grounds, for 
 these they manifestly do not even understand, but as the 
 readiest engine for propagating the doctrine dear to their 
 heart that man is a beast, and should be at liberty to 
 behave as one. The common-sense of mankind, however, 
 revolts against such teaching wherefore, instead of practis- 
 ing their own principles and adopting the rules laid down 
 by their fellows, they set themselves to convert their less 
 enlightened countrymen, though they usually find it expedi- 
 ent to veil the grossness of their meaning in a mist of words. 
 But, on occasion, they can be bolder and less circumspect, 
 as was Mr. Clodd's friend and associate, Mr. Grant Allen, 
 when he exhibited his true sentiments naked and un- 
 ashamed, complaining of the tyranny of the law which pre- 
 vents a man from saying anything worth hearing the law 
 in question being that which prohibits obscene publications." 
 
 That to such writers the mention of Religion should be 
 as a red rag to a bull is not surprising, but their hostility 
 is not the least of her claims on the respect of thinking 
 men. 
 
 But this is somewhat of a digression. To return to the 
 subject directly engaging our attention, it is evident that, 
 strenuously as they repudiate the idea, those who deny that 
 Design has operated in the making of the world, ascribe to 
 Chance the results we see. It will be asked what is meant 
 by Chance. Chance is the negation of Design : what is 
 not intended happens fortuitously. But within all human 
 experience nothing remotely analogous to the countless 
 
 * " In England, where freedom of speech and thought are unknown, 
 and where men get imprisoned under Lord Campbell's Act for saying 
 anything worth hearing. ..." Mr. Grant Allen in the New Review, 
 March, 1890, p. 267.
 
 96 Evolution and Design 
 
 mechanisms and contrivances which we meet in Nature has 
 ever been produced except by the agency of a designing 
 mind. 
 
 Of this no better example can be given than that which 
 Mr. Darwin adduced to prove the opposite. Supposing 
 a man to wish to build a house, who has no means 
 of cutting stone to the required shapes, but lives near the 
 foot of a precipice, whence from time immemorial rocks 
 have in their fall been shattered into every variety of form. 
 He picks out the wedge-shaped to construct arches, the 
 longer fragments for lintels, the more rectangular for walls, 
 and so the house is built. A savage, says Mr. Darwin, 
 would call it the work of Chance, but the man trained in 
 the methods of science would know that, given a suffi- 
 cient number of variations, every variety of shape must 
 result, and there only is required a selective power to pick 
 them out and arrange them. Just so ; and the selective 
 power, which produces the only precise and definite result 
 in such a case, is the mind of the builder ; without this, the 
 most skilfully cut stones in a mason's yard would never 
 make a house ; with it, almost any materials may serve the 
 purpose. And it is in regard of the house, not of its 
 materials, that a substitute for design is required. If the 
 stones from the cliff were to drop into their places of them- 
 selves, forming arches, doors, and walls, and spontaneously 
 evolving a building, we should have an example in point ; or, 
 again, if any one amongst them were to be chipped into the 
 likeness of the rudest hammer or arrow-head that ever came 
 from the hand of primaeval man ; but until some such 
 result can be found, or even conceived, to be produced 
 without the intervention of Mind, what warrant have we, in 
 our experience, for supposing that the machines of Nature's 
 contrivance, infinitely transcending our own, can have been 
 otherwise constructed ? And it is upon experience that 
 Science is based.
 
 UN-NATURAL HISTORY 
 
 THE present generation has unquestionably distanced all 
 others in the field of scientific research, and has imported 
 into its investigations an accuracy of method, an ingenuity, 
 and an industry, which are as admirable as they are new. 
 But, as Aristotle has it, there is nothing incapable of mis- 
 use, save virtue alone ; and there may be reason to fear 
 lest our scientific merits should introduce along with them 
 a parasitical crop of defects, going far to neutralize their 
 advantages. 
 
 It is more particularly in the province of Natural History 
 that symptoms of this danger appear, if we should not 
 rather say that Natural History, as our fathers understood 
 it, is like to be altogether extinguished in favour of the 
 newer science of Biology. More than this : the old-school 
 naturalist is not merely being in great measure trampled 
 out of existence by his younger rivals, they deny to his 
 pursuits the right to be classed as science at all, speak- 
 ing of Gilbert White himself with undisguised contempt as 
 " the old gardener-naturalist." There are in fact many who 
 consider nothing to be truly scientific which does not admit 
 of being described by a formal nomenclature and expressed 
 in tabulated form, and who admit no elements as constituents 
 of knowledge, except such as we can weigh and count and 
 measure. Hence it comes to pass that while we learn from 
 modern works a great deal about anatomy and classifica- 
 tion, we hear comparatively little of the life-history of plants 
 and animals ; nay, it is irreverently said that not a few of 
 our leading ornithologists would not know a thrush if they 
 
 VII. H
 
 98 Un-natural History 
 
 saw one, though easily recognizing its skeleton. Biology, 
 in truth, not content with numberless triumphs in its own 
 domain, appears to be intent on annexing that of Natural 
 History as well, assuming it to be for all practical purposes 
 as unoccupied as Central Africa. 
 
 Nor is this all. When the observer of the period goes 
 afield, he is generally thinking a great deal more of what 
 he wants to prove as to " life histories " than of what he 
 is going to see : he cares comparatively little for the 
 creatures he meets, and a great deal about constructing a 
 genealogy for them. It may be said that while the 
 naturalist of the past concerned himself with what was 
 present, he of the present concerns himself with what is 
 past. 
 
 That this is no overstatement we have evidence to show. 
 The point has been most ably developed by Dr. Hudson, in 
 a Presidential address to the Royal Microscopical Society, 
 bearing the significant title, On some needless difficulties in 
 the study of Natural History, wherein he contends, not 
 only that the fact is as has been stated, but that we are 
 doing an injury to science by allowing it to be so.* His 
 words are so much in point that I make no apology for 
 quoting them at some length. 
 
 A little while ago [he says] I read in the preface to a work on 
 natural history, that the book was "of little value to the scientific 
 reader, but that its various anecdotes and its minute detail of 
 observation would be found useful and entertaining.'' What, 
 then, may the " scientific reader " be expected to desire ? He 
 must be, in my opinion, a most unreasonable man, if he does not 
 thankfully welcome anecdotes of the creatures he wishes to study, 
 when these anecdotes are the result of patient and accurate 
 observation. For it is precisely such information that is con- 
 spicuously absent from many scientific memoirs and monographs; 
 the author generally spending his main space and strength in 
 examining the shape and structure of his animals, and in com- 
 paring one with another, but giving the most meagre details of 
 their lives and habits. Which, then, is the more scientific treat- 
 ment of a group of animals, that which catalogues, classifies, 
 measures, weighs, counts, and dissects, or that which simply 
 
 * Reprinted in Nature, Feb. 20, 1890, pp. 375, seq.
 
 Un-natural History 99 
 
 observes and relates ? Or, to put it in another way, which is the 
 better thing to do : to treat the animal as a dead specimen, or as 
 a living one ? Merely to state the question is to answer it. It is 
 the living animal that is so intensely interesting, and the main 
 use of the indexing, classifying, measuring, and counting is to 
 enable us to recognize it when alive, and to help us to understand 
 its perplexing actions. . . . We read much of the animal's 
 organs ; we see plates showing that its bristles have been 
 counted, and its muscular fibres traced to the last thread ; we 
 have the structure of its tissues analyzed to their very elements ; 
 we have long discussions on its title to rank with this group or 
 that ; and sometimes even disquisitions on the probable form and 
 habits of some extremely remote, but quite hypothetical, ancestor, 
 who is made to degrade in this way, or to advance in that, or 
 who is credited with one organ, or deprived of another, just as 
 the ever-varying necessities of a desperate hypothesis require ; 
 but of the creature itself, of the way it lives, of the craft with 
 which it secures its prey or outwits its enemies, .... of its per- 
 plexing stupidity coupled with actions of almost human sagacity 
 of all this, which is the real natural history of the animal, we, 
 too often, hear little or nothing. And the reason is obvious, for 
 in many cases the writer has no such information to give ; and, 
 even when he has, he is compelled by fashion to give so much 
 space to that which is considered the more scientific portion of 
 his subject, that he has scant room for the more interesting. 
 
 Evidence to the same effect is likewise forthcoming from 
 the other side, from those who rejoice in the change that 
 has been wrought as much as Dr. Hudson deplores it. 
 Here, for instance, is the complacent account given by a 
 writer of the modern school as to what occurs when an 
 enlightened schoolboy interviews a primrose. * 
 
 The study of even the most commonplace object may, under 
 the newer phases of research, be made to yield an amount of 
 " sweetness and light " for which we might be wholly unprepared. 
 The day of the Peter Bells, and of uninquiring moods and tenses, 
 if not altogether a thing of the past, is happily already in its 
 twilight stage. The schoolboy, with a primer of botany in hand, 
 understands things at which the previous generation simply 
 wondered. . . . The primrose still grows by the " river's brim,' 1 
 in truth, but it is no longer merely a yellow primrose. On the 
 
 * Dr. A. Wilson, Chapters on Evolution, p. 308.
 
 ioo Un-natural History 
 
 contrary, the flower is in greater part understood, the mechanism 
 of its life is well-nigh completely within our mental grasp ; and, 
 best of all, its study has led in the past, as it leads even now, to 
 the comprehension of wider ideas of nature, and more extensive 
 views of plant-life, than those which formerly met the gaze of 
 the wayfarer in scientific pastures. The appreciation of what 
 is involved in part of the life-history of a primrose may thus 
 serve as a starting-point for more extensive research into the 
 phenomena of plant-fertilization at large ; and this latter topic, 
 in its turn, falls naturally into its proper niche in teaching us 
 plain lessons respecting the manner in which the wide domain 
 of life is regulated and governed. 
 
 Into the " sweetness " thus claimed for the new method, 
 as contrasted with the old, I do not propose to inquire, 
 with the " light " alone am I concerned. What is the truth 
 about these " plain lessons" taught us so freely, and about 
 the implied superiority of a modern primer to the labours 
 . of a former lifetime ? Are our latter-day observers doing 
 the best thing for science by the style of observation which 
 they have adopted ? or are they not rather in danger of 
 losing the faculty of seeing what is, in their eagerness to 
 speculate as to what may have been ? 
 
 For a point whereon to test these questions we have not 
 far to go, for several are suggested by what we have heard. 
 To the old observer the flower was " merely a yellow prim- 
 rose " ; to the modern, the fact that it is yellow * is full of 
 significance, and pregnant with a whole volume of life- 
 histories. For the question of colour lands us at once in 
 the midst of those problems which the modern naturalist 
 delights to examine. The colours of flowers, he tells us, 
 are intimately connected with the past history of the 
 species to which they belong. Colour helps a flower in the 
 struggle for existence the factor which, according to him, 
 rules all development by enabling it more effectually to 
 secure the services of insects for purposes of fertilization, 
 
 * It may, I suppose, be assumed for our present purpose, that a 
 primrose is yellow, though artists, I believe, maintain that its hue is in 
 truth a delicate green. Mr. Ruskin tells us that by a little observation 
 we may satisfy ourselves that sun-lighted grass is of the colour of prim- 
 roses, though, as he adds, few people are aware of the fact.
 
 Un-natural History 101 
 
 especially cross-fertilization." 1 Cross-fertilization is declared 
 to be a necessity for plants that would be prolific and 
 vigorous ; that is to say, the pistil, which is to mature to 
 a seed-bearing fruit, must be fertilized by pollen from the 
 stamens in another blossom of the same species, and bees, 
 or other insects, dusting their bodies with pollen while 
 visiting one flower, deposit this on the pistil of the next to 
 which they travel, thus securing for it the aforesaid benefit, 
 and the colour of flowers has been developed through this 
 agency the insects recognizing what they are in search of, 
 amongst other blossoms, by means of it. 
 
 Now it is evident that if a bee carries the pollen of one 
 flower to the pistil of a flower of different species, he will 
 do nothing whatever to help the cause of fertilization, for 
 on such pistil the pollen will be entirely barren just as 
 barren as so much sand. Consequently we need another 
 fact to supplement the first, namely, that bees on their 
 part have developed an instinct making them keep to one 
 kind of flower at a time. That this is a fact writers of the 
 present day constantly assure us, and this assurance may 
 well serve as a first example whereby to test the character 
 of their observations. 
 
 To begin with, they shall tell their own story. " It has 
 been ascertained by several observers," says Mr. Wallace,! 
 " that many insects, bees especially, keep to one kind of 
 flower at a time, visiting hundreds of blossoms in suc- 
 cession, and passing over other species that may be mixed 
 with them." " It is a remarkable fact," says Sir J. Lubbock, \ 
 " that in most cases bees confine themselves in each journey 
 to a single species of plant ; though in the case of some 
 nearly allied forms this is not so ; for instance it is stated, 
 on good authority, that Ranunculus acris, R. repens, and 
 R. knlbosuS)\ are not distinguished by the bees, or at least 
 are visited indifferently by them, as is also the case with 
 
 * I have made some remarks upon this theory in a paper entitled, 
 "Who Painted the Flowers?" (Science and Scientists'). 
 f Darwinism, p. 318. 
 
 t British Wild Flowers in relation to Insects, p. 26. 
 Species of buttercup, equally common.
 
 IO2 Un-natural History 
 
 two of the species of clover, Trifolium fragiferum and T. 
 repens" "Numerous naturalists," says Mr. Grant Allen, * 
 " have put on record the preferences which individual 
 insects have shown on special occasions for one kind of 
 blossom alone. A single case must suffice for all. That 
 careful observer, Mr. H. O. Forbes, saw ' by the roadside, 
 near Kew Bridge Station, several species of hymenoptera,! 
 of the genus Bombus\ principally ; one visited thirty flowers 
 of Lamium purpureum in succession, passing over without 
 notice all the other plants on the same bank species of 
 Convolvulus, Rubus,\\ Solatium.*^. Two other species of 
 Bombus, and a Pieris rapa** also patronized the Lamium, 
 seeking it out in the deep thicket, thrusting their probosces 
 even into withered cups, although the Rubus flowers were 
 far more accessible, and seemed much more attractive, 
 being fresh and well-expanded.' The pages of scientific 
 journals during the last few years have positively teemed 
 with similar instances from all parts of the world." 
 
 So categorical are these statements, and seemingly so pre- 
 cise, that I must confess to having long taken them for 
 granted. And yet, even as they stand, they present diffi- 
 culties by no means slight. Sir J. Lubbock tells us that 
 certain flowers, restharrow for example, though containing 
 no honey, are occasionally visited by bees in a vain search 
 for it. ft Are we therefore to say that they keep during one 
 journey to such delusive plants? If not, the presence of 
 the insects there is a contradiction of the general statement 
 we have heard. Moreover it cannot but appear that the 
 authorities to whom we have listened lack one important 
 requisite for compulsion of our assent. They are very ex- 
 plicit as to the thing said to be observed, but there is an 
 ominous vagueness as to the observers. Of these only one 
 has been actually produced, and his evidence appears to 
 be considered so singularly important that he is called as 
 
 * The Colour-sense, p. 89. See also The Colours of Flowers, p. 18. 
 t i.e., Bees. \ Bumble-bees. Red dead-nettle. 
 
 || Blackberry. IF Nightshade. ** The common white butterfly, 
 ft Wild Flowers and Insects, p. 85. See a similar statement con- 
 cerning St. John's Wort, p. 69.
 
 Un-natural History 103 
 
 Mr. Grant Allen's solitary witness in two different books. 
 When we come to scrutinize that evidence even by the 
 light of book-knowledge it at once presents a serious flaw. 
 The bees and the butterfly observed by Mr. Forbes stuck 
 unanimously to Lamium amid blossoms of Convolvulus, 
 Solatium, and Rubus. But if we turn to Sir John Lubbock's 
 book, already quoted, we find that Rubus and Sola- 
 nu?n secrete no honey at all,* while Convolvulus septum, 
 doubtless the species meant, on the same authority,! offers 
 such scanty attractions as to be comparatively little visited 
 by insects. It is not wonderful, therefore, that the Lamium 
 was preferred, being a flower rich in honey, and it is not 
 easy to understand what is meant by saying that the Rubus 
 flowers " seemed much more attractive" Of course a 
 flower which has a monopoly of honey will have a monopoly 
 of bees ; the question is as to what will happen when there 
 are several honey-bearing competitors. It is a pity, there- 
 fore, that we have but one witness brought, for, careful 
 observer as no doubt he is, his evidence does not help us 
 much upon this occasion, and it is curious to find an 
 authority so given to out-door studies as Mr. Grant Allen 
 contenting himself with a general reference to the teeming 
 testimonies of scientific journals in corroboration. It is 
 not only at Kew Bridge that wild flowers grow, and ten 
 minutes' observation of the nearest meadow or hedgerow, 
 or even of any flower-bed in a garden, would seem to be 
 a preferable method of bringing the subject to book. 
 
 The reader who will make trial of this method will 
 certainly very soon be lost in admiration of the agility 
 of those observers who have been able to report, as 
 we have heard from Mr. Wallace, on the course of a 
 bee over " hundreds of blossoms." If we can make sure 
 of him for half a dozen we shall be very fortunate ; 
 for, as a rule, there is a strange capriciousness in his 
 evolutions, and he is continually rushing away to some other 
 locality, at a rate we cannot follow. However, even so, it 
 will not be long before we find ourselves in possession of 
 abundant data whereon to base a judgment, for, if I mistake 
 * Pp- 93- 133- \ I'- i33-
 
 IO4 Un-natural History 
 
 not, every insect we meet will flatly contradict the law in 
 which we have been told to believe. In support of this 
 assertion I will here set down the results of my own 
 observations made last year,* which I might have multiplied 
 indefinitely, had there been any object in so doing. To 
 simplify the record, I will denote the insects observed by 
 the letters of the alphabet, in order of observation, and 
 when there is no indication to the contrary, the insect in 
 question is a bumble-bee. A. after feeding on a plant of 
 very dark wall-flower, passing over several other wall-flowers, 
 betook himself to Weigelia rosea, a shrub with light rose- 
 coloured blossoms. B. passed from rhododendron to wall- 
 flower. C. from Dielytra eximia (a pink fumitory) to lilac. 
 D. from wild raspberry to red campion and thence again to 
 raspberry. E. from Deutzia scabea (white) to a very purple 
 rhododendron. F. from bush vetch to water avens. G. 
 from comfrey to red campion. H. worked backwards and 
 forwards between germander speedwell and herb robert, also 
 once visited a bush vetch ; he, however, passed many red 
 campions without a call. I. passed from water avens to 
 raspberry. J. from figwort (Scropularia aquatica) to thistle. 
 K. from campion to bush vetch, and again to campion. 
 L. (hive bee) from chervil (a white umbellifer) to nonsuch 
 (a small yellow clover), going backwards and forwards 
 frequently from one to the other. M. from self-heal (blue) 
 to yellow-rattle (backwards and forwards), once to red- 
 clover. N. of all observed showed most constancy, to a 
 row of dark blue (garden) pansies, which, however, he once 
 varied with a yellow poppy. O. passed from fox-glove to 
 snap-dragon. P. and Q. worked promiscuously among 
 foxgloves and campions. R. passed from ragged robin to 
 self-heal, back to the first and again to the second. S. from 
 figwort to self-heal, then to raspberry. T. from figwort to 
 meadow-pea (Lathyrus pratensis). U. from yellow rattle to 
 meadow-pea. V. (white butterfly) from campion to a butter- 
 cup, thence to cat's-ear (Hippocharis). W. (brown butterfly) 
 from cat's-ear to sow-thistle. X. (brown butterfly) from 
 pignut to thyme. Y. from snowberry to woundwort. 
 * 1890.
 
 Un-natural History 105 
 
 I have drawn out this list at what may appear inordinate 
 length, in view of the high authority guaranteeing the 
 doctrine which it disproves. It certainly throws a strange 
 light on the methods of modern observation, to find an 
 assertion so boldly made, and so easily accepted, for the 
 proper appreciation of which were needed only those 
 materials which are within the reach of all. A sufficient 
 commentary upon the whole story will be furnished by the 
 reply of a most excellent field-naturalist, a working man, of 
 whom I enquired whether he had ever observed if bees 
 behaved in regard of flowers as we are told they do. 
 " Yes," he answered, " I've seen it in books : but what 
 makes them say that? it isn't because they've looked." 
 
 A small matter of detail, unconnected with the general 
 argument, is found in Sir J. Lubbock's mention of the 
 various buttercups, which he tells us are indiscriminately 
 visited by bees. After what we have seen, this is not very 
 surprising that is, when bees visit them at all. During 
 the whole of last season I have only once seen a bee on a 
 buttercup, and that not in England, but in Austria. 
 
 It is, however, not a little strange to find that the assertion 
 we have been examining should originally have been made 
 by one who had no theory to support, and who was an 
 admirable observer. Aristotle, in his Natural History* 
 writes : " On each flight it (the bee) does not go to flowers 
 of different kind, but, for instance, from a violet to a violet, 
 touching no other till it returns to the hive." 
 
 In like manner Mr. Jefferies who is nothing if not 
 observant tells us : t " One bee will come along, calling at 
 every head of white clover. By-and-by you may see one 
 calling at the heath-bells, and nothing else, as in each 
 journey they visit only the flower with which they begin." 
 But whether in ancient Greece or modern England, the 
 fact appears more than doubtful in view of what has been 
 seen, notwithstanding the unprejudiced nature of these 
 witnesses, and their high character for accuracy. 
 
 The question above discussed is not the only one to 
 
 * Bekker's Edition, vol. i. p. 624. 
 t Field and Hedgerow > p. 69.
 
 io6 Un-natural History 
 
 which the colour of flowers introduces us. The hues of 
 different species, we are assured, are so various, because 
 some are more attractive to bees than others, and those 
 plants which have managed the development business best, 
 have secured the best colours. Mr. Grant Allen, following 
 Sir J. Lubbock, has drawn out this idea at great length, 
 and he undertakes to tell us the exact order in which 
 the different colours appeared, and consequently their 
 order of merit in bee-estimation, for each one came into 
 fashion only because it was judged better than its pre- 
 decessor. The original colour, he tells us,* was yellow ; 
 then came successively white, pink, red, purple, lilac, 
 mauve, violet, and finally blue, the bee's hue of predilec- 
 tion. That the colours vary thus in popularity with bees is 
 held to be proved chiefly by Sir J. Lubbock's experiments. 
 Taking pieces of variously coloured paper, and putting on 
 each a drop of honey, he observed them carefully, and 
 found that which was on blue paper more largely patronized 
 by the insects than any other, next to it that on violet, 
 and so of the rest. What I have heard it asked can be 
 more conclusive than this ? Well, undoubtedly it is con- 
 clusive enough, so far as paper is concerned, but the 
 question is about flowers ; and if we go to them, the 
 matter is by no means so simple. In the first place, there 
 is one example, easily observable, and witnessed to us by 
 Mr. Wallace,! which by itself appears quite sufficient to 
 shake our faith in the assertion we have heard. Many of 
 the flowers of one of our common English families, the 
 great Borage tribe, as for instance, the lungwort and the 
 forget-me-not, have flowers which, when they first open, are 
 pink, and later turn to blue. In one species, the parti- 
 coloured scorpion grass, the new-opened blossoms are 
 generally yellow. Yet it is the young flowers, not the old, 
 which the bees prefer. In regard of lungwort Mr. Wallace 
 writes: "H. Miiller observed bees visiting many red 
 flowers, but neglecting the blue." He adds another 
 instance still more remarkable. " In South Brazil there is 
 a species of Lantana, whose flowers are yellow the first day, 
 * Colours of Flowers, pp. 19, 59. f Darwinism, p. 317.
 
 Un-natural History 107 
 
 orange the second, and purple the third ; and Dr. Fritz 
 Miiller observed that many butterflies visited the yellow 
 flowers only, some both the yellow and the orange flowers, 
 but none the purple." ''' 
 
 But besides this, we have not far to seek for examples 
 where the superior attractiveness of blue is found to be 
 conspicuous by its absence. Last summer there grew in 
 close proximity two species of cruciferous plants, the one 
 Aubrietia, blue or purple, the other, Arafa's, white. The 
 bees were constantly at work among the white flowers, 
 seldom amongst the others. In a row of variegated sweet 
 peas, white, pink, red, purple, and blue, the white blossoms 
 were clearly the favourites. One may watch a mass of 
 bright blue lobelias all day without detecting an insect 
 visitor, while their many-hued neighbours of the garden 
 are being rifled right and left. The periwinkle, which in 
 matter of blueness need fear comparison with no flower, 
 seems to be similarly neglected; while as to the sage, which 
 is not only blue, but, as we are told, perhaps the most 
 highly specialized of all flowers for insect purposes, it is, I 
 think, more than doubtful whether it is, after all, as popular 
 with the bees as the simple and colourless blossom of the 
 wild raspberry, the sycamore, and the lime. 
 
 In reply to such facts as these it is sometimes said that 
 the assertion as to the superior charms of blue applies only 
 to those cases where the honey-stores of two flowers are 
 equal. But how can we tell what these stores are, except 
 by seeing which the bees prefer ? Are we to discount the 
 facts we meet ; when a yellow flower is preferred, crediting 
 the fact not to its yellowness, but to its honey, and when 
 a blue flower, not to its honey, but to its blueness ? This 
 would be a strange method of investigating the secrets of 
 
 * Mr. Grant Allen tells the story of this Lantana {Colours of Flowers, 
 p. 19) on behalf of the thesis that insects keep to one blossoms ; but 
 tells it with a difference which certainly makes it more suitable for his 
 purpose than in its original form. This is his version, the italics being 
 mine "Fritz Miiller noticed a Laiitana in South America, which 
 changes its colour as its flowering advances ; and he observed that each 
 kind of butterfly which visited it stuck rigidly to its own favourite 
 colour, waiting to pay its addresses until that colour appeared"
 
 io8 Un-natural History 
 
 Nature. Moreover, which is far more important, what 
 business has a flower, on the above theory, to be blue, 
 unless it contains more honey than others that are not blue ? 
 Why should the bees prefer this colour, unless it be the 
 trade-mark of the superior article ? Are we to credit them 
 with a taste in colours for their own sake ? If so, whence 
 did that taste come ? How have flowers been made blue 
 by the selective preference of insects, if, as a matter of fact, 
 insects do not prefer them ? 
 
 All this is puzzling enough, and there is more beyond. 
 Sir J. Lubbock found, in his paper experiments, as Mr. 
 Grant Allen tells us,* that bees "do not so easily dis- 
 criminate between blue and green as between other 
 colours," and Mr. Allen adds that this is very natural, 
 considering how small is the difference between these 
 shades. But if there be little difference between these 
 colours, there is all the difference in the world between the 
 flowers that wear therm Flowers which are green are to 
 our notions so unflowerlike, that most people are unaware 
 of their existence those, for example, of the oak, the 
 nettle, and the grasses, being always comparatively small 
 and of exceedingly simple construction. We are told, on 
 the other hand, that blue flowers are the most highly 
 developed, not in colour only, but in form and arrange- 
 ment. It seems, therefore, that the progress must have been 
 away from a hue which the insects cannot distinguish from 
 that which they most affect, through all less-favoured shades, 
 and back to the favourite again. And this is by no means 
 all. Green should, being undistinguishable from it, be as 
 attractive as blue ; but when we have to consider the fact 
 that some flowers do not attract bees at all, we are told, in 
 an explanation, to observe that they are green. These are 
 the great tribe of wind-fertilized flowers, the blossoms of 
 most of our trees, and a large number of herbs, even with- 
 out counting the vast host of grasses and sedges. We are 
 told that as they gain nothing from insects, they do nothing 
 to attract them, and are consequently inconspicuous. But 
 the strange thing is that, apparently, being inconspicuous, 
 * The Colour 'sense, p. 85.
 
 Un-natural History 109 
 
 means being green. " Petals, however small, or green, or 
 inconspicuous," says Mr. Grant Allen." 1 ' " It is, I think, a 
 strong argument," says Sir J. Lubbock, t "that while large 
 flowers are almost always coloured, small ones are usually 
 greenish." But if greenish be, for practical purposes, the 
 same as bluish, where is the point of the argument ? 
 
 There remains another proof offered to us, besides that 
 of the coloured paper, to show that blue is the highest in 
 the list of colours. This is the fact, already alluded to, 
 that we find in connection with it the most wonderful 
 machinery for securing the carrying of pollen from one 
 blossom to another, and the most remarkable varieties of 
 form. As to machinery, this, we are told, is to be found 
 most perfect in " the sage and other labiates, perhaps the 
 most specialized of any flowers so far as regards insect fer- 
 tilization." This machinery as it exists in the sage is illus- 
 trated by a beautiful woodcut in Sir J. Lubbock's book,]: 
 whence it has been extensively copied into other works. 
 But it is by no means so easy to find the arrangement thus 
 described and delineated, actually working in a sage blossom ; 
 I have never, in fact, found one where the modus operandi 
 was as clear as in the picture. As to the varieties of shape 
 found in the highest forms of flowers, and coupled, according 
 to Mr. Grant Allen, with blueness, the matter is proved by 
 the help of a good deal of what looks rather like special 
 pleading. We are, for example, referred to one of these 
 highly developed forms, the Iris fatidissima, described for 
 us as the ' common flag,' and are invited to notice that it is 
 violet-blue. This is true of the common flag of our gardens 
 (Iris germanica), which is perhaps the plant Mr. Allen means ; 
 the flowers of /. fetidissima hardly accord with his descrip- 
 tion. The common wild flag, however, is Iris Psendacorus^ 
 which has yelloiu flowers, and these, though just as highly 
 developed in form, affect the lowest instead of the highest in 
 the scale of colours. Apparently a still higher development is 
 the monkshood, which is " specially adapted to the very highest 
 class of insect visitors," jj and moreover of ultramarine hue,* 
 
 * Vignettes from Nature, p. 15. f Flowers and Insects, p. 158. 
 \ P. 148. Colours of Flowers, p. 59. || //., p. 37. 1 Ibid., p. 38.
 
 no Un-natural History 
 
 which among colours " probably marks the highest level of 
 all." * But if we study the monkshood not merely in our 
 gardens, but in a wild condition, we shall find that some of 
 the species have yellow flowers, others have blossoms dappled 
 with a great deal of white ; while in no species can the blue 
 be styled ultramarine. Mr. Allen's notions of colour were 
 somewhat severely criticized at the time his book appeared.! 
 
 Once again, therefore, we find speculation in the fore- 
 ground, and observation lagging behind, and the eyes of the 
 naturalist in scanty requisition as compared with the in- 
 genuity of the historian. 
 
 Another illustration of the same kind is suggested by the 
 question of flower-fertilization, and connects itself with the 
 name of Mr. Darwin himself. In his greatest work, the 
 Origin of Species, he writes as follows \ : 
 
 From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found 
 that the visits of bees are necessary to the fertilization of some 
 kinds of clover ; but humble-bees alone visit the red-clover 
 ( Trifolium pratense\ as other bees cannot reach the nectar. 
 Hence I have my little doubt that if the whole genus of humble- 
 bees became extinct or very rare in England, the red-clover 
 would become very rare or wholly disappear. The number of 
 humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the 
 number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests, 
 and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of 
 humble-bees, believes that more than two-thirds of them are 
 thus destroyed all over England. Now the number of mice 
 is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats, 
 and Mr. Newman says : " Near villages or small towns I have 
 found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, 
 which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." 
 Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal 
 in large numbers in a district might determine, through the 
 intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of 
 certain flowers in that district. 
 
 The idea thus suggested has been enthusiastically received 
 by Mr. Darwin's followers, and we find his statement of the 
 
 * Ibid., p. 23. t See Journal of Botany, 1883, p. 59. 
 
 \ Origin of Species, p. 73.
 
 Un-natural History 1 1 1 
 
 case continually quoted, sometimes with a eulogium of the 
 method of argumentation therein illustrated, and disparag- 
 ing remarks on the ineptitude of the processes employed by 
 previous philosophers. Nor do his disciples merely assume 
 that the statement above given is absolutely convincing 
 they proceed to add fresh links to the chain of causes and 
 effects, at either end. Thus Dr. A. Wilson writes * : 
 
 The scientific demonstration of the interdependence of living 
 things becomes in this fashion perfectly clear. Carried out 
 to its ultimate result such demonstration becomes sufficiently 
 startling. British brain and sinew depend (according to a 
 foreign estimate) on home-fed beef, whilst the quality of the 
 nutriment is said to depend on the clover on which the ox 
 subsists. But clover owes its continuance to humble-bees, 
 humble-bees in turn are killed by field-mice,! whilst cats 
 exterminate the rodents. As old maids conserve the feline race, 
 it is alleged that the continuance of British intellect is dependent 
 upon such conservation so that a scientific justification of 
 spinsterhood is thus rendered possible. 
 
 Thus is natural history evolved, and such are the products 
 of British intellect for which the poor clover is made respon- 
 sible ; for neither in the above passage, nor in its context, 
 is there the faintest indication of any wish to be humorous, 
 it is but an illustration of the mode in which scientific 
 demonstration becomes perfectly clear. One would natur- 
 ally suppose that there was no possibility of doubt as to the 
 simple primary facts, which serve as foundation to so vast 
 a superstructure. But red-clover and bumble-bees are 
 familiar objects enough, and the observation of them a 
 matter of no difficulty if we are minded to observe. Let us 
 go out to the nearest grass-plot and watch the history in 
 action. Unless future experience be at variance with all my 
 observations of the past, this is what we shall find. Bumble- 
 bees do indeed come to this plant, and they alone, and it 
 may be that they have trunks long enough to reach down 
 
 * Chapters on Evolution, p. 338. 
 
 t It may be remarked that according to some observers cats do not 
 eat field-mice.
 
 1 1 2 Un-natural History 
 
 the tube of the flower and so get at the honey. But whether 
 capable of such an operation or no they never seem to 
 attempt it, but thrusting their head down amongst the 
 blossoms, they quickly bite a hole through the base of each, 
 and through it extract the honey. All the bees I have 
 observed acted thus, and all the clover heads, the flowers 
 of which had been open for any time, had been thus tapped. 
 But, visiting them thus, the bees can do nothing at all to 
 help the fertilization of the plant, least of all its cross-fertiliza- 
 tion, for no part of their body comes in contact with either 
 pollen or pistil, and it is impossible for them to convey the 
 one to the other. Yet the clover obstinately continues to 
 flourish, though the insects, selfishly intent upon their own 
 convenience, grudge it the service which they might possibly 
 render, and which is, we have been told, essential to its 
 wellbeing. 
 
 One instance, indeed, I met last summer, where examina- 
 tion of the flowers contradicted my wonted experience. It 
 was among the Bavarian highlands, where I found red-clover 
 growing in such unusual profusion as to attract my attention. 
 Desiring to see whether the ways of German bees are the 
 same as those of our own, I gathered a head, and looked 
 for the usual incisions in its blossoms. But they were not 
 to be found ; every floret was whole and intact, which per- 
 haps was the reason that, although we were past the middle 
 of August, the flowers showed, through the whole field, with 
 such singular brightness and freshness. The thought 
 naturally suggested itself, that here was an instance where 
 the familiar account of the matter was a true one, and I 
 started, determined to verify it. Presently, however, a 
 somewhat different explanation obtruded itself there were 
 no bumble-bees, not one could I find amid acres of the 
 flowers. 
 
 The problem thus suggested by clover is by no means 
 solitary ; we meet with it in other and even stranger forms 
 elsewhere. No flowers have more elaborately prepared 
 themselves to secure the services of insects so we are told 
 than the higher members of the buttercup tribe as, for 
 instance, the larkspur and the columbine, for they have both
 
 Un-natural History 1 1 3 
 
 donned the winning colours, and devised wondrous compli- 
 cations of their organs for the purpose. " Columbines," 
 says Mr. Grant Allen,* "are very specialized forms of the 
 buttercup type. Both sepals and petals are brightly 
 coloured, while the former organs " (it should be " the 
 latter") "are produced above into long, bow-shaped spurs, 
 each of which secretes a drop of honey." But the plant 
 would appear to have overreached itself in its ingenuity, 
 for these spurs are so narrow and so long that bees cannot 
 get down them within reach of the honey. Sir J. Lubbock i 
 quotes the case of one that made the attempt and failed. 
 Those observed by myself appeared to know that the 
 attempt was useless, and did at first what the other ended 
 by doing going to the base of the spurs and boring 
 through for the honey. Moreover, here again the plant, 
 strange to say, appears no whit the worse in consequence, 
 ripening its seeds in quite remarkable profusion, while of 
 all kinds of columbine none is more prolific than the 
 Aquilegia Skinneri, which is not blue, but yellow. The 
 success of the larkspur's labours in the same direction 
 appear to be scarcely less dubious, for according to Sir J. 
 Lubbock, t only two insects have a proboscis long enough 
 to reach to the end of its spur, and as one of these two has 
 disappeared before the plant flowers, the net result of all 
 its trouble is to make it wholly dependent upon the other. 
 As though to complete the perplexity of the matter, Sir 
 John concludes his review of these flowers thus : " The 
 honey is in some cases easily accessible, in others it is 
 situated at the end of a long spur. The former species are 
 capable of self-fertilization, the latter are said by H. Miiller 
 to have lost that power." So that those plants which bees 
 enter can get on without them, and those which bees do 
 not enter, cannot ; while, nevertheless, somehow they do. 
 We are now, perhaps, in a position to form some estimate 
 of the scientific advantages enjoyed by a young observer 
 whose base of operations is a botanical primer, who is 
 taught that the proper mode of regarding Nature is through 
 
 * Colours of Flowers, p. 35. t Flowers and Insects, p. 20. 
 
 ; Ibid., p. 53. s Ibid.
 
 1 1 4 Un-natural History 
 
 the medium of doctrines such as we have seen, and that 
 it is beneath the dignity of science merely to look with his 
 own eyes. 
 
 The case becomes still more bewildering when from the 
 individual instances, in which illustration has been sought, 
 we recur to the fundamental principle on which all the 
 above doctrines are based ; namely, the necessity of cross- 
 fertilization. It is to secure this that all complicated 
 machineries have been constructed, strange forms elabor- 
 ated, and various hues developed. Therefore, obviously, 
 it must be worth securing, and that it is so, testimonies 
 abound. " I will not enter," says Sir J. Lubbock, * " into 
 the large question why this cross-fertilization should be an 
 advantage ; but that it is so has been clearly proved." 
 " Nature tells us in the most emphatic manner," says Mr. 
 Darwin, I " that she abhors perpetual self-fertilization." 
 " Self-fertilization with its resultant puny and feeble off- 
 spring," observes Mr. Clodd ; \ " poor, weak, self-fertilized 
 seeds," re-echoes Mr. Grant Allen ; "all the various 
 adaptations of flowers to insects are in view of inter- 
 crossing," and "no continuously self-fertilized species would 
 continue to exist," Dr. Asa Gray tells us, || are aphorisms of 
 the school ; while Dr. A. Wilson thus sums up the whole 
 matter: If "Sprengel laid down the axiom that Nature does 
 not wish any complete flower to be self-fertilized. Darwin 
 in turn improves upon this dictum, in his assertion that 
 Nature abhors perpetual self-fertilization. That cross 
 fertilization is generally beneficial, and self-fertilization in- 
 jurious, is thus a stable result of botanical investigation." 
 
 But on the back of all this it is sufficiently startling to 
 find Mr. Wallace writing as follows, and this too in his 
 matured apology for the Darwinian doctrine"*: 
 
 We have direct proof of the beneficial results of intercrossing 
 in a great number of cases ; we have an overwhelming mass of 
 * Flowers and Insects, p. 6. \ Fertilization of Orchids, p. 359. 
 \ Story of Creation, p. 84. Vignettes from Nature. 
 
 \\ Contemporary Review, April 1882, p. 600. 
 *,\ Chapters on Evolution, p. 339. 
 ** Darwinism, p. 325. The italics are mine,
 
 Un-natural History 115 
 
 facts as to the varied and complex structure of flowers evidently 
 adapted to secure this intercrossing by insect agency ; yet we 
 see many of the most vigorous plants which spread widely over 
 the globe, with none of these adaptations, and evidently depend- 
 ing on self-fertilization for their continued existence and success 
 in the battle of life. Yet more extraordinary is it to find numerous 
 cases in which the special arrangements for cross-fertilization 
 appear to have been a failure, since they have either been supple- 
 mented by special means for self-fertilization, or have reverted 
 back in various degrees to simpler forms in which self-fertiliza- 
 tion is the rule. 
 
 He proceeds to tell us, with regard to the highly complex 
 modes by which cross-fertilization is brought about, that 
 the result thus laboriously attained is after all "by no 
 means an unmixed good," nay, that it " is far less certain 
 in securing the perpetuation of the species, than is self- 
 fertilization." In another place* he adds: "That self- 
 fertilization has some great advantages is shown by the fact 
 that it is usually the species which have the smallest and 
 least conspicuous flowers which have spread widely, while 
 the large and showy flowered species of the same genera, or 
 families, which require insects to cross-fertilize them, have 
 a much more limited distribution." All of which, as he 
 justly observes, is "most puzzling." 
 
 Such, then, is the hopeless tangle of enigmas into which 
 our " stable result " of botanical investigation would appear 
 to resolve itself, and this it is which we are bidden to take 
 as the guiding line which shall alone conduct us aright 
 into the labyrinth of Nature's secrets, enabling us at the 
 very outset easily to understand what to our forefathers was 
 a mystery. 
 
 It must likewise be remembered that plants with flowers 
 are, after all, but one section of the vegetable kingdom, and 
 when we come to consider the other section, of plants re- 
 producing their kind by spores, we find as, for example, 
 among ferns that all the arrangements are such as to 
 make self-fertilization a practical necessity; it requires, 
 in fact, a good deal of delicate manipulation artificially to 
 
 * Ibid., p. 323.
 
 i 1 6 tfn-natural History 
 
 secure a cross. It may be that these plants are lower in 
 the scale of life than the others, still there they are, and 
 seem likely to remain ; and on a full view of the whole field, 
 it would rather seem, as I have heard it suggested, that the 
 utterances to which we have listened amount in reality to 
 no more than this that Nature abhors self-fertilization in 
 those cases where cross-fertilization is produced. But such 
 a conclusion scarcely warrants us in adjudging to the bee 
 the office of Nature's head-gardener, and in crediting him 
 with all the infinite beauty which we behold. Yet this it is 
 that Mr. Grant Allen does in the following passage, quoted 
 with approbation by Mr. Wallace * : 
 
 While man has only tilled a few level plains, a few great river 
 valleys, a few peninsular mountain slopes, leaving the vast mass 
 of earth untouched by his hand, the insect has spread himself 
 over every land in a thousand shapes, and has made the whole 
 flowering creation subservient to his daily wants. His butter- 
 cup, his dandelion, and his meadow-sweet grow thick in every 
 English field. His thyme \ clothes the hillside; his heather 
 purples the bleak grey moorland. High up among the Alpine 
 heights his gentian spreads its lakes of blue ; amid the snows ot 
 the Himalayas his rhododendrons gleam with crimson light. 
 Even the wayside pond yields him the white crowfoot and the 
 arrow-head, while the broad expanses of Brazilian streams are 
 beautified by his gorgeous water-lilies. The insect has thus 
 turned the surface of the earth into a boundless flower-garden, 
 which supplies him from year to year with pollen or honey, and 
 itself in turn gains perpetuation by the baits which it offers for 
 its allurement. 
 
 A writer should be very sure of his ground who indulges 
 in such a rhapsody as this, and from what has been said we 
 are able to judge as to the solid foundation underlying these 
 sonorous phrases. Strange to say, I have heard it argued 
 by a disciple of the same philosophy that even our British 
 wild flowers must have been affected by cultivation on the 
 
 * The Colour-sense, p. 95, quoted in Darwinism, p. 333. 
 
 t This appears to be Mr. Wallace's emendation. In Mr. Grant Allen's 
 own work the reading is " mint." Mr. Wallace's version is an improve- 
 ment, as mint certainly does not clothe hill-sides.
 
 tin-natural History 1 1 7 
 
 ground that they are more highly developed than would be 
 possible under the influence of insects alone ; the high 
 development being visible, amongst other things, in the 
 fact that so many of them are blue. If anything were 
 needed at this stage of our investigation to obscure any 
 gleam of light which may have remained to us, this sug- 
 gestion would amply suffice for the purpose. The vast 
 majority of wild flowers are for the cultivator simply 
 " weeds," and his only treatment is to destroy them ; and 
 even if this were not so, how should our influence affect 
 flowers in the same direction as that of bees, unless we, 
 like them, quested for honey and admired blue ? The idea 
 is not worthy of mention for its own sake, but it serves to 
 exhibit one more specimen of the sort of thing which 
 nowadays is made to pass muster under the name of 
 science. 
 
 Examples from the field of botany have occupied us so 
 long that there is little space for any others, but I cannot 
 refrain from adducing at least one from the realm of animal 
 life. As the colours of flowers, so the colour of everything 
 else must be accounted for on utilitarian principles, and 
 amongst the rest that of birds' eggs. Why are the 
 thrush's blue, the dipper's white, the blackbird's green and 
 brown, the robin's white and red? Into such manifold 
 complexities does this question lead that it has been found 
 impossible to do more than indicate the general principle 
 which, in modes infinitely various, is supposed to be 
 illustrated. This principle is that of " protective colora- 
 tion." Eggs laid in a covered nest, we are told, are white, 
 but this colour would be too conspicuous in the open, so it 
 is exchanged for others which by assimilation to the sur- 
 roundings help to guard against detection. But besides 
 the difficulty, immediately arising, that the ringdove, for 
 instance, lays eggs of pure white in a nest absolutely flat 
 and open, and moreover, so loosely constructed that they 
 can often be seen through it from beneath, there is the 
 farther fact to be explained, that the bright colours of many 
 eggs would appear more likely to advertise their situation 
 than to conceal it. Into the consideration of this point I
 
 1 1 8 Un-natural History 
 
 do not wish to enter ; my object is merely to illustrate the 
 ways of the modern naturalist, by observing how he 
 approaches it. Mr. Wallace, then, thus writes * : 
 
 The beautiful blue or greenish eggs of the hedge-sparrow, the 
 song-thrush, the blackbird, and the lesser redpole, seem at first 
 sight especially calculated to attract attention, but it is very 
 doubtful whether they are really so conspicuous, when seen at a 
 little distance among their usual surroundings. For the nests 
 of these birds are either in evergreens, as holly or ivy, or 
 surrounded by the delicate green tints of our early spring 
 vegetation, and may thus harmonize very well with the colours 
 around them. The great majority of the eggs of our smaller 
 birds are so spotted or streaked with brown or black on variously 
 tinted grounds that, when lying in the shadow of the nest, and 
 surrounded by the many colours and tints of bark and moss, of 
 purple buds and tender green or yellow foliage, with all the 
 complex glittering lights and mottled shades produced among 
 these by the spring sunshine and by sparkling raindrops, they 
 must have a quite different aspect from that which they possess 
 when we observe them torn from their natural surroundings. 
 
 When we observe them torn from their natural surround- 
 ings! Are birds' eggs to be seen only in museums? Are 
 there no banks and bushes where we may go and look at 
 them, and so satisfy ourselves not only how they may look, 
 but how, in fact, they do ? Are our possibilities of describ- 
 ing the actual face of Nature limited to the potential mood ? 
 
 O weak Might Be ! 
 
 O May, Might, Could, Would, Should ! 
 How powerless ye 
 
 For evil or for good ! 
 
 If this be really the plight of naturalists, then is our friend 
 the schoolboy qualified to be their teacher rather than their 
 disciple, for he, depend upon it, is well acquainted with the 
 look of a thrush's nest. 
 
 It is, perhaps, not without significance that such a 
 passage as we have heard should have Mr. Wallace for its 
 
 * Darwinism, p. 215.
 
 Un-natural History 1 1 9 
 
 author. He is by no means a closet-naturalist only, and 
 has done most wonderful work in the way of field observa- 
 tion. But the scene of his labours was the Indian Archi- 
 pelago, not the thickets and hedgerows of his native land, 
 and it would almost appear as though he illustrated in his 
 own practice a superstition whereof many symptoms are 
 to be found elsewhere. It seems, indeed, commonly to be 
 assumed that the only objects really worth observing are 
 those which, in one way or another, are so removed from 
 the vulgar gaze, as to be observable by the specialist alone. 
 Unless a man can use a dissecting-knife, or be prepared to 
 pore for long hours through a microscope, or can afford to 
 go to the ends of the earth to seek exotic species under 
 other stars, he is not held to be capable of contributing 
 anything of value to the stores of science ; while as for the 
 common objects around us, they are so utterly insignificant 
 that we do the kindest thing on their behalf by constructing 
 their history for them upon those scientific principles 
 which, left to themselves, they fail to exhibit as plainly as 
 they should. The resulting product may or may not have 
 its merits as work of the imagination, but it appears to be 
 clear that, whatever it may be, it is not natural history. 
 
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