Arthur O. Lovejoy

“ But if, on the other hand, you look on all forms of organized beings as the results of the gradual modification of a primitive type, the facts receive a meaning and you see that these older conditions are the necessary predecessors of the present. Viewed in this light the facts of paleontology receive a meaning—upon any other hypothesis I am unable to see, in the slightest degree, what knowledge or signification we are to draw from them. ”

“ The special creation theory could make nothing of rudimentary organs; viewed in the light of the theory of development, as incidental to natural descent with gradual modification, they appeared normal, intelligible and instructive. It is worth while, perhaps, before concluding, to bring the last six arguments together, in a single general view of their logical bearings. No one of them, nor all of them collectively, ever amounted to more than "circumstantial evidence" of the transformation of species; none of them actually exhibits any species in flagrante delicto of transmutation. ”

“ Creationism, to conform to the accepted principles and accumulated knowledge of geological science, had been compelled, like the Ptolemaic astronomy before it, to interpolate some very singular epicycles in its hypothesis. And while all these miraculous interpositions were taking place in order to keep the organic kingdom in a going condition, the Creator was not for a moment allowed by the orthodox geologists to interfere in a similar manner in their own particular domain of the inorganic processes. ”

“ And the apparent existence of such a radical distinction between the varieties produced under domestication and true physiological species was an objection, not only against natural selection, but also against evolution itself; for it meant that we do not see now, nor within the limits of human observation, organisms actually getting transformed, through the accumulation of variations, into new species differing from their progenitors by the final test of specificity of character. ”

“ For no man out of a madhouse ever behaved in such a manner as that in which, by this hypothesis, the Creator of the universe was supposed to have behaved. Ascribing to him both the ability and the disposition to intervene with absolute freedom in natural—or, at least, in organic—phenomena, the theory also represented him as incapable of intervening intelligently or effectually. ”

“ More remarkable, perhaps, is the failure, for an equally long period, of a number of men not impeded by theological prepossessions—men who were capable of seeing the absurdities of the special creation hypothesis—to recognize the methodological superiority and the promise of scientific fruitfulness inhering in the other hypothesis, or even to recognize the logical obligation to choose between the only two hypotheses available. ”

“ Accommodations and forced interpretations had, indeed, been devised in abundance, to "harmonize" the new science with theology; but if these could be invented to justify geology, others could as well be, as they since have been, invented to justify evolutionary biology. Any consistent scriptural believer could make out as good a case of heresy against Cuvier, Owen, Sedgwick, Agassiz, or Hugh Miller, as against the author of the "Vestiges" or Herbert Spencer. ”

“ Firstly, that at the time the evidence in favor of transmutation was wholly insufficient; secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at the time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable. . . . As for the "Vestiges," I confess the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence at all, it set me against evolution. ”

“ In the "Vestiges" and the "Explanations" Chambers urged the presumption from geological uniformitarianism with an effective use of concrete examples. [18]
If there is anything more than another impressed on our minds by the course of geological history, it is that the same laws and conditions of nature now apparent to us have existed throughout the whole time. Admitting that we do not now see any such fact as the production of new species, we at least know that, while such facts were occurring upon earth, there were associated phenomena of a perfectly ordinary character. ”

“ Hardly any advance has since been made on Chambers' general arguments, which at the time they appeared would have been accepted as convincing, but for theological truculence and scientific timidity. And Chambers himself only gave unity to thoughts already in wide circulation. . . . Chambers was not a scientific expert, nor altogether an original thinker, but he had studied scientific literature to better purpose than any professor. . . . The considerations that now recommend evolution to popular audiences are no other than those urged in the "Vestiges." ”

“ For the theory of universal order—that is, order as presiding both in the origin and administration of the world—we have the testimony of a vast number of facts in nature, and this one in addition—that whatever is reft from the domain of ignorance and made undoubted matter of science, forms a new support to the same doctrine. ”

“ It was a further consequence of these changes in the scientific situation that the men who, in the name of orthodoxy but under the mantle of science, attacked the pioneers of evolutionism, themselves taught doctrines no less completely at variance with the usual—and with any natural—interpretation of Scripture. ”

“ That men of great abilities were unable to see the true character of the hypothesis which great numbers of them so long embraced, is certainly an interesting, if not an encouraging, fact in the history of the human intellect. ”

“ The classic of the special creation doctrine was the introduction to the third edition of Cuvier's "Récherches sur les ossements fossiles"; and the principal argument of that work was, in the words of one of Cuvier's disciples, [11] to the effect that "no fossil species, at least among the two classes of mammalia and reptilia, has any analogue among living species, or, in other words, that every fossil species is extinct," If this could be shown by positive evidence not to be the case, one of the principal supports of the special creation hypothesis was taken away from it. ”

“ Huxley later saw this clearly enough, and expressed it forcibly, though he never seems to have confessed the unreasonableness of his earlier position. The publication of Lyell's "Principles of Geology" in 1830, wrote Huxley [16] in 1887, "constituted an epoch in the modern history of the doctrine of evolution, by raising in the mind of every intelligent reader this question: If natural causation is competent to account for the not-living part of our globe, why should it not also account for the living part?" ”

“ To the mind of Darwin the same sort of data presented a very different import.
As it seems to me, the leading facts in embryology, which are second to none in importance, are explained on the principle of variations in the many descendants from some one ancient progenitor, having appeared at a not very early period in life, and having been inherited at a corresponding period. Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the progenitor, either in its adult or larval state, of all the members of the same great class. ”

“ The Argument from Persistent Types.—If good cases of graduated form-series were not available at the time of the "Origin" or before, the evolutionist of the period could still find in paleontology one sort of evidence decidedly unfavorable to the chief hypothesis then opposed to his own—that of extensive "revolutions of the globe," wholesale obliterations of faunas, and thorough-going new creations of the entire organic world. This evidence lay in the persistence of many orders and certain species through more than one geological epoch. ”

“ The other source of the supposition that Darwin presented the first adequate grounds for believing in evolution is the express testimony of Huxley, whose paper on the reception of the "Origin of Species" [5] has come to be the principal source of information on its subject. In that article, and in several letters and other writings, Huxley takes credit to himself for his rejection of the transformation-theory until he became acquainted with Darwin's work; and he never expressed any sentiment far short of contempt for Chambers's "Vestiges." ”

“ But in general, as time went on, the Creator brought both more diverse and more complicated beings into existence. In doing so, he behaved after the manner of a lazy and incompetent architect, who, instead of "studying" each problem afresh, with reference to the special uses and situation of the edifice to be erected, is content to make a few minor alterations in a single conventionalized plan. ”

“ On the one side we have a theory which converts the Power whose garment is seen in the visible universe into an artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting by broken effects, as man is seen to act. On the other side, we have the conception that all we see around us and feel within us—the phenomena of physical nature as well as those of the human mind—have their unsearchable roots in a cosmical life, . ”

“ In an arbitrary system we had surely no reason to expect mammals after reptiles; yet in this order they came. [2]
Thus the general fact of the gradual appearance of higher types in the course of geological time, and the existence of a broad parallelism between antiquity of strata and relative simplicity of the contained organic forms, was by this time thoroughly established and universally familiar. True it is, however, that the evidence from paleontology, when more minutely scrutinized, proved to be by no means so favorable to the development hypothesis. ”

“ The theory of evolution does not rest immediately upon an induction of individual phenomena; and the evidence for it did not increase by a slow arithmetical progression, through the accumulation of observations of individual phenomena. It is a generalization established inferentially, by virtue of the fact that it unifies and explains a number of lesser generalizations, themselves for the most part established by direct induction, in several special sciences. ”

“ The same writer, [5] who is, of course, a convinced evolutionist, observes:
After all we can not forget that there exists an immense number of creatures without intermediate links, and that the relations of the great divisions of the animal or vegetable kingdom are much less strict than the theory demands. . . . The keenest partisan of the descent theory must admit that the fossil links between the classes and orders of the two kingdoms exist in infinitesimally small numbers. ”

“ The second argument of the paleontological opponents of the theory Darwin regarded as still more deserving of serious consideration.
The sudden manner in which several groups of species first appear in our European formations, the almost entire absence, as at present known, of formations rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian strata, are all undoubtedly of the most serious nature. The difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great. ”

“ As in the political world, however, men do not trust in the endurance of a dynasty which is reduced to a single city or nook of its dominions, so we may expect a speedy extinction to a doctrine which has been driven from every portion of nature but one or two limited fields.
Huxley, it is true, seems in his pre-Darwinian period to have disapproved of this type of argument; creation being "perfectly conceivable. ”

“ We are now in possession of so many of these historical analogies, that all minds with any instincts of science in their composition have grown to distrust on merely antecedent grounds, any explanation which embodies a miraculous element. . . . Now, it must be obvious to any mind which has adopted this attitude of thought, that the scientific theory of natural descent is recommended by an overwhelming weight of antecedent presumption.
Th "overwhelming weight of antecedent presumption" against special creation, and in favor of evolution, was pointed out by Chambers with entire clearness ”

“ The public must soon see that if a literal interpretation of scripture is an insufficient argument against the true geognostic history of our earth, so also must it be against all associated phenomena, supposing they are presented on good evidence. ”