Lawrence Clement Johnson

“ No amount of wonders would impart faith to a soul already filled with doubt; nor would the scientist have the least alarm on the subject of miracles and cataclysms if he understood truly the finite and the infinite, the Creator and the creation, the reign of eternal and universal law! In going around the circle of mere cosmical relations, time and space, man finds himself bounded by the great impassable and incomprehensible Unconditioned—eternity—ubiquity. ”

“ Not having arrived at any thing beyond anthropomorphic notions of the Deity themselves, they weakly imagine that no other are possible; that there is no religion, no religious worship, nothing to lift man out of and beyond himself into the contemplation of the unexpressed sublimities of the Infinite and the Almighty, except the legends of the miracles and wonders of remote ages. Hence one of them now boasts that, in the advance of science, "anthropomorphism" (by which he means religion itself) "is driven to its last intrenchment—the mind and heart of man himself." ”

“ Variation, by slight accidental degrees, is quite as unphilosophical as the production of species, by decided saltus or springs, from some innate miraculous cause. Suppose, then, we drop the question of the origin of species and the cause of variation, and try to observe and understand the different stages of the growth and evolution of such living creatures as the earth is filled with, whether fittest or unfittest: would not this be much more consistent with the vocation of science? In itself it will be a delight, whether it solves anything or not. ”

“ Indeed, as will be seen at the proper time, the mysteries of daily occurrence, such as growth, budding, and reproduction, are as great as any which beset the passage from form to form, from species to species. No one who has thought of it sufficiently can deny that the ordinary facts of generation, as the necessity of the union of two cells of nearly-spent vitality to produce a third cell, or a brood of cells, endowed with primeval vigor, present difficulties more unsurpassable than the origin of the germs of living things from inorganic matter ”

“ When a naturalist, confining himself properly to reason and the laws of Nature, speculates on the origin of species, and attempts to show the correlation of form to form, the evolution of one from another, or the development of many distinct species from a common stock, the reverence of certain minds, which have long run in a certain groove that connects these obscure mysteries of Nature with some imagined interference of Omnipotence, is seriously shocked. ”

“ There is one point, then, we may set ourselves easy upon, and claim reconciliation with the rest of the world: There is no such dogma as that of special creations, announced as a systematic article of faith by any religious authority; nor philosophically discussed and contended for by any theologian worthy of the name. A few unwary ones, like Hugh Miller, more skilled in rocks than in the theology in which he thought he believed, may, now that the question is raised, have confounded the Genesis of Species with the more general idea of Creation ”

“ Nor, in regarding man, whom we fondly believe the crowning glory of creation, should we expect to see the precise yearly growths which have finally lifted him to this elevation. The steps of the evolution may still be traced, but not a single individual of the lineal ancestry remains. When, therefore, we speak of the chain of species—of the line of man's descent—upon a priori grounds, we do not expect to find, extant in life, the very links of the chain. The loss of them is another proof of evolution. ”

“ Now, this involution, by which the progress of evolution takes place, may, as remarked, and strange to say, be described as a failure of development—a failure to unfold into the original type, constituting, by the very failure, a new and higher type. If we watch the development of any leaf from venation, we observe that in some way it was folded down upon itself, or rolled up with its fellows of the same bud, and before coming to adult age it expanded into the recognized form of its order. Let but that expansion fail, and the evolution may be said to fail. ”

“ Rightly understood, not a drawn battle, but a victory to Religion, the possessor of the citadel—a victory which grows more and more decisive the more it is perceived that the "mind and heart of man himself" is the only territory it ever claimed—the only dominion it ever attempted to defend. After all, is not the simple admission of a devout mind, when it meets with some inexplicable fact—"God made it so"—more philosophical than the shallow assertion of presumptuous science, "We can never know?" ”

“ Now, then, what is the first, the simplest form of organization—the primordial type of organic creatures? It is a cell. For, notice what is really meant by an organism—an organized creature. It is a creature that has functions dependent upon organs or parts. There is, then, in the very simplest organism already a manifestation of Von Baer's great law in biology—differentiation. Without differentiation there is no organization, and without organization, again, no life. ”

“ For there is evolution in human thought and comprehension, as in all things else. Yet the how—the question of the method—the process of the development of life—still confronts us; and the recent labors of Charles Darwin, Wallace, Voght, Haeckel, Cope, and others, have taught us that the answer is not to be jumped at by mere speculation, nor by hasty inference from the sparse and ill-digested facts of natural history now in our possession. ”

“ Talk of their bringing forward this doctrine of evolution as a new discovery! They have, indeed, elaborated it in many new applications, but, as to the doctrine itself as a new proposition in philosophy, it was already old when Pythagoras was a school-master. Evolution new in philosophy, and the poetic or anthropomorphic notion of special creations a dogma of theology! Why, we are almost tempted to believe, with the satirist, that "nowadays men read every thing but books!" ”

“ Socrates once desired to see the day "when Nature would be explained by reason alone." This is the end and aim of all philosophy: to render all we see, and know, and think, and do, rational; to obtain rational conceptions for all things. But, remember what explanation is. No explanation removes all difficulties; solves all mysteries. ”

“ But, leaving special genesis aside, let us consider a little more closely the doctrine of natural selection. This, in fact, is not a theory of the origin—of the genesis of species. As M. Quatrefages has remarked, it is not a theory at all, for it explains nothing, accounts for nothing, and is not therefore truly an hypothesis in philosophy. Natural selection is not a cause, but the discussion of it draws attention to the chain of causes at the bottom of which we must look for the solution of our problem. ”

“ From very remote periods, even of Greek philosophy, discriminating analysis is compelled to discover that the question is not so much of a creation, as of a rational conception of the creation—not of the fact, but of the method.
Religious faith does step in, where science fails, to say how the Cosmos began, and is ordered and sustained in perpetual harmony. Physical science, of course, has nothing to do with first and final causes, and therefore answers: "We cannot tell whether the Cosmos is eternal, or began in time." ”

“ Doubtless, in Nature, the true process was a failure at one point to fill out the rounded fullness of the ball; some contraction, some atrophy, some failure to grow at a certain spot, while the balance of the creature continues its development, until a wall arises around the constriction and becomes permanent, further growth only increasing the introversion—precisely such a process as we may witness at the hands of a potter when he places a ball of clay upon his wheel. ”

“ When, therefore, these doctors of the new school tell us that they are about to overthrow religion in one of its old dogmas—namely, as they define it themselves, that the Creator came here, and, like a potter upon his wheel, out of distinct lumps of clay, in certain definite periods, produced certain definite forms, which forms, in organic creatures, are species, and which may perish or endure, but cannot change—it is easy to see that they have not themselves risen above that anthropomorphic conception of Deity which they assume to condemn. ”

“ The old cell fails in force to throw off the new one; or, by another law, equally in force, adhesion takes place between the contiguous surfaces of the old and the new, and the extrusion to complete independence cannot be effected. This is the simple rule extending up through all the shining ranks and files of life. In the higher forms this law presents itself in the form of involution; but in lower creatures it is but an adhesion—an anchylosis. In all it is a failure of a perfect evolution—a failure perfectly to develop and reproduce a separate cell. ”

“ In the dawn of science as we know it—that is to say, in the rise of the Greek philosophy—no other view of creation was thought of than that which modern induction now demands, because, happily for them, there was not in their possession any supposed revelation on the subject, and there was no school which thought of any other solution of the problem than one which could be deduced from observation and speculation. ”

“ This wonderfully intimate relationship of the innumerable forms of living creatures, properly considered, is calculated to elevate our conception of the creation, and of man himself; while, to the glory of the Creator, it is held out to us as another "bow of promise"—another assurance of the certainty of the universal reign of law. ”

“ Why, with all the lights of human history, we cannot trace the line of any human family more than a few hundred years! And what is the historic period, upon which all doubts and objections are based, compared to the ages multitudinous that have passed away without recognition in human calendars? Take the simplest tree, a few years old. We see a crowning bud at the apex of its principal axis of growth ”

“ If we liken the half-armed advocates of religion, in their heterogeneous harness, to the gallant knight of La Mancha running a tilt with the windmills, we are not the less reminded of him when we witness the triumph of the new philosophers at the overthrow of the "dogma of special creations." ”

“ Every anatomist, in order to comprehend the physiology and anatomy of this class, begins his analysis of the vertebrate skeleton by observing two distinct systems of organization—the dermal and the neurohæmal, heretofore supposed to be peculiar to vertebrates. Now, to which system, the dermal or the neurohæmal, do the extremities belong? No amount of ingenuity can satisfy the thoughtful student that the limbs are evolutions of the appendages of the neurohæmal axis. They are dermal. Even in mammalia they have no proper union, no true articulation with the spinal column. ”

“ These, looking only to primary and final causes, feel contempt for the laborer who is working, for his penny a day, for the sight of the next step in that endless chain of secondary, efficient causes, which is the revelation of Nature to the rational faculty.
On the other hand, the proper conservatism of religious minds is often insulted by the exclusive cultivator of mere natural science, as the reserve and resistance of ignorance and fanaticism. Vainglorious in the light of some new discovery, he sees all the rest of the world in apparent darkness. ”

“ The dermal system is the counterpart and homologue of that wondrous external skeleton of articulata, as you must see if you have followed me through the metamorphoses of cœlenterata, entomostraca, and cirrhipeda to mollusca, and from mollusca to vertebrata. Comparative anatomy will not hesitate now to point out every correspondence of every part, every organ, every articulation. Not a bone, nor a scale, nor a hair, is ever lost. In each limb there are so many joints and no more ”

“ Our ordinary discoveries teach us that force can be multiplied by a multiplication of the elements or organs evolving force. The simplest child knows how to obtain two pounds instead of one by putting another weight in the scale; and the electrician obtains more power by adding another jar, or another plate, or another cell to his battery. In like manner Nature has in various directions seized every means to increase and concentrate what for convenience is termed vital force. ”

“ And in vain the half-learned, and all not fond of exertion, because they cannot easily comprehend the relations of the finite and the infinite, rush to the conclusion that they are in conflict, and irreconcilable; so that, in the popular mind, the human and the divine, reason and the imagination, our doubts, and hopes, and fears, have become much entangled, and like "sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harshly." ”

“ If you have followed the chain of evolution here briefly sketched, although in mere suggestions, you can have no difficulty in perceiving the unbroken succession of allied links, all the way from the lowest cell-formations up to man. Many forms, doubtless, belong to subordinate systems, and take no part, directly, in the chain; yet the study of all will enable us more fully to comprehend the whole process. ”