Arthur William Robinson

“ Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture! ”

“ It has been said that there is energy enough in fifteen grains of radium, if it could all be set free at once, to blow the whole British Navy a mile high into the air. The thought that we are thus encompassed on every side by pent up potentialities of force, which if uncontrolled might at any moment work our destruction, may well deepen in us the sense of the need, not only for an originating, but for a continually directing mind to superintend the conduct of the universe. ”

“ There is reason to hope that the bitterness of old controversies will not be revived, and that we have before us a time in which Theology and Science will co-operate and no longer conflict. With deepening insight it is becoming plainer than ever that the phenomena of life, and even of matter, are the expressions of a more than physical force. Evolution is a law under which a forward process is moving on, and moving up. There is an impulse of consciousness working from within, and there is a spiritual, as well as a material, environment inviting {105} to correspondence with itself. ”

“ And, first of all, Sir Oliver Lodge shall tell us what he understands by the Soul. "The soul is that controlling and guiding principle which is responsible for our personal expression and for the construction of the body, under the restrictions of physical condition and ancestry. In its higher developments it includes also feeling and intelligence and will, and is the storehouse of mental experience. The body is its instrument and organ, enabling it to receive and to convey physical impressions, and to affect and be affected by matter and energy." ”

“ The amount of energy required to build up a molecule of any degree of complexity is very great, and it is {72} by the breaking down of complex molecules into simple ones that all our mechanical work is done. And this is not all, for not only can the molecule be thus broken in pieces, but the atom itself is capable of disintegration. "Although we do not know how to break atoms up, they are liable every now and then themselves to explode, and so resolve themselves into simpler forms." "Atoms of matter are not the indestructible and immutable things they were once thought." ”

“ Is it any longer necessary, or even possible, to insist upon a First Cause for all that exists? Can the argument from Design be said to retain its validity as a proof of the working of a controlling Mind? If we admit the evidence for the existence of a Creator, can we know anything about Him? ”

“ So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account) we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world... When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men... I call this higher part of the universe by the name of God. ”

“ Even if the whole course of organic development could be proved to have been continuous without a break from the first movements of matter, through all the changes of physical life, up to the highest exhibition of human powers—and no one ventured to say that this had been proved—there would still be the necessity for an initial impulse to set the process in action. Spencer, as we have seen, declared that there must have been a First Cause, and Tyndall agreed that "the hypothesis" of Evolution "does nothing more than transport the conception of life's origin to an indefinitely distant past." ”

“ We know how it has happened to us over and over again in our own individual experiences to have been made conscious of a gradual modification of our opinions as new evidence has reached us, and we have had time to relate it to our previous understanding and knowledge. We have had our first thoughts, and our second thoughts, and then there have come third thoughts, which were the ripest {11} and soundest of all. Just such a process of which we can mark the stages in ourselves is to be seen on a larger scale—in bigger print, as it were—in the thought movements of an age. ”

“ It is not to be supposed that anyone was to be found who denied the general intelligibility of Nature. To have done this would have been to reduce science to an absurdity. Science is bound to proceed upon the assumption that there are "reasons" for things. Moreover, there is mind in man, who is part of the order of Nature. It follows that what is in the part cannot be denied to the whole. All this could be freely admitted. But then the question arose, Is mind the originating source of the movements of matter, or is it not rather itself the product of them? ”

“ Everywhere but in man consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way. Man continues the vital movement indefinitely, although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in itself. ”

“ It is important to remember that Darwin never claimed that his doctrine of evolution could account for the occurrence of variations. That it could do so he expressly denied. "Some," he said, in his great work, The Origin of Species (1859) "have, even imagined that natural selection induces variability, whereas it implies only the preservation of such variations as arise.... Unless such occur, natural selection can do nothing." ”

“ Huxley, arguing to the same effect, concluded that "since thousands of times a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate of hell, the world cannot be governed by what we call benevolence." ”

“ Shall we not be led to admire and revere increasingly the wonder of it all, as there grows upon us the sense of the quietness and gentleness, the foresight, and the infinite patience of the Being of beings, who will never obtrude His presence and action upon us, just because He would help us to be our own, not dead but living, selves, and would have us rise with Him to the highest things? ”

“ CHAPTER II THE PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY
We find it hard to realise that not so very long ago the steam-engine and the electric telegraph were unknown; and we are right when we say that life must have worn a very different aspect in those days. It is scarcely less difficult for us to realise the change that has been wrought in men's thoughts since the time when the biological cell was unrecognised, and the theory of evolution had not yet been formulated. ”

“ Agnosticism appeared dressed in the garb of an exceeding reverence, but, on closer acquaintance, it became evident that its acceptance would mean the cheapening of life by banishing from it the Divine personality, and robbing the human of the qualities that give it its greatest worth. ”

“ Not that science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces ... but, in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural. ”

“ We have spoken of what science has recently been doing in the investigation of the constitution of matter; we have now to talk of its researches into the nature of Life.
The discovery that all plant and animal life is developed from living cells was made, as we have already stated, more than seventy years ago. Since then our knowledge of the formation and history of these cells has been continually growing. The size of cells varies, but as a rule they are very minute. They consist of what is termed protoplasm. At one time it was supposed that protoplasm was structureless. ”

“ It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent, for it is only the mode according to which our agent proceeds: it implies a power, for it is the order according to which that power acts. ”

“ Sir William Thomson, as President of the British Association in 1871, suggested that a germ of life might have been wafted to our world on a meteorite; but to say that is obviously only to banish the problem to a greater distance. [1]
Huxley had, in 1868, invented the name "Bathybius" to describe the deep-sea slime which he held to be the progenitor of life on the planet. But later on he frankly confessed that his suggestion was fruitless, acknowledging that the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living. ”

“ The notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law; the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas." [11]
But a dogma of Necessity would be more tolerable than a doctrine of Chance. In Lord Kelvin's address, to which reference has been made, he declared his conviction that "directive power" was "an article of belief which science compelled him to accept." ”

“ What is specially characteristic of M. Bergson is the insistence that this power of choice is an evidence of Consciousness. "Life," he declares, "is nothing but consciousness using matter for its purposes." "There is behind life an impulse, an immense impulse to climb higher and higher, to run greater and greater risks in order to arrive at greater and greater efficiency." ”

“ Freedom and power of choice are admitted to be present in regions where their existence was for long most strenuously denied. Even matter may have its own power of insistence and resistance—how much more mind and will. This consideration may give us a yet clearer clue to the mysteries of failure, miscarriage, and waste. A world that was to produce self-conscious, self-determining personalities needed to have freedom through the whole of its development ”

“ But all this does not, of course, make it clear why in a beneficently ordered world such a necessity of slaughter should ever have been allowed to arise.
Darwin, as we have said, tried hard to take the most favourable view of the whole process. He thus concluded his chapter on the struggle for existence; "When we reflect on the struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that {56} the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." ”

“ Kepler and Newton had stirred men's minds by their account of the prodigious scale upon which the mechanism of the Universe was constructed, and Laplace had already enunciated the theory according to which the cosmic bodies were originally formed in obedience to the law of gravitation by the condensation of rotating nebulous spheres. And there were those who used these discoveries of astronomy to cast doubts upon the likelihood that the Divine attention would be concentrated upon the concerns of so tiny a speck as this planet of ours. ”

“ The idea that all these weapons exist for the purpose of shedding blood or giving pain is wholly illusory. As a matter of fact, their effect is wholly beneficent even to the sufferers, inasmuch as they tend to the diminution of pain. Their actual purpose is always to prevent the escape of captured food—of a wounded animal, which would then, indeed, suffer useless pain, since it would certainly very soon be captured again and be devoured. ”

“ The teleology which supposes that the eye such as we see it in man, or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution. ”

“ Perhaps it was because science had been so busy about the more external things, that it had seemed to have no time to spare for the thorough consideration of that which is more truly vital to man than the matter which obeys or opposes him, or even than the physical life which enables him to act, in so far as he can, as its master. It was strange that the last thing to be thought of should be his own personality, himself ”

“ It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes myriads of happy beings crowd upon my {18} view. 'The insect youth are on the wing.' Swarms of new-born flies are trying their pinions in the air. ”

“ On a stagnant and inactive world life would be {84} powerless: it could only make dry bones stir in such a world if it were itself a form of energy. It is only potent where inorganic energy is mechanically 'available'—to use Lord Kelvin's term—that is to say, is either potentially or actually in process of transfer and transformation. In other words, life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide its transformation. ”

“ Venomous animals there were, no doubt, but the fang and the sting "may be no less merciful to the victim, than salutary to the devourer"; and it was to be noted "that whilst only a few species possess the venomous property, that property guards the whole tribe." Then again, before we condemn the ordering whereby animals devour one another we must consider what would happen if they did not. "Is it to see the world filled with drooping, superannuated, half-starved, helpless and unhelped animals, that you would alter the present system of pursuit and prey?" ”

“ Discussions may continue as to whether what Huxley called "the wider teleology," or some other form of the doctrine of Design is to be preferred; but thoughtful men are likely to agree with the judgment given by Sir George Stokes—that recognised master of masters—when he said: "We meet with such overwhelming evidence of design, of purpose, especially in the study of living things, that we are compelled to think of mind as being involved in the constitution of the universe." ”