Edward B. Aveling

“ Science is taking the place of Religion and yielding to mankind the poetry that its forerunner missed. Nature is our all in all. Only the whisper of a secret thought here and there of hers has yet reached our ears. But one. The only good result that is supposed to flow from prayer does not really flow from prayer at all, but is explicable by purely natural facts. It is healthier that people should know these facts, than that they should refer real sensations to an imaginary cause. ”

“ While our less fortunate brethren, the lower animals, the plants, the minerals, are playing their good part in the universal history, without the consciousness in full of the meaning of it all, we read the signs of the past and of to-day. "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be," in all the detail that our children's children will see and live. Yet we know that the race has a future that will transcend its past, as that past transcended the dark dumb lives of the ancestry whence our kind has sprung.
The Gospel of Evolution is replacing that of Christianity. ”

“ This by gradual stages of ascent rises to the loftiest forms of plants and animals yet known. But these in their constant decay and in their death once for all as individuals, return to the mineral kingdom again. If only we grasp the full meaning of this new gospel founded on science, all life acquires a new significance. Most of all our own life, as the highest expression known to us of the phenomena of matter in motion, becomes more solemn and more full of hope. In it more than in any other are gathered together the forces of the universe. ”

“ It is time that we should turn from god to man, from prayer to work, from dreaming to acting. Man shall do for earth what prayer has failed to do; and man's thought, man's love, man's sturdy effort shall make that Golden Age for which so many have prayed, but so few have worked. ”

“ This special re-action which under certain circumstances follows, but is not paused by prayer to a supernatural existence, forms but a minute part of the results which flow from belief in prayer. I desire to destroy prayer not only because it is a fraud, but because it is a hindrance to progress. Men pray to do that which they should link hands to perform for themselves. They are down on their knees, crying like children, when they should be on their feet, working, striving for their fellows. I grudge every moment of time that is given by man to god. Man wants all we can do ”

“ The distinctions between plants and animals are found to have vanished. Once again it is easy enough to distinguish high plants from high animals. But no man can satisfactorily draw the line between the lower members of the two kingdoms. The old definitions of the animal and the plant given with a suicidal glibness in old books on botany and zoology, when tried in the balance of criticism, are found wanting. Even the food-distinction, supposed to be the best distinction between the two groups, fails. It is no longer true that plants feed on the inorganic, and animals on organic substances. ”

“ The chemist might go on continually manufacturing hydrogen and oxygen, carbon dioxide, ammonia. But he was never to hope to make alcohol, sugar, urea, any of the multitudinous substances called organic. And now all this folly of forbidding is at an end. The organic bodies are manufactured by man. The inorganic and the organic are no more regarded as clearly distinguishable. Even the chemistry books by their very titles recognise and proclaim this fact. We have no longer works on organic chemistry. We have volumes on the chemistry of carbon compounds. ”

“ If we pass up into the kingdoms of the living, and study plants and animals, the same unity of phenomena meets us. Our classification terms—order, genus, species, and so forth—are as artificial as our names for the geological systems. No one holds to-day that any single species is clearly marked off from all others. ”

“ The very sciences that deal with these different modes of matter and motion are now by no means as clearly marked off one from another as their earlier students thought they were. Physics, chemistry; geology, botany, zoology, anatomy, physiology, how they all dovetail into, or actually overlap each other. It is impossible to say sometimes to which domain of science a particular fact belongs. The distinctions between the physical and the chemical properties of bodies are confessedly artificial. ”

“ Harsh as it may seem, an idea in any branch of knowledge has never attained a sure basis until it is expressible in terms of mathematics. There was a time when physics and chemistry were divorced from mathematics to a large extent. Now even the phenomena of electricity and the reactions one upon another of chemical bodies are expressed in algebraical formulae. This is the result of the increased precision of our knowledge. Following in the footsteps of physics and chemistry the biological sciences are becoming every day more mathematical. ”

“ The reasons why we regard matter and motion as all-sufficient in the explanation of all the phenomena of the universe are several. In the first place, no destruction of matter has ever been witnessed. Second, no destruction of motion, has ever been witnessed. The creation of either matter or motion has been equally unseen. Transformations of matter from one of its infinitely many forms to some other are constantly visible, and they are always unattended by the smallest increase or diminution in the actual quantity of matter. ”

“ We are led to take a larger and more true conception of the universe. If the subdivisions disappear the unity of the whole comes out with wonderful clearness. We study phenomena from below upwards, and see something more than an unbroken series. We see that actually there is no below and no above.' The mineral kingdom of the non-living passes into the living. ”

“ Evolution is the name for the idea of the unity and continuity of phsenomena. The popular and unscientific notion was that there was not only an original effort on the part of the supernatural causing the natural, setting it going, in fact, but a continual interposition of the supernatural from without, controlling the natural. Evolution is the doctrine of non-intervention. According to this gospel, matter and motion are all in all. Matter is the convenient name for all that which can affect the senses of man. ”

“ There are no means of progress upon earth save those of study and of work. Study of nature to find out what is; work to apply the knowledge for the increase of human happiness. For centuries upon centuries men have prayed to god for deliverance from poverty, from misery, from crime ”

“ Botany implies a study of the anatomy and the physiology of plants. Physiology in its turn becomes only a question of chemistry; its phenomena are becoming reduced to mathematical expressions. We are learning to calculate the actual amount of work done in the performance of different functions of the living body, in the same terms as we calculate the work done by a steam engine. The respiratory organs or the muscular during the day do so many foot-pounds of work. The foot-pound is the unit of measurement employed in the study of work. Work is done when matter is moved through space. ”

“ We must have a care lest we make too much of some truth, even though it be a scientific conclusion, based on scientific observation and reasoning. And we must not forget that, of all the great generalisations, that of Evolution is the one most likely to be thus regarded, for it is a generalisation of generalisations. ”

“ An element such as carbon or gold, is a body which has not yet been decomposed. A mixture is that which results from putting together two or more substances, without those substances undergoing any change of properties. Thus brandy and water, or gunpowder is a mixture. The properties of the brandy and of the water in the one case, and of the charcoal, nitre and sulphur in the other, are unchanged. A compound is the result of the union of two or more elements with change of properties; thus water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and its properties are those of neither hydrogen nor oxygen. ”

“ I sometimes think that the difference between the loveliness of our thinking and of our dreaming on natural phsenomena, as compared with that which the older thinkers and dreamers enjoyed, will be as the difference between the joy of a game of chess between skilled players or between those that know not even the moves. ”

“ The researches of the physicists, the chemists, the biologists have demonstrated that there is a whole world of movements that affect only the minute particles of bodies. Thus heat is a mode of motion; electricity is another; magnetism is a third. The familiar phenomena of light are no longer regarded as due to any actual matter that has been thrown from a luminous body. ”

“ Whilst Darwinism shows that man is not distinct from the lower animals, and that all species of animals, and all species of plants are artificial groups gliding one into the other, just as in their gradual development they glided one out of the other, Evolution goes further than this and does not fare worse. ”

“ For the evolutionist not only believes that which the works of Darwin have made an assured truth, but he believes that plants and animals have had a common parentage, that living matter has originated from the non-living, that there has been no break in the vast series of phenomena at any point. ”

“ They are the result of waves of a fluid imponderable and universal called ether, and there seems every reason to believe that the phenomena commonly called vital are of the same or of a Kindred order. Life, it would appear, is but a mode of motion. And though we know life generally only by its manifestations of molar motion, as in the blow of the arm, or the stride of the leg, yet these massive movements are but the outward representatives of a large number of internal movements, of chemical nature in digestion, of nervous nature in the sense-organs and nerve tissues. ”

“ In geology the different kinds of rocks graduate into each other. Between the aqueous, or sedimentary, and the igneous, or those due to the action of fire, range the metamorphic, i.e., sedimentary rocks that have been afterwards subjected to heat. The various systems of sedimentary rocks are known now to be purely artificial if convenient divisions. From the Laurentian up to the recent rocks there has never been any real hiatus. Nowhere is there the slightest evidence of pause or of recommencement. Our groups are artificial. Nature is like Oallio and cares for none of these things. ”

“ In the tales that it tells us of the past, in the advice that it gives us for the present, and in the hopes and threats it holds out for the future, it is a misleading guide, a poor philosopher, a false friend. ”

“ A group of plants known as saprophytes, that feed on decaying organic things, is the natural transition between the ordinary plants that eat inorganic food-stuffs, and those plants that, like animals, exist on organic substances. So marked is this difficulty of distinguishing between the lower plants and the lower animals, that it has been suggested that a third kingdom of the living should be constructed midway between the two generally recognised. ”

“ From all that I have just said it will be understood that the Gospel of Evolution has a wider significance than popular notions imply. The general idea, as to Evolution, that it is synonymous with Darwinism, is not accurate. The Darwinian teaching is only a part, though in one sense it is the most important part, of the Evolution truth. Evolution itself means, as we have seen, the unity of phenomena. ”

“ But the thoughtful, as yet few in number, although the number grows hourly, and even the commonplace people, if they are in the unaccustomed atmosphere of culture, are estimating the value of a human being by that which he actually does and is, rather than by the magnitude of the cheques he can draw. ”

“ It is true that at first there seems to be a loss because of the indistinctness that now veils the old lines of demarcation. At first some taring of a shock is felt when we realise that the old definitions and classifications are only matters of convenience, and really represent nothing in nature. ”

“ Only it is very important to remember that, great as any idea may be, the mental effort needed for its understanding and its acquisition is to the individual of as much moment as the idea itself. The exercise of our faculties is of as great value to us as the results attained by the exercise. ”

“ If we turn to any of the special sciences the same dovetailing and over-lapping appear. In chemistry it is difficult to mark off any group of bodies from all other groups. The three sets of bodies that chemistry is supposed to study are elements, mixtures, and compounds. ”

“ And he will get it. £40,000 are given so easily for a house of god, but 40,000 pence would be grudged to make decent the hovels in which human beings live. I hate the charity which pours out wealth for a god, and counts in miserly fashion every farthing given for man. ”