George Barry O'Toole

“ Thus the instinct, which should, in the normal course of events, guide night-flying moths to the white flowers that contain the life-sustaining nectar of their nocturnal banquets, proves their undoing, when they come into contact with the white lights of artificial illumination. In fact, the fatal fondness of the moth for the candle flame has become in all languages a proverb for the folly of courting one’s own destruction. ”

“ Bateson announced the failure of De Vries’ Mutation Theory, when he said: “But that particular and essential bit of the theory of evolution, which is concerned with the origin and nature of species remains utterly mysterious. We no longer feel as we used to do, that the process of variation, now contemporaneously occurring, is the beginning of a work which needs merely the element of time for its completion; for even time cannot complete that which has not yet begun. ”

“ Evolution, we repeat, has brought us materialistic monism, in whose barren soil nor faith, nor idealism, nor morality, nor poesy, nor art, nor any of the finer things of life can thrive. To its dystelic and atomistic view, Nature has ceased to be the vicar of God, and material things are no longer sacramental symbols of eternal verities. It denies all design in Nature, and dismembers all beauty into meaningless fragments. ”

“ The constancy of the martyr and the patriotism of the fallen soldier become unintelligible folly, while a heartless and infamous sensualism preying vulturelike upon the carrion of human misery and corruption is to be reckoned the highest expression of wisdom and efficiency. The grandest ideals that have inspired enthusiasm and devotion in human breasts are but idle dreams and worthless delusions. From a world which accepts this degraded view of human nature all heroism and chivalry must vanish utterly; for it will recognize no loftier incentives to action than pleasure and love of self. ”

“ The monophyletic derivation of all organic forms from one primordial cell or protoblast is a fantastic dream, for which, from the very nature of things, natural science does not, and can not, furnish even the semblance of an objective basis. The ground is cut from under our feet, the moment we attempt to extend the principle of descent outside the limits of an organic phylum. The sole basis of inference is a group of uniformities, and, unless these uniformities predominate over the diversities, there can be no rational application of the principle of transformism. ”

“ Now, whatever one’s views may be on the subject of transformism, this prolonged permanence of certain genera and species is an indubitable fact, which is utterly irreconcilable with a universal law of organic evolution. The theory of transformism is impotent to explain an exception so palpable as this; for persistence and transmutation cannot be subsumed under one and the same principle. That which accounts for change cannot account for unchange. ”

“ With this inconvenient restraint removed, there remains no alternative save to aspire to the acquisition of all the pleasures of life; and for him who lacks the wherewithal to procure them for himself there remains no other recourse than to seek them by means of violence or strategy. Hence anarchy. In this supposition, morality no longer possesses that sole, true, and efficacious sanction which religion alone can furnish; it amounts to nothing more than the resultant of the evolution of the individual’s perfections and their coördination to the well-being of his race and of society. ”

“ I feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man, and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I remember, when I wrote the ‘Origin of Species’; and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? ”

“ But the scientist is not content to note the bare fact of its existence. He seeks an explanation, he wishes to know the raison d’être of homology. Innumerable threads of similarity run through the woof of divergence, and the question arises: How can we account for the coëxistence of this woof of diversity with a warp of similarity? Certainly, if called upon to explain the similarity existent between members of one and the same species, even the man in the street would resort instinctively to the principle of inheritance and the assumption of common ancestry, exclaiming: “Like sire, like son!” ”

“ When we ask by what right men of science presume to lift the veil of mystery from a remote past, which no one has observed, we are told that the justification of this procedure is the principle of the uniformity of nature or the invariability of natural laws. Nature’s laws are the same yesterday, today, and forever. Hence the scientist, who wishes to penetrate into the unknown past, has only to “prolong the methods of nature from the present into the past.” ”

“ The blade of grass can nourish not only a horse, but its very self, whereas a molecule of sodium nitrate is impotent to nourish itself, and can only nourish a subject other than itself, such as the blade of grass. Here the active source and receptive subject of the action is one and the same unit, namely, the living organism, which can operate upon itself in the interest of its own perfection. In chemical synthesis two substances interact to produce a third, but in vital assimilation one substance is incorporated into another without the production of a third. ”

“ According to the principle of the minimum, it is unscientific to assume in a given agent the presence of anything that is not rigidly required for the explanation of its observed phenomena. We must refrain, therefore, from reading into the consciousness of an animal what is not really there. We must abstain from transporting our own viewpoint and personality into a brute, by imagining, with Darwin, that we discern a “sense of humor,” or a “high degree of self-complacency” in some pet animal, like a dog. ”

“ The so-called Homo primigenius, therefore, is not a distinct species of human being, but merely an ancient race that is, at most, a distinct variety or subspecies of man. In spite of tireless searching, no traces of a bestial, irrational man have been discovered. Indeed, man whom nature has left naked, defenseless, unarmed with natural weapons, and deficient in instinct, has no other resource than his reason and could never have survived without it. ”

“ The earliest work of art wrought by the human mind—more ancient than any literary document, and prior even to the first whisperings of tradition—the human language, forms one uninterrupted chain, from the first dawn of history down to our own times. ”

“ To make the human mind or soul a product of evolution is equivalent to a denial of its spirituality, because it implies that the human soul like that of the brute, is inherent in the potentiality of matter, and is therefore a purely material principle, totally dependent on the matter, of which it is a perfection. Between such a soul and the sentient principle present in the beast, there would be no essential difference of kind, but only an accidental difference of degree; and this is precisely what Darwin and his successors have spared no effort to demonstrate. ”

“ To disprove the theory of organic evolution is a feat beyond our power to accomplish. We can only adduce negative evidence, whose scope is to show that the various evolutionary arguments are inconsequential or inconclusive. We cannot rob the theory of its intrinsic possibility, and sheer justice compels us to confess that certain facts, like those of symbiotic preadaptation, lend themselves more readily to a transformistic, than to a fixistic, interpretation. ”

“ With the close of the nineteenth century the hour hand of biological science had completed another revolution. One after another, the classic systems of evolution had passed into the discard, as its remorseless progress registered their doom. The last of these systems, De-Vriesianism, enjoyed a meteoric vogue in the first years of the present century, but it, too, has gone into eclipse with the rise of rediscovered Mendelism. Notwithstanding all these reverses, however, the evolutionary theory still continues to number a host of steadfast adherents. ”

“ By way of anomaly, almost any human peculiarity can occur in animals, and, conversely, any bestial peculiarity in man, but the resemblance to man of an animal outside of the alleged line of human descent represents a grave difficulty for the theory of evolution, and not an argument in its favor.
The human body is certainly not a mosaic of heterogenetic organs, i.e. a complex of structures inherited from any and every sort of animal, whether extant or extinct; for such a vast number and variety of ancestors could not possibly have coöperated to produce man. ”

“ It is this that constitutes the thread of continuity which links our yesterdays with today, and makes us morally responsible for all the deliberate deeds of a lifetime. Courts of law do not acquit a criminal because he is in a different frame of mind from that which induced him to commit murder, nor do they excuse him on the score that metabolism has made him a different mass of flesh from that which perpetrated the crime. Such philosophies as phenomenalism and materialism are purely academic. Even their advocates dare not reduce them to consistent practice in everyday life. ”

“ Whosoever, therefore, sees in the homology of organic forms conclusive evidence of descent from a common ancestor, cannot, without grave inconsistency, reject the doctrine of the bestial origin of man. He may still, it is true, exclude the [Pg 52] human mind or soul from the evolutionary account of origins, but, if homology is, in any sense, a sound argument for common descent, the evolutionary origin of the human body is a foregone conclusion, and none of the anatomical “differences in degree” will avail to spare us the humiliation of sharing with the ape a common family-tree. ”

“ One can alternate at will between cænogenesis and palingenesis, just as, in comparative anatomy, one can alternate capriciously between convergence and homology, on the general understanding of its being a case of: “Heads, I win; tails, you lose”—certainly, there is no objective consideration to restrain us in such procedure. “Such weapons as Cænogenesis and Convergence,” says Kohlbrugge (in his “Die Morphologische Abstammung des Menschen,” 1908) “are unfortunately so shaped that anyone can use them when they suit him, or throw them aside when they do not. ”

“ For what assurance can we have that the fruits of our sacrifice will be acceptable to a progressive posterity, or what difference will our self-denial make, when the whole human species shall have become extinct on the desolate surface of a dying world? Without an adequate motivation for altruism, however, the existence of society becomes impossible, since self-interest is not a feasible substitute. ”

“ Unless this perceptive act has for its object some unitary and uniformly persistent reality distinct from our composite, corruptible bodies, and not identified with our transitory thoughts, this sense of permanent personal identity would be utterly impossible. Materialism, which recognizes nothing more in man than a decaying organism, a mere vortex of fluent molecules, is at a loss to account for our consciousness of being always the same person. Phenomenalism, which identifies mind or self with the “thought-stream,” is equally impotent to account for this sense of our abiding sameness. ”

“ Chemical Theories of the Origin of Life
In fact, the very notion of a chemical synthesis of living matter is founded on a misconception. It would, indeed, be rash to set limits to the chemist’s power of synthesizing organic compounds, but living protoplasm is not a single chemical compound. Rather it is a complex system of compounds, enzymes and organelles, coördinated and integrated into an organized whole by a persistent principle of unity and finality. Organic life, to say nothing at all of its unique dynamics, is a morphological as well as a chemical problem ”

“ Hence Dewey refers to evolution as a “clinching proof” of the continuity hypothecated by the monist. For the latter, there is no hierarchy of values, and all essential distinctions are abolished; for him nothing is unique and everything is equally important. He affirms the democracy of facts and is blind to all perspective in nature. He is, in short, the enemy of all beauty, all spirituality, all culture, all morality, and all religion. He substitutes neurons for the soul, and enthrones Natural Selection in the place of the Creator. ”

“ To accept as certain what remains unproved, is to compromise our intellectual sincerity. True certainty, which rests on the recognition of objective necessity, will never be attainable so long as difficulties that sap the very base of evolutionary argumentation are left unanswered; and, as for those who, in the teeth of discordant factual evidence, profess, nevertheless, to have certainty regarding the “fact” of evolution, we can [Pg 125] only say that such persons cannot have a very high or exacting conception of what scientific certainty really means. ”

“ It is by introspection or reflective thought that we discriminate between our present and our past thoughts, and become conscious of our own consciousness. Our intellect even reflects upon its own act of reflection, and so on indefinitely, so that, unless we are prepared to accept the absurd alternative of an infinite series of thinkers, we have no choice but to identify the subject knowing with the subject known. ”

“ When we apply our rationes convenientiae to the Divine operations, we must not make the mistake of applying them to the Divine action itself instead of the created effects of that action. We may be competent to discern disorder and irregularity in finite things, but we are wholly incompetent to prescribe rules for Divine conduct. To say that God is constrained by His infinite Wisdom to indirect, rather than direct, production, or that He must evolve a variety of forms out of living, rather than non-living, matter, is to be guilty of ridiculous anthropomorphism. ”

“ Human reason, therefore, owes its origin, not to any evolution of the human body, but to the creation of the human soul, which is the source and subject of that unique prerogative of man, namely: the power of abstract thought. ”

“ It is, in fact, by no means inconceivable that the scientific world will eventually discard the now prevalent dogma of evolution. In that case those who have seen fit to reconcile religion with evolution will have the questionable pleasure of unreconciling it in response to this reversal of scientific opinion.
On the whole, the safest attitude toward evolution is the agnostic one. It commits us to no uncertain position. It does not compromise our intellectual sincerity by requiring us to accept the dogmatism of scientific orthodoxy as a substitute for objective evidence. ”

“ Nevertheless, even in man, the soul forms one substance with the organism, and the organism participates as a coëfficient factor in all his vital functions, both physiological and psychic, excluding only the superorganic or spiritual functions of rational thought and volition, whose agent and recipient is the soul alone. In man, then, soul and body unite to form a single substance, a single nature, and a single person. ”