Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

“ He adopts the first interpretation of animal phenomena, namely, that there has been a transmutation of species, that the scale of creation has been gradually advancing in virtue of an inherent and organic law of development. Nature, he contends, began humbly; her first works were of simple form, which were gradually meliorated by circumstances favourable to improvement, and that everywhere animals and plants exhibit traces of a parallel advance of the physical conditions and the organic structure. ”

“ The remains and traces of plants and animals found in the succession of strata show that, while these operations were going on, the earth gradually became the theatre of organic being, simple forms appearing first, and more complicated afterwards. A time when there was no life is first seen. We then see life begin, and go on; but whole ages elapsed before man came to crown the work of nature. ”

“ Let us seek in the history of the earth’s formation for a new suggestion on this point. We have seen powerful evidence, that the construction of this globe and its associates, and inferentially that of all the other globes of space, was the result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are expressions of his will. What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of his will? ”

“ The great fact established by it is, that the organic creation, as we now see it, was not placed upon the earth at once; it observed a PROGRESS. Now we can imagine the Deity calling a young plant or animal into existence instantaneously; but we see that he does not usually do so. The young plant and also the young animal go through a series of conditions, advancing them from a mere germ to the fully developed repetition of the respective parental forms. ”

“ Nature's greatest phenomena are the celestial spaces and the bodies that fill them; our own planet and its living occupants. Upon each of these, their commencement and subsequent vicissitudes, the Vestiges of Creation have propounded an hypothesis, but one mystery is only sought to be explained by another still more mysterious. For the fiat of a Creator chemical affinities and mechanical laws have been substituted, but aided by these the author has failed to produce a world such as we find it. ”

“ But how does this notion comport with what we have seen of the gradual advance of species, from the humblest to the highest? How can we suppose an immediate exertion of this creative power at one time to produce zoophytes, another time to add a few marine mollusks, another to bring in one or two conchifers, again to produce crustaceous fishes, again perfect fishes, and so on to the end? This would surely be to take a very mean view of the Creative Power—to, in short, anthropomorphize it, or reduce it to some such character as that borne by the ordinary proceedings of mankind. ”

“ It goes forth to take its chance of instant oblivion, or of a long and active course of usefulness in the world. Neither contingency can be of any importance to me, beyond the regret or the satisfaction which may be imparted by my sense of a lost or a realized benefit to my fellow-creatures. The book, as far as I am aware, is the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation. ”

“ I suggest, then, as an hypothesis already countenanced by much that is ascertained, and likely to be further sanctioned by much that remains to be known, that the first step was an advance under favour of peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being, to the next more complicated, and this through the medium of the ordinary process of generation.
Unquestionably, what we ordinarily see of nature is calculated to impress a conviction that each species invariably produces its like. ”

“ Is it not idle almost to speculate on the impenetrable secret of their origin when their very existence is undefinable—when their end, their glittering discs, and all but immeasurable distances are wholly unapproachable? Nor hardly less beyond our grasp is the commencement of organic existences. ”

“ And this work of creation, or rather of development, is still in progress all around us, and in all its various stages, though in the portion most directly exposed to the observation of man it is far advanced towards perfection. Upon this earth, the unaided action of these atoms is still evolving all the phenomena of generation, progress, and decay, of vegetable and animal life, of instinct and of mind. ”

“ We are very far from intending to follow the author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of the Creation through all the sciences along which his track has led him. We shall limit ourselves to what forms the most peculiar and startling portion of his work—to his theory of the origin and development of animal life. ”

“ Land-plants and animals came next, though of a low type; continually advancing orders of beings, reptiles, birds, and mammifers, suited to the improved condition of things, successively appeared, until, at the latest epoch, man entered upon the scene, the head of animated nature as at present constituted, with powers and capacities well adapted for the full enjoyment of the augmented riches of the earth. ”

“ Design and intelligence in the creation are left paramount as before, and our impression of the skill exercised, and the means employed, only transferred to another part of the work. He who produced the primordial condition the author supposes, who filled space with such a mist, composed of such materials, subjected to such laws, such constitution, that sun, moon, and stars necessarily resulted from them, appears omnipotent as ever. But it does not advance inquiry, nor assist us in explaining the wonders we contemplate in our own globe. ”

“ But our view at length extending and becoming more comprehensive, we begin to see parterres balancing each other, trees, statues, and arbours placed symmetrically, and that the whole is an assemblage of parts mutually reflective. It can scarcely be necessary to point to the inference hence arising with regard to the origination of nature in some Power, of which man’s mind is a faint and humble representation. ”

“ Still, however, there is no authentic or satisfactory instance of human remains being found, except in deposits obviously of very modern date; a tolerably strong proof that the creation of our own species is a comparatively recent event, and one posterior (generally speaking) to all the great natural transactions chronicled by geology. ”

“ Last of all, "God created man in his own image, male and female created he them." We are not merely quoting Scripture; we are repeating the facts positively affirmed by the geologists, and incorporated by our author into his "history"—as authentic leaves taken from the "stone book"—in the same order in which they are narrated in the first chapter of Genesis. ”

“ Geology at first seems inconsistent with the authority of the Mosaic record. A storm of unreasoning indignation rises against its teachers. In time, its truths, being found quite irresistible, are admitted, and mankind continue to regard the Scriptures with the same respect as before. So also with several other sciences. ”

“ We recognize a divine involution as the antecedent and causation of all so-called natural evolution. We see each link in the chain of being, from least to greatest, from the simplest to the most complex; grass, herb, and tree, fish, reptile, bird, and beast, as multiple yet orderly expressions of the immanence and permanence of the fatherhood of God. We view the creation of man as His highest handiwork, in which the seed of human life, bearing latent within it every high attribute and potency possessed by its celestial source, is placed or planted in a prepared material environment. ”

“ In fact, whenever an independent origin of the different forms of animals and plants has been assumed, naturalists have found themselves compelled to fall back upon so many “acts of creation,” that is, on supernatural interferences of the Creator in the natural course of things, which in all other cases goes on without interference. ”

“ The hypotheses respecting the origin of species, which profess to stand upon a scientific basis, and, as such, alone demand serious attention, are of two kinds. The one, the “special creation” hypothesis, presumes every species to have originated from one or more stocks, these not being the result of the modification of any other form of living matter—or arising by natural agencies—but being produced, as such, by a supernatural creative act. ”

“ Thus we see, wherever we turn our eyes, the various species of creatures which God has made. Every element is stocked with inhabitants, the sea with fishes, the air with fowls, and the earth with quadrupeds and creeping things. All these different provinces are richly replenished with food for the support of all the innumerable creatures that live in them. And what surprising skill and sagacity do some in the brute creation discover ”

“ Since it has been shown that from the beginning of Creation till the present time the physical history of the world has been divided into a succession of distinct periods, each one accompanied by its characteristic animals and plants, so that our own epoch is only the closing one in the long procession of the ages, naturalists have been constantly striving to find the connecting link between them all, and to prove that each such creation has been a normal and natural growth out of the preceding one. ”

“ The Creation is, as it were, a Poem in the Sublime: Every Species of created Beings is a Stanza, and every individual Creature, a Verse in it, as a certain learned Divine expresses it. Creation here is not stiled εργον, which is a Work of manual Labor, but ποιημα [333] , a Work of Skill; not so much the Operation of the Hand, as of the Head and Heart: No Creature so small and mean, but glitters with a Beam of divine Skill. ”

“ All the different ideas which we may form of a separate and independent origin of the individual organic species by creation lead us, when logically carried out, to a so-called anthropomorphism, that is, to imagining the Creator as a man-like being, as was shown in our last chapter. ”

“ If, taking this point of view, we were to explain the origin of the first terrestrial organisms, from which all the others are descended, as due to the action of a personal Creator acting according to a definite plan, we should of course have to renounce all scientific knowledge of the process, and pass from the domain of true science to the completely distinct domain of poetical faith. By assuming a supernatural act of creation we should be taking a leap into the inconceivable. ”

“ The truth of this remark is indeed shown by that old but somewhat exaggerated canon in natural history of "Natura non facit saltum." We meet with this admission in the writings of almost every experienced naturalist; or, as Milne Edwards has well expressed it, Nature is prodigal in variety, but niggard in innovation. Why, on the theory of Creation, should this be so? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps? ”

“ To encounter this supposed reason for maintaining the doctrine of special creations, he proceeds to ask whether the divine power "would not have been still better demonstrated by the separate creation of each individual than it is by the separate creation of each species? Why should there exist this process of natural generation? Why should not omnipotence have been proved by the supernatural production of plants and animals everywhere throughout the world from hour to hour? ”

“ The Creator formed man out of a clod of earth, breathed the living breath into his nostrils, and then created for him the different useful domestic animals and garden plants, among which he thought well to save himself the trouble of distinguishing species. ”

“ Finally, that phase of highest culture which recognizes the law of universal evolution, formulates the [212] view of one continuous creative act, in which every object is still a creation but not a separate creation,—only a separate manifestation of one eternal act of creative energy. The history of creation, which means the same thing as the history of evolution, shows innumerable adaptations which may surely be considered as the work of a cosmos designer. Evolution has profoundly modified our conceptions of design in nature as it has those of creation. ”

“ Even the production of individual species is not the act of divine Providence, but is a process of nature — in fact, of evolution, in modern parlance. These Naturalists, as they called themselves, denied the existence of miracles ”

“ But while no hypothesis of development can neutralize or explain away the great geologic fact, that every true species had a beginning independently, apparently, of every preceding species, there was demonstrably a general progress, in the course of creation, from lower to higher forms, which seems scarce less fraught with important consequences to the natural theologian than this fact of beginning itself. ”

“ Now the earth has become inhabitable for organisms, and plants are first created, animals later—and among the latter the inhabitants of the water and the air first, afterwards the inhabitants of the dry land. Finally God creates man, the last of all organisms, in his own image, and as the ruler of the earth.
Two great and fundamental ideas, common also to the non-miraculous theory of development, meet us in this Mosaic hypothesis of creation, with surprising clearness and simplicity—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. ”