BY PROF. JAS. T. BIXBY, PH. D.

In the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a memorandum, copied from his pocket note-book of 1837, to this effect:—“In July, opened first notebook on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly struck with the character of the South American fossils and the species on Galapagos Archipelago.”

These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epoch-making views as to the development of life and the work of natural selection in evolving species.

His suspicions that species were not immutable and made at one cast, directly by the fiat of the Creator, seemed to him, at first, he says, almost like murder.

To the greater part of the church, when in 1859, after twenty years of work in accumulating the proofs of his theory, he at last gave it to the world, it seemed quite as bad as murder.

It is very interesting now to look back upon the history and career of the Darwinian theory in the last thirty years; to recall, first the fierce outcry and denunciation it elicited, then the gradual accumulation of corroboratory evidence from all quarters in its favor; the accession of one scientific authority after another to the new views; the softening, little by little, of ecclesiastical opposition; its gradual acceptance by the broad-minded alike in theological and scientific circles; then, in these recent years, the exaltation of the new theory into a scientific and philosophic creed, wherein matter, force, and evolution constitute the new trinity, which, unless the modern man piously believes, he becomes anathematized and excommunicated by all the priests of the new dogmatism.

In the field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has won the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old time prejudices and slow conservatism, clinging to its creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the cast-off shell of oyster or clam, still resist it. The great body of the Christian laity looks askance on it. And even in progressive America, one of the largest and most liberal of American denominations has recently formally tried and condemned one of its clergy for heresy, for the publication of a book in which the principles of Evolution are frankly adopted and applied to Christianity. For a man to call himself a Christian Evolutionist is (we have been told by high Orthodox authority) a contradiction in terms.

I think it is safe to say to-day that Evolution has come to stay. It is too late to turn it out of the mansions of modern thought. And it is, therefore, a vital question, “Can belief in God, and the soul, and divine revelation abide under the same roof with evolution in peace? Or must Christianity vacate the realm of modern thought and leave it to the chilling frosts of materialism and scepticism?”

Now, if I have been able to understand the issue and its grounds, there is no such alternative, no such incompatibility between Evolution and Christianity.

There is, I know, a form of Evolution and a form of Christianity, which are mutually contradictory.

There is a form of Evolution which is narrowly materialistic. It dogmatically asserts that there is nothing in existence but matter and physical forces, and the iron laws according to which they develop. Life, according to this school, is only a product of the happy combination of the atoms; feeling and thought are but the iridescence of the brain tissues; conscience but a transmuted form of ancestral fears and expediences. Soul, revelation, providence, nothing but illusions of the childish fancy of humanity’s infancy. Opposed to it, fighting with all the intensity of those who fight for their very life, stands a school of Christians who maintain that unless the special creation of species by divine fiat and the frequent intervention of God and His angels in the world be admitted, religion has received its death wound. According to this school, unless the world was created in six days, and Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and it obeyed, and Hezekiah turned the solar shadow back on the dial, and Jesus was born without human father, and unless some new miracle will interfere with the regular course of law, of rain and dew, of sickness and health, of cause and effect, whenever a believer lifts up his voice in prayer, why then, the very foundations of religion are destroyed.Now, of course, between a Christianity and an Evolutionism of this sort, there is an irreconcilable conflict. But it is because neither of them is a fair, rational, or true form of thought.

When the principle of Evolution is properly comprehended and expounded; when Christianity is interpreted in the light that history and philosophy require,—the two will be found to have no difficulty in joining hands.

Though a purely naturalistic Evolutionism may ignore God; and a purely supernatural religion may leave no room for Evolution, a natural religion and a rational Evolutionism may yet harmoniously unite in a higher and more fruitful marriage.

Let us only recognize Evolution by the divine spirit, as the process of God’s working in the world, and we have then a theory which has a place and a function, at once for all that the newest science has to teach and the most venerable faith needs to retain.

In the first place, Evolution is not itself a cause. It is no force in itself. It has no originating power. It is simply a method and law of the occurrence of things. Evolution shows that all things proceed, little by little, without breach of continuity; that the higher ever proceeds from the lower; the more complex ever unfolds from the more simple. For every species or form, it points out some ancestor or natural antecedent, from which by gradual modification, it has been derived. And in natural selection, the influence of the environment, sexual selection, use and disuse, sterility, and the variability of the organism, Science shows us some of the secondary factors or conditions of this development. But none of these are supposed by it to be first causes or originating powers. What these are, science itself does not claim the right as yet to declare.

Now, it is true that this unbroken course of development, this omnipresent reign of law, is inconsistent with the theological theories of supernatural intervention that have so often claimed a monopoly of faith. But independent of all scientific reasons, on religious and philosophical grounds themselves, this dogmatic view is no longer to be accepted. For if God be the God of all-seeing wisdom and foresight that reverence conceives him to be, his work should be too perfect from the outset to demand such changes of plan and order of working. The great miracle of miracles, as Isaac Taylor used to say, is that Providence needs no miracles to carry out its all-perfect plans.

But if, I hear it asked, the huge machine of the universe thus grinds on and has ever ground on, without interruption; if every event is closely bound to its physical antecedent, life to the cell, mind to brain, man to his animal ancestry and bodily conditions,—what other result will there be than an inevitable surrender to materialism? When Laplace was asked by Napoleon, on presenting to him his famous essay on the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the stellar universe, “Why do I see here no mention of the Deity?” the French astronomer proudly replied: “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”

Is not that the natural lesson of Evolutionism, to say that God is a hypothesis, no longer needed by science and which progressive thought, therefore, better dismiss?

I do not think so. Old time materialism dismissed the idea of God because it dismissed the idea of a beginning. The forces and phenomena of the world were supposed eternal; and therefore a Creator was unnecessary. But the conception of Evolution is radically different. It is a movement that demands a motor force behind it. It is a movement, moreover, that according to the testimony of modern science cannot have been eternal. The modern theory of heat and the dissipation of energy requires that our solar system and the nebula from which it sprang should have had a beginning in some finite period of time. The evolutionary process cannot have been going on forever; for the amount of heat and the number of degrees of temperature and the rate of cooling, are all finite, calculable quantities, and therefore the process cannot have been going on for more than a certain finite number of years, more or less millions, say. Moreover, if the original fire-mist was perfectly homogeneous, and not impelled into motion by any external force, it would never have begun to rotate and evolve into planets and worlds. If perfectly homogeneous, it would have remained, always balanced and always immobile. To start it on its course of rotation and evolution, there must have been either some external impelling power, or else some original differentiation of forces or conditions; for which, again, some other cause than itself must be supposed. For the well-known law of inertia forbids that any material system that is in absolute equilibrium should spontaneously start itself into motion. As John Stuart Mill has admitted, “the laws of nature can give no account of their own origin.”

In the second place, notice that the materialistic interpretation of Evolution fails to account for that which is most characteristic in the process, the steady progress it reveals. Were Evolution an aimless, fruitless motion, rising and falling alternately, or moving round and round in an endless circle, the reference of these motions to the blind forces of matter might have, perhaps, a certain plausibility. But the movements of the evolution process are of quite a different character. They are not chaotic; no barren, useless circlings back to the same point, again and again; but they are progressive; and if often they seem to return to their point of departure, we see, on close examination, that the return is always on a higher plane. The motion is a spiral one, ever advancing to loftier and loftier ranges. Now this progressive motion is something that no accidental play of the atoms will account for. For chance builds no such rational structures. Chance writes no such intelligent dramas, with orderly beginning, crescendo, and climax. Or if some day, chance builds a structure with some show of order in it, to-morrow it pulls it down. It does not move steadily forward with permanent constructiveness.

The further Science penetrates into the secrets of the universe the more regular seems the march of thought presented there; the more harmonious the various parts; the more rational the grand system that is discovered. “How the one force of the universe should have pursued the pathway of Evolution through the lapse of millions of ages, leaving traces so legible by intelligence to-day, unless from beginning to end the whole process had been dominated by intelligence,” this is something, as Francis Abbot well says, that passes the limits of conjecture. The all-luminous intelligibility of the universe is the all-sufficient proof of the intelligence of the cause that produced it. In the annals of science there is nothing more curious than the prophetic power which those savans have gained who have grasped this secret of nature—the rationality of the universe. It was by this confidence in finding in the hitherto unexplored domains of nature what reason demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the mammalian skeleton, discovered the intermaxillary bone in man; and Sir William Hamilton, from the mathematical consequences of the undulation of light, led the way to the discovery of conical refraction. A similar story is told of Prof. Agassiz and Prof. Pierce, the one the great zoÖlogist, the other the great mathematician, of Cambridge. Agassiz, having studied the formation of radiate animals, and having found them all referable to three different plans of structure, asked Prof. Pierce, without informing him of his discovery, how to execute all the variations possible, conformed to the fundamental idea of a radiated structure around a central axis. Prof. Pierce, although quite ignorant of natural history, at once devised the very three plans discovered by Agassiz, as the only fundamental plans which could be framed in accordance with the given elements. How significantly do such correspondences speak of the working of mind in nature, moulding it in conformity with ideas of reason. Thus to see the laws of thought exhibiting themselves as also the laws of being seems to me a fact sufficient of itself to prove the presence of an over-ruling mind in nature.

Is there any way of escaping this obvious conclusion? The only method that has been suggested has been to refer these harmonies of nature back to the original regularity of the atoms. As the drops of frozen moisture on the window pane build up the symmetrical frost-forms without design or reason, by virtue of the original similarity of the component parts, so do the similar atoms, without any more reason or plan, build up the harmonious forms of nature.

But this answer brings us face to face with a third still more significant problem, a still greater obstacle to materialism. Why are the atoms of nature thus regular, thus similar, one to another? Here are millions on millions of atoms of gold, each like its fellow atom. Millions and millions of atoms of oxygen, each with the same velocity of movement, same weight and chemical properties. All the millions on millions on millions of atoms on the globe are not of infinitely varied shape, weight, size, quality; but there are only some seventy different kinds, and all the millions of one kind, just as like one another as bullets out of the same mould, so that each new atom of oxygen that comes to a burning flame does the same work and acts in precisely the same way as its fellows. Did you ever think of that? If you have ever realized what it means, you must recognize this uniformity of the atoms, billions and billions of them as like one another as if run out of the same mould—as the most astonishing thing in nature.

Now, among the atoms, there can have been no birth, no death, no struggle for existence, no natural selection to account for this. What other explanation, then, in reason is there, than to say, as those great men of science, Sir John Herschel and Clerk Maxwell, who have, in our day, most deeply pondered this curious fact, have said, that this division of all the infinity of atoms in nature into a very limited number of groups, all the billions of members in each group substantially alike in their mechanical and chemical properties, “gives to each of the atoms the essential characters at once of a manufactured article and a subordinate agent.”

Evolution cannot, then, be justly charged with materialism. On the contrary, it especially demands a divine creative force as the starter of its processes and the endower of the atoms with their peculiar properties. The foundation of that scientific system which the greatest of modern expositors of Evolution has built up about that principle (Herbert Spencer’s synthetic philosophy) is the persistence of an infinite, eternal, and indestructible force, of which all things that we see are the manifestations.

To suppose, as many of the camp-followers of the evolution philosophy do, that the processes of successive change and gradual modification, which have been so clearly traced out in nature, relieve us from the need or right of asking for any anterior and higher cause of these processes; or that because the higher and finer always unfolds from the lower and coarser, therefore there was really nothing else in existence, either at the beginning or at present, than these crude elements which alone disclose themselves at first; and that these gross, sensuous facts are the only source and explanation of all that has followed them,—this is a most superficial and inadequate view. For this explanation, as we have already noticed, furnishes no fountain-head of power to maintain the constant upward-mounting of the waters in the world’s conduits. It furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams into ever wise and ordered channels. To explain the higher life that comes out of these low beginnings, we must suppose the existence of spiritual powers, unseen at first, and disclosing themselves only in the fuller, later results, the moral and spiritual phenomena that are the crowning flower and fruit of the long process. When a thing has grown from a lower to a higher form, its real rank in nature is not shown by what it began in, but by what it has become. Though chemistry has grown out of alchemy, and astronomy out of astrology, this does not empty them of present truth or impair at all their authority and trustworthiness to-day. Though man’s mind has grown out of the sensations of brutish ancestors, that does not take away the fact that he has now risen to a height from which he overlooks all these mists and sees the light which never was on sea or land. The real beginning of a statue is not in the rough outline in which it first appears, but in the creative idea of the perfect work which regulates its whole progress. The real nature of a tree is not to be discovered in the first swellings of the acorn, or the first out-pushing of its rootlets, but rather are acorn and rootlet themselves parts of that generic idea, that evolutive potentiality, which is only to be understood when manifested in its completer form in the full-grown monarch of the forest. So to discern the real character and motor-power of the world’s evolution, we must look, not to its beginnings, but to its end, and see in the latest stages, and its highest moral and spiritual forms and forces, not disguises of its earlier stages, but ampler manifestations of that Divine power and purpose which is the ever-active agent, working through all the varied levels of creation.

The evolution theory is, also, it must be acknowledged, hostile to that phase of theology which conceives of God as a being outside of nature; which regarded the universe as a dead lump, a mechanical fabric where the Creator once worked, at the immensely remote dawn of creation; and to which again, for a few short moments, this transcendental Power stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive species of living beings were called into being in brief exertions of supernatural energy. But this mechanical view of God who, as Goethe said, “only from without should drive and twirl the universe about,” what a poor conception of God, after all, was that; not undeserving the ridicule of the great German.Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has given us, as a Power not indefinitely remote, but ever present and infinitely near,

“A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,

And rolls through all things,”