In studying it we should like to follow a method somewhat different from that usually observed in apologetic writings. “Darwinism,” even in its technical, biological form, never was quite, and is to-day not at all a unified and consistent system. It has been modified in so many ways and presented in such different colours, that we must either refrain altogether from attempting to get into close quarters with it, or we must make ourselves acquainted to some extent with the phases of the theory as it has gradually developed up to the present day. This is the more necessary and useful since it is precisely within the circle of technical experts that revolts from and criticisms of the Darwinian theory [pg 087] have in recent years arisen; and these are so incisive, so varied, and so instructive, that through them we can adjust our standpoint in relation to the theory better than in any other way. And in thus letting the biologists speak for themselves, we are spared the fatal task of entering into the discussion of questions belonging to a region outside our own particular studies.

We cannot, however, give more than a short sketch. But even such a sketch may do more towards giving us a general knowledge of the question and showing us a way out of the difficulties it raises than any of the current “refutations.” To supplement this sketch, and facilitate a thorough understanding of the problem, we shall give somewhat fuller references than are usual to the relevant literature. And the same method will be pursued in the following chapter, which deals with the mechanical theory of life. This method throws more upon the reader, but it is probably the most satisfactory one for the serious student.

The reactions from the Darwinism of the schools which we have just referred to, and to which the second half of this chapter is devoted, are, of course, of a purely scientific kind. And while we are devoting our attention to them, we must not be unfaithful to the canon laid down in the previous chapter, namely that with reference to the question of teleology in the religious sense no real answer can be looked for from scientific study, not even if it be anti-Darwinian. In this case, too, it is impossible to read the convictions [pg 088] and intuitions of the religious conception of the world out of a scientific study of nature: they precede it. But here, too, we may find some accessory support and indirect corroboration more or less strong and secure. This may be illustrated by a single example. It will be shown that, on closer study, it is not impossible to subordinate even the apparently confused tangle of naturalistic factors of evolution which are summed up in the phrase “struggle for existence” to interpretation from the religious point of view. But matters will be in quite a different position if the whole theory collapses, and instead of evolution and its paths being given over to confusion and chance, it appears that from the very beginning and at every point there is a predetermination of fixed and inevitable lines along and up which it must advance. In many other connections considerations of a like nature will reveal themselves to us in the course of our study.

Darwinism, as popularly understood, is the theory that “men are descended from monkeys,” and in general that the higher forms of life are descended from the lower, and it is regarded as Darwin's epoch-making work and his chief merit—or fault according to the point of view—that he established the Theory of Descent. This is only half correct, and it leaves out the real point of Darwinism altogether. The Theory of Descent had its way prepared by the evolutionist ideas and the speculative nature-philosophy of Goethe, Schelling, Hegel and Oken; by the suggestions and glimmerings of the [pg 089] nature-mysticism of the romanticists; by the results of comparative anatomy and physiology; was already hinted at, at least as far as derivation of species was concerned, in the works of LinnÉ himself; was worked out in the “zoological philosophies,” by the elder Darwin, by Lamarck, Etienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire and Buffon; was in the field long before Charles Darwin's time; was already in active conflict with the antagonistic theory of the “constancy of species,” and had its more or less decided adherents. Yet undoubtedly it was through and after Darwin that the theory grew so much more powerful and gained general acceptance.