The European nations are acknowledged to have come, in successive waves of migration, from Asia. Modern ethnologists generally agree that the Indian races of America are derived from Mongoloid sources in Eastern Asia, either through Polynesia or by way of the Aleutian Islands. Bunsen, Philos. of Universal History, 2:112—the Asiatic origin of all the North American Indians “is as fully proved as the unity of family among themselves.” Mason, Origins of Invention, 361—“Before the time of Columbus, the Polynesians made canoe voyages from Tahiti to Hawaii, a distance of 2300 miles.” Keane, Man Past and Present, 1-15, 349-440, treats of the American Aborigines under two primitive types: Longheads from Europe and Roundheads from Asia. The human race, he claims, originated in Indomalaysia and spread thence by migration over the globe. The world was peopled from one center by Pleistocene man. The primary groups were evolved each in its special habitat, but all sprang from a Pleiocene precursor 100,000 years ago. W. T. Lopp, missionary to the Eskimos, at Port Clarence, Alaska, on the American side of Bering Strait, writes under date of August 31, 1892: “No thaws during the winter, and ice blocked in the Strait. This has always been doubted by whalers. Eskimos have told them that they sometimes crossed the Strait on ice, but they have never believed them. Last February and March our Eskimos had a tobacco famine. Two parties (five men) went with dogsleds to East Cape, on the Siberian coast, and traded some beaver, otter and marten skins for Russian tobacco, and returned safely. It is only during an occasional winter that they can do this. But every summer they make several trips in their big wolf-skin boats—forty feet long. These observations may throw some light upon the origin of the prehistoric races of America.”

Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48—“The semi-civilized nations of Java and Sumatra are found in possession of a civilization which at first glance shows itself to have been borrowed from Hindu and Moslem sources.” See also Sir Henry Rawlinson, quoted in Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 156, 157; Smyth, Unity of Human Races, 223-236; Pickering, Races of Man, Introd., synopsis, and page 316; Guyot, Earth and Man, 298-334; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, and UnitÉ de l'EspÈce Humaine; [pg 478]Godron, UnitÉ de l'EspÈce Humaine, 2:412 sq. Per contra, however, see Prof. A. H. Sayce: “The evidence is now all tending to show that the districts in the neighborhood of the Baltic were those from which the Aryan languages first radiated, and where the race or races who spoke them originally dwelt. The Aryan invaders of Northwestern India could only have been a late and distant offshoot of the primitive stock, speedily absorbed into the earlier population of the country as they advanced southward; and to speak of ‘our Indian brethren’ is as absurd and false as to claim relationship with the negroes of the United States because they now use an Aryan language.” Scribner, Where Did Life Begin? has lately adduced arguments to prove that life on the earth originated at the North Pole, and Prof. Asa Gray favors this view; see his Darwiniana, 205, and Scientific Papers, 2:152; so also Warren, Paradise Found; and Wieland, in Am. Journal of Science, Dec. 1903:401-430. Dr. J. L. Wortman, in Yale Alumni Weekly, Jan. 14, 1903:129—“The appearance of all these primates in North America was very abrupt at the beginning of the second stage of the Eocene. And it is a striking coincidence that approximately the same forms appear in beds of exactly corresponding age in Europe. Nor does this synchronism stop with the apes. It applies to nearly all the other types of Eocene mammalia in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the accompanying flora as well. These facts can be explained only on the hypothesis that there was a common centre from which these plants and animals were distributed. Considering further that the present continental masses were essentially the same in the Eocene time as now, and that the North Polar region then enjoyed a subtropical climate, as is abundantly proved by fossil plants, we are forced to the conclusion that this common centre of dispersion lay approximately within the Arctic Circle.... The origin of the human species did not take place on the Western Hemisphere.”

On Sanskrit as a connecting link between the Indo-Germanic languages, see Max MÜller, Science of Language, 1:146-165, 326-342, who claims that all languages pass through the three stages: monosyllabic, agglutinative, inflectional; and that nothing necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for either the material or the formal elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech. The changes of language are often rapid. Latin becomes the Romance languages, and Saxon and Norman are united into English, in three centuries. The Chinese may have departed from their primitive abodes while their language was yet monosyllabic.

G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters, 195—“Children are the constructors of all languages, as distinguished from language.” Instance Helen Keller's sudden acquisition of language, uttering publicly a long piece only three weeks after she first began to imitate the motions of the lips. G. F. Wright, Man and the Glacial Period, 242-301—“Recent investigations show that children, when from any cause isolated at an early age, will often produce at once a language de novo. Thus it would appear by no means improbable that various languages in America, and perhaps the earliest languages of the world, may have arisen in a short time where conditions were such that a family of small children could have maintained existence when for any cause deprived of parental and other fostering care.... Two or three thousand years of prehistoric time is perhaps all that would be required to produce the diversification of languages which appears at the dawn of history.... The prehistoric stage of Europe ended less than a thousand years before the Christian Era.” In a people whose speech has not been fixed by being committed to writing, baby-talk is a great source of linguistic corruption, and the changes are exceedingly rapid. Humboldt took down the vocabulary of a South American tribe, and after fifteen years of absence found their speech so changed as to seem a different language.

ZÖckler, in Jahrbuch fÜr deutsche Theologie, 8:68 sq., denies the progress from lower methods of speech to higher, and declares the most highly developed inflectional languages to be the oldest and most widespread. Inferior languages are a degeneration from a higher state of culture. In the development of the Indo-Germanic languages (such as the French and the English), we have instances of change from more full and luxuriant expression to that which is monosyllabic or agglutinative. The theory of Max MÜller is also opposed by Pott, Die Verschiedenheiten der menschlichen Rassen, [pg 479]202, 242. Pott calls attention to the fact that the Australian languages show unmistakable similarity to the languages of Eastern and Southern Asia, although the physical characteristics of these tribes are far different from the Asiatic.

On the old Egyptian language as a connecting link between the Indo-European and the Semitic tongues, see Bunsen, Egypt's Place, 1: preface, 10; also see Farrar, Origin of Language, 213. Like the old Egyptian, the Berber and the Touareg are Semitic in parts of their vocabulary, while yet they are Aryan in grammar. So the Tibetan and Burmese stand between the Indo-European languages, on the one hand, and the monosyllabic languages, as of China, on the other. A French philologist claims now to have interpreted the Yh-King, the oldest and most unintelligible monumental writing of the Chinese, by regarding it as a corruption of the old Assyrian or Accadian cuneiform characters, and as resembling the syllabaries, vocabularies, and bilingual tablets in the ruined libraries of Assyria and Babylon; see Terrien de Lacouperie, The Oldest Book of the Chinese and its Authors, and The Languages of China before the Chinese, 11, note; he holds to “the non-indigenousness of the Chinese civilization and its derivation from the old ChaldÆo-Babylonian focus of culture by the medium of Susiana.”See also Sayce, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1884:934-936; also, The Monist, Oct. 1906:562-596, on The Ideograms of the Chinese and the Central American Calendars. The evidence goes to show that the Chinese came into China from Susiana in the 23d century before Christ. Initial G wears down in time into a Y sound. Many words which begin with Y in Chinese are found in Accadian beginning with G, as Chinese Ye, “night,” is in Accadian Ge, “night.” The order of development seems to be: 1. picture writing; 2. syllabic writing; 3. alphabetic writing.

In a similar manner, there is evidence that the Pharaonic Egyptians were immigrants from another land, namely, Babylonia. Hommel derives the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians from the pictures out of which the cuneiform characters developed, and he shows that the elements of the Egyptian language itself are contained in that mixed speech of Babylonia which originated in the fusion of Sumerians and Semites. The Osiris of Egypt is the Asari of the Sumerians. Burial in brick tombs in the first two Egyptian dynasties is a survival from Babylonia, as are also the seal-cylinders impressed on clay. On the relations between Aryan and Semitic languages, see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 55-61; Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, 7; Bib. Sac., 1870:162; 1876:352-380; 1879:674-706. See also Pezzi, Aryan Philology, 125; Sayce, Principles of Comp. Philology, 132-174; Whitney, art. on Comp. Philology in Encyc. Britannica, also Life and Growth of Language, 269, and Study of Language, 307, 308—“Language affords certain indications of doubtful value, which, taken along with certain other ethnological considerations, also of questionable pertinency, furnish ground for suspecting an ultimate relationship.... That more thorough comprehension of the history of Semitic speech will enable us to determine this ultimate relationship, may perhaps be looked for with hope, though it is not to be expected with confidence.” See also Smyth, Unity of Human Races, 199-222; Smith's Bib. Dict., art.: Confusion of Tongues.

We regard the facts as, on the whole, favoring an opposite conclusion from that in Hastings's Bible Dictionary, art.: Flood: “The diversity of the human race and of language alike makes it improbable that men were derived from a single pair.” E. G. Robinson: “The only trustworthy argument for the unity of the race is derived from comparative philology. If it should be established that one of the three families of speech was more ancient than the others, and the source of the others, the argument would be unanswerable. Coloration of the skin seems to lie back of climatic influences. We believe in the unity of the race because in this there are the fewest difficulties. We would not know how else to interpret Paul in Romans 5.” Max MÜller has said that the fountain head of modern philology as of modern freedom and international law is the change wrought by Christianity, superseding the narrow national conception of patriotism by the recognition of all the nations and races as members of one great human family.

Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 163—“It may be safely affirmed that, even if the differences between men are specific, they are so small that the assumption of more than one primitive stock for all is altogether superfluous. We may admit that Negroes and Australians are distinct species, yet be the strictest monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primeval parents of mankind, i. e., on Darwin's hypothesis”; Origin of Species, 118—“I am one of those who believe that at present there is no evidence whatever for saying that mankind sprang originally from more than a single pair; I must say that I cannot see any good ground whatever, or any tenable evidence, for believing that there is more than one species of man.” Owen, quoted by Burgess, Ant. and Unity of Race, 185—“Man forms but one species, and differences are but indications of varieties. These variations merge into each other by easy gradations.”Alex. von Humboldt: “The different races of men are forms of one sole species,—they are not different species of a genus.”

Quatrefages, in Revue d. deux Mondes, Dec. 1860:814—“If one places himself exclusively upon the plane of the natural sciences, it is impossible not to conclude in favor of the monogenist doctrine.” Wagner, quoted in Bib. Sac., 19:607—“Species—the collective total of individuals which are capable of producing one with another an uninterruptedly fertile progeny.” Pickering, Races of Man, 316—“There is no middle ground between the admission of eleven distinct species in the human family and their reduction to one. The latter opinion implies a central point of origin.”

There is an impossibility of deciding how many races there are, if we once allow that there are more than one. While Pickering would say eleven, Agassiz says eight, Morton twenty-two, and Burke sixty-five. Modern science all tends to the derivation of each family from a single germ. Other common characteristics of all races of men, in addition to those mentioned in the text, are the duration of pregnancy, the normal temperature of the body, the mean frequency of the pulse, the liability to the same diseases. Meehan, State Botanist of Pennsylvania, maintains that hybrid vegetable products are no more sterile than are ordinary plants (Independent, Aug. 21, 1884).

E. B. Tylor, art.: Anthropology, in Encyc. Britannica: “On the whole it may be asserted that the doctrine of the unity of mankind now stands on a firmer basis than in previous ages.” Darwin, Animals and Plants under Domestication, 1:39—“From the resemblance in several countries of the half-domesticated dogs to the wild species still living there, from the facility with which they can be crossed together, from even half tamed animals being so much valued by savages, and from the other circumstances previously remarked on which favor domestication, it is highly probable that the domestic dogs of the world have descended from two good species of wolf (viz., Canis lupus and Canis latrans), and from two or three other doubtful species of wolves (namely, the European, Indian and North American forms); from at least one or two South American canine species; from several races or species of the jackal; and perhaps [pg 481]from one or more extinct species.” Dr. E. M. Moore tried unsuccessfully to produce offspring by pairing a Newfoundland dog and a wolf-like dog from Canada. He only proved anew the repugnance of even slightly separated species toward one another.

Dana, quoted in Burgess, Antiq. and Unity of Race, 185, 186—“In the ascending scale of animals, the number of species in any genus diminishes as we rise, and should by analogy be smallest at the head of the series. Among mammals, the higher genera have few species, and the highest group next to man, the orang-outang, has only eight, and these constitute but two genera. Analogy requires that man should have preËminence and should constitute only one.” 194—“A species corresponds to a specific amount or condition of concentrated force defined in the act or law of creation.... The species in any particular case began its existence when the first germ-cell or individual was created. When individuals multiply from generation to generation, it is but a repetition of the primordial type-idea.... The specific is based on a numerical unity, the species being nothing else than an enlargement of the individual.” For full statement of Dana's view, see Bib. Sac., Oct 1857:862-866. On the idea of species, see also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:63-74.

Agassiz's view was first published in an essay on the Provinces of the Animal World, in Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind, a book gotten up in the interest of slavery. Agassiz held to eight distinct centres of creation, and to eight corresponding types of humanity—the Arctic, the Mongolian, the European, the American, the Negro, the Hottentot, the Malay, the Australian. Agassiz regarded Adam as the ancestor only of the white race, yet like Peyrerius and Winchell be held that man in all his various races constitutes but one species.

The whole tendency of recent science, however, has been adverse to the doctrine of separate centres of creation, even in the case of animal and vegetable life. In temperate North America there are two hundred and seven species of quadrupeds, of which only eight, and these polar animals, are found in the north of Europe or Asia. If North America be an instance of a separate centre of creation for its peculiar species, why should God create the same species of man in eight different localities? This would make man an exception in creation. There is, moreover, no need of creating man in many separate localities; for, unlike the polar bears and the Norwegian firs, which cannot live at the equator, man can adapt himself to the most varied climates and conditions. For replies to Agassiz, see Bib. Sac., 19:607-632; Princeton Rev., 1862:435-464.

Instances of physiological change as the result of new conditions: The Irish driven by the English two centuries ago from Armagh and the south of Down, have become prognathous like the Australians. The inhabitants of New England have descended from the English, yet they have already a physical type of their own. The Indians of North America, or at least certain tribes of them, have permanently altered the shape of the skull by bandaging the head in infancy. The Sikhs of India, since the establishment of BÁba NÁnak's religion (1500 A. D.) and their consequent advance in civilization, have changed to a longer head and more regular features, so that they are now distinguished greatly from their neighbors, the Afghans, Tibetans, Hindus. The Ostiak savages have become the Magyar nobility of Hungary. The Turks in Europe are, in cranial shape, greatly in advance of the Turks in Asia from whom they descended. The Jews are confessedly of one ancestry; yet we have among them the light-haired Jews of Poland, the dark Jews of Spain, and the Ethiopian Jews of the Nile Valley. The Portuguese who settled in the East Indies in the 16th century are now as dark in complexion as the Hindus themselves. Africans become lighter in complexion as they go up from the alluvial river-banks to higher land, or from the coast; and on the contrary the coast tribes which drive out the negroes of the interior and take their territory end by becoming negroes themselves. See, for many of the above facts, Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 195-202.

The law of originally greater plasticity, mentioned in the text, was first hinted by Hall, the palÆontologist of New York. It is accepted and defined by Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 360—“A new law is coming into view: that species when first introduced have an innate power of expansion, which enables them rapidly to extend themselves to the limit of their geographical range, and also to reach the limit of their divergence into races. This limit once reached, these races run on in parallel lines until they one by one run out and disappear. According to this law the most aberrant races of men might be developed in a few centuries, after which divergence would cease, and the several lines of variation would remain permanent, at least so long as the conditions under which they originated remained.” See the similar view of Von Baer in Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 55, note. Joseph Cook: Variability is a lessening quantity; the tendency to change is greatest at the first, but, like the rate of motion of a stone thrown upward, it lessens every moment after. Ruskin, Seven Lamps, 125—“The life of a nation is usually, like the flow of a lava-stream, first bright and fierce, then languid and covered, at last advancing only by the tumbling over and over of its frozen blocks.” Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 54—“The further back we go into antiquity, the more closely does the Egyptian type approach the European.” Rawlinson says that negroes are not represented in the Egyptian monuments before 1500 B. C. The influence of climate is very great, especially in the savage state.

In May, 1891, there died in San Francisco the son of an interpreter at the Merchants' Exchange. He was 21 years of age. Three years before his death his clear skin was his chief claim to manly beauty. He was attacked by “Addison's disease,” a gradual darkening of the color of the surface of the body. At the time of his death his skin was as dark as that of a full-blooded negro. His name was George L. Sturtevant. Ratzel, History of Mankind, 1:9, 10—As there is only one species of man, “the reunion into one real whole of the parts which have diverged after the fashion of sports” is said to be “the unconscious ultimate aim of all the movements” which have taken place since man began his wanderings. “With Humboldt we can only hold fast to the external unity of the race.” See Sir Wm. Hunter, The Indian Empire, 223, 410; Encyc. Britannica, 12:808; 20:110; ZÖckler, Urgeschichte, 109-132, and in Jahrbuch fÜr deutsche [pg 483]Theologie, 8:51-71; Prichard, Researches, 5:547-552, and Nat. Hist. of Man, 2:644-656; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 96-108; Smith, Unity of Human Races, 255-283; Morris, Conflict of Science and Religion, 325-385; Rawlinson, in Journ. Christ. Philosophy, April, 1883:359.

The truth at the basis of the theory of preËxistence is simply the ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of God—that is, God's foreknowledge of it. The intuitive ideas of which the soul finds itself in possession, such as space, time, cause, substance, right, God, are evolved from itself; in other words, man is so constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper occasions or conditions. The apparent recollection that we have seen at some past time a landscape which we know to be now for the first time before us, is an illusory putting together of fragmentary concepts or a mistaking of a part for the whole; we have seen something like a part of the landscape,—we fancy that we have seen this landscape, and the whole of it. Our recollection of a past event or scene is one whole, but this one idea may have an indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within it. The sight of something which is similar to one of these parts suggests the past whole. Coleridge: “The great law of the imagination that likeness in part tends to become likeness of the whole.” Augustine hinted that this illusion of memory may have played an important part in developing the belief in metempsychosis.

Other explanations are those of William James, in his Psychology: The brain tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are different; Baldwin, Psychology, 263, 264: We may remember what we have seen in a dream, or there may be a revival of ancestral or race experiences. Still others suggest that the two hemispheres of the brain act asynchronously; self-consciousness or apperception is distinguished from perception; divorce, from fatigue, of the processes of sensation and perception, causes paramnesia. Sully, Illusions, 280, speaks of an organic or atavistic memory: “May it not happen that by the law of hereditary transmission ... ancient experiences will now and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise to apparently personal recollections?” Letson, The Crowd, believes that the mob is atavistic and that it bases its action upon inherited impulses: “The inherited reflexes are atavistic memories” (quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 204).

Plato held that intuitive ideas are reminiscences of things learned in a previous state of being; he regarded the body as the grave of the soul; and urged the fact that the soul had knowledge before it entered the body, as proof that the soul would have knowledge after it left the body, that is, would be immortal. See Plato, Meno, 82-85, PhÆdo, 72-75, PhÆdrus, 245-250, Republic, 5:460 and 10:614. Alexander, Theories of the Will, 36, 37—“Plato represents preËxistent souls as having set before them a choice of virtue. The choice is free, but it will determine the destiny of each soul. Not God, but he who [pg 489]chooses, is responsible for his choice. After making their choice, the souls go to the fates, who spin the threads of their destiny, and it is thenceforth irreversible. As Christian theology teaches that man was free but lost his freedom by the fall of Adam, so Plato affirms that the preËxistent soul is free until it has chosen its lot in life.” See Introductions to the above mentioned works of Plato in Jowett's translation. Philo held that all souls are emanations from God, and that those who allowed themselves, unlike the angels, to be attracted by matter, are punished for this fall by imprisonment in the body, which corrupts them, and from which they must break loose. See Philo, De Gigantibus, Pfeiffer's ed., 2:360-364. Origen accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God's justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here corresponds to the degree of previous guilt; Mat. 20:3—“others standing in the market place idle” = souls not yet brought into the world. The Talmudists regarded all souls as created at once in the beginning, and as kept like grains of corn in God's granary, until the time should come for joining each to its appointed body. See Origen, De Anima, 7; pe?? ?????, ii:9:6; cf. i:1:2, 4, 18; 4:36. Origen's view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople, 538. Many of the preceding facts and references are taken from Bruch, Lehre der PrÄexistenz, translated in Bib. Sac., 20:681-733.

For modern advocates of the theory, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, sec. 15; Religion in. d. Grenzen d. bl. Vernunft, 26, 27; Julius MÜller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:357-401; Edward Beecher, Conflict of Ages. The idea of preËxistence has appeared to a notable extent in modern poetry. See Vaughan, The Retreate (1621); Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood; Tennyson, Two Voices, stanzas 105-119, and Early Sonnets, 25—“As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood, And ebb into a former life, or seem To lapse far back in some confused dream To states of mystical similitude; If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair, Ever the wonder waxeth more and more, So that we say ‘All this hath been before, All this hath been, I know not when or where.’ So, friend, when first I looked upon your face, Our thought gave answer each to each, so true—Opposed mirrors each reflecting each—That though I knew not in what time or place, Methought that I had often met with you, And either lived in either's heart and speech.” Robert Browning, La Saisiaz, and Christina: “Ages past the soul existed; Here an age 'tis resting merely, And hence fleets again for ages.” Rossetti, House of Life: “I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell; I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights along the shore. You have been mine before, How long ago I may not know; But just when, at that swallow's soar, Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall—I knew it all of yore”; quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 103-106, who holds the phenomenon due to false induction and interpretation.

Briggs, School, College and Character, 95—“Some of us remember the days when we were on earth for the first time;”—which reminds us of the boy who remembered sitting in a corner before he was born and crying for fear he would be a girl. A more notable illustration is that found in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by Lockhart, his son-in-law, 8:274—“Yesterday, at dinner time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of preËxistence—viz., a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time—that the same topics had been discussed and the same persons had started the same opinions on them. It is true there might have been some ground for recollections, considering that three at least of the company were old friends and had kept much company together.... But the sensation was so strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert and sylvan landscapes in the sea. It was very distressing yesterday and brought to mind the fancies of Bishop Berkeley about an ideal world. There was a vile sense of want of reality in all I did and said.... I drank several glasses of wine, but these only aggravated the disorder. I did not find the in vino veritas of the philosophers.”

Creatianism, as ordinarily held, regards only the body as propagated from past generations. Creatianists who hold to trichotomy would say, however, that the animal soul, the ????, is propagated with the body, while the highest part of man, the p?e?a, is in each case a direct creation of God,—the p?e?a not being created, as the advocates of preËxistence believe, ages before the body, but rather at the time that the body assumes its distinct individuality.

Aristotle (De Anima) first gives definite expression to this view. Jerome speaks of God as “making souls daily.” The scholastics followed Aristotle, and through the influence of the Reformed church, creatianism has been the prevailing opinion for the last two hundred years. Among its best representatives are Turretin, Inst., 5:13 (vol. 1:425); Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:65-76; Martensen, Dogmatics, 141-148; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 99-106. Certain Reformed theologians have defined very exactly God's method of creation. Polanus (5:31:1) says that God breathes the soul into boys, forty days, and into girls, eighty days, after conception. GÖschel (in Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Seele) holds that while dichotomy leads to traducianism, trichotomy allies itself to that form of creatianism which regards the p?e?a as a direct creation of God, but the ???? as propagated with the body. To the latter answers the family name; to the former the Christian name. Shall we count George Macdonald as a believer in PreËxistence or in Creatianism, when he writes in his Baby's Catechism: “Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here. Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky, as I came through. Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got here. Where did you get that pearly ear? God spoke, and it came out to hear. How did they all just come to be you? God thought about me, and so I grew.”

Passages commonly relied upon by creatianists are the following: Eccl. 12:7—“the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Is. 57:16—“the souls that I have made”; Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah ... who formeth the spirit of man within him”; Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.” But God is with equal clearness declared to be the former of man's body: see Ps. 139:13, 14—“thou didst form my inward parts: Thou didst cover me [marg. “knit me together”] in my mother's womb. I will give thanks unto thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Wonderful are thy works”; Jer. 1:5—“I formed thee in the belly.” Yet we do not hesitate to interpret these latter passages as expressive of mediate, not immediate, [pg 492]creatorship,—God works through natural laws of generation and development so far as the production of man's body is concerned. None of the passages first mentioned forbid us to suppose that he works through these same natural laws in the production of the soul. The truth in creatianism is the presence and operation of God in all natural processes. A transcendent God manifests himself in all physical begetting. Shakespeare: “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 112—“Creatianism, which emphasizes the divine origin of man, is entirely compatible with Traducianism, which emphasizes the mediation of natural agencies. So for the race as a whole, its origin in a creative activity of God is quite consistent with its being a product of natural evolution.”

The new physiology properly views soul, not as something added from without, but as the animating principle of the body from the beginning and as having a determining influence upon its whole development. That children are like their parents, in intellectual and spiritual as well as in physical respects, is a fact of which the creatian theory gives no proper explanation. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 115—“The love of parents to children and of children to parents protests against the doctrine that only the body is propagated.” Aubrey Moore, Science and the Faith, 207,—quoted in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:876—“Instead of the physical derivation of the soul, we stand for the spiritual derivation of the body.” We would amend this statement by saying that we stand for the spiritual derivation of both soul and body, natural law being only the operation of spirit, human and divine.

The differences of the child from the parent are often exaggerated; men are generally more the product of their ancestry and of their time than we are accustomed to think. Dickens made angelic children to be born of depraved parents, and to grow up in the slums. But this writing belongs to a past generation, when the facts of heredity were unrecognized. George Eliot's school is nearer the truth; although she exaggerates the doctrine of heredity in turn, until all idea of free will and all hope of escaping our fate vanish. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 78, 90—“Separate motives, handed down from generation to generation, sometimes remaining latent for great periods, to become suddenly manifested under conditions the nature of which is not discernible.... Conflict of inheritances [from different ancestors] may lead to the institution of variety.”

Sometimes, in spite of George Eliot, a lily grows out of a stagnant pool—how shall we explain the fact? We must remember that the paternal and the maternal elements are themselves unlike; the union of the two may well produce a third in some respects unlike either; as, when two chemical elements unite, the product differs from either of the constituents. We must remember also that nature is one factor; nurture is another; and that the latter is often as potent as the former (see Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 77-81). Environment determines to a large extent both the fact and the degree of development. Genius is often another name for Providence. Yet before all and beyond all we must recognize a manifold wisdom of God, which in the very organization of species impresses upon it a law of variation, so that at proper times and under proper conditions the old is modified in the line of progress and advance to something higher. Dante, Purgatory, canto vii—“Rarely into the branches of the tree Doth human worth mount up; and so ordains He that bestows it, that as his free gift It may be called.” Pompilia, the noblest character in Robert Browning's Ring and the Book, came of “a bad lot.” Geo. A. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 123-126—“It is mockery to account for Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns and William Shakespeare upon naked principles of heredity and environment.... All intelligence and all high character are [pg 493]transcendent, and have their source in the mind and heart of God. It is in the range of Christ's transcendence of his earthly conditions that we note the complete uniqueness of his person.”

The decisive argument against creatianism is this one, that it makes God the author of moral evil. See Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:250—“Creatianism rests upon a justly antiquated dualism between soul and body, and is irreconcilable with the sinful condition of the human soul. The truth in the doctrine is just this only, that generation can bring forth an immortal human life only according to the power imparted by God's word, and with the special coÖperation of God himself.” The difficulty of supposing that God immediately creates a pure soul, only to put it into a body that will infallibly corrupt it—“sicut vinum in vase acetoso”—has led many of the most thoughtful Reformed theologians to modify the creatian doctrine by combining it with traducianism.

Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:249-251, holds to creatianism in a wider sense—a union of the paternal and maternal elements under the express and determining efficiency of God. Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:327-332, regards the soul as new-created, yet by a process of mediate creation according to law, which he calls “metaphysical generation.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:56, says that the individual is not simply a manifestation of the species; God applies to the origination of every single man a special creative thought and act of will; yet he does this through the species, so that it is creation by law,—else the child would be, not a continuation of the old species, but the establishment of a new one. So in speaking of the human soul of Christ, Dorner says (3:340-349) that the soul itself does not owe its origin to Mary nor to the species, but to the creative act of God. This soul appropriates to itself from Mary's body the elements of a human form, purifying them in the process so far as is consistent with the beginning of a life yet subject to development and human weakness.

Bowne, Metaphysics, 500—“The laws of heredity must be viewed simply as descriptions of a fact and never as its explanation. Not as if ancestors passed on something to posterity, but solely because of the inner consistency of the divine action” are children like their parents. We cannot regard either of these mediating views as self-consistent or intelligible. We pass on therefore to consider the traducian theory which we believe more fully to meet the requirements of Scripture and of reason. For further discussion of creatianism, see Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 18-58; Alger, Doctrine of a Future Life, 1-17.

Tertullian, De Anima: “Tradux peccati, tradux animÆ.” Gregory of Nyssa: “Man being one, consisting of soul and body, the common beginning of his constitution must be supposed also one; so that he may not be both older and younger than himself—that in him which is bodily being first, and the other coming after” (quoted in Crippen, Hist. of Christ. Doct., 80). Augustine, De Pec. Mer. et Rem., 3:7—“In Adam all sinned, at the time when in his nature all were still that one man”; De Civ. Dei, 13:14—“For we all were in that one man, when we all were that one man.... The form in which we each should live was not as yet individually created and distributed to us, but there already existed the seminal nature from which we were propagated.”

Gen. 1:27—“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created he them”; 28—“And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”; cf. 22—of the brute creation: “And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” Gen. 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; cf. 22—“and the rib which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man”; 1 Cor. 11:8—“For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man” (?? ??d???). Gen. 4:1—“Eve ... bare Cain”; 5:3—“Adam ... begat a son ... Seth”; 46:26—“All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, that came out of his loins”; Acts 17:26—“he made of one [“father” or “body”] every nation of men”; Heb. 7:10—Levi “was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedek met him”; Gen. 2:2—“And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made, [pg 495]and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:19-29, adduces also John 1:13; 3:6; Rom. 1:13; 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:22; Eph. 2:3; Heb. 12:9; Ps. 139:15, 16. Only Adam had the right to be a creatianist. Westcott, Com. on Hebrews, 114—“Levi paying tithes in Abraham implies that descendants are included in the ancestor so far that his acts have force for them. Physically, at least, the dead so rule the living. The individual is not a completely self-centred being. He is member in a body. So far traducianism is true. But, if this were all, man would be a mere result of the past, and would have no individual responsibility. There is an element not derived from birth, though it may follow upon it. Recognition of individuality is the truth in creatianism. Power of vision follows upon preparation of an organ of vision, modified by the latter but not created by it. So we have the social unity of the race, plus the personal responsibility of the individual, the influence of common thoughts plus the power of great men, the foundation of hope plus the condition of judgment.”

God's method is not the method of endless miracle. God works in nature through second causes. God does not create a new vital principle at the beginning of existence of each separate apple, and of each separate dog. Each of these is the result of a self-multiplying force, implanted once for all in the first of its race. To say, with Moxom (Baptist Review, 1881:278), that God is the immediate author of each new individual, is to deny second causes, and to merge nature in God. The whole tendency of modern science is in the opposite direction. Nor is there any good reason for making the origin of the individual human soul an exception to the general rule. Augustine wavered in his traducianism because he feared the inference that the soul is divided and subdivided,—that is, that it is composed of parts, and is therefore material in its nature. But it does not follow that all separation is material separation. We do not, indeed, know how the soul is propagated. But we know that animal life is propagated, and still that it is not material, nor composed of parts. The fact that the soul is not material, nor composed of parts, is no reason why it may not be propagated also.

It is well to remember that substance does not necessarily imply either extension or figure. Substantia is simply that which stands under, underlies, supports, or in other words that which is the ground of phenomena. The propagation of mind therefore does not involve any dividing up, or splitting off, as if the mind were a material mass. Flame is propagated, but not by division and subdivision. Professor Ladd is a creatianist, together with Lotze, whom he quotes, but he repudiates the idea that the mind is susceptible of division; see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206, 359-366—“The mind comes from nowhere, for it never was, as mind, in space, is not now in space, and cannot be conceived of as coming and going in space.... Mind is a growth.... Parents do not transmit their minds to their offspring. The child's mind does not exist before it acts. Its activities are its existence.” So we might say that flame has no existence before it acts. Yet it may owe its existence to a preceding flame. The Indian proverb is: “No lotus without a stem.” Hall Caine, in his novel The Manxman, tells us that the Deemster of the Isle of Man had two sons. These two sons were as unlike each other as are the inside and the outside of a bowl. But the bowl was old Deemster himself. Hartley Coleridge inherited his father's imperious desire for stimulants and with it his inability to resist their temptation.

Galton, in his Hereditary Genius, and Inquiries into Human Faculty, furnishes abundant proof of the transmission of mental and spiritual characteristics from father [pg 496]to son. Illustrations, in the case of families, are the American Adamses, the English Georges, the French Bourbons, the German Bachs. Illustrations, in the case of races, are the Indians, the Negroes, the Chinese, the Jews. Hawthorne represented the introspection and the conscience of Puritan New England. Emerson had a minister among his ancestry, either on the paternal or the maternal side, for eight generations back. Every man is “a chip of the old block.” “A man is an omnibus, in which all his ancestors are seated” (O. W. Holmes). Variation is one of the properties of living things,—the other is transmission. “On a dissecting table, in the membranes of a new-born infant's body, can be seen ‘the drunkard's tinge.’ The blotches on his grand-child's cheeks furnish a mirror to the old debauchee. Heredity is God's visiting of sin to the third and fourth generations.” On heredity and depravity, see Phelps, in Bib. Sac., Apr. 1884:254—“When every molecule in the paternal brain bears the shape of a point of interrogation, it would border on the miraculous if we should find the exclamation-sign of faith in the brain-cells of the child.”

Robert G. Ingersoll said that most great men have great mothers, and that most great women have great fathers. Most of the great are like mountains, with the valley of ancestors on one side and the depression of posterity on the other. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables illustrates the principle of heredity. But in his Marble Faun and Transformation, Hawthorne unwisely intimates that sin is a necessity to virtue, a background or condition of good. Dryden, Absalom and Ahithophel, 1:156—“Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” Lombroso, The Man of Genius, maintains that genius is a mental disease allied to epileptiform mania or the dementia of cranks. If this were so, we should infer that civilization is the result of insanity, and that, so soon as Napoleons, Dantes and Newtons manifest themselves, they should be confined in Genius Asylums. Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau, comes nearer the truth: “A solitary great man's worth the world. God takes the business into his own hands At such time: Who creates the novel flower Contrives to guard and give it breathing-room.... 'Tis the great Gardener grafts the excellence On wildlings, where he will.”

Page-Roberts, Oxford University Sermons: “It is no more unjust that man should inherit evil tendencies, than that he should inherit good. To make the former impossible is to make the latter impossible. To object to the law of heredity, is to object to God's ordinance of society, and to say that God should have made men, like the angels, a company, and not a race.” The common moral characteristics of the race can only be accounted for upon the Scriptural view that “that which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6). Since propagation is a propagation of soul, as well as body, we see that to beget children under improper conditions is a crime, and that foeticide is murder. Haeckel, Evolution of Man, 2:3—“The human embryo passes through the whole course of its development in forty weeks. Each man is really older by this period than is usually assumed. When, for example, a child is said to be nine and a quarter years old, he is really ten years old.” Is this the reason why Hebrews call a child a year old at birth? President Edwards prayed for his children and his children's children to the end of time, and President Woolsey congratulated himself that he was one of the inheritors of those prayers. R. W. Emerson: “How can a man get away from his ancestors?”Men of genius should select their ancestors with great care. When begin the instruction of a child? A hundred years before he is born. A lady whose children were noisy and troublesome said to a Quaker relative that she wished she could get a good Quaker governess for them, to teach them the quiet ways of the Society of Friends. “It would not do them that service,” was the reply; “they should have been rocked in a Quaker cradle, if they were to learn Quakerly ways.”

Galton, Natural Inheritance, 104—“The child inherits partly from his parents, partly from his ancestry. In every population that intermarries freely, when the genealogy of any man is traced far backwards, his ancestry will be found to consist of such varied [pg 497]elements that they are indistinguishable from the sample taken at haphazard from the general population. Galton speaks of the tendency of peculiarities to revert to the general type, and says that a man's brother is twice as nearly related to him as his father is, and nine times as nearly as his cousin. The mean stature of any particular class of men will be the same as that of the race; in other words, it will be mediocre. This tells heavily against the full hereditary transmission of any rare and valuable gift, as only a few of the many children would resemble their parents.” We may add to these thoughts of Galton that Christ himself, as respects his merely human ancestry, was not so much son of Mary, as he was Son of man.

Brooks, Foundations of ZoÖlogy, 144-167—In an investigated case, “in seven and a half generations the maximum ancestry for one person is 382, or for three persons 1146. The names of 452 of them, or nearly half, are recorded, and these 452 named ancestors are not 452 distinct persons, but only 149, many of them, in the remote generations, being common ancestors of all three in many lines. If the lines of descent from the unrecorded ancestors were interrelated in the same way, as they would surely be in an old and stable community, the total ancestry of these three persons for seven and a half generations would be 378 persons instead of 1146. The descendants of many die out. All the members of a species descend from a few ancestors in a remote generation, and these few are the common ancestors of all. Extinction of family names is very common. We must seek in the modern world and not in the remote past for an explanation of that diversity among individuals which passes under the name of variation. The genealogy of a species is not a tree, but a slender thread of very few strands, a little frayed at the near end, but of immeasurable length. A fringe of loose ends all along the thread may represent the animals which having no descendants are now as if they had never been. Each of the strands at the near end is important as a possible line of union between the thread of the past and that of the distant future.”

Weismann, Heredity, 270, 272, 380, 384, denies Brooks's theory that the male element represents the principle of variation. He finds the cause of variation in the union of elements from the two parents. Each child unites the hereditary tendencies of two parents, and so must be different from either. The third generation is a compromise between four different hereditary tendencies. Brooks finds the cause of variation in sexual reproduction, but he bases his theory upon the transmission of acquired characters. This transmission is denied by Weismann, who says that the male germ-cell does not play a different part from that of the female in the construction of the embryo. Children inherit quite as much from the father as from the mother. Like twins are derived from the same egg-cell. No two germ-cells contain exactly the same combinations of hereditary tendencies. Changes in environment and organism affect posterity, not directly, but only through other changes produced in its germinal matter. Hence efforts to reach high food cannot directly produce the giraffe. See Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolution, 235-239; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems; Ribot, Heredity; Woods, Heredity in Royalty. On organic unity in connection with realism, see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1865:126-135; Dabney, Theology, 317-321.