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Charles W. Chesnutt - "The House Behind The Cedars"

Jules Verne - "The Survivors of the Chancellor"

Charles W. Chesnutt - "The House Behind The Cedars"

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol - "Dead Souls"

History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

A >> Andrew Dickson White >> History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom




Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century the main
movement culminated in the Bridgewater Treatises. Pursuant to
the will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the President of the
Royal Society selected eight persons, each to receive a thousand
pounds sterling for writing and publishing a treatise on the
"power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the
creation." Of these, the leading essays in regard to animated
Nature were those of Thomas Chalmers, on The Adaptation of
External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Condition of Man;
of Sir Charles Bell, on The Hand as evincing Design; of Roget,
on Animal and Vegetable Physiology with reference to Natural
Theology; and of Kirby, on The Habits and Instincts of Animals
with reference to Natural Theology.

Besides these there were treatises by Whewell, Buckland, Kidd,
and Prout. The work was well done. It was a marked advance on
all that had appeared before, in matter, method, and spirit.
Looking back upon it now we can see that it was provisional, but
that it was none the less fruitful in truth, and we may well
remember Darwin's remark on the stimulating effect of mistaken
THEORIES, as compared with the sterilizing effect of mistaken
OBSERVATIONS: mistaken observations lead men astray, mistaken
theories suggest true theories.

An effort made in so noble a spirit certainly does not deserve
the ridicule that, in our own day, has sometimes been lavished
upon it. Curiously, indeed, one of the most contemptuous of
these criticisms has been recently made by one of the most
strenuous defenders of orthodoxy. No less eminent a
standard-bearer of the faith than the Rev. Prof. Zoeckler says of
this movement to demonstrate creative purpose and design, and of
the men who took part in it, "The earth appeared in their
representation of it like a great clothing shop and soup kitchen,
and God as a glorified rationalistic professor." Such a
statement as this is far from just to the conceptions of such men
as Butler, Paley, and Chalmers, no matter how fully the thinking
world has now outlived them.[17]

[17] For a very valuable and interesting study on the old idea of
the generation of insects from carrion, see Osten-Sacken, on the
Oxen-born Bees of the Ancients, Heidelberg, 1894; for Ray, see
the work cited, London, 1827, p. 153; for Grew, see Cosmologia
Sacra, or a Discourse on the Universe, as it is the Creature and
Kingdom of God; chiefly written to demonstrate the Truth and
Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the
College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of London, 1701;
for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions;
also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as
follows:

"Welche Verehrung verdient der Weltenerschopfer, der Gnadig,
Als er den Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand."

For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol.
ii, pp. 74, 440.


But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation of fact
on which they reared it became evidently more and more insecure.
For as far back as the seventeenth century acute theologians had
begun to discern difficulties more serious than any that had
before confronted them. More and more it was seen that the
number of different species was far greater than the world had
hitherto imagined. Greater and greater had become the old
difficulty in conceiving that, of these innumerable species, each
had been specially created by the Almighty hand; that each had
been brought before Adam by the Almighty to be named; and that
each, in couples or in sevens, had been gathered by Noah into the
ark. But the difficulties thus suggested were as nothing
compared to those raised by the DISTRIBUTION of animals.

Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused serious
thought, and above all in the great mind of St. Augustine. In
his City of God he had stated the difficulty as follows: "But
there is a question about all these kinds of beasts, which are
neither tamed by man, nor spring from the earth like frogs, such
as wolves and others of that sort,....as to how they could find
their way to the islands after that flood which destroyed every
living thing not preserved in the ark....Some, indeed, might be
thought to reach islands by swimming, in case these were very
near; but some islands are so remote from continental lands that
it does not seem possible that any creature could reach them by
swimming. It is not an incredible thing, either, that some
animals may have been captured by men and taken with them to
those lands which they intended to inhabit, in order that they
might have the pleasure of hunting; and it can not be denied
that the transfer may have been accomplished through the agency
of angels, commanded or allowed to perform this labour by God."

But this difficulty had now assumed a magnitude of which St.
Augustine never dreamed. Most powerful of all agencies to
increase it were the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama,
Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, and other navigators of the period of
discovery. Still more serious did it become as the great islands
of the southern seas were explored. Every navigator brought home
tidings of new species of animals and of races of men living in
parts of the world where the theologians, relying on the
statement of St. Paul that the gospel had gone into all lands,
had for ages declared there could be none; until finally it
overtaxed even the theological imagination to conceive of angels,
in obedience to the divine command, distributing the various
animals over the earth, dropping the megatherium in South
America, the archeopteryx in Europe, the ornithorhynchus in
Australia, and the opossum in North America.

The first striking evidence of this new difficulty was shown by
the eminent Jesuit missionary, Joseph Acosta. In his Natural and
Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590, he proved
himself honest and lucid. Though entangled in most of the older
scriptural views, he broke away from many; but the distribution
of animals gave him great trouble. Having shown the futility of
St. Augustine's other explanations, he quaintly asks: "Who can
imagine that in so long a voyage men woulde take the paines to
carrie Foxes to Peru, especially that kinde they call `Acias,'
which is the filthiest I have seene? Who woulde likewise say
that they have carried Tygers and Lyons? Truly it were a thing
worthy the laughing at to thinke so. It was sufficient, yea,
very much, for men driven against their willes by tempest, in so
long and unknowne a voyage, to escape with their owne lives,
without busying themselves to carrie Woolves and Foxes, and to
nourish them at sea."

It was under the impression made by this new array of facts that
in 1667 Abraham Milius published at Geneva his book on The Origin
of Animals and the Migration of Peoples. This book shows, like
that of Acosta, the shock and strain to which the discovery of
America subjected the received theological scheme of things. It
was issued with the special approbation of the Bishop of
Salzburg, and it indicates the possibility that a solution of the
whole trouble may be found in the text, "Let the earth bring
forth the living creature after his kind." Milius goes on to
show that the ancient philosophers agree with Moses, and that
"the earth and the waters, and especially the heat of the sun and
of the genial sky, together with that slimy and putrid quality
which seems to be inherent in the soil, may furnish the origin
for fishes, terrestrial animals, and birds." On the other hand,
he is very severe against those who imagine that man can have had
the same origin with animals. But the subject with which Milius
especially grapples is the DISTRIBUTION of animals. He is
greatly exercised by the many species found in America and in
remote islands of the ocean--species entirely unknown in the
other continents--and of course he is especially troubled by the
fact that these species existing in those exceedingly remote
parts of the earth do not exist in the neighbourhood of Mount
Ararat. He confesses that to explain the distribution of animals
is the most difficult part of the problem. If it be urged that
birds could reach America by flying and fishes by swimming, he
asks, "What of the beasts which neither fly nor swim?" Yet even
as to the birds he asks, "Is there not an infinite variety of
winged creatures who fly so slowly and heavily, and have such a
horror of the water, that they would not even dare trust
themselves to fly over a wide river?" As to fishes, he says,
"They are very averse to wandering from their native waters," and
he shows that there are now reported many species of American and
East Indian fishes entirely unknown on the other continents,
whose presence, therefore, can not be explained by any theory of
natural dispersion.

Of those who suggest that land animals may have been dispersed
over the earth by the direct agency of man for his use or
pleasure he asks: "Who would like to get different sorts of
lions, bears, tigers, and other ferocious and noxious creatures
on board ship? who would trust himself with them? and who would
wish to plant colonies of such creatures in new, desirable
lands?"

His conclusion is that plants and animals take their origin in
the lands wherein they are found; an opinion which he supports
by quoting from the two narrations in Genesis passages which
imply generative force in earth and water.

But in the eighteenth century matters had become even worse for
the theological view. To meet the difficulty the eminent
Benedictine, Dom Calmet, in his Commentary, expressed the belief
that all the species of a genus had originally formed one
species, and he dwelt on this view as one which enabled him to
explain the possibility of gathering all animals into the ark.
This idea, dangerous as it was to the fabric of orthodoxy, and
involving a profound separation from the general doctrine of the
Church, seems to have been abroad among thinking men, for we find
in the latter half of the same century even Linnaeus inclining to
consider it. It was time, indeed, that some new theological
theory be evolved; the great Linnaeus himself, in spite of his
famous declaration favouring the fixity of species, had dealt a
death-blow to the old theory. In his Systema Naturae, published
in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had enumerated four
thousand species of animals, and the difficulties involved in the
naming of each of them by Adam and in bringing them together in
the ark appeared to all thinking men more and more
insurmountable.

What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct species went
on increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until, as an eminent
zoological authority of our own time has declared, "for every one
of the species enumerated by Linnaeus, more than fifty kinds are
known to the naturalist of to-day, and the number of species
still unknown doubtless far exceeds the list of those recorded."

Already there were premonitions of the strain made upon Scripture
by requiring a hundred and sixty distinct miraculous
interventions of the Creator to produce the hundred and sixty
species of land shells found in the little island of Madeira
alone, and fourteen hundred distinct interventions to produce the
actual number of distinct species of a single well-known shell.

Ever more and more difficult, too, became the question of the
geographical distribution of animals. As new explorations were
made in various parts of the world, this danger to the
theological view went on increasing. The sloths in South America
suggested painful questions: How could animals so sluggish have
got away from the neighbourhood of Mount Ararat so completely and
have travelled so far?

The explorations in Australia and neighbouring islands made
matters still worse, for there was found in those regions a whole
realm of animals differing widely from those of other parts of
the earth.

The problem before the strict theologians became, for example,
how to explain the fact that the kangaroo can have been in the
ark and be now only found in Australia: his saltatory powers are
indeed great, but how could he by any series of leaps have sprung
across the intervening mountains, plains, and oceans to that
remote continent? and, if the theory were adopted that at some
period a causeway extended across the vast chasm separating
Australia from the nearest mainland, why did not lions, tigers,
camels, and camelopards force or find their way across it?

The theological theory, therefore, had by the end of the
eighteenth century gone to pieces. The wiser theologians waited;
the unwise indulged in exhortations to "root out the wicked heart
of unbelief," in denunciation of "science falsely so called," and
in frantic declarations that "the Bible is true"--by which they
meant that the limited understanding of it which they had
happened to inherit is true.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological
theory of creation--though still preached everywhere as a matter
of form--was clearly seen by all thinking men to be hopelessly
lost: such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman Church,
Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and Hugh Miller in the Scottish
Church, made heroic efforts to save something from it, but all to
no purpose. That sturdy Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon honesty, which
is the best legacy of the Middle Ages to Christendom, asserted
itself in the old strongholds of theological thought, the
universities. Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler nor
the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed. Just as the
line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had
destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the centre,
and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving
the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of
biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator
minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs
and purposes of man. They had developed a system of a very
different sort, and this we shall next consider.[18]

[18] For Acosta, see his Historia Natural y moral de las Indias,
Seville, 1590--the quaint English translation is of London, 1604;
for Abraham Milius, see his De Origine Animalium et Migratione
Popularum, Geneva, 1667; also Kosmos, 1877, H. I, S. 36; for
Linnaeus's declaration regarding species, see the Philosophia
Botanica, 99, 157; for Calmet and Linnaeus, see Zoeckler, vol.
ii, p. 237. As to the enormously increasing numbers of species
in zoology and botany, see President D. S. Jordan, Science
Sketches, pp. 176, 177; also for pithy statement, Laing's
Problems of the Future, chap. vi.



III. THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES, OF AN
EVOLUTION IN ANIMATED NATURE.


We have seen, thus far, how there came into the thinking of
mankind upon the visible universe and its inhabitants the idea of
a creation virtually instantaneous and complete, and of a Creator
in human form with human attributes, who spoke matter into
existence literally by the exercise of his throat and lips, or
shaped and placed it with his hands and fingers.

We have seen that this view came from far; that it existed in
the Chaldaeo-Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, and probably
in others of the earliest date known to us; that its main
features passed thence into the sacred books of the Hebrews and
then into the early Christian Church, by whose theologians it was
developed through the Middle Ages and maintained during the
modern period.

But, while this idea was thus developed by a succession of noble
and thoughtful men through thousands of years, another
conception, to all appearance equally ancient, was developed,
sometimes in antagonism to it, sometimes mingled with it--the
conception of all living beings as wholly or in part the result
of a growth process--of an evolution.

This idea, in various forms, became a powerful factor in nearly
all the greater ancient theologies and philosophies. For very
widespread among the early peoples who attained to much thinking
power was a conception that, in obedience to the divine fiat, a
watery chaos produced the earth, and that the sea and land gave
birth to their inhabitants.

This is clearly seen in those records of Chaldaeo-Babylonian
thought deciphered in these latter years, to which reference has
already been made. In these we have a watery chaos which, under
divine action, brings forth the earth and its inhabitants; first
the sea animals and then the land animals--the latter being
separated into three kinds, substantially as recorded afterward
in the Hebrew accounts. At the various stages in the work the
Chaldean Creator pronounces it "beautiful," just as the Hebrew
Creator in our own later account pronounces it "good."

In both accounts there is placed over the whole creation a solid,
concave firmament; in both, light is created first, and the
heavenly bodies are afterward placed "for signs and for seasons";
in both, the number seven is especially sacred, giving rise to a
sacred division of time and to much else. It may be added that,
with many other features in the Hebrew legends evidently drawn
from the Chaldean, the account of the creation in each is
followed by a legend regarding "the fall of man" and a deluge,
many details of which clearly passed in slightly modified form
from the Chaldean into the Hebrew accounts.

It would have been a miracle indeed if these primitive
conceptions, wrought out with so much poetic vigour in that
earlier civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates, had failed to
influence the Hebrews, who during the most plastic periods of
their development were under the tutelage of their Chaldean
neighbours. Since the researches of Layard, George Smith,
Oppert, Schrader, Jensen, Sayce, and their compeers, there is no
longer a reasonable doubt that this ancient view of the world,
elaborated if not originated in that earlier civilization, came
thence as a legacy to the Hebrews, who wrought it in a somewhat
disjointed but mainly monotheistic form into the poetic whole
which forms one of the most precious treasures of ancient thought
preserved in the book of Genesis.

Thus it was that, while the idea of a simple material creation
literally by the hands and fingers or voice of the Creator
became, as we have seen, the starting-point of a powerful stream
of theological thought, and while this stream was swollen from
age to age by contributions from the fathers, doctors, and
learned divines of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, there was
poured into it this lesser current, always discernible and at
times clearly separated from it--a current of belief in a process
of evolution.

The Rev. Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, than whom no English-speaking
scholar carries more weight in a matter of this kind, has
recently declared his belief that the Chaldaeo-Babylonian theory
was the undoubted source of the similar theory propounded by the
Ionic philosopher Anaximander--the Greek thinkers deriving this
view from the Babylonians through the Phoenicians; he also
allows that from the same source its main features were adopted
into both the accounts given in the first of our sacred books,
and in this general view the most eminent Christian
Assyriologists concur.

It is true that these sacred accounts of ours contradict each
other. In that part of the first or Elohistic account given in
the first chapter of Genesis the WATERS bring forth fishes,
marine animals, and birds (Genesis, i, 20); but in that part of
the second or Jehovistic account given in the second chapter of
Genesis both the land animals and birds are declared to have been
created not out of the water, but "OUT OF THE GROUND" (Genesis,
ii, 19).

The dialectic skill of the fathers was easily equal to explaining
away this contradiction; but the old current of thought,
strengthened by both these legends, arrested their attention,
and, passing through the minds of a succession of the greatest
men of the Church, influenced theological opinion deeply, if not
widely, for ages, in favour of an evolution theory.

But there was still another ancient source of evolution ideas.
Thoughtful men of the early civilizations which were developed
along the great rivers in the warmer regions of the earth noted
how the sun-god as he rose in his fullest might caused the water
and the rich soil to teem with the lesser forms of life. In
Egypt, especially, men saw how under this divine power the Nile
slime brought forth "creeping things innumerable." Hence mainly
this ancient belief that the animals and man were produced by
lifeless matter at the divine command, "in the beginning," was
supplemented by the idea that some of the lesser animals,
especially the insects, were produced by a later evolution, being
evoked after the original creation from various sources, but
chiefly from matter in a state of decay.

This crude, early view aided doubtless in giving germs of a
better evolution theory to the early Greeks. Anaximander,
Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aristotle, as we
have seen, developed them, making their way at times by guesses
toward truths since established by observation. Aristotle
especially, both by speculation and observation, arrived at some
results which, had Greek freedom of thought continued, might have
brought the world long since to its present plane of biological
knowledge; for he reached something like the modern idea of a
succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the
fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature.

With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a
yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old
crude view remained, and as a typical example of it we may note
the opinion of St. Basil the Great in the fourth century.
Discussing the work of creation, he declares that, at the command
of God, "the waters were gifted with productive power"; "from
slime and muddy places frogs, flies, and gnats came into being";
and he finally declares that the same voice which gave this
energy and quality of productiveness to earth and water shall be
similarly efficacious until the end of the world. St. Gregory
of Nyssa held a similar view.

This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church took even
stronger hold on the great father of the Western Church. For St.
Augustine, so fettered usually by the letter of the sacred text,
broke from his own famous doctrine as to the acceptance of
Scripture and spurned the generally received belief of a creative
process like that by which a toymaker brings into existence a box
of playthings. In his great treatise on Genesis he says: "To
suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is
very childish....God neither formed man with bodily hands nor
did he breathe upon him with throat and lips."

St. Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old emanation or
evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not
have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have
originated later from putrefying matter," argues that, even if
this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a
potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks
of animals "whose numbers the after-time unfolded."

In his great treatise on the Trinity--the work to which he
devoted the best thirty years of his life--we find the full
growth of this opinion. He develops at length the view that in
the creation of living beings there was something like a
growth--that God is the ultimate author, but works through
secondary causes; and finally argues that certain substances are
endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of
plants and animals.[19]

[19] For the Chaldean view of creation, see George Smith,
Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 14,15, and 64-
86; also Lukas, as above; also Sayce, Religion of the Ancient
Babylonians, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pp. 371 and elsewhere; as
to the fall of man, Tower of Babel, sacredness of the number
seven, etc., see also Delitzsch, appendix to the German
translation of Smith, pp. 305 et seq.; as to the almost exact
adoption of the Chaldean legends into the Hebrew sacred account,
see all these, as also Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte
Testament, Giessen, 1883, early chapters; also article Babylonia
in the Encyclopedia Britannica; as to simialr approval of
creation by the Creator in both accounts, see George Smith, p.
73; as to the migration of the Babylonian legends to the Hebrews,
see Schrader, Whitehouse's translation, pp. 44,45; as to the
Chaldaean belief ina solid firmament, while Schrader in 1883
thought it not proved, Jensen in 1890 has found it clearly
expresses--see his Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp.9 et seq., also
pp. 304-306, and elsewhere. Dr. Lukas in 1893 also fully accepts
this view of a Chaldean record of a "firmament"--see Kosmologie,
pp. 43, etc.; see also Maspero and Sayce, the Dawn of
Civilization, and for crude early ideas of evolution in Egypt,
see ibid., pp. 156 et seq.

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