Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/42

32 can understand how a man might obtain such an acquaintance with the literary or artistic style of some human author or artist, as should embolden him to pronounce an opinion as to whether a certain piece of work was or was not from the master's hand; but we do not see that any one has it in his power so to con the works of Deity as to authorize him in saying that he knows the Divine style, and is therefore in a position to decide which of two plans of action is most in harmony therewith. We have before us simply the facts that Nature presents; our task is to see these in the most rational order possible, knowing well that, however enlarged our knowledge may become, a perfect interpretation of the facts will forever be beyond our reach. Whatever view, therefore, may at any moment best colligate and harmonize the phenomena of the universe, that view—if we are going to concern ourselves with Divine plans—we must regard as most nearly revealing the Divine plan. But to allow our interpretation of the phenomena to be overborne and controlled by any conceptions, such as Mr. Curtis seeks to force upon us, of the Divine nature and attributes, is simply to abandon science and betake ourselves to dogma and mysticism.

Now, to be quite frank, we don't believe Mr. Curtis is one bit better a judge of the Divine style in creation than the very humblest among us. It is puzzling enough to know how merely superior human faculties will work. The child can not understand the mind of its father in matters beyond its own experience, and can not see the wisdom of its father's actions. The inferior man can not understand the mind of the superior man. We can hardly imagine anything more ridiculous, certainly nothing more hopeless, than an attempt by weak or undeveloped minds to comprehend the workings or appraise the manifestations of minds of a higher order; yet what is the interval between the youngest child and its parent, between the most uninstructed peasant and the mightiest philosopher, compared with that existing between, say, Mr. Curtis, and that mind which he proclaims to be infinite, yet offers to interpret for us? Surely, then, it is not without good reason that the leading scientific investigators of our day have decided on conducting their researches in entire independence of all theological assumptions. They feel instinctively that the moment they begin to draw deductions from theological premises, even the most plausible, their conclusions cease to have scientific validity, and that science itself becomes a mere aborted appendage to theology.

It is time, however, to proceed to a somewhat closer examination of the work before us. The author is much struck, in the first place, with the parallel he finds existing between the Platonic theory (or rather myth) of creation as developed in the "Timæus" and the Darwinian theory of the origin of species, including the human. We fail, for our part, to see much resemblance between a myth in which everything which is referred to the arbitrary and purposive acts of an imaginary divinity, and a scientific theory which ascribes all growth