Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/43

Rh and development to the unceasing operation of laws inherent (as would appear) in things themselves. What strikes us with wonder, however, is that our author, after explaining that on Plato's theory man was first made, and after him the other animals in the order of their dignity, the lowest forms of aquatic life coming last, should proceed to say that there is as much in Nature to support this view of creation as to support the Darwinian theory, according to which life, beginning with the lowliest forms, worked upward to the highest. These are his words: "Nor had Plato less of probability to support his theory than Darwin to support his.... If Plato had known as much about the animal kingdom as is now known, he could have arrayed the same facts in support of his theory by an argument as powerful as that which now supports the doctrine of evolution" (pp. 73, 74). This, in face of the fact that the geological record is there for every one who has eyes to read, showing that the highest forms of life were not first in the order of creation or development, but last, and the lowest forms first! Surely it is not the doctrine of evolution that will suffer by such an attack as this. The influence of the "postulate" must have been making itself very strongly felt when the author contrived to overlook simply the broadest, the most conspicuous, and the most important fact of all bearing on the question of the relative claims of the two theories he was comparing. It is not an encouraging example of the effect of theological or metaphysical prepossessions. The Platonic theory of the soul has also, it would seem, made much impression on our author. The Demiurgus makes it entirely "distinct from matter," and places it in some star, where it is to await the birth of the body with which it is destined to be united, and which it is to govern, if it can, "according to the eternal laws of reason and rectitude." If it succeeds in this duty, it flies back at the death of the body to its own star; if not, it passes into some more degraded body, for the purpose, apparently, of getting another chance under worse conditions. "Stripped," says the writer, "of the machinery by which Plato supposes the soul to have come into existence, his conception of its origin and its nature is the most remarkable contribution which philosophy, apart from the aid of what is called inspiration, has made to our means of speculating upon this great theme." Surely it is not our "means of speculating" upon this or any other theme that we want to have enlarged; it is our knowledge of the facts of the case; in general, the less we know the more freely we can speculate. We fail to see that as a contribution to knowledge the Platonic conception is of any value whatever.

The strictly scientific arguments brought by our author against the doctrine of evolution present, we feel justified in saying, no character of originality. They are such as every one in the least acquainted with the literature of the subject is thoroughly familiar with. Against Darwin is urged the absence of the intermediate forms which, upon his