Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/120

110 environment. Finally, Mr. Romanes postulates a highly variable reproductive system of which no explanation is given, and by this he would explain the sterility of species inter se; Prof. Weismann carries us back to the Protophyta and Protozoa, where strictly speaking there is no reproduction, and to the direct action of environment upon these, from which, in the Metaphyta and Metazoa, by sexual reproduction we get "spontaneous" tendencies multipledmultiplied [sic] in geometrical ratio. These "spontaneous," or, as we prefer to call them, "inherent" tendencies or characters, are transmissible; acquired characters are not. We trust we have not misrepresented these views. We notice them not in the least with a view to deciding between them, though there is little doubt which way the balance of scientific authority at present inclines; still less with the wish to make capital out of their disagreement, but in order to emphasize the fact that, while Darwinism is generally accepted in the scientific world, there is much which as yet is unsettled; in other words, that, while every competent man of science now believes in the origin of species by progressive variations, we can not be too much on our guard against stereotyping any theory as to the proximate causes. It is nearly as true now as when Darwin wrote it in 1878 that, though "there is almost complete unanimity among biologists about evolution, . . . there is still considerable difference as to the means, such as how far natural selection has acted, and how far external conditions, or whether there exists some mysterious innate tendency to perfectibility."

In the present and a future article we propose to deal with the doctrine so far as it is generally accepted by scientific men, and, without attempting to discuss the evidence on which the doctrine rests, to answer the following question: Given a Churchman who accepts the dogmatic position of the English Church on the one hand, and who, so far as he is able to understand it, believes the doctrine of evolution to be the truest solution yet discovered by science of the facts open to its observation, what reconstruction of traditionally accepted views and arguments is necessary and possible? How is he to relate the new truth with the old?

In so stating the problem we put out of court three classes of persons: (a) those who, intrenched in the fortress of religious certainty, are content to leave intellectual problems alone and ignore the movement of scientific thought around them; (b) those who are so "immersed in matter" that the religious side of their nature has become atrophied by disuse; and (c) those who possess the wonderful power of keeping their intellectual and religious life "sundered as with an axe," who, if they were