Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/123

Rh —the one the theory of Darwin, the other the theory of "special creation" and they are mutually destructive. If the theory of "special creation" is true, Darwinism is false; if Darwinism is true,"special creation" is false. And this issue is plainly accepted by both parties. Thus Mr. Darwin says, "I have at least done good service in overthrowing the dogma of separate creations"; and Haeckel, in the preface to his "Evolution of Man," boasts that "when, in 1873, the grave closed over Louis Agassiz, the last great upholder of the constancy of species and of miraculous creation, the dogma of the constancy of species came to an end, and the contrary assumption—the assertion that all the various species descended from common ancestral forms—now no longer encounters serious difficulty." Darwin was fully aware of the opposition his theory would have to encounter. And he feared the men of science as much as the theologians. "Authors," he says, "of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied that each species has been independently created." When he first hinted at the theory to Joseph Hooker in 1843, he says, "I am almost convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable," and his utmost hope is that he may be able "to show, even to sound naturalists, that there are two sides to the question of the immutability of species," and that "allied species are co-descendants from common stocks." Whether true or not scientifically, this does not sound like a dangerous heresy, and yet the outcry raised from the side of religion was as great as that raised by contemporary science. Even now religious people are surprised to be told that it is a purely scientific question, to be decided solely on scientific evidence, and to be dealt with effectively only by scientific men. It is not the question whether species were created by God or came into existence independently of him, or (as Huckleberry Finn puts it) "whether they were made or whether they just happened." For science repudiates chance—except as a name for unexplained causation—as earnestly as religion does. It is a question between two views as to secondary creation, or, more strictly, between a theory and the denial of the possibility of a theory as to the method of this creation. The question is this: Were species directly created at the firsts or by intermediate laws, as individuals are? Were they independently created, or descended from other species? "To say that species were created so and so," says Mr. Darwin, "is no scientific explanation, only a reverent way of saying it is so and so." "Special creation" is here on the agnostic side, while evolution at least attempts to bring God's action in the past in line with his action