Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/431

Rh certain limits is an evolutionist, and we have little hesitation in saying that the limits within which each man is an evolutionist are the real limits of his intelligence. Where he ceases to be an evolutionist he resigns all attempt to comprehend, and merely records his acceptance of unexplained facts. In the sphere of human history the principle of evolution seems to be fully recognized. The historian who would fold his hands and turn up his eyes before any given event, and say that it was utterly incomprehensible, having no relation, save the abstract one of time, to previous or subsequent events, would be scorned by every intelligent reader. Not to be able fully to explain a historical occurrence is one thing; to say that it has no dependence on previous conditions is another and very different thing. We look to the historian to attack such problems with a view to bringing them under the operation of some law of historical development; in other words, we believe fully in evolution as applied to the social and political history of mankind.

Similarly we believe—and when we say "we" we mean all persons with any pretensions to education or intelligence—in evolution as applied to the physical history of our globe. We believe that it passed through successive stages or phases, each of which prepared the way for the one following. "Evolution," says Prof. Le Conte, "is the central idea of geology. It is this idea alone which makes geology a distinct science. This is the cohesive principle which unites and gives cohesion to all the scattered facts of geology; which cements what would otherwise be a mere incoherent pile of rubbish into a solid and substantial edifice." That the Silurian age passed naturally into the Devonian, which served as a transition to the Carboniferous, no one who has given any thought to the subject for a moment doubts. The trouble arises when it is proposed to consider successive animal species as genetically connected. The scientific world at large has no difficulty in framing the conception or in adopting the idea, but to a few scientific men and a multitude of non-scientific persons there is impiety in the suggestion that one animal species—or one plant species, for that matter—could possibly have passed into or given birth to another. The creation of species was an office which their theology had reserved for a supernatural being, and they can not assign to natural causes or processes the honor of introducing to existence so much as the tiniest parasite. Whatever is most hideous, uncouth, destructive, and loathsome in the animal kingdom must be regarded as the special and intentional production of Divine Wisdom no less than the noblest forms of life. None the less do men set themselves to destroy whatever in creation they find hurtful or inconvenient; in practically dealing with plants and animals they ask—not, "Did Divine Wisdom create it for a wise purpose?" but, "Does it suit our interests to allow it to exist?"

The great weakness of the assailants of evolution is that they do not offer so much as the germ of an instructive or helpful idea in the place of that which they oppose and would fain subvert. Admitting that there has been much of error in connection with the speculations of the evolutionist school, the error, we contend, has been of a healthful kind. An ancient Greek philosopher held that what was of chief importance in a scientific theory was, not that it should be in exact accordance with facts, but that it should be based on belief in a natural sequence of phenomena. Anything, he said, rather than the nonnatural, the irrational, the arbitrary—in a word, anything rather than superstition. And he was right; for the man who is taught to believe in natural causes, studies natural causes; and if,