The Old Riddle and the Newest Answer
It is also to be noticed that in these accounts of the origin of language, the essential element of reason is always quietly smuggled in as a matter of course. Thus Mr. Darwin's wisest of the pithecoids was able to "think of" a device for the information of his fellows. There is not the smallest doubt that any creature which had got so far as that would find what he wanted. It is but the old case of the man who was sure he could have written Hamlet had he had a mind to do so. Like him, the ape might have made the invention, if he had a mind to make it; – only he had not got the mind. So too, Professor Romanes' missing links use tones and signs which acquire "more and more" the character of true speech: which could not be unless they contained some measure of that character already. But it is just the first step thus ignored which spans the gulf between man and brute.
There is another factor upon which, in conjunction with these suppositions, great stress is wont to be laid, namely that of time; it being apparently taken for granted that if only time enough be given anything whatever may come about. Thus Professor Romanes tells us121 that his imaginary Homo alalus, or speechless man, must probably have lived for an "inconceivably long time," before getting far enough on the road towards speech to give him such an advantage as enabled him to crush out his less accomplished congeners; and that even after this point was reached, another "inconceivable lapse of time" must have been required to turn him into Homo sapiens, or man as he actually is. Immense intervals, he further tells us, must have been consumed in the passage through various grades of mental evolution; "The epoch during which sentence-words prevailed was probably immense"; "It was not until æons of ages had elapsed that any pronouns arose."
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1
Collected Essays, i. 35.
2
Lectures on Evolution, Cheap Edition, p. 16.
3
Conservation of Energy, § 210, p. 153.
4
F. W. Hutton, F.R.S., The Lesson of Evolution (1902), pp. 9-11.
5
Nineteenth Century, February, 1889. p. 173.
6
This term is now applied almost exclusively to physical science, or that whose province is the observation of phenomena and inferences directly deducible from them. To avoid confusion, this sense of the word "Science" will be here adopted: it is nevertheless objectionable inasmuch as it implies that – as Professor Huxley following Hume would have it – sound knowledge is restricted, outside the field of mathematics, to "experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence." But although all premisses or data of inference come to us first through the gates of sense, there is much, beyond the limits within which sensible experience is confined, to a knowledge of which inference can lead us, and of which we become certain before experience can verify what we have thus learnt. Thus a chipped flint or a fragment of pottery is universally recognized as evidencing the work of man: a single page of Virgil would suffice – apart from all other information – to prove its author to have been both a poet and a scholar: the shipwrecked mariner cast on an unknown shore argued soundly from the sight of a gibbet that he had reached a civilized land ruled by law. But more than this, Science herself proceeds on this principle to the recognition not only of forces, the character of which is known by previous experience, but of others concerning which she knows nothing at all, except through the very effects from which she argues. Thus, as all bodies left free are found to draw towards one another in a certain mode, it is concluded with absolute confidence that there is a force making them do so, although this is in itself utterly imperceptible, and is known only by the way in which bodies behave under what must be its influence. Yet, who questions the existence of Gravitation? In like manner, the phenomena of light force us to admit the existence of the Ether, as the medium through which its waves are transmitted. Yet, we are compelled to attribute to this medium qualities apparently so incompatible that, as the late Lord Salisbury said, Ether remains, "a half discovered entity." But little as we can realize its nature, we have no doubt that such a medium exists.
7
"Value of the Natural History Sciences" (Lay Sermons), p. 75.
8
Italics his.
9
Confession of Faith of a Man of Science, English translation, 1903, Preface, p. vii.
10
Riddle of the Universe, Cheap English Edition, p. 2.
11
ibid., p. 85.
12
And also, it should be added, travelling bodily through space with a movement of "translation."
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., p. 2.
15
The 15th Chapter of Haeckel's Natural History of Creation is devoted to this point.
16
Confession of Faith of a Man of Science, p. 32.
17
Riddle of the Universe, p. 5.
18
Ibid., p. 78.
19
Ibid., p. 86.
20
Ibid., 134.
21
An Easy Outline of Evolution, by Dennis Hird, M.A., Principal of Ruskin Hall, Oxford, p. 230.
22
Presidential Address, Section D, Zoology, Leeds, 1890.
23
Riddle of the Universe, p. 2.
24
Ibid., p. 83.
25
"Pseudo-Scientific Realism," Collected Essays, i, 68, 74-78.
26
Newman, Grammar of Assent, p. 72. A "Law of Nature," as has already been said, is simply a statement of what de facto has always been found to occur under certain conditions, and may consequently be expected again. It is obvious however that such expectation is implicitly based on the existence of some cause capable of ensuring the result.
27
"The Teaching of Natural Philosophy," Contemporary Review, Jan., 1878.
28
Lay Sermons, p. 83.
29
Riddle of the Universe, p. 6.
30
See Wasmann "Gedanken zur Entwicklungslehre," Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, vol. 63, p. 298.
31
Contemporary Review, ut sup., p. 301.
32
Professor Weldon, F.R.S., in the Dictionary of National Biography.
33
Collected Essays, v. 41.
34
Riddle of the Universe, p. 75.
35
Professor Garnett in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. By "Force" is understood "any cause which tends to alter a body's natural state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line." Of the nature of such causes science professes to know very little, and as Clerk-Maxwell, who knew as much as most men, sang apropos of a lecture of Professor Tait's:
… Tait writes in lucid symbols clear one small equation;
And Force becomes of Energy a mere space-variation.
36
Balfour Stewart, Conservation of Energy, § 115; by Clerk-Maxwell, apud Garnett, ut sup.
37
Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 5th Edition, p. 23.
38
Conservation of Energy, § 209.
39
Sir William Thomson, now Lord Kelvin.
40
March 29, 1888.
41
So of another effort in the same direction Capt. Hutton tells us: "The last champion in the field is Professor A. W. Bickerton, who thinks he has found a way in which this dismal conclusion, as he considers it, may be averted. But he is not very sure about it, and has to assume: first, that space contains now and always will contain, a large quantity of cosmic dust scattered through it with some approach to uniformity; and secondly, that the Universe consists of an infinite number of what he calls 'cosmic systems,' travelling through space, constantly throwing off dust in all directions and occasionally colliding. As all this is pure assumption and highly improbable, I cannot think that Professor Bickerton has brought forward any serious objection to the theory of the dissipation of energy, and his hypothesis must be added to the list of failures." (Lesson of Evolution, p. 14, n.)
42
Lesson of Evolution, p. 14.
43
Darwin and after Darwin, p. 17.
44
Riddle of the Universe, p. 64.
45
Über die Grenzen der Naturerkennens: Die Sieben Welträthsel, Leipzic, 1882.
46
Riddle of the Universe, p. 64.
47
Du Bois-Reymond does not say that they are soluble, but only that he cannot pronounce them "transcendental."
48
Samuel Laing, Modern Science and Modern Thought, Cheap Edition, p. 19.
49
Riddle of the Universe, p. 86.
50
Ibid.
51
P. 78.
52
P. 64.
53
Origin of the Laws of Nature, p. 23.
54
Belfast Address, 1874.
55
Lay Sermons. "On the Physical Basis of Life," p. 143.
56
Professor Tait, Properties of Matter, § 108.
57
Contemporary Review, January, 1878, p. 301.
58
Story of Creation, p. 11.
59
Edinburgh Review, October, 1903, p. 399.
60
Or "primal stuff." This looks remarkably like the old Materia Prima of the Schoolmen translated into Greek.
61
Ibid. The Revelations of Radium.
62
Ibid., p. 398.
{Note.– It is often assumed that the composite character of the atom – if fully established – must upset the Atomic Theory. This is not so; all that the new hypothesis does is to go further back in accounting for the Atomic Theory, and for all practical purposes things remain exactly as they were; except, indeed, that the dissolution of matter does away with what was held as one of the most assured conclusions of science.}
63
The Nebular Hypothesis itself is, of course, far from being an established certainty, and is not devoid of grave difficulties. Into these, however, it is not necessary now to enter.
64
Apud Gaynor, The New Materialism, p. 83.
65
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Biology."
66
Apud Gaynor, p. 84.
67
Professor Marsh.
68
Professor Dewar at Belfast, 1902.
69
Recent Advances in Physical Science, 3rd Edition, p. 6.
70
Gaynor, p. 102.
71
Lay Sermons, p. 18.
72
Critiques and Addresses, p. 305.
73
Being the year in which this passage was written.
74
Viz. that of the derivation of life from life alone, as opposed to Abiogenesis, or its production from lifeless matter.
75
See Fragments of Science, "Spontaneous Generation," for a full account.
76
March 18, 1863. Life and Letters, i. 352.
77
April 30, 1870. Ibid. ii. 17.
78
Critiques and Addresses, p. 238.
79
Lay Sermons, p. 18.
80
Evolution and the Origin of Life, 1874, p. 23.
81
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Biology."
82
Fragments of Science. "Rev. James Martineau and Belfast Address."
83
Ibid. "Scientific use of the imagination."
84
Fragments of Science, "Spontaneous Generation."
85
Ibid. "Rev. James Martineau and Belfast Address."
86
Ibid. "Vitality."
87
Nineteenth Century, May, 1886, p. 769.
88
Italics mine.
89
It has been established by Pasteur and others that the highest temperature at which organic life is possible is 45° Centigrade (113° Fahrenheit). When the globe had cooled to this point from its primitive molten condition, the epoch of terrestrial life commenced.
According to what is perhaps the latest theory, that of M. Quinton, the temperature immediately below this, 44° Centigrade, remains always the best for living things, and those creatures are highest in the scale of life, and consequently the most developed, which have contrived means of keeping their internal heat at, or about, this level, despite the refrigeration of their surroundings. In their blood-heat M. Quinton therefore finds an absolute rule for fixing the relative rank of organic forms, and the date of their appearance; those whose blood is warmest being the most recently evolved. The results of this new system are sufficiently startling. Birds are to be classed as the highest and newest of all; while man, with the other Primates, has to take a much lower place, the ungulates, including the horse and donkey, and the carnivora, as dogs and cats, being his superiors. (La Revue des Idées, January 15, 1904, pp. 29 seq.)
90
To D. Mackintosh, February 28, 1882.
91
To Sir J. D. Hooker, March 29, 1863.
92
To V. Carus, November 21, 1866.
93
To D. Mackintosh, February 28, 1882.
94
Riddle of the Universe, p. 6.
95
As regards Protoplasm, p. 21.
96
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Biology."
97
Printed in Lay Sermons.
98
Nature, June 5, 1902, p. 121.
99
Id. ibid.
100
Op. cit. p. 27.
101
Presidential Address, British Association, 1887.
102
Les Emules de Darwin, ii. 66.
103
Op. cit. ii. 63.
104
Darwinism, p. 474.
105
The other stages presenting similar difficulties are the 5th and 6th of Du Bois-Reymond's Enigmas, viz. the introduction of sensation or consciousness (animal life), and of rational thought and speech.
106
Contemporary Review, January, 1878, p. 298.
107
Die sieben Welträthsel, D. 82.
108
Professor Huxley, it must be remarked, speaks of Homer as a "half savage Greek" (Lay Sermons, p. 12), and intimates a mild wonder that such a being could share our feelings in presence of nature to so large an extent as his poems testify. This is undoubtedly a fine example of the good conceit of ourselves which the pursuit of science is rather apt to produce.
109
Darwinism, p. 475.
110
Descent of Man, c. ii.
111
Ibid. 54.
112
In his paper read before the British Association at Oxford in 1847.
113
Lessons from Nature, p. 89.
114
See Mivart, Origin of Human Reason, p. 166.
115
See Louis Arnould, Une âme en prison, and article "An imprisoned Soul," by the Ctesse. de Courson, The Month, January, 1902, p. 82.
116
Descent of Man, i. 57.
117
i. e. ape-like.
118
Quoted by Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man.
119
Ibid., p. 371.
120
Origin of Human Reason, p. 385.
121
Op. cit. p. 379.
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