touching the real nature of instinct, the data obtainable being so hopelessly insufficient and even contradictory, as to render such a conclusion unwarrantable. Indeed it would appear that there is no way of settling this question until we can enter into articulate converse with the lower animals, or be furnished with the power of participating in their actual consciousness. It is therefore one of these innumerable questions which we shall do well to leave alone one belonging to the domain of a wise agnosticism. The only certain conclusion to be drawn from the wonderful facts by which we are confronted is that the evolutionary theory of instinct is an idle tale. Or how are we to account, say, for the hunger-enduring capabilities of some animals? Why should a spider be able to fast for a year, a toad for fourteen months, a beetle for three years? 1—whilst other animals will scarcely survive as many days. "Inherited tendency of some kind?-A mere cloak for ignorance. An evolutionary assumption.. With regard to the evolution hypothesis as a whole, Mr. Clodd actually assumes that "the function creates the organ" 2—not merely that the exercise of the function improves the organ, which is rational and true, but actually that "the function creates the organ." Now, compared to this inversion of Common Sense, the putting of the cart before the horse is quite a venial and pleasant little error; for in the latter case, the noble quadruped might, for a change, be induced to push the cart instead of hauling it; but when a man gravely assures you, or assumes that "the function creates the organ "-in other words, that sight creates the eye; walking, the feet; food, the digestive organs-! He who speaks thus, disqualifies himself as a scientific witness. 1 Goldsmith's Animated Nature, vol. i., note, p. 186. 2 The Story of Creation, p. 73. This dogma, however, he contradicts, happily, in the same book—" the organs exist for the work which they have to do, not the work for the organs.' P. 178. His mind regarding such questions, seems to be in a "primordial, nebulous, non-luminous state." It is alarming to have "teachers," "scientists," "savants" of this kind let loose amongst simple people. 2. The Unknowable touching Eggs.-Again, why should a fully organised, common hen's egg carefully sat upon for three weeks by a common hen, bring forth a chicken? Nobody can tell us anything about it beyond the wellknown facts of the case. No man can enter into the critical "why"? of the business at all. The keenest biologist is, essentially, as ignorant about it as the veriest Hodge. Let one domestic hen's egg be placed in the centre of a large table, and let all the philosophers in the world. be comfortably seated round about it, and the most philosophical thing that the assembled philosophers could do concerning it, would be—simply to gaze at the egg with intelligent, but speechless, wonder. Why should that egg possess the potentiality of yielding a chicken? The thing is as inscrutable as Orion or the Pleiades. occasion, devout silence would be more instructive than a thousand orations upon Eggs. And yet some people go swaggering about as if the Universe were too small for them! On such an The Origin of Eggs ?-Then as to the familiar question, the first origin of eggs! Did the egg precede the hen, or the hen, the egg? Here is a question to make even the toughest metaphysical or biological brain dizzy. I always think it argues great intellectual power and great wisdom in a philosopher, when he knows at what point to stop speaking, or even thinking-at what point to let his mind. rise into an attitude of reverent wonder. If our savants would but generally adopt this most rational attitude, what a deliverance it would be to us all, in the matter of books! This, the terrestrial origin and the fecundity of eggs, though they can be bought at one shilling per dozen, is one of those questions most fit to call forth silence and wonder. The common hen's egg remains to this day as inscrutable in its first origin and fecundity—as wonderful almost, as the Universe the universal Egg. Then even as to the origin of the first hen as domestic : who caught and tamed the first one? How comes it to-day, to be substantially the same kind of fowl from China to Peru? It is ignorance, for the most part, that loads our bookshelves-not knowledge. It is a great pity but the intellectual health of the philosopher could be ascertained by an examination of his tongue. If this could be done, we should frequently find it indicating a bad state of mental dyspepsia. 3. The Unknowable in Vegetation.—If we turn to such a question as to the "why" of vegetation, we are equally ill off for an answer. Why should a young tree planted appropriately in the ground take root and grow? Why should wheat sown in certain well-known circumstances, germinate, grow up, and reproduce itself? Why such incalculable fecundity and variety in Nature at large? We really know almost nothing about it but the facts of germination, etc., and their manner, and the conditions under which such processes will take place. In such processes, it need scarcely be said that we do not apprehend the real nature, the cur res sit, of germination and growth. Why should an acorn fitly planted and tended, produce an oak tree? Cur res sit? Nature furnishes us with no information on the subject, beyond the facts of the case. 4. Origins in general.-But not only do some of the philosophers try to account for the origin of eggs; they want to account for the origin of everything. "The essential function of science," they tell us, without any trace of a redeeming smile on their countenance, such as one finds on that of Sir John Maundevile, "the essential function of science is to reduce apparently disparate phenomena to the expression of a single law." Why they should have taken "a single law" so much to heart, I do not know; but it appears to me that it would not be a bad plan for them to find out how many, and what kind of, laws are actually in operation round about us and within us, before starting to reduce them to unity. That single law, they tell us, is to be found in what they call the "Law of Evolution": namely, that fleas and elephants, monkeys and men are all descended from the same original parent. This is the high-water mark of nineteenthcentury biology. (How it must grieve Father Adam!) Man is not and was not made in the likeness of God at all: our ancestor was probably a hideous kind of fish. We, at present, are just undergoing the process of losing our tails. (How it must disgust Mother Eve!) Nay, Dohrn, I find, thinks that we must seek the clue to our ancestry in "chaetopod worms." 1 Such is the summit of our present scientific wisdom and understanding. ness and dunghills! Dark The following colloquy is to be found in Aristophanes : "Phidippides. I will not injure my teachers. Strepsiades. Yes, yes, reverence paternal Jove. Phidippides. Paternal Jove! How antiquated you are! Why, is there any Jove? Strepsiades. There is. Phidippides. There is not, no; for Vortex reigns, having expelled I am afraid that Vortex is supposed by some to be still reigning. The "Generalised Ancestor."-Just notice, in passing, how infinitely more difficult it is to suppose a common or "generalised ancestor" for the flea and the elephant than to suppose simply, that the elephant began its terrestrial existence as an elephantine beast, and the flea as a pulicious; that the flea's terrestrial parent was originally a flea, or very flea-like; that the elephant's, was an elephant, or very elephantine. A "generalised ancestor," indeed! It 1 Athenaeum, 1889, vol. i. p. 47. appears to me that the evolutionists are engaged in something much wilder than a wild-goose chase, for the wild-goose may be caught, but the "generalised ancestor "!1 Such attempts should long ere this date, have been as obsolete as crusading. Indeed we Nothing known about natural Origins. shall probably do well to leave all questions touching the origin of things in Nature to the rash and hot-headed members of society. All that the self-possessed and intelligent man knows about "origins" is that nobody knows anything about them-not even of acorns or eggs, nuts or nutmegs. Nay, even with regard to the racial origins of some existing nations-even our own, the only certain point is that our knowledge concerning such origins" is extremely defective. The continual falling of the seed into the ground, or the grass continually growing out of it; the laying of any egg, or 'the hatching of it, remains up to this late date in the nineteenth century 2 -even after thousands of evolutionary philosophers have pondered on the subject all their lives, absolutely inscrutable as to its real aetiology. This is the present state of the case both as to eggs and acorns. The rem esse is plainly before us; the cur res sit remains shrouded, for the present, in impenetrable darkness. If philosophers would steadily remember this truth, it would bring enormous accessions of scientific wisdom to the world. In any case it seems to be but an act of pretentious ignorance to assume that the theory of biological evolution is "scientific.” Different kinds of ignorance. A word here on the subject of ignorance. It should be recognised that there 1 Speaking about geese, it is stated that in the Museum at Boolak is a fragmentary fresco taken from a tomb at Maydoom, dating from some 3000 years B.C., in which three species of geese are depicted with such accuracy that two of them can easily be identified." Athenaeum, 1885, vol. i. p. 626. However, I find that to talk to the evolutionist about mere thousands of years, is as if one were to say "five minutes ago." 2 13th February 1896. |