Well, physical geology must go with it: for, even on the soberest view, it
demands an indefinitely long time antecedent to the introduction of organic
life upon our earth. A fortiori is physical astronomy a branch of
metaphysics, demanding, as it does, still larger "instalments of infinity,"
as the reviewer calls them, both as to time and number. Moreover, far the
greater part of physical inquiries now relate to molecular actions, which,
a distinguished natural philosopher informs us, "we have to regard as the
results of an infinite number of in finitely small material particles,
acting on each other at infinitely small distances"--a triad of
infinities--and so physics becomes the most metaphysical of sciences.
Verily, if this style of reasoning is to prevail--
"Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And naught is everything, and everything is naught."
The leading objection of Mr. Agassiz is likewise of a philosophical
character. It is, that species exist only "as categories of thought"--that,
having no material existence, they can have had no material variation, and
no material community of origin. Here the predication is of species in the
subjective sense, the inference in the objective sense. Reduced to plain
terms, the argument seems to be: Species are ideas; therefore the objects
from which the idea is derived cannot vary or blend, and cannot have had a
genealogical connection.
The common view of species is, that, although they are generalizations, yet
they have a direct objective ground in Nature, which genera, orders, etc.,
have not. According to the succinct definition of Jussieu--and that of
Linnaeus is identical in meaning--a species is the perennial succession of
similar individuals in continued generations. The species is the chain of
which the individuals are the links. The sum of the
genealogically-connected similar individuals constitutes the species, which
thus has an actuality and ground of distinction not shared by genera and
other groups which were not supposed to be genealogically connected. How a
derivative hypothesis would modify this view, in assigning to species only
a temporary fixity, is obvious. Yet, if naturalists adopt that hypothesis,
they will still retain Jussieu's definition, which leaves untouched the
question as to how and when the "perennial successions" were established.
The practical question will only be, How much difference between two sets of
individuals entitles them to rank under distinct species? and that is the
practical question now, on whatever theory. The theoretical question is--as
stated at the beginning of this article--whether these specific lines were
always as distinct as now.
Mr. Agassiz has "lost no opportunity of urging the idea that, while species
have no material existence, they yet exist as categories of thought in the
same way [and only in the same way] as genera, families, orders, classes,"
etc. He
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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