Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Religion
Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Church of England; Skepticism; Skepticism -- Controversial literature
that "Nature's power of selection" must be incomparably greater, and
competent to produce incomparably superior effects in respect of "the
beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all
organic beings, one with another, and with their physical conditions
of life." Language of a similar sort he very frequently uses. He has,
therefore, as a scientific man laid himself open to the reproof of M.
Flourens, whom no one will deny to be a scientific critic. "Either,"
says M. Flourens, "Natural Selection is nothing, or it is nature, but
nature endowed with the attribute of selection--nature personified,
which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has
done with personifications." The nineteenth century ought to have done
with personifications; but with the spirit of Lamarck's speculations
the style of the French atheistic philosophy of the last century
reappears.
Mr. Darwin, in the passage quoted by Mr. Kingsley, describes the
manner in which his Natural Selection may be conceived as operating.
What, if his meaning were expressed with strict scientific truth, he
ought to intend to say, is that such as he describes is the result
of providential working according to the mode and order which he
designates by the phrase Natural Selection. "All we ask," says one of
Mr. Darwin's ablest critics, "is that we may be allowed to believe in a
God and a real Divine Providence, as powerful and wise and good as Mr.
Darwin's Natural Selection."
But, moreover, it must not be forgotten that there is something besides
the mere process of change and growth, of what our philosophers call
development, to be accounted for. There is a fact on which the growth,
the change, the evolution, must be held in a true sense to depend: a
prior fact to be taken account of. The growth proceeds upon a plan,
and fulfils an idea: protoplasm itself embodies a scientific principle.
But as the seal must be before the impression, the original before the
copy, so the principle must be before its embodiment, the plan and the
idea must be before the growth: the end, towards which as its goal the
growth or development proceeds, must have been conceived and set up
as an aim before its fulfilment began. We are bound therefore, if we
would exhaust the problem, nay, if we would truly conceive, and justly
state it, to ask how and whence the principle, the plan, the idea, the
end, had their existence? These are realities; they are the most inner
and essential realities in every instance of growth or development;
to deal only with the development of the physical basis, is to leave
untouched the kernel of the matter, is altogether superficial and
unreal. But principles, plans, types and ideas, ends contemplated in
movement and progress, these at any rate are not physical, are not
matters of sense and organization. They are, as I have said, prior to
what is physical, they are conditions antecedent to organization and
growth.
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