BOOKS.
CHARLES DARWIN.* [THIRD NOTICE.] THE critic of Charles Darwin's life, when he has paid his tribute to the genius, industry, and perseverance of the man of science, has performed only half his task. It still remains for him to speak of the influence exercised by the widely read author upon the deepest beliefs of mankind. We enter on this part of our attempt with some reluctance. But to believe in Jonah's whale and Balaam's ass—to hold that the earth stopped its rash through space at the bidding of Joshua, and the waters of the sea were obedient to the bidding of Moses—and, finally, that the
tlEifebyatti:ilstttner4sr;w9fezhr3rirleswilt.)artgi=eltxr rray Chapter. world in which all these marvels took place was made in a week and finished on a Sunday morning,—to believe all this, and to believe also in the Heavenly Father, is to think more truly of this universe in which we live than Charles Darwin thought of it. And there is no denying that since he gave the world his views, it has accepted their negative as well as their positive side. Our previous notices have, we hope, given a pledge that the man and his work, on their own ground, are not unappreciated by us. What follows must be read with the recollection that we have now passed into a region where the builder was a destroyer.
We have said that this destructive influence is undeniable. Perhaps in order to make that term accurate, we ought to shut out from contemplation those who are determined, at whatever cost, to maintain that all truth is immediately and obviously con- sistent. We confess the exception to be a large one; but when it is once made, we should say that no sane person can deny Darwin's influence to have been at least contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. The average secular Christian in the pre-Darwinian age felt that he knew very little about religion, and that if he tried to think much on the subject, he found it dull. But he meant something when he called him- self a Christian. He might not have much religious conviction at first-band, but he felt dimly that greater and better men had it, and that he wished to be one with them. How much con- viction would survive if he were on a desert island, he would have found it hard to say ; but he was sure that there was some- thing real in the feeling as long as he was with others who were joined together on that basis. This is the kind of Christianity that modern science has made impossible. To say," This is the most important thing possible, as long as one believes it, but dis- belief in it is a matter of utter indifference," may be the expres- sion of an amiable or of a cowardly state of mind ; but in either case it is illogical, and logic carries the day in the long-run. The name of orthodoxy still clings to the idea of religion, but the thing is to be looked for in the house of science.
The last device by which the religion of our time seeks recon- ciliation with its now triumphant foe, is to pour scorn on this ideal of orthodoxy. It is said by many earnest Christians (Charles Kingsley, for instance) that the b Alai which Darwin did so much to destroy was not Christianity. Hardly any one can now go on denying that the two first chapters of Genesis contain certain statements on the same subject as The Origin of Species, and that a logical intellect must make its choice between them ; but still, it is urged that a theory of Creation, whether from Moses or Darwin, is not Christianity. Vain is the effort to conceal a radical divergence of spirit beneath the veil of a logical modua vivendi. Darwin's books, if certain views of Genesis, which have really nothing to do with the subsequent coarse of Scrip- tural history, were discarded, might, we fully allow, be adopted as the scientific text-books of any religious system of education. But it is not what a man says at a particular moment that tells you his influence on those who listen to him. It is what he says more strongly to-day than he did yesterday. It is the change, slight, perhaps, and only discernible to the eye of close atten- tion, which distinguishes the growing organism from the withering husk,—those indications of direction in a man's thought which give pledges of its permanence, and make lie know which are the convictions that will grow, and which the opinions that will wither. Charles Darwin's Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his experience. He denied nothing, he consciously opposed nothing ; but so far as he swayed men's thoughts, they turned from the Invisible.
From Darwin's disciples, at any rate, it would be no concession, it would be the summit and concentration of their claim that he has delivered the average mind from the bondage of theo- logical belief. They are ready to address him as Lucretius addressed Epicurna
"Nam pimal so ratio Loa ocepit vooiferari Natnram reram, divisa mente worts, Diffnginnt anima terraces, mania mundi Diseednnt, totnm video per inane geri res."
Darwin himself had never felt the bondage of what Lacretios meant by Religion, and never sought to destroy it ; and, on the other hand, his enthusiasm was exactly for that element of science in which Lucretius was as deficient as Virgil. The present writer once showed him the remarkable passage in which his views are anticipated (" De Her. Nat.," v., 855-877). It had not the slighest interest for him. Be saw that it was not based on observation, and the fact that a great genius should, as it were, respond to him on wrong grounds, or what he would have called no grounds, gave him no pleasure. Nevertheless, this element of modern science, which is found in its perfection in a poet who lived before the dawn of physical science, found an immense stimulus in his speculations. In the opinion alike of those who think they owe Darwin most, and those who consider that he has done something towards robbing the world of all that makes life worth living, it is through him, as through his Greek proto-
type, that- religio pedibus subjects vicissim Obteritur."
And those who agree in nothing else are not likely to be altogether mistaken in their single point of agreement.
It would be out of scale, in so brief a criticism as ours, to attempt to distinguish between Darwinism truly so called, and Darwinism falsely so called. The distinction itself is an important one, but, like some important geographical difference which vanishes when we take oar point of view from the nearest planet and con- sider the movements of the earth, it is lost when we contemplate the antagonism between modern science and faith. We believe that this antagonism is real, as firmly as the narrowest of Evangelical dogmatists in the pre.Darwinian era, or the narrowest of evolutionary dogmatists in the post-Darwinian era. We think that the works of Darwin and his contemporaries have been a torpedo-touch to the life of faith. It is a trite remark—made trite, probably, by this very revolution in general feeling—that the loss of faith is not the destruction of truth. The truths which Christian convictions inadequately approach remain as the ground and basis of all life, whether they are recognised or not. When the Hebrew scribe wrote down his psalm of Creation, natural selec- tion already explained just as much of the method of the Creator's working as it does now, and no more ; and it is still as true now as it was then, that "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." As natural selection did not begin to be an agent when it began to be discerned, so neither has the Divine Will ceased to be an agent now that it has ceased to be recognised. Confused thought sometimes lies so near deep intuitions, that perhaps it is worth while to state what, when it is once stated, no one would deny. But because no man can make facts other than they are, it does not follow that no man can make belief in facts other than it is. Christianity, as we under- stand the word, is the reflection in human hearts of divine realities. To deny that this reflection has been troubled and obscured by the investigations of modern science, would surely be like asserting that the stars are visible at noon. It is not that any fact or principle brought to light by modern science has any bearing on the object of faith. Perhaps it is rather the discovery, in the view of so many men of science, that it has no such bearing. To be assured that the study of the outward universe suggests no Creator, ought to be per- plexing to every one who believes in a Creator. There can be no doubt that patient, disinterested study of the visible world, instead of leaving men of science, as we should expect, on the threshold of the invisible world, does, in fact, at the present day, take them far away from it. "The invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made," said St. Paul. 'The invisible things of God are possibly nothing at all,' say, and say quite sincerely, those who know much more of the things that are made than St. Paul did. From them its difficulties are hid no less than its realities.
The present writer once heard Mr. Darwin give his reasons for withholding his belief from that idea of a Creator "which," he added (and the words came from his lips, his hearer thought, with a certain emphasis)," is natural to us all." The statement is practically repeated in a letter given here (I, 316), and was, as hie hearer found afterwards, misunderstood in the same way by both persons to whom it was addressed ; it must therefore have been somewhat confused, and we will not attempt to reproduce it. For our purpose, the misunderstanding is as important as the understanding would have been. The words which introduced his speech, "The reason why I find it impossible to accept that belief in a Creator," suggested facts of every day. "Because of East London, because of Central Africa, because of the police reports, because of the larger part of the experience of most lives and the whole of many,"—these are the terms in which ordinary men would sum up their difficulties in trusting God, or thinking there is a God to trust. But it was not the raillery of the world which veiled the face of the Creator from one who never saw suffering without an ardent and painful desire to relieve it, and who had but one regret in his happy life, that he had not done more for his fellow-creatures. It is not the misery of the
world which hides God from the eyes that are bent on the visible. Men of science, in so far as they are men of science merely, know quite as little of that which makes it hard, as of that which makes it possible, to believe in the Heavenly Father.
Perhaps it is a proof that Charles Darwin was something more than a mere man of science, that another reminiscence of his conversation arises to the writer's mind as a clue to an explanation of that great antagonism of our day which he did so much to further. A friend expressed to him, not long before his death, with an oblivion of the way in which the remark told that was a marvellous tribute to the modesty of the hearer, the opinion that the Correlation of the Physical Forces was a greater dis- covery than evolution. "I entirely agree with you," he responded, with that overflowing emphasis whenever agreement was possible which gave his conversation a sort of youthful charm even in his old age ; "and I should go farther, and say it was an even greater discovery than that of gravitation." The reminiscence is an in- dication of something in him that transcended the boundaries of his habitual thought, and brought him to the borderland where science confronts philosophy. The correlation of the physical forces is that principle which sums up the truth of all natural law,. that principle whereby the truth that concerns matter is divided from the truth that concerns min& All physical change may be represented by an equation. So much friction equals so mach heat; so much heat equals so mush movement. The trans- formations of force are infinite, but force itself can neither be increased nor diminished, except so far as we come in contact with that which to the man of science takes the aspect of miracle. On spiritual ground, no such law holds good. Man can give man warmth and light that he does not lose. The man of science may say, indeed, that this is only what happens when a candle is lighted at the fire. But those who have known the deepest influence that one spirit can pour upon another, feel the evolution of latent force an inadequate description of that experience. We disappoint each other, it is true, whenever we seek to deal with each other merely as spirit with spirit, and forget the limitations of the flesh. But the spirit of man is also in contact with one to whom such limita- tions are unknown ; and when he thinks of the origin of this universe, he cannot but identify it with this infinite spirit which floods his own.
Now, the change in the relation of Science to Faith in our day lies here,—that up to the promulgation of the Darwinian theory, the Creation formed a link between the laws of the outward and the inward universe. Te recognise the creative spirit met with at every step in the inner world on the very threshold of the outer world, is to make room for any possible extension of tlutt creative agency in the subsequent development of the outer world. Miracle required jnetification, it required evidence of exceptional strength answering to its exceptional nature ; but as long as science assumed miracle in the beginning of things, it could not reject miracle afterwards. Thus, the study of science led the mind towards an event that could not be described other- wise than as a stupendous miracle, though before reaching that event science stopped abruptly. Evolution, we need not say, is much older than Darwin, and evolution always bridged the chasm and invited science to extend her realm. But Darwin did for evolution what Newton did for gravitation ; he wedded vague theory to definite and verified fact. After him there was no- assumption ready for teleology ; the marble must be quarried as well as hewn. Those who believe, as John Mill puts it, "that the eye of man was made by one who can see," are not confuted by anything Darwin has written. But they are opposed by the whole spirit of his argument, and its effect on his own mind ; and this being so, it was inevitable that a general acceptance of his doctrines should involve an eclipse of faith.
When once the outward has relaxed its overmastering clutch on the world of intellect, and the inward again speaks to the heart of man, those doctrines, we cannot doubt, will be dis- covered to stand in the closest relation to deeper views of spiritual truth. What the soul, feeling its need of God, seeks from any in- tellectual account of his relation to his creature, is space to think of him as an Eternal Beginner. Those yet living can remember an infancy overshadowed by the dread that this brief life on earth was in truth the six days of Creation for the soul of man, that after that His hand was withdrawn for ever, and the spirits He had made left as they were. From this ghastly fear we have been delivered. We have learned to look forward to that experience which we call death as an end of nothing but our relation to the things we see, an end which will leave us still, in relation to the Invisible, in the attitude of unfinished creatures, through all eternity passing into a greater fullness of being as we approach its source, Is not there a close connection between this new spiritual phase of our time, and an intellectual phase which expands the six days of Creation into the whole life of the world, and teaches us to think of our abode here as unfinished P A God exhausted in his creation is no inevitable part of the idea of evolution, how- ever much for the moment it be the creed of evolutionists. A God still working, and calling man to help him in his work, is a view of the divine that suits better with the inevitable pro- blems of life than the view of a Creator who finished his work, such as we know it, and who, looking upon it, pronounced it very good. The "struggle for existence" is, indeed, a sad fact that, not only in the animal, but in the human world, continues to daunt and exercise faith, while the "survival of the fittest," inasmuch as all it nieans is the survival of the fittest to survive, is no real answer to any of the difficulties raised by the more candid formula. We must let the perplexities of the world melt into the background of Creation; we must accept the fact that the difficulties which lacerate our hearts and perplex our minds in the course of the world's history have been there from the beginning. The spirit which feels itself in contact with the Infinite sees room for explanation beyond all such obstacles to faith, vast as they are ; the spirit which has no such experience will find faith inadequate to meet the requirements of commonplace prosperity, and the knowledge that none can escape who live in this world.
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