DR. RADCUFFE ON THE UNITY OF NATURE.* TEE main object
of this book we take to be to point out the existence, in all provinces of Nature, of diversity in unity and unity in diversity ; but while we are made fully aware by Dr. Radcliffe of the fact that there is unity and the fact that there is diversity in nature, we cannot say that he quite satisfies us in the matter, no doubt extremely ticklish, of drawing the line between the two and explaining the relation of the one to the other. Nay, we should have difficulty in stating any one principle, truth, or main idea which lends unity to Dr. Radcliffe's own book, marshalling its diversities of statement and argument into singleness of purpose and precision of result. There is no lack of talent. Dr. Radcliffe is clearly an able man, of scientific attainments at once extensive and exact, capable of following lines of thought into complex ramification, and of de- tailing facts with clearness and vivacity. But the subject, which indeed, as we hinted, is transcendentally difficult, seems to have partly escaped his grasp, and when we reach his final chapter, having listened to his solution of the comprehensive problem of nature's unity in diversity and diversity in unity, we still have many ques- tions to ask. In his introduction he recites, not without eloquence,
• Proteus ; or, Unity in Nature. By Charles Bland Radcliffe, BED. ffeottad Edition. London: Macmillan and Co.
thastory of Proteus; how the creature emerged from the sea, was en- trapped, outwitted, mastered, and compelled to reveal the secrets of which his captors were in quest. In his changing shapes and persist-
ent unity Proteus stands well enough for Nature maintaining unity through many phases of diversity, and Dr. Radcliffe had every right to appropriate the name of the slippery monster in giving a title to his book ; but we cannot say that, in his presentation of Proteus, Dr. Radcliffe appeases our philosophical curiosity by any means so effectually as the seal-herd appeased that of Menelaus.
In the earlier portion of his book 1)r. Radcliffe adopts language which sounds like that of a thorough-going evolutionist, bringing to light and dwelling on the kind of fact adduced by those who most accurately apprehend the logic of evolution. In the second half of the volume, and most decidedly of all towards its close, he finds his way through a modification of Platonism to a rejection of the inferences drawn by evolutionists, emphatic enough to satisfy his "friend, Dr. Elam," and to encourage persons of
timorous devoutness in the persuasion that Darwin, Huxley, and above all, Herr Haeckel, are merely (to apply somewhat boldly a similitude from the iEnei4) insolent winds (of doctrine), which
the said Dr. Elam, playing the part of Eolus, is competent to order back into the cave out of which they have broken. We shall point out some of those statements and expressions which seem to class Dr. Radcliffe with evolutionists.
In one of his chapters he traces the unity of type discernible amid diversities of limb in vertebrate animals. Wide as is the gap between the foot or hand of man and the hoofs of a horse, it is one, he tells us, " which is easily bridged over." Professor Huxley himself would hardly, we think, say that it is " easily bridged over ;" he would say rather that only the most patient, careful, and prolonged observation of nature has enabled natural- ists to say how it is bridged over,—but he would probably add, as we take liberty to do, that if a writer believes it to be easily bridged over, the scientific reader will not expect him to believe at the same time that the way in which it has been bridged over is by the separate creation of a few dozens, or scores, or hun- dreds of intermediate species between man and the horse. But this is, so far as we know, the only alternative in the sup- posed case to evolution. Again, Dr. Radcliffe speaks of the Miocene horse, hipparion, as " extinct," a term which implies that the living horse is a new species. He describes hipparion as having "the second and third fingers, which in the modern horse are represented merely by the ' splint-bones ' attached to the side of the ' canon-bone,' " dangling as " spurious hoofs " behind the principal hoof. It certainly did not occur to us when we read this that the writer had any doubt that the modern horse had got rid of the spurious hoofs-by development, or that he imagined a miracle of creation to have taken place, at the time when hipparion became extinct, by which our horse, unencumbered by .dangling and superfluous hoofs, was called into existence. Nor was our impression that he considered the modern horse to have lineally descended from the Miocene species weakened, but strengthened, by his mentioning that, both in the days of Julius Caesar and more recently, specimens of horses have appeared with superfluous hoofs dangling in the fashion of hipparion. Some- times Dr. Radcliffe strikes us as talking not only as an evolutionist, but as a resolute and adventurous evolutionist. Such is his tone in his ingenious speculations on the possible origin of life through magnetic and electric motions in particular kinds of matter, and such is the spirit of the following remark :—" Crystallisation, for _ anything that appears to the contrary, may be a manifestation of growth,—a first movement lifewards." He betrays no reluctance to use the forms of expression which advocates of development affect, and we really cannot see how the writer of the following passage on the " progressive evolution " of the animal frame could, at the time of writing it, have been anything but an evolu- tionist :— " On following out the progressive evolution of the animal frame, the next step appears to consist in a partial or complete division of the zone into segments. Just as the zone itself is formed out of the cell by the increase of tho equatorial region at the expense of the polar regions, so now the division of the zone into segments would seem to be formed by the development of certain parts of the zone at the expense of the intermediate parts. The effect of the segmentation is manifested in the formation of ganglia in the nervous layer, of muscular masses in the muscular layer, of cardiac centres in the vascular layer, of bony masses in the osseous layer, and so on. The ambulacral lines of the starfish or sea-urchin are traces of the division of the zone into seg- ments. The tentacles of the polype and of the cephalopod are formed in part of the division of the edge of the zone into segments, and in part by the subsequent growth of the portion of the edge belonging to them; and the multiplication of certain polypes by fission' is only an
extension of the same process which is seen at work in the cutting-out of the tentacles."
The reader will, we think, acquit us of intentional injustice to Dr. Radcliffe, in concluding from this evidence, and a great deal more of like import, that he was in the ordinary sense an evolu- tionist. This, however, can scarcely be the case, though it is possible that while vehemently disclaiming the hypothesis of evolution as put forward with more than German schwarmerei by Herr Haeckel, he does not wholly repudiate evolution as taught by the more sober-minded Huxley and Darwin. He gets into Platonism, and we cannot be quite sure as to his whereabouts while he moves amid its luminous mist. According, he tells us, to the true Platonic doctrine, " each fraolX0Y has a firm founda- tion, through its own ri4z, in the Divine Being." Each creature, he holds, was created as a necessary part of a great whole, per- fect in itself, and perfect in its relations to other creatures, and to the universe to which it belongs." He maintains that " there is everywhere in nature one and the same archetypal plan." He seems to intend an express renunciation of the Darwinian theory when he refers to sundry facts, or alleged facts, which, in his opinion, " make it more than difficult to believe that the more simple had precedence of the less simple in the order of develop- ment." One cannot help, when pulled up by a statement like this, asking whether Dr. Radcliffe means to inform ua that the " progressive evolution," of which he minutely detailed each " step," in the formation of the animal frame " out of the cell," was really not progressive at all, and that it is " more than diffi- cult to believe " that the simplicity of the cell preceded the com- plexity of the organism ?
It is easy enough to reconcile Plato's doctrine of ideas with the modern theory of evolution. Plato held that the ideal form of every organism existed in absolute perfection in the Divine Mind, but that this ideal form, constantly striven after, was never fully realised in an actual animal or flower. Mr. Darwin, confining himself, as a man of science, to what the eye can see and the hand handle, says nothing about absolute perfec- tion or divine ideals, but affirms that change, instead of per- manence, is the law of material things, and that perfection is limited, wherever the senses can ascertain the state of the case, by the struggle for existence. Practically, therefore, there would
be agreement between Plato and Darwin as to the imperfection and mutability of all finite things. But we cannot confidently
say what either Plato or Darwin would think of Dr. Radcliffe's "archetypal plan," which in nature is everywhere "one and the same," and that for the simple reason that we cannot confidently say what Dr. Radcliffe means by it him- self. Our impression is that Dr. Radcliffe is haunted with the notion that it would be irreverent to impute imperfection to anything in nature,—thus we account for his express declaration that " each creature " is " perfect in itself ;" but when we ask whether this implies that each creature perfectly realises the "archetypal plan," or even whether it implies a degree of excellence which would be generally held by the human observer to constitute perfection, we can find, in Dr. Radcliffe's pages, no definite answer. Take the Miocene horse, mentioned by himself, and compare it with the modern horse. One of these had "spurious hoofs" dangling useless in the air ; the other, save in exceptional instances, has got rid of the appendages. Which, in this case, is the specimen "perfect in itself "? or are both perfect ? or is neither perfect? To change the illustra- tion, consider the case of the blind fish of the Kentucky Cave. It has an organ of vision like those of other fish, but it has no power of sight. Which animal is "perfect in itself," the fish that has eyes that can see, or the fish that has eyes that cannot see? Might it not be forcibly urged also that if "each creature" were perfect, then each creature in a species would be exactly like every other creature, whereas it is well known that no two things in the world of the senses are identical ? The rational evolutionist need have no more objection to an " archetypal plan" of organic existence than to the ideal types of Plato, but must insist upon the practical fact that all organisms act upon surrounding circumstances, and are acted upon by surround- ing circumstances, and that their characteristics, whether we call them perfect or imperfect, are conditioned by this two- fold influence. Dr. Radcliffe seems to us to have been led astray by mistaking the presumptuous dogmatism of Haeckel for the sober truth of evolution. We repeat, however, that his book is able, and add that many of his illustrations of nature's unity in diversity and diversity in unity are interesting and impressive.
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