31. Tried then by the appropriate tests, Mr. Darwin's scheme is found wanting. To a fair hearing he is amply entitled. True, his doctrine is fatal-there is no use concealing it-to what has hitherto been revered as Divine Revelation: Man, when he dies, has as much to fear or to hope for as his kinsman and congener the gorilla, and no more. That is consequence the first. The speculation, moreover, is such as may excuse, on the face of it, a measure of distrust and shrinking; for the creed would change in most minds the code of duty, and conviction of a bestial origin and fate would not ordinarily yield the fruits of even a feeble and flickering faith in rank but a little lower than the angels. That is consequence the second. Mr. Darwin does not deduce these consequences: with instinctive loyalty to a better culture, he studiously abstains from drawing them, and even, indirectly, deprecates their being drawn.68 Nevertheless he has touched to the quick the problem pressing through all time on all souls for solution: "What is life, and what ought I to live for? Is man a spiritual nature, surviving the grave, or simply the chief animal, and death the last of him?" The question at issue bears all the burden of the chasm that parts the creed of Lucretius from that of St. Paul. "Lying on the

infinite bosom of nature, the Greek was yet unsatisfied. Had you asked his highest wish, he would have replied, "This world, if it would only last, I ask no more.' Its revels, its dances, its races,

its academic groves, these were blessedness; and the Greek's hell was death." 69 Would the case be otherwise with a modern to whom a future life had become a brain-sick phantom, and the Deity practically undistinguishable from the aggregate of physical laws? Or if otherwise with the very few whom the accidents of a refined temperament and a noble culture kept a class by themselves, would it rest with this or the other lettered recluse to lay reins on the fierce logic of the multitude? The creed that man is ape-born, speaking generally, where it made a disciple would not miss an interpreter. Did it ever pass from the brain of imaginative savans into the heart and belief of a people, no shrinking on the part of its authors could stay its mission-could prevent its stamping a sordid utilitarianism as the sole wisdom of life, and Sauve qui peut as the whole duty of man; lending ruthless oppression its ready salvo, and successful chicane its absolving gospel. But this is a digression. Consequences, whether agreeable or disagreeable, have no legitimate voice, it

must be carefully borne in mind, in the determining of scientific fact. No consequences will make that which is true false, or that which is false true. If man is a transmuted ape, no brilliancy of ridicule, or felicity of sarcasm, will upset the proof, or dissolve the pedigree. Mr. Darwin did not make nature; he only interprets it; and so he does not misinterpret, no fault can be found, however startling or saddening the facts may be. "What is actually true it is always most desirable to know, whatever consequences may arise from its admission;" 70 and truth is not the contortion of things by thought, but the conformity of thought with things. Let the truth then be reached, though the heavens fall; only, when it is a case of the heavens falling, be we very sure it is truth that brings them down. Do then the observed or recorded phenomena of species supply any solid groundwork for Mr. Darwin's speculation? Does it decipher aright the function of the struggle for subsistence? Does it allow due force to the laws of limitation and equilibrium, so critically coinciding with the pervading rule of nature as to animal sterility and productiveness? Does it account for the predetermined life-cycle in different species; the "septuma æstas or the threescore and ten? Has it any animal to show,

lifted by either natural or artificial means out of its own sphere? Does it tally with the testimony of the rocks? Does it take account of the equivalence of scale to time? Does it vanquish the infinitely ramified proof of design in the structures and instincts of animals; and succeed in converting creative endowments into fortuitous acquirements? Can we descry with clearness in the vista of the future, by putting on the spectacles of natural selection, here a race of superhuman men, and there a race of super-simian apes? Have we lighted on the true apology for the basest shapes of historical superstition when we discover that the Egyptian monkey-worship" was an innocent memorial of ancestors? Are Homer, and Plato, and Pascal, and Shakspeare, to be looked back on and looked down on by the coming masters of the earth, as we look back on the mammoth or the mastodon; and shall it be the chosen pastime of the sages of the future to

Admire such wisdom in so mean a shape,

And show a Newton as we show an ape?

Or, conversely, must we accept it, as matter of unerring prediction, that, supposing the scene cleared of their human competitors, only time is required for the dawning of a new and splendid civilization, guaranteed by

the action of infallible laws, and the hope-inspiring aptitudes of the gorilla and the orang? All products of art, language, science-the city, the minster, the university; the steam-ship, the telegraph, the printingpress; the sculpture lining the walls of the British Museum, the thought garnered in a million volumes beneath its dome-all this latent in the chimpanzee, potentially restorable from the baboon ! Strike out all moral concern from the questions: the verdict of the Scientific Reason must surely nevertheless be, No.

32. Mr. Darwin himself reels and recoils in presence of these enormous incredibilities. But he reassures himself in some such fashion as this. My choice is between two alternatives. As a scholar of Bacon and Newton, I desiderate a vera causa for living things. Natural selection is such; creative agency is not. The one may be improbable I own it is loaded with immense embarrassments, some of which I cannot even touch, far less remove but the other is altogether chimerical. Would you really have me believe that "at innumerable periods in the earth's history, certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues." 72

33. Darwinianism, like earlier schemes of development, is born of a difficulty; and this is that difficulty,