VIII. WHAT IS DARWINISM?' (THE NATION, May 28, 1874.) THE question which Dr. Hodge asks he promptly and decisively answers: "What is Darwinism? it is atheism." Leaving aside all subsidiary and incidental matters, let us consider-1. What the Darwinian doctrine is, and 2. How it is proved to be atheistic. Dr. Hodge's own statement of it cannot be very much bettered: "His [Darwin's] work on the 'Origin of Species' does not 'purport to be philosophical. In this aspect it is very different from the cognate works of Mr. Spencer. Darwin does not speculate on the origin of the universe, on the nature of matter or of force. He is simply a naturalist, a careful and laborious observer, skillful in his descriptions, and singularly candid in dealing with the difficulties in the way of his peculiar doctrine. He set before himself a single problem—namely, How are the fauna 1 "What is Darwinism? By Charles Hodge, Princeton, N. J." New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1874. "The Doctrine of Evolution. By Alexander Winchell, LL. D., etc." New York: Harper & Brothers. 1874. "Darwinism and Design; or, Creation by Evolution. By George St. Clair." London: Hodder & Stoughton. 1873. "Westminster Sermons. By the Rev. Charles Kingsley, F. L. S., F. G. S., Canon of Westminster, etc." London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1874. ... and flora of our earth to be accounted for? . . . To account for the existence of matter and life, Mr. Darwin admits a Creator. This is done explicitly and repeatedly. . . . He assumes the efficiency of physical causes, showing no disposition to resolve them into mind-force or into the efficiency of the First Cause. . . . He assumes, also, the existence of life in the form of one or more primordial germs. . . . How all living things on earth, including the endless variety of plants and all the diversity of animals, have descended from the primordial animalcule, he thinks, may be accounted for by the operation of the following natural laws, viz.: First, the law of Heredity, or that by which like begets like the offspring are like the parent. Second, the law of Variation; that is, while the offspring are in all essential characteristics like their immediate progenitor, they nevertheless vary more or less within narrow limits from their parent and from each other. Some of these variations are indifferent, some deteriorations, some improvements—that is, such as enable the plant or animal to exercise its functions to greater advantage. Third, the law of Over-Production. All plants and animals tend to increase in a geometrical ratio, and therefore tend to overrun enormously the means of support. If all the seeds of a plant, all the spawn of a fish, were to arrive at maturity, in a very short time the world could not contain them. Hence, of necessity, arises a struggle for life. Only a few of the myriads born can possibly live. Fourth, here comes in the law of Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest; that is, if any individual of a given species of plant or animal happens to have a slight deviation from the normal type favorable to its success in the struggle for life, it will survive. This variation, by the law of heredity, will be transmitted to its offspring, and by them again to theirs. Soon these favored ones gain the ascendency, and the less favored perish, and the modification becomes established in the species. After a time, another and another of such favorable variations occur, with like results. Thus, very gradually, great changes of structure are introduced, and not only species, but genera, families, and orders, in the vegetable and animal world, are produced" (pp. 26-29). Now, the truth or the probability of Darwin's hy. pothesis is not here the question, but only its congruity or incongruity with theism. We need take only one exception to this abstract of it, but that is an important one for the present investigation. It is to the sentence which we have italicized in the earlier part of Dr. Hodge's own statement of what Darwinism is. With it begins our inquiry as to how he proves the doctrine to be atheistic. First, if we rightly apprehend it, a suggestion of atheism is infused into the premises in a negative form: Mr. Darwin shows no disposition to resolve the efficiency of physical causes into the efficiency of the First Cause. Next (on page 48) comes the positive charge that "Mr. Darwin, although himself a theist," maintains that "the contrivances manifested in the organs of plants and animals . . . . are not due to the continued coöperation and control of the divine mind, nor to the original purpose of God in the constitution of the universe." As to the negative statement, it might suffice to recall Dr. Hodge's truthful remark that Darwin "is simply a naturalist," and that "his work on the origin of species does not purport to be philosophical." In physical and physiological treatises, the most religious men rarely think it necessary to postulate the First Cause, nor are they misjudged by the omission. But surely Mr. Darwin does show the disposition which our author denies him, not only by implication in many instances, but most explicitly where one would naturally look for it, namely at the close of the volume in question: "To my mind, it accords better with what we know of the laws im pressed on matter by the Creator," etc. If that does not refer the efficiency of physical causes to the First Cause, what form of words could do so? The positive charge appears to be equally gratuitous. In both Dr. Hodge must have overlooked the beginning as well as the end of the volume which he judges so hardly. Just as mathematicians and physicists, in their systems, are wont to postulate the fundamental and undeniable truths they are concerned with, or what they take for such and require to be taken for granted, so Mr. Darwin postulates, upon the first page of his notable work, and in the words of Whewell and Bishop Butler: 1. The establishment by divine power of general laws, according to which, rather than by insulated interpositions in each particular case, events are brought about in the material world; and 2. That by the word "natural" is meant "stated, fixed, or settled," by this same power, "since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so—i. e., to effect it continually or at stated times as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once." So when Mr. Darwin makes such large and free use of "natural as antithetical to supernatural causes, we are left in no doubt as to the ultimate source which he refers them to. Rather let us say there ought to be no doubt, unless there are other grounds for it to rest upon. Such ground there must be, or seem to be, to justify or excuse a veteran divine and scholar like Dr. Hodge in his deduction of pure atheism from a system 1 These two postulate-mottoes are quoted in full in a previous article, in No. 446 of the Nation (page 259 of the present volume). produced by a confessed theist, and based, as we have seen, upon thoroughly orthodox fundamental conceptions. Even if we may not hope to reconcile the difference between the theologian and the naturalist, it may be well to ascertain where their real divergence begins, or ought to begin, and what it amounts to. Seemingly, it is in their proximate, not in their ultimate, principles, as Dr. Hodge insists when he declares that the whole drift of Darwinism is to prove that everything "may be accounted for by the blind operation of natural causes, without any intention, purpose, or coöperation of God" (page 64). "Why don't he say," cries the theologian, "that the complicated organs of plants and animals are the product of the divine intelligence? If God made them, it makes no difference, so far as the question of design is concerned, how he made them, whether at once or by process of evolution" (page 58). But, as we have seen, Mr. Darwin does say that, and he over and over implies it when he refers the production of species "to secondary causes," and likens their origination to the origination of individuals; species being series of individuals with greater difference. It is not for the theologian to object that the power which made individual men and other animals, and all the differences which the races of mankind exhibit, through secondary causes, could not have originated congeries of more or less greatly differing individuals through the same causes. Clearly, then, the difference between the theologian and the naturalist is not fundamental, and evolution may be as profoundly and as particularly theistic as it is |