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CHAPTER X.

(SUBJECT CONTINUED.)

Were our First Parents Savages?—Recent Theories as to the Origin of Civilisation considered in Relation to the Mental Faculties, the Moral Sense, and Religion.

"Christians have a right to protest against the arraying of probabilities against the clear teachings of Scripture. It is not easy to estimate the evil that is done by eminent men throwing the weight of their authority on the side of unbelief, influenced by a mere balance of probabilities in one department, to the neglect of the most convincing proofs of a different kind. . . . . Thus they often decide against the Bible on evidence that would not determine an intelligent jury in a suit for twenty shillings."--Professor C. Hodge.

IN

IN attempting to deduce those mental and moral results. which characterise modern civilisation from some creature that had not even a head in which to treasure a single idea, theorists have greater difficulties to overcome than when they endeavour to connect man's body with the lowest mollusc. No one refuses to acknowledge the existence of intelligence, memory, and some measure of reasoning power in many of the lower animals; but such an admission stops far short of connecting the human mind, by lineal descent, with intellectual germs in some gorilla, or snail, or worm, and of discovering in that lowliest origin not only the foundation of the complex fabric of our civilisation, but the spring of all those ideas of immortality, responsibility, private and public duties, eternity, and God, which shed a richer splendour over man's history than that which all the sciences and arts united can of themselves create. The

advocates of this theory have utterly failed in their attempt to include in their system, and to account for, the practical lessons of Christianity. Its lofty morality, its sublime doctrines, and its "pure and undefiled religion" are left without an origin or an aim. As facts, if as nothing else, theorists are bound to account for them, or, at least, as an outcome from previous ideas. Let us examine the facts which they select from the natural history of the lower animals and of the lowest man, to constitute the basis of ultimate intellectual and moral improvement. What evidence is there that the ideas and the habits of the lower animals, and the most sunken savages, so commingle as to make this theory even plausible? Is there a vestige of proof to show that there has been an intermingling of notions or practices, and that, through or by them, man has emerged to that lowest platform on which there was the first beam of civilisation? What data do they present to warrant our acceptance of the sweeping conclusion that Psychology, Mental Philosophy, Ethics, and Practical Religion, or the lessons of Christianity, are deducible from even the most accomplished of the lower animals?

To that issue the theorist is brought, and he is bound to face it. If he cannot include in his exposition all the higher forms of Feeling, Thought, and Law, he should acknowledge his failure, and we are justified in rejecting his conclusions.

Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Sir John Lubbock, evidently anticipating such legitimate demands as these, have resolutely attempted to satisfy them; and, in their respective fields, have adduced their strongest proofs and best reasoning. By placing in immediate connexion their interlacing, and, sometimes, conflicting expositions of each topic, we shall obtain a definite view of what has been most

influential in deciding their opinion, and be the better able to do justice to them and ourselves in forming a deliberate conclusion.

But to follow this course, is to find the very same kind of defective reasoning in reference to the descent of the human mind, and the growth of civilisation, of which we complained when discussing the proof for the descent of the human body from some primordial germ which started into life millions of years ago. There are the same unbridged

chasms, the same absence of necessary links, the same inadequacy of data.

Three questions require to be answered. First, Are there any facts to show the close connexion of the mind and habits of the highest of the lower animals with the very lowest of the human race? Second, Is there any evidence of a moral nature in the lower animals which can, even plausibly, be regarded as the foundation of Man's moral constitution? And Third, Out of what condition is religion evolved? On what foundation does this theory place it? What is its influence on civilisation?

Darwin himself has answered these questions with such qualifications, that it is surprising to see him endeavouring to fasten together important conclusions by a chain, broken and dissevered through the absence of its central links.

Let us proceed to consider

III. CIVILISATION IN RELATION TO MAN'S MENTAL FACULTIES.

Among British Naturalists of the highest standing, there is a general concurrence of opinion as to the gulf between the intellectual faculties of man and whatever degree of mind may show itself in the lower animals. It is impossible to connect the two. Professor Huxley speaks "of the great gulf which intervenes between the lowest man and the highest

ape in intellectual power,"1 "of the immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the human from the Simian stirps," and "of the present enormous gulf between them." "3 "At the same time," he repeats, "no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilised man and the brutes; or is more certain that, whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them." 4

In reference to this vast break, Darwin is no less explicit than Huxley. When he is describing the intellectual distance between man and those creatures which are nearest him in brain-organisation, and force, he declares the difference to be enormous. "No doubt," he says, "the difference in this respect is enormous, even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest savages, who has no words to express any number higher than four, and who can use no abstract terms for the commonest objects or affections, with that of the most highly organised ape. The difference would, no doubt, still remain immense, even if one of the higher apes had been improved or civilised as much as a dog has been in comparison with its parent form, the wolf or jackal."5 Notwithstanding this "immense" distance between the two, and the consequent want of the least evidence of any lineal relations whatever, he has amusingly assumed, in his "Origin of Species," that he has discovered such a mental connexion of man with the lower animals as shall form the basis of a new system of Psychology. Mental science will start on a new track in search of other objects than our metaphysicians have hitherto kept in view. His statement is, "In the distant future, I see open fields for far more important

2

1 "Man's Place in Nature," p. 102. Ibid, Foot-note, p. 103. Ibid, p. 102. 4 Ibid, p. 110. 5 "Descent of Man," Vol. 1, p. 34.

researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." 1 The contests of metaphysicians will cease, when even the phrenologist has transferred his examination of the supposed compartments of the human brain to the nervous tissues of the lower and lowest animals, and new triumphs will indeed give unexpected lustre to man's history when he has educed from a material body that which is non-material, and from the perishing that which is imperishable. We have here a theory involving the complete and immediate overthrow of that system of mental science in which Mind is regarded as a substance distinct from the body, and which has been developed by some of the most accurate and powerful thinkers of recent times, advocated on the possible existence of facts of which there is not the slightest evidence. Mr. Wallace, who in originality and independence as a thinker and a naturalist is Mr. Darwin's compeer, rejects his theory regarding the descent of our mental faculties. There are faculties and conceptions for which, in his view, it provides no explanation. "But there is," he says, "another class of human faculties that do not regard our fellowmen, and which cannot, therefore, be thus accounted for. Such are the capacity to form ideal conceptions of space and time, of eternity and infinity. The capacity for intense artistic feelings of pleasure in form, colour, and composition, and for those abstract notions of form and number which render geometry and arithmetic possible. How were all or any of these faculties first developed, when they could have been of no possible use to man in his early stages of barbarism ?

1 "Origin of Species," pp. 577, 578. 1869

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