I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the gaps of knowledge by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses."-Mr. Darwin.

"The simplicity and completeness of the evolutionist theory entirely disappear when we consider the unproved assumptions on which it is based, and its failure to connect with each other some of the most important facts in nature: in short, it is not in any true sense a philosophy, but merely an arbitrary arrangement of facts in accordance with a number of unproved hypotheses.”—Principal Dawson.

"Trained in a less severe school than that of geometry and physics, his reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive."-Sir David Brewster.

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CHAPTER V.

A HOUSE OF CARDS.

"SPONTANEOUS Generation " therefore, not less than "Transmutation of Species," is merely "a puerile hypothesis." But on these two dogmas the theory of agnostic Evolution is absolutely dependent. By means of the support derived from them-if only they themselves could have been made to stand-it might have stood; but with their fall, it also comes to the ground. Its relation to them renders its. fate inevitable. The instability of the superstructure is inseparably concomitant with the insecurity of the foundation.

Nor is this all. Fate is involved in character: and when we proceed to examine the character of this theory, we are at no loss to discover the cause of its fate.

If the doctrine of agnostic Evolution were scientifically true, it could not fail to command the universal assent of scientific men; whereas now, on the contrary, it is notorious that

among the ranks of those most eminent for scientific attainment there are not wanting earnest and enlightened seekers after truth, who have not only refused to accept this new doctrine with its "logical consequences," but who have based their refusal on this explicit ground, that agnostic Evolution is "nothing more than a flimsy framework of hypothesis constructed upon imaginary or irrelevant facts, with a complete departure from every established canon of scientific investigation."

In his Review of Professor Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation," or, as he would prefer to call it, "The History of the Development or Evolution of Nature," Professor Huxley has expressly formulated "the fundamental proposition of Evolution." "That proposition is," he tells us, "that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed." And he adds, "If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay potentially in the cosmic vapour."

1

In this, of course, he agrees with Haeckel, by

1 "Critiques and Addresses," Macmillan, 1873 (xii. "The Genealogy of Animals "), p. 305.

whom "full justice is done to Kant, as the originator of that 'cosmic gas theory,' as the Germans somewhat quaintly call it, which is commonly ascribed to Laplace." 1

Professor Tyndall agrees with both. Having discerned in "Matter" " the promise and potency of all terrestial life," he lays it down as fundamental that "the doctrine of evolution derives man in his totality from the interaction of organism and environment through countless ages past." 3 By that "vision of the mind," which, as he tells us, "authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye," he sees "the cosmic vapour" as a primitive "nebular haze" (the "universal fire-mist" of the "Vestiges "), gradually cooling, and contracting as it cooled, into a "molten mass," in which "latent and potential" were not only "life" before it was alive, and "form" before it was formed, "not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but the human mind itself; emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena all our philosophy, all our poetry, all

1 66 Critiques and Addresses," Macmillan, 1873 (xii. "The Genealogy of Animals "), p. 304.

2 “Belfast Address,” p. 55.

3 Ibid., p. 59.

4 Ibid., p. 55.

F

our science, and all our art-Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Raphael." All that has been; all that is; nay, even all that is imagined only; was once, to the scientific eye, "in a fine frenzy rolling,"-" potential in the fires of the sun;" 1 just as those fires themselves had no existence (other than "latent and potential") until they were kindled by the condensation of "the cosmic vapour."

These quotations, and such as these-for they might be indefinitely extended-enable us to sum up the doctrine of Agnostic Evolution in two short propositions :

First, "That the earliest organisms were the natural product of the interaction of ordinary inorganic matter and force."

Second, "That all the forms of animal and vegetable life, including man himself, with all his special and distinctive faculties, have been slowly, but successively and gradually developed from the earliest and simplest organisms."

But when we proceed to examine the scientific pretensions of the theory thus succinctly stated, we find, on Professor Tyndall's own showing, that they are worthless. Worthless, because unverified, and incapable of verification. "The strength of the doctrine of 1 "Scientific Use of the Imagination," p. 453.