And habits produce a tendency to variation in the
offspring (no matter how slight such variation may be), and unless
you can define the possible limit of such variation during an
infinite series of generations, unless you can show that there is a
limit, and that Darwin's theory over-steps it, you have no right to
reject his conclusions. As for the objections to the theory, Darwin
has treated them with admirable candour, and our time is too brief to
enter into them here. My recommendation to you is that you should
read the book again.
C. Thank you, but for my own part I confess to caring very little
whether my millionth ancestor was a gorilla or no; and as Darwin's
book does not please me, I shall not trouble myself further about the
matter.
BARREL-ORGANS: [From the Press, 17 January, 1863.]
Dugald Stewart in his Dissertation on the Progress of Metaphysics
says: "On reflecting on the repeated reproduction of ancient
paradoxes by modern authors one is almost tempted to suppose that
human invention is limited, like a barrel-organ, to a specific number
of tunes."
It would be a very amusing and instructive task for a man of reading
and reflection to note down the instances he meets with of these old
tunes coming up again and again in regular succession with hardly any
change of note, and with all the old hitches and involuntary squeaks
that the barrel-organ had played in days gone by. It is most amusing
to see the old quotations repeated year after year and volume after
volume, till at last some more careful enquirer turns to the passage
referred to and finds that they have all been taken in and have
followed the lead of the first daring inventor of the mis-statement.
Hallam has had the courage, in the supplement to his History of the
Middle Ages, p. 398, to acknowledge an error of this sort that he has
been led into.
But the particular instance of barrel-organism that is present to our
minds just now is the Darwinian theory of the development of species
by natural selection, of which we hear so much. This is nothing new,
but a rechauffee of the old story that his namesake, Dr. Darwin,
served up in the end of the last century to Priestley and his
admirers, and Lord Monboddo had cooked in the beginning of the same
century. We have all heard of his theory that man was developed
directly from the monkey, and that we all lost our tails by sitting
too much upon that appendage.
We learn from that same great and cautious writer Hallam in his
History of Literature that there are traces of this theory and of
other popular theories of the present day in the works of Giordano
Bruno, the Neapolitan who was burnt at Rome by the Inquisition in
1600. It is curious to read the titles of his works and to think of
Dugald Stewart's remark about barrel-organs. For instance he wrote
on "The Plurality of Worlds," and on the universal "Monad," a name
familiar enough to the readers of Vestiges of Creation. He was a
Pantheist, and, as Hallam says, borrowed all his theories from the
eclectic philosophers, from Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and
ultimately they were no doubt of Oriental origin. This is just what
has been shown again and again to be the history of German Pantheism;
it is a mere barrel-organ repetition of the Brahman metaphysics found
in Hindu cosmogonies. Bruno's theory regarding development of
species was in Hallam's words: "There is nothing so small or so
unimportant but that a portion of spirit dwells in it; and this
spiritual substance requires a proper subject to become a plant or an
animal"; and Hallam in a note on this passage observes how the modern
theories of equivocal generation correspond with Bruno's.
No doubt Hallam is right in saying that they are all of Oriental
origin. Pythagoras borrowed from thence his kindred theory of the
metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. But he was more
consistent than modern philosophers; he recognised a downward
development as well as an upward, and made morality and immorality
the crisis and turning-point of change - a bold lion developed into a
brave warrior, a drunken sot developed into a wallowing pig, and
Darwin's slave-making ants, p. 219, would have been formerly
Virginian cotton and tobacco growers.
Perhaps Prometheus was the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said
to have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the
invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from
the backbone to the mammalia, and from the mammalia to the manco-
cerebral, he compounded man of each and all:-
Fertur Prometheus addere principi
Limo coactus particulam undique
Desectam et insani leonis
Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.
One word more about barrel-organs. We have heard on the undoubted
authority of ear and eyewitnesses, that in a neighbouring province
there is a church where the psalms are sung to a barrel-organ, but
unfortunately the psalm tunes come in the middle of the set, and the
jigs and waltzes have to be played through before the psalm can
start. Just so is it with Darwinism and all similar theories. All
his fantasias, as we saw in a late article, are made to come round at
last to religious questions, with which really and truly they have
nothing to do, but were it not for their supposed effect upon
religion, no one would waste his time in reading about the
possibility of Polar bears swimming about and catching flies so long
that they at last get the fins they wish for.
DARWIN ON SPECIES: [From the Press, 21 February, 1863.]
To the Editor of the Press.
Sir - In two of your numbers you have already taken notice of Darwin's
theory of the origin of species; I would venture to trespass upon
your space in order to criticise briefly both your notices.
