8 Phenomena do not [LECT. tradicts all the analogies of our experience. You take a little acorn, plant it, up springs a tiny tender shoot; the forces of the soil, and sunshine, and air develop its latent powers and increase its bulk until eventually you have the majestic oak with colossal trunk, gigantic branches, unnumbered twigs, a wealth of foliage and perennial crops of new acorns. Now, does the acorn, that little seed alone, account for that development and productiveness? Am I to be blamed if I tell you I do not believe that that seed could have produced an oak, even with all the other forces of soil, and air, and light, and heat combined, if there had not first been involved into the acorn the life and powers of a perfect oak tree from which it sprang? Evolution cannot bring out of matter and mechanical force what is not actually involved in them. How does it come Again you see this watch (not Paley's old watch this time). I ask you to explain to me the philosophy of this watch. Well, you say, here are gold and silver, and steel and enamel, and jewels, and all combined make up the watch. Yes; but all those things might be, and still there be no watch. to be a watch? Why, there are the properties of the elementsinertia, malliability, ductility, etc., and there is adjustment of part to part, the hands indicating the hours. Yes, but how does it come that these form a watch? Well, there are cog wheels, and springs, and balances, and regulators, and mechanical forces, and-Yes, but you have not yet told me about the watch as such at all, and whole volumes of such explanations would not give me a true philosophy of that little instrument. I must be metaphysical and talk of forces that I cannot see, cannot touch, cannot know. But do you blame me for believing—yes, having faith, that all the matter and mechanical forces in the universe could never have produced this watch without the addition of mind? Matter, and properties of matter plus mind, produced this watch. At least so I believe, although I I.] Explain Ultimate Causes. 9 don't know how, or when, or where, or by whom the watch was made. Am I unscientific because I confess to you my faith in the existence of a watchmaker who had a mind? And can you blame me if, following these analogies, I find it impossible to believe that without the addition of creative mind, matter and mechanical force combined ethereal atoms into molecules, and these into suns and systems and stars, each set in its place and moving with more than clock-like regularity along its self-appointed way? Or that this earth hardened into a sphere and raised the mountain chains, and gave the sea her bounds, and hollowed out a way for the rivers, and prepared a soil for the child it was about to produce? Or that matter and mechanical force brought life into being, by which chemical action is reversed and made to build up by transformation of appropriated matter, and by the loss of which those chemical forces bring forth rottenness and decay; a power which clothes the plains and hills with verdure, secures seed time and harvest, and makes all nature rich and beautiful with the unbounded opulence of forest and field and flower? Or that matter and mechanical force acting in the vegetable world brought forth animal life, by which the dark sea was peopled with tiny creatures and monsters great; by which the worm of the sod, the beast of the forest and field, the songsters in the sky and the soaring eagle were brought forth? Or that matter and mechanical force alone working through the lower animals brought forth man with his ideas of moral good and evil, his conception of spiritual unseen things beyond, his longing for immortality ? Do you blame me when I tell you that as my philosophy of this watch demands the existence of an unseen mind to account for it, so my philosophy of this marvellous universe demands the existence of a mind adequate not only to produce it out of matter and force, but also to produce matter and mechanical force themselves from a something still behind them? Is it not just 10 Is man an Evolved Ape? [LECT. possible that this, the highest arc in the section of infinity which comes within our reach, the mind, intellect, spiritual longings of man, may give us a clue to the mysterious problem? Onward it reaches to spirit worlds and higher possibilities still, away on to the infinite mind the climax of all, and is it not possible that when we reach that point, apparently the antipodes of matter and mechanical force, we will find ourselves at the fountain of infinite being, the point from which all else has sprung, the infinite cycle there complete? The infinite mind projecting itself in all the vast laws of matter, and mechanical forces, and vital phenomena, is the one unseen and necessary agent that makes even evolution possible and holds the universe in harmony. But what has all this to do with the antiquity of man? Much every way. Where does man come in, in this evolution or creation or whatever it may be? Man is of simian origin, say the most of evolutionists, or have so said until lately, some of the links of course being missing; but the point of departure for the development of man seems to be driven back step by step and the missing links to become more numerous than ever. Morphologists, those who study outline and form and resemblances there, tell us that there is a general similarity between the skeleton of the man and the higher apes. Anatomists who study the parts more fully tell us that there is a radical difference in every bone of the body, and every muscle shows a different adaptation. Physiologists tells us that the viscera of man are carnivorous, and those of the ape herbivorous, and that we can as easily have been evolved out of bears and lions as out of apes. Again we are reminded that in the series of phenomena of individual development of the body, the inverse order is observed; moreover apes are climbers and men are walkers. Now, say many scientists, "it is evident that when two organised beings follow an inverse order-especially when otherwise antagonisticin the course of their growth, the more highly developed of the two I.] Prehistoric Traces. 11 can not have descended from the other by means of evolution." So that even scientifically viewed, man's place in evolution has not yet been defined. It is well to notice that thus far, in all developments of apes, from lowest to highest, there is nothing but ape and no approach to man; and in all the degradation of man, there is always man and no approach to apes. Nothing is known to science of man and his progenitors, excepting as essentially and perfectly man, and any talk of his simian origin is pure imagination. Just here comes in another phase of the question: When did man first appear? Sufficient proof has been given that man existed in the quaternary period along with the mammoth elephant and cave tiger, before Europe was last submerged and covered with glacial ice and arctic cold. But it is also roundly asserted that man lived in tertiary times, that is in geologic time-or 500,000, or 1,000,000 years ago. Now the supposed proofs of this assertion in Europe are confined to a few scratches on some bones, and a dubious flint or two, so that cautious scientists there hesitate to accept the assertion as fact. But it is said that there is proof positive of the fact in America, remains being found under lava beds in gravel layers which belong to this ancient age. This find in the region of Table Mountain in California has been used even here to illustrate, above all other illustrations, the stupidity of theologians and the vast age of Let us look at this illustrious example more closely. I have at hand information respecting the implements found in those gravel beds, and either the asserted facts are wrong, or there is something hard for evolution to explain. As to the facts, (1) doubts are entertained as to the age of the sublava gravels. They may be no older than the early quaternary. (2) But admitting their pliocene age, there are doubts as to the authenticity of the findings, no competent scientist having seen them there. (3) Admitting their authenticity, there a regrave man. 12 No Proof yet of Tertiary Man. [LECT. doubts as to the non-disturbance of the gravels previous to the time of the findings, for auriferous gravels are peculiarly liable to disturbance, and there is good reason to think that those of California had been worked by other races before the whites. (4) The character of the implements said to have been found gives great force to the last (3rd) doubt, for they are mostly mortars and pestles, and other neolithic implements, such as are in common use among the Indians and Mexicans of to-day.-The very idea of neolithic implements in pliocene times is enough to make even the wildest extremist among believers in prehistoric man gasp and stare it would be like talking of specimens of railways and telegraphs found among remains of the stone age.—So that Favre, and Evans, and Huxley and Dawkins, and Lubbock all say the existence of tertiary man is "not proven.' : 1 The second difficulty however is here, if, as we have been told in this house, tertiary man existed in America, there is certainly something loose about evolution or man must have had an evolution all to himself. I quote from a professor in California. "Not a single existing mammalian species can be traced back beyond the quaternary. The higher the organism the more rapidly species change. Existing mammals can be traced back only into the quaternary molluscan species, a small percentage to the early tertiary; protozoan species even to the cretaceous. Is it possible then that man, the highest of all, will be traced back to the middle tertiary? Why, since that time the whole mammalian fauna has changed five or six times! Shall man be an exception to all the laws governing the evolution of the animal kingdom." Man 500,000 years ago, and man today on the same spot precisely the same!! and the universe moving to the march of evolution!! Why such an exception? The fact is there is less talk about the vast antiquity of 1Le Conte in New York Independent. |