ORDINARY MEETING, MARCH 18, 1867. THE REV. WALTER MITCHELL, VICE-PRESIDENT, IN THE CHAIR. The minutes of the previous Meeting having been read and confirmed, it was announced that G. T. Miller, Esq., 59, Portland Place, had been elected a Member of the Institute. The discussion upon Mr. Warington's Paper, read at the last Meeting, "On the Credibility of Darwinism," was resumed by Mr. Reddie; who read the following Paper in reply to that of Mr. Warington : By ON THE CREDIBILITY OF DARWINISM. (In reply to ΟΝ N the present occasion, Sir, I could have wished that Mr. Warington and myself had changed places. I almost wish, I mean, that I could have written and read his paper, that I might have had the satisfaction of hearing how he would have criticised it. He will not, I hope, misunderstand the double compliment I mean most sincerely to pay him, in saying this now. Could I have undertaken to write in defence of Darwinism, I would have wished to write as plainly as Mr. Warington has done. And if I wished, on the other hand, to pull all the arguments he has advanced to pieces, I should like nothing better than to let loose his critical faculty upon the paper it is now our duty to discuss. I think, Sir, it is a happy circumstance that in this Society such an impartial and temperate paper should have been read upon such a subject; and I most sincerely trust that the tone of the discussion throughout will be that observed by Mr. Warington, whether we agree or disagree with the views he has advanced. I have thought it right to make these preliminary remarks, all the more because I so thoroughly disagree with Mr. Warington from first to last, and am now about to move, as it were (as they say "in another place"), a direct negative to all the principles, assumptions and arguments throughout his paper. I must, however, reverse his way of putting the subject before you. I think Darwinism incredible, not because I can first prove it to be impossible, but because I hope to show that it is inharmonious, inconsistent and inadequate; and that it is therefore, if not "impossible," yet utterly improbable, and that it ought to be at once rejected as an irrational hypothesis, and altogether incredible. You will observe that I disclaim being able logically to prove that Darwinism is "impossible," while Mr. Warington has boldly claimed to have proved it to be possible. Well, Sir, in my opinion he has gone quite beyond the range of à priori possibility in the case, in even attempting to do what he thus has claimed to have done. I can perfectly understand his believing the theory to be possible as he has put it before us. Darwinism plus Deity must, no doubt, be possible as a mere conception of the mind,-i. e., if we assume that God has chosen so to work; but Darwinism, pure and simple, as the French say, is a very different matter. Nor must Mr. Warington object to my drawing this distinction. I assure him I intend to steer clear of all odium theologicum-as I trust others will of all odium scientificum— in discussing this vital question; but at the same time I have no intention of avoiding-and I am sure it will not be expected that I should avoid-speaking perfectly freely on the subject, and bringing out the logical issues to which the hypothesis leads, not only in my opinion as its opponent, but in that of some of its own most zealous advocates. At the same time I beg to say that I shall touch very lightly upon that most important issue, and as far as possible (in order to do mere justice to the argument) I shall limit myself to the issues raised by Mr. Warington himself. I shall do so, if for no other reason, because, from past experience in discussing Darwinism with others, I know how skittish Darwinians can be; and I wish to impress it upon the members of the Institute that they must not conclude, even if we refute Mr. Warington, that it will be admitted we have refuted Darwinism, but only his way of supporting it. Even Mr. Warington himself frankly tells us in the concluding sentences of his able paper, that "Mr. Darwin's own book is professedly but a meagre abstract of the evidence on behalf of the hypothesis he has in store. The full statement has long been promised, and, in respect to one important part of the subject, is announced as now preparing for publication.' It were rashness in the extreme to jump to any definite conclusion until this fuller statement has been seen and weighed. And even then much further investigation into facts will probably be needed before a final decision can be made." "Meanwhile," Mr. Warington-with, in my opinion, the extreme rashness he has thus very sensibly deprecated-does "jump to a conclusion," in the absence of the coming evidence, and "submits that Darwinism is certainly to be maintained as credible." I have said that I shall reverse the order, as well as endeavour to negative the conclusions, of Mr. Warington's several propositions. But in the first place I must touch upon his preliminary matter-his principles of philosophizing and the analogy he adduces-before entering upon the more immediate question he has brought before us. Well, Sir, here again, I am unfortunately at issue with Mr. Warington in some important respects. He appears to me to have quite thrown over the very principles of inductive science in his opening sentences. He is positively in love with hypothesis, theorizing and speculation. We need not, therefore, be surprised that" to love and be wise " has been beyond his power. He concludes that mainly, if not exclusively, "it is through hypothesis that truth is ultimately attained;" and not only so, but throwing Bacon's cautious and philosophic wisdom to the winds, he actually believes that we positively cannot collect together and store up a knowledge of the facts of nature, without first of all determining "what facts especially need to be accumulated and sought after." This mode of collecting facts which have been sought after in order to meet the needs of a foregone conclusion, must remind us of the temple, alluded to by Bacon, in which were to be found the votive tablets of those who had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and which were appealed to as proving the power of the gods to which they had been offered, but where the portraits of those who had perished, after making the very same vows, were altogether absent. (Nov. Org., i. 46.) We have had some experience, too, since Bacon's day, of the effect of this method of seeking for and tabulating facts to suit some favourite hypothesis. And I have sufficiently expressed my opinion of the vicious nature of this unphilosophical mode of "going on for years collecting and arranging in the mind all newly-discovered facts, with sole reference, for instance, to the nebular hypothesis," only recently given up.* But still I agree with Mr. Warington to this extent, that men are prone to theorize and speculate, though in my opinion they often do so in * Scientia Scientiar.; Journ. of Trans. of Vict. Inst., vol. i. p. 21. F detriment to the true advancement of real science and in spite of all Bacon's principles and warnings. And that being the case, I quite accept as a necessity that we must look these theoretical speculations in the face, and, if we can, refute them. I now come to the consideration of the analogy of the theory of universal gravitation, adduced by Mr. Warington as an example for our guidance in testing Darwinism, as he evidently intends it should be tested, by what he considers the most rigid of scientific tests. In my opinion, this analogy has been most happily chosen. Chosen happily by Mr. Warington, because the choice proves how thoroughly he means to test the theory the credibility of which he pleads for. Chosen happily, also, Sir, because you preside over our deliberations, who are most competent to estimate both the abstract and the relative merits of the proofs relied upon for the establishment of the two theories thus placed in comparison. And happily chosen, I beg leave to add besides, on my own account, because of the way in which my name has recently been publicly mixed up with the Newtonian hypothesis in connection with this society. I allude to an article especially in the Saturday Review of 12th January last, and I am glad of the opportunity now given me to show to our members that I have some reason on my side. The theory of universal gravitation being a subject to which, like yourself, I have given considerable attention, (though we have viewed it from different stand-points-I as a sceptic, and you as a believer, -and at present, perhaps, we have therefore naturally arrived at different results,) I am able to say that the analogy sought to be established by Mr. Warington is probably much more applicable than he imagined to the theory of Mr. Darwin. Only in the first test does the analogy entirely break down. We can prove or disprove, by absolute mathematical demonstration, the possibility of universal gravitation. But, as I have already said, this we certainly cannot do with respect to Darwinism. But as regards the other three tests-adequacy, consistency, harmoniousness-the analogy "runs on all fours." When once we get over the question of " possibility," these tests can be applied equally to both the hypotheses. Before, however, I proceed to examine how these tests have been or may be applied to Darwinism, there is a prior part of the analogy to be glanced at. We must not forget, then, that the present distinguished naturalist, Mr. Charles Darwin, is not the first propounder of what we now call "Darwinism." I am not even quite sure that the theory of "natural selection,"-as explanatory of the resultant hypothesis of developmental transmutation of species,--can fairly be attributed to him as its sole author, except as regards this new name, he has no doubt furnished the theory. But, at any rate, his grandfather, Dr. Darwin, preceded him; as did also Lamarck and Monboddo, to mention no other more ancient but less-known names, who have held the same views as regards all essential results, though they failed to give precisely his explanations of how the results were brought about. In the notorious anonymous volume, The Vestiges of Creation, we had essential Darwinism put forward most confidently, without Mr. Darwin's carefully selected and ingeniously varied and modified explanations; which have since been developed, in support, however, we must always remember, of conclusions arrived at previously. But Dr. Louis Büchner, in his Kraft und Stoff, distinctly claims to have put forward views identical with those of Mr. Darwin seven years before The Origin of Species by Natural Selection was published, though he recognizes the value of the "most convincing proofs " which he says Mr. Darwin has furnished in support of those views. (Force and Matter, p. 91, note.) Well, we have a very close analogy to this in the history of universal gravitation. On a recent occasion, when Dr. Gladstone read a paper here, I pointed out, by citations from the Philosophical Transactions, that both Hook and Halley had preceded Newton by ten or twelve years in starting the identical theory, though neither of them produced a Principia in order to establish it on mathematical principles.* That is, of course, Newton's great merit; just as the natural-selection explanations of Mr. Darwin are his. I ought, perhaps, to add that even Kepler is said to have also had some idea of the same kind as Newton, as to the influence of the sun in regulating the motions of the planets; but in truth Kepler's idea was not the same. He considered the sun had merely a directive influence, and not a force of attraction, as is explained in Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences. (Vol. ii. p. 19.) In that admirable volume we are also told of the remarkable manner in which the Principia of Newton was looked and longed for, and how it was at once accepted whenever it was published. How some believed in the theory, even before the book came out just as some now do in Darwinism, while yet only expecting Mr. Darwin's coming treatise, which is to make all clear! and how some-including even the acute philosopher Locke-believed in universal gravitation after the Principia was published, while acknowledging that they could not follow the steps of the reasoning by which it was mathematically established. I think it is very probable that * Journ. of Trans. of Vict. Inst., vol. i., p. 414. |