What the Senses Teach OF THE World and the Doctrine of Evolution.

Is there more than one World—stuff?—Thus far, with a few exceptions which may be called heterodox, physicists have in their speculations used the term matter as though in ultimate conception there is but one kind of matter and the atoms of that matter are absolutely alike. In other words there is but one stuff of which the cosmos is formed. The senses on which this theory is based do not endorse, but, by their limitation, prove the opposite. We have no means of knowing of sound aside from the ear, which is wonderfully fashioned to receive vibrations and transmit them to the brain; yet its imperfection, caused by the limitations of nerve tissue, reveals the fact that it is cognizant of only a narrow field, either side of which is a wide tract, which to it is profound silence. If a sound wave impinges on the ear with less vibrations than 16½ times in a second it is inaudible; and if the number of vibrations is increased above 38,000 per second, they again lose the power of impressing the ear. There may be insects capable of hearing these high sounds, which to man are silence itself; and the long waves that beat less than 16½ times in a second may be sweet music to some of the lower tribes of animated life.

Perfect as the eye may be as an optical instrument, its range is far less than that of the ear. Only those rays of light having waves 1-39,000th of an inch in length are visible on one side, and the last visible radiations on the other end of the spectrum have wave lengths of 1-575,000th of an inch. This is a narrow limit, and on either side there must be rays, which eyes or nerves differently constructed would receive and interpret, yielding, perhaps, colors unknown to our consciousness. There is a harmony in color waves, like music in sound waves, for as a note blends in one, in all octaves above or below, so light waves, twice or thrice the length of given waves yield the same color impression.

We may regard from the same point of view the sense of taste, the nerves of which have a still narrower range, and are apparently differently affected in animals than they are in man—substances disagreeable to him being relished by them, and of course affecting the taste differently.

We are not sure that there are not senses which appreciate conditions of matter, of which we have no conception. There are insects which apparently have organs bestowing senses unlike our own. Their antennæ have no corresponding organs in the higher animals, and the conception of the world which these give has no analogy in our minds.

As the senses are thus cognizant of narrow belts of sound and light, leaving unknown stretches on either side, so what is called matter may be the narrow range recognized by our finite powers as a whole, on either side of which may lie stuffs of widely different qualities and possibilities.

A Dead View of Dead Worlds.—Pausing to consider the received theory of force, as an explanation of the causes of the world—creation, we shall find that it fails to meet the high promises it vauntingly makes.

According to the received theory of force, every manifestation of power and energy on the earth is originally derived from the sun. The growth of plants and animals, and all the activities displayed by the latter, are derived from their food, which was produced by the light and heat of the sun.

In illustration of the sun’s incalculable power, take, for instance, the rain fall of one-tenth of an inch extending over the United States. Such a rain-fall has been estimated at ten thousand millions of tons, which the heat of the sun had raised at least to the height of one mile. It would take all the pumping engines in the United States a century to lift this amount of water back again to the clouds. If the force is so great as displayed in the rain-fall of one-tenth of an inch, how incomprehensible the power which lifts the entire amount of water evaporated, amounting to, at least, forty inches!

Yet the force of the sun, manifested on the earth, is an inconceivably small part of that radiated, for the earth only receives in the proportion that its surface bears to the sphere of its orbit, and how incomparable is its diameter of 8,000 miles to that of a sphere 184,000,000 across. The combined surface of all the planets would receive a scarcely appreciable ratio of the entire amount which, unimpeded, flies away into the abyss of space.

The energy radiated at the surface of the sun is estimated at 7,000 horse power to the square foot, and if the sun was a mass of coal, it would have to be consumed in 5,000 years in order to supply it, and in 5,000 years would have to cool down to 9,000 degrees, C. If the nebular hypothesis be received, the contraction would supply the loss for 7,000 years before the temperature would fall 1 degree, C.

Incomprehensible as this force is, it is constantly diminishing, and although the projection of meteors and hypothetical cosmical bodies may prolong its action, the time must come when all its energy will be dissipated into space; all bodies will have the same temperature, and as there is no other source of energy, physical and vital phenomena will cease, and the universe, bereft of living beings, will itself be dead.

A Dead World.—According to the most advanced views at present entertained, this is the end of the career of the universe.

Balfour Stewart endorses this conclusion by saying: “We are induced to generalize still further, and regard not only our own system, but the whole material universe, when viewed with respect to serviceable energy, as essentially evanescent, and as embracing a succession of physical events which can not go on forever as they are.”

In stronger language Mr. Pickering says: “The final result, therefore, would be that all bodies would assume the same temperature, there would be no further source of energy; physical phenomena would cease, and the physical universe would be dead. Such, at least, is the present view of this stupendous question.”

In explanation of the origin of this energy, and the reason for its loss, Mr. Stewart further says: “It is supposed that these particles originally existed at a great distance from each other, and that, being endowed with force of gravitation, they have gradually come together; while in this process heat has been generated, just as if a stone were dropped from the top of a cliff toward the earth.”

Thus the universe would become an equally heated mass, utterly worthless as far as the work of production is concerned, since such production depends on difference of temperature.

In other words, the universe becomes dead matter, wholly incapable of supporting life, and so far as present science gives us any information, must remain forever at rest.

The fact that such a conclusion has been reached should cause us to pause in doubt of the correctness of the data leading thereto. It would be more plausible were it shown how, at the end of the great cycle, there was renewal of the lost energy, and return to the nebulous beginning. Causation moves in cycles, and the most alarming perturbations are balanced by forces operating in other directions, so that the result is the preservation of order. Planets swing wide of their orbits for a million years, getting further and further away, yet the time comes when they return on a pathway carrying them as wide on the other side.

This latest view of the universe by scientific thought, however plausible its argument, or apparently logical its results, is proven by the very logic of those results to be defective.

The Logic of Results.—It starts with the declaration that matter and force are inseparable, that there can be no matter without force. The nebulous beginning was a storehouse of energy, which has been wasting ever since the first world was formed. This force has been for countless ages dispersing by radiation. It is still wasting, for as it is radiated into space it does not even raise the temperature of the trackless abyss through which it passes. When it is all gone, there will be left the force of gravitation, holding with adamantine grasp the dead residuum of suns and planets; and, strange conclusion to which these premises force us, this residuum must be matter without force.

Here the problem remains unsolved, and a theory which proudly assumes for itself the distinction of being the only true system of nature, which rules God out of the universe, or makes Him an unknown and unknowable quantity, destroys life in nature, and has no means of its restoration except by a miracle. If the universe is a machine which in time will run down and die, all its force being dissipated, does it not follow that in the beginning some superior power united this force with matter? And also, does it not follow that if this dead universe again lives, a superior power must draw back the scattered beams of light, heat, magnetism, and other forces, and re-endow the dead residuum?

Thus this materialistic hypothesis, which boasts arrogantly of its certitude, begins in assumption and ends in a dilemma out of which confession of ignorance and acceptance of miracle only can extricate it.

Creation is not a clock that must be wound up at stated intervals by a foreign power, and any system which does not provide for its restoration as well as destruction, confesses weakness.

The Choice of Causes.—We have this choice: To believe that forces by blind action and reaction have evolved the world from a nebulous fire-cloud and peopled it with sentient and intellectual beings, making of it a perpetual motion, a machine not designed, but the result of infinite failures, perfected by infinite blunders, and sustained by the fortuitous equilibrium of unseeing, unknowing forces; or that back of these forces is an intelligence, planning and willing through their agency. If the latter be accepted, it does not follow that the crude conception of design in nature as the direct work of a personal God must be maintained. At the commencement of the great revival of the study of nature, when the views which have revolutionized scientific thought were beginning to dawn, illy defined and partially understood, they were seized on by a class seeking support to the theological doctrines they felt yielding beneath their feet, and distorted by plausible sophistry into apparent vindication of their dogmas. Of these, Paley became most famous, his illustration of the watch was the most renowned of his arguments. It is misleading, as there is no real likeness between a watch and the mechanism of nature. Yet we do not endorse the complacency of many leading supporters of evolution. Evolution is undoubtedly a true statement of the method of creation. It offers no further explanation and gives no cause. Accepting evolution and following the development of life from the least to the greatest, what do we see but the constant unfoldment of a well defined purpose and plan? Are not the beings of the Silurian and Devonian epoch prophecies of the forms which were evolved out of them? We may call things by new names, and in place of design use “adaptation”; we do not change the relations of things thereby. When we see a bird cleave the air with rapid wings, and observe the wonderful adaptation of bones and muscles and forms of feathers, we may explain it all by evolution, which has made the bird the embodiment of the forces of the air. Have we done more than state the method of growth? What cause have we assigned for the process? We see an interminable series of forms, changing from age to age, becoming more and more complex in their relations, but pressing forward constantly to final production of man as the perfection of the vertebrate type. Evolution describes this process, at every step furnishing evidence of a purpose, achieving its ends through matter, often failing, but through failures at last reaching its object. In this light the imperfection of organs proves nothing against design. The eye of man is instanced as more imperfect than a glass lens. It is as perfect as the organic material out of which it is made permits. That it becomes diseased is from the same necessity of organization.

Evolution.—Evolution is a new name for facts exceedingly old; but its supporters would have its scheme reach through creation to the foundation of things. Advancement with them means only better adaptation in the struggle for existence, the result of accidental fitness which has pushed unorganized protoplasm to man. Matter and its potentialities granted, all else flows in assured course. Difficulties disappear; the riddle of the Sphinx is no longer obscure. The sunlight has fallen on the marble lips, and Memnon has revealed in a single sentence what mortal man has never understood, “The survival of the fittest.” The theologian has rested in blissful confidence in the arms of the Creator; now comes the scientist who by easy methods calls the Creator “evolution,” and falls as blindly confident into the arms of his new-named God. The likeness is made more complete by the scorn of one equaling the sneer of the other.

It is a new name for the old fact, that the forms of life on this earth are united by common parentage, and have been differentiated by the accumulation of infinite beneficial changes. The struggle for existence has been the center around which these have aggregated. This no careful student will deny. Having granted this, what then? Is anything explained? Have we approached the cause by a single step? Really, has anything been done more than to explain the phenomena of the world with new words and phrases?

Of old it was said the world is a machine with gods or a god at the crank; to-day the god at the crank is the Unknowable, the laws of nature, the potentiality of matter; or in the most recent theory the all-god has appeared in the revival of the god imminent in the universe, which is regarded as an organism, with a god-soul. This is poetic but neither sensible nor scientific. Forever and forever old ideas are washed on the shore of time, out of the wreck of the past, and instead for being relegated to the museum, are galvanized into grimace of life, and branded as new, when they are rapidly disintegrating in every part.

The Survival of the Fittest.—The survival of the fittest is a wonderful scheme of the preservation of the best. To illustrate, take the tiger and the deer. Once they herded together, the tiger not being, as now, noted for strength or cunning, nor the deer for caution and fleetness. The dull tiger was able to take as prey the least cautious and weakest of the deer. The fleetest deer propagated, and then only the most cunning tigers were able to procure food, and continue their kind. As their strength and cunning increased, the cautiousness and fleetness of the deer increased in this matched game of life; the two species reacting on each other until we now have the perfected deer and tiger. In both kingdoms of living beings, among all their diverse families and species, this struggle has gone on, and the result is the differentiation from abysmal protoplasmic slime the humming bird on the flower to the leviathan in the deep; the litchen on the rock to man with an intellectual comprehension of unknown breadth. We here have the chronicle of creation, and Froissart was not more garrulous with his exploits of lord and lady than the chroniclers of the changes effected in specific forms “on their way to man.”

We hear all that is said, and with a feeling of disappointment, while admitting all, respond that we were promised a cause, and have been given only a method? What stands behind the “struggle for existence?” What is the infinite force of the ceaseless unrest, which throws each wave higher on the tide line, working like a blind giant, hewing out organic forms from protoplasm, and amid infinite failures approximating ever to the perfect, with constant prophecy that that perfection will be attained? The “survival of the fittest” reveals the prodigal method which preserves one of a million germs, casting the others back into the seething crucible for new trials. Can it claim anything more? The laws of nature are grooves in which causes run to effects; but why do they thus move? Calling them by other names will not satisfy. As Newton, when he gave the law of gravitation mathematical form, penetrated not a step toward its cause, so the biologist has not passed the threshold of the domain of life. A recent scientific association sat in silence after a verbose and flippant discussion on protoplasm, when asked by a member what was the difference between living and dead protoplasm? Not one could answer. Life had escaped their observation. Protoplasm dead is no longer protoplasm. The protoplasmic germ impelled by the forces of life, commences its growth, sending out its feeding vessels, and from the beginning copies the paleontological history of the earth, and more completely the biography of its direct ancestors.

When we consider that this invisible fleck bears in its cell or cells the impress of every condition bearing on its progenitors from remotest time, and will express it in all these conditions, it is no longer a phenomenon on which we gaze, but a miracle of creative power, and all that has been written by physiologists since Galen’s time as to its cause is as children’s prattle. The material side furnishes no adequate explanation. Its coarse methods are not adapted to measure the illusive psyche. The balance weighs not, the scalpel dissects not, the retort holds not the elements of the soul.