However, we find a curious confession a few paragraphs before the theistic conclusion of the book. It runs: “Light will be thrown on the origin and history of humanity.” Light, that is to say, from the theory of the transformation of species by natural selection. The words contained the promise of a new twilight of the gods. In the innocent days, when the Creator stood in person behind each species of animal and plant, Linné had seen no great innovation in his defining man as a definite species, the highest species of mammal. God had created the polar bear and the hippopotamus, Genesis said, as well as man. That man had transgressed the command in Paradise, fallen into sin, needed salvation, and so on, was another matter altogether. With Darwin the innovation was incalculably important.
On his theory the various species of animals had been developed from each other, without a new creative act. If man was an animal species in this sense, he also must have originated from other animals; and that would be bitter. The phrase shows that Darwin already saw clearly, and had abandoned his belief in a special creation of man. But this point was bound to make more bad blood than all the rest put together. God, now restricted to the direct production of the first living things, had lost man as well as the animals. Moreover, whatever interpretation was put upon the Mosaic narrative, the very source of theistic belief, the Bible, was called into question. How had we come to know of this story of divine creations? By the Bible, the vehicle of revelation. But this Bible was the work of man, and man was now well within the bounds of nature, from which God had been excluded. How could he learn anything from revelation? The biblical writers had clearly only made conjectures. Some of them—with regard to Adam, for instance—were certainly incorrect. There was nothing in the Bible about evolution by means of selection. Indeed, was not the whole picture of a creating Deity an error? These thoughts were bound to press upon the religious mind with all their logical force. When they did so, the very foundations of theology became insecure, to a far more serious extent than Darwin’s moderate conclusion suggested. When the book fell on this contentious ground, it was bound, even if it were only read in the last two pages, to provoke vast waves of hostility against its heretical zoology and botany, especially in England.
Haeckel was in Italy when the work—the work of his life, too, as the sequel shows—was published. We have seen where he was: in sight of the blue sea, penetrating for the first time into a special section of zoology, the radiolaria, and making it his own. He was far from theorising, for the first years of reality were upon him. He returned to Berlin at the beginning of May, 1860, bringing his study of the radiolaria, and resolved to publish it in comprehensive form. Here he learned for the first time that a “mad” work by Darwin had appeared, that denied the venerable Linnean dogma of the immutability of species.
German official science was now invaded from two sides at once. Haeckel had returned like a new man from the freshness of Italy; and Darwin’s work, translated by Bronn, was bringing some slight extract of the English student’s thoughts, like a draught of old golden wine. They were bound to meet this time.
The aged Bronn, a German naturalist of distinction and merit, had found the Origin of Species interesting enough, at least, to deserve the trouble of translation. But his interest in it was very restricted. He was one of the thoughtful students of the days following Cuvier, and was not of the kind to pin his faith to one man. The appearance of the plant and animal species in the various terrestrial periods, so sharply separated by Cuvier himself, showed unmistakably an ascent from lower to higher forms. The fish is placed lower in the system than the mammal. At a certain period there were fishes living, but no mammals as yet. At another period the only plants on the earth were of the decidedly lower group of the cryptogams (ferns, shore-grasses, club-mosses), and these were succeeded by pines and palm-ferns, and finally by the true palms and foliage-trees. Cuvier’s theory of creation had to take account of this. Agassiz, who held firmly to the fresh creation of species in each new epoch, conceived the Creator as an artist who improved in his work in the course of time. Each new achievement was better than the preceding. It was rather a curious idea of the Creator!
Photograph of Marble Bust by G. Herold.
Others, who did not venture to use the idea of Deity quite so naïvely as Agassiz in zoology and botany, conceived a “law of development” within life itself. It was a time when belief in a “vital force” was universal. Living things had their peculiar force, which was not found in lifeless things. The life-principle might be at work in the law of development. It would raise living things higher and higher in the succeeding geological epochs. It was a vague theory, though it purported to cover not only the fact but the machinery of development. In the course of ages it brought about the appearance of new species. Those who held this idea of an immanent law of evolution rejected the older notion of a personal Deity, putting in an appearance suddenly at the beginning of the secondary period and creating the ichthyosauri “out of nothing.” They looked upon Cuvier’s catastrophes, to which Agassiz still clung, with a touch of Lyell’s scepticism. The “law of evolution” had been the deus ex machina of the long procession of life-forms. One day a fish ceased to give birth to little fishes in the manner of its parents. The “law of evolution” was at work in its ova, and suddenly little ichthyosauri were developed from them. Thus, again, a lizard was believed to have engendered young mammals one day. One student would hold that the transition was quite abrupt in this sense. Another would think it more gradual, and approach the idea of a slow transformation of a fish into a lizard, and a lizard into a mammal, or a tree-fern into a palm-fern, and this into a true palm. At the bottom they were all agreed that the whole inner law of evolution had nothing whatever in common with the other laws of nature and was not subordinate to them. They did not hold an evolution in harmony with the great mechanism of natural laws. Their principle got astride of natural laws at certain points, like a little man, and turned them in this or that direction.
Very little philosophic reflection was needed to show that they had merely replaced the Creator with a word. The older Dualism remained. On one side was the raw material of the world with the ordinary natural laws; on the other side a lord and master, the law of evolution, playing with the laws as it pleased, and moulding the material into new life-forms in an advancing series. It is true that they no longer pictured to themselves a venerable being with a white beard creating the ichthyosauri, but the finger of God remained in the law of evolution, attenuated into a special and spectral form. The God that acted from without was banished, but the “impulse from within,” reduced to a mere skeleton in substance, was put upon the throne.