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Show 280 DARWINIAN A. The length of the analysis of the first book on our list precludes the notices which we intended to take of the three others. They are all the production of men who are both scientific and religious, one of them a celebrated divine and writer unusually versed in natural history. They all look upon theories of evolution either as in the way of being established or as not unlikely to prevail, and they confidently expect to lose thereby no solid ground for theism or reUgion. Mr. St. Clair, a new writer, in his "Darwinism and Design ; or, Creation by Evolution," takes his ground in the following succinct statement of his preface: "It is being assumed by our scientific guides that the designargument has been driven out of the field by the doctrine of evolution. It seems to be thought by our theological teachers that the best defense of the faith is to deny evolution in toto, and denounce it as anti-Biblical. My volume endeavors to show that, if evolution be true, all is not lost; but, on t~e contrary something is gained: the design-argument remams unshak~ n, and the wisdom and beneficence of God receive new illustration." Of his closing remark, that, so far as he knows, the subject has never before been handled in the same way for the same purpose, we will only say that the handling strikes us as mainly sensible rather than as substantially novel. He traverses the whole ground of evolution from that of the solar system to "the origin of m'oral species." He is clearly a theistic Darwinian without misgiving, and the arguments f?r that hypothesis and for its religious a~pects -~btam from him their most favorable presentatiOn, whde he combats the dysteleology of Hackel, Buchner, etc., not, however, with any remarkable strength. WHAT IS .DARWINISM! 281 Dr. Winchell, chancellor of the new university at Syracuse, in his volume just issued upon the "Doctrine of Evolution," adopts it in the abstract as "clearly as the law of universal intelligence under which complex results are brought into existence" (whatever that may mean), accepts it practically for the inorgani? world as a geologist should, hesitates as to the orgamc world, and sums up the arguments for .the origin of species by diversification unfavorably for the Darwinians, regarding it mainly from the geological side. As some of our zooloo-ists and palre- • b ontologists may have somewhat to say upon this matter, we leave it for their consideration. We are tempted to develop a point which Dr. Winchell incidentally refers to-viz., how very modern the idea of the independent creation and fixity of species is, and how well ·the old .divinas got on without it. Dr. Winchell reminds us that St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas were model evolutionists; and, where authority is deferred to, this should count for something. Mr. Kingsley's eloquent and suggestive "Westminster Sermons," in which he touches here and there upon many of the topics which evolution brings up, has incorporated into the preface a paper which he read in 1871 to a meeting of London clergy at Sion College, upon certain problems of natural theology as affected by modern theories in science. We may hereafter have occasion to refer to this volume. Meanwhile, perhaps we may usefully conclude this article with two or three short extracts from it: "The God who satisfies our conscience ought more or less to satisfy our reason also. To teach that was Butler's mission |