| OCR Text |
Show 136 DARWINIAN A. other views of the same writers; others, when carried out, as incompatible with general experience or general beliefs, and therefore as proving too much; still others, as proving nothing at all ; so that, on the whole, the effect is rather confusing and disappointing. We certainly expected a stronger adverse case than any which the thoroughgoing opposers of Darwin appear to have made out. Wherefore, if it be found that the new hypothesis has grown upon om· favor as we proceeded, this must be attributed not so much to the force of the arguments of the book itself as to the want of force of several of those by which ~t has been assailed. Darwin's arguments we might resist or adjourn; but some of the refutations of it give us more concern than the book itself did. These remarks apply mainly to the philosophical and theological objections which have been elaborately urged, almost exclusively by the American reviewers. The North British reviewer, indeed, roundly denounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems the case too clear for argument. The Edinburgh reviewer, on the contrary, scouts all such objections -as well he may, since he records his belief in "a continuous creative operation," a constantly operating secondary creational law," through which species are successively produced; and he emits faint, but not indistinct, glimmerings of a transmutation theory of his own; 1 so that he is equally exposed to all the 1 Whatever it may be, it is not" the homooopathic form of the transmutative hypothesis," as Darwin's is said to be (p. 252, .A~erican reprint), so happily that the prescription is repeated in the second (p. 259) and third (p. 271) dilutions, no doubt, on Hahnemann's famous princi- DARWIN AND HIS REVIEWERS. 137 philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to mos.t ofD t hose. urged by the other American crl' tl'C S, agamst arwm himself. Proposjng now to criticise the critics so far as to s~e what their most general and compreb~nsive object. wns am.o unt to, we must needs begin with the Ame r_ 1can reviewers, and with their arguments adduced to prove that a derivative hypothesis mtght not to be true or is not possible, philosophical, or theistic. ' It must not be forgotten that on former occasions very confident judgments have been pronounced b ver.Y competent persons, which have not been finall~ ratrfied. Of the two great minds of the seventeenth ?entury, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religIOUS as well as philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitati~n, the other objected to that theory that it was su?vers1ve of natural religion. The nebular hy~ ot~esis--a natural consequence of the theory of gravItatwn and of the subsequent progress of physical and astronomical discovery-has been denounced as atheistical even down to our own day. But it is now largely adopted by the most theistical natural philosophers as a tenable and perhaps sufficient hypothesis, and where not accepted is no longer objected to, so far as we know, on philosophical or religious grounds. The gist of the philosophical objections urged by ple, of an incl'ease of potency at each dilution. Probably the supposed :-ransmntation is per saltus. "Homreopathic doses of transmutation," mdeed! Well, if we really must swallow transmutation in some form or other, as this reviewer intimates, we might prefer the mild homreopathic doses of Darwin's formula to the allopathic bolus which the Edinburgh general practitioner appears to be compounding. |
