Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)

Evolution does not make the idea of a Creator superfluous, because evolution is only the method of God. It is perfectly consistent with a Scriptural doctrine of Creation that man should emerge at the proper time, governed by different laws from the brute creation yet growing out of the brute, just as the foundation of a house built of stone is perfectly consistent with the wooden structure built upon it. All depends upon the plan. An atheistic and undesigning evolution cannot include man without excluding what Christianity regards as essential to man; see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 43-73. But a theistic evolution can recognize the whole process of man's creation as equally the work of nature and the work of God.

Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 42—“You are not what you have come from, but what you have become.” Huxley said of the brutes: “Whether from them or not, man is assuredly not of them.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:289—“The religious dignity of man rests after all upon what he is, not upon the mode and manner in which he has become what he is.” Because he came from a beast, it does not follow that he isa beast. Nor does the fact that man's existence can be traced back to a brute ancestry furnish any proper reason why the brute should become man. Here is a teleology which requires a divine Creatorship.

J. M. Bronson: “The theist must accept evolution if he would keep his argument for the existence of God from the unity of design in nature. Unless man is an end, he is an anomaly. The greatest argument for God is the fact that all animate nature is one vast and connected unity. Man has developed not from the ape, but away fromthe ape. He was never anything but potential man. He did not, as man, come into being until he became a conscious moral agent.” This conscious moral nature, which we call personality, requires a divine Author, because it surpasses all the powers which can be found in the animal creation. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, tells us that: 1. Mollusca learn by experience; 2. Insects and spiders recognize offspring; 3. Fishes make mental association of objects by their similarity; 4. Reptiles recognize persons; 5. Hymenoptera, as bees and ants, communicate ideas; 6. Birds recognize pictorial representations and understand words; 7. Rodents, as rats and foxes, understand mechanisms; 8. Monkeys and elephants learn to use tools; 9. Anthropoid apes and dogs have indefinite morality.

But it is definite and not indefinite morality which differences man from the brute. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, concedes that man passed through a period when he resembled the ape more than any known animal, but at the same time declares that no anthropoid ape could develop into a man. The brute can be defined in terms of man, but man cannot be defined in terms of the brute. It is significant that in insanity the higher endowments of man disappear in an order precisely the reverse of that in which, according to the development theory, they have been acquired. The highest part of man totters first. The last added is first to suffer. Man moreover can transmit his own acquisitions to his posterity, as the brute cannot. Weismann, Heredity, 2:69—“The evolution of music does not depend upon any increase of the musical faculty or any alteration in the inherent physical nature of man, but solely upon the power of transmitting the intellectual achievements of each generation to those which follow. This, more than anything, is the cause of the superiority of men over animals—this, and not merely human faculty, although it may be admitted that this latter is much higher than in animals.” To this utterance of Weismann we would add that human progress depends quite as much upon man's power of reception as upon man's power of transmission. Interpretation must equal expression; and, in this interpretation of the past, man has a guarantee of the future which the brute does not possess.

Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast, Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins, Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23 months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers only as his will exerts itself in attention.

Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited, when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the first time and forever.”

Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of self in the third person and is devoid of self-consciousness, corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to a superior order of being.

Connecting these remarks with our present subject, we assert that no brute ever yet said, or thought, “I.” With this, then, we may begin a series of simple distinctions between man and the brute, so far as the immaterial principle in each is concerned. These are mainly compiled from writers hereafter mentioned.

1. The brute is conscious, but man is self-conscious. The brute does not objectify self. “If the pig could once say, ‘I am a pig,’ it would at once and thereby cease to be a pig.” The brute does not distinguish itself from its sensations. The brute has perception, but only the man has apperception, i. e., perception accompanied by reference of it to the self to which it belongs.

2. The brute has only percepts; man has also concepts. The brute knows white things, but not whiteness. It remembers things, but not thoughts. Man alone has the power of abstraction, i. e., the power of deriving abstract ideas from particular things or experiences.

3. Hence the brute has no language. “Language is the expression of general notions by symbols” (Harris). Words are the symbols of concepts. Where there are no concepts there can be no words. The parrot utters cries; but “no parrot ever yet spoke a true word.” Since language is a sign, it presupposes the existence of an intellect capable of understanding the sign,—in short, language is the effect of mind, not the cause of mind. See Mivart, in Brit. Quar., Oct. 1881:154-172. “The ape's tongue is eloquent in his own dispraise.” James, Psychology, 2:356—“The notion of a sign as such, and the general purpose to apply it to everything, is the distinctive characteristic of man.” Why do not animals speak? Because they have nothing to say, i. e., have no general ideas which words might express.

4. The brute forms no judgments, e. g., that this is like that, accompanied with belief. Hence there is no sense of the ridiculous, and no laughter. James, Psychology, 2:360—“The brute does not associate ideas by similarity.... Genius in man is the possession of this power of association in an extreme degree.”

6. The brute has no general ideas or intuitions, as of space, time, substance, cause, right. Hence there is no generalizing, and no proper experience or progress. There is no capacity for improvement in animals. The brute cannot be trained, except in certain inferior matters of association, where independent judgment is not required. No animal makes tools, uses clothes, cooks food, breeds other animals for food. No hunter's dog, however long its observation of its master, ever learned to put wood on a fire to keep itself from freezing. Even the rudest stone implements show a break in continuity and mark the introduction of man; see J. P. Cook, Credentials of Science, 14. “The dog can see the printed page as well as a man can, but no dog was ever taught to read a book. The animal cannot create in its own mind the thoughts of the writer. The physical in man, on the contrary, is only an aid to the spiritual. Education is a trained capacity to discern the inner meaning and deeper relations of things. So the universe is but a symbol and expression of spirit, a garment in which an invisible Power has robed his majesty and glory”; see S. S. Times, April 7, 1900. In man, mind first became supreme.

7. The brute has determination, but not self-determination. There is no freedom of choice, no conscious forming of a purpose, and no self-movement toward a predetermined end. The donkey is determined, but not self-determined; he is the victim of heredity and environment; he acts only as he is acted upon. Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 537-554—“Man, though implicated in nature through his bodily organization, is in his personality supernatural; the brute is wholly submerged in nature.... Man is like a ship in the sea—in it, yet above it—guiding his course, by observing the heavens, even against wind and current. A brute has no such power; it is in nature like a balloon, wholly immersed in air, and driven about by its currents, with no power of steering.” Calderwood, Philosophy of Evolution, chapter on Right and Wrong: “The grand distinction of human life is self-control in the field of action—control over all the animal impulses, so that these do not spontaneously and of themselves determine activity” [as they do in the brute]. By what Mivart calls a process of “inverse anthropomorphism,” we clothe the brute with the attributes of freedom; but it does not really possess them. Just as we do not transfer to God all our human imperfections, so we ought not to transfer all our human perfections to the brute, “reading our full selves in life of lower forms.” The brute has no power to choose between motives; it simply obeys motive. The necessitarian philosophy, therefore, is a correct and excellent philosophy for the brute. But man's power of initiative—in short, man's free will—renders it impossible to explain his higher nature as a mere natural development from the inferior creatures. Even Huxley has said that, taking mind into the account, there is between man and the highest beasts an “enormous gulf,” a “divergence immeasurable” and “practically infinite.”

8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory that man's conscience is simply a development of brute instincts; and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter is simply God's preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution and Man's Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of tracing the origin of man's rational life to evolution from a lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man's place has been won by an entire change in the limitations of his psychic development.... The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of animal.”

John Burroughs, Ways of Nature: “Animal life parallels human life at many points, but it is in another plane. Something guides the lower animals, but it is not thought; something restrains them, but it is not judgment; they are provident without prudence; they are active without industry; they are skilful without practice; they are wise without knowledge; they are rational without reason; they are deceptive without guile.... When they are joyful, they sing or they play; when they are distressed, they moan or they cry; ... and yet I do not suppose they experience the emotion of joy or sorrow, or anger or love, as we do, because these feelings in them do not involve reflection, memory, and what we call the higher nature, as with us. Their instinct is intelligence directed outward, never inward, as in man. They share with man the emotions of his animal nature, but not of his moral or æsthetic nature; they know no altruism, no moral code.” Mr. Burroughs maintains that we have no proof that animals in a state of nature can reflect, form abstract ideas, associate cause and effect. Animals, for instance, that store up food for the winter simply follow a provident instinct but do not take thought for the future, any more than does the tree that forms new buds for the coming season. He sums up his position as follows: “To attribute human motives and faculties to the animals is to caricature them; but to put us in such relation to them that we feel their kinship, that we see their lives embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, that we see in their minds a humbler manifestation of the same psychic power and intelligence that culminates and is conscious of itself in man—that, I take it, is the true humanization.” We assent to all this except the ascription to human life of the same iron necessity that rules the animal creation. Man is man, because his free will transcends the limitations of the brute.

While we grant, then, that man is the last stage in the development of life and that he has a brute ancestry, we regard him also as the offspring of God. The same God who was the author of the brute became in due time the creator of man. Though man came through the brute, he did not come from the brute, but from God, the Father of spirits and the author of all life. Œdipus' terrific oracle: “Mayst thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art!” might well be uttered to those who believe only in the brute origin of man. Pascal says it is dangerous to let man see too clearly that he is on a level with the animals unless at the same time we show him his greatness. The doctrine that the brute is imperfect man is logically connected with the doctrine that man is a perfect brute. Thomas Carlyle: “If this brute philosophy is true, then man should go on all fours, and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral.” G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human Race, lecture IX—“One or other of the lower animals may exhibit all the faculties used by a child of fifteen months. The difference may seem very little, but what there is is very important. It is like the difference in direction in the early stages of two separating curves, which go on forever diverging.... The probability is that both in his bodily and in his mental development man appeared as a sport in nature, and leaped at once in some single pair from the plane of irrational being to the possession of the higher powers that have ever since characterized him and dominated both his development and his history.”

Scripture seems to teach the doctrine that man's nature is the creation of God. Gen. 2:7—“Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—appears, says Hovey (State of the Impen. Dead, 14), “to distinguish the vital informing principle of human nature from its material part, pronouncing the former to be more directly from God, and more akin to him, than the latter.” So in Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him”—the soul is recognized as distinct in nature from the body, and of a dignity and value far beyond those of any material organism. Job 32:8—“there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding”; Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it.” A sober view of the similarities and differences between man and the lower animals may be found in Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence. See also Martineau, Types, 2:65, 140, and Study, 1:180; 2:9, 13, 184, 350; Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 8:23; Chadbourne, Instinct, 187-211; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 384, 386, 397; Bascom, Science of Mind, 295-305; Mansel, Metaphysics, 49, 50; Princeton Rev., Jan. 1881:104-128; Henslow, in Nature, May 1, 1879:21, 22; Ferrier, Remains, 2:39; Argyll, Unity of Nature, 117-119; Bib. Sac., 29:275-282; Max Müller, Lectures on Philos. of Language, no. 1, 2, 3; F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 21; Le Conte, in Princeton Rev., May, 1884:238-261; Lindsay, Mind in Lower Animals; Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals; Fiske, The Destiny of Man.

For the theory of natural selection, see Darwin, Origin of Species, 398-424, and Descent of Man, 2:368-387; Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 241-269, Man's Place in Nature, 71-138, Lay Sermons, 323, and art.: Biology, in Encyc. Britannica, 9th ed.; Romanes, Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. The theory holds that, in the struggle for existence, the varieties best adapted to their surroundings succeed in maintaining and reproducing themselves, while the rest die out. Thus, by gradual change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life, man has been evolved. We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the important features of God's method. We concede the partial truth of his theory. We find it supported by the vertebrate structure and nervous organization which man has in common with the lower animals; by the facts of embryonic development; of rudimentary organs; of common diseases and remedies; and of reversion to former types. But we refuse to regard natural selection as a complete explanation of the history of life, and that for the following reasons:

1. It gives no account of the origin of substance, nor of the origin of variations. Darwinism simply says that “round stones will roll down hill further than flat ones”(Gray, Natural Science and Religion). It accounts for the selection, not for the creation, of forms. “Natural selection originates nothing. It is a destructive, not a creative, principle. If we must idealize it as a positive force, we must think of it, not as the preserver of the fittest, but as the destroyer, that follows ever in the wake of creation and devours the failures; the scavenger of creation, that takes out of the way forms which are not fit to live and reproduce themselves” (Johnson, on Theistic Evolution, in Andover Review, April, 1884:363-381). Natural selection is only unintelligent repression. Darwin's Origin of Species is in fact “not the Genesis, but the Exodus, of living forms.” Schurman: “The survival of the fittest does nothing to explain the arrival of the fittest”; see also DeVries, Species and Varieties, ad finem. Darwin himself acknowledged that “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.... The cause of each slight variation and of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions” (quoted by Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 280-301). Weismann has therefore modified the Darwinian theory by asserting that there would be no development unless there were a spontaneous, innate tendency to variation. In this innate tendency we see, not mere nature, but the work of an originating and superintending God. E. M. Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881—“Spirit was the moulding power, from the beginning, of those lower forms which would ultimately become man. Instead of the physical derivation of the soul, we propose the spiritual derivation of the body.”

Respecting the Enghis and Neanderthal crania, Huxley says: “The fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the modification of which he has probably become what he is.... In vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been sought: not a single one is there to show. The so-called Protanthropos who should exhibit this link has not been found.... None have been found that stood nearer the monkey than the men of to-day.” Huxley argues that the difference between man and the gorilla is smaller than that between the gorilla and some apes; if the gorilla and the apes constitute one family and have a common origin, may not man and the gorilla have a common ancestry also? We reply that the space between the lowest ape and the highest gorilla is filled in with numberless intermediate gradations. The space between the lowest man and the highest man is also filled in with many types that shade off one into the other. But the space between the highest gorilla and the lowest man is absolutely vacant; there are no intermediate types; no connecting links between the ape and man have yet been found.

Professor Virchow has also very recently expressed his belief that no relics of any predecessor of man have yet been discovered. He said: “In my judgment, no skull hitherto discovered can be regarded as that of a predecessor of man. In the course of the last fifteen years we have had opportunities of examining skulls of all the various races of mankind—even of the most savage tribes; and among them all no group has been observed differing in its essential characters from the general human type.... Out of all the skulls found in the lake-dwellings there is not one that lies outside the boundaries of our present population.” Dr. Eugene Dubois has discovered in the Post-pliocene deposits of the island of Java the remains of a preeminently hominine anthropoid which he calls Pithecanthropus erectus. Its cranial capacity approaches the physiological minimum in man, and is double that of the gorilla. The thigh bone is in form and dimensions the absolute analogue of that of man, and gives evidence of having supported a habitually erect body. Dr. Dubois unhesitatingly places this extinct Javan ape as the intermediate form between man and the true anthropoid apes. Haeckel (in The Nation, Sept. 15, 1898) and Keane (in Man Past and Present, 3), regard the Pithecanthropus as a “missing link.” But “Nature”regards it as the remains of a human microcephalous idiot. In addition to all this, it deserves to be noticed that man does not degenerate as we travel back in time. “The Enghis skull, the contemporary of the mammoth and the cave-bear, is as large as the average of to-day, and might have belonged to a philosopher.” The monkey nearest to man in physical form is no more intelligent than the elephant or the bee.

4. No species is yet known to have been produced either by artificial or by natural selection. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 323—“It is not absolutely proven that a group of animals having all the characters exhibited by species in nature has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural”; Man's Place in Nature, 107—“Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional, so long as one link in the chain of evidence is wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile with one another, that link will be wanting.” Huxley has more recently declared that the missing proof has been found in the descent of the modern horse with one toe, from Hipparion with two toes, Anchitherium with three, and Orohippus with four. Even if this were demonstrated, we should still maintain that the only proper analogue was to be found in that artificial selection by which man produces new varieties, and that natural selection can bring about no useful results and show no progress, unless it be the method and revelation of a wise and designing mind. In other words, selection implies intelligence and will, and therefore cannot be exclusively natural. Mivart, Man and Apes, 192—“If it is inconceivable and impossible for man's body to be developed or to exist without his informing soul, we conclude that, as no natural process accounts for the different kind of soul—one capable of articulately expressing general conceptions,—so no merely natural process can account for the origin of the body informed by it—a body to which such an intellectual faculty was so essentially and intimately related.” Thus Mivart, who once considered that evolution could account for man's body, now holds instead that it can account neither for man's body nor for his soul, and calls natural selection “a puerile hypothesis” (Lessons from Nature, 300; Essays and Criticisms, 2:289-314).