Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

Then, preferring the genuine to the obscure cognition, he adds a word thus:

Whenever the obscure cognition can no longer in its smaller degree either see, or hear, or smell, or taste, or perceive by touch, why then one must resort to the property which is more subtle."

The passage just given, with its quotations from Demokritos, is found in the works of Sextos Empeirikos; the following is from Diogenes of Laerte:-"Demokritos disregards quiddities, where he says, What is cold is cold in opinion, hot, hot in opinion, but individuals and void exist in reality. And again: In reality, we know nothing, for truth lies in a deep."

These are the reverse of what we might expect from the dogmas of a confident atomist; but misunderstanding of Demokritos has been so general that we are afraid to add to it. Such a version of his doctrines as the following, from Theophrastos, must surely be mere misconception :

"Concerning sanity of thought, he has advanced, that it is derived from the soul's holding itself conveniently after movement, while, if one should become too hot or too cold, it alters."

In Theophrastos is the following reference to the theories of Demokritos:

"There is, in the first place, the absurd production of impression on the air; for what is solidified must retain its density and not be dissipated, just as he says in his comparison, the imprint is as if you made an impression in wax. In that case so much the more readily

can an impression be made in water, as it is the more dense, though the more difficult to be perceived. Such assuredly were more fitting. On the whole, why must a person making emanation proceed from a form, as in the book which treats of images, make the impression come as from a mould? for the eidola themselves are presented visibly."

This is an adverse criticism, and therefore there is no cause for wonder if it does not present the philosophy to which it refers with absolute clearness. If in no way, however, we can find the certain outline of the doctrine of Demokritos, we may reasonably conclude that he came nearer to a puzzled groper after an immaterial philosophy than to a physicalist resting content in a corpuscular solution of the origin of life. And further, that he left open that spiritual gateway of the mind, by which come wafted strains that, even though brokenly heard, make life's meanig larger and sweeter.

It is possible that Demokritos is not the author of all of the following:

"The nobility of cattle lies in the fine strength of the bodily frame, the nobility of man in the well disposedness of the character."

"Beauty of body, without basis of mind, marks animal nature merely."

"The harmony of man consists in making account of the soul rather than of the body; for a highly perfect soul gives uprightness to a mean state of the tabernacle, whereas strength of the carcase without rationality renders soul better no whit."

"It is the mark of a divine mind to be always dwelling on what is noble.

"The world is a scene, life a passage; thon camest, sawest, departedst."

"The world is an estrangement; life in it an interruption."

"Whatsoever things a poet writes when under inspiration of holy spirit, are beautiful exceed ingly."

If these apophthegms, however, some of which have not fallen under suspicion of spuriousness, do not prove Demokritos something more than a mere atomist, the title of one of his lost works, Concerning those that are in Hades," must do so. We may

66

a

pass by as fabulous the story that he put out his eyes with burning glass in order to become more intimately a student of the reasoning faculties through the minimisement of the disturbances of the external senses; the theory, however, he may perhaps have speculatively advanced. But if he wrote of existence in Hades, either there are two of the name, or Demokritos did not find the supreme source of life in the molecule.

NEW ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION.

THE theory of evolution of animal life appears to be now getting past the stage in which direct attacks are made upon its groundwork. Present evidences of calculable variation are so decisive, and the innumerable supports to the theory are so unassailable, that it has taken its place as proven with unexampled speed. Strangely enough, as yet no spiritual theory is being made to fit it, just as the fact that one moves one's hand to write can be adjusted by no intelligible links to the antecedent fact that one thought of something, and thereupon had the will to write it. The theory of evolution has not yet been made to tally with any theory of man as being a spiritual creature rather than a mere secretion originating in matter; and it is no doubt due to this fact that so much reluctance is felt to accept the evolutionary theory among those who instinctively feel that nature is more than a blind procreative accident. And the same reason, coupled with the fact that the most enthusiastic upholders of evolution do not seem interested in forming a theory containing their doctrines, and yet big enough to embrace the higher mysteries of life, is no doubt stimulating students now, before whom the cut-and-dried results of research are lying, to see to what uses they can be put in the way of a true science of man.

They are indeed challenged to

effort by the physicists who boldly maintain that there is no divine purpose in nature at all. Mr. Samuel Butler, to whose new work* we are about to refer, cites Professor Haeckel to the following effect: "Anyone who makes a really close study of the organisation and mode of life of the various animals and plants, must necessarily come to the conclusion that this 'purposiveness' [purpose in nature] no more exists than the much-talkedof beneficence of the Creator." Clifford also has said, comparing the work of man and what has been generally regarded as the work of God, or at least the effort of a Demiurge: "A man made the corkscrew with a purpose in his mind, and he knew and intended that it should be used for pulling out corks. But nobody made our lungs with a purpose in his mind, and intended that they should be used for breathing. The respiratory apparatus was adapted to its purpose by natural selection, namely, by the gradual preservation of better and better adaptations, and by the killing-off of the worse and imperfect adaptations." This is a fair specimen of the cut-and-dried arguments of the materialist; here the argument is reasonable enough, but before it begins, there has to be postulated a first and imperfect respiratory apparatus, and some kind of air; whether an early and imperfect at

* "Evolution, Old and New; or the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin." London: Hardwicke and Bogue. 1879.

mosphere now superseded, or a well-preserved aërial adaptation such as we now have it, the professor did not say. With these postulates might unfortunately have to be admitted the very purposiveness he rejects. What was the first and original germ of being drawn from, and by whose natural selection, and out of what, did it get its tendency to improve itself?

Mr. Butler substitutes for the abstraction called "natural selection," a very palpable designer of forms; he points to "a living tangible person with flesh, blood, eyes, nose, ears, organs, senses, dimensions, who did of his own cunning, after infinite proof of every kind of hazard and experiment, scheme out and fashion each organ of the human body. This is the person whom we claim as the designer and artificer of that body, and he is the one of all others the best fitted for the task by his antecedents, and his practical knowledge of the requirements of the case, for he is man himself. Not man, the individual of any given generation, but man in the entirety of his existence from the dawn of life onwards to the present moment.' Again he says, in other phraseology: "With but little change in the present signification of words, the question resolves itself into this. Shall we see God henceforth as embodied in all living forms; as dwelling in them; as being that power in them whereby they have learnt to fashion themselves, each one according to its ideas of its own convenience, and to make itself not only a microcosm, or little world, but a little unwritten history of the universe from its own point of view into the bargain? From everlasting, in time past, only in so far as the ultimate connection between the will to do, and the thing which does is invisible; imperishable, only in so far as life as a

[ocr errors]

whole is imperishable; omniscient and omnipotent, within the limits only of a very long and large experience, but ignorant and impotent in respect of all else-limited in all the above respects, yet even so incalculably vaster than anything we can conceive."

If we are to change our dreams of God for that of an entity whose immortality depends upon the continuance of physical existence, all the great poets and seers of the last few thousand years have been wrong, and the nineteenth century is a lean cow able to eat up the herds of fat and comfortable kine of a hundred centuries. But if the theory is inadequate, it is at least suggestive. How much of our physical creation on the hypothesis of the superintendence of a Divine Being-does He allow us to carry out for ourselves? He, providing us with materials, and entrusting us to a motherly old nurse who stands as guardian over them, and holds us in the leading strings of natural law, giving us allotted times for youth, maturity and death.

In certain ways it may be readily seen how man is his own manufacturer. The physical expression of a slouching, drunken, criminal vagabond is markedly different from that of a good husband and father, and yet the pair might have been nursed in the same cradle. An artist grows to have a peculiar distinguishing appearance, not entirely due to dress. The man who is continually adjusting himself to the minor softnesses and flatteries of drawing-room society comes to have a different set and expression of features from the man whose eye and nerve have to be cultivated into steady reliability for tiger shooting. And the exercise of these functions is for so short a time that the wonder is not how little, but how much, man does in

fact adapt his physical machinery to his own purposes.

But, granting variations of this kind, if we turn to such a process as the cutting of our second set of teeth, we cannot at first see that man (whether man the individual spirit, or Mr. Butler's continuous or perpetually re-incarnate man) has anything to do with it himself; and it must certainly be reckoned as a process different in kind from those in which the direct influence of man himself is discernible.

But Mr. Butler's argument, which, on such a point as this, was fully given in his preceding work "Life and Habit" ("Op. 3" as he labels it), is exceedingly plausible. We do well the things we have done for a long time; we do unconsciously what we do well, as the brilliant player is unconscious of devoting effort to any given note on the piano, and indeed might be engaged in earnest conversation without making a false note. contention is as follows:

His

"That we are most conscious of, and have most control over, such habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences, which are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely human.

"That we are less conscious of, and have less control over, eating and drinking, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing, which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which are still, geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent.

"That we are most unconscious of, and have least control over, our digestion and circulation, which belonged even to our invertebrate

ancestry, and which are habits, geologically speaking, of extreme antiquity."

Being satisfied with our present system of teething, his argument must run, and having provided it many ages ago, the process is now unconscious with us, and latent in the memory. But what a unanimity this implies in humanity; that no sect should be found to have chosen, while it had the chance, that teeth should grow like other bones or rodents' incisors, and one set so develop as to do away with the necessity of a second teething. If we accept Mr. Butler's new idea how "Man is man and master of his fate," and believe that man makes men, we must allow for humanity's using some means of communication or passage of sympathy between the particles composing its mass, with an unity of purpose we are unacquainted with now. Else man, the unit, would surely vary more, and a Central African might be found to have developed a quite different arrangement of legs and arms from an Icelander, in the course of a few thousand years passed without communication between them. The question who sets the fashion, or erects the standard for the regulation and order of life in all its classes, is just as difficult to solve, and just as much neglected in every work on evolution, as the question as to the origin or presence of the primordial germ, preparing for its initiatory stages of variation.

If we (Man) have elected to replenish our hair by growth during our maturity, to replenish our jaws by one renewal of teeth, to replenish lost legs and arms never, except by artificial and unsatisfactory machines, and cannot now tell why we follow such different plans, it follows that we have, or have had, a parcel of intelligence of which we are not conscious, and which does

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »