Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art. T. W. Rolleston
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of existence, the metaphysical basis for the speculations contained in them would have to be elaborated at considerable length. But, after all, the conclusions reached would only be those which most people are willing to accept as a necessary assumption, if all thought on the constitution of the universe is not to be a pure futility. Suffice it to say Man is here regarded as an organic part of Nature, and his consciousness as Nature’s way of mirroring herself to herself. Since, like other natural things, the soul is not a complete and unalterable entity, but is part of the eternal Becoming, it never can be claimed that its reflection of the world is absolutely pure and complete, yet some reality, some significance this reflection must surely have. The fact that man is not something different from the world, observing it from outside, but is vitally related to it, would alone entitle us to believe that, however much his observations may need to be purified and corrected, and however false may be the argumentative deductions sometimes drawn from them, he is still capable of a real and fruitful apprehension of the phenomena by which he is surrounded, and of their relations to each other and to himself. All sincere thought must therefore tend to brighten a little the mirror of the human soul. If this book should do so in any degree, were it merely by provoking other minds to more successful labours, the writer will thankfully say, like Apollo’s temple-sweeper in the play of Euripides, Fair is the service of Light.
T. W. ROLLESTON.
Glenealy, Co. Wicklow.
I have to thank The Macmillan Co. for permission to reproduce two illustrations (Figs. 1 and 2) from Wilson’s The Cell in Development and Inheritance, and Mr. Edward Arnold for a similar favour in regard to Fig. 3 from Weismann’s The Evolution Theory.
PARALLEL PATHS
PART I: BIOLOGY
CHAPTER I
THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN
“The wisdom of the divine rule is apparent not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world.”—Lord Acton.
PALEY’S Natural Theology though not by any means an epoch-making may perhaps be called an epoch-marking book. It was the crown of the endeavour of eighteenth-century religious philosophy to found a theology on the evidences of external nature. According to such exact knowledge of Nature’s operations as was then generally available, Paley’s attempt might well be thought to have succeeded. He opens his argument with a striking and effective illustration. He imagines a wayfarer crossing a heath who strikes his foot against a stone, and who asks himself how it came into being. Paley thinks he might be content with vaguely supposing that it was there ‘always.’ But suppose that what he had found at his foot was not a stone but a watch and that he now saw such an instrument for the first time. He would then certainly have not been so easily contented with an answer to the riddle of its existence. He would, if he examined it minutely, have observed that it was a structure intended for a certain purpose, and having all its parts arranged for that object, and mutually interdependent The different substances of which it was composed would be discovered to have each its special appropriateness for the fulfilling of some particular function in the economy of the whole. Though unacquainted with watches he would, if he was a man of sense and cultivation, infallibly conclude that he had before him an instrument intelligently constructed with a certain object in view—the object of measuring the flight of time. He would feel assured of this, even though he should find that the object of the mechanism were not attained with absolute accuracy, and even though there were some parts of it whose functions were not clear to him. The watch would be rightly regarded as a work of design; and the observer would be justified in arguing from it to the existence of a designer, endowed with the faculties of intelligence and conscious purpose, by whom the watch must have been put together.
The rest of Paley’s Natural Theology is an application of this analogy to the question of the origin of the universe. Ranging over the whole field of animate and inanimate nature he points to instance after instance of what appears to be the minute and thoughtful adaptation of means to ends, the co-ordination of part with part in the interest of the whole, and he has no difficulty, from this point of view, in showing the world of nature to be a piece of mechanism far more wonderfully and ingeniously constructed than any watch, and bearing prima facie evidence of the most convincing kind of its construction by a Being possessed of intelligence, purpose and foresight precisely resembling those attributes as displayed by man, but vastly heightened and enlarged. As the watch must have been made by man, so a manlike being, endowed with the necessary powers and faculties, must be postulated as the maker of the material universe. And thus the existence of a God made in the image of man appeared to have been demonstrated to the satisfaction of eighteenth-century theology.
But minds of real philosophic depth have always shrunk from pressing home deductions of this sort. They have felt that the matter is probably not quite so simple as it might appear on the surface, and they have recognised that if one is allowed to argue from the phenomena of nature to the qualities of the author of nature one cannot draw an arbitrary line including only those facts which testify to wisdom, power and goodness, and excluding from view all those which reveal imperfection of design and execution, or which would convict a man, if he were their author, of inhumanity and injustice. If the universe is really analogous to a watch one is entitled to examine it throughout as one would examine a watch. All watches testify to intelligence and design, but besides good watches there are bad ones, there are those which are made of cheap materials, rudely put together, with showy exteriors and unreliable works. Every watch, if examined by experts in mechanism, in art, and so forth, would reveal the characteristics of its designer and maker, and these characteristics would not always be admirable. They would rarely, in fact, be altogether admirable. If we apply these methods of inquiry to a universe which contains malarial mosquitoes, slave-making ants, snakes, earthquakes, and all the pests which blight and deform life without calling forth any strong or noble qualities to carry on the contest with them, we shall go where Paley certainly never intended to lead us, but we shall go there by Paley’s road. The fact is that these methods are altogether fantastic and inapplicable. The universe is not made like a watch. When we observe a human being or one of the higher animals we say, ‘He has such and such qualities; he is faithful, false, brave, cowardly, diligent, indolent, strong, weak, beautiful or ugly,’ but we do not think of referring his qualities back to certain attributes of an unknown maker of his physical and mental organism. A philosophy worthy of the name has always tended to regard the world as in some sense a vital organism, and has asked ‘What is it?’ rather than ‘What does it prove about some other being?’ “How green must be the maker of all grass” was quite a legitimate satire on all such attempts to deduce the qualities of a hypothetical creator from the phenomena of the universe. Thus the mistake of Paley and his school was fundamental. It was the mistake of seeking God in fragmentary phenomena—the same mistake, essentially, as that rebuked by Christ, by which every calamity or material blessing is regarded as a ‘judgment’ or a reward. His method, if applied with thorough-going consistency, destroys its own basis, for the One and the Many, the Whole and the Parts, cannot be apprehended at one and the same time by one and the same faculty of any human mind. Looking at phenomena alone, and thinking in that sphere, we cannot say that God made the world but rather that the world is becoming divine. Philosophically and religiously, God is all in all—historically, He is not the beginning, He is rather the end, the end in which the whole history is resumed.
Paley’s elaborate argument was felt by the orthodox of his time to be called for, even though at this period his way of thinking was popular. The conception of the world as a vital organism was as yet, indeed, very vague, and unsupported by any detailed, scientific scrutiny of the facts of nature, but it was in the air—it had always been in the air; it always held the minds of cautious students back from a complete surrender to the facile but illusory way of thinking typified by Paley’s famous analogy of the universe and the watch. Bacon knew that species