54 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



Transformism enjoys the additional advantage of being able 

 to make the imagination its partisan by means of a visual 

 appeal. Such an appeal is always more potent than that of 

 pure logic stripped of sensuous imagery. When it comes to 

 vividness and persuasiveness, the syllogism is no match for 

 the object-lesson. Retinal impressions have a hypnotic in- 

 fluence that is not readily exorcised by considerations of an 

 abstract order — "Segnius irritant demissa per aurem, Quam 

 quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus," says Horace, in the ''Ars 

 Poetica." Philosophers may distinguish between the magnetic 

 appeal of a graphic presentation and the logical cogency of the 

 doctrine so presented, but there is no denying that, in prac- 

 tice, imagination is often mistaken for reason and persuasion 

 for conviction. Be that as it may, the ordinary method of 

 bringing home to the student the evolutionary significance 

 of homology is certainly one that utilizes to the full all the 

 advantages of visual presentation. Given a class of impres- 

 sionable premedics and coeds; given an instructor's table with 

 skeletons of a man, a flamingo, an ape and a dog hierarchically 

 arranged thereon; given an instructor sufiiciently versed in 

 comparative osteology to direct attention to the points in which 

 the skeletons concur: and there can be no doubt whatever as to 

 the psychological result. The student forms spontaneously the 

 notion of a common vertebrate type, and the instructor assures 

 him that this "general type" is not, as it would be with respect 

 to other subject matter, a mere universal idea with no formal 

 existence outside the mind, but rather a venerable family 

 likeness, posed for originally by a single pair of ancestors (or 

 could it possibly have been, by one self-fertilizing hermaphro- 

 dite?) and recopied from generation to generation, with certain 

 variations on the original theme, by the hand of an artist called 

 Heredity. This explanation may be true, but logically con- 

 sequential it is not. However, if the dialectic is poor, the 

 pedagogy is beyond reproach, and the solution proposed has in 

 its favor the fact that it accords well with the student's limited 

 experience. He is aware of the truism that children re- 



