232 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cial ancestry in the ape. Some transcendental realists do get over the 

 difficulty ; but Carlyle never could. In June, 18G8, he wrote in his 

 journal as follows : 



" ' Surely the speed with which matters are going on in this su- 

 preme province of our affairs is something notable and sadly undeni- 

 able in late years. . . . "All descended from gorillas, seemingly." 

 " Sun made by collision of huge masses of planets, asteroids, etc., in 

 the infinite of space." Very possibly, say I. " Then where is the 

 place for a Creator ? " The fool hath said in his heart there is no 

 God. From the beginning it has been so, is now, and to the end will 

 be so. The fool hath said it — he and nobody else ; and with dismal 

 results in our days — as in all days ; which often makes me sad to 

 think of, coming nearer myself and the end of my life than I ever ex- 

 pected they would do. That of the sun, and his possibly being made 

 in that manner, seemed to me a real triumph of science, indefinitely 

 widening the horizon of our theological ideas withal, and awakened a 

 good many thoughts in me when I first heard of it, and gradually per- 

 ceived that there was actual scientific basis for it — I suppose the finest 

 stroke that " Science," poor creature, has or may have succeeded in 

 making during my time : welcome to me if it be a truth, honorably 

 welcome ! But what has it to do with the existence of the Eternal 

 Unnaraable ? ' 



"The speculation as to the genesis of the sun and the probable du- 

 ration of his heat here adverted to by Carlyle with such recognition of 

 its real importance came before him first, I believe, in the form of a 

 paper by Sir William Thomson, of Glasgow, which I had myself the 

 honor of inserting in ' Macmillan's Magazine.' He was much struck 

 with the paper at the time, and often mentioned it to me afterward. 

 It is characteristic that he should have had less objection to this specu- 

 lation, assigning a definite beginning to the whole solar system, and 

 pointing perhaps to its ultimate collapse and the cessation of all ter- 

 restrial life, humanity included, with the extinction of the sun's heat, 

 than to the nearer scientific speculation as to the evolution of species 

 on the earth itself and man's descent from the gorilla. It is as if he 

 found the imagination of a wholesale crash, whether of formation or 

 of annihilation, in the far-back vast of physical immensity, or the far- 

 future vast of the same, more cleanly, and therefore more endurable, 

 than any imagination of a materialistic derivation of the human organ- 

 ism, through the ape and what not, from earthly protoplasmic slime. 

 On the whole, one may say that he lived too late to be able to accept the 

 modern scientific doctrine of evolution and work it into his philosophy,, 

 and remained therefore at the last a transcendental realist of the old 

 school. Or perhaps, with the foregoing passage to enlighten us, it 

 might be fairer to say that, whatever conceptions of a cosmic evo- 

 lution science might bring in, he found them irrelevant to the main 

 matter, and did not care a rush about them in comparison with the 



