HARD WICKE' S SCIENCE- G OS SI P. 



i73 



A THEORY IN POPULAR LANGUAGE.* 



" T AM Isis, no man hath opened my veil:" 



-1- such words suit well to open such an argu- 

 ment as this, and yet she is not veiled so darkly as 

 she once was, as many may think. We can see 

 through it, but we have not raised it hardly. How- 

 ever, this clears a few of our doubts away regarding 

 the world and ourselves, and tells us to hope for the 

 day to come when we shall see "face to face" and 

 not as in a glass " darkly." 



We live in a world of prejudice. I do not say 

 narrow-mindedness, but there are persons of the 

 present day whose minds are capable of resisting 

 prejudice and who would endeavour to make others 

 do so also ; however, with these few brief introduc- 

 tory words, let me plunge into the heart of my subject 

 and attempt to unravel some of the mysterious 

 meshes of the veil. 



The world has not always been as it is, nor has 

 anything else either, and yet it is true " there is 

 nothing new under the sun " in more ways than one, 

 which I leave to my readers to observe. We are all 

 aware of the transformation of energy, that it cannot 

 be destroyed, but only manifested in various forms, 

 and of the wonderful power of the various forms of 

 energy, light, heat, electricity, etc. : this being so, 

 and matter also being indestructible, we cannot say 

 that the world was made from nothing, for there must 

 always have been something, and it is quite conceiv- 

 able that energy has been the main cause of the world 

 as it now is, and that it will be the dissolutor of the 

 world when it comes into some other manifestation of 

 itself with matter. Hence there is no necessity to 

 imagine beginning or end of the world, but only 

 manifestations of its constituents. 



Again can we reasonably speak of a good, all- 

 powerful God, who creates what is harmful, what 

 certainly appears not for the best, and yet it is done ? 

 Notice, as one or two simple but evident instances 

 which are before us just now : the Siamese twins, the 

 Orissa sisters, in the human race ; the numerous 

 monstrosities of a harmful kind in the lower animal 

 and vegetable kingdoms. Can anyone see the use of 

 the above, and if not, how can he say that God is 

 good, and that He creates for the best, and does all 

 things well? Tf we impute good to Him, we must 

 also impute these cases as good. Secondly : a child 

 is sick, or becomes sick and dies from disease, and 

 we say it is the "providence or will of God," and 

 perhaps this child was born of unhealthy parents, or 

 lived in foulsome places, it was not strong enough to 

 withstand the attacks of disease, and yet it is unfair 

 to say God did it, it seems to me ; still we must put 

 such a child down to His direct creation or not at all. 

 On the other hand it appears to me that the 

 theory " survival of fittest " is a more likely case, and 



* Although we print this characteristic article, we must not 

 be supposed to endorse its views.— Ed. Science-Gossip. 



it can be seen plainly in the following, in which I see 

 no intervention of God required at all. 



Many people put down the fall of Babylon and 

 Rome to the wrath of God ; but it was not that, it 

 was the result of luxury in excess, licentiousness, in- 

 dulgence of all kinds, debasing and wasting their 

 strength, till at length those hardier races (in the case 

 of Rome) from Germany, owing to their better 

 physical powers, were able to pour in and destroy 

 them, the stronger thus taking the place of the 

 weaker, and add to the above debaucheries of Rome, 

 an outcome which could hardly have been helped, 

 viz., the continual inherited defects in children during 

 the latter times of the empire (which I believe must 

 have been the case) who may have survived for a 

 time ; nevertheless we can see what a state of down- 

 ward tendency they were in, and consequently what 

 it led to. The same is seen in the North American 

 Indians of the present day. If we impute to the 

 good God these things, we have to say that He 

 made at that time each of His creations less strong, 

 (other causes as well, I will admit, of course might 

 make them even more so), and this would also in 

 time lead to their destruction — a most unreasonable 

 and unfair argument ag-iinst a good and perfect God, 

 but not in the theory I spoke of above. 



Here let us look at the individual parts of our own 

 body. The poet Pope says in his " Essay on Man " 

 that we could not make ourselves with more skill 

 than we are made, and no doubt he infers from this, 

 God alone could make us as we are. But looking at 

 the eye, it is imperfect, so Helmholtz has said ; the 

 imperfections of the image on the retina are nothing 

 compared with the incongruities in the domain of the 

 sensations : such is the tenor of his teaching. Com- 

 parative anatomists say that there are valves in the 

 body useless to us in our present state, and that we 

 are only partially adapted in the structure of our 

 limbs for walking on the ground on only two legs. 

 Does the foresight of a good and perfect God appear 

 at all here ? — giving us machinery that is useless, and 

 maybe harmful, and organs where needed specially, 

 imperfect. Yet Pope's words are true, but the blind 

 forces of nature make us what we are, through 

 evolution and other minor changes subservient to 

 that. 



We see daily new creations being effected, being 

 brought to maturity and how they die ; in cells we 

 may notice creation with microscope before our very 

 eyes ; as to how they die I need not speak of here, 

 constant action produces constant reaction. As for 

 death being the result of man's first sin, we know by 

 geology that plants and animals of the lower order 

 existed long before man appeared on the scene, and 

 their fossilised remains prove death must have also 

 come by various ways to both kingdoms. 



But whence came the knowledge of self-conscious- 

 ness ? This is one great difficulty in such a theory, 

 but may we not attribute it to a manifestation of 



