Barrel-Organs
[From the Press, 17 January, 1863.]

Dugald Stewart in his Dissertation on the Progress of Metaphysics says: “On reflecting on the repeated reproduction of ancient paradoxes by modern authors one is almost tempted to suppose that human invention is limited, like a barrel-organ, to a specific number of tunes.”

It would be a very amusing and instructive task for a man of reading and reflection to note down the instances he meets with of these old tunes coming up again and again in regular succession with hardly any change of note, and with all the old hitches and involuntary squeaks that the barrel-organ had played in days gone by. It is most amusing to see the old quotations repeated year after year and volume after volume, till at last some more careful enquirer turns to the passage referred to and finds that they have all been taken in and have followed the lead of the first daring inventor of the mis-statement. Hallam has had the courage, in the supplement to his History of the Middle Ages, p. 398, to acknowledge an error of this sort that he has been led into.

But the particular instance of barrel-organism that is present to our minds just now is the Darwinian theory of the development of species by natural selection, of which we hear so much. This is nothing new, but a réchauffée of the old story that his name- page 165 sake, Dr. Darwin, served up in the end of the last century to Priestley and his admirers, and Lord Monboddo had cooked in the beginning of the same century. We have all heard of his theory that man was developed directly from the monkey, and that we all lost our tails by sitting too much upon that appendage.

We learn from that same great and cautious writer Hallam in his History of Literature that there are traces of this theory and of other popular theories of the present day in the works of Giordano Bruno, the Neapolitan who was burnt at Rome by the Inquisition in 1600. It is curious to read the titles of his works and to think of Dugald Stewart’s remark about barrel-organs. For instance he wrote on “The Plurality of Worlds,” and on the universal “Monad,” a name familiar enough to the readers of Vestiges of Creation. He was a Pantheist, and, as Hallam says, borrowed all his theories from the eclectic philosophers, from Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and ultimately they were no doubt of Oriental origin. This is just what has been shown again and again to be the history of German Pantheism; it is a mere barrel-organ repetition of the Brahman metaphysics found in Hindu cosmogonies. Bruno’s theory regarding development of species was in Hallam’s words: “There is nothing so small or so unimportant but that a portion of spirit dwells in it; and this spiritual substance requires a proper subject to become a plant or an animal”; and Hallam in a note on this passage observes how the modern theories of equivocal generation correspond with Bruno’s.

No doubt Hallam is right in saying that they are all of Oriental origin. Pythagoras borrowed from thence page 166 his kindred theory of the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. But he was more consistent than modern philosophers; he recognised a downward development as well as an upward, and made morality and immorality the crisis and turning-point of change—a bold lion developed into a brave warrior, a drunken sot developed into a wallowing pig, and Darwin’s slave-making ants, p. 219, would have been formerly Virginian cotton and tobacco growers.

Perhaps Prometheus was the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said to have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from the backbone to the mammalia, and from the mammalia to the manco- cerebral, he compounded man of each and all:-

Fertur Prometheus addere principi
Limo coactus particulam undique
Desectam et insani leonis
Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.

One word more about barrel-organs. We have heard on the undoubted authority of ear and eyewitnesses, that in a neighbouring province there is a church where the psalms are sung to a barrel-organ, but unfortunately the psalm tunes come in the middle of the set, and the jigs and waltzes have to be played through before the psalm can start. Just so is it with Darwinism and all similar theories. All his fantasias, as we saw in a late article, are made to come round at last to religious questions, with which really and truly they have nothing to do, but were it not for their supposed effect upon religion, no one would waste page 167 his time in reading about the possibility of Polar bears swimming about and catching flies so long that they at last get the fins they wish for.