Is the Doctrine Degrading?

After reading the extract just given, we can understand the vehement opposition which the doctrine of Evolution has provoked. First, there is a natural sentiment of revulsion from the idea that man is to be linked in family relationship with the brutes. It is a "degrading" doctrine; it assigns to man a "bestial origin;" so we have been hearing again and again during the controversy of the last few weeks.

Well, that may be : Evolution may be "degrading," and the origin it suggests may be "bestial," but we must not rely upon these epithets to rid us of the facts. "Facts are chiels that winna ding," and the doctrine of Evolution is supposed to rest upon hard facts.

But consider a little whether we are entitled to insist so much on the indignity which this doctrine puts upon us. Look at a class of facts which are patent to us all, and which remain the same, whatever be true about the doctrine of descent. Is there not an actual structural affinity between man and brutes? He and they have the same bony structure, the same limbs for the same general page 6 uses, and these limbs terminating in the same digits,—the same organs of sense, of respiration and nutrition, the same arrangement of brain, heart, lungs, stomach. In these and other physical characteristics man notoriously differs less from the creatures below him, than they differ from each other. He is of the same flesh and blood, moulded upon the same general plan, and no classifier, not himself a man and thus biased, would dream of drawing an arbitrary line between man and the apes.

Further, every mental faculty of ours is traceable back through the brutes. Even a rudimentary conscience is to be discerned in them.^* On the general mental and moral affinity which subsists, I quote the following passage from Agassiz—himself an opponent of the doctrine of descent:—

"The gradations of the moral faculty among the higher animals and man are so imperceptible, that to deny to the first a certain sense of responsibility and consciousness, would certainly be an exaggeration of the differences which distinguish man and animals. This argues strongly in favour of the existence in every animal of an immaterial principle similar to that which, by its excellence and superior endowments, places man so much above animals."—"Essay on Classification."

However repugnant, then, the idea" may be to us, we cannot deny the fact of our actual affinity with the brutes in type and structure; we cannot deny a community of bodily instincts, appetites, pains, pleasures, a common dependence upon food and sleep, a common liability to accidents, diseases, and death. We cannot even refuse their claim to participation in our nobler qualities. Mother-love, sagacity, affection, fidelity, courage, all have their exemplifications in the brute world. We may imagine, indeed, one of our despised cousins expostulating with us much after the fashion of the Jew in the "Merchant of Venice :"—"I am an ape! Hath not an ape eyes? Hath not an ape hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in all else, we will be like you also in that."

The mention of revenge may remind us that in one respect our remote has an advantage over our later ancestry. The nature of the lower creatures is at any rate uncontaminated by moral pollution, and I confess to a feeling of sympathy with the remark of an American writer :—"For my part I had rather descend from apes page 7 than from some of the men I see around here." Much of the repugnance we feel to what is called a "bestial origin" may be set down to personal vanity. We set an inordinate value on an ancient and honourable lineage. A French marquis, in order to illustrate the high antiquity of his house, is said to have had a picture painted representing Noah carrying into the Ark a tin box, of the kind common in lawyers' offices, inscribed "Papers of the De Vaux family." There is a snobbishness common in society which, though not running quite to this length, takes the shape of a disposition to estimate a man not for what he is, but for what his progenitors may have been. "Pray, sir," sari an exquisite to the venerable Indian missionary Carey, sitting as an invited guest at the table of the Governor-General—"Pray, sir, is it correct that your former vocation was that of a shoemaker?" "Quite incorrect," was the sturdy reply, "it was merely that of a cobbler." We sympathise with that reply, and our sympathy means that it matters little from whom or from what a man has sprung, provided only he is a man. With respect to Evolution, we must accept the inevitable, and, for my part, if it should be proved, as seems likely, that one of our remote progenitors rejoiced in "a tail and pointed ears," I should be disposed still to say with Burns, "A man's a man for a' that."