Natural selection not inconsistent with natural theology : a free examination of Darwin's treatise On the origin of species, and of its American reviewers / by Asa Gray.
- Asa Gray
- Date:
- 1861
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Natural selection not inconsistent with natural theology : a free examination of Darwin's treatise On the origin of species, and of its American reviewers / by Asa Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![rather confusing and disappointing. We certainly expected a stronger adverse case than any which the thorough-going opposers of Darwin appear to have made out. Wherefore, if it be found that the new hypothesis has grown upon our favor as we proceeded, this must be attributed not so much to the force of the arguments of the book itself as to the vvant of force of several of those by which it has been assailed. Darwin’s arguments we might resist or adjourn ; but some of the refu- tations of it give us more concern than the book itself did. These remarks apply mainly to the philosophical and theological . objections which have been elaborately urged, almost exclusively by ; the American reviewers. The “North British” reviewer, indeed, : roundly denounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems the . case too clear for argument. The Edinburgh reviewer, on the con- • trary, scouts all such objections, — as well he may, since he records ; his belief in “ a continuous creative operation,” “ a constantly operating j ? secondary creational law,” through which species are successively pro- I duced; and he emits faint, but not indistinct, glimmerings of a trans- I mutation theory of his own ; * so that he is equally exposed to all the j philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to most of those 1 urged by the other American critics, against Darwin himself. Proposing now to criticise the critics, so far as to see what their most I general and comprehensive objections amount to, we must needs begin iwith the American reviewers, and with their arguments adduced to \ prove that a derivative hypothesis ought not to he true, or is not possible, j philosophical, or theistic. It must not be forgotten that on former occasions very confident ] judgments have been pronounced by very competent persons, which I have not been finally ratified. Of the two great minds of the seven- i teenth century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well » as philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitation, the other ob- j jected to that theory that it was subversive of natural religion. The t nebular hypothesis — a natural consequence of the theory of gravita- t tion and of the subsequent progress of physical and astronomical dis- ( covery — has been denounced as atheistical even down to our own day. 1 But it is now largely adopted by the most theistical natural philoso- [ phers as a tenable and perhaps sufficient hypothesis, and where not * Whatever it may be, it is not “ the homoeopathic form of the transmutative hypoth- esis,” as Darwin’s is said to be, (p. 252, Amer. reprint,) so happily that the prescription - is repeated in the second (p. 269) and third (p. 271) dilutions, no doubt, on Hahnemann’s famous principle, with an increase of potency at each dilution. Probably the supposed transmutation is per saltus. “ Homoeopathic doses of transmutation,” indeed ! Well, if » we really must swallow transmutation in some form or other, as this reviewer intimates, ^ we might prefer the mild homoeopathic doses of Darwin’s formula to the allopathic bolus » which the Edinburgh general practitioner appears to be compounding.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22344949_0031.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
