Evolution and revelation / by J.A. Fleming.

  • John Ambrose Fleming
Date:
[between 1900 and 1999]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution and revelation / by J.A. Fleming. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    self-defence, and so on. Intelligence is not, however, necessarily proportional to size of brain. The intelligence of ants and even other insects seems quite on the level of that of many of the larger mammals. Also, if the brain is the mere instrument for the manifestation of thought and not, taken alone, its producing agency, we seem bound to admit for animals a certain immaterial psychical possession or power which is the controlling and guiding agency in bodily activity. If this is so, then that which distinguishes man from the brute is not merely the possession of a more highly organized brain, but of a higher form or type of psyche, or soul, or hyper-material endowment of self-conscious, thinking per- sonality. There is no evidence whatever that the few fragmentary bony remains which have been found, called by anthropologists EHoanthropus, Pithecanthropus, Homo herdelbergensis, Neander- thal man, Homo rhodesiensis, etc., all of them very imperfect remains, had the progressive human type of intelligence rather than the static animal or anthropoid-ape type. We have no means of knowing how far we are justified in calling these remains the evidences of an evolutionary transition from apes to man. Hiven leading biologists admit the uncertain, questionable charac- ter of much of the evidence for the existence of such transition. The evidence that we do possess is much more consistent with the view that there was a “beginning” or creation, as asserted in the first chapter of Genesis, of the psychical or rational man by the bestowment of some special super-material endow- ment, or soul, which justified the use of the phrase “ in the image of God created He him.” It is the psyche which is the true seat or source of the thinking power or intelligence. If we deny this proposition, then we are forced to admit that mere collocations of atoms of matter in a certain form called brain-tissue can become conscious of their own existence and possess originative or ordering power. But, as we all know, there are two accounts of the Creation of Man in the book of Genesis. The higher critics have adopted a view which originated with Astruc in 1753, that the book of Genesis is a patchwork of narratives by various authors and editors which are distinguished amongst other things by different names for the Supreme Being, translated in our Authorized Version, God, Lord God, The Almighty. It would be quite beyond the limits of this short essay to discuss this theory. Those who
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