Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845

VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION

We should take but a limited view of science if we supposed, that the laws of nature of which it is cognizant have for their object the continuance only and preservation of the several parts of the universe; they provide also for change, improvement, development, progression. By these laws not only are the same phenomena, the same things, perpetually reproduced, but new phenomena, new arrangements, new objects are being successively developed. In short, we are able to perceive, to a certain extent, that not only the world is preserved and renewed, but grows and is created according to great general laws, which are indeed no other than the great ideas of the Divine Mind.

The modern science of geology has more especially led us to extend our view of science in this direction. The discovery of those mute records of past changes which lay buried in the earth, has induced us to investigate with awakened curiosity those changes which are actually taking place before us in the broad day, and in our own generation; and the result has been a conviction, that in the activity of nature there was a provision made, not only for restoration from decay, and a perpetual renewal of the individuals of each species, but for successive transformations in the surface of the globe, fitting it for successive forms of vegetable and animal life. The plant that lives, and sows its seed, and dies, has not only provided for its own progeny; under many circumstances it prepares the soil for successors of a superior rank of vegetation – "Pioneers of vegetation," as Dr Macculloch calls them, "the lichens, and other analogous plants, seek their place where no others could exist; demanding no water, requiring no soil, careless alike of cold and heat, of the sun and of the storm; rootless, leafless, flowerless; clothing the naked rock, and forming additional soil for their successors." The whole tribe of corals, whose lives are sufficiently brief and sufficiently simple, are yet not permitted to die away from the scene, and leave it, as so many of us do, just as they found it; they build up such a mausoleum of their bones – (for what used to be considered as the shell of the animal, is now pronounced to be a sort of bony nucleus or skeleton) – that large islands are formed, and a corresponding displacement of the sea is occasioned. The little creatures heave up the ocean on us. The river that to the poet's eye flows on for ever in the same channel, "giving a kiss," and kisses only, to every pebble and every sedge "it overtaketh in its pilgrimage," is detected to be secretly scraping, abrading, cutting out the earth like a knife, and washing it away into the sea. On the other hand, the earthquake and the volcano, which were looked on as paroxysms and agonies of nature, are transformed in our imagination into the constant ministers of beneficent change, and of creative purposes; and the momentary violence they commit, is to be excused on the plea of the great and permanent good they effect. For it is they who build the hills and the mountains, whence flow the streams of abundance upon the earth, and which, instead of being the gigantic, melancholy ruins Bishop Burnet took them to be, are the palaces and storehouses of nature, which it is given in charge to these sons of Vulcan to construct and to repair from the ravages which the soft rains of heaven incessantly commit upon them.

Astronomy, too, notwithstanding the severe discipline she has undergone, has in these later times resumed all the boldness of her youth, and brought her stores of science to the construction of the most splendid cosmogony that ever attracted the faith of the learned. She has girt her long robe around her, and entered the lists with, and far outstripped, whatever is boldest in the speculations of the youngest of the sciences. The nebular hypothesis, though not yet entitled, as we think, to be considered other than an hypothesis, has assumed a shape and consistency which forbids an entire rejection of it, which enforces our respect, and which, at all events, habituates the imagination to regard our planetary system as having probably been evolved, under the will of Providence, by the long operation of the established laws of matter.

It is quite a legitimate object of science, therefore, to view the laws of the physical world – whether they regard its mechanic movement, its chemistry, or its zoology – in their creative as well as reproductive functions; and it is the purpose of a work lately published, entitled "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," and which has drawn to itself considerable attention, to collect and arrange whatever hints or fragments of knowledge science affords, enabling us to bring the successive phenomena of creation under the formula of general laws. In this purpose it is impossible to find a shadow of blame, and the work will probably answer one good end, that of directing the studies of scientific men into paths but little or timidly explored. But unfortunately, what the author has collected as the results of science, are, in some instances, little else than the wild guess-work of speculation. He has no scruple whatever in imitating those early geographers, who, disliking the blank spaces of undiscovered regions, were in the habit in their charts

Indeed, his book is an assemblage of all that is most venturous and most fanciful in modern speculation, in which the most conspicuous place is allotted to a modification of Lamarck's theory on the development of animal life.

The charge of an atheistic tendency, as it is the heaviest which can be made against a work, so it is the last which ought to be hazarded without sufficient cause. In general, owing to the very sacredness of the subject, we feel disposed, in all suspicious cases, to pass over in silence both accusation and defence; and if in the present instance we depart, for a moment, from this line of conduct, it is only to give expression to a conviction – which we share, we believe, with all who have both the interest of science and the interest of theology at heart – that the fair efforts of the scientific enquirer should never be impeded by needless objections of a theological character. What we mean is this: though a suspicion may cross the mind, that a writer does not hold the religious tenets which we should desire to see every where advocated; yet if we are persuaded, at the same time, that this laxity of faith has no real logical connexion with the scientific results with which he is occupied, we ought not to inflict on them any portion of our suspicion or distrust. We shall always protest against confounding the legitimate attempts of science with the erroneous principles of certain schools of metaphysics, which may or may not be connected with them. If there is atheism in the world, we know whence it comes; we know well it is in a very different laboratory than that of the chemist that it has been distilled.

The unknown author before us, repeatedly protests against being numbered amongst atheistic philosophers; on our own part, we are thoroughly convinced that no formula of physical science could possibly interfere with a rational belief in the power and wisdom of God; what remains, then, but to treat his book purely in a scientific point of view?

To reduce to a system the acts of creation, or the development of the several forms of animal life, no more impeaches the authorship of creation, than to trace the laws by which the world is upheld and its phenomena perpetually renewed. The presumption naturally rises in the mind, that the same Great Being would adopt the same mode of action in both cases. If, for instance, the nebular hypothesis, to which we have already alluded, should be received as a scientific account of the proximate origin of our planetary system, this, as Mr Whewell has shown in his "Bridgewater Treatise," would serve only to enlighten and elevate our conception of the power of God. And indeed to a mind accustomed – as is every educated mind – to regard the operations of Deity as essentially differing from the limited, sudden, evanescent impulses of a human agent, it is distressing to be compelled to picture to itself the power of God as put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in; it pains the imagination to be obliged to assimilate those operations, for a moment, to the brief energy of a human will, or the manipulations of a human hand. Does not the language even of a Christian poet, when he speaks of God as launching from his ample palm the rolling planets into space, in some measure offend us? Do we not avoid as much as possible all such similitudes, as being derogatory to our notions of the Supreme?

There are still, indeed, some men of narrow prejudices who look upon every fresh attempt to reduce the phenomena of nature to general laws, and to limit those occasions on which it is necessary to conceive of a direct and separate interposition of divine power, as a fresh encroachment on the prerogatives of the Deity, or a concealed attack upon his very existence. And yet these very same men are daily appealing to such laws of the creation as have already been established, for their great proofs of the existence and the wisdom of God! Their imagination has remained utterly untutored by the little knowledge which they have rather learned to repeat than to apprehend. Whatever words they may utter, of subtle and high-sounding import, concerning the purely spiritual nature of the Divine Being, it is, in fact, a Jupiter Tonans clad in human lineaments, and invested with human passions, that their heart is yearning after. Such objectors as these can only be beaten back, and chained down, by what some one has called the brute force of public opinion.

Some little time ago men of this class deemed it irreligious to speak of the laws of the human mind; it savoured of necessity, of fatalism; they now applaud a Dr Chalmers when he writes his Bridgewater Treatise, to illustrate the attributes of God in the laws of the mental as well as the physical world.

No, there is nothing atheistic, nothing irreligious, in the attempt to conceive creation, as well as reproduction, carried on by universal laws. For what is the difference between individual isolated acts, and acts capable of being expressed in a general formula? This only, that in the second case the same act is repeated in constant sequence with other acts, and probably repeated in many places at the same time. The divine work is only multiplied. If the creation of a world should be proved to be as orderly and systematic as that of a plant, this may make worlds more common to the imagination, but it cannot make the power that creates them less marvellous.

But while we would reprove the narrowness of spirit that finds, in any of the discoveries of science, a source of disquietude for the interests of religion, we have here an observation to make of an opposite character, which we think of some importance, and which we shall again, in reviewing the theories of our author, have occasion to insist upon. It is undoubtedly true that there rises in the minds of every person at all tinctured with science, a presumption that every phenomenon we witness might be, if our knowledge enabled us, reduced under the expression of some general law; and that whatever changes are, or have been, produced in the world, might be traced to the interwoven operations of such laws. But however prevalent and justifiable such a presumption may be, we hold it no sound philosophy to give it so complete a preponderance as to debar the mind from contemplating the possibility of quite other and independent acts of divine power, the possibility of the abrupt introduction into our system of new facts, or series of facts, with their appropriate laws. The author before us, in his anxiety to explain, after a scientific manner, the introduction of life, and the various species of animals, into the globe, seems to have thought himself entitled to have recourse to the wildest hypothesis rather than to the immediate intervention of creative power; as if it were something altogether unphilosophical to suppose that there could be such a thing as a quite new development of that plastic energy. It is not even necessary that we should urge, that if a Creator exist, it is a most unwarrantable supposition to imagine that all his creative power has been exhausted. We say, even to an atheistic philosophy, that it is an unauthorized limitation that would forbid the mind to contemplate the possibility of the uprise, in time, of entirely new phenomena. Can any philosopher, of any school whatever, be justified in saying, that there shall be no new fact introduced into the universe? – that its laws cannot be added to? Why should he recoil from the introduction of any thing new? If he is one whose last formula stands thus, whatever is, is– this new fact will also fall, with others, into his formula. Of this, also, he can say, whatever is, is. There is, we repeat, a strong presumption in favour of a scientific sequence, of an unbroken order of events; but this presumption is not to authorize any hypothesis whatever in order to escape from the other alternative, an immediate intervention of creative power. This, also, is a probability which philosophy recognises, and in which a rational mind may choose to rest till science brings to him some definite result.