The Faith of the Millions Part 6

And now to consider more closely the grounds of Mr. Laing's very cheerful view of a world in which, for all we know, there is no soul, no G.o.d, and certainly no faith. Since of the two former we know and can know nothing, we must build our happiness, our morality, our "religion,"

on a basis whereof they form no part. He believes that morality will be able to hold its own distinct, not only from all belief in revelation, in a personal G.o.d, and in a spiritual soul, but in spite of a philosophy which by tracing the origin of moral judgments to mere physical laws of hereditary transmission of experienced utilities, robs them of all authority other than prudential, and convicts them of being illusory so far as they seem to be of higher than human origin.

Herein, as usual, he treads in the steps of Professor Huxley, "the greatest living master of English prose" (though why his mastery of prose should add to his weight as a philosopher, we fail to see). "Such ideas _evidently_ come from education, and are not the results either of inherited instinct [15] or of supernatural gift.... Given a being with man's brain, man's hands, and erect stature, _it is easy to see_ how ...

rules of conduct ... must have been formed and fixed by successive generations, according to the Darwinian laws." [16]

He tells us: "We may read the Athanasian Creed less, but we practise Christian charity more in the present than in any former age." [17]

"Faith has diminished, charity increased." [18]

Of moral principles, he says: "Why do we say that ... they carry conviction with them and prove themselves?... Still, there they are, and being what they are ... it requires no train of reasoning or laboured reflection to make us _feel_ that 'right is right,' and that it is _better_ for ourselves and others to act on such precepts ... rather than to reverse these rules and obey the selfish promptings of animal nature." [19] "It is _clearly_ our highest wisdom to follow right, not from selfish calculation, ... but because 'right is right.' ... For practical purposes it is comparatively unimportant how this standard got there ... as an absolute imperative rule." [20] As to the apprehended ill effect of agnosticism on morals, he says: "The foundations of morals [21] are fortunately built on solid rock and not on s.h.i.+fting sand.

It may truly be said in a great many cases that, as individuals and nations become more sceptical, they become more moral." [22] "_If there is one thing more certain than another_ in the history of evolution, it is that morals have been evolved by the same laws as regulate the development of species." [23]

These citations embody Mr. Laing's opinions on this point, and show very clearly his utter incapacity for elementary philosophic thought. Here, as elsewhere, as soon as he leaves the bare record of facts and embarks in any kind of speculation, he shows himself helpless; however, he tries to fortify his own courage and that of his readers, with "it is clear,"

"it is evident," "it is certain."

To say that "right is right," sounds very oracular; but it either means that "right" is an ultimate spring of action, inexplicable on evolutionist principles, or that right is the will of the strongest, or an illusory inherited foreboding of pain, or a calculation of future pleasure and pain, or something which, in no sense, is a true account of what men _do_ mean by right. To say that moral principles "carry conviction with them, and prove themselves" _(i.e._, are self-evident), unless, as we suspect, it is mere verbiage conveying nothing particular to Mr. Laing's brain, is to deny that right has reference to the consequences of action as bearing on human progress and evolution, which is to deny the very theory he wishes to uphold. No intuitionist could have spoken more strongly. Then we are a.s.sured that we "feel" rightness, or that "right is right"--apparently as a simple irresoluble quality of certain actions--and with same breath, that "it is _better_ for ourselves and others to act on these rules," where he jumps off to utilitarianism again; and then we are forbidden to "obey the selfish impulses of our animal nature"--a strange prohibition for one who sees in us nothing but animal nature, who denies us any free power to withstand its impulses. Then it is "clearly our highest wisdom to follow right"--an appeal to prudential motives--"not from any selfish calculations"--a repudiation of prudential motives--"but because 'right is right'"--an appeal to a blind unreasoning instinct, and a prohibition to question its authority. We are told that for practical purposes it matters little whence this absolute imperative rule originates. Was there ever a more unpractical and short-sighted a.s.sertion! Convince men that the dictates of conscience are those of fear or selfishness, that they are all mere animal instincts, that they are anything less than divine, and who will care for Mr. Laing's appeal to blind faith in the "rightness of right"?

As long as Christian tradition lives on, as it will for years among the ma.s.ses, the effects of materialist ethics will not be felt; but as these new theories filter down from the few to the many, they will inevitably produce their logical consequences in practical matters. No one with open eyes can fail to see how the leaven is spreading already. Still the majority act and speak to a great extent under the influence of the old belief, which they have repudiated, in the freedom of man's will and the Divine origin of right. It is quite plain that Mr. Laing has either never had patience to think the matter out, or has found it beyond his compa.s.s. Having thus established morality on a foundation independent of religion and of everything else, making "right" rest on "right," he a.s.sumes the prophetic robe, and on the strength of his seventy years of experience and philosophy poses as a _Cato Major_ for the edification of the semi-scientific millions of young persons to whom he addresses his volumes. We have a whole chapter on Practical Life, [24] on self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, full of portentous plat.i.tudes and ancient saws; St. Paul's doctrine of charity, and all that is best in the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, is liberated from its degrading a.s.sociation with the belief in a G.o.d who rewards and punishes.[25] We are "to act strenuously in that direction which, after _conscientious_ inquiry, seems the best, ... and trust to what religious men call Providence, and scientific men Evolution, for the result," and all this simply on the bold a.s.sertion of this sage whose sole aim is "to leave the world a little better rather than a little worse for my individual unit of existence." [26]

And here we may inquire parenthetically as to the motive which urges Mr.

Laing to throw himself into the labours of the apostolate and to become such an active propagandist of agnosticism. We are told[27] that the enlightened should be "liberal and tolerant towards traditional opinions and traditional practices, and trust with cheerful faith to evolution to bring about _gradually_ changes of form," &c.; that the influence of the clergy is "on the whole exerted for good," and it is frankly acknowledged that Christianity has been a potent factor in the evolution of modern civilization. It has, however, nearly run its course, and the old order must give place to the new, _i.e._, to agnosticism. But even allowing, what we dare say Mr. Laing would not ask, that the speculative side of the new religion is fully defined and worked out, and ready to displace the old dogmatic creeds, yet its practical aspect is so vague that he writes: "I think the time is come when the intellectual victory of agnosticism is so far a.s.sured, that it behoves thinking men to _begin to consider_ what practical results are likely to follow from it." [28]

In the face of this confession we find Mr. Laing industriously addressing himself to "those who lack time and opportunity for studying," [29] to the "minds of my younger readers, and of the working cla.s.ses who are striving after culture," [30] "to what may be called the semi-scientific readers, ... who have already acquired some elementary ideas about science," "to the millions;" [31] and endeavouring by all means in his power to destroy the last vestige of their faith in that religion which alone provides for them a definite code of morality strengthened by apparent sanctions of the highest order, and venerable at least by its antiquity and universality. [32] And while he is thus busily pulling down the old scaffolding, he is calmly _beginning_ to consider the practical results. This is his method of "leaving the world a little better than he found it." He professes to understand and appreciate "In Memoriam." Has he ever reflected on the lines: "O thou that after toil and storm," [33] when the practical conclusion is--

Leave thou thy sister, when she prays, Her early Heaven, her happy views; Nor thou with shadowed hint infuse A life that leads melodious days.

Her faith through form is pure as thine, Her hands are quicker unto good; O sacred be the flesh and blood, To which she links a truth divine.

On his own principles he is convicted of being a lover of mischief. No, one is sorely tempted to think that these men are well aware that the moral sense which sound philosophy and Christian faith have developed, is still strong in the minds and deeper conscience of the English-speaking races, and that were they to present materialism in all its loathsome nudity to the public gaze, they would be hissed off the stage. And so they dress it up in the clothes of the old religion just for the present, with many a quiet wink between themselves at the expense of the "semi-scientific" reader.

We have already adverted to Mr. Laing's utter incapacity for anything like philosophy, except so far as that term can be applied to a power of raking together, selecting, and piling up into "a popular shape" the sc.r.a.ps of information which favour the view whose correctness he was convinced of ere he began. A few further remarks may justify this somewhat severe estimate. After stating that in the solution of life and soul problems, science stops short at germs and nucleated cells, he proceeds with the usual tirade against metaphysics: "Take Descartes'

fundamental axiom: _Cogito ergo sum_.... Is it really an axiom?... If the fact that I am conscious of thinking proves the fact that I exist, is the converse true that whatever does not think does not exist?...

Does a child only begin to exist when it begins to think? If _Cogito ergo sum_ is an inst.i.tution to which we can trust, why is not _Non cogito ergo non sum?_" [34] Here is a man posing before the gaping millions as a philosopher and a severe logician, who thinks that the proposition, "every cow is a quadruped," is disproved by the evident falsehood of, "what is not a cow is not a quadruped," which he calls "the converse." He sums up magnificently by saying: "These are questions to which no metaphysical system that I have ever seen, can return the semblance of an answer;" giving the impression of a life devoted to a deep and exhaustive study of all schools of philosophy. Mr. Laing here surely is addressing his "younger readers."

He tells us elsewhere [35] that, "when a.n.a.lyzed by science, spiritualism leads straight to materialism;" free-will "can be annihilated by the simple mechanical expedient of looking at a black wafer stuck on a white wall;" that if "Smith falls into a trance and believes himself to be Jones, he really is Jones, and Smith has become a stranger to him while the trance lasts.... I often ask myself the question, If he died during one of these trances, which would he be, Smith or Jones? and I confess it takes some one wiser than I am to answer it." Without pretending to be wiser than Mr. Laing, we hope it will not be too presumptuous for us to suggest that if Smith dies in a trance _believing_ himself to be Jones, he is under a delusion, and that he really is Smith. Else it would be very awkward for poor Jones, who in nowise believes himself to be Smith. Mr. Laing would have to break it gently to Jones, that, "in fact, my dear sir, Smith borrowed your personality, and unfortunately died before returning it; and as to whether you are yourself or Smith, as to whether you are alive or dead, 'I confess it takes some one wiser than I am to decide.'" That a man's own name, own surroundings, own antecedents, are all objects of his thought, and distinguished from the _self, ego,_ or _subject_ which contemplates them, has never suggested itself to Mr. Laing. That though Smith may mistake every one of these, yet the term "I" necessarily and invariably means the same for him, the one central, constant unity to which every _non-ego_ is opposed. And this from a man who elsewhere claims an easy familiarity with Kant.

"Again what can be said of love and hate if under given circ.u.mstances they can be transformed into one another by a magnet?" What indeed? And how is it that the gold-fish make no difference in the weight of the globe of water?

His conclusion to these inquiries is: "When Shakespeare said, 'We are such stuff as dreams are made of,' he enumerates what has become a scientific fact. The 'stuff' is in all cases the same--vibratory motions of nerve particles." [36] Thus knowledge, self-consciousness, free-choice, is as much a function of matter as fermentation, or crystallisation--a mode of motion, not dissimilar from heat, perhaps transformable therewith.

Recapitulating this farrago of nonsense on p. 188, he adds a new difficulty which ought to make him pause in his wild career. "What is the value of the evidence of the senses if a suggestion can make us see the hat, but not the man who wears it; or dance half the night with an imaginary partner? Am I 'I myself, I,' or am I a barrel-organ playing 'G.o.d save the Queen,' if the stops are set in the normal fas.h.i.+on, but the 'Ma.r.s.eillaise' if some cunning hand has altered them without my knowledge? These are questions which I cannot answer." He cannot answer a question on which the value of his whole system of physical philosophy depends; uncertain about his own ident.i.ty, about the evidence of his senses, he would make the latter the sole rule and measure of cert.i.tude, and deny to man any higher faculty by which alone he can justify his trust in his cognitive faculties. Another instance of his absolute ignorance of common philosophic terminology is when he a.s.serts that according to theology we know the dogmas of religion by "intuition." [37]

This doctrine rests on Cardinal Newman's celebrated theory of the "Illative Sense." Surely a moment's reflection on the meaning of words, not to speak of a slight acquaintance with the book referred to, would have saved him from confounding two notions so sharply distinguished as "intuition" and "inference." Again, "There can be no doubt there are men often of great piety and excellence who have, or fancy they have, a sort of sixth sense, or, as Cardinal Newman calls it, an 'illative sense,' by which they see by intuition ... things unprovable or disprovable by ordinary reason." [38] Can a man who makes such reckless travesties of a view which he manifestly has never studied, be credited with intellectual honesty?

Doubtless, the semi-scientific millions will be much impressed by the wideness of Mr. Laing's reading and his profound grasp of all that he has read, when they are told casually that "s.p.a.ce and time are, ... to use the phraseology of Kant, 'imperative categories;'" [39] but perhaps to other readers it may convey nothing more than that he has heard a dim something somewhere about Kant, about the categories, about s.p.a.ce and time being schemata of sense, and about the _categorical imperative._ It is only one instance of the unscrupulous recklessness which shows itself everywhere. Akin to this is his absolute misapprehension of the Christian religion which he labours to refute. He never for a moment questions his perfect understanding of it, and of all it has got to say for itself. Brought up apparently among Protestants, who hold to a verbal inspiration [40] and literal interpretation of the Scriptures, who have no traditional or authoritative interpretation of it, he concludes at once that his own crude, boyish conception of Christianity is the genuine one, and that every deviation therefrom is a "climbing down," or a minimizing. He has no suspicion that the wider views of interpretation are as old as Christianity itself, and have always co-existed with the narrower.

He regards the Christian idea of G.o.d as essentially anthropomorphic.

Indeed, whether in good faith or for the sake of effect, he brings forward the old difficulties which have been answered _ad nauseam_ with an air of freshness, as though unearthed for the first time, and therefore as setting religion in new and unheard-of straits. So, at all events, it will seem to the millions of his young readers and to the working cla.s.ses.

Let us follow him in some of his destructive criticism, or rather denunciations, in order to observe his mode of procedure. "The discoveries of science ... make it impossible for _sincere_ men to retain the faith," &c., [41] therefore all who differ from Mr. Laing are insincere. "It is _absolutely certain_ that portions of the Bible are not true; and those, important portions." [42] This is based on two premisses which are therefore absolutely certain, (i) Mr. Laing's conclusions about the antiquity of man--of which more anon; (43) his baldly literal interpretation of the Bible as delivered to him in his early "infancy. On p. 253, we have the ancient difficulty from the New Testament prophecy of the proximate end of the world, without the faintest indication that it was felt 1800 years ago, and has been dealt with over and over again. Papias [44] is lionized [45] in order to upset the antiquity of the four Gospels--which upsetting, however, depends on a dogmatic interpretation of an ambiguous phrase, and the absence of positive testimony. Here again there is no evidence that Mr. Laing has read any elementary text-book on the authenticity of the Gospels. He is "perfectly clear" as to the fourth Gospel being a forgery; again for reasons which he alone has discovered. [46] Paul is the first inventor of Christian dogma, without any doubt or hesitation. But the undoubted results of modern science ... shatter to pieces the whole fabric. _It is as certain as that_ 2 + 2 = 4 that the world was not created in the manner described in Genesis."

As regards harmonistic difficulties of the Old and New Testaments, he a.s.sumes the same confident tone of bold a.s.sertion without feeling any obligation to notice the solutions that have been suggested. It makes for his purpose to represent the orthodox as suddenly struck dumb and confounded by these amazing discoveries of his. He sees discrepancies everywhere in the Gospel narrative, e.g.: [47]

"Judas' death is _differently_ described." "Herod is introduced by Luke and not mentioned by the others." "Jesus carried His own Cross in one account, while Simon of Cyrene bore it in another. Jesus gave no answer to Pilate, says Matthew; He explains that His Kingdom was not of the world, says John. Mary His Mother sat _(sic)_ at the foot of the Cross, according to St. John; it was not His Mother, but Mary the mother of Salome _(sic)_ 'who beheld Him from afar,' according to Mark and Matthew. There was a guard set to watch the tomb, says Matthew; there is no mention of one by the others."

At first we thought Mr. Laing must have meant _differences_ and not discrepancies; but the following paragraph forbade so lenient an interpretation. "The only other mention of Mary by St. John, who describes her as sitting _(sic)_ by the foot of the Cross, is apocryphal, being directly contradicted by the very precise statement [48]

in the three other Gospels, that the Mary who was present on that occasion was a different woman, the mother of Salome." Even his youngest readers ought to open their eyes at this. Similarly he thinks the omission of the Lord's Prayer by St. Mark tells strongly against its authenticity. [49]

II.

We must now say something about the great facts of evolutionary philosophy which have shattered dogmatic Christianity to pieces, and have made it impossible for any sincere man to remain a Christian. To say that Mr. Laing is absolutely certain of the all-sufficiency of evolutionism to explain everything that is knowable to the human mind, that he does not hint for a moment that this philosophy is found by the "bell-wethers" of science to be every day less satisfactory as a complete _rationale_ of the physical cosmos; is really to understate the case for sheer lack of words to express the intensity of his conviction.

His fundamental fact is that, however theologians may shuffle out of the first chapter of Genesis by converting days into periods, when we come to the story of the Noachean Deluge, we are confronted with such a glaring absurdity that we must at once allow that the Bible is full of myths. For history and science show that man existed probably two hundred thousand years ago, at all events not less than twenty thousand; also that five thousand B.C., a highly organized civilization existed in Egypt, whose monuments of that date give evidence to the full development of racial and linguistic differences as now existing among men; that this plants the common stem from which these have branched off, in an indefinitely remote pre-historic period; that to suppose that the present races and tongues are all derived from one man (Noe), who lived only two thousand B.C., is a monstrous impossibility; still more so, to believe that the countless thousands of species of animals which populate the world were collected from the four quarters of the globe, were housed and fed in the Ark, landed on Mount Ararat, and thence spread themselves out over the world again regardless of interjacent seas. Hence the Bible story of human origins is a mere myth; man has not fallen, but has risen by slow evolution from some ancestor common to him and apes, at a remote period, long sons prior even to the miocene period, which shows man to have been then as obstinately differentiated from the apes as ever. Therefore "all did not die in Adam," and seeing this is the foundation of the dogmatic Christianity invented by Paul, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. [45]

And indeed, given that the Bible means what Mr. Laing says it means, and that science has proved what he says it has proved, that the two results are incompatible, few would care to deny. As regards the latter condition, let us see some of his reasonings. We are told that "modern science shows that uninterrupted historical records, confirmed by contemporary monuments, carry history back at least one thousand years before the supposed creation of man ... and show then no trace of a commencement, but populous cities, celebrated temples, great engineering works, and a high state of the arts and of civilization already existing." [46] Strange to say, Mr. Laing developes a sudden reverence for the testimony of _priests_ at the outset of his historical inquiries, and finds that history begins with "priestly organizations;"

[47] that the royal records are "made and preserved by special castes of priestly colleges and learned scribes, and that they are to a great extent precise in date and accurate in fact." Of course this does not include Christian priests, but the priests of barbarous cults of many thousand years ago, who, as well as their royal masters, are at once credited with all the delicacy of the accurate criticism which we boast of in these days--how vainly, G.o.d knows. We are told one moment that Herodotus "was credulous, and not very critical in distinguis.h.i.+ng between fact and fable," that his "sources of information were often not much better than vague popular traditions, or the tales told by guides;"

[48] and yet we are to lay great stress on his a.s.sertion that the Egyptian priests told him "that during the long succession of ages of the three hundred and forty-five high priests of Heliopolis, whose statues they showed him in the Temple of the Sun, there had been no change in the length of human life or the course of nature." [49] A valuable piece of evidence _if_ Herodotus reports rightly, and _if_ the priest was not like the average guide, and _if_ the statues answered to real existences, and _if_ each of the three hundred and forty-five high priests made a truthful a.s.sertion of the above to his successor for the benefit of posterity.

Manetho's History is, however, the chief source of our information as to the antiquity of Egyptian civilization. He was commissioned to compile this History by Ptolemy Philadelphus, "from the most authentic temple records and other sources of information," [50] whose infallibility is taken for granted. He was "eminently qualified for such a task, being,"

as Mr. Laing will vouch, [51] "a learned and judicious man, and a priest of Sebbenytus, one of the oldest and most famous temples." Let us by all means read Manetho's History; but where is it? It is "unfortunately lost, ... but fragments of it have been preserved in the works of Josephus, Eusebius, Julius Africa.n.u.s, and Syncellus.... With the curious want of critical faculty of almost all the Christian Fathers" [52] (so different from the learned, judicious, upright priests of the sun), "these extracts, though professing to be quotations from the same book, contain many inconsistencies and in several instances they have been obviously tampered with, especially by Eusebius, in order to bring their chronology more in accordance with that of the Old Testament, ... but there can be _no doubt_ that his original work a.s.signed an antiquity to Menes of over 5500 B.C." [53] "On the whole, we have to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history."

Manetho, however, needed confirmation against the aspersions of the orthodox, who thought he might be deficient in critical delicacy, and p.r.o.ne to exaggerate as even later historians had done. Their casuistic minds also suggested that his list comprised Kings who had ruled different provinces simultaneously. But this "effugium" was cut off by the witness of contemporary monuments and ma.n.u.scripts. "This has now been done to such an extent that it may be fairly said that Manetho is confirmed, and it is fully established, as a fact acquired by science, that nearly all his Kings and dynasties are proved by monuments to have existed, and that, successively." [54]

What is needed for the validity of this argument is a concurrence, which could not possibly be fortuitous, between the clear and undoubted testimony of Manetho and of the monuments. But first of all, what sort of probability is there left of our possessing anything approximately like the results of Manetho: and if we had them, of their historical accuracy? Secondly, is it at all credible that so fragmentary and fortuitous a record as survives in monuments (allowing again their very dubious historical worth) should just happen to coincide with the surviving fragments of our patch-work Manetho, king for king and dynasty for dynasty, as Mr. Laing would have us believe? On the contrary, nothing would throw more suspicion on the interpretation of these monuments than the a.s.sertion of such an improbable coincidence. What, then, is the force of this argument from Egyptology? _If_ the records from which Manetho compiled were historically accurate; _if_ he was perfectly competent to understand them; _if_ he was scrupulously honest and critical; _if_ from the tampered-with fragments in the Christian Fathers we can arrive at a reliable and accurate knowledge of his results; and _if_ the Bible in the original text--whatever that may be--undoubtedly a.s.serts that man was not created till 4000 B.C., then according to certain Egyptologists (Boeck), Menes reigned fifteen hundred years previously, and according to others (Wilkinson), one thousand years subsequently. Similarly as to the argument from coincidence: _if_, as before, we possess Manetho's genuine list intact, and _if_ we have the clear testimony of the monuments giving a precisely similar record, this coincidence, apart from all independent value to be given to Manetho or to the monuments, is an effect demanding a cause, for which the most probable is the objective truth from which both these veracious records have been copied. But the monuments are not written in plain English, and need a key; and we must be first a.s.sured that Manetho's list has not been used for this purpose. We are told; for example, [55] that the name "Snefura," deciphered on a tablet found at the copper-mines of Wady Magerah, is the name of a King of the third dynasty, who reigned about 4000 B.C. Now _if_ there were no doubt about the reading of this name on the tablet, and _if_ his date and dynasty were as plainly there recorded, and _if_ all this tallies exactly with equally precise particulars in Manetho's list, it would indeed be a remarkable coincidence and would imply some common source, whether record or fact. But if having credited Manetho with the record of such a name and date, one tortures a hieroglyph into a faintly similar name, and concludes at once that the same name must be the same person, and that therefore this is the oldest record in the world, the confirmation is not so striking. That it is so in this instance we do not affirm; but we should need the a.s.sertion of a man of more intellectual sobriety than Mr. Laing to make it worth the trouble of investigating.

Pa.s.sing over the confirmation which he draws from the "known rate of the deposit of Nile mud of about three inches a century," which would give a mild antiquity of twenty-six thousand years to pottery fished up from borings in the mud, since he admits that "borings are not _very_ conclusive," we may notice how he deals with evidence from Chaldea on much the same principles. Here, again, the source had been till lately only "fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus.

Berosus was a _learned priest_ of Babylon, who ... wrote in Greek a history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the annals preserved in the temples and from the oldest traditions." [56]

Still this "learned priest," though antecedently as competent a critic as Manetho, is so portentously mythical in his accounts, that "no historical value can be attached to them," which must be regretted, since he pushes history back a quarter of a million years prior to the Deluge, and the Deluge itself to about half a million years ago. Here, therefore, we are thrown solely upon the independent value of the monumental evidence, and must drop the argument from coincidence. This evidence, we are told, "is not so conclusive as in the case of Egypt, where the lists of Manetho, &c.... The date of Sargon I. [57] (3800 B.C.) rests mainly on the authority of Nabonidus, who lived more than three thousand years later, and may have been mistaken." "The probability of such a remote date is enhanced _by the certainty_ that a high civilization existed in Egypt as long ago as 5000 B.C." If the evidence for the antiquity of Chaldee civilization is "less conclusive" than that for Egyptian, and rests on it for an argument _a pari_, it cannot be said in any way to strengthen Mr. Laing's position.

These strictures are directed chiefly to showing Mr. Laing's incapacity for anything like coherent reasoning in historical matters. Subsequently he uses these most lame and impotent conclusions as demonstrated certainties, without the faintest qualification, and builds up on them his refutation of dogmatic Christianity.

However, it is only in his more recent work on _Human Origins_ that he thus comes forward as an historian, in preparation for which he seems to have devoted himself to the study of cuneiform and hieroglyphs and mastered the subject thoroughly and exhaustively, before bursting forth from behind the clouds to flood the world with new-born light.

It is deep down in the bowels of the earth, at the bottom of a geological well, that he has found not only truth but, also man--among the monsters,

Dragons of the prime Who tare each other in their slime,

and has hauled him up for our inspection. Mr. Laing is before all else an evolutionist, with an unshaken belief in spontaneous generation. He is quite confident that force and atoms will explain everything. He seems to mean force, pure and simple, without any intelligent direction; atoms, ultimate, h.o.m.ogeneous, undifferentiated. No doubt, if the subsequent evolution depends on the _kind_ and _direction_ of force, or on the _nature_ of the atoms; then there is a remoter question for physics to determine; but if, as he implies, force and atoms are simple and ultimate, then evolution is as fortuitous as a sand-storm, or more so. All prior to force and atoms is "behind the veil." "The material universe is composed of ether, matter, and energy." [58] Ether is a billion times more elastic than air, "almost infinitely rare," [59] its oscillations must be at least seven hundred billions per second, "it exerts no gravitating or r.e.t.a.r.ding force;" in short, Mr. Laing has to confess some uncertainty about his original dogma as to the triple const.i.tuents of the universe, and say "that it may be _almost doubted_ whether such an ether has any real material existence, and is anything more than a sort of mathematical [why 'mathematical'?] ent.i.ty." [60] "It is clear that matter really does consist of minute particles which do not touch," and even these we must conceive of as "corks as it were floating in an ocean of ether, causing waves in it by their own proper movement," [61]--an explanation which loses some of its helpfulness when we remember that the ethereal ocean is only a mathematical ent.i.ty. "A cubic centimetre contains 21,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules,"

"the number of impacts received by each molecule of air during one second will be 4,700 millions. The distance traversed between each impact averages 95/1000000 of a millimetre," and so on with lines of ciphers to overawe the gaping millions with Mr. Laing's minute certainty as to the ultimate const.i.tution of matter. [62]

As to _how_ atoms came into existence, he can only reply, "Behind the veil, behind the veil;" for it is at this point at last that he becomes agnostic.[63] The notion of creation is rejected (after Spencer) as inconceivable, because unimaginable, as though the origination of every change in the phenomenal world were not just as unimaginable; we see movement _in process_, and we see its results, but its inception is unimaginable, and its efficient cause still more so.

The evolution of man is practically taken for granted, the only question being the _when_.

We have the old argument from embryonic transformism brought forward without any hint that later investigation tends to show differentiation further and further back, prior to segmentation and, according to some, in the very protoplasm itself. Nothing could be more inaccurate than to say "every human being pa.s.ses through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of a mammal and finally of man." [64] All that can be truly said is that the embryonic man is at certain stages not superficially distinguishable from the embryonic fish--quite a different thing, and no more significant than that the adult man possesses organs and functions in common with other species of the animal genus.

Mr. Laing's own conclusions from skulls and human remains which he takes to be those of tertiary man, show man to be as obstinately unlike the "dryopithecus" as ever, in fact, the reputedly oldest skulls [65] are a decided improvement on the Carnstadt and Neanderthal type. Even then man seems to have been the same flint-chipping, tool-making, speaking animal as now. So convinced is he of this essential and ineradicable difference in his heart, that seeing traces of design in palaeolithic flint flakes, and so forth, he has "not the remotest doubt as to their being the work of human hands,"--"as impossible to doubt as it would be if we had found clasp-knives and carpenters adzes." [66] Perhaps Professor Boyd-Dawkins, who credits the "dryopithecus" with these productions, is a more consistent evolutionist; but at present Mr. Laing is defending a thesis as to _man's_ antiquity. Yet he has just said that these flint instruments are "_only one step_ in advance of the rude, natural stone which an _intelligent_ orang or chimpanzee might pick up to crack a cocoa-nut with." Truly a very significant step, though it be only one.

How hard this is to reconcile with what Mr. Laing ascribes to dogs and ants elsewhere, or with what he says on page 173, "These higher apes remain creatures of very considerable intelligence.... There is a chimpanzee now in the Zoological Gardens ... which can do _all but_ speak" [either it speaks, or it does not. It is precisely a case of the "only one step" quoted above. Here if anywhere a "miss is as good as a mile"], "which understands almost every word the keeper says to it, and when told to sing will purse out its lips and try to utter connected notes." [How on earth do we know what it is trying to do?] "In their native state they (apes) form societies and obey a chief." [The old fallacy of metaphors adverted to in relation to ants and dogs.] Yet "no animal has ever learned to speak," "no chimpanzee or gorilla has ever been known to fas.h.i.+on any implement." [67] Their nearest approach to invention is in the building of huts or nests, in which they "are very inferior to most species of birds, to say nothing of insects." On the other hand, "as regards tool-making, no human race is known which has not shown some faculty in this direction." [68] "The difference is a very fundamental one," and "may be summed up in the words 'arrested development.'" Words, indeed! but what do they mean? They mean that these animals have not developed the faculties of speech and tool-making, which would have been most useful to them in the struggle for existence, the reason being _that they did not_; and this reason is exalted into a cause or law of "arrested development." Who or what arrested it? The advantage of the term is that it implies that they were on the point of developing, that they could "all but speak," were "trying to utter connected notes," were "but one step" behind flint axes, when some cosmic power said, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no further."

If the dog had organs of speech or an instrument like the hand by which to place himself in closer relation to the outer world, he would doubtless be on a footing of mental equality with man, according to Mr.

Laing. [69] The elephant's trunk accounts for his superior sagacity, and the horse suffers by his hoof-enclosed forefoot. [70] "Given a being with man's brain, man's hand, and erect stature, _it is easy to see_ how intelligence _must_ have been gradually evolved." [71] Now honestly it seems to us that many animals are as well provided as man is with a variety of flexible organs of communication with the outward world (for example, the antennae of insects, the prehensile tails of some monkeys, whose hands are as lithe as man's and articulated bone for bone and joint for joint). But letting this pa.s.s, we thought evolutionists allowed that structure is determined by function, rather than the converse; and so the confession that "it is not so easy to see how this difference of the structure arose," [72] surprises us, coming from Mr.

Laing; though why this difference should exist at all, on evolution principles, is a far greater difficulty. Yet he confesses that "the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape, [73] is too great to admit of one being possibly the direct descendant of the other." The ape, then, is not a man whose development is arrested. "The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation, ... still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or gorilla. Even the idiot is ... an arrested man and, not an ape." [74]