The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

state — and that no geologist

will now deny; —let me ask them how it is that Europeans have

advanced (this involving a change in the structure of the

brain), while others have remained in the savage state, others

in the pastoral condition, others fixed at a certain point of

culture, as the Hindus and the Chinese? The analogy is

perfect, and the answer is in either case the same. Those forms

remain stationary which are able to preserve their conditions

of life unchanged. The savages of the primeval forest, when the

game is exhausted in one region, migrate to another region

where game exists. They remain therefore in the hunting state.

The shepherds of the boundless plains, when one pasture is

devoured by their flocks, migrate to another pasture where they

find grass and water in abundance. But when, in a land like

Egypt, the inhabitants are confined to a certain tract of land

they are unable to evade the famine of food produced by the

vicissitudes of nature and the law of population; they are

compelled to invent in order to subsist; new modes of life, new

powers, new desires, new sentiments arise; and the human animal

is changed. Then a second period of immobility arrives; by

means of despotism, caste, slavery, and infanticide, the status

quo is preserved.

 

In the primeval sea the conditions of life were constantly

changing, but its inmates could usually keep them constant by

migration. For instance, let us imagine a species accustomed to

dwell at the bottom of the sea, feeding on the vegetable matter

and oxygen gas which come down by liquid diffusion from the

waters of the surface. By elevation of the sea-bed, or by the

deposit of sediment from rivers, that part of the sea which

this species inhabits becomes gradually shallow and light. The

animal would migrate into deep dark water, and would therefore

undergo no change. But let us suppose that it is prevented from

migrating by a wall of rocks. It would then be exposed to

light, and to other novel forces, and it would either change or

die.

 

Here progress is the result of absolute necessity, and such

must always be the case. Animals which inhabit the waters have

no innate desire to make acquaintance with the land; but it

sometimes happens that they live in shallow places, where

they are left uncovered at low water for a certain time, and so

in the course of geological periods the species becomes

amphibious in habit; and then the hard struggle for life in the

water, with the abundance of food upon the land, leads them to

adopt terrestrial life. There are creatures now existing of

whom it is not easy to say whether they belong to the water or

the land: there are fishes which walk about on shore, and climb

trees: It is not difficult to imagine such animals as these

deserting the water, and entirely living upon land.

 

But the development of life, in its varied aspects, must always

remain incomprehensible to those who have not studied the noble

science of geology, or who at least have not made themselves

acquainted with its chief results. Unless the student

understands what extraordinary transformation scenes have taken

place upon the globe, all that is now land, having formerly

been sea, and all that is now sea having formerly been land,

not only once, but again, and again, and again; unless he

understands that these changes have been produced by the same

gradual, and apparently insignificant, causes as those which

are now at work before our eyes; the sea gnawing away the cliff

upon the shore; the river carrying soil to the sea; the glacier

gliding down the mountain slope; the iceberg bearing huge

boulders to mid ocean; the coralline insects building

archipelagoes; the internal fires suddenly spouting forth

stones and ashes, or slowly upheaving continents; unless he

fully understands how deliberate is Nature’s method, how

prodigal she is of time, how irregular and capricious she is in

all her operations — he will never cease to wonder that allied

forms should be distributed in apparent disorder and confusion,

instead of being arranged on a regular ascending scale. And,

moreover, unless he understands how Nature, like the Sibyl,

destroys her own books, he will never cease to wonder at

missing links.

 

For it is not one missing link, but millions, that we require.

It would however be just as reasonable to expect to find every

book that ever was written; every clay-tablet that ever was

baked in the printing ovens of Chaldaea; every rock that

was ever inscribed; every obelisk that was ever engraved,

every temple wall that was ever painted with

hieroglyphics, as to expect to find every fossil of

importance. Where are the missing links in literature, and

where are the primeval forms? Where are the ancient Sanskrit

hymns that were written without ink on palm leaves with an iron

pen? Where are the thousands of Hebrew bibles that were written

before the tenth century A.D.? Where are the lost books of the

Romans and the Greeks? We know that many manuscripts have been

consumed in great fires; the fire of Alexandria in the time of

Julius Caesar, which no doubt destroyed papyri that could never

be replaced; the fire in the time of Omar; the fires lighted

by Popes and reverend Fathers of the Church; and the fire of

Constantinople during the Crusades, which robbed us for ever of

Arian’s history of the successors of Alexander; Ctesias’

history of Persia, and his description of India; several books

of Diodorus, Agatharcides, and Polybius; twenty orations of

Demosthenes, and the Odes of Sappho. But the material of books,

whether paper or parchment, bark, clay, or stone, is always of

a perishable nature, and, under ordinary circumstances, is

destroyed sooner or later by the action of the atmosphere. Were

it not that books can be copied, what would remain to us of the

literature of the past?

 

In a rainless country such as Egypt, which is a museum

of Nature, a monumental land, not only painted

and engraven records, but even paper scrolls of an

immense antiquity, have been preserved. But if we add to these

the rock inscriptions, the printed bricks, and inscribed

cylinders of Western Asia, how scanty and fortuitous are the

remains! Let us now remember that fossils cannot be copied;

once destroyed, they are for ever lost. Is it wonderful,

therefore, that so few should be left? Fires greater than those

of Alexandria and Constantinople are ever burning beneath our

feet; at this very moment a precious library may be in flames.

Yet that is not the worst. The action of air and water is fatal

to the archives of Nature, which it is not part of Nature’s

plan to preserve for our instruction. Those animals which have

neither bones nor shells are at once destroyed; and those which

possess a solid framework are only preserved under special and

exceptional conditions. The marvel is not that we find so

little, but that we find so much. The development of man from

the lower animals is now an authenticated fact. We believe,

therefore, that connecting links between man and some ape-like

animal existed for the same reason that we believe the Second

Decade of Livy existed. It is not impossible that the missing

books of Livy may be, discovered at some future day beneath the

Italian soil. It is not impossible that forms intermediate

between man and his ape-like ancestors may be discovered in the

unexplored strata of equatorial Africa, or the Indian

Archipelago. But either event is improbable in the extreme; and

the existence of such intermediate forms will be admitted by

the historians of the next generation, whether they are found

or not.

 

We shall now proceed to describe the rise and progress of the

mental principle. The origin of mind is an inscrutable mystery,

but so is the origin of matter. If we go back to the beginning

we find a world of gas, the atoms of which were kept asunder by

excessive heat. Where did those atoms come from? How were they

made? What were they made for? In reply to these questions

theology is garrulous, but science is dumb.

 

Mind is a property of matter. Matter is inhabited by mind.

There can be no mind without matter; there can be no matter

without mind. When the matter is simple in its composition, its

mental tendencies are also simple; the atoms merely tend to

approach one another and to cohere; and as matter under the

influence of varied forces (evolved by the cooling o the world)

becomes more varied in its composition, its mental tendencies

become more and more numerous, more and more complex, more and

more elevated, till at last they are developed into the desires

and propensities of the animal, into the aspirations and

emotions of the man. But the various tendencies which inhabit

the human mind, and which devote it to ambition, to religion,

or to love, are not in reality more wonderful than the tendency

which impels two ships to approach each other in a calm. For

what can be more wonderful than that which can never be

explained? The difference between the mind of the ship and the

mind of man is the difference between the acorn and the oak.

 

The simplest atoms are attracted to one another merely

according to distance and weight. That is the law of

gravitation. But the compound atoms, which are called elements,

display a power of selection. A will unite itself to C in

preference to B; and if D passes by, will divorce itself from

C, and unite itself to D. Such compounds of a compound are

still more complex in their forms, and more varied in their

minds. Water, which is composed of two gases — oxygen and

hydrogen — when hot, becomes a vapour; when cold, becomes a

crystal. In the latter case it displays a structural capacity.

Crystals assume particular forms according to the substances of

which they are composed; they may be classed into species, and

if their forms are injured by accident, they have the power of

repairing their structure by imbibing matter from without. A

live form is the result of matter subjected to certain complex

forces, the chief of which is the chemical power of the sun. It

is continually being injured by the wear and tear of its own

activity; it is continually darning and stitching its own life.

After a certain period of time it loses its self-mending power,

and consequently dies. The crystal grows from without by simple

accretions or putting on of coats. The plant or animal grows

and re-grows from within by means of a chemical operation.

Moreover, the crystal is merely an individual; the plant or

animal is the member of a vast community; before it dies, and

usually as it dies, it produces a repetition of itself. The

mental forces which inhabit the primeval jelly-dot are more

complex than those which inhabit the crystal; but those of the

crystal are more complex than those of a gas, and those of a

gas than those of the true elementary atoms which know only two

forces — attraction and repulsion — the primeval “Pull and

Push”, which lie at the basis of all Nature’s operations.

 

The absorption of food and the repetition of form in the animal

are not at first to he distinguished from that chemical process

which is termed growth. Then from this principle of growth, the

root of the human flower, two separated instincts like twin

seed-leaves arise. The first is the propensity to preserve

self-life by seeking food; from this instinct of self-preservation our intellectual faculties have been derived. The

second is the propensity to preserve the life of the species;

and from this instinct of reproduction our moral faculties have

been derived.