Canterbury Pieces | Page 9

an infinite series
of generations, unless you can show that there is a limit, and that
Darwin's theory over-steps it, you have no right to reject his
conclusions. As for the objections to the theory, Darwin has treated

them with admirable candour, and our time is too brief to enter into
them here. My recommendation to you is that you should read the book
again.
C. Thank you, but for my own part I confess to caring very little
whether my millionth ancestor was a gorilla or no; and as Darwin's
book does not please me, I shall not trouble myself further about the
matter.

BARREL-ORGANS: [From the Press, 17 January, 1863.]

Dugald Stewart in his Dissertation on the Progress of Metaphysics says:
"On reflecting on the repeated reproduction of ancient paradoxes by
modern authors one is almost tempted to suppose that human invention
is limited, like a barrel-organ, to a specific number of tunes."
It would be a very amusing and instructive task for a man of reading
and reflection to note down the instances he meets with of these old
tunes coming up again and again in regular succession with hardly any
change of note, and with all the old hitches and involuntary squeaks
that the barrel-organ had played in days gone by. It is most amusing to
see the old quotations repeated year after year and volume after volume,
till at last some more careful enquirer turns to the passage referred to
and finds that they have all been taken in and have followed the lead of
the first daring inventor of the mis-statement. Hallam has had the
courage, in the supplement to his History of the Middle Ages, p. 398, to
acknowledge an error of this sort that he has been led into.
But the particular instance of barrel-organism that is present to our
minds just now is the Darwinian theory of the development of species
by natural selection, of which we hear so much. This is nothing new,
but a rechauffee of the old story that his namesake, Dr. Darwin, served
up in the end of the last century to Priestley and his admirers, and Lord
Monboddo had cooked in the beginning of the same century. We have
all heard of his theory that man was developed directly from the
monkey, and that we all lost our tails by sitting too much upon that
appendage.
We learn from that same great and cautious writer Hallam in his
History of Literature that there are traces of this theory and of other
popular theories of the present day in the works of Giordano Bruno, the

Neapolitan who was burnt at Rome by the Inquisition in 1600. It is
curious to read the titles of his works and to think of Dugald Stewart's
remark about barrel-organs. For instance he wrote on "The Plurality of
Worlds," and on the universal "Monad," a name familiar enough to the
readers of Vestiges of Creation. He was a Pantheist, and, as Hallam
says, borrowed all his theories from the eclectic philosophers, from
Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and ultimately they were no doubt of
Oriental origin. This is just what has been shown again and again to be
the history of German Pantheism; it is a mere barrel-organ repetition of
the Brahman metaphysics found in Hindu cosmogonies. Bruno's theory
regarding development of species was in Hallam's words: "There is
nothing so small or so unimportant but that a portion of spirit dwells in
it; and this spiritual substance requires a proper subject to become a
plant or an animal"; and Hallam in a note on this passage observes how
the modern theories of equivocal generation correspond with Bruno's.
No doubt Hallam is right in saying that they are all of Oriental origin.
Pythagoras borrowed from thence his kindred theory of the
metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. But he was more
consistent than modern philosophers; he recognised a downward
development as well as an upward, and made morality and immorality
the crisis and turning-point of change--a bold lion developed into a
brave warrior, a drunken sot developed into a wallowing pig, and
Darwin's slave-making ants, p. 219, would have been formerly
Virginian cotton and tobacco growers.
Perhaps Prometheus was the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said to
have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the
invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from
the backbone to the mammalia, and from the mammalia to the manco-
cerebral, he compounded man of each and all:-
Fertur Prometheus addere principi Limo coactus particulam undique
Desectam et insani leonis Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.
One word more about barrel-organs. We have heard on the undoubted
authority of ear and eyewitnesses, that in a neighbouring province there
is a church where the psalms