The Reception of the Origin of Species | Page 7

is only because
I know it better than that of other people.
I think I must have read the 'Vestiges' before I left England in 1846; but,
if I did, the book made very little impression upon me, and I was not
brought into serious contact with the 'Species' question until after 1850.
At that time, I had long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony, which
had been impressed upon my childish understanding as Divine truth,
with all the authority of parents and instructors, and from which it had
cost me many a struggle to get free. But my mind was unbiassed in
respect of any doctrine which presented itself, if it professed to be
based on purely philosophical and scientific reasoning. It seemed to me
then (as it does now) that "creation," in the ordinary sense of the word,
is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in imagining that, at some
former period, this universe was not in existence; and that it made its
appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in
consequence of the volition of some pre-existent Being. Then, as now,
the so-called a priori arguments against Theism; and, given a Deity,
against the possibility of creative acts, appeared to me to be devoid of
reasonable foundation. I had not then, and I have not now, the smallest
a priori objection to raise to the account of the creation of animals and
plants given in 'Paradise Lost,' in which Milton so vividly embodies the
natural sense of Genesis. Far be it from me to say that it is untrue
because it is impossible. I confine myself to what must be regarded as a
modest and reasonable request for some particle of evidence that the
existing species of animals and plants did originate in that way, as a
condition of my belief in a statement which appears to me to be highly
improbable.
And, by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to
give to the evolutionists of 1851-8. Within the ranks of the biologists,
at that time, I met with nobody, except Dr. Grant, of University College,
who had a word to say for Evolution--and his advocacy was not
calculated to advance the cause. Outside these ranks, the only person

known to me whose knowledge and capacity compelled respect, and
who was, at the same time, a thorough-going evolutionist, was Mr.
Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852, and then
entered into the bonds of a friendship which, I am happy to think, has
known no interruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought
on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness
of apt illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took
my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in
favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no
suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which
had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena.
Looking back at the state of knowledge at that time, I really do not see
that any other conclusion was justifiable.
In those days I had never even heard of Treviranus' 'Biologie.' However,
I had studied Lamarck attentively and I had read the 'Vestiges' with due
care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing
my negative and critical attitude. As for the 'Vestiges,' I confess that the
book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly
unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any
influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review
I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless
savagery, is one I wrote on the 'Vestiges' while under that influence.
With respect to the 'Philosophie Zoologique,' it is no reproach to
Lamarck to say that the discussion of the Species question in that work,
whatever might be said for it in 1809, was miserably below the level of
the knowledge of half a century later. In that interval of time the
elucidation of the structure of the lower animals and plants had given
rise to wholly new conceptions of their relations; histology and
embryology, in the modern sense, had been created; physiology had
been reconstituted; the facts of distribution, geological and
geographical, had been prodigiously multiplied and reduced to order.
To any biologist whose studies had carried him beyond mere
species-mongering in 1850, one-half of Lamarck's arguments were
obsolete and the other half erroneous, or defective, in virtue of omitting
to deal with the various classes of evidence which had been brought to
light since his time. Moreover his one suggestion as to the cause of the
gradual modification of species--effort excited by