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This view has survived the Copernican revolution in science, and it has survived the Darwinian revolution. Nay, if the foregoing exposition be sound, it is Darwinism which has placed Humanity upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The future is lighted for us with the radiant colours of hope. Strife and sorrow shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign supreme.
For instance, forty or fifty years ago, there was a fierce controversy amongst biologists between the group of ideas represented by Darwin's theory and the group of ideas represented by the traditional view of the fixity of species. There was a long conflict between these two groups of ideas, and we may now say that the Darwinian group of ideas has emerged from the conflict victorious.
In English Science, he had studied Darwin, and he was the first to give me a real insight into the Darwinian theory and a general summary of it, for in my younger days I had only heard it attacked, as erroneous, in lectures by Rasmus Nielsen on teleology.
But by the time the "Origin of Species" had been before the public for eight years, the Darwinian principle of selection had become an integral part of the Spencerian mechanism of organic evolution. Indeed the term "survival of the fittest," approved by both Darwin and Wallace as an alternative for "natural selection," was, as is well known, introduced by Spencer.
Treating the Devil from a Darwinian point of view, we may assert that he developed himself from the protoplasm of ignorance, and in the gloomy fog of fear and superstition grew by degrees into a formidable monster, being changed by the overheated imaginations of dogmatists into a reptile, an owl, a raven, a dog, a wolf, a lion, a centaur, a being half monkey, half man, till, finally, he became a polite and refined human being.
"If we apprehend," Huxley further says, "the spirit of the 'Origin of Species' rightly, then, nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian theory." It has already been stated that Mr. Wallace does not apply the doctrine of evolution to man; neither does Mr. Mivart, a distinguished naturalist, who is a member of the Latin Church.
"It's not that alone, madam," screamed Raby, "but, d m it, the little rascal's a scientist, an atheist, a radical, a scoffer! Disbelieves in the Bible, ma'am; is full of this Darwinian stuff about natural selection and descent. Descent, forsooth! In my day, madam, gentlemen were content to trace their ancestors back to gentlemen, and not to monkeys!" "Dear heart, the boy is clever," urged Jael.
If the hunted deer or fox rushes into an open shed or a barn door, it is because it is desperately hard-pressed, and sees and knows nothing but some object or situation that it may place between itself and its deadly enemy. The great fear obliterates all minor fears. The key to the behavior of the birds in this respect may be found in the Darwinian theory of natural selection.
For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made for the conditions in which it is found; for the Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it is found.
All his successes have been lucky hits: steam, electricity, representative government, printing how long he groped for them before he found them! There is always and everywhere the Darwinian tendency to variation, to seek new forms, to improve upon the past; and man is under this law, the same as is the rest of nature.