Darwin's arguments we might resist or adjourn; but some
of the refutations of it give us more concern than the book itself
did.
These remarks apply mainly to the philosophical and theological
objections which have been elaborately urged, almost exclusively by
the American reviewers. The "North British" reviewer, indeed, roundly
denounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems the case too
clear for argument. The Edinburgh reviewer, on the contrary, scouts
all such objections,--as well he may, since he records his belief in
"a continuous creative operation," "a constantly operating secondary
creational law," through which species are successively produced; and
he emits faint, but not indistinct, glimmerings of a transmutation
theory of his own;[1] so that he is equally exposed to all the
philosophical objections advanced by Agassiz, and to most of those
urged by the other American critics, against Darwin himself.
Proposing now to criticize the critics, so far as to see what their
most general and comprehensive objections amount to, we must needs
begin with the American reviewers, and with their arguments adduced to
prove that a derivative hypothesis _ought not to be true_, or is not
possible, philosophical, or theistic.
It must not be forgotten that on former occasions very confident
judgments have been pronounced by very competent persons, which have
not been finally ratified. Of the two great minds of the seventeenth
century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well as
philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitation, the other
objected to that theory that it was subversive of natural religion.
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