



Produced by D.R. Thompson





MR. GLADSTONE AND GENESIS

ESSAY #5 FROM "SCIENCE AND HEBREW TRADITION"


By Thomas Henry Huxley



In controversy, as in courtship, the good old rule to be off with the
old before one is on with the new, greatly commends itself to my sense
of expediency. And, therefore, it appears to me desirable that I should
preface such observations as I may have to offer upon the cloud of
arguments (the relevancy of which to the issue which I had ventured to
raise is not always obvious) put forth by Mr. Gladstone in the January
number of this review, [1] by an endeavour to make clear to such of
our readers as have not had the advantage of a forensic education the
present net result of the discussion.

I am quite aware that, in undertaking this task, I run all the risks
to which the man who presumes to deal judicially with his own cause is
liable. But it is exactly because I do not shun that risk, but, rather,
earnestly desire to be judged by him who cometh after me, provided that
he has the knowledge and impartiality appropriate to a judge, that I
adopt my present course.

In the article on "The Dawn of Creation and Worship," it will be
remembered that Mr. Gladstone unreservedly commits himself to three
propositions. The first is that, according to the writer of the
Pentateuch, the "water-population," the "air-population," and the
"land-population" of the globe were created successively, in the order
named. In the second place, Mr. Gladstone authoritatively asserts that
this (as part of his "fourfold order") has been "so affirmed in our time
by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion
and established fact." In the third place, Mr. Gladstone argues that the
fact of this coincidence of the pentateuchal story with the results
of modern investigation makes it "impossible to avoid the conclusion,
first, that either this writer was gifted with faculties passing all
human experience, or else his knowledge was divine." And having settled
to his own satisfaction that the first "branch of the alternative is
truly nominal and unreal," Mr. Gladstone continues, "So stands the plea
for a revelation of truth from God, a plea only to be met by questioning
its possibility" (p. 697).

I am a simple-minded person, wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so
that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning
in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor
plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like
intellectual limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have
the chance of attaining that position of a representative of average
opinion which appears to be the modern ideal of a leader of men, when
I make free confession that, after turning the matter over in my mind,
with all the aid derived from a careful consideration of Mr. Gladstone's
reply, I cannot get away from my original conviction that, if Mr.
Gladstone's second proposition can be shown to be not merely inaccurate,
but directly contradictory of facts known to every one who is acquainted
with the elements of natural science, the third proposition collapses of
itself.

And it was this conviction which led me to enter upon the present
discussion. I fancied that if my respected clients, the people of
average opinion and capacity, could once be got distinctly to conceive
that Mr. Gladstone's views as to the proper method of dealing with grave
and difficult scientific and religious problems had permitted him to
base a solemn "plea for a revelation of truth from God" upon an error as
to a matter of fact, from which the intelligent perusal of a manual of
palaeontology would have saved him, I need not trouble myself to
occupy their time and attention [167] with further comments upon his
contribution to apologetic literature. It is for others to judge whether
I have efficiently carried out my project or not. It certainly does not
count for much that I should be unable to find any flaw in my own case,
but I think it counts for a good deal that Mr. Gladstone appears to have
been equally unable to do so. He does, indeed, make a great parade of
authorities, and I have the greatest respect for those authorities whom
Mr. Gladstone mentions. If he will get them to sign a joint memorial to
the effect that our present palaeontological evidence proves that birds
appeared before the "land-population" of terrestrial reptiles, I shall
think it my duty to reconsider my position--but not till then.

It will be observed that I have cautiously used the word "appears" in
referring to what seems to me to be absence of any real answer to my
criticisms in Mr. Gladstone's reply. For I must honestly confess that,
notwithstanding long and painful strivings after clear insight, I am
still uncertain whether Mr. Gladstone's "Defence" means that the
great "plea for a revelation from God" is to be left to perish in the
dialectic desert; or whether it is to be withdrawn under the protection
of such skirmishers as are available for covering retreat.

In particular, the remarkable disquisition which covers pages 11 to
14 of Mr. Gladstone's last contribution has greatly exercised my mind.
Socrates is reported to have said of the works of Heraclitus that he who
attempted to comprehend them should be a "Delian swimmer," but that, for
his part, what he could understand was so good that he was disposed
to believe in the excellence of that which he found unintelligible. In
endeavouring to make myself master of Mr. Gladstone's meaning in these
pages, I have often been overcome by a feeling analogous to that
of Socrates, but not quite the same. That which I do understand has
appeared to me so very much the reverse of good, that I have sometimes
permitted myself to doubt the value of that which I do not understand.

In this part of Mr. Gladstone's reply, in fact, I find nothing of which
the bearing upon my arguments is clear to me, except that which relates
to the question whether reptiles, so far as they are represented by
tortoises and the great majority of lizards and snakes, which are land
animals, are creeping things in the sense of the pentateuchal writer or
not.

I have every respect for the singer of the Song of the Three Children
(whoever he may have been); I desire to cast no shadow of doubt upon,
but, on the contrary, marvel at, the exactness of Mr. Gladstone's
information as to the considerations which "affected the method of
the Mosaic writer"; nor do I venture to doubt that the inconvenient
intrusion of these contemptible reptiles--"a family fallen from
greatness" (p. 14), a miserable decayed aristocracy reduced to mere
"skulkers about the earth" (_ibid._)--in consequence, apparently,
of difficulties about the occupation of land arising out of the
earth-hunger of their former serfs, the mammals--into an apologetic
argument, which otherwise would run quite smoothly, is in every way to
be deprecated. Still, the wretched creatures stand there, importunately
demanding notice; and, however different may be the practice in that
contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments
his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail
whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to bury them out of
sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my experience of the "Elysian
regions of Science," wherein it is a pleasure to me to think that a man
of Mr. Gladstone's intimate knowledge of English life, during the last
quarter of a century, believes my philosophic existence to have been
rounded off in unbroken equanimity.

However reprehensible, and indeed contemptible, terrestrial reptiles may
be, the only question which appears to me to be relevant to my
argument is whether these creatures are or are not comprised under the
denomination of "everything that creepeth upon the ground."

Mr. Gladstone speaks of the author of the first chapter of Genesis as
"the Mosaic writer"; I suppose, therefore, that he will admit that it
is equally proper to speak of the author of Leviticus as the "Mosaic
writer." Whether such a phrase would be used by any one who had an
adequate conception of the assured results of modern Biblical criticism
is another matter; but, at any rate, it cannot be denied that Leviticus
has as much claim to Mosaic authorship as Genesis. Therefore, if one
wants to know the sense of a phrase used in Genesis, it will be well
to see what Leviticus has to say on the matter. Hence, I commend
the following extract from the eleventh chapter of Leviticus to Mr.
Gladstone's serious attention:--

   And these are they which are unclean unto you among the creeping
   things that creep upon the earth: the weasel, and the mouse, and
   the great lizard after its kind, and the gecko, and the land
   crocodile, and the sand-lizard, and the chameleon. These are
   they which are unclean to you among all that creep (v. 29-3l).

The merest Sunday-school exegesis therefore suffices to prove that when
the "Mosaic writer" in Genesis i. 24 speaks of "creeping things," he
means to include lizards among them.

This being so, it is agreed, on all hands, that terrestrial lizards,
and other reptiles allied to lizards, occur in the Permian strata. It
is further agreed that the Triassic strata were deposited after these.
Moreover, it is well known that, even if certain footprints are to be
taken as unquestionable evidence of the existence of birds, they are
not known to occur in rocks earlier than the Trias, while indubitable
remains of birds are to be met with only much later. Hence it follows
that natural science does not "affirm" the statement that birds were
made on the fifth day, and "everything that creepeth on the ground" on
the sixth, on which Mr. Gladstone rests his order; for, as is shown
by Leviticus, the "Mosaic writer" includes lizards among his "creeping
things."

Perhaps I have given myself superfluous trouble in the preceding
argument, for I find that Mr. Gladstone is willing to assume (he does
not say to admit) that the statement in the text of Genesis as to
reptiles cannot "in all points be sustained" (p. 16). But my position
is that it cannot be sustained in any point, so that, after all, it
has perhaps been as well to go over the evidence again. And then Mr.
Gladstone proceeds as if nothing had happened to tell us that--

   There remain great unshaken facts to be weighed. First, the fact
   that such a record should have been made at all.

As most peoples have their cosmogonies, this "fact" does not strike me
as having much value.

    Secondly, the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it
    has placed itself under the severe conditions of a chronological
    order reaching from the first _nisus_ of chaotic matter to
    the consummated production of a fair and goodly, a furnished and
    a peopled world.

This "fact" can be regarded as of value only by ignoring the fact
demonstrated in my previous paper, that natural science does not
confirm the order asserted so far as living things are concerned; and
by upsetting a fact to be brought to light presently, to wit, that, in
regard to the rest of the pentateuchal cosmogony, prudent science has
very little to say one way or the other.

   Thirdly, the fact that its cosmogony seems, in the light of the
   nineteenth century, to draw more and more of countenance from
   the best natural philosophy.

I have already questioned the accuracy of this statement, and I do not
observe that mere repetition adds to its value.

   And, fourthly, that it has described the successive origins of
   the five great categories of present life with which human
   experience was and is conversant, in that order which geological
   authority confirms.

By comparison with a sentence on page 14, in which a fivefold order is
substituted for the "fourfold order," on which the "plea for revelation"
was originally founded, it appears that these five categories are
"plants, fishes, birds, mammals, and man," which, Mr. Gladstone affirms,
"are given to us in Genesis in the order of succession in which they are
also given by the latest geological authorities."

I must venture to demur to this statement. I showed, in my previous
paper, that there is no reason to doubt that the term "great sea
monster" (used in Gen. i. 21) includes the most conspicuous of great sea
animals--namely, whales, dolphins, porpoises, manatees, and dugongs; [2]
and, as these are indubitable mammals, it is impossible to affirm that
mammals come after birds, which are said to have been created on the
same day. Moreover, I pointed out that as these Cetacea and Sirenia are
certainly modified land animals, their existence implies the antecedent
existence of land mammals.

Furthermore, I have to remark that the term "fishes," as used,
technically, in zoology, by no means covers all the moving creatures
that have life, which are bidden to "fill the waters in the seas" (Gen.
i. 20-22.) Marine mollusks and crustacea, echinoderms, corals, and
foraminifera are not technically fishes. But they are abundant in the
palaeozoic rocks, ages upon ages older than those in which the first
evidences of true fishes appear. And if, in a geological book, Mr.
Gladstone finds the quite true statement that plants appeared before
fishes, it is only by a complete misunderstanding that he can be led
to imagine it serves his purpose. As a matter of fact, at the present
moment, it is a question whether, on the bare evidence afforded
by fossils, the marine creeping thing or the marine plant has the
seniority. No cautious palaeontologist would express a decided opinion
on the matter. But, if we are to read the pentateuchal statement as
a scientific document (and, in spite of all protests to the contrary,
those who bring it into comparison with science do seek to make a
scientific document of it), then, as it is quite clear that only
terrestrial plants of high organisation are spoken of in verses 11
and 12, no palaeontologist would hesitate to say that, at present, the
records of sea animal life are vastly older than those of any land plant
describable as "grass, herb yielding seed or fruit tree."

Thus, although, in Mr. Gladstone's "Defence," the "old order passeth
into new," his case is not improved. The fivefold order is no more
"affirmed in our time by natural science" to be "a demonstrated
conclusion and established fact" than the fourfold order was. Natural
science appears to me to decline to have anything to do with either;
they are as wrong in detail as they are mistaken in principle.

There is another change of position, the value of which is not so
apparent to me, as it may well seem to be to those who are unfamiliar
with the subject under discussion. Mr. Gladstone discards his three
groups of "water-population," "air-population," and "land-population,"
and substitutes for them (1) fishes, (2) birds, (3) mammals, (4)
man. Moreover, it is assumed, in a note, that "the higher or ordinary
mammals" alone were known to the "Mosaic writer" (p. 6). No doubt it
looks, at first, as if something were gained by this alteration; for,
as I have just pointed out, the word "fishes" can be used in two senses,
one of which has a deceptive appearance of adjustability to the "Mosaic"
account. Then the inconvenient reptiles are banished out of sight; and,
finally, the question of the exact meaning of "higher" and "ordinary"
in the case of mammals opens up the prospect of a hopeful logomachy. But
what is the good of it all in the face of Leviticus on the one hand and
of palaeontology on the other?

As, in my apprehension, there is not a shadow of justification for the
suggestion that when the pentateuchal writer says "fowl" he excludes
bats (which, as we shall see directly, are expressly included under
"fowl" in Leviticus), and as I have already shown that he demonstrably
includes reptiles, as well as mammals, among the creeping things of the
land, I may be permitted to spare my readers further discussion of
the "fivefold order." On the whole, it is seen to be rather more
inconsistent with Genesis than its fourfold predecessor.

But I have yet a fresh order to face. Mr. Gladstone (p. 11) understands
"the main statements of Genesis" in successive order of time, but without
any measurement of its divisions, to be as follows:--

1. A period of land, anterior to all life (v. 9, 10). 2. A period of
vegetable life, anterior to animal life (v. 11, 12). 3. A period of
animal life, in the order of fishes (v. 20). 4. Another stage of animal
life, in the order of birds. 5. Another in the order of beasts (v. 24,
25). 6. Last of all, man (v. 26, 27).

Mr. Gladstone then tries to find the proof of the occurrence of a
similar succession in sundry excellent works on geology.

I am really grieved to be obliged to say that this third (or is it
fourth?) modification of the foundation of the "plea for revelation"
originally set forth, satisfies me as little as any of its predecessors.

For, in the first place, I cannot accept the assertion that this order
is to be found in Genesis.