The Old Riddle and the Newest Answer

John Gerard

John Gerard

The Old Riddle and the Newest Answer

PREFACE

THE enemies of Science are not the philistines alone – if any still remain – who would muzzle or stifle her. More numerous and dangerous are those – professedly of her own household – who ascribe to her pretensions of which she herself knows nothing, and strive to make her responsible for a philosophy entirely beyond her scope. With this object efforts are assiduously made to popularize the idea that nothing in heaven or earth is beyond her ken, and that she has rendered all such beliefs impossible as alone can satisfy the deeper cravings of humanity. At the same time the very brilliance of her achievements is apt to dazzle our eyes, blinding them to the extremely narrow limits of the field in which she can operate, and making us rush to the conclusion that she has solved the riddle which from the beginning of time Nature has offered to every thinking mind, – or at least that what her search-light cannot illumine must for ever remain unknowable.

How far such assumptions are rational, it is the object of the present enquiry to examine by means of the evidence furnished by Science herself in her own regard.

I have to thank Mr. W. E. Darwin for permission to use the illustration of feathers of the Argus Pheasant from his illustrious father's Descent of Man, and for the loan of blocks for the purpose. Through the courtesy of Messrs. Macmillan I am allowed to copy a portion of the plate in the late Professor Huxley's Lectures on Evolution, illustrating his pedigree of the Horse. If I forbear to mention others who have kindly supplied me with information, it is only lest it might be supposed that they are anywise responsible for the use I have made of it. The design on the cover of the present volume I owe to my friend Mr. Paul Woodroffe.

В В В В J. G.

March 10, 1904.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

IN this edition, which has been thoroughly revised throughout, a few corrections have had to be made, especially in the Index, and in one or two instances alterations or additions have appeared advisable for the sake of clearness or accuracy of expression. Nothing has, however, as yet been brought to the author's notice which affects any substantial point in what he has written.

July 28, 1904.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

THIS edition has again been thoroughly revised, and some new matter appended which bears on various points raised in the original volume, especially the establishment of the important group of the Cycado-filices, as affecting the succession of plant life on the earth, and recent evidence concerning the pedigree of the horse.

December 21, 1906.

I

TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING

THAT the world as we know it had a beginning is a truth which there is no denying. Not only have philosophers always argued that it must be so: the researches of physical science assure us that it has been so in fact. Astronomy, says Professor Huxley,[1 - Collected Essays, i. 35.] "leads us to contemplate phenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they must have had a beginning." The hypothesis that phenomena of Nature similar to those exhibited by the present world have always existed, the same authority assures us,[2 - Lectures on Evolution, Cheap Edition, p. 16.] "is absolutely incompatible with such evidence as we have, which is of so plain and so simple a character that it is impossible in any way to escape from the conclusions which it forces upon us." This conclusion, physicists tell us, is inevitable when we study the laws by which the operations of Nature are governed, and as Professor Balfour Stewart writes,[3 - Conservation of Energy, § 210, p. 153.] we thus become "absolutely certain" that these operations cannot have existed for ever, and that a time will come when they must cease. In like manner, a recent and competent witness to the conclusions of contemporary Science, lays down,[4 - F. W. Hutton, F.R.S., The Lesson of Evolution (1902), pp. 9-11.] as one of the truths which her latest disc