Divine Selection or The Survival of the Useful/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
The
Last Link
IT IS well known that the vibrisæ or whiskers of the cat, which terminate in sacs about which nerve fibers cluster, serve as delicate organs of touch.
Embryology tells us that cat-whiskers are merely specialized forms of hair, like that on mammals, and which, in germinal form, are found upon man imbedded in the skin.
It is claimed that the eye and ear are developed from the same vibrisæ.
We are told that in the process of evolution, while the differentiations of dermal tissue formed scales, feathers, and hair, some differentiations went toward the production of eyes and ears. Then the bulb of the eye and the auditory chamber of the ear were, to start with, hair sacs. They are now metamorphosed hair sacs. The crystalline lens of the eye is also, we are told, a differentiated hair sac, and the aqueous and vitreous humor are liquefied, dermal tissue.
Says Mr. Fiske, in commenting upon this, "One can seem to discern how in the history of the eye there was at first a concentration of pigment grains in a particular dermal sac, making the spot exceptionally sensitive to light; then came by slow degrees the heightened translucence, the convexity of surface, the refracting humor and the multiplication of nerve vesicles arranging themselves as rectinal rods."[1] In other words, the eye was formed by the impact of light rays upon pigment grains in a dermal sac. The ear is represented to have been formed in a like manner by adjustment of other dermal sacs to the sound wave.
The reality and substantiality of the spiritual world, together with the fact of a Divinely Human God, supplies us with the last link in the chain of ascending creation.
If light falling upon pigment grains in the hair sac can form the eye, the activity of intelligence within the soul can form the organ of human intelligence. If sound waves form the ear, the activity of spiritual light can form from cells of the soul the organ of mental sight. Divine Love acting upon initial forms in the soul can form the organs of human love. Likewise the Divine Understanding can form the human understanding, and the Divine Will can form the human will. In short, the activities of the Divine Human operating upon elementary cells of the soul can form all the faculties of the finite human. In a similar way to the formation of the eye and ear by adjustment to the external world, the human of the spirit can be formed by adjustment to the Divine Human through the spiritual world. And is it going too far to say that it is the undefined consciousness of this that has fixed so fundamentally in the Christian faith the belief in the Divine Humanity, the Personality of God, that has in all time been so resolutely defended?
If we regard the spiritual world not material, but real and substantial as the natural world, having corresponding substances and forces, yet purer and higher, if we will use the same, sound sense in thinking of that which is invisible to the corporeal senses as we do of the visible, the formation of the spirit with its special organs and faculties is as rationally, easily, and clearly conceived as is the development of the material organs of sense by the impact of natural forces.
The line and purpose of developing forms were to take on an ever more perfect correspondence with nature. The eye developed to light, touch to objects, the ear to sound, the taste to flavor, the nostrils to odor. The acme of forms possible through adjustment merely to external realities is reached in the brute, which has all these faculties. Yet there is truth, purity, charity, righteousness, holiness, godliness; but adjustment to sound waves, flavors, odors, light, and material objects does not produce these, for the brute is as unaware of them as if they did not exist, although his natural senses are incomparably keener than man's. When development had reached its height through adjustment to external realities, then commenced the development by adjustment to internal realities—to the Divine Human. Through this adjustment came the human, as a superstructure to the animal.
If the eye developed by adjustment to light, the ear to sound, and the animal to nature in general, is it unreasonable to ask what did the human develop in adjustment to? Certainly something! What this something is we surely know. The faculty of perceiving truth develops by adjustment to Truth, the sense of purity to Purity, charity to Charity, righteousness to Righteousness, godliness to Godliness, humanity to Humanity.
We have but to consider the spiritual world as real as nature, and capable of spiritual powers as nature is of natural powers, and to think of the Divine Human of God filling the spiritual world full of human power as the sun fills nature with sun-powers, to have a rational, tangible basis for progressive study.
Should this seem to be a statement too large for human grasp, let it be said that we do not have to enter strange territory to confirm this. We are not required to believe anything that is not in harmony with physical facts. We need not accept anything that is not similar to that with which we are already familiar. In fact the very opposite is imperative. We are requested to think in harmony with physical facts; to reason just as we do about things with which we are familiar, and to disbelieve everything that is not in harmony with a broad and true conception of nature and her laws.
We know how the sun imparts activity to nature and fills it with sun potencies. We are continually impressed with the complex and numerous forms of the activity of ether as displayed by the prism and photography. If there are so many varieties of electric activity that there are developed not only such different things as heat, light, and power, but also many particular activities, exemplified by the X-ray, wireless telegraphy, and radio activity in general, how much more probable it is that there are still more numerous and complex activities, still more potencies in the Human Spirit that flows into the universe from God! How conceivable it is that His Spirit, bathing the soul of man and the spiritual world like sunshine, should produce in man by its inherent forms of activity all the essentials that distinguish man from brute! The introduction of the factor of the spiritual world, in adjustment to which the spiritual faculties of man are formed and developed, certainly solves the problem in a conceivable way. Nor does it stand on this basis alone, for it solves the problem in a rational way, and also it is confirmed by the analogy of all that we know.
Even Materialists acknowledge a realm of invisible, material substance, called ether, as absolutely essential to the explanation of the simplest phenomenon of nature. One of two things must occur: either men must refuse to think, or the same logic will force into our reasonings the introduction of an unseen, spiritual world. Therefore men of the higher rational order cannot deny what they see, and so urge as the only means of progress in intelligence the acknowledgment of the reality of the unseen world.
There is no reason that can be urged against the fact that the impact of the activity of the Spirit of God, in which there are infinite potencies, gives the sense of spiritual beauty, the inspiration of divine grandeur, the perception of moral law, the sense of purity, love, righteousness, holiness, divinity; and produces in the soul the aspiration to know God and to come more fully into His image and likeness. Certainly the same logic is used to explain how the body comes into correspondence with nature, and it equally shows how the soul comes into correspondence with the powers of the unseen world.
Viewing creation from the first to the present day, we see it to be a fact that forms took on successively nearer perfect correspondence with nature, and that when the animal in which there was at that time the nearest complete correspondence with nature became perfected, then came man, who has continued in the upward development, and little by little has come gradually into nearer perfect correspondence with the spiritual world and the Creator. This being the fact proves by all the logic there is in the course of events that it was the design in the beginning, and the final purpose throughout development.
If we admit the cause that the effect demonstrates, our vision will clear at once, "For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal powers and Godhead; so that they are without excuse."
Therefore it rests upon those who see, to put together the facts of nature that the hewers of wood and drawers of water in Israel have gathered, and leave them still hewing and drawing, if it must be, while the men of God advance in the understanding of things that, though invisible to the senses, are yet real, and to the mind and soul are tangible and knowable.
- ↑ "Through Nature to God," page 183.