Page 92 (part 2)

" (" Modern Science and Modern Thought, " p. 152.) While most of the men of Science, who are uncompromising in their belief in the descent of man from an "extinct anthropoid mammal," will not accept even the bare tenability of any other theory than an ancestor common to man and the Dryopithecus, it is refreshing to find in a work of real scientific value such a margin for compromise. Indeed, it is as wide as it can be made under the circumstances, i.e. , without immediate danger of getting knocked off one's feet by the tidal wave of "science-adulation." Believing that the difficulty of accounting "for the development of intellect and morality by evolution is not so great as that presented by the difference as to physical structure** between man and the highest animal," the same author says: -- "But it is not so easy to see how this difference of physical structure arose, and how a being came into existence which had such a brain and hand, and such undeveloped capabilities for an almost unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape is too great to admit of the possibility of one being the direct descendant of the other. The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation towards the Simian type. His skull is narrower, his brain less capacious, his muzzle more projecting, his arm longer than those of the [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * It is asked, whether it would change one iota of the scientific truth and fact contained in the above sentence if it were to read: "the ape is simply an instance of the biped type specialized for going on all fours, generally, and a smaller brain." Esoterically speaking, this is the real truth, and not the reverse. ** We cannot follow Mr. Laing here. When avowed Darwinists like Huxley point to "the great gulf which intervenes between the lowest ape and the highest man in intellectual power," the " enormous gulf . . . between them," the " immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the Human from the Simian stirps" ( Man ' s Place in Nature, pp. 102-3); when even the physical basis of mind -- the brain -- so vastly exceeds in size that of the highest existing apes; when men like Wallace are forced to invoke the agency of extra-terrestrial intelligences in order to explain the rise of such a creature as the Pithecanthropus alalus, or speechless savage of Haeckel, to the level of the large-brained and moral man of to-day -- it is idle to dismiss Evolutionist puzzles so lightly. If the structural evidence is so unconvincing and, taken as a whole, so hostile to Darwinism, the difficulties as to the "how" of the Evolution of the human mind by natural selection are tenfold greater. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 678 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. average European man. Still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or the gorilla. Even the idiot or cretin, whose brain is no larger and intelligence no greater than that of the chimpanzee, is an arrested man, not an ape. " "If, therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man and ape, we must go back to some common ancestor from whom both may have originated . . . . But to establish this as a fact and not a theory we require to find that ancestral form, or, at any rate, some intermediate forms tending towards it . . . . in other words . . . . the missing link! Now it must be admitted that, hitherto, not only have no such missing links been discovered, but the oldest known human sculls and skeletons which date from the Glacial period, and are probably at least 100,000 years old, show no very decided approximation towards any such pre-human type. On the contrary, one of the oldest types, that of the men of the sepulchral cave of Cro-Magnon,* is that of a fine race, tall in stature, large in brain, and on the whole superior to many of the existing races of mankind. The reply of course is that the time is insufficient, and if man and the ape had a common ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape, certainly, and man, probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such ancestor must be sought still further back at a distance compared with which the whole Quaternary period sinks into insignificance . . . . It may well make us hesitate before we admit that man . . . is alone an exception. . . . This is more difficult to believe, as the ape family which man (?) so closely resembles . . . . contains numerous branches which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series. If a special creation is required for man, must there not have been special creations for the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least 100 different species of ape and monkeys which are all built on the same lines?" (p. 182, "Modern Science, etc.") There was a "special creation" for man, and a "special creation" for the ape, his progeny; only on other lines than ever bargained for by Science. Albert Gaudry and others give some weighty reasons why man cannot be regarded as the crown of an ape-stock. When one finds that not only was the "primeval savage" (?) a reality in the Miocene times, but that, as de Mortillet shows, the flint relics he has left behind him were splintered by fire in that remote epoch; when we learn that the Dryopithecus, alone of the anthropoids, appears in those strata, what is the natural inference? That the Darwinians are in a quandary. The very manlike Gibbon is still in the same low grade of development, as it was when it co-existed with Man at the close of the Glacial Period. It has not appreciably altered since the Pliocene times. Now there is little to choose between the Dryopithecus and the existing anthropoids -- gibbon, gorilla, etc. If, then, the Darwinian theory is all-sufficient, how are we to "explain" the evolution of this [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * A race which MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy regard as a branch of the same stock whence the Canary Island Guanches sprung -- offshoots of the Atlanteans, in short. [[Vol. 2, Page]] 679 MATERIALISM IS PUZZLED. ape into Man during the first half of the Miocene? The time is far too short for such a theoretical transformation. The extreme slowness with which variation in species supervenes renders the thing inconceivable -- more especially on the Natural Selection hypothesis. The enormous mental and structural gulf between a savage acquainted with fire and the mode of kindling it, and a brutal anthropoid, is too much to bridge even in idea, during so contracted a period.