De Vi Physicâ et Imbecillitate Darwinianâ disputavit Franciscus Gulielmus Bain, Artium Magister

Abstract

WE gather from this work that its author was present as a boy at Darwin's funeral in Westminster Abbey, and had his toe trodden on by the King himself, then Prince of Wales; that the impression produced on him was such that he determined to devote himself in future years to finding out who Darwin was; and that having now succeeded in this laudable endeavour, he cannot visit the British Museum of Natural History and look up at the statue on the staircase facing the entrance, without being seized by inextinguishable laughter. “It is this curious incarnation of philosophical poverty and unscientific perversity,” he exclaims, “who is elevated into a scientific deity. A theory-blinded and arbitrary denier of Nature's organic and creative power is worshipped as a god in her own temple, every object in which gives the lie to his creed.” “The theory of Darwin,” he says in another place, “is the ne plus ultra of human stupidity. It never could have occurred, except to one incapable of understanding the corollaries of organisation: but once having occurred, it never could have been retained and defended, except by one who was capable of systematically ignoring whole classes of animal organisation, and attending only to instances that prove nothing at all.” But Darwin is not the only victim of the author's indignation. Of another name, scarcely less famous than Darwin's, we read that “the ravings of an old woman in a lunatic asylum would be wisdom in comparison with the latest views of this eminent philosopher.” What, we may ask, is the cause of this lamentable collapse on the part of modern men of science? The explanation offered is simple; it is merely that they have learned their method from “that unfortunate being J. S. Mill. I consider the authority of J. S. Mill, and the fact that his ‘Logic’ and ‘Political Economy’ were and still are text-books in the University of Oxford, to be a national disaster, and almost equivalent to destroying English intelligence in the germ.” Most of the opinions here advanced are of equal weight with the foregoing.

De Vi Physicâ et Imbecillitate Darwinianâ disputavit Franciscus Gulielmus Bain, Artium Magister.

Pp. 103. (Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 1903.) Price 2s. 6d. net.