It was not so much what was stated, as the obvious implications of the doctrine, which men shrank from. Darwin, who had nothing of the defiant arrogance of some who speak in his name, was even accused of dishonesty in not clearly stating at the outset the hearing of the doctrine on man. And his volume on "The Descent of Man" was his answer to the charge. But his letters show how fully he realized the consequences of his theory from the first:
For the scientific acceptance of the theory, as Darwin says, "ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte,"[4] but for people generally, who judge a theory by its consequences, not on its evidence, it is, as he says of Carpenter, "the last mouthful that chokes."[5] Of course, as he admits, it is open to every one to believe that man appeared by a separate miracle,[6] but to hold the doctrine of special creation here and here only is to ignore the arguments which, ex hypothesi, carried conviction everywhere else.
It was on this point that Darwin and Wallace parted company, though the divergence is commonly represented as far greater than it was. Wallace admitted the evolution of man out of a lower form, but contends, and this was what he calls his "heresy," that natural selection would have only given man a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas it is greatly superior. He therefore contrasts "man" with the "unaided productions" of Nature, and argues that, as in artificial selection, man supervenes and uses the law of natural selection to produce a desired result, so "a higher intelligence" may have supervened, and used the law of natural selection to produce man. Whether from the scientific side this is rightly called a "heresy" or not it is not necessary to decide; but certainly, from the religious side, it has a strangely unorthodox look. If, as a Christian believes, the "higher intelligence" who used these laws for the creation of man was the same God who worked in and by these same laws in creating the lower forms of life, Mr. Wallace's distinction, as a distinction of cause, disappears; and if it was not the same God, we contradict the first article of the Creed. Whatever be the line which Christianity draws between man and the rest of the visible creation, it certainly does not claim man as the work of God, and leave the rest to "unaided Nature."
We have then to face the question, If it be true that man, "as
