CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 7

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 7

Mechanism of the Human Frame

(J) You were very severe last time.

(R) You must allow for the immense consequence of the truth involved.

(J) It has been well said that there are two subjects in which human fervour is liable to be more strongly engaged than any other- family and religion: sex and God.

(R) It is true. Pardon my vehemence. The argument is strong. It is not at an end yet.

(J) Do you mean the argument of last week?

(R) Yes.

(J) I should have thought you had pretty well exhausted it.

(R) Not quite yet. You have not only to think of the absurdity of chance producing a human pair, essential to each other, but of producing either of them with their varied and exquisite powers. If chance were at work, its operation would necessarily work in every variety of caprice. Its results must certainly be marked as often by foolishness as wisdom. But, in fact, chance does not work in any region of nature that man is acquainted with. Whatever happens has a cause, and that cause has a cause, and so back and back. When a new plant or animal is discovered, no one imagines it has come into existence spontaneously, or that there has never been the like before. The discoverer sets to work to find its history its origin its habitat if he can. If this is the case with the simplest form of life, vegetable or animal, how much more in a case like man, whose organization shows such a complex adaptation of means to ends, and such an exquisite result from the whole?

(J) Man is no more remarkable in that respect than the animals is he?

(R) Well, yes; his powers are higher: but even if it were not so-even if the animals are on a par with him as regards the wisdom of their organization, the argument would only be all the stronger. I select the case of man because he is the most signal illustration.

(J) Well, what do you have to say about him?

(R) There is more to be said than I can say, but I will try and give a rough idea or two. First of all, look at him in his entirety. He is a perfectly extraordinary phenomenon. He is a working machine that not only does the work it was made for, but repairs itself as it performs its work: a self working, self repairing machine.

(J) I am not sure I catch your idea there. The working and the repairing are both one thing aren’t they?

(R) No: No doubt the repairing is a class of work, but it is not the kind of work I mean. By work, I mean the exercises and functions of intelligent life. For example, a man attends to business, or serves his friends, or engages in study, or devotes himself to politics or travel. In all this, he uses the mechanism of his being, but it is outside and extra to that mechanism. It is what the mechanism was designed for, speaking generally. The heart was not made to pump blood merely that blood might be pumped, but that blood so pumped might contribute to intelligent life as a result. The lungs were not made to breathe, and the stomach to digest, merely that breath might be inhaled and food converted into new forms, but that these functions might sustain life, and admit of the objects involved in life. Now, what I wished to say was, that here you have a wonderful machine, that not only does the work it was made for, but that repairs itself at the same time it goes along.

(J) Repairs itself?

(R) Yes. You know that there is continual waste going on with all that we do, and that if there were not continual renewal or repair, we should not be able to carry on a single day. Now, this renewal is going on every moment in every part of every organ of the body, and yet we don’t have to stop to let it be done, but go on working and repairing at the same time. Take the eye for example: you go on using it all day, and yet with every throb of the heart its substance is being renewed, without interference of your use of it. My contention is, that on this general view, we cannot contemplate the human organization without having reason to feel that extraordinary wisdom must have been at work to produce such an organization, and that the idea of chance doing it is an outrage upon reason.

(J) As I said before, the argument would apply to everything: because there is just as much wisdom, as you call it, in the organization of a snail.

(R) No doubt it is so; and as I said before, that only makes the argument all the stronger. Only it is more clearly seen, perhaps, in the case of man, because of his superior parts the case is very powerful when you come to the details.

(J) Such as?

(R) Well, such as the eye, taking the eye again in another way. You will admit the great importance and the great delicacy of the function of eye-sight?

(J) Certainly.

(R) Consider, then, how the eye is placed: in a bony socket which protects it absolutely from injury or interference on all sides. Even in front, where exposure is essential for its work, it is protected by the jutting eyebrow, and the socket sides come so nearly level with the organs as to make it difficult to hurt the eye. Does not such a placing of the eye argue the highest wisdom?

(J) That, of course, is not to be denied.

(R) Then consider the curtain of the eye-lid, by which, without interference with the eye-sight, the action of the eye is eased and guarded by an adjustment that works completely over it as quick as lightening subject to the control of will, and yet working most of the time automatically. See, too, the arrangement of tubes and vessels by which just the requisite amount of moisture is kept in constant supply, so that we are saved from the serious inconvenience that would result from the drying of so delicate a membrane. When men say that chance, or the operation of blind force has evolved such skilful combinations, we can but look in astonishment and wonder what they mean! In such talk “chance,” and “blindness,” and “wisdom” have lost their meanings. Not only so, but such talk goes against the most elementary postulate of science that for every phenomenon of Nature there must be an adequate cause.

(J) You have said nothing about the eye itself.

(R) Thank you. I was about to refer to the structure of the eye itself, as the most wonderful lesson of all. Whether we regard the result secured, or the means employed to secure the result, it is nothing less than an astounding marvel. Those are best able to appreciate the masterly result who has tried their hand at any time at the construction of optical glasses. By the due adjustment of convex or concave lenses, you can get a near or distant enlargement as you desire: but the adjustment involves much trouble, and when you have got it, it remains just what you have made it. If you want a different adjustment, you must work your ratchet backwards or forwards, who could invent a lens that would be self adjusting, and become convex or concave, according to the degree of light or the distance of the object to be operated on? This is the extraordinary character of the eye as an optical instrument. It requires an exquisiteness of construction, and a sensitiveness of action, that baffles the imagination.
Then we have to consider that besides an internal structure so perfectly adapted to the uses of sight, the whole apparatus is set in a gearing of muscles that enables the will to turn it into any position in a moment. We are so accustomed to the use and grace of this arrangement that we fail to be struck with it as the case warrants. There it is: a physiological miracle which we carry daily with us. How different would human expression and human deportment have been, if the eye, instead of being the flexible self-acting instrument it is, had been a mechanical fixture in the head? Lenses of unchangeable form would have unfitted the eye to see anything clearly under or over certain fixed distance; and, without muscles for turning the eye, we should have been compelled to turn the head with every new requirement of sight. Think of the awkward deportment: think of the expressionless countenance: think of the defectiveness of vision and the tiresomeness of the use of the eye in that case. If the eye had been had been the work of chance, there was much more likelihood of such a clumsiness, than of perfect skilfulness and beauty of the present arrangement. “Chance!” Away, away! It is an outrage upon reason; an insult to common sense; the denial of experience; the confounding of true science, and philosophy. Not chance, but contrivance: not blind force, but powerful wisdom: is called for as the only solution of the beautiful marvel.