Diary of George Templeton Strong, March 6, 1860

. . . Looking further into Darwin’s Origin of Species this evening. Though people who don’t like its conclusions generally speak of it as profound and as a formidable attack on received notions, I timidly incline to think it a shallow book, though laboriously and honestly written.

Darwin cannot understand why Omnipotent Power and Wisdom should have created so many thousand various types of organic life, allied to each other by various complex relations and differing in points of detail for which we can assign no reason. He wants to shew that the original creative act was on the smallest scale and produced only some one organism of the humblest rank but capable of development into the fauna and flora of the earth, from moss to oak and from monad to man, under his law of progress and natural selection. To him, as to the physicists of the last one hundred years, the notion of a supernatural creative power is repugnant and offen¬ sive. He wants to account for the wonderful, magnificent harmonies and relations of the varied species of life that exist on earth by reducing the original agency of supernatural power in their creation to a minimum. This feeling sticks out at page 483, where he asks triumphantly. Do people “really believe that . . . certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues?” (That passage is the keynote of the whole book.)

I must say I find it just as easy to answer that question in the affirmative as to admit that certain elemental atoms of lime, silex, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so forth are daily and hourly “commanded to flash into” organic wood fibre, cellulose, parenchyma, and so on. The latter miracle is being performed on the largest scale this minute wherever vegetation is in progress; the former seems to occur only at long intervals. I can see no other distinction between them. One is familiar to our senses, the other is proved by deduction. They are a priori equally credible, or incredible, whichever Mr. Darwin pleases. The inorganic world has its own internal harmonies and relations quite as distinct and unmistakeable as the organic. But no law of progressive development can be inferred from them. Mr. Darwin would not venture to maintain that iodine and bromine are developments of chlorine or vice versa, that some one little dirty, obscure or obsolete element was parent and progenitor of osmium, iridium, ruthenium, and all the rest of the platinum group. Very possible that these so-called elements may be hereafter decomposed and proved to be composite, but we have no right to assume that they will be, and until analysis reduces the inorganic world to a series of compounds of only two primal entities, it will testify against Darwin’s theory.

SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 13-4