EVOLUTION IN GENERAL
THE last romance of Science, the most daring
it has ever tried to pen, is the Story of the Ascent of Man. Withheld from all
the wistful eyes that have gone before, whose reverent ignorance forbade their
wisest minds to ask to see it, this final volume of Natural History has begun
to open with our century's close. In the monographs of His and Minot, the
Embryology of Man has already received a just expression; Darwin and Haeckel
have traced the origin of the Animal-Body; the researches of Romanes mark a
beginning with the Evolution of Mind; Herbert Spencer has elaborated theories
of the development of Morals; Edward Caird of the Evolution of Religion.
Supplementing the contributions of these authorities, verifying, criticizing,
combating, rebutting, there works a multitude of others who have devoted their
lives to the same rich problems, and already every chapter of the bewildering
story has found its editors.
Yet, singular though the omission may seem, no
connected outline of this great drama has yet been given us. These researches,
preliminary reconnaissances though they be, are surely worthy of being looked
upon as a whole. No one can say that this multitude of observers is not in
earnest, nor their work honest, nor their methods competent to the last powers
of science. Whatever the uncertainty of the field, it is due to these pioneer
minds to treat their labour with respect. What they see in the unexplored land
in which they travel belongs to the world. By just such methods, and by just
such men, the map of the world of thought is filled in--here from the tracing
up of some great river, there from a bearing taken roughly in a darkened sky,
yonder from a sudden glint of the sun on a far-off mountain-peak, or by a swift
induction of an adventurous mind from a momentary glimpse of a natural law. So
knowledge grows; and in a century which has added to the sum of human learning
more than all the centuries that are past, it is not to be conceived that some
further revelation should not await us on the highest themes of all.
The day is for ever past when science need
apologize for treating Man as an object of natural research. Hamlet's "being of
large discourse, looking before and after" is withal a part of Nature, and can
be made neither larger nor smaller, anticipate less nor prophesy less, because
we investigate, and perhaps discover, the secret of his past. And should that
past be proved to be related in undreamed-of ways to that of all other things
in Nature, "all other things" have that to gain by the alliance which
philosophy and theology for centuries have striven to win for them. Every step
in the proof of the oneness in a universal evolutionary process of this divine
humanity of ours is a step in the proof of the divinity of all lower things.
And what is of infinitely greater moment, each footprint discovered in the
Ascent of Man is a guide to the step to be taken next. To discover the
rationale of social progress is the ambition of this age. There is an
extraordinary human interest abroad about this present world itself, a yearning
desire, not from curious but for practical reasons, to find some light upon the
course; and as the goal comes nearer the eagerness passes into suspense to know
the shortest and the quickest road to reach it. Hence the Ascent of Man is not
only the noblest problem which science can ever study, but the practical
bearings of this theme are great beyond any other on the roll of knowledge.
Now that the first rash rush of the evolutionary
invasion is past, and the sins of its youth atoned for by sober concession,
Evolution is seen to be neither more nor less than the story of creation as
told by those who know it best. "Evolution," says Mr. Huxley, "or development
is at present employed in biology as a general name for the history of the
steps by which any living being has acquired the morphological and the
physiological characters which distinguish it."[1] Though applied specifically to plants and animals this
definition expresses the chief sense in which Evolution is to be used
scientifically at present. We shall use the word, no doubt, in others of its
many senses; but after all the blood spilt, Evolution is simply "history," a
"history of steps," a "general name" for the history of the steps by which the
world has come to be what it is. According to this general definition, the
story of Evolution is narrative. It may be wrongly told; it may be coloured,
exaggerated, over- or under-stated like the record of any other set of facts;
it may be told with a theological bias or with an anti-theological bias;
theories of the process may be added by this thinker or by that; but these are
not of the substance of the story. Whether history is told by a Gibbon or a
Green the facts remain, and whether Evolution be told by a Haeckel or a Wallace
we accept the narrative so far as it is a rendering of Nature, and no more. It
is true, before this story can be fully told, centuries still must pass. At
present there is not a chapter of the record that is wholly finished. The
manuscript is already worn with erasures, the writing is often blurred, the
very language is uncouth and strange. Yet even now the outline of a continuous
story is beginning to appear--a story whose chief credential lies in the fact
that no imagination of man could have designed a spectacle so wonderful, or
worked out a plot at once so intricate and so transcendently simple.
This story will be outlined here partly for the
story and partly for a purpose. A historian dare not have a prejudice, but he
cannot escape a purpose--the purpose, conscious or unconscious, of unfolding
the purpose which lies behind the facts which he narrates. The interest of a
drama--the authorship of the play apart--is in the players, their character,
their motives, and the tendency of their action. It is impossible to treat
these players as automata. Even if automata, those in the audience are not.
Hence, where interpretation seems lawful, or comment warranted by the facts,
neither will he withheld.
To give an account of Evolution, it need scarcely
be remarked, is not to account for it. No living thinker has yet found it
possible to account for Evolution. Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous definition of
Evolution as "a change from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite
coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations"[2] --the formula of which the Contemporary
Reviewer remarked that "the universe may well have heaved a sigh of relief
when, through the cerebration of an eminent thinker, it had been delivered of
this account of itself"--is simply a summary of results, and throws no light,
though it is often supposed to do so, upon ultimate causes. While it is true,
as Mr. Wallace affirms in his latest work, that "Descent with modification is
now universally accepted as the order of nature in the organic world," there is
everywhere at this moment the most disturbing uncertainty as to how the Ascent
even of species has been brought about. The attacks on the Darwinian theory
from the outside were never so keen as are the controversies now raging in
scientific circles, over the fundamental principles of Darwinism itself. On at
least two main points--sexual selection and the origin of the higher mental
characteristics of man--Mr Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of
the principle of Natural Selection though he be, directly opposes his
colleague. The powerful attack of Weismann on the Darwinian assumption of the
inheritability of acquired characters has opened one of the liveliest
controversies of recent years, and the whole field of science is hot with
controversies and discussions. In his `GermPlasm,' the German naturalist
believes himself to have finally disposed of both Darwin's "gemmules" and
Herbert Spencer's "primordial units," while Eimer breaks a lance with Weismann
in defence of Darwin, and Herbert Spencer replies for himself, assuring us that
"either there has been inheritance of acquired characters or there has been no
evolution."
It is the greatest compliment to Darwinism that
it should have survived to deserve this era of criticism. Meantime all prudent
men can but hold their judgment in suspense both as to that specific theory of
one department of Evolution which is called Darwinism, and as to the factors
and causes of Evolution itself. No one asks more of Evolution at present than
permission to use it as a working theory. Undoubtedly there are cases now
before Science where it is more than theory--the demonstration from Yale, for
instance, of the Evolution of the Horse; and from Steinheim of the
transmutation of Planorbis. In these cases the missing links have come in one
after another, and in series so perfect, that the evidence for their evolution
is irresistible. "On the evidence of Palaeontology," says Mr. Huxley in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "the evolution of many existing forms of
animal life from their predecessors is no longer an hypothesis but an
historical fact." And even as to Man, most naturalists agree with Mr. Wallace
who "fully accepts Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of
Man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia and his descent from
some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes," for "the evidence
of such descent appears overwhelming and conclusive."[3] But as to the development of the whole Man it is
sufficient for the present to rank it as a theory, no matter how impressive the
conviction be that it is more. Without some hypothesis no work can ever be
done, and, as everyone knows, many of the greatest contributions to human
knowledge have been made by the use of theories either seriously imperfect or
demonstrably false. This is the age of the evolution of Evolution. All thoughts
that the Evolutionist works with, all theories and generalizations, have been
themselves evolved and are now being evolved. Even were his theory perfected,
its first lesson would be that it was itself but a phase of the Evolution of
further opinion, no more fixed than a species, no more final than the theory
which it displaced. Of all men the Evolutionist, by the very nature of his
calling, the mere tools of his craft, his understanding of his hourly shifting
place in this always moving and ever more mysterious world, must be humble,
tolerant, and undogmatic.
These, nevertheless, are cold words with which to
speak of a Vision--for Evolution is after all a Vision---which is
revolutionizing the world of Nature and of thought, and, within living memory,
has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science
has never witnessed before. While many of the details of the theory of
Evolution are in the crucible of criticism, and while the field of modern
science changes with such rapidity that in almost every department the
textbooks of ten years ago are obsolete to-day, it is fair to add that no one
of these changes, nor all of them together, have touched the general theory
itself except to establish its strength, its value, and its universality. Even
more remarkable than the rapidity of its conquest is the authority with which
the doctrine of development has seemed to speak to the most authoritative minds
of our time. Of those who are in the front rank, of those who by their
knowledge have, by common consent, the right to speak, there are scarcely any
who do not in some form employ it in working and in thinking. Authority may
mean little; the world has often been mistaken; but when minds so different as
those of Charles Darwin and of T. H. Green, of Herbert Spencer and of Robert
Browning, build half the labours of their life on this one law, it is
impossible, and especially in the absence of any other even competing principle
at the present hour, to treat it as a baseless dream. Only the peculiar nature
of this great generalization can account for the extraordinary enthusiasm of
this acceptance. Evolution has done for Time what Astronomy has done for Space.
As sublime to the reason as the Science of the Stars, as overpowering to the
imagination, it has thrown the universe into a fresh perspective, and given the
human mind a new dimension. Evolution involves not so much a change of opinion
as a change in man's whole view of the world and of life. It is not the
statement of a mathematical proposition which men are called upon to declare
true or false. It is a method of looking upon Nature. Science for centuries
devoted itself to the cataloguing of facts and the discovery of laws. Each
worker toiled in his own little place--the geologist in his quarry, the
botanist in his garden, the biologist in his laboratory, the astronomer in his
observatory, the historian in his library, the archaeologist in his museum.
Suddenly these workers looked up; they spoke to one another; they had each
discovered a law; they whispered its name. It was Evolution. Henceforth their
work was one, science was one, the world was one, and mind, which discovered
the oneness, was one.
Such being the scope of the theory, it is
essential that for its interpretation this universal character be recognized,
and no phenomenon in nature or in human nature be left out of the final
reckoning. It is equally clear that in making that interpretation we must begin
with the final product, Man. If Evolution can be proved to include Man, the
whole course of Evolution and the whole scheme of Nature from that moment
assume a new significance The beginning must then be interpreted from the end,
not the end from the beginning. An engineering workshop is unintelligible until
we reach the room where the completed engine stands. Everything culminates in
that final product, is contained in it, is explained by it. The Evolution of
Man is also the complement and corrective of all other forms of Evolution. From
this height only is there a full view, a true perspective, a consistent world.
The whole mistake of naturalism has been to interpret Nature from the
standpoint of the atom --to study the machinery which drives this great moving
world simply as machinery, forgetting that the ship has any passengers, or the
passengers any captain, or the captain any course. It is as great a mistake, on
the other hand, for the theologian to separate off the ship from the passengers
as for the naturalist to separate off the passengers from the ship. It is he
who cannot include Man among the links of Evolution who has greatly to fear the
theory of development. In his jealousy for that religion which seems to him
higher than science, he removes at once the rational basis from religion and
the legitimate crown from science, forgetting that in so doing he offers to the
world an unnatural religion and an inhuman science. The cure for all the small
mental disorders which spring up around restricted applications of Evolution is
to extend it fearlessly in all directions as far as the mind can carry it and
the facts allow, till each man, working at his subordinate part, is compelled
to own, and adjust himself to, the whole.
If the theological mind be called upon to make
this expansion, the scientific man must be asked to enlarge his view in another
direction. If he insists upon including Man in his scheme of Evolution, he must
see to it that he include the whole Man. For him at least no form of Evolution
is scientific or is to be considered, which does not include the whole Man, and
all that is in Man, and all the work and thought and life and aspiration of
Man. The great moral facts, the moral forces so far as they are proved to
exist, the moral consciousness so far as it is real, must come within its
scope. Human History must be as much a part of it as Natural History. The
social and religious forces must no more be left outside than the forces of
gravitation or of life. The reason why the naturalist does not usually include
these among the factors in Evolution is not oversight, but undersight.
Sometimes, no doubt, he may take at their word those who assure him that
Evolution has nothing to do with those higher things, but the main reason is
simply that his work does not lie on the levels where those forces come into
play. The specialist is not to be blamed for this; limitation is his strength.
But when the specialist proceeds to reconstruct the universe from his little
corner of it, and especially from his level of it, he not only injures science
and philosophy, but may fatally mislead his neighbours. The man who is busy
with the stars will never come across Natural Selection, yet surely must he
allow for Natural Selection in his construction of the world as a whole. He who
works among star-fish will encounter little of Mental Evolution, yet will he
not deny that it exists. The stars have voices, but there are other voices; the
star-fishes have activities, but there are other activities. Man, body, soul,
spirit, are not only to be considered, but are first to be considered in any
theory of the world. You cannot describe the life of kings, or arrange their
kingdoms, from the cellar beneath the palace. "Art," as Browning reminds us,
"Must fumble for
the whole, once fixing on a part,
However poor, surpass the fragment, and aspire
To reconstruct thereby the ultimate entire."
THE MISSING FACTOR IN CURRENT THEORIES
But it is not so much in ignoring Man that
evolutionary philosophy has gone astray; for ,of that error it has seriously
begun to repent. What we have now to charge against it, what is a main object
of these pages to point out, is that it has misread Nature herself. In "fixing
on a part" whereby to "reconstruct the ultimate," it has fixed upon a part
which is not the most vital part, and the reconstructions, therefore, have come
to be wholly out of focus. Fix upon the wrong "part," and the instability of
the fabric built upon it is a foregone conclusion. Now, although
reconstructions of the cosmos in the light of Evolution are the chief feature
of the science of our time, in almost no case does even a hint of the true
scientific standpoint appear to be perceived. And although it anticipates much
that we should prefer to leave untouched until it appears in its natural
setting, the gravity of the issues makes it essential to summarize the whole
situation now.
The root of the error lies, indirectly rather
than directly, with Mr. Darwin. In 1859, through the publication of the
Origin of Species, he offered to the world what purported to be the
final clue to the course of living Nature. That clue was the principle of the
Struggle for Life. After the years of storm and stress which follow the
intrusion into the world of all great thoughts, this principle was universally
accepted as the key to all the sciences which deal with life. So ceaseless was
Mr. Darwin's emphasis upon this factor, and so masterful his influence, that,
after the first sharp conflict, even the controversy died down. With scarce a
challenge the Struggle for Life became accepted by the scientific world as the
governing factor in development, and the drama of Evolution was made to hinge
entirely upon its action. It became the "part" from which science henceforth
went on "to reconstruct the whole," and biology, sociology, and teleology, were
built anew on this foundation.
That the Struggle for Life has been a prominent
actor in the drama is certain. Further research has only deepened the
impression of the magnitude and universality of this great and far-reaching
law. But that it is the sole or even the main agent in the process of Evolution
must be denied. Creation is a drama, and no drama was ever put upon the stage
with only one actor. The Struggle for Life is the "Villain" of the piece, no
more; and, like the "Villain" in the play, its chief function is to re-act upon
the other players for higher ends. There is, in point of fact, a second
factor which one might venture to call the Struggle for the Life of
Others, which plays an equally prominent part. Even in the early stages of
development, its contribution is as real, while in the world's later
progress--under the name of Altruism-- it assumes a sovereignty before which
the earlier Struggle sinks into insignificance. That this second form of
Struggle should all but have escaped the notice of Evolutionists is the more
unaccountable since it arises, like the first, out of those fundamental
functions of living organisms which it is the main business of biological
science to investigate. The functions discharged by all living things, plant
and animal, are two[4] in number. The first is
Nutrition, the second is Reproduction. The first is the basis of the Struggle
for Life; the second, of the Struggle for the Life of Others. These two
functions run their parallel course--or spiral course, for they continuously
intertwine--from the very dawn of life. They are involved in the fundamental
nature of protoplasm itself. They affect the entire round of life; they
determine the whole morphology of living things; in a sense they are life. Yet,
in constructing the fabric of Evolution, one of these has been taken, the other
left.
Partly because of the limitations of its purely
physical name, and partly because it has never been worked out as an
evolutionary force, the function of Reproduction will require to be introduced
to the reader in some detail. But to realize its importance or even to
understand it, it will be necessary to recall to our minds the supreme place
which function generally holds in the economy of life.
Life to an animal or to a Man is not a random
series of efforts. Its course is set as rigidly as the courses of the stars.
All its movements and changes, its apparent deflections and perturbations are
guided by unalterable purposes; its energies and caprices definitely
controlled. What controls it are its functions. These and these only determine
life; living out these is life. Trace back any one, or all, of the countless
activities of an animal's life, and it will be found that they are at bottom
connected with one or other of the two great functions which manifest
themselves in protoplasm. Take any organ of the body-- hand or foot, eye or
ear, heart or lung--or any tissue of the body--muscle or nerve, bone or
cartilage--and it will be found to be connected either with Nutrition or with
Reproduction. Just as everything about an engine, every bolt, bar, valve,
crank, lever, wheel, has something to do with the work of that engine,
everything about an animal's body has something to do with the work prescribed
by those two functions. An animal, or a Man, is a consistent whole, a rational
production. Now the rationale of living stands revealed to us in protoplasm.
Protoplasm sets life its task. Living can only be done along its lines. There
start the channels in which all life must run, and though the channels
bifurcate endlessly as time goes on, and though more life and fuller is ever
coursing through them, it can never overflow the banks appointed from the
beginning.
But this is not all. The activities even of the
higher life, though not qualitatively limited by the lower, are determined by
these same lines. Were these facts only relevant in the domain of physiology,
they would be of small account in a study of the Ascent of Man. But the more
profoundly the Evolution of Man is investigated the more clearly is it seen
that the whole course of his development has been conducted on this fundamental
basis. Life, all life, higher or lower, is an organic unity. Nature may vary
her effects, may introduce qualitative changes so stupendous as to make their
affinities with lower things unthinkable, but she has never re-laid the
foundations of the world. Evolution began with protoplasm and ended with Man,
and all the way between, the development has been a symmetry whose secret lies
in the two or three great crystallizing forces revealed to us through this
first basis.
Having realized the significance of the
physiological functions, let us now address ourselves to their meaning and
connotations. The first, the function of Nutrition, on which the Struggle for
Life depends, requires no explanation. Mr. Darwin was careful to give to his
favourite phrase, the Struggle for Life, a wider meaning than that which
associates it merely with Nutrition; but this qualification seems largely to
have been lost sight of-- to some extent even by himself--and the principle as
it stands to-day in scientific and philosophical discussion is practically
synonymous with the Struggle for Food. As time goes on this Struggle --at first
a conflict with Nature and the elements, sustained by hunger, and intensified
by competition --assumes many disguises, and is ultimately known in the modern
world under the names of War and Industry. In these later phases the early
function of protoplasm is obscured, but on the last analysis, War and
Industry--pursuits in which half the world is now engaged--are seen to be
simply its natural developments.
The implications of the second function,
Reproduction, lie further from the surface. To say that Reproduction is
synonymous with the Struggle for the Life of Others conveys at first little
meaning, for the physiological aspects of the function persist in the mind, and
make even a glimpse of its true character difficult. In two or three chapters
in the text, the implications of this function will be explained at length, and
the reader who is sufficiently interested in the immediate problem, or who sees
that there is here something to be investigated, may do well to turn to these
at once. Suffice it for the moment to say that the physiological aspects of the
Struggle for the Life of Others are so overshadowed even towards the close of
the Animal Kingdom by the psychical and ethical that it is scarcely necessary
to emphasize the former at all. One's first and natural association with the
Struggle for the Life of Others is with something done for posterity--in the
plant the Struggle to produce seeds, in the animal to beget young. But this is
a preliminary which, compared with what directly and indirectly rises out of
it, may be almost passed over. The significant note is ethical, the development
of Other-ism, as Altruism--its immediate and inevitable outcome. Watch any
higher animal at that most critical of all hours--for itself, and for its
species--the hour when it gives birth to another creature like itself. Pass
over the purely physiological processes of birth; observe the behaviour of the
animal-mother in presence of the new and helpless life which palpitates before
her. There it lies, trembling in the balance between life and death. Hunger
tortures it; cold threatens it; danger besets it; its blind existence hangs by
a thread. There is the opportunity of Evolution. There is an opening appointed
in the physical order for the introduction of a moral order. If there is more
in Nature than the selfish Struggle for Life the secret can now be told.
Hitherto, the world belonged to the Food-seeker, the Self-seeker, the Struggler
for Life, the Father. Now is the hour of the Mother. And, animal though she be,
she rises to her task. And that hour, as she ministers to her young, becomes to
the world the hour of its holiest birth.
Sympathy, tenderness, unselfishness, and the long
list of virtues which make up Altruism, are the direct outcome and essential
accompaniment of the reproductive process. Without some rudimentary maternal
solicitude for the egg in the humblest forms of life, or for the young among
higher forms, the living world would not only suffer, but would cease. For a
time in the life history of every higher animal the direct, personal,
gratuitous, unrewarded help of another creature is a condition of existence.
Even in the lowliest world of plants the labours of Maternity begin, and the
animal kingdom closes with the creation of a class in which this function is
perfected to its last conceivable expression. The vicarious principle is shot
through and through the whole vast web of Nature; and if one actor has played a
mightier part than another in the drama of the past, it has been
self-sacrifice. What more has come into humanity along the line of the Struggle
for the Life of Others will be shown later. But it is quite certain that, of
all the things that minister to the welfare and good of Man, of all that make
the world varied and fruitful, of all that make society solid and interesting,
of all that make life beautiful and glad and worthy, by far the larger part has
reached us through the activities of the Struggle for the Life of Others.
How grave the omission of this supreme factor
from our reckoning, how serious the effect upon our whole view of nature, must
now appear. Time was when the science of Geology was interpreted exclusively in
terms of the action of a single force --fire. Then followed the theories of an
opposing school who saw all the earth's formations to be the result of water.
Any Biology, any Sociology any Evolution, which is based on a single factor, is
as untrue as the old Geology. It is only when both the Struggle for Life and
the Struggle for the Life of Others are kept in view, that any scientific
theory of Evolution is possible. Combine them, contrast them, assign each its
place, allow for their inter-actions, and the scheme of Nature may be worked
out in terms of them to the last detail. All along the line, through the whole
course of the development, these two functions act and react upon one another;
and continually as they co-operate to produce a single result, their specific
differences are never lost.
The first, the Struggle for Life, is, throughout,
the Self-regarding function; the second, the Other-regarding function. The
first, in lower Nature, obeying the law of self-preservation, devotes its
energies to feed itself; the other, obeying the law of species-preservation, to
feed its young. While the first develops the active virtues of strength and
courage, the other lays the basis for the passive virtues, sympathy, and love.
In the later world one seeks its end in personal aggrandizement, the other in
ministration. One begets competition, self-assertion, war; the other
unselfishness, self-effacement, peace. One is Individualism, the other,
Altruism.
To say that no ethical content can be put into
the discharge of either function in the earlier reaches of Nature goes without
saying. But the moment we reach a certain height in the development, ethical
implications begin to arise. These, in the case of the first, have been read
into Nature, lower as well as higher, with an exaggerated and merciless
malevolence. The other side has received almost no expression. The final result
is a picture of Nature wholly painted in shadow--a picture so dark as to be a
challenge to its Maker, an unanswered problem to philosophy, an abiding offence
to the moral nature of Man. The world has been held up to us as one great
battlefield heaped with the slain, an Inferno of infinite suffering, a
slaughter-house resounding with the cries of a ceaseless agony.
Before this version of the tragedy, authenticated
by the highest names on the roll of science, humanity was dumb, morality
mystified, natural theology stultified. A truer reading may not wholly relieve
the first, enlighten the second, or re-instate the third. But it at least
re-opens the inquiry; and when all its bearings come to be perceived, the light
thrown upon the field of Nature by the second factor may be more impressive to
reason than the apparent shadow of the first to sense.
To relieve the strain of the position forced upon
ethics by the one-sided treatment of the process of Evolution, heroic attempts
have been made. Some have attempted to mitigate the amount of suffering it
involves, and assure us that, after all, the Struggle, except as a metaphor,
scarcely exists. "There is," protests Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, "good reason
to believe . . . that the supposed `torments ` and `miseries ` of animals have
little real existence, but are the reflection of the imagined sensations of
cultivated men and women in similar circumstances; and that the amount of
actual suffering caused by the Struggle for Existence among animals is
altogether insignificant."[5] Mr. Huxley, on the
other hand, will make no compromise. The Struggle for Life to him is a
portentous fact, unmitigated and unexplained. No metaphors are strong enough to
describe the implacability of its sway. "The moral indifference of nature" and
"the unfathomable injustice of the nature of things" everywhere stare him in
the face. "For his successful progress, as far as the savage state, Man has
been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the
tiger."[6] That stage reached, "for thousands
and thousands of years, before the origin of the oldest known civilizations,
men were savages of a very low type. They strove with their enemies and their
competitors; they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves;
they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of
generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyaena, whose
lives were spent in the same way; and they were no more to be praised or
blamed, on moral grounds, than their less erect and more hairy compatriots....
Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations
of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of
existence. The human species, like others, plashed and floundered amid the
general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might, and
thinking neither of whence nor whither."[7]
How then does Mr. Huxley act--for it is
instructive to follow out the consequences of an error--in the face of this
tremendous problem? He gives it up. There is no solution. Nature is without
excuse. After framing an indictment against it in the severest language at his
command, he turns his back upon Nature--sub-human Nature, that is --and leaves
teleology to settle the score as best it can. "The history of civilization," he
tells us, "is the record of the attempts of the human race to escape from this
position." But whither does he betake himself? Is he not part of Nature, and
therefore a sharer in its guilt? By no means. For by an astonishing tour de
force--the last, as his former associates in the evolutionary ranks have
not failed to remind him, which might have been expected of him--he ejects
himself from the world-order, and washes his hands of it in the name of Ethical
Man. After sharing the fortunes of Evolution all his life, bearing its burdens
and solving its doubts, he abandons it without a pang, and sets up an
imperium in imperio, where, as a moral being, the `cosmic' Struggle
troubles him no more. "Cosmic Nature," he says, in a parting shot at his former
citadel, "is no school of virtue, but the head-quarters of the enemy of ethical
nature."[8] So far from the Ascent of Man
running along the ancient line, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic
process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be
called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who
may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which
exist, but of those who are ethically the best."[9]
The expedient, to him, was a necessity. Viewing
Nature as Mr. Huxley viewed it there was no other refuge. The "cosmic process"
meant to him the Struggle for Life, and to escape from the Struggle for Life he
was compelled to turn away from the world-order, which had its being because of
it. As it happens, Mr. Huxley has hit upon the right solution, only the method
by which he reaches it is wholly wrong. And the mischievous result of it is
obvious --it leaves all lower Nature in the lurch. With a curious disregard of
the principle of Continuity, to which all his previous work had done such
homage, he splits up the world-order into two separate halves. The earlier
dominated by the `cosmic ` principle-- the Struggle for Life; the other by the
`ethical ` principle--virtually, the Struggle for the Life of Others. The
Struggle for Life is thus made to stop at the `ethical ` process; the Struggle
for the Life of Others to begin. Neither is justified by fact. The Struggle for
the Life of Others, as we have seen, starts its upward course from the same
protoplasm as the Struggle for Life; and the Struggle for Life runs on into the
`ethical' sphere as much as the Struggle for the Life of Others. One has only
to see where Mr. Huxley gets his `ethical ` world to perceive the extent of the
anomaly. For where does he get it, and what manner of world is it? "The history
of civilization details the steps by which men have succeeded in building up an
artificial world within the cosmos."[10] An
artificial world within the cosmos?
This suggested breach between the earlier and the
later process, if indeed we are to take it seriously, is scientifically
indefensible, and the more unfortunate since the same result, or a better, can
be obtained without it. The real breach is not between the earlier and the
later process, but between two rival, or two co-operating processes, which have
existed from the first, which have worked together all along the line, and
which took on `ethical ` characters at the same moment in time. The Struggle
for the Life of Others is sunk as deep in the "cosmic process" as the Struggle
for Life; the Struggle for Life has a share in the "ethical process" as much as
the Struggle for the Life of Others. Both are cosmic processes; both are
ethical processes; both are both cosmical and ethical processes. Nothing but
confusion can arise from a cross-classification which does justice to neither
half of Nature.
The consternation caused by Mr. Huxley's change
of front, or supposed change of front, is matter of recent history. Mr. Leslie
Stephen and Mr. Herbert Spencer hastened to protest; the older school of
moralists hailed it almost as a conversion. But the one fact everywhere
apparent throughout the discussion is that neither side apprehended either the
ultimate nature or the true solution of the problem. The seat of the disorder
is the same in both attackers and attacked--the one-sided view of Nature.
Universally Nature, as far as the plant, animal, and savage levels, is taken to
be synonymous with the Struggle for Life. Darwinism held the monopoly of that
lower region, and Darwinism revenged itself in a manner which has at least
shown the inadequacy of the most widely accepted premise of recent science.
That Mr. Huxley has misgivings on the matter
himself is apparent from his Notes. "Of course," he remarks, in reference to
the technical point, "strictly speaking, social life and the ethical process,
in virtue of which it advances towards perfection, are part and parcel of the
general process of Evolution."[11] And he
gets a momentary glimpse of the "ethical process" in the cosmos, which, if he
had followed it out, must have modified his whole position. "Even in these
rudimentary forms of society, love and fear come into play, and enforce a
greater or less renunciation of self-will. To this extent the general cosmic
process begins to be checked by a rudimentary ethical process, which is,
strictly speaking, part of the former, just as the `governor' in a steam-engine
is part of the mechanism of the engine."[12]
Here the whole position is virtually conceded;
and only the pre-conceptions of Darwinism and the lack of a complete
investigation into the nature and extent of the "rudimentary ethical process"
can have prevailed in the face of such an admission. Follow out the metaphor of
the `governor,' and, with one important modification, the true situation almost
stands disclosed. For what appears to be the `governor' in the rudimentary
ethical process becomes the `steam-engine' in the later process. The mere fact
that it exists in the "general cosmic process" alters the quality of that
process; and the fact that, as we hope to show, it becomes the prime mover in
the later process, entirely changes our subsequent conception of it. The
beginning of a process is to be read from the end and not from the beginning.
And if even a rudiment of a moral order be found in the beginnings of this
process it relates itself and that process to a final end and a final unity.
Philosophy reads end into the earlier process by
a necessity of reason. But how much stronger its position if it could add to
that a basis in the facts of Nature? "I ask the evolutionist," pertinently
inquires Mr. Huxley's critic, "who has no other basis than the Struggle for
existence, how he accounts for the intrusion of these moral ideas and standards
which presume to interfere with the cosmic process and sit in judgment upon its
results."[13] May we ask the philosopher how
he accounts for them? As little can he account for them as he who has
"no other basis than the Struggle for existence." Truly, the writer continues,
the question "cannot be answered so long as we regard morality merely as an
incidental result, a by-product, as it were, of the cosmical system." But what
if morality be the main product of the cosmical system--of even the
cosmical system? What if it can be shown that it is the essential and not the
incidental result of it, and that so far from being a by-product, it is
immorality that is the by-product?
These interrogations may be too strongly put.
`Accompaniments' of the cosmical system might be better than `products';
`revelations through that process' may be nearer the truth than `results' of
it. But what it is intended to show is that the moral order is a continuous
line from the beginning, that it has had throughout, so to speak, a basis in
the cosmos, that upon this, as a trellis-work, it has climbed upwards to the
top. The one--the trelliswork--is to be conceived of as an incarnation; the
other--the manifestation--as a revelation; the one is an Evolution from below,
the other an Involution from above. Philosophy has long since assured us of the
last, but because it was never able to show us the completeness of the first,
science refused to believe it. The defaulter nevertheless was not philosophy
but science. Its business was with the trellis-work. And it gave us a broken
trellis-work, a ladder with only one side, and every step on the other side
resting on air. When science tried to climb the ladder it failed; the steps
refused to bear any weight. What did men of science do? They condemned the
ladder and, balancing themselves on the side that was secure, proclaimed their
Agnosticism to philosophy. And what did philosophy do? It stood on the other
half of the ladder, the half that was not there, and rated them. That
the other half was not there was of little moment. It was in themselves. It
ought to be there; therefore it must be there. And it is quite true; it is
there. Philosophy, like Poetry, is prophetic: "The sense of the whole," it
says, "comes first."[14]
But science could not accept the alternative. It
had looked, and it was not there; from its standpoint the only refuge was
Agnosticism-- there were no facts. Till the facts arrived, therefore,
philosophy was powerless to relieve her ally. Science looked to Nature to put
in her own ends, and not to philosophy to put them in for her. Philosophy might
interpret them after they were there, but it must have something to start from;
and all that science had supplied her with mean time was the fact of the
Struggle for Life. Working from the standpoint of the larger Nature, Human
Nature itself, philosophy could put in other ends; but there appeared no solid
backing for these in facts, and science refused to be satisfied. The position
was a fair one. The danger of philosophy putting in the ends is that she cannot
convince everyone that they are the right ones.
And what is the valid answer? Of course, that
Nature has put in her own ends if we would take the trouble to look for them.
She does not require them to be secretly manufactured upstairs and credited to
her account. By that process mistakes might arise in the reckoning. The
philosophers upstairs might differ about the figures, or at least in equating
them. The philosopher requires fact, phenomenon, natural law, at every turn to
keep him right; and without at least some glimpse of these, he may travel far
afield. So long as Schopenhauer sees one thing in the course of Nature and
Rousseau another, it will always be well to have Nature herself to act as
referee. The end as read in Nature, and the end as re-read in, and interpreted
by, the higher Nature of Man may be very different things; but nothing can be
done till the End-in-the-phenomenon clears the way for the End-in-itself--till
science overtakes philosophy with facts. When that is done, everything can be
done. With the finding of the other half of the ladder, even Agnosticism may
retire. Science cannot permanently pronounce itself "not knowing," till it has
exhausted the possibilities of knowing. And in this case the Agnosticism is
premature, for science has only to look again, and it will discover that the
missing facts are there.
Seldom has there been an instance on so large a
scale of a biological error corrupting a whole philosophy. Bacon's aphorism was
never more true: "This I dare affirm in knowledge of Nature, that a little
natural philosophy, and the first entrance into it, doth dispose the opinion to
atheism, but on the other side, much natural philosophy, and wading deep into
it, will bring about men's minds to religion."[15] Hitherto, the Evolutionist has had practically no other
basis than the Struggle for Life. Suppose even we leave that untouched, the
addition of an Other-regarding basis makes an infinite difference. For when it
is then asked on which of them the process turns, and the answer is given `On
both,' we perceive that it is neither by the one alone, nor by the other alone,
that the process is to be interpreted, but by a higher unity which resolves and
embraces all. And as both are equally necessary to the antinomy, even that of
the two which seems irreconcilable with higher ends is seen to be necessary.
Viewed simpliciter, the Struggle for Life appears irreconcilable with
ethical ends, a prodigious anomaly in a moral world; but viewed in continuous
reaction with the Struggle for the Life of Others, it discloses itself as an
instrument of perfection the most subtle and far-reaching that reason could
devise.
The presence of the second factor therefore,
while it leaves the first untouched, cannot leave its implications untouched.
It completely alters these implications. It has never been denied that the
Struggle for Life is an efficient instrument of progress; the sole difficulty
has always been to justify the nature of the instrument. But if even it be
shown that this is only half the instrument, teleology gains something. If the
fuller view takes nothing away from the process of Evolution, it imports
something into it which changes the whole aspect of the case. For even from the
first that factor is there. The Struggle for the Life of Others, as we have
seen, is no interpolation at the end of the process, but radical, engrained in
the world-order as profoundly as the Struggle for Life. By what right, then,
has Nature been interpreted only by the Struggle for Life? With far greater
justice might science interpret it in the light of the Struggle for the Life of
Others. For, in the first place, unless there had been this second factor, the
world could not have existed. Without the Struggle for the Life of Others,
obviously there would have been no Others. In the second place, unless there
had been a Struggle for the Life of Others, the Struggle for Life could not
have been kept up. As will be shown later the Struggle for Life almost wholly
supports itself on the products of the Struggle for the Life of Others. In the
third place, without the Struggle for the Life of Others, the Struggle for Life
as regards its energies would have died down, and failed of its whole
achievement. It is the ceaseless pressure produced by the exuberant fertility
of Reproduction that creates any valuable Struggle for Life at all. The moment
"Others" multiply, the individual struggle becomes keen up to the disciplinary
point. It was this, indeed-- through the reading of Malthus on
Over-population--that suggested to Mr. Darwin the value of the Struggle for
Life. The law of Over-population from that time forward became the
foundation-stone of his theory; and recent biological research has made the
basis more solid than ever. The Struggle for the Life of Others on the plant
and animal plane, in the mere work of multiplying lives, is a final condition
of progress. Without competition there can be no fight, and without fight there
can be no victory. In other words, without the Struggle for the Life of Others
there can be no Struggle for Life, and therefore no Evolution. Finally, and all
the reasons already given are frivolous beside it, had there been no
Altruism--Altruism in the definite sense of unselfishness, sympathy, and
self-sacrifice for Others, the whole higher world of life had perished as soon
as it was created. For hours, or days, or weeks in the early infancy of all
higher animals, maternal care and sympathy are a condition of existence.
Altruism had to enter the world, and any species which neglected it was
extinguished in a generation.
No doubt a case could be made out likewise for
the imperative value of the Struggle for Life. The position has just been
granted. So far from disputing it, we assume it to be equally essential to
Nature and to a judgment upon the process of Evolution. But what is disputed is
that the Struggle for Life is either the key to Nature, or that it is more
important in itself than the Struggle for the Life of Others. It is pitiful
work pitting the right hand against the left, the heart against the head; but
if it be insisted that there is neither right hand nor heart, the proclamation
is necessary not only that they exist, but that absolutely they are as
important and relatively to ethical Man of infinitely greater moment than
anything that functions either in the animal or social organism.
But why, if all this be true of the Struggle for
the Life of Others, has a claim so imperious not been recognized by science?
That a phenomenon of this distinction should have attracted so little attention
suggests a suspicion. Does it really exist?
Is the biological basis sound? Have we not at
least exaggerated its significance? The biologist will judge. Though no doubt
the function of Reproduction is intimately connected in Physiology with the
function of Nutrition, the facts as stated here are facts of Nature; and some
glimpse of the influence of this second factor will be given in the sequel from
which even the non-biological reader may draw his own conclusions. Difficult as
it seems to account for the ignoring of an elemental fact in framing the
doctrine of Evolution, there are circumstances which make the omission less
unintelligible. Foremost, of course, there stands the overpowering influence of
Mr. Darwin. In spite of the fact that he warned his followers against it, this
largely prejudged the issue. Next is to be considered the narrowing, one had
almost said the blighting, effect of specialism. Necessary to the progress of
science, the first era of a reign of specialism is disastrous to philosophy.
The men who in field and laboratory are working out the facts, do not speculate
at all. Content with slowly building up the sum of actual knowledge in some
neglected and restricted province, they are too absorbed to notice even what
the workers in the other provinces are about. Thus it happens that while there
are many scientific men, there are few scientific thinkers. The complaint is
often made that science speculates too much. It is quite the other way. One has
only to read the average book of science in almost any department to wonder at
the wealth of knowledge, the brilliancy of observation, and the barrenness of
idea. On the other hand, though scientific experts will not think themselves,
there is always a multitude of onlookers waiting to do it for them. Among these
what strikes one is the ignorance of fact and the audacity of the idea. The
moment any great half-truth in Nature is unearthed, these unqualified
practitioners leap to a generalization; and the observers meantime, on the
track of the other half, are too busy or too oblivious to refute their
heresies. Hence, long after its foundations are undermined, a brilliant
generalization will retain its hold upon the popular mind; and before the
complementary, the qualifying, or the neutralizing facts can be supplied, the
mischief is done.
But while this is true of many who play with the
double-edged tools of science, it is not true of a third class. When we turn to
the pages of the few whose science is adequate and whose sweep is over the
whole vast horizon, we find, as we should expect, some recognition of the
altruistic factor. Though Mr. Herbert Spencer, to whom the appeal in this
connection is obvious, makes a different use of the fact, it has not escaped
him. Not only does the Other-regarding function receive recognition, but he
allots it a high place in his system. Of its ethical bearings he is equally
clear. "What," he asks, "is the ethical aspect of these [altruistic]
principles? In the first place, animal life of all but the lowest kinds has
been maintained by virtue of them. Excluding the Protozoa, among which
their operation is scarcely discernible, we see that without gratis
benefits to offspring, and earned benefits to adults, life could not have
continued. In the second place, by virtue of them life has gradually evolved
into higher forms. By care of offspring, which has become greater with
advancing organization, and by survival of the fittest in the competition among
adults, which has become more habitual with advancing organization, superiority
has been perpetually fostered and further advances caused."[16] Fiske, Littre, Romanes, Le Conte, L. Buchner, Miss
Buckley, and Prince Kropotkin have expressed themselves partly in the same
direction; and Geddes and Thomson, in so many words, recognize "the
co-existence of twin-streams of egoism and altruism, which often merge for a
space without losing their distinctness, and are traceable to a common origin
in the simplest forms of life."[17] The last
named--doubtless because their studies have taken them both into the fields of
pure biology and of bionomics--more clearly than any other modern writers, have
grasped the bearings of this theme in all directions, and they fearlessly take
their standpoint from the physiology of protoplasm. Thus, "in the hunger and
reproductive attractions of the lowest organisms, the self-regarding and
other-regarding activities of the higher find their starting-point. Though some
vague consciousness is perhaps co-existent with life itself, we can only speak
with confidence of psychical egoism and altruism after a central nervous system
has been definitely established. At the same time, the activities of even the
lowest organisms are often distinctly referable to either category.... Hardly
distinguishable at the outset, the primitive hunger and love become the
starting-points of divergent lines of egoistic and altruistic emotion and
activity."[18]
That at a much earlier stage than is usually
supposed, Evolution visibly enters upon the "rudimentary ethical" plane,
is certain, and we shall hope to outline the proof. But even if the thesis
fails, it remains to challenge the general view that the Struggle for Life is
everything, and the Struggle for the Life of Others nothing. Seeing not only
that the second is the more important, but also this far more significant
fact--which has not yet been alluded to--that as Evolution proceeds the one
Struggle waxes, and the other wanes, would it not be wiser to study the
drama nearer its denouement before deciding whether it was a moral, a
non-moral, or an immoral play?
Lest the alleged waning of the Struggle
for Life convey a wrong impression, let it be added that of course the word is
to be taken qualitatively. The Struggle in itself can never cease. What ceases
is its so-called anti-ethical character. For nothing is in finer evidence as we
rise in the scale of life than the gradual tempering of the Struggle for Life.
Its slow amelioration is the work of ages, may be the work of ages still, but
its animal qualities in the social life of Man are being surely left behind;
and though the mark of the savage and the brute still mar its handiwork, these
harsher qualities must pass away. In that new social order which the gathering
might of the altruistic spirit is creating now around us, in that reign of Love
which must one day, if the course of Evolution holds on its way, be realized,
the baser elements will find that solvent prepared for them from the beginning
in anticipation of a higher rule on earth. Interpreting the course of Evolution
scientifically, whether from its starting-point in the first protoplasm, or
from the rallying-point of its two great forces in the social organism of
to-day, it becomes more and more certain that only from the commingled
achievement of both can the nature of the process be truly judged. Yet, as one
sees the one sun set, and the other rise with a splendour the more astonishing
and bewildering as the centuries roll on, it is impossible to withhold a
verdict as to which may be most reasonably looked upon as the ultimate reality
of the world. The path of progress and the path of Altruism are one. Evolution
is nothing but the Involution of Love, the revelation of Infinite Spirit, the
Eternal Life returning to Itself. Even the great shadow of Egoism which darkens
the past is revealed as shadow only because we are compelled to read it by the
higher light which has come. In the very act of judging it to be shadow, we
assume and vindicate the light. And in every vision of the light, contrariwise,
we resolve the shadow, and perceive the end for which both light and dark are
given.
"I can believe,
this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else,
Devised--all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain--to evolve,
By new machinery in counterpart,
The moral qualities of Man--how else?--
To make him love in turn, and be beloved,
Creative and self-sacrificing too,
And thus eventually Godlike." [19]
WHY WAS EVOLUTION THE METHOD CHOSEN?
One seldom-raised yet not merely curious
question of Evolution is, why the process should be an evolution at all? If
Evolution is simply a method of Creation, why was this very extraordinary
method chosen? Creation tout d'un coup might have produced the
same result; an instantaneous act or an age-long process would both have given
us the world as it is? The answer of modern natural theology has been that the
evolutionary method is the infinitely nobler scheme. A spectacular act, it is
said, savours of the magician. As a mere exhibition of power it appeals to the
lower nature; but a process of growth suggests to the reason the work of an
intelligent Mind. No doubt this intellectual gain is real. While a catastrophe
puts the universe to confusion at the start, a gradual rise makes the beginning
of Nature harmonious with its end. How the surpassing grandeur of the new
conception has filled the imagination and kindled to enthusiasm the soberest
scientific minds, from Darwin downwards, is known to everyone. As the memorable
words which close the Origin of Species recall: "There is a grandeur in
this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by
the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone
cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being
evolved."[20]
But can an intellectual answer satisfy us any
more than the mechanical answer which it replaced? As there was clearly a moral
purpose in the end to be achieved by Evolution, should we not expect to find
some similar purpose in the means? Can we perceive no high design in selecting
this particular design, no worthy ethical result which should justify the
conception as well as the execution of Evolution?
We go too far, perhaps, in expecting answers to
questions so transcendent. But one at least suggests itself, whose practical
value is apology enough for venturing to advance it. Whenever the scheme was
planned, it must have been foreseen that the time would come when the directing
of part of the course of Evolution would pass into the hands of Man. A
spectator of the drama for ages, too ignorant to see that it was a drama, and
too impotent to do more than play his little part, the discovery must sooner or
later break upon him that Nature meant him to become a partner in her task, and
share the responsibility of the closing acts. It is not given to him as yet to
bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or to unloose the bands of Orion. In
part only can he make the winds and waves obey him, or control the falling
rain. But in larger part he holds the dominion of the world of lower life. He
exterminates what he pleases; he creates and he destroys; he changes; he
evolves; his selection replaces natural selection; he replenishes the earth
with plants and animals according to his will. But in a far grander sphere, and
in an infinitely profounder sense, has the sovereignty passed to him, For, by
the same decree, he finds himself the guardian and the arbiter of his personal
destiny, and that of his fellow-men. The moulding of his life and of his
children's children in measure lie with him. Through institutions of his
creation, through Parliaments, Churches, Societies, Schools, he shapes the path
of progress for his country and his time. The evils of the world are combated
by his remedies; its passions are stayed, its wrongs redressed, its energies
for good or evil directed by his hand. For unnumbered millions he opens or
shuts the gates of happiness, and paves the way for misery or social health.
Never before was it known and felt with the same solemn certainty that Man,
within bounds which none can pass, must be his own maker and the maker of the
world. For the first time in history not individuals only but multitudes of the
wisest and the noblest in every land take home to themselves, and unceasingly
concern themselves with, the problem of the Evolution of Mankind. Multitudes
more, philanthropists, statesmen, missionaries, humble men and patient women,
devote themselves daily to its practical solution, and everywhere some, in a
God-like culmination of Altruism, give their very lives for their fellow-men.
Who is to help these Practical Evolutionists--for those who read the book of
Nature can call them by no other name, and those who know its spirit can call
them by no higher--who is to help them in their tremendous task? There is the
will--where is the wisdom?
Where but in Nature herself. Nature may have
entrusted the further building to Mankind, but the plan has never left her
hands. The lines of the future are to be learned from her past, and her
fellow-helpers can most easily, most loyally, and most perfectly do their part
by studying closely the architecture of the earlier world, and continuing the
half-finished structure symmetrically to the top. The information necessary to
complete the work with architectural consistency lies in Nature. We might
expect that it should be there. When a business is transferred, or a partner
assumed, the books are shown, the methods of the business explained, its future
developments pointed out. All this is now done for the Evolution of Mankind. In
Evolution Creation has shown her hand. To have kept the secret from Man would
have imperilled the further evolution. To have revealed it sooner had been
premature. Love must come before knowledge, for knowledge is the instrument of
Love, and useless till it arrives. But now that there is Altruism enough in the
world to begin the new era, there must be wisdom enough to direct it. To make
Nature spell out her own career, to embody the key to the development in the
very development itself, so that the key might be handed over along with the
work, was to make the transference of responsibility possible and rational. In
the seventeenth century, Descartes, who with Leibnitz already foresaw the
adumbration of the evolutionary process, almost pointed this out; for speaking,
in another connection, of the intellectual value of a slow development of
things he observes, "their nature is much more easy to conceive when they are
seen originating by degrees in this way, than when they are considered as
entirely made."[21]
The past of Nature is a working-model of how
worlds can be made. The probabilities are there is no better way of making
them. If Man does as well it will be enough. In any case he can only begin
where Nature left off, and work with such tools as are put into his hands. If
the new partner had been intended merely to experiment with world-making, no
such legacy of useful law had been ever given him. And if he had been meant to
begin de novo on a totally different plan, it is unlikely either that
that should not have been hinted at, or that in his touching and beautiful
endeavour he should be embarrassed and thrown off the track by the old plan. As
a child set to complete some fine embroidery is shown the stitches, the
colours, and the outline traced upon the canvas, so the great Mother in setting
their difficult task to her later children provides them with one superb part
finished to show the pattern.
EVOLUTION AND SOCIOLOGY
[2] Data of Ethics, p. 65.
[3] Darwinism, p. 461.
[4] There is a third function--that of
Co-relation--but, to avoid confusing the immediate issue, this may remain at
present in the background.
[5] Darwinism, p. 37.
[6] Evolution and Ethics, p.6.
[7] Nineteenth Century, Feb., l888.
[8] Evolution and Ethics, p. 27.
[9] Evolution and Ethics, p. 33.
[10] Evolution and Ethics, p. 35.
[11] Evolution and Ethics, note 19.
[12] Evolution and Ethics, note 19.
[13] Prof Seth, Blackwood's Magazine,
Dec., 1893.
[14] Prof. H. Jones, Browning, p.
28.
[15] Meditationes Sacrae, X.
[16] Principles of Ethics, Vol. II.,
p. 5.
[17] The Evolution of Sex, p. 279.
[18] Ibid., p. 279.
[19] The Ring and the Book--The Pope,
1375.
[20] Origin of Species, p. 429.
[21] Discourse on Method.
[22] The Evolution of Religion, Vol.
I, pp. 26, 29.
[23] Evolution and Ethics, p. 27.
[24] Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution,
p. 28.
[25] Op. cit., p. 78.
[26] Op. cit., p. 64.
[27] Op. cit., p. 79.
[28] Op. cit., p. 77-8.
[29] Op. cit., p. 80.
[30] Principles of Ethics, Vol. II.,
p. 6.
The moment it is grasped that we may have in
Nature a key to the future progress of Mankind, the study of Evolution rises to
an imposing rank in human interest. There lies the programme of the world from
the first of time, the instrument, the charter, and still more the prophecy of
progress. Evolution is the natural directory of the sociologist, the guide
through that which has worked in the past to what--subject to modifying
influences which Nature can always be trusted to give full notice of--may be
expected to work in the future. Here, for the individual, is a new and
impressive summons to public action, a vocation chosen of Nature which it will
profit him to consider, for thereby he may not only save the whole world, but
find his own soul. "The study of the historical development of man," says Prof.
Edward Caird, "especially in respect of his higher life, is not only a matter
of external or merely speculative curiosity; it is closely connected with the
development of that life in ourselves. For we learn to know ourselves, first of
all, in the mirror of the world: or, in other words, our knowledge of our own
nature and of its possibilities grows and deepens with our understanding of
what is without us, and most of all with our understanding of the general
history of man. It has often been noticed that there is a certain analogy
between the life of the individual and that of the race, and even that the life
of the individual is a sort of epitome of the history of humanity. But, as
Plato already discovered, it is by reading the large letters that we learn to
interpret the small.... It is only through a deepened consciousness of the
world that the human spirit can solve its own problem. Especially is this true
in the region of anthropology. For the inner life of the individual is deep and
full, just in proportion to the width of his relations to other men and things;
and his consciousness of what he is in himself as a spiritual being is
dependent on a comprehension of the position of his individual life in the
great secular process by which the intellectual and moral life of humanity has
grown and is growing. Hence the highest practical as well as speculative
interests of men are connected with the new extension of science which has
given fresh interest and meaning to the whole history of the race."[22]
If, as Herbert Spencer reminds us, "it is one of
those open secrets which seem the more secret because they are so open, that
all phenomena displayed by a nation are phenomena of Life, and are dependent on
the laws of Life," we cannot devote ourselves to study those laws too earnestly
or too soon. From the failure to get at the heart of the first principles of
Evolution the old call to "follow Nature" has all but become a heresy. Nature,
as a moral teacher, thanks to the Darwinian interpretation, was never more
discredited than at this hour; and friend and foe alike agree in warning us
against her. But a further reading of Nature may decide not that we must
discharge the teacher but beg her mutinous pupils to try another term at
school. With Nature studied in the light of a true biology, or even in the
sense in which the Stoics themselves employed their favourite phrase, it must
become once more the watchword of personal and social progress. With Mr.
Huxley's definition of what the Stoics meant by Nature as "that which holds up
the ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute submission of the will to
its behests . . . which commands all men to love one another, to return good
for evil, to regard one another as citizens of one great state,"[23] the phrase, "Live according to Nature," so far from
having no application to the modern world or no sanction in modern thought, is
the first commandment of Natural Religion.
The sociologist has grievously complained of late
that he could get but little help from science. The suggestions of Bagehot, the
Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, the proposals of multitudes of the
followers of the last who announced the redemption of the world the moment they
discovered the "Social Organism," raised great expectations. But somehow they
were not fulfilled. Mr. Spencer's work has been mainly to give this century,
and in part all time, its first great map of the field. He has brought all the
pieces on the board, described them one by one, defined and explained the game.
But what he has failed to do with sufficient precision, is to pick out the King
and Queen. And because he has not done so, some men have mistaken his pawns for
kings; others have mistaken the real kings for pawns; every ism has
found endorsement in his pages, and men have gathered courage for projects as
hostile to his whole philosophy as to social order. Theories of progress have
arisen without any knowledge of its laws, and the ordered course of things has
been done violence to by experiments which, unless the infinite conservatism of
Nature had neutralized their evils, had been a worse disaster than they are.
This inadequacy, indeed, of modern sociology to meet the practical problems of
our time, has become a by-word. Mr. Leslie Stephen pronounces the existing
science "a heap of vague empirical observation, too flimsy to be useful"; and
Mr. Huxley, exasperated with the condition in which it leaves the human family,
protests that "if there is no hope of a large improvement" he should "hail the
advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole affair away."
The first step in the reconstruction of Sociology
will be to escape from the shadow of Darwinism-- or rather to complement the
Darwinian formula of the Struggle for Life by a second factor which will turn
its darkness into light. A new morphology can only come from a new physiology,
and vice versa, and for both we must return to Nature. The one-sided
induction has led Sociology into a wilderness of empiricism, and only a
complete induction can reinstate it among the sciences. The vacant place is
there awaiting it; and every earnest mind is prepared to welcome it, not only
as the coming science, but as the crowning Science of all the sciences, the
Science, indeed, for which it will one day be seen every other science exists.
What it waits for meantime is what every science has had to wait for,
exhaustive observation of the facts and ways of Nature. Geology stood still for
centuries waiting for those who would simply look at the facts. Men speculated
in fantastic ways as to how the world could have been made, and the last thing
that occurred to them was to go and see it making. Then came the observers, men
who, waiving all theories of the process, addressed themselves to the natural
world direct, and in watching its daily programme of falling rain and running
stream laid bare the secret for all time. Sociology has had its Werners; it
awaits its Huttons. The method of Sociology must be the method of all the
natural sciences. It also must go and see the world making, not where the
conditions are already abnormal beyond recall, or where Man, by irregular
action, has already obscured everything but the conditions of failure; but in
lower Nature which makes no mistakes, and in those fairer reaches of a higher
world where the quality and the stability of the progress are guarantees that
the eternal order of Nature has had her uncorrupted way.
It cannot be that the full programme for the
perfect world lies in the imperfect part. Nor can it ever be that science can
find the end in the beginning, get moral out of non-moral states, evolve human
societies from ant-heaps, or philanthropies from protoplasm. But in every
beginning we get a beginning of an end; in every process a key to the single
step to be taken next. The full corn is not in the ear, but the first cell of
it is, and though `it doth not yet appear' what the million-celled ear shall
be, there is rational ground for judging what the second cell shall be. The
next few cells of the Social Organism are all that are given to Sociology to
affect. And, in dealing with them, its business is with the forces; the
phenomena will take care of themselves. Neither the great forces of Nature, nor
the great lines of Nature, change in a day, and however apparently unrelated
seem the phenomena as we ascend--here animal, there human; at one time
non-moral, at another moral--the lines of progress are the same. Nature, in
horizontal section, is broken up into strata which present to the eye of
ethical Man the profoundest distinctions in the universe; but Nature in the
vertical section offers no break, or pause, or flaw. To study the first
is to study a hundred unrelated sciences, sciences of atoms, sciences of cells,
sciences of Souls, sciences of Societies; to study the second is to deal with
one science--Evolution. Here, on the horizontal section, may be what Geology
calls an unconformability; there is overlap; changes of climate may be
registered from time to time, each with its appropriate reaction on the things
contained; upheavals, depressions, denudations, glaciations, faults, vary the
scene; higher forms of fossils appear as we ascend; but the laws of life are
continuous throughout, the eternal elements in an ever temporal world. The
Struggle for Life, and the Struggle for the Life of Others, in essential
nature, have never changed. They find new expression in each further sphere,
become coloured to our eye with different hues, are there the rivalries or the
affections of the brute, and here the industrial or the moral conflicts of the
race; but the factors themselves remain the same, and all life moves in
widening spirals round them. Fix in the mind this distinction between the
horizontal and the vertical view of Nature, between the phenomena and the law,
between all the sciences that ever were and the one science which resolves them
all, and the confusions and contradictions of Evolution are reconciled. The man
who deals with Nature statically, who catalogues the phenomena of life and
mind, puts on each its museum label, and arranges them in their separate cases,
may well defy you to co-relate such diverse wholes. To him Evolution is alike
impossible and unthinkable. But these items that he labels are not wholes. And
the world he dissects is not a museum, but a living, moving, and ascending
thing. The sociologist's business is with the vertical section, and he who has
to do with this living, moving, and ascending thing must treat it from the
dynamic point of view.
The significant thing for him is the study of
Evolution on its working side. And he will find that nearly all the phenomena
of social and national life are phenomena of these two principles--the Struggle
for Life, and the Struggle for the Life of Others. Hence he must betake himself
in earnest to see what these mean in Nature, what gathers round them as they
ascend, how each acts separately, how they work together, and whither they seem
to lead. More than ever the method of Sociology must be biological. More
urgently than ever "the time has come for a better understanding and for a more
radical method; for the social sciences to strengthen themselves by sending
their roots deep into the soil underneath from which they spring; and for the
biologist to advance over the frontier and carry the methods of his science
boldly into human society, where he has but to deal with the phenomena of life,
where he encounters life at last under its highest and most complex aspect."[24]
Would that the brilliant writer whose words these
are, and whose striking work appears while these sheets are almost in the
press, had "sent his roots deep enough into biological soil" to discover the
true foundation for that future Science of Society which he sees to be so
imperative. No modern thinker has seen the problem so clearly as Mr. Kidd, but
his solution, profoundly true in itself, is vitiated in the eyes of science and
philosophy by a basis wholly unsound. With an emphasis which Darwin himself has
not excelled, he proclaims the enduring value of the Struggle for Life. He sees
its immense significance even in the highest ranges of the social sphere. There
it stands with its imperious call to individual assertion, inciting to a
rivalry which Nature herself has justified, and encouraging every man by the
highest sanctions ceaselessly to seek his own. But he sees nothing else in
Nature; and he encounters therefore the difficulty inevitable from this
standpoint. For to obey this voice means ruin to Society, wrong and anarchy
against the higher Man. He listens for another voice; but there is no response.
As a social being he cannot, in spite of Nature, act on his first initiative.
He must subordinate himself to the larger interest, present and future, of
those around him. But why, he asks, must he, since Nature says "Mind thyself"?
Till Nature adds the further precept, "Look not every man on his own things,
but also on the things of Others," there is no rational sanction for morality.
And he finds no such precept. There is none in Nature. There is none in Reason.
Nature can only point him to a strenuous rivalry as the one condition of
continued progress; Reason can only endorse the verdict. Hence he breaks at
once with reason and with Nature, and seeks an "ultra-rational sanction" for
the future course of social progress.
Here, in his own words, is the situation. "The
teaching of reason to the individual must always be that the present time and
his own interests therein are all-important to him. Yet the forces which are
working out our development are primarily concerned not with those interests of
the individual, but with those widely different interests of a social organism
subject to quite other conditions and possessed of an indefinitely longer life.
. . . The central fact with which we are confronted in our progressive
societies is, therefore, that the interests of the social organism and those of
the individuals comprising it at any time are actually antagonistic; they can
never be reconciled; they are inherently and essentially irreconcilable."[25] Observe the extraordinary dilemma. Reason
not only has no help for the further progress of Society, but Society can only
go on upon a principle which is an affront to it. As Man can only attain his
highest development in Society, his individual interests must more and more
subordinate themselves to the welfare of a wider whole. "How is the possession
of reason ever to be rendered compatible with the will to submit to conditions
of existence so onerous, requiring the effective and continual subordination of
the individual's welfare to the progress of a development in which he can have
no personal interest whatever?"[26]
Mr. Kidd's answer is the bold one that it is not
compatible. There is no rational sanction whatever for progress. Progress, in
fact, can only go on by enlisting Man's reason against itself. "All those
systems of moral philosophy, which have sought to find in the nature of things
a rational sanction for human conduct in society, must sweep round and round in
futile circles. They attempt an inherently impossible task. The first great
social lesson of those evolutionary doctrines which have transformed the
science of the nineteenth century is, that there cannot be such a sanction.[27] . . . The extraordinary character of the
problem presented by human society begins thus slowly to come into view. We
find man making continual progress upwards, progress which it is almost beyond
the power of the imagination to grasp. From being a competitor of the brutes he
has reached a point of development at which he cannot himself set any limits to
the possibilities of further progress, and at which he is evidently marching
onwards to a high destiny. He has made this advance under the sternest
conditions, involving rivalry and competition for all, and the failure and
suffering of great numbers. His reason has been, and necessarily continues to
be, a leading factor in this development; yet, granting, as we apparently must
grant, the possibility of the reversal of the conditions from which his
progress results, those conditions have not any sanction from his reason. They
have had no such sanction at any stage of his history, and they continue to be
as much without such sanction in the highest civilizations of the present day
as at any past period."[28]
These conclusions will not have been quoted in
vain if they show the impossible positions to which a writer, whose
contribution otherwise is of profound and permanent value, is committed by a
false reading of Nature. Is it conceivable, a priori, that the
human reason should be put to confusion by a breach of the Law of Continuity at
the very point where its sustained action is of vital moment? The whole
complaint, which runs like a dirge through every chapter of this book, is
founded on a misapprehension of the fundamental laws which govern the processes
of Evolution. The factors of Darwin and Weismann are assumed to contain an
ultimate interpretation of the course of things. For all time the conditions of
existence are taken as established by these authorities. With the Struggle for
Life in sole possession of the field no one, therefore, we are warned, need
ever repeat the gratuitous experiment of the past, of Socrates, Plato, Kant,
Hegel, Comte, and Herbert Spencer, to find a sanction for morality in Nature.
"All methods and systems alike, which have endeavoured to find in the nature of
things any universal rational sanction for individual conduct in a progressive
society, must be ultimately fruitless. They are all alike inherently
unscientific in that they attempt to do what the fundamental conditions of
existence render impossible." And Mr. Kidd puts a climax on his devotion to the
doctrine of his masters by mourning over "the incalculable loss to English
Science and English Philosophy" because Herbert Spencer's work "was practically
complete before his intellect had any opportunity of realizing the full
transforming effect in the higher regions of thought, and, more particularly,
in the department of sociology, of that development of biological science which
began with Darwin, which is still in full progress, and to which Professor
Weismann has recently made the most notable contributions."[29] Whether Mr. Spencer's ignorance or his science has been
at the bottom of the escape, it is at least a lucky one. For if Mr. Kidd had
realized "the full transforming effect" of the following paragraph, much of his
book could not have been written. "The most general conclusion is that in order
of obligation, the preservation of the species takes precedence of the
preservation of the individual. It is true that the species has no existence
save as an aggregate of individuals; and it is true that, therefore, the
welfare of the species is an end to be subserved only as subserving the welfare
of individuals. But since disappearance of the species, implying absolute
disappearance of all individuals, involves absolute failure in achieving the
end, whereas disappearance of individuals, though carried to a great extent,
may leave outstanding such numbers as can, by continuance of the species, make
subsequent fulfilment of the end possible; the preservation of the individual
must, in a variable degree according to circumstances, be subordinated to the
preservation of the species, where the two conflict."[30]
What Mr. Kidd has succeeded, and splendidly
succeeded, in doing is to show that Nature as interpreted in terms of the
Struggle for Life contains no sanction either for morality or for social
progress. But instead of giving up Nature and Reason at this point, he should
have given up Darwin. The Struggle for Life is not "the supreme fact up
to which biology has slowly advanced." It is the fact to which Darwin advanced;
but if biology had been thoroughly consulted it could not have given so maimed
an account of itself. With the final conclusion reached by Mr. Kidd we have no
quarrel. Eliminate the errors due to an unrevised acceptance of Mr. Darwin's
interpretation of Nature, and his work remains the most important contribution
to Social Evolution which the last decade has seen. But what startles us is his
method. To put the future of Social Science on an ultra-rational basis is
practically to give it up. Unless thinking men have some sense of the
consistency of a method they cannot work with it, and if there is no guarantee
of the stability of the results it would not be worth while.
But all that Mr. Kidd desires is really to be
found in Nature. There is no single element even of his highest sanction which
is not provided for in a thorough-going doctrine of Evolution--a doctrine, that
is, which includes all the facts and all the factors, and especially which
takes into accounts that evolution of Environment which goes on pari passu
with the evolution of the organism and where the highest sanctions
ultimately lie. With an Environment which widens and enriches until it
includes--or consciously includes, for it has never been absent--the Divine;
and with Man so evolving as to become more and more conscious that that Divine
is there, and above all that it is in himself, all the materials and all the
sanctions for a moral progress are for ever secure. None of the sanctions of
religion are withdrawn by adding to them the sanctions of Nature. Even those
sanctions which are supposed to lie over and above Nature may be none the less
rational sanctions. Though a positive religion, in the Comtian sense, is no
religion, a religion that is not in some degree positive is an impossibility.
And although religion must always rest upon faith, there is a reason for faith,
and a reason not only in Reason, but in Nature herself. When Evolution comes to
be worked out along its great natural lines, it may be found to provide for all
that religion assumes, all that philosophy requires, and all that science
proves.
Theological minds, with premature approval, have
hailed Mr. Kidd's solution as a vindication of their supreme position.
Practically, as a vindication of the dynamic power of the religious factor in
the Evolution of Mankind, nothing could be more convincing. But as an
apologetic, it only accentuates a weakness which scientific theology never felt
more keenly than at the present hour. This weakness can never be removed by an
appeal to the ultra-rational. Does Mr. Kidd not perceive that anyone possessed
of reason enough to encounter his dilemma, either in the sphere of thought or
of conduct, will also have reason enough to reject any "ultra-rational"
solution? This dilemma is not one which would occur to more than one in a
thousand; it has tasked all Mr. Kidd's powers to convince his reader that it
exists; but if exceptional intellect is required to see it, surely exceptional
intellect must perceive that this is not the way out of it. One cannot, in
fact, think oneself out of a difficulty of this kind; it can only be
lived out. And that precisely is what Nature is making all of us, in
greater or less degree, do, and every day making us do more. By the time,
indeed, that the world as a whole is sufficiently educated to see the problem,
it will already have been solved. There is little comfort, then, for
apologetics in this direction. Only by bringing theology into harmony with
Nature and into line with the rest of our knowledge can the noble interests
given it to conserve retain their vitality in a scientific age. The first
essential of a working religion is that it shall be congruous with Man; the
second that it shall be congruous with Nature. Whatever its sanctions, its
forces must not be abnormal, but reinforcements and higher potentialities of
those forces which, from eternity, have shaped the progress of the world. No
other dynamic can enter into the working schemes of those who seek to guide the
destinies of nations or carry on the Evolution of Society on scientific
principles. A divorce here would be the catastrophe of reason, and the end of
faith. We believe with Mr. Kidd that "the process of social development which
has been taking place, and which is still in progress, in our Western
civilization, is not the product of the intellect, but the motive force behind
it has had its seat and origin in the fund of altruistic feeling with
which our civilization has become equipped." But we shall endeavour to show
that this fund of altruistic feeling has been slowly funded in the race by
Nature, or through Nature, and as the direct and inevitable result of that
Struggle for the Life of Others, which has been from all time a condition of
existence. What religion has done to build up this fund, it may not be within
the scope of this introductory volume to inquire; it has done so much that
students of religion may almost be pardoned the oversight of the stupendous
natural basis which made it possible. But nothing is gained by protesting that
"this altruistic development, and the deepening and softening of character
which has accompanied it, are the direct and peculiar product of the
religious system." For nothing can ever be gained by setting one half of Nature
against the other, or the rational against the ultra-rational. To affirm that
Altruism is a peculiar product of religion is to excommunicate Nature from the
moral order, and religion from the rational order. If science is to begin to
recognize religion, religion must at least end by recognizing science. And so
far from religion sacrificing vital distinctions by allying itself with Nature,
so far from impoverishing its immortal quality by accepting some contribution
from the lower sphere, it thereby extends itself over the whole rich field, and
claims all--matter, life, mind, space, time--for itself. The present danger is
not in applying Evolution as a method, but only in not carrying it far enough.
No man, no man of science even, observing the simple facts, can ever rob
religion of its due. Religion has done more for the development of Altruism in
a few centuries than all the millenniums of geological time. But we dare not
rob Nature of its due. We dare not say that Nature played the prodigal for
ages, and reformed at the eleventh hour. If Nature is the Garment of God, it is
woven without seam throughout; if a revelation of God, it is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever; if the expression of His Will, there is in it
no variableness nor shadow of turning. Those who see great gulfs fixed--and we
have all begun by seeing them--end by seeing them filled up. Were these gulfs
essential to any theory of the universe or of Man, even the establishment of
the unity of Nature were a dear price to pay for obliterating them. But the
apparent loss is only gain, and the seeming gain were infinite loss. For to
break up Nature is to break up Reason, and with it God and Man.
[1] Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 9th Ed.
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