CHAPTER IX
THE EVOLUTION OF A FATHER
IN last chapter we watched the beautiful
experiment of Nature making Mothers. We saw how the young produced at one birth
were gradually reduced in numbers until it was possible for affection to
concentrate upon a single object; how that object was delayed in birth till it
was a likeable and presentable thing; how it was tied to its mother's side by
physical bonds, and hindered there for years to give time for the Mother's care
to ripen into love. We saw, what was still more instructive, that Nature, when
she had laid the train for perfecting these arrangements, gave up making any
more animals; and that there were physiological reasons why this well-mothered
class should survive beyond all others, and, by sheer physiological fitness,
henceforth dominate the world.
But there was still a crowning task to
accomplish. The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were no
Fathers. During all this long process the Father has not even been named.
Nothing that has been done has touched or concerned him almost in the least
degree. He has gone his own way, lived outside all these changes; and while
Nature has succeeded in moulding a human Mother and a human child, he still
wanders in the forest a savage and unblessed soul.
This time for him, nevertheless, is not lost. In
his own way he is also at school, and learning lessons which will one day be
equally needed by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary
to human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the cradle;
and these robuster elements--strength, courage, manliness, endurance,
self-reliance--could only have been secured away from domestic cares. Apart
from that, it was not necessary to put the Father through the same mill as the
Mother. Whatever the Mother gained would be handed on to her boys as well as to
her girls, and with the law of heredity to square accounts, it was unnecessary
for each of the two great sides of humanity to make the same investments. By
one acquiring one set of virtues and the other another, the blend in the end
would be the richer; and, without obliterating the eternal individualities of
each, the measure of completeness would be gained more quickly for the race.
Before heredity, however, could do its work upon the Father a certain basis had
to be laid. With his original habits he would squander the hereditary gains as
fast as he received them, and unless some change was brought about in his mode
of life the old wild blood in his veins would counteract the gentler influence,
and leave all the Mother's work in vain. Hence Nature had to set about another
long and difficult process--to make the savage Father a reformed character.
The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a
process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as formidable a problem
to attack. As much depended on it, as we shall see, as the training of the
mother; and though it began later, it required the bringing about of one or two
changes in Nature as novel as any that preceded it. When the work was begun,
the Father was in a much worse plight, so far as training for family life was
concerned, than the Mother. If Maternity was at a feeble level in the lower
reaches of Nature, Paternity was non-existent. Among a few Invertebrates the
male parent took a passing share in the care of the egg, but it is not until we
are all but at the top that fatherly interest finds any real expression. Among
the Birds, the parents unite together in most cases to build the nest, the
Father doing the rough work of bringing in moss and twigs, while the more
trusty Mother does the actual work. When the eggs are laid, the male parent
also takes his turn at incubation; supplies food and protection; and lingers
round the place of birth to defend the fledglings to the last. When we leave
the Birds, however, and pass on to the Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all
backsliders. Many are not only indifferent to their young, but hostile: and
among the Carnivora the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in
case the father eats them.
We have another and a more serious count against
early Fatherhood. If the Love of Father for child was in this backward state,
infinitely more grave was the condition of things between him and the Mother.
Probably we have all taken it for granted that husbands and wives have always
loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted. The affection between
husband and wife is, of all the immeasurable forms of Love, the most beautiful,
the most lasting, and the most divine: yet up to this time we have not been
able even to record its existence. The finished results of Evolution appear so
natural to us, looking back from this late day, that we continually ignore the
difficulties it had to meet, and forget how every single step in progress from
the lowest to the highest had to be carried at the bayonet's point. The most
informed naturalist probably has never given Nature credit for a thousandth
part of the work she has done, or has succeeded in presenting to his mind more
than a surface outline of the gigantic series of problems she had to solve. In
lower Nature, as a simple fact, male and female do not love one another; and in
the lower reaches of Human-Nature, husband and wife do not love one another.
Among exceptional nations, for the last few hours of the world's history,
husbands and wives have truly loved; but for the vast mass of Mankind, during
the long ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all but
unknown.
Now here is a very pretty problem for Evolution.
She has at once to make good Husbands and good Fathers out of lawless savages.
Unless this problem is solved the higher progress of the world is at an end. It
is the mature opinion of every one who has thought upon the history of the
world, that the thing of highest importance for all times and to all nations is
Family Life. When the Family was instituted, and not till then, the higher
Evolution of the world was secured. Hence the exceptional value of the Father's
development. As the other half of the arch on which the whole higher world is
built, his taming, his domestication, his moral discipline, are vital; and in
the nature of things this was the next great operation undertaken by
Evolution.
The first step in the transition was to relate
him, definitely and permanently, to the Mother. And here a formidable initial
obstacle had to be encountered. The apathy and estrangement between husband and
wife in the animal world is radical and universal. There is almost no such
thing there as married life. Marriage, in anthropology, is not a word for an
occasion, but for a state; it is not, that is to say, a wedding, but a dwelling
together throughout life of husband and wife. Now when Man emerged from the
animal creation this institution of conjugal life had not been arrived at.
Marriage like everything else has been slowly evolved, and until it was
evolved, until they learned to dwell continually together, there was no chance
for mutual love to spring up between male and female. In Nature the pairing
season is usually but an incident. It lasts only a very short time, and during
the rest of the year, with some exceptions, the sexes remain apart. From the
investigations of Westermarck, who has lately contributed to sociology the most
masterly account of the Evolution of Marriage we possess--it appears more than
probable that the earliest progenitors of Man had also a pairing season, and
that the young were born at a particular time of the year, and never at any
other time. All the animals nearest to Man in Nature have such a season, and
there are only a few known--the elephant for instance, and some of the
whales--which have none. Now the brevity of this period in the father's case
must have told against his developing any real affection. If he is to run away
a few days after the young are born he will miss all the discipline of the
home, and as this discipline is essential, as this is the only way in which
love can be acquired, or inherited love developed, some method must be adopted
in his case to extend the period of home life during which it can act.
Now let us see how this was done. The problem
being to give Love time, the solution was in some way to alter the
circumstances which confined the pairing season to a specific date--to abolish,
in fact, the pairing season in the case of Man, and lengthen out the time in
which husband and wife should stay together. And as this was actually the
method adopted, we have first to ask what these special circumstances were. Why
should animals have specific dates at all? . The clue will be found if we
examine carefully what these dates are and the reasons Nature has had for
choosing them. Some wise principle must underlie this, or it would not be the
universal rule it is. The pairing time with Birds, as everyone knows, occurs in
the Spring. With Reptiles this is also the case; but among Mammals each species
has a season peculiar to itself, every separate month being selected by one or
other, and invariably adhered to. "The bat pairs in January and February; the
wild camel in the desert to the east of Lake Lob-nor, from the middle of
January nearly to the end of February; the Canis Azarae and the Indian bison in
winter; the weasel in March; the kulan from May to July; the musk-ox at the end
of August; the elk, in the Baltic Provinces, at the end of August, and, in
Asiatic Russia, in September or October; the wild Yak in Tibet in September;
the reindeer in Norway at the end of September; the badger in October; the
Capra pyrenaica in November; the chamois, the musk-deer, and the
orongo-antelope in November and December; the wolf, from the end of December to
the middle of February."[91] It might seem
that no law governed these various dates, but their very variety is the proof
of an underlying principle. For these dates show that each animal in each
particular country chooses that time of the year to give birth to her young
when they will have the best chance of surviving--that is to say, when the
climate is mildest, food most abundant, and the prospects of life on the whole
most favourable. The dormouse thus brings forth its young in August, when the
nuts begin to ripen; and the young deer sees the light just before the first
grass shoots into greenness. Because those born at this season survived and
those born out of it perished, by the prolonged action of Natural Selection
these dates in time probably became engrained in the species, and would only
alter with climate itself.
But when Man's Evolution made a certain progress,
and when the Mother's care reached mature perfection, it was no longer
imperative for children to be born only when the sun was shining, and the
fruits grew ripe. The parents could now make provision for any weather and for
any dearth. They could give their little ones clothes when nights grew cold;
they could build barns and granaries against times of famine. In any climate,
and at any time, their young were safe; and the old marriage dates, with their
subsequent desertions, were struck from the human calendar. So arose, or at
least was inaugurated, Family Life, the first and the last nursery of the
higher sympathies, and the home of all that was afterwards holy in the world.
One could not find a simpler instance of the growing sovereignty of Mind over
the powers of Nature. So remote a cause as the inclination of the earth's axis,
and the consequent changes of the seasons, determines the time of Marriage for
almost the whole animal creation, while Man, and a few other forms of life
whose environment is exceptional, are able to refuse all such dictations. It
was when Man's mind became capable of making its own provisions against the
weather and the crops that the possibility of Fatherhood, Motherhood, and the
Family were realized.
The supporters of the hypothesis of promiscuity
have tried to show, what would almost follow from their theory, that the
children in primitive times belonged rather to the tribe. But it is not likely
that this was the case. The hypothesis of promiscuity itself, notwithstanding
its support from M'Lennan, Morgan, Lubbock, Bastian, Post, and other
authorities, has probably received its death-blow; and the ancientness of the
family as well as of the institution of Marriage are both vindicated by later
facts. "Everywhere," writes Westermarck, "we find the tribes or clans composed
of several families, the members of each family being more closely connected
with one another than with the rest of the tribe. The Family, consisting of
parents, children, and often also their next descendants, is a universal
institution among existing people. And it seems extremely probable that among
our early human ancestors, the Family proved, if not the Society itself, at
least the nucleus of it. I do not, of course, deny that the tie which bound the
children to the Mother was much more intimate and more lasting than that which
bound them to the Father; but it seems to me that the only result to which a
critical investigation of facts can lead us is, that in all probability there
has been no stage of human development where marriage has not existed, and that
the father has always been, as a rule, the protector of his Family."[92]
But the process is not yet quite completed. With
the longer time together husband and wife may get to know and lean upon one
another a little, but the time is still too short for deep affection, and there
remain one or two serious obstacles to remove. Indeed, unless some further
steps are taken, this first achievement must end in failure. As a matter of
fact, it has often ended in failure, and there have been and still are tribes
and nations where love between husband and wife is non-existent. Among the
Hovas, we are assured by authorities, the idea of love between husband and wife
is "hardly thought of"; that at Winnebah "not even the appearance of affection"
exists between them; that among the Beni-Amer it is "considered even
disgraceful for a wife to show any affection for her husband"; that the
Chittagong Hill tribes have "no idea of tenderness nor of chivalrous devotion";
and that the Eskimo treat their wives "with great coldness and neglect." The
savage cruelty with which wives are treated by the Australian aborigines is
indicated even in their weapons. The very names "Servant, Slave," by which the
Brahman address their wives, and the wife's reply, "Master, Lord," symbolize
the gulf between the two. There are exceptions, it is true, and often touching
exceptions. Travellers cite instances of constancy among savage peoples which
reach the region of romance. Probably there never was a time, indeed, nor a
race, when some measure of sympathy did not stir between husband and wife. But
when we consider all the facts, it is impossible to doubt that in the region of
all the higher affections the savage wife and the savage husband were all but
strangers to each other.
What then was wanting for the perfecting of the
domestic tie, and how did Evolution secure it? In the animal creation, we have
already witnessed the methods which Nature took to get more care out of little
care, to make a short-lived sympathy grow into a great sympathy. Her method was
first, concentration; and second, extension of time. By giving a Mother one or
two young to care for instead of a hundred, she made care practicable, and by
lengthening the period of infancy from hours to years she made it inevitable.
And these are again her methods in perfecting love between man and wife. By
abolishing the pairing season she lengthened the time for love to grow in; the
next step is to perfect the object on which it shall focus. For there was again
the same sort of barrier to a full-blown love which we saw before in the animal
kingdom. An animal mother could not truly love in the early days because she
had a hundred or a thousand young. Man could not love in the early days because
he had a dozen wives. This love was too diluted to come to anything. What
Evolution next worked at was to get a quintessence. Polygamy, in other words,
the scattered love of many, must, from this time forward, be changed into
monogamy--the absorbing love of one. And this transposition was gradually
introduced. A few polygamous people, a very few at first, become monogamous.
The new system worked better, it spread, and was finally adopted by those
higher nations which it also helped to create. It is an instance, nevertheless,
of the slowness with which radical changes succeed in leavening great masses of
mankind, that the older system, with the ban of Evolution upon it, still
survives in Modern Europe. Yet there are signs, even among the uncivilized,
that polygamy is passing away. Among some almost savage tribes it is unknown;
among others prohibited. Even in a polygamous community it is usually only a
minority who have more wives than one. And where the plural system is in full
force, the tendency--the Evolutionist would say the transition --to monogamy is
plainly marked, for among the many wives possessed by any individual, there is
generally one who is first favourite and ranks as helpmeet or wife. The stress
just laid upon the ethical gains of the monogamous state as contrasted with the
polygamous, of course only emphasizes one side of the question, and by the pure
naturalist might be ruled out of court. Were the physiologist to go over the
same ground he could give a parallel account of the development, and show that
on the merely Physiological plane the transition to monogamy and the rise of
the Family was a likely if not an inevitable result. It is at least certain
that during those later stages of social Evolution in which Monogamy has
prevailed, the change has been in the best physical interests alike of the
parents, the offspring, and of society.
This barrier removed, Evolution had still much to
do to the other--the brevity of the time during which husband and wife remained
together. What short work Nature had already made of this obstacle--by
abolishing the pairing season--we have just seen. But that requires
supplementing. It is not enough to give time for mutual knowledge and affection
after marriage. Nature must deepen the result by extending it to the
time before marriage. In primitive times there was no such thing as
courtship. Men secured their wives in three ways, and in uncivilized nations so
find them still. Among barbarous nations marriage is not a case of love, but of
capture; among the semi-barbarous it is a case of barter; and among the
imperfectly civilized-- among whom we must often include ourselves--a matter of
convention. The second of these, the purchase system--a slightly evolved form
of marriage by capture--is probably one through which all human Marriage has
passed; and relics of it still exist in the dos and other symbols among
nations with whom the custom of buying a bride has long since passed away. By
degrading the object of barter to the level of a chattel, this system is a
barrier to high affection. But in most cases this is heightened by the
impossibility of that preliminary courtship which leads to mutual knowledge and
intelligent love. The bride and bridegroom, in the extremer cases, meet as
total strangers; and though affection may bud in after years, the mingling of
unknown temperaments, together with the destruction of reverence for woman by
treating her as an article of barter, make the chances small of it blossoming
into a flower.
Courtship, with its vivid perceptions and
quickened emotions, is a great opportunity for Evolution; and to institute and
lengthen reasonably a period so rich in impression is one of its latest and
highest efforts. To give love time, indeed, has been all along, and through a
great variety of arrangements, the chief means of establishing it on the earth.
Unfortunately, the lesson of Nature here is being all too slowly learned, even
among nations with its open book before them. In some of the greatest of
civilized countries real mutual knowledge between the youth of the sexes is
unattainable; marriages are made only by a higher kind of purchase, and the
supreme step in life is taken in the dark. Whatever safeguards this method
provides, it cannot be final, nor can those nations rise to any exalted social
height or moral greatness till some change occurs. It has been given especially
to one nation to lead the world in its assault upon this mistaken law, and to
demonstrate to mankind that in the unconstrained and artless relations of youth
lie higher safeguards than the polite conventions of society can afford. The
people of America have proved that the blending of the sweet currents of
different family-lives in social intercourse, in recreation, and--most original
of all--in education, can take place freely and joyously without any sacrifice
of man's reverence for woman, or woman's reverence for herself; and, springing
out of these naturally mingled lives, there must more and more come those
sacred and happy homes which are the surest guarantees for the moral progress
of a nation. So long as the first concern of a country is for its homes, it
matters little what it seeks second or third. Long before Evolution showed its
scientific interest in this first social aggregate, and proclaimed it the
strategic point in moral progress, poetry, philosophy, and history assigned the
same great place to Family-life. The one point, indeed, where all students of
the past agree, where all prophets of the future meet, where all the sciences
from biology to ethics are enthusiastically at one, is in their faith in the
imperishable potentialities of this yet most simple institution.
With all these barriers removed it might now be
supposed that the process was at last complete. But one of the surprises of
Evolution here awaits us. All the arrangements are finished to fan the flame of
love, yet out of none of them was love itself begotten. The idea that the
existence of sex accounts for the existence of love is untrue. Marriage among
early races, as we have seen, has nothing to do with love. Among savage peoples
the phenomenon everywhere confronts us of wedded life without a grain of love.
Love then is no necessary ingredient of the sex relation; it is not an
outgrowth of passion. Love is love, and has always been love, and has never
been anything lower. Whence, then, came it? If neither the Husband nor the Wife
bestowed this gift upon the world, Who did? It was A Little Child. Till this
appeared, Man's affection was non-existent; Woman's was frozen. The Man did not
love the Woman; the Woman did not love the Man. But one day from its Mother's
very heart, from a shrine which her husband never visited nor knew was there,
which she herself dared scarce acknowledge, a Child drew forth the first fresh
bud of a Love which was not Passion, a Love which was not selfish, a Love which
was an incense from its Maker, and whose fragrance from that hour went forth to
sanctify the world. Later, long later, through the same tiny and unconscious
intermediary, the father's soul was touched. And one day, in the love of a
little child, Father and Mother met.
That this is the true lineage of love, that it
has descended not from Husbands and Wives but through children, is proved by
the simplest study of savage life. Love for children is always a prior and a
stronger thing than love between Father and Mother. The indifference of the
Husband to his Wife--though often greatly exaggerated by anthropology--is all
too manifest, and throughout whole regions the Wife does not love but only
fears her Husband. For the children on the other hand both parents have almost
always a regard. The universality of a Mother's Love is one of the revelations
of travel. Even among cannibals, where the shocking treatment of Wives by their
Husbands is in daily evidence, a case of cruelty to children from the Mother's
side--apart from infanticide, which has a rationale of its own--is rarely heard
of. The status of children if not ideal forms a most striking contrast to the
general moral and social level: and one cannot but decide that they have been
unconsciously the true moral teachers of the world. Had the institution of the
Family depended on Sex and not on affection it would probably never have
endured for any time. Love is eternal; Sex, transient. Its unbridled expression
in individual natures, and its recklessness when thwarted, have given rise to
exaggerated ideas of its power. In all uncontrolled forms, however, it becomes
so immediate a menace to social order that if it does not die out in
self-destruction it is checked by the community and forced into lawful
channels. The only thing that could bear the heavy burden of social order and
adapt itself to every change and fresh demand was the indestructibly solid, yet
elastic, strength of love. The care and culture of love therefore became
thenceforth the first great charge of Evolution, and every obstruction to its
path began to be swept away. Whatever facilities could further its career were
gradually adopted, and changes which soon began to pass over the face of all
human societies seemed but parts of one great conspiracy to hasten its final
reign.
For a prolonged and protective Fatherhood, once
introduced into the world, was immediately taken charge of by Natural
Selection. The children who had fathers to fight for them grew up; those who
had not were killed or starved. The lengthening of the period during which
Father and Mother kept together meant double protection for the little ones;
and the more they kept together for the first few days or weeks, and the more
the Father helped to defend mother and child, the more chance for all three in
the end. The picture which Koppenfells draws of the female Gorilla and her
young ensconced in a nest upon the fork of a tree, while Gorilla pere
sat all night at the foot with his back against the trunk to protect them from
the leopards, is a fair object-lesson in the first or protective stage of the
Father's Evolution. When Man passed, however, as he probably did, from the
frugivorous to the carnivorous state, the Father had the additional
responsibility of keeping his family in food. It would be impossible for a
Mother to hunt for game and attend to her young; and for a long time the young
themselves were useless in the chase, and must be entirely dependent on their
parents' bounty. But this means promotion to the Father. He is not only
protector but food-provider. It is impossible to. believe that in process of
time the discharge of this office did not bring some faint satisfactions to
himself, that the mere sight of his offspring fed instead of famished did not
give him a certain pleasure. And though the pleasure at first may have been no
more than the absence of the annoyance they caused by the clamorousness of
their want, it became a stimulus to exertion, and led in the end to rudimentary
forms of sympathy and self-denial.
Once established in the world as a winning force,
love could only yield to a greater force than itself, and greater force there
is none. In the hands of Natural Selection, therefore, it ran its course.
Whatever physiological adjustments continued to go on beneath the surface,
ethical factors now determined extinction or survival. Bad parents mean starved
children, and starved children will be replaced in the Struggle for Life by
full-fed children, and ere a few generations parents without love will exist no
more. The child, on the other hand, which has drunk most deeply of its Father's
or its Mother's love lives to hand on that which has spared it to a succeeding
race. How much of affection is handed on, or how little, matters not, for
Heredity works with the finest microscope, and sees, and seizes, the invisible.
In a second child, reared by parents one degree more loving than the last, this
ultimate particle of love will grow a little more, and each succeeding Family
in this royal line will be richer in the elements which make for progress than
the last.
When we reach the human Family, we find that this
simple combination was already strong enough to become the nucleus of the
social and national life of the world. For the moment the new forces of
Sympathy, Brotherhood, Self-denial, or Love, began to work among the isolated
units which made up primitive Man, the whole composition and character of the
aggregate began to change. Sooner or later in the recurring necessities of
savage existence there came an opportunity for the members of the first
combination, the little group of Father, Mother, and Sons, to act together.
However unworthily this primitive group merited the name of Family, there was
here what at that time was of final importance-- the elements of physical
strength. He who formerly stood alone in the Struggle for Life now found
himself backed on occasion by an inner circle. Those who outside this circle
ventured to oppose or offend an individual within it had the Family to reckon
with. Ends were gained by the new alliance which were unattainable
single-handed by any individual member of the tribe, and whether enlisted to
evade disaster or secure a prey, to resist an injustice or avenge a wrong, the
odds henceforth and always were in favour of the combination. When it is
remembered how, owing to the comparative equality of the competitors in the
conflict of savage existence, even an infinitesimal advantage on one side or
the other determines health or starvation, survival or extinction, the
importance of the first feeble effort at federation must be recognized.
Shoulder to shoulder has been the watchword all through history of national
development. Almost from the very first, indeed, the Family and not the
individual must have been the unit of Tribal life; and as Families grew more
and more definite, they became the recognized piers of the social structure and
gave a first stability to the race of men.
But great as are the physical advantages of the
Family, the ethical uses, even in the early days of its existence, place this
institution at the head of all the creations of Evolution. For the Family is
not only its greatest creation, but its greatest instrument for further
creation. The ethical changes begin almost the moment it is formed. One
immediate effect, for instance, of the formation of Family groups was to take
off from any single individual the perpetual strain of the Struggle for Life.
The Family as a whole must sometimes fight, but the responsibility and the duty
are now distributed, and those who were once solely preoccupied with the
personal struggle will have respites, during which other things will occupy
their minds. Attention thus called off from environing enemies, the members of
the Family will, as it were, discover one another. New relations among them
will spring up, new adjustments to one another's presence and to one another's
needs, and hitherto unknown elements of character will be gradually called to
the surface. That unselfishness, in some rude form, should now grow up is a
necessity of living together. A man cannot be a member of a Family and remain
an utter egoist. His interests are perforce divided, and though the Family
group is a small surface for unselfishness to spread to and to practise on, no
greater feat could as yet be attempted, and Evolution never runs risks of too
rapid development or over-strain. With the incorporation of the Family into a
Clan or Tribe the area will presently be extended, and the necessity of
controlling self-interest more thoroughly, or merging it in a wider interest,
become more obligatory. But to prepare the altruistic sentiment for so great an
abnegation, the simpler discipline of the Family was required. How firmly
Families in time became welded together in mutual interest and support, and how
much crude Altruism this implies, is evident from the place of Family feuds and
the power of great Families and Houses both in ancient and modern history. A
striking instance is the Vendetta. To avenge a Family insult in countries where
this prevails was a sacred duty to all the relatives, and even the last
surviving member willingly gave up his life to vindicate its honour. So strong
indeed sometimes has grown the power of individual Families that the more
desirable spread of Altruism to the Nation was threatened, and wider interests
so much forgotten that the Family became the enemy of the State. Nothing could
more forcibly show the tremendous power of self-development contained within
the Family circle, and the solidity and strength to which it can grow, than
that, time after time in history, it has had to be crushed and broken up by all
the forces of the State.
Among other elements in human nature fostered in
the Family is one of exceptional interest. The attempt has been made to show
that from the inevitable relations of early Family life, the sense of Duty
first dawned upon the world. The theme is too great, too intricate, and too
dangerous to open under the limitations of the present inquiry, for these deny
us the appeal to Society, to Religion, and even to the Conscience of the higher
Man. But it is due to the Father, whose Evolution we are tracing, that the
share he is supposed by some authorities to take in it should be at least
named.
That morality in general has something to do with
the relations of people to one another is evident, as everyone knows, from the
mere derivation of the word. Mores, morals are in the first instance
customs, the customs or ways which people have when they are together.
Now, the Family is the first occasion of importance where we get people
together. And as there are not only a number of people in a Family, but
different kinds of people, there will be a variety in the relations subsisting
between them, in the customs which stereotype the most frequently repeated
actions necessitated by these relations, and in the moods and attitudes of mind
accompanying them. Leaving out of sight differences of kind among brothers and
sisters, consider the probably more divergent and certainly more dominant
influences of Father and Mother. What the relation of child to Mother has
crystallized into we have sufficiently marked--it is a relation of direct
dependence, and its product is Love. But the Father is a wholly different
influence. What attitude does the Child take up in this austerer presence, and
what ways of acting, what customs, mores, morals, are engrained in the
child's mind through it? The acknowledged position of the Father in most early
tribes is head of the Family. To the children, and generally even to the
Mother, he represents Authority. He is the children's chief. Bachoven has
familiarized us with the idea of a Matriarchate, or Maternal Family; but
although exceptional tribes have given supremacy to the Mother, the rule is for
the Father to be supreme. As head of the Family, therefore, it was his business
to make the Family laws. No doubt the Mother also made laws; but the Father, as
the more terrible person, exacted obedience with greater severity, and his laws
acquired more force. To do what was pleasing in his eyes was a necessity with
the children, and his favour or his frown became standards of what was "good"
and what was "bad." Low as this standard was--the fear or favour of a savage
Father--it was a beginning of right mores, good conduct, proper manners.
Plant in the mind, or evoke from it, the idea of acting in a given way with
reference to some half-dozen daily trifles when done in the presence of one
authoritative individual, and Evolution has already found something to work on.
The children have got six, if not ten commandments. Extend the half-dozen
things done rightly to a whole dozen, and then to a score, and then to a
hundred; and let it become habitual to do these things rightly. When the right
doing of these things commends the doer to one person, he will next be apt to
commend himself by similar conduct to other persons, if their standard happens
to be the same. Whether good behaviour purchases favour or simply succeeds in
evading penalties is at first immaterial. All that is required, under whatever
sanctions, is that some standard of good or bad shall arise. No abstract sense
of duty, of course, here exists; no perfect law; it is a purely personal and
local code; but the word duty has at least received a first imperfect meaning;
and the Father, in some rough way, forms an external conscience to those
beneath him.
Such is the tentative theory of the advocates of
Evolutional Ethics. It may or may not be a possible account of the rise of a
sense of obligation, but it is certain that it does not account for the whole
of it. Why, also, that particular thing should be elicited under the
circumstances described is an unanswered question. In attempting to trace its
rise, no rationale appears of its origin; all proofs, in short, of its
evolution take for granted its previous existence. A latent thing has become
active; an invisible thing has become apparent. In one sense a relation has
been created, in another sense a quality in that relation has been revealed. A
new experiment upon human nature has been tried; a new discovery of its
properties has been the result.
That these moral elements, on the other hand,
must have a beginning somewhere in space and time is certain enough. Not less
necessary to the world than the Mother's gift of Love is the twin offering of
the Father--Righteousness. And if, almost before the soul is born, the shadowy
outline of a moral order should begin to loom out in history, the later phases
and the later sanctions lose nothing of their quality, are all the more
wonderful and all the more divine, because met by moral adumbrations in the
distant past. If the later children had their ten commandments given them in
one way, they cannot grudge that the world's earlier children should have been
given their two or three commandments in another way--another way which,
nevertheless, did we know all, might turn out to be but another phase of the
same way. But it is impossible even to approach the Evolution of Morality until
we have carried Man some stages further up his Ascent. It is only when he
reaches the social stage, when he becomes aggregated into clans, tribes, and
nations, that this problem opens. For the present we must content ourselves
with having witnessed his arrival in the Human Family--the starting-point and
threshold of the true moral life.
For a long time, it is true, the Family circle,
as a circle, was incomplete. Machinery must itself evolve before its products
evolve. Scarcely defined at all, broken as soon as formed, the earlier circles
allowed their strongest forces to escape almost at the moment they generated.
But the walls grew higher and higher with the advance of history. The leakage
became less and less. With the Christian era the machinery was complete; the
circle finally closed in, and became a secluded shrine where the culture of
everything holy and beautiful was carried on. The path by which this ideal
consummation was reached was not, as we have seen, a straight path; nor has the
integrity of the institution been always preserved through the later centuries.
The difficulty of realizing the ideal may be judged of by the fewness of the
nations now living who have reached it, and by the multitude of peoples and
tribes who have vanished from the earth without attaining. From the failure to
fulfil some one or other of the required conditions people after people and
nation after nation have come together only to disperse, and leave no legacy
behind except the lesson--as yet in few cases understood--of why they
failed.
Yet whether the road be straight or devious is of
little moment. The one significant thing is that it rises. We have reached a
stage in Evolution at which physiological gains are guarded and accentuated, if
not in an ethical interest, at least by ethical factors becoming utilized by
natural selection. Henceforth affection becomes a power in the world; and
whatever physiological adjustments continue to perfect themselves, the most
attached Families will have a better chance of surviving and of transmitting
their moral characteristics to succeeding generations. The completion of the
arch of Family Life forms one of the great, if not the greatest of the
landmarks of history. If the crowning work of Organic Evolution is the
Mammalia, the consummation of the Mammalia is the Family. Physically,
psychically, ethically, the Family is the masterpiece of Evolution. The
creation of Evolution, it was destined to become the most active instrument and
ally which Evolution has ever had. For what is its evolutionary significance?
It is the generator and the repository of the forces which alone can carry out
the social and moral progress of the world. There they rally when they become
enfeebled, there their excesses are counterbalanced, and thence they radiate
out, refined and reinforced, to do their holy work.
Looking at the mere dynamics of the question, the
Family contains all the machinery, and nearly all the power, for the moral
education of mankind. Feebly, but adequately, in the early chapters of Man's
history it fulfilled its function of nursing Love, the Mother of all morality,
and Righteousness, the Father of all morality, so preparing a parentage for all
the beautiful spiritual children which in later years should spring from them.
If life henceforth is to go on at all, it must be a better life, a more loving
life, a more abundant life; and this premium upon Love means--if it means
anything--that Evolution is taking henceforth an ethical direction. It is no
more possible to interpret Nature physically from this point than to interpret
a "Holy Family" of Raphael's in terms of the material structure of canvas or
the qualities of pigments. Canvas may be coarse or fine, pigments may be
vegetable or mineral; but whether the colours be crushed out of madder or
ground out of arsenic or lead is of no importance now. Once these things were
important; by infinitely slow processes Nature formed them; by clever arts the
colourman prepared them. But the "Holy Family" did not lie potentially in the
madder-bud, nor in the earth with the lead and arsenic, nor in the laboratory
with the colourman. He who claims Nature for Matter and Physical force makes
the same assumption that these would do if they claimed the painting. In a far
truer sense than Raphael produced his "Holy Family" Nature has produced a Holy
Family. Not for centuries but for millenniums the Family has survived. Time has
not tarnished it; no later art has improved upon it; nor genius discovered
anything more lovely; nor religion anything more divine. From the bee's cell
and the butterfly's wing men draw what they call the Argument from Design; but
it is in the kingdoms which come without observation, in these great immaterial
orderings which Science is but beginning to perceive, that the purposes of
Creation are revealed.
[91] Westermarck's History of Human Marriage,
p. 26.
[92] Op. cit., pp. 42-50.
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