A man's made learned by reading oft,
And not by rush and shock;
Just as the water, falling down,
Drip-dripping, wears the rock.
Assuming for the sake of brevity that the reader agrees to this, which
is a matter about which men of sense are generally agreed, what has to
be told is that Charlie Darwin, our Charlie, illustrating evolution
without studying it, unconsciously suggested that the approved method
of steady and gentle exertion was merely a continuation of Nature's
way upwards, the identical way that Nature took to bring the apes
above the other beasts, and then improve the apes. Their hands
provided a ready means of action for many purposes, and their habits
of diet, which made them ever ready to eat, provided a perpetual
supply of motive power. The great progressive movement, so begun, has
never stopped. The restlessness and the _ennui_ which cause so many
crimes and follies are Nature's impulse, misused or neglected. It
comes from habits older than the hills. It is the vital force of each.
With it, we may do evil, if we will; but we can do nothing at all
without it. The cats can gorge themselves and sleep in happiness and
health; but Nature has made that impossible for gibbons and for men.
Of course the only novelty here is the suggestion that continual
employment was Nature's way of stimulating the growth of the brain.
The doctrine that beings, with such brains as men and apes have now,
can find content and peace in healthy occupation, and in no other way,
is a very old discovery; but, as there are many to whom philosophy is
folly written large, it may make the truth more credible to them to
mention that Charlie's habits proved this beyond a doubt, and so
corroborated the profoundest conclusion of Aristotle (_Ethics_).
She also ratified the rhetoric of John Ruskin. His declamations
against the excessive division of labour were the derision of
practical people in the nineteenth century. "Polishing the pins with
men's souls! Bah!" With shrugs and sneers they intimated that he was a
lunatic. If he had not been rich, he might have been jailed as an
incendiary. Rich or poor, he would have been in danger anywhere but in
free and happy England. And now England's patience is rewarded by the
discovery that Ruskin was essentially right. If our brains have been
developed by our innate readiness to "turn our hands to anything,"
then, assuredly, to restrict activity to one or two mechanical
movements is to reverse the natural process, and so torture the mind
worse than the constraining bandages torture the feet of Chinese
ladies. The damage done to vital organs in that way cannot be
compensated by any wages.
Thus were the conclusions of Aristotle and the rhetoric of Ruskin
reinforced by the example of Charlie Darwin.