ETHICS OF THE COSMOS
Conduct and Metaphysics--Conventional and Critical Minds--Good
and Evil--Huxley's Last Appearance at Oxford--The Ethical Process
and the Cosmic Process--Man's Intervention--The Cosmic Process
Evil--Ancient Reconciliations--Modern Acceptance of the
Difficulties--Criticism of Huxley's Pessimism--Man and his
Ethical Aspirations Part of the Cosmos.
We have seen that Huxley refused to acquiesce in the current orthodox
doctrine that our systems of morality rested on a special revelation,
miraculous in its origin, and vouched for by the recorded miracles of
its Founder, or by those entrusted by the Founder with miraculous
power. He supported the view that, historically and actually, there is
no necessary connection between religion and morality. The one is an
attempt, in his opinion always unsuccessful, to lift the veil from the
unseen, to know the unknowable; the other is simply the code that
social man, through the ages, has elaborated for his own guidance, and
proved by his own experience. So far as the conduct of life goes, the
morality of one who accepts the agnostic position with regard to
revelation and the unseen universe differs in no respect from the code
taken under the protection of the modern forms of religion. As John
Morley, in his _Essay on Voltaire_ wrote of such a person:
"There are new solutions for him, if the old have fallen dumb. If
he no longer believe death to be a stroke from the sword of God's
justice, but the leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter,
the humility of his awe is deepened, and the tenderness of his
pity made holier, that creatures who can love so much should have
their days so shut round with a wall of darkness. The purifying
anguish of remorse will be stronger, not weaker, when he has
trained himself to look upon every wrong in thought, every duty
omitted from act, each infringement of the inner spiritual law
which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own guidance and
advantage, less as a breach of the decrees of an unseen tribunal
than as an ungrateful infection weakening and corrupting the
future of his brothers."
But there are wider questions than the immediate problems of conduct. A
certain type of mind finds it almost impossible not to attempt ethical
judgments on the whole universe, not to speculate whether the Cosmos, as
we can imagine it from the part of it within the cognisance of man,
offers a spectacle of moral or immoral or of non-moral significance. In
the old times of Greece and in the modern world many have been devoid of
the taste for argument on such subjects. Those who are uninterested in
these abstract discussions are rarely in opposition to the mode of faith
surrounding them, as to reject the doctrines held by the majority of
one's friends and associates implies either a disagreeable disposition
or an unusual interest in ultimate problems; they are usually orthodox
according to their environment--Stoics, Epicureans, Jews, Episcopalians,
Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, Mormons, Mohammedans, Buddhists, or
whatever may be the prevailing dogma around them. The attitude of
indifference to moral philosophy has practically no relation to what may
be considered good or bad moral conduct; those characterised by it live
above or below or round about their own moral standards in a fashion as
variable as that of moral philosophers. Many of the saints, ancient and
modern, have been notorious instances; question them as to their faith
or as to the logical foundation of their renunciations and they will
tell you in simple honesty or make it plain by their answers that they
have no head for logic, that they cannot argue, but only know and feel
their position to be true. In addition to the saints, many of the best
and most of the pleasant people in the world are of this type.
The type strongly in contrast with the foregoing is found in persons
of a more strenuous, perhaps more admirable but less agreeable
character. The savour of acerbity may be a natural attribute of the
critical character, and it is certainly not lessened where moral
philosophy is the subject-matter of the criticism. The continual
search after solutions of problems that may be insoluble at least
makes the seekers excellent judges of wrong solutions. Like Luther and
Loyola and Kant, they may be able to satisfy themselves, or, like
Huxley, they may remain in doubt, but in either case they are
excellent critics of the solutions of others. They are the firebrands
of faith or of negation; they are possessed by an intellectual fury
that will not let them cease from propagandising. They must go through
the world as missionaries; and the missionary spirit is dual, one side
zealous to proclaim the new, the other equally zealous to denounce the
old. But theirs is the great work, "to burn old falsehood bare," to
tear away the incrustations of time which people have come to accept
as the thing itself, and in their track new and lively truth springs
up, as fresh green follows the devastations of fire.
To most of us it seems of sufficient importance and of sufficient
difficulty to make our decisions in the little eddies of good and evil
that form as the world-stream breaks round our individual lives.
Huxley strove to interpret the world-stream itself, to translate its
movements into the ethical language of man. As knowledge of the forces
and movements of the Cosmos has increased so has our general
conception been intensified, our conception of it as a wondrous
display of power and grandeur and superhuman fixity of order. But are
the forces of the Cosmos good or evil? Are we, and the Cosmos of which
we are a part, the sport of changeable and capricious deities, the
pawns in a game of the gods, as some of the Greeks held; or of a power
drunkenly malicious, as Heine once cynically suggested; or a
battle-ground for a force of good and a force of evil as in so many
Eastern religions? Are we dominated by pure evil, as some dark creeds
have held, or by pure good, as the religion of the Western world
teaches? And if we are dominated by pure evil, whence come good and
the idea of good, or, if by pure good, whence evil and the idea of
evil?
Huxley's interest in these great problems appears and reappears
throughout his published writings, but his views are most clearly and
systematically exposed in his "Romanes" lecture on "Evolution and
Ethics" delivered and published at Oxford in 1894, and afterwards
republished with a prefatory essay in the last volume of his
_Collected Essays_. Not long before his death, Professor Romanes, who
had come to live in Oxford, founded a University lectureship, the
purpose of which was that once a year a distinguished man should
address the University on a subject neither religious nor political.
Mr. Gladstone was the first lecturer, and, at the suggestion of the
founder, Huxley was chosen as the second. For years he had been taking
a special interest in both religion and politics, and he was not a
little embarrassed by the restrictions imposed by the terms of the
foundation, for he determined to make ethical science the subject of
his address, and
"ethical science is, on all sides, so entangled with religion and
politics, that the lecturer who essays to touch the former
without coming in contact with either of the latter, needs all
the dexterity of an egg-dancer, and may even discover that his
sense of clearness and his sense of propriety come into conflict,
by no means to the advantage of the former."
As Huxley, on that great occasion, ascended the rostrum in the
Sheldonian theatre, very white and frail in his scarlet doctor's
robes, there must have been present in his mind memories of the
occasion, four-and-thirty years before, when he first addressed an
audience in the University of Oxford. Then he was a young man, almost
unknown, rising to lead what seemed a forlorn hope for an idea utterly
repugnant to most of his hearers. Now, and largely by his own efforts,
the idea had become an inseparable part of human thought, and Huxley
himself was the guest to whom the whole University was doing honour.
Graduates from all parts of England had come to hear what, it was
feared, might be his last public speech, and practically every member
of the University who could gain admission was present. The press of
the world attended to report his words as if they were those of a
great political leader, about to decide the fate of nations. Although
his voice had lost much of its old sonorous reach, and although the
old clear rhythms were occasionally broken by hesitancies, the magic
of his personality oriented to him every face.
It is a curious and striking circumstance, a circumstance fully
recognised by Huxley himself, that in this exposition of his ethical
conception of the Cosmos he reconstructed, on the lines of his
evolutionary philosophy one of the oldest and most widespread
theories, a theory again and again reached by men of different
civilisations and epochs. Manes, the Persian, from whose name the word
"Manicheism" has been coined to denote his doctrine, taught in perhaps
the most explicit fashion that the Cosmos was the battle-ground of two
contending powers,--Ahriman, the principle of evil, and Ormuzd, the
principle of good. This doctrine in some form or other is implicit in
most of the greater religions, some of which have assumed an ultimate
triumph for the principle of good, while others have left the issue
doubtful. The Ahriman of Huxley, the principle of evil, is what he
termed the cosmic process, that great play of forces, by which, in a
ruthless struggle for existence, the fittest (by which is meant the
most suited to the surrounding conditions and not necessarily the
ethically best) have survived at the expense of the less fit. The
Ormuzd, the principle of good, is what Huxley called the Ethical
process, the process by which sentient, intelligent, and moral man has
striven to replace the "old ape and tiger methods" of the cosmic
process, by methods in which justice and mercy, sacrifice and
consideration for others have a part.
To explain clearly the distinction he made between the ethical and
cosmic processes. Huxley, in the prefatory essay ("Prolegomena")
published in the volume with his Romanes lecture, developed the
analogy of a cultivated garden reclaimed from surrounding wild nature.
He described how the countryside, visible from his windows at
Eastbourne, had certainly been in a "state of nature" about two
thousand years ago when Cæsar had set foot in Britain and had made the
Roman camps, the remains of which still mark the chalk downs of
England.
"Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral mounds, such as
those which still, here and there, break the flowing contours of
the Downs, man's hands had made no mark upon it; and the thin
veil of vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and
the shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry.
The native grasses and weeds, the scattered patches of gorse,
contended with one another for possession of the scanty surface
soil; they fought against the droughts of summer, the frosts of
winter, and the furious gales, which swept with unbroken force,
now from the Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all times
of the year; they filled up, as they best might, the gaps made in
their ranks by all sorts of overground and underground ravagers.
One year with another, an average population, the floating
balance of the unceasing struggle for existence among the
indigenous plants, maintained itself. It is as little to be
doubted that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed in
this region for many thousand years before the coming of Cæsar;
and there is no assignable reason for denying that it might
continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity except
for the intervention of man."
This present state of nature, he explained, is only a fleeting phase
of a process that has gone on for millions of years. Under the thin
layer of soil are the chalk cliffs, hundreds of feet thick and
witnesses of the entirely different phases of the struggle that went
on while the cliffs were being formed at the bottom of the chalk sea,
when the vegetation of the nearest land was as different from the
existing vegetation as that is different from the trees and flowers of
an African forest.
"Before the deposition of the chalk, a vastly longer period
elapsed, throughout which it is easy to follow the traces of the
same process of ceaseless modification and of the same
internecine struggle for existence of living things; and when we
can go no further back, it is not because there is any reason to
think we have reached the beginning, but because the trail of the
most ancient life remains hidden or has become obliterated."
The state of nature, then, is a fleeting and impermanent process.
"That which endures is not one or other association of living
forms, but the process of which the Cosmos is the product and of
which these are among the transitory expressions. And in the
living world, one of the most characteristic features of this
cosmic process is the struggle for existence, the competition of
each with all, the result of which is the selection, that is to
say, the survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best
adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain; and which
are, therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the
fittest. The acme reached by the cosmic process in the vegetation
of the Downs is seen in the turf with its weeds and gorse. Under
the conditions, they have come out of the struggle victorious;
and, by surviving, have proved that they are the fittest to
survive."
For three or four years, the state of nature in a small portion of the
Downs surrounding Huxley's house had been put an end to by the
intervention of man.
"The patch was cut off from the rest by a wall; within the area
thus protected the native vegetation was, as far as possible,
extirpated, while a colony of strange plants was imported and set
down in its place. In short, it was made into a garden. This
artificially treated area presents an aspect extraordinarily
different from that of so much of the land as still remains in
the state of nature outside the wall. Trees, shrubs and herbs,
many of them appertaining to the state of nature in remote parts
of the globe, abound and flourish. Moreover, considerable
quantities of vegetables, fruit, and flowers are produced, of
kinds which neither now exist nor have ever existed except under
conditions such as obtain in the garden and which therefore are
as much works of the art of man as the frames and glass-houses in
which some of them are raised. That the 'state of art' thus
created in the state of nature by man, is sustained by and
dependent on him, would at once become apparent if the watchful
supervision of the gardener were withdrawn, and the antagonistic
influences of the general cosmic process were no longer
sedulously warded off, or counteracted."
He proceeds to describe how, under such circumstances, the artificial
barriers would decay, and the delicate inhabitants of the garden would
perish under the assaults of animal and vegetable foes. External
forces would reassert themselves and wild nature would resume its
sway. While, in a sense, he had strenuously advocated the unity of all
nature, he found in it two rivals: the artificial products of sentient
man and the forces and products of wild nature. These two he believed
to be in inevitable opposition and to represent the good and the evil
forces of the world.
In the dim ages of the past, the forces that have gone to the making
of man have been part of the cosmic process. In the endless and
wonderful series of kaleidoscopic changes by which, under the
operation of natural laws, the body, habits, and the character of man
have been elaborated slowly from the natal dust, there is the widest
field for the operation of the most acute intelligence to study and
trace the stages in the process. But if intellectual delight in
studying the process be left out of account, a serious question at
once appears. In the higher stages of evolution the cosmic forces,
ceasing to act merely on insentient matter, have operated on sentient
beings, and in so doing have given rise to the mystery of pain and
suffering. When the less fit of chemical combinations or even of the
lower forms of life perished in the struggle, we may regard the
process with the unemotional eye of pure intelligence. But "pain, the
baleful product of evolution, increases in quantity and in intensity
with advancing stages of animal organisation, until it attains its
highest level in man." And so it comes about that the cosmic process
produces evil, sorrow, and suffering. Consideration of the cosmic
process leads up against the mystery of evil.
Huxley argued that the various philosophies and civilisations of the
past had led by different paths to a similar conclusion. The primitive
ethical codes of man were not unlike the compacts of a wolf-pack, the
understanding to refrain from mutual attack during the chase of a
common prey. Conceptions of this kind became arranged in codes and
invested with supernatural sanction. But in Hindustan and Ionia alike,
material prosperity, no doubt partly the result of the accepted codes,
produced culture of the intellect and culture of the pleasures. With
these came the "beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is legion and who
dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths." The doubting intellect,
acting on the codes, produced the conception of justice-in-itself, of
merit as divorced from the effect of action on others, the abstract
idea of goodness.
The old philosopher, turning from this new conception to the Cosmos,
found that incompatible with goodness. Suffering and sorrow, sunshine
and rain, were distributed independently of merit. With Greek and
Semite and Indian the conscience of man revolted against the moral
indifference of nature. Instead of bringing in a verdict of guilty,
they attempted reconciliation in various ways. Indian speculation
invented or elaborated the theory of transmigration, in which the
Karma or soul-character passed from individual to individual, the
algebraic sums of happiness in the whole chain being proportional to
merit. The Stoics were metaphysicians and imagined an immanent,
omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent First Cause. Evil was
incompatible with this, and so they held, against experience, that
either it did not exist, or that it was inflicted for our benefit or
due to our fault. In one fashion or another, all the great systems of
thought had recognised the antagonism and had attempted some
explanation of it. Huxley's view was that the modern world with its
new philosophy was only retreading the toil-worn paths of the old.
Scientific optimism was being replaced by a frank pessimism. Cosmic
evolution might be accountable for both good and evil, but knowledge
of it provided no better reason for choice of the good than did
earlier speculation. The cosmic process was not only non-moral but
immoral; goodness did not lead to success in it, and laws and moral
precepts could only be addressed to the curbing of it.
In a sense these conclusions of Huxley seemed to lead to absolute
pessimism, but he offered some mitigating considerations. Society
remains subject to the cosmic process, but the less as civilisation
advances and ethical man is the more ready to combat it. The history
of civilisation shows that we have some hope of this, for "when
physiology, psychology, ethics, and political science, now befogged by
crude anticipations and futile analogies, have emerged from their
childhood, they may work as much change on human affairs as the
earlier-ripened physical sciences wrought on material progress." And
so, remembering that the evil cosmic nature in us has the foothold of
millions of years, and never hoping to abandon sorrow and pain, we may
yet, in the manhood of our race, accept our destiny, and, with clear
and steady eyes, address ourselves to the task of living, that we and
others may live better.
These gloomy views come from Huxley with such weight and authority
that even in a sketch of his life and opinions it may be noticed that
they do not seem necessary deductions from the evolutionary conception
of the world. The first count adduced against the cosmic process is
its connection with suffering. It may be doubted, so far as the animal
world is concerned, if Huxley has not exaggerated the gravity of this.
The two greatest contributors to the modern conception of evolution
are not in agreement with him. Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:
"On the whole, then, we conclude that the popular idea of the
struggle for existence entailing misery and pain on the animal
world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings
about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment of life with
the minimum of suffering and pain. Given the necessity of death
and reproduction--and without those there could have been no
progressive development of the animal world--and it is difficult
even to imagine a system by which a greater balance of happiness
could have been secured."
This view was evidently that also of Darwin himself, who thus
concluded his chapter on the struggle for existence: "When we reflect
on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that
the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death
is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy
survive and multiply." As for man himself, though it be true that in
him the consummation of pain is reached, still this is no isolated
fact of far-reaching ethical importance. It is in direct dependence on
the increased physical and mental development of man, and these are
equally necessary for and equally susceptible to increased pleasure
and increased happiness. It is not necessary to regard the cosmic
process as evil. Even when man, in various ages, had elaborated the
conception of abstract goodness, and had endeavoured to make his
justice a doling out of reward and punishment according to merit, it
was not inevitable to bring in a verdict of guilty against the Cosmos.
It is quite true that, in all the ages, man has seen the sun shine on
the unjust as on the just. But it is an easy reflection that the world
could not turn round on individual merit, and if few are so guilty as
to deserve the agonies of grief that may come to all, still fewer
deserve some of the simpler and more common joys of life. The
conception that was implicit in the disciplines of the older
philosophies is still open to the philosophy of evolution. Behind it,
as behind the "self-hypnotised catalepsy of the devotee of Brahma,"
the Buddhist aspirations to Nirvana, the _apatheia_ of the Stoics,
there may lie a recognition of the worthlessness of the individual: an
equable acceptation of one's self as part of a process: a triumph of
intelligence over selfishness. Finally, behind the sharp division made
between man and the Cosmos, there still lurks one of the oldest and
most enduring fallacies of the world, a fallacy that Huxley himself
spent a great part of his intellectual life in discovering and
routing. The fallacy is the conception of the Cosmos as something
separate and apart from man, as something through which he, however
briefly, passes. Thus Omar sang:
"Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.
"With them the seed of wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reaped--
'I came like Water, and like Wind I go.'
"Into this Universe, and _Why_ not knowing
Nor _Whence_, like water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, like Wind along the Waste
I know not _Whither_, willy-nilly blowing."
But, the more profoundly does the conception of evolution lay hold of
human thought, the more inevitable it becomes to recognise that man
and all that is best in man--his aspirations, ideas, virtues, and
practical and abstract justice and goodness--are just as much the
product of the cosmic process and part of the Cosmos as the most
sinister results of the struggle for existence.