evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love,
from—I will not say self-_sacrifice_, but from the ardent impulse to
fulfil another’s highest impulse. Suppose, for example, that I have an
idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my creature; for as
shown in last July’s _Monist_, it is a little person. I love it; and I
will sink myself in perfecting it. It is not by dealing out cold justice
to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing
and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. The philosophy we
draw from John’s gospel is that this is the way mind develops; and as
for the cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it
capable of further evolution. Love, recognising germs of loveliness in
the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is
the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay “The Law of
Mind,” must see that _synechism_ calls for.
The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we all
begin to review its doings and to think what character it is destined to
bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of future historians.
It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century; for political
economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity
than has any other science. Well, political economy has its formula of
redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures
the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct
of all the dealings between men, and leads to the _summum bonum_, food
in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master
of intelligence. I do not mean to say that this is one of the legitimate
conclusions of political economy, the scientific character of which I
fully acknowledge. But the study of doctrines, themselves true, will
often temporarily encourage generalisations extremely false, as the study
of physics has encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that
the great attention paid to economical questions, during our century has
induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the
unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy
which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the
elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe.
I open a handbook of political economy,—the most typical and middling one
I have at hand,—and there find some remarks of which I will here make a
brief analysis. I omit qualifications, sops thrown to Cerberus, phrases
to placate Christian prejudice, trappings which serve to hide from author
and reader alike the ugly nakedness of the greed-god. But I have surveyed
my position. The author enumerates “three motives to human action:
The love of self;
The love of a limited class having common interests and feelings with
one’s self;
The love of mankind at large.”
Remark, at the outset, what obsequious title is bestowed on greed,—“the
love of self.” Love! The second motive _is_ love. In place of “a limited
class” put “certain persons,” and you have a fair description. Taking
“class” in the old-fashioned sense, a weak kind of love is described. In
the sequel, there seems to be some haziness as to the delimitation of
this motive. By the love of mankind at large, the author does not mean
that deep, subconscious passion that is properly so called; but merely
public-spirit, perhaps little more than a fidget about pushing ideas. The
author proceeds to a comparative estimate of the worth of these motives.
Greed, says he, but using, of course, another word, “is not so great an
evil as is commonly supposed.... Every man can promote his own interests
a great deal more effectively than he can promote any one else’s, or than
any one else can promote his.” Besides, as he remarks on another page,
the more miserly a man is, the more good he does. The second motive “is
the most dangerous one to which society is exposed.” Love is all very
pretty: “no higher or purer source of human happiness exists.” (Ahem!)
But it is a “source of enduring injury,” and, in short, should be
overruled by something wiser. What is this wiser motive? We shall see.
As for public spirit, it is rendered nugatory by the “difficulties in
the way of its effective operation.” For example, it might suggest
putting checks upon the fecundity of the poor and the vicious; and “no
measure of repression would be too severe,” in the case of criminals.
The hint is broad. But unfortunately, you cannot induce legislatures to
take such measures, owing to the pestiferous “tender sentiments of man
towards man.” It thus appears, that public-spirit, or Benthamism, is
not strong enough to be the effective tutor of love, (I am skipping to
another page,) which must therefore be handed over to “the motives which
animate men in the pursuit of wealth,” in which alone we can confide, and
which “are in the highest degree beneficent.”[20] Yes, in the “highest
degree” without exception are they beneficent to the being upon whom all
their blessings are poured out, namely, the Self, whose “sole object,”
says the writer in accumulating wealth is his individual “sustenance and
enjoyment.” Plainly, the author holds the notion that some other motive
might be in a higher degree beneficent even for the man’s self to be a
paradox wanting in good sense. He seeks to gloze and modify his doctrine;
but he lets the perspicacious reader see what his animating principle
is; and when, holding the opinions I have repeated, he at the same time
acknowledges that society could not exist upon a basis of intelligent
greed alone, he simply pigeonholes himself as one of the eclectics of
inharmonious opinions. He wants his mammon flavored with a _soupçon_ of
god.
The economists accuse those to whom the enunciation of their atrocious
villainies communicates a thrill of horror of being _sentimentalists_. It
may be so: I willingly confess to having some tincture of sentimentalism
in me, God be thanked! Ever since the French Revolution brought this
leaning of thought into ill-repute,—and not altogether undeservedly, I
must admit, true, beautiful, and good as that great movement was,—it has
been the tradition to picture sentimentalists as persons incapable of
logical thought and unwilling to look facts in the eyes. This tradition
may be classed with the French tradition that an Englishman says _godam_
at every second sentence, the English tradition that an American talks
about “Britishers,” and the American tradition that a Frenchman carries
forms of etiquette to an inconvenient extreme, in short with all those
traditions which survive simply because the men who use their eyes and
ears are few and far between. Doubtless some excuse there was for all
those opinions in days gone by; and sentimentalism, when it was the
fashionable amusement to spend one’s evenings in a flood of tears over
a woeful performance on a candle-litten stage, sometimes made itself a
little ridiculous. But what after all is sentimentalism? It is an _ism_,
a doctrine, namely, the doctrine that great respect should be paid to
the natural judgments of the sensible heart. This is what sentimentalism
precisely is; and I entreat the reader to consider whether to contemn
is not of all blasphemies the most degrading. Yet the nineteenth
century has steadily contemned it, because it brought about the Reign
of Terror. That it did so is true. Still, the whole question is one of
_how much_. The reign of terror was very bad; but now the Gradgrind
banner has been this century long flaunting in the face of heaven, with
an insolence to provoke the very skies to scowl and rumble. Soon a flash
and quick peal will shake economists quite out of their complacency, too
late. The twentieth century, in its latter half, shall surely see the
deluge-tempest burst upon the social order,—to clear upon a world as
deep in ruin as that greed-philosophy has long plunged it into guilt. No
post-thermidorian high jinks then!
So a miser is a beneficent power in a community, is he? With the same
reason precisely, only in a much higher degree, you might pronounce
the Wall Street sharp to be a good angel, who takes money from
heedless persons not likely to guard it properly, who wrecks feeble
enterprises better stopped, and who administers wholesome lessons to
unwary scientific men, by passing worthless checks upon them,—as you
did, the other day, to me, my millionaire Master in glomery, when you
thought you saw your way to using my process without paying for it,
and of so bequeathing to your children something to boast of their
father about,—and who by a thousand wiles puts money at the service of
intelligent greed, in his own person. Bernard Mandeville, in his “Fable
of the Bees,” maintains that private vices of all descriptions are
public benefits, and proves it, too, quite as cogently as the economist
proves his point concerning the miser. He even argues, with no slight
force, that but for vice civilisation would never have existed. In
the same spirit, it has been strongly maintained and is to-day widely
believed that all acts of charity and benevolence, private and public, go
seriously to degrade the human race.
The “Origin of Species” of Darwin merely extends politico-economical
views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life. The
vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold the opinion that the
true cause of those exquisite and marvellous adaptations of nature for
which, when I was a boy, men used to extol the divine wisdom is that
creatures are so crowded together that those of them that happen to
have the slightest advantage force those less pushing into situations
unfavorable to multiplication or even kill them before they reach the
age of reproduction. Among animals, the mere mechanical individualism is
vastly reënforced as a power making for good by the animal’s ruthless
greed. As Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for
existence; and he should have added for his motto: Every individual for
himself, and the Devil take the hindmost! Jesus, in his sermon on the
Mount, expressed a different opinion.
Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes
from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his
neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is
that progress takes place by virtue of every individual’s striving for
himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever
he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of
Greed.
Much is to be said on both sides. I have not concealed, I could not
conceal, my own passionate predilection. Such a confession will probably
shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling is in itself, I
think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic theory of
evolution,—so far as it may be presumed to bespeak the normal judgment of
the Sensible Heart. Certainly, if it were possible to believe in agapasm
without believing it warmly, that fact would be an argument against the
truth of the doctrine. At any rate, since the warmth of feeling exists,
it should on every account be candidly confessed; especially since it
creates a liability to one-sidedness on my part against which it behooves
my readers and me to be severally on our guard.
SECOND THOUGHTS. IRENICA.
Let us try to define the logical affinities of the different theories
of evolution. Natural selection, as conceived by Darwin, is a mode
of evolution in which the only positive agent of change in the whole
passage from moner to man is fortuitous variation. To secure advance in
a definite direction chance has to be seconded by some action that shall
hinder the propagation of some varieties or stimulate that of others.
In natural selection, strictly so called, it is the crowding out of the
weak. In sexual selection, it is the attraction of beauty, mainly.
The “Origin of Species” was published toward the end of the year 1859.
The preceding years since 1846 had been one of the most productive
seasons,—or if extended so as to cover the great book we are considering,
_the_ most productive period of equal length in the entire history of
science from its beginnings until now. The idea that chance begets order,
which is one of the corner-stones of modern physics (although Dr. Carus
considers it “the weakest point in Mr. Peirce’s system,”) was at that
time put into its clearest light. Quetelet had opened the discussion
by his “Letters on the Application of Probabilities to the Moral and
Political Sciences,” a work which deeply impressed the best minds of that
day, and to which Sir John Herschel had drawn general attention in Great
Britain. In 1857, the first volume of Buckle’s “History of Civilisation”
had created a tremendous sensation, owing to the use he made of this same
idea. Meantime, the “statistical method” had, under that very name, been
applied with brilliant success to molecular physics. Dr. John Herapath,
an English chemist, had in 1847 outlined the kinetical theory of gases
in his “Mathematical Physics”; and the interest the theory excited had
been refreshed in 1856 by notable memoirs by Clausius and Krönig. In
the very summer preceding Darwin’s publication, Maxwell had read before
the British Association the first and most important of his researches
on this subject. The consequence was that the idea that fortuitous
events may result in a physical law, and further that this is the way
in which those laws which appear to conflict with the principle of the
conservation of energy are to be explained, had taken a strong hold upon
the minds of all who were abreast of the leaders of thought. By such
minds, it was inevitable that the “Origin of Species,” whose teaching
was simply the application of the same principle to the explanation of
another “non-conservative” action, that of organic development, should
be hailed and welcomed. The sublime discovery of the conservation of
energy by Helmholtz in 1847, and that of the mechanical theory of heat
by Clausius and by Rankine, independently, in 1850, had decidedly
overawed all those who might have been inclined to sneer at physical
science. Thereafter a belated poet still harping upon “science peddling
with the names of things” would fail of his effect. Mechanism was now
known to be all, or very nearly so. All this time, utilitarianism,—that
improved substitute for the Gospel,—was in its fullest feather; and was
a natural ally of an individualistic theory. Dean Mansell’s injudicious
advocacy had led to mutiny among the bondsmen of Sir William Hamilton,
and the nominalism of Mill had profited accordingly; and although the
real science that Darwin was leading men to was sure some day to give a
death-blow to the sham-science of Mill, yet there were several elements
of the Darwinian theory which were sure to charm the followers of Mill.
Another thing: anæsthetics had been in use for thirteen years. Already,
people’s acquaintance with suffering had dropped off very much; and
as a consequence, that unlovely hardness by which our times are so
contrasted with those that immediately preceded them, had already set
in, and inclined people to relish a ruthless theory. The reader would
quite mistake the drift of what I am saying if he were to understand me
as wishing to suggest that any of those things (except perhaps Malthus)
influenced Darwin himself. What I mean is that his hypothesis, while
without dispute one of the most ingenious and pretty ever devised, and
while argued with a wealth of knowledge, a strength of logic, a charm
of rhetoric, and above all with a certain magnetic genuineness that was
almost irresistible, did not appear, at first, at all near to being
proved; and to a sober mind its case looks less hopeful now than it
did twenty years ago; but the extraordinarily favorable reception it
met with was plainly owing, in large measure, to its ideas being those
toward which the age was favorably disposed, especially, because of the
encouragement it gave to the greed-philosophy.
Diametrically opposed to evolution by chance, are those theories which
attribute all progress to an inward necessary principle, or other form of
necessity. Many naturalists have thought that if an egg is destined to
go through a certain series of embryological transformations, from which
it is perfectly certain not to deviate, and if in geological time almost
exactly the same forms appear successively, one replacing another in the
same order, the strong presumption is that this latter succession was as
predeterminate and certain to take place as the former. So, Nägeli, for
instance, conceives that it somehow follows from the first law of motion
and the peculiar, but unknown, molecular constitution of protoplasm,
that forms must complicate themselves more and more. Kölliker makes one
form generate another after a certain maturation has been accomplished.
Weismann, too, though he calls himself a Darwinian, holds that nothing
is due to chance, but that all forms are simple mechanical resultants
of the heredity from two parents.[21] It is very noticeable that all
these different sectaries seek to import into their science a mechanical
necessity to which the facts that come under their observation do not
point. Those geologists who think that the variation of species is due
to cataclasmic alterations of climate or of the chemical constitution of
the air and water are also making mechanical necessity chief factor of
evolution.
Evolution by sporting and evolution by mechanical necessity are
conceptions warring against one another. A third method, which supersedes
their strife, lies enwrapped in the theory of Lamarck. According to
his view, all that distinguishes the highest organic forms from the
most rudimentary has been brought about by little hypertrophies or
atrophies which have affected individuals early in their lives, and have
been transmitted to their offspring. Such a transmission of acquired
characters is of the general nature of habit-taking, and this is the
representative and derivative within the physiological domain of the
law of mind. Its action is essentially dissimilar to that of a physical
force; and that is the secret of the repugnance of such necessitarians
as Weismann to admitting its existence. The Lamarckians further suppose
that although some of the modifications of form so transmitted were
originally due to mechanical causes, yet the chief factors of their first
production were the straining of endeavor and the overgrowth superinduced
by exercise, together with the opposite actions. Now, endeavor, since it
is directed toward an end, is essentially psychical, even though it be
sometimes unconscious; and the growth due to exercise, as I argued in
my last paper, follows a law of a character quite contrary to that of
mechanics.
Lamarckian evolution is thus evolution by the force of habit.—That
sentence slipped off my pen while one of those neighbors whose function
in the social cosmos seems to be that of an Interrupter, was asking me
a question. Of course, it is nonsense. Habit is mere inertia, a resting
on one’s oars, not a propulsion. Now it is energetic projaculation
(lucky there is such a word, or this untried hand might have been put to
inventing one) by which in the typical instances of Lamarckian evolution
the new elements of form are first created. Habit, however, forces them
to take practical shapes, compatible with the structures they affect, and
in the form of heredity and otherwise, gradually replaces the spontaneous
energy that sustains them. Thus, habit plays a double part; it serves to
establish the new features, and also to bring them into harmony with the
general morphology and function of the animals and plants to which they
belong. But if the reader will now kindly give himself the trouble of
turning back a page or two, he will see that this account of Lamarckian
evolution coincides with the general description of the action of love,
to which, I suppose, he yielded his assent.
Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too, the
continuity of mind, let us ask what aspect Lamarckian evolution takes
on within the domain of consciousness. Direct endeavor can achieve
almost nothing. It is as easy by taking thought to add a cubit to one’s
stature, as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any of the Muses by
merely straining for it, before it is ready to come. We haunt in vain
the sacred well and throne of Mnemosyne; the deeper workings of the
spirit take place in their own slow way, without our connivance. Let but
their bugle sound, and we may then make our effort, sure of an oblation
for the altar of whatsoever divinity its savor gratifies. Besides this
inward process, there is the operation of the environment, which goes
to break up habits destined to be broken up and so to render the mind
lively. Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit
makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens
the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is
the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and
sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open,
but slumbering when it is closed. Few psychologists have perceived how
fundamental a fact this is. A portion of mind abundantly commissured to
other portions works almost mechanically. It sinks to the condition of
a railway junction. But a portion of mind almost isolated, a spiritual
peninsula, or _cul-de-sac_, is like a railway terminus. Now mental
commissures are habits. Where they abound, originality is not needed and
is not found; but where they are in defect, spontaneity is set free.
Thus, the first step in the Lamarckian evolution of mind is the putting
of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play. As to
growth by exercise, I have already shown, in discussing “Man’s Glassy
Essence,” in last October’s _Monist_, what its _modus operandi_ must be
conceived to be, at least, until a second equally definite hypothesis
shall have been offered. Namely, it consists of the flying asunder of
molecules, and the reparation of the parts by new matter. It is, thus, a
sort of reproduction. It takes place only during exercise, because the
activity of protoplasm consists in the molecular disturbance which is
its necessary condition. Growth by exercise takes place also in the mind.
Indeed, that is what it is to _learn_. But the most perfect illustration
is the development of a philosophical idea by being put into practice.
The conception which appeared, at first, as unitary, splits up into
special cases; and into each of these new thought must enter to make a
practicable idea. This new thought, however, follows pretty closely the
model of the parent conception; and thus a homogeneous development takes
place. The parallel between this and the course of molecular occurrences
is apparent. Patient attention will be able to trace all these elements
in the transaction called learning.
Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us; evolution by
fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution
by creative love. We may term them _tychastic_ evolution, or _tychasm_,
_anancastic_ evolution, or _anancasm_, and _agapastic_ evolution,
or _agapasm_. The doctrines which represent these as severally of
principal importance, we may term _tychasticism_, _anancasticism_, and
_agapasticism_. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute
chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love, are severally
operative in the cosmos, may receive the names of _tychism_, _anancism_,
and _agapism_.