and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are
ugly, famine would be uglier still. I have no instruction to give you,
and you would not thank me for wasting your time with rhetorical praise
of art, even if I had all the flowers of diction at my command. To me,
as an outer barbarian, it seems that some of the language on these
subjects is already pretty high pitched. I have thought so even in
reading that one of Mr. Addington Symond's most attractive volumes about
Italy which relates to Italian art. Art is the interpreter of beauty,
and perhaps beauty, if we could penetrate to its essence, might reveal
to us something higher than itself. But Art is not religion, nor is
connoisseurship priesthood. To happiness Art lends intensity and
elevation; but in affliction, in ruin, in the wreck of affection how
much can Phidias and Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a
sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there."
It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great
Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never
rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his
country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own
perfection, to need religion--not a system of dogma, but a faith. This,
probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of
Assisi or in the Arena Chapel at Padua. Perhaps those paintings also
gain something by being in the proper place for religious art, a Church.
Since the divorce of religious art from religion, it has been common to
see a Crucifixion hung over a sideboard. That age was an age of faith;
and so most likely was the glorious age of Greek art in its way. Ours is
an age of doubt, an age of doubt and of strange cross currents and
eddies of opinion, ultra scepticism penning its books in the closet
while the ecclesiastical forms of the Middle Ages stalk the streets. Art
seems to feel the disturbing influence like the rest of life. Poetry
feels it less than other arts, because there is a poetry of doubt and
Tennyson is its poet. Art is expression, and to have high expression you
must have something high to express. In the pictures at our exhibitions
there may be great technical skill; I take it for granted there is; but
in the subject surely there is a void, an appearance of painful seeking
for something to paint, and finding very little. When you come to a
great picture of an Egyptian banquet in the days of the Pharaohs, you
feel that the painter must have had a long way to go for something to
paint. Certainly this age is not indifferent to beauty. The art movement
is in every house; everywhere you see some proof of a desire to possess
not mere ornament but something really rare and beautiful. The influence
transmutes children's picture books and toys. I turned up the other day
a child's picture book of the days of my childhood; probably it had been
thought wonderfully good in its time; and what a thing it was. Some day
our doubts may be cleared up; our beliefs may be settled; faith may come
again; life may recover its singleness and certainty of aim; poetry may
gush forth once more as fresh as Homer, and the art of the future may
appear. What is most difficult to conceive, perhaps, is the sculpture of
the future; because it is hardly possible that the moderns should ever
have such facilities as the ancients had for studying the human form. In
presence of the overwhelming magnificence of the sculpture in the
museums of Rome and Naples, one wonders how Canova and Co. can have
looked with any complacency on their own productions. There seems reason
by the way to think that these artists worked not each by himself, but
in schools and brotherhoods with mutual aid and sympathy; and this is an
advantage equally within the reach of modern art. Meantime, though the
Art of the future delays to come, modern life is not all hideous. There
are many things, no doubt, such as the Black Country and the suburbs of
our cities, on which the eye cannot rest with pleasure. But Paris is not
hideous. There may be in the long lines of buildings too much of the
autocratic monotony of the Empire, but the city, as a whole, is the
perfect image of a brilliant civilization. From London beauty is almost
banished by smoke and fog, which deny to the poor architect ornament,
colour, light and shadow, leaving him nothing but outline. No doubt
besides the smoke and fog there is a fatality. There is a fatality which
darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in
Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National
Gallery; to temper the grandeurs of Westminster by the introduction of
the Aquarium, with Mr. Hankey's Tower of Babel in the near distance; to
guard against any too-imposing effect which the outline of the Houses of
Parliament might have by covering them with minute ornament, sure to be
blackened and corroded into one vast blotch by smoke; to collect the art
wonders of Pigtail Place; to make the lions in Trafalgar Square lie like
cats on a hearth-rug, instead of supporting themselves on a slope by
muscular action, like the lions at Genoa; to perch a colossal equestrian
statue of the Duke of Wellington, arrayed in his waterproof cape, and
mounted on a low-shouldered hack instead of a charger, on the top of an
arch, by way of perpetual atonement to France for Waterloo; and now to
think of planting an obelisk of the Pharaohs on a cab-stand. An obelisk
of the Pharaohs in ancient Rome was an august captive, symbolizing the
university of the Roman Empire, but an obelisk of the Pharaohs in London
symbolizes little more than did the Druidical ring of stones which an
English squire of my acquaintance purchased in one of the Channel
Islands and set up in his English park. As to London we must console
ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it
was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper. If the house
is less beautiful the home is more so. Even a house in what Tennyson
calls the long unlovely street is not utterly unlovely when within it
dwell cultivated intellect, depth of character and tenderness of
affection. However the beauty of English life is in the country and
there it may challenge that of Italian palaces. America is supposed to
be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and
the ugliest are the most pretentious. As it is in society so it is in
architecture. America is best when she is content to be herself. An
American city with its spacious streets all planted with avenues of
trees with its blocks of buildings far from unimpeachable probably in
detail yet stately in the mass with its wide spreading suburbs where
each artizan has his neat looking house in his own plot of ground and
light and air and foliage with its countless church towers and spires
far from faultless yet varying the outline might not please a painters
eye but it fills your mind with a sense of well rewarded industry of
comfort and even opulence shared by the toiling man of a prosperous,
law-loving, cheerful, and pious life. I cannot help fancying that
Turner, whose genius got to the soul of everything, would have made
something of even in American city. The cities of the Middle Ages were
picturesquely huddled within walls for protection from the violence of
the feudal era, the cities of the New World spread wide in the security
of an age of law and a continent of peace. At Cleveland in Ohio there is
a great street called Euclid Avenue, lined with villas each standing in
its own grounds and separated from each other and from the street only
by a light iron fencing instead of the high brick wall with which the
Briton shuts out his detested kind. The villas are not vast or
suggestive of over-grown plutocracy, they are suggestive of moderate
wealth, pleasant summers, cheerful winters and domestic happiness. I
hardly think you would call Euclid Avenue revolting. I say it with the
diffidence of conscious ignorance but I should not be much afraid to
show you one or two buildings that our Professor of Architecture at
Cornell University has put up for us on a bluff over Cayuga Lake, on a
site which you would certainly admit to be magnificent. If I could have
ventured on any recommendation concerning Art, I should have pleaded
before the Royal Commission for a Chair of Architecture here. It might
endow us with some forms of beauty; it might at all events endow us with
rules for building a room in which you can be heard, one in which you
can breathe, and a chimney which would not smoke. I said that in America
the most pretentious buildings were the worst. Another source of failure
in buildings, in dress, and not in these alone, is servile imitation of
Europe. In northern America the summer is tropical, the winter is
arctic. A house ought to be regular and compact in shape, so as to be
easily warmed from the centre, with a roof of simple construction, high
pitched, to prevent the snow from lodging, and large eaves to throw it
off,--this for the arctic winter, for the tropical summer you want ample
verandas, which, in fact, are the summer sitting rooms. An American
house built in this way is capable at least of the beauty which belongs
to fitness. But as you see Parisian dresses under an alien sky, so you
see Italian villas with excrescences which no stove can warm, and Tudor
mansions with gables which hold all the snow. It is needless to say what
is the result, when the New World undertakes to reproduce not only the
architecture of the Old World, but that of classical Greece and Rome, or
that of the Middle Ages. Jefferson, who was a classical republican,
taught a number of his fellow citizens to build their homes like Doric
temples, and you may imagine what a Doric temple freely adapted to
domestic purposes must be. But are these attempts to revive the past
very successful anywhere? We regard as a decided mistake the revived
classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be
regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all
probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties
with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There
is our own museum; the best, I suppose, that could be done in the way of
revival; the work of an architect whom the first judges deemed a man of
genius. In that, ancient form and modern requirements seem everywhere at
cross purposes. Nobody can deny that genius is impressed upon the upper
part of the front, which reminds one of a beautiful building in an
Italian city, though the structure at the side recalls the mind to
Glastonbury, and the galaxy of chimneys has certainly no parallel in
Italy. The front ought to stand in a street, but as it stands in a field
its flanks have to be covered by devices which are inevitably weak. What
is to be done with the back always seems to me one of the darkest
enigmas of the future. The basement is incongruously plain and bare, in
the street it would perhaps be partly hidden by the passengers. Going
in, you find a beautiful mediaeval court struggling hard for its life
against a railway station and a cloister, considerately offering you a
shady walk or shelter from the weather round a room. Listen to the
multitudinous voices of Science and you will hear that the conflict
extends to practical accommodation. We all know it was not the fault of
the architect, it was the fault of adverse exigencies which came into
collision with his design, but this only strengthens the moral of the
building against revivals. Two humble achievements, if we had chosen
were certainly within our reach,--perfect adaptation to our object and
inoffensive dignity. Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of
architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the
mediaeval churches. For my part I look up with admiration, as fervent as
any one untrained in art can, to those divine creations of old religion
which soar over the smoke and din of our cities into purity and
stillness and seem to challenge us, with all our wealth and culture and
science and mechanical power, to produce their peer till the age of
faith shall return. Not Greek Art itself springing forth in its
perfection from the dark background of primaeval history, seems to me a
greater miracle than these. How poor beside the lowliest of them in
religious effect in romance, in everything but size and technical skill,
is any pile of neo-paganism even I will dare to say, St. Peter's. Yet
for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the
Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest
emotion in any modern Gothic church. I will even own that, except where
restoration rids us of the unchristian exclusiveness of pews, I prefer
the unrestored churches, with something of antiquity about them, to the
restored. There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to
bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that
they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to
bring back the Middle Ages. You may hear pinings for the return of an
age of force from gentle aestheticists, who, if the awe of force did
return, would certainly be crushed like eggshells. There is a well-known
tale by Hans Andersen, that great though child-like teacher, called the
"Overshoes of Fortune." A gentleman, at an evening party, has been
running down modern society and wishing he were in the heroic Middle
Ages. In going away he unwittingly puts on the fairy overshoes, which
have the gift of transporting the wearer at once to any place and time
where he wishes to be. Stepping out he finds his own wish fulfilled--he
is in the Middle Ages. There is no gas, the street is pitch dark, he is
up to his ankles in mud, he is nearly knocked into the kennel by a
mediaeval bishop returning from a revel with his roystering train, when
he wants to cross the river there is no bridge; and after vainly
inquiring his way in a tavern full of very rough customers, he wishes
himself in the moon, and to the moon appropriately he goes. Mediaevalism
can hardly be called anything but a rather enfeebling dream. If it were
a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one
perpetual prevarication. You would be drawn by the steam engine to
lecture against steam; you would send eloquent invectives against
printing to the press, and you would be subsisting meanwhile on the
interest of investments which the Middle Ages would have condemned as
usury. If you were like some of the school, you would praise the golden
silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the
hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious
apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but
hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral
interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see
their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble
character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the
mould. But the mould is broken, and it is broken for ever. Through
aesthetic pining for a past age, we may become unjust to our own, and
thus weaken our practical sense of duty, and lessen our power of doing
good. I will call the age bad when it makes me so, is a wise saying, and
worth all our visionary cynicism, be it never so eloquent. To say the
same thing in other words, our age will be good enough for most of us,
if there is genuine goodness in ourselves. Rousseau fancied he was
soaring above his age, not into the thirteenth century, but into the
state of nature, while he was falling miserably below his own age in all
the common duties and relations of life; and he was a type, not of
enthusiasts, for enthusiasm leads to action, but of mere social
dreamers. Where there is duty, there is poetry, and tragedy too, in
plenty, though it be in the most prosaic row of dingy little brick
houses with clothes hanging out to dry, or rather to be wetted, behind
them, in all Lancashire. We have commercial fraud now, too much of it;
and the declining character of English goods is a cause of their
exclusion from foreign markets, as well as hostile tariffs; so that
everything South Kensington can do to uphold good and genuine work will
be of the greatest advantage to the English trade. But if anyone
supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him
study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his
mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a
fancy to run away with him. There was fraud beneath the cross of the
Crusader, and there was forgery in the cell of the Monk. In comparing
the general quality of work we must remember that it is the best work of
those times that has survived. I think I could prove from history that
mediaeval floors sometimes gave way even when there was no St. Dunstan
there. You will recollect that the floor miraculously fell in at a
synod, and killed all St. Dunstan's opponents; but sceptics, who did not
easily believe in miracles, whispered that the Saint from his past
habits, knew how to handle tools. We are told by those whose creed is
embodied in "Past and Present" that this age is one vast anarchy,
industrial and social; and that nothing but military discipline--that is
the perpetual cry--will restore us to anything like order as workers or
as men. Well, there are twenty thousand miles of railway in the three
kingdoms, forming a system as complex as it is vast. I am told that at
one junction, close to London, the trains pass for some hours at the
rate of two in five minutes. Consider how that service is done by the
myriads of men employed, and this in all seasons and weathers in
overwhelming heat, in numbing cold, in blinding storm, in midnight
darkness. Is not this an army pretty well disciplined, though its object
is not bloodshed? If we see masses full of practical energy and good
sense, but wanting in culture, let us take our culture to them, and
perhaps they will give us some of their practical energy and good sense
in return. Without that Black Country industry, all begrimed and sweaty,
our fine culture could not exist. Everything we use, nay, our veriest
toy represents lives spent for us in delving beneath the dark and
perilous mine, in battling with the wintry sea, in panting before the
glowing forge, in counting the weary hours over the monotonous and
unresting loom, lives of little value, one could think, if there were no
hereafter. Let us at least be kind. I go to Saltaire. I find a noble
effort made by a rich man who kept his heart above wealth, Titus Salt--
he was a baronet, but we will spare him, as we spare Nelson, the
derogatory prefix--to put away what is dark and evil in factory life. I
find a little town, I should have thought not unpleasant to the eye, and
certainly not unpleasant to the heart, where labour dwells in pure air,
amidst beautiful scenery, with all the appliances of civilization, with
everything that can help it to health, morality, and happiness. I find a
man, who might, if he pleased, live idly in the lap of luxury, working
like a horse in the management of this place, bearing calmly not only
toil and trouble, but perverseness and ingratitude. Surely, aesthetic
culture would be a doubtful blessing if it made us think or speak
unsympathetically and rudely of Saltaire. Four hundred thousand people
at Manchester are without pure water. They propose to get it from
Thirlmere. For this they are denounced in that sort of language which is
called strong, but the use of which is a sure proof of weakness, for
irritability was well defined by Abernethy as debility in a state of
excitement. Let us spare, whenever they can be spared, history and
beauty; they are a priceless part of the heritage of a great industrial
nation, and one which lost can never be restored. The only difference I
ever had with my fellow-citizens in Oxford during a pretty long
residence, arose out of my opposition to a measure which would have
marred the historic character and the beauty of our city, while I was
positively assured on the best authority that it was commercially
inexpedient. If Thirlmere can be spared, spare Thirlmere; but if it is
really needed to supply those masses with a necessary of life, the
loveliest lake by which poet or artist ever wandered could not be put to
a nobler use. I am glad in this to follow the Bishop of Manchester, who
is not made of coarse clay, though he cares for the health as well as
for the religion of his people. A schism between aesthetic Oxford and
industrial Lancashire would be a bad thing for both; and South
Kensington, which, while it teaches art, joins hands with industry,
surely does well. It is needless to debate before this audience the
question whether there is any essential antagonism between art or
esthetic culture, and the tendencies of an age of science. An accidental
antagonism there may be, an essential antagonism there cannot be. What
is science but truth, and why should not truth and beauty live together?
Is an artist a worse painter of the human body from being a good
anatomist? Then why should he be a worse painter of nature generally,
because he knows her secrets, or because they are being explored in his
time? Would he render moonlight better if he believed the moon was a
green cheese? Art and Science dwelt together well enough in the minds of
Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. In the large creative mind there
is room for both; though the smaller and merely perceptive mind being
fixed on one may sometimes not have room for the other. True, the
perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science,
may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word
more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of
competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise
with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a
sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we
cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the
ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. But nothing
hinders that, in working for a prize as in working for your bread, you
may, at the same time, be working from sense of duty and love of the
subject, and though co-operation may be our final state, competition is
our present. Here the competition is at least fair. There can hardly be
any doubt that the prize system often calls into activity powers of
doing good work which would otherwise have lain dormant, and if it does
this it is useful to the community, though the individual needs to be on
his guard against its drawbacks in himself. In reading the Life of Lord
Althorp the other day I was struck with the fact, for a fact, I think,
it evidently was, that England had owed one of her worthiest and most
useful statesmen to a college competition, which aroused him to a sense
of his own powers, and of the duty of using them, whereas he would
otherwise never have risen above making betting books and chronicling
the performances of foxhounds. Perhaps about the worst consequence of
the prize system, against which, I have no doubt, your Instructor
guards, is undue discouragement on the part of those who do not win the
prize. And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish you were to receive your
rewards from a hand which would lend them any additional value. But
though presented by me they have been awarded by good judges; and as
they have been awarded to you, I have no doubt you have deserved them
well.
THE ASCENT OF MAN.
Science and criticism have raised the veil of the Mosaic cosmogony and
revealed to us the physical origin of man. We see that, instead of being
created out of the dust of the earth by Divine fiat, he has in all
probability been evolved out of it by a process of development through a
series of intermediate forms.
The discovery is, of course, unspeakably momentous. Among other things
it seems to open to us a new view of morality, and one which, if it is
verified by further investigation, can hardly fail to produce a great
change in philosophy. Supposing that man has ascended from a lower
animal form, there appears to be ground at least for surmising that
vice, instead of being a diabolical inspiration or a mysterious element
of human nature, is the remnant of the lower animal not yet eliminated;
while virtue is the effort, individual and collective, by which that
remnant is being gradually worked off. The acknowledged connection of
virtue with the ascendency of the social over the selfish desires and
tendencies seems to correspond with this view; the nature of the lower
animals being, so far as we can see, almost entirely selfish, and
admitting no regard even for the present interests of their kind, much
less for its interests in the future. The doubtful qualities, and "last
infirmities of noble minds," such as ambition and the love of fame, in
which the selfish element is mingled with one not wholly selfish, and
which commend themselves at least by their refinement, as contrasted
with the coarseness of the merely animal vices, may perhaps be regarded
as belonging to the class of phenomena quaintly designated by some
writers as "pointer facts," and as marking the process of transition. In
what morality consists, no one has yet succeeded in making clear. Mr.
Sidgwick's recent criticism of the various theories leads to the
conviction that not one of them affords a satisfactory basis for a
practical system of ethics. If our lower nature can be traced to an
animal origin, and can be shown to be in course of elimination, however
slow and interrupted, this at all events will be a solid fact, and one
which must be the starting-point of any future system of ethics. Light
would be at once thrown by such a discovery on some parts of the subject
which have hitherto been involved in impenetrable darkness. Of the vice
of cruelty for example no rational account, we believe, has yet been
given; it is connected with no human appetite, and seems to gratify no
human object of desire; but if we can be shown to have inherited it from
animal progenitors, the mystery of its existence is at least in part
explained. In the event of this surmise being substantiated, moral
phantasms, with their mediaeval trappings, would for ever disappear;
individual responsibility would be reduced within reasonable limits; the
difficulty of the question respecting free will would shrink to
comparatively narrow proportions; but it does not seem likely that the
love of virtue and the hatred of vice would be diminished; on the
contrary, it seems likely that they would be practically intensified,
while a more practical direction would certainly be given to the science
of ethics as a system of moral training and a method of curing moral
disease.
It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine
of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which
it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of
institutions. Our general histories will apparently have to be almost
rewritten from that point of view. It is only to be noted, with regard
to the treatment of history, that the mere introduction of a physical
nomenclature, however elaborate and apparently scientific, does not make
anything physical which before was not so, or exclude from human
actions, of which history is the aggregate, any element not of a
physical kind. We are impressed, perhaps, at first with a sense of new
knowledge when we are told that human history is "an integration of
matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter
passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent
heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel
transformation." But a little reflection suggests to us that such a
philosophy is vitiated by the assumption involved in the word "matter,"
and that the philosophy of history is in fact left exactly where it was
before. The superior complexity of high civilization is a familiar
social fact which gains nothing in clearness by the importation of
mechanical or physiological terms.
We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may
explain everything else, cannot explain itself. What is the origin of
the movement, and by what power the order of development is prescribed,
are questions yet unsolved by physical science. That the solution, if it
could be supplied, would involve anything arbitrary, miraculous, or at
variance with the observed order of things, need not be assumed; but it
might open a new view of the universe, and dissipate for ever the merely
mechanical accounts of it. In the meantime we may fairly enter a caveat
against the tacit insinuation of an unproved solution. Science can
apparently give no reason for assuming that the first cause, and that
which gives the law to development, is a blind force rather than an
archetypal idea. The only origination within our experience is that of
human action, where the cause is an idea. Science herself, in fact,
constantly assumes an analogous cause for the movements of the universe
in her use of the word "law," which necessarily conveys the notion, not
merely of observed co-existence and sequence, but of the intelligent and
consistent action of a higher power, on which we rely in reasoning from
the past to the future, as we do upon consistency in the settled conduct
of a man.
Unspeakably momentous, however, we once more admit, the discovery is,
and great is the debt of gratitude due to its illustrious authors. Yet
it seems not unreasonable to ask whether in some respects we are not too
much under its immediate influence, and whether the revolution of
thought, though destined ultimately to be vast, may not at present have
somewhat overpassed its bounds. Is it not possible that the physical
origin of man may be just now occupying too large a space in our minds
compared with his ulterior development and his final destiny? With our
eyes fixed on the "Descent," newly disclosed to us, may we not be losing
sight of the _Ascent_ of man?
There seems in the first place, to be a tendency to treat the origin of
a being as finally decisive of its nature and destiny. From the language
sometimes used, we should almost suppose that rudiments alone were real,
and that all the rest was mere illusion. An eminent writer on the
antiquities of jurisprudence intimates his belief that the idea of human
brotherhood is not coeval with the race, and that primitive communities
were governed by sentiments of a very different kind. His words are at
once pounced upon as a warrant for dismissing the idea of human
brotherhood from our minds, and substituting for it some other social
principles, the character of which has not yet been definitely
explained, though it is beginning in some quarters pretty distinctly to
appear. But surely this is not reasonable. There can be no reason why
the first estate of man, which all allow to have been his lowest estate,
should claim the prerogative of furnishing his only real and
indefeasible principles of action. Granting that the idea of human
brotherhood was not aboriginal--granting that it came into the world at
a comparatively late period, still it has come, and having come, it is
as real and seems as much entitled to consideration as inter-tribal
hostility and domestic despotism were in their own day. That its advent
has not been unattended by illusions and aberrations is a fact which
does not cancel its title to real existence under the present
conditions, and with the present lights of society, any more than in
annuls the great effects upon the actions of men and the course of
history which the idea has undeniably produced. Human brotherhood was
not a part of a primaeval revelation; it may not have been an original
institution; but it seems to be a real part of a development, and it may
be a part of a plan. That the social principles of certain anti-
philanthropic works are identical with those which governed the actions
of mankind in a primaeval and rudimentary state, when man had only just
emerged from the animal, and have been since worked off by the foremost
races in the course of development, is surely rather an argument against
the paramount and indefeasible authority of those principles than in
favour of it. It tends rather to show that their real character is that
of a relapse, or, as the physiologists call it, a reversion. When there
is a vast increase of wealth, of sensual enjoyment, and of the
selfishness which is apt to attend them, it is not marvellous that such
reversions should occur.
Another eminent writer appears to think that he has put an end to
metaphysical theology, and perhaps to metaphysics and theology
altogether, by showing that "being," and the cognate words, originally
denoted merely physical perceptions. But so, probably, did all language.
So did "spirit," so did "geist," so did "power," so did even "sweet
reasonableness," and "the not us which makes for righteousness." Other
perceptions or ideas have gradually come, and are now denoted by the
words which at first denoted physical perceptions only. Why have not
these last comers as good a claim to existence as the first? Suppose the
intellectual nature of man has unfolded, and been brought, as it
conceivably may, into relations with something in the universe beyond
the mere indications of the five bodily senses--why are we bound to
mistrust the results of this unfolding? We might go still further back,
and still lower, than to language denoting merely physical perceptions.
We might go back to inarticulate sounds and signs; but this does not
invalidate the reality of the perceptions afterwards expressed in
articulate language. It seems not very easy to distinguish, in point of
trustworthiness of source, between the principles of metaphysics and the
first principles of mathematics, or to say, if we accept the deductions
in one case, why we should not accept them in the other. It is
conceivable at least, we venture to repeat, that the development of
man's intellectual nature may have enabled him to perceive other things
than those which he perceives by means of his five bodily senses; and
metaphysics, once non-existent, may thus have come into legitimate
existence. Man, if the doctrine of evolution is true, was once a
creature with only bodily senses; nay, at a still earlier stage, he was
matter devoid even of bodily sense; now he has arrived--through the
exercise of his bodily senses it may be--at something beyond bodily
sense, at such notions as _being, essence, existence_: he reasons
upon these notions, and extends the scope of his once merely physical
vocabulary so as to comprehend them. Why should he not? If we are to be
anchored hard and fast to the signification of primaeval language, how
are we to obtain an intellectual basis for "the not us which makes for
righteousness?" Do not the anti-metaphysicists themselves unconsciously
metaphysicize? Does not their fundamental assumption--that the knowledge
received through our bodily senses alone is trustworthy--involve an
appeal to a mental necessity as much as anything in metaphysics, whether
the mental necessity in this case be real or not?
Again, the great author of the Evolution theory himself, in his
_Descent of Man_, has given us an account of morality which
suggests a remark of the same kind. He seems to have come to the
conclusion that what is called our moral sense is merely an indication
of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions.
Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced
to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette
which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles
to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating
as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of
moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self-
sacrifice; to say nothing of spiritual life with its hopes and
aspirations, its prayers and fanes. Such an account even of the origin
of morality seems rather difficult to receive. Surely, even in their
most rudimentary condition, virtue and vice must have been distinguished
by some other characteristic than the relative permanency of two
different sets of impressions. There is a tendency, we may venture to
observe, on the part of eminent physicists, when they have carefully
investigated and explained what seems to them the most important and
substantial subjects of inquiry, to proffer less careful explanations of
matters which to them seem secondary and less substantial, though
possibly to an intelligence surveying the drama of the world from
without the distinctly human portion of it might appear more important
than the rest. Eminent physicists have been known, we believe, to
account summarily for religion as a surviving reminiscence of the
serpent which attacked the ancestral ape and the tree which sheltered
him from the attack, so that Newton's religious belief would be a
concomitant of his remaining trace of a tail. It was assumed that
primaeval religion was universally the worship of the serpent and of the
tree. This assumption was far from being correct; but, even if it had
been correct, the theory based on it would surely have been a very
summary account of the phenomena of religious life.
However, supposing the account of the origin of the moral sense and of
moral life, given in _The Descent of Man_, to be true, it is an
account of the origin only. Though profoundly significant, as well as
profoundly interesting, it is not more significant, compared with the
subsequent development, than is the origin of physical life compared
with the subsequent history of living beings. Suppose a mineralogist or
a chemist were to succeed in discovering the exact point at which
inorganic matter gave birth to the organic; his discovery would be
momentous and would convey to us a most distinct assurance of the method
by which the governing power of the universe works: but would it qualify
the mineralogist or the chemist to give a full account of all the
diversities of animal life, and of the history of man? Heroism, self-
sacrifice, the sense of moral beauty, the refined affections of
civilized men, philanthropy, the desire of realizing a high moral ideal,
whatever else they may be, are not tribal self-preservation subtilized
into etiquette; nor are they adequately explained by reference to the
permanent character of one set of impressions and the occasional
character of another set. Between the origin of moral life and its
present manifestation has intervened something so considerable as to
baffle any anticipation of the destiny of humanity which could have been
formed for a mere inspection of the rudiments. We may call this
intervening force circumstance, if we please, provided we remember that
calling it circumstance does not settle its nature, or exclude the
existence of a power acting through circumstance as the method of
fulfilling a design.
Whatever things may have been in their origin, they are what they are,
both in themselves and in regard to their indications respecting other
beings or influences the existence of which may be implied in theirs.
The connection between the embryo and the adult man, with his moral
sense and intelligence, and all that these imply, is manifest, as well
as the gradual evolution of the one out of the other, and a conclusive
argument is hence derived against certain superstitions or fantastic
beliefs; but the embryo is not a man, neither is the man an embryo. A
physiologist sets before us a set of plates showing the similarity
between the embryo of Newton and that of his dog Diamond. The inference
which he probably expects us to draw is that there is no essential
difference between the philosopher and the dog. But surely it is at
least as logical to infer, that the importance of the embryo and the
significance of embryological similarities may not be so great as the
physiologist is disposed to believe.
So with regard to human institutions. The writer on legal antiquities
before mentioned finds two sets of institutions which are now directly
opposed to each other, and between the respective advocates of which a
controversy has been waged. He proposes to terminate that controversy by
showing that though the two rival systems in their development are so
different, in their origin they were the same. This seems very clearly
to bring home to us the fact that, important as the results of an
investigation of origins are, there is still a limit to their
importance.
Again, while we allow no prejudice to stand in the way of our acceptance
of Evolution, we may fairly call upon Evolution to be true to itself. We
may call upon it to recognise the possibility of development in the
future as well as the fact of development in the past, and not to shut
up the hopes and aspirations of our race in a mundane egg because the
mundane egg happens to be the special province of the physiologist. The
series of developments has proceeded from the inorganic to the organic,
from the organic upwards to moral and intellectual life. Why should it
be arrested there? Why should it not continue its upward course and
arrive at a development which might be designated as spiritual life?
Surely the presumption is in favour of a continued operation of the law.
Nothing can be more arbitrary than the proceeding of Comte, who, after
tracing humanity, as he thinks, through the Theological and Metaphysical
stages into the Positive, there closes the series and assumes that the
Positive stage is absolutely final. How can he be sure that it will not
be followed, for example, by one in which man will apprehend and commune
with the Ruler of the Universe, not through mythology or dogma, but
through Science? He may have had no experience of such a phase of human
existence, nor may he be able at present distinctly to conceive it. But
had he lived in the Theological or the Metaphysical era he would have
been equally without experience of the Positive, and have had the same
difficulty in conceiving its existence. His finality is an assumption
apparently without foundation.