THE DISHARMONIES OF NATURE.
It has already been indicated that it is not really necessary, in order
to prove design, to establish the fact that the design is perfect or
that it exhibits complete goodness. It is enough that there be design.
Its moral quality or value is quite another question. Nevertheless, it
will be as well to deal with this latter aspect of the subject, and to
see what kind of "plan" it is that nature does exhibit, even assuming
the existence of some design.
Now it is evident that if there be design in nature, and if the design
is the expression of a single supreme mind one quality of that plan
should be unity. The products should, so to speak, dovetail into each
other in such a way that they work together, and even harmonise with
each other. But this is, notoriously, not the case. If from one point of
view there is a certain harmony throughout the world of living beings in
virtue of which life is preserved, it is at least equally true that from
another point of view the harmony is one of destruction. And in the end
death wins. Sooner or later death overtakes all forms of life, while in
the grand total of living beings born into the world, a far larger
number perish than can reach maturity. Wasted effort is the mildest
judgment that can be passed upon these abortive attempts. And not only
does death eventually win in the case of each individual, and against
which may be set the consideration that in the economy of nature death
plays a part in the development of life, but eventually death will, if
we are to trust science, reap a sweeping and universal triumph by the
consummation of terrestrial conditions that will render the maintenance
of life impossible.
Or, again, the relations of species are clearly not what we have a right
to expect in the working out of a reasonably wise and benevolent plan.
It is a general truth that, with the exception of a few instances,
chiefly connected with the relations existing between insects and
flowers, the development of one species in relation to another is not
that of mutual helpfulness. The general rule here is that of mutual
injury. The carnivora prey on the herbivora and upon each other; and the
herbivora crush each other by methods that are as effective as the
method of direct attack. Any variation is "good" provided it be of
advantage to its possessor. And the "good" of the one kind may mean the
destruction of another order. All the exquisite design shown in the
development of the finer feelings of man, and upon which theistic
sentimentalists love to dwell, may be seen in the structure of those
parasites which destroy man and bring his finer feelings to naught. The
late Theodore Roosevelt says of the Brazilian forests:--
In these forests the multitude of insects that bite, sting, devour,
and prey on other creatures, often with accompaniments of atrocious
suffering, passes belief. The very pathetic myths of beneficent
nature could not deceive even the least wise being if he once saw
the iron cruelty of life in the tropics. Of course, "nature"--in
common parlance a wholly inaccurate term, by the way, especially
when used to express a single entity--is entirely ruthless, no less
so as regards types than as regards individuals, and entirely
indifferent to good or evil, and works out her ends or no ends
with utter disregard of pain and woe (Cited by E. D. Fawcett in
_The World as Imagination_; pp. 571-2).
And Mr. Carveth Reade expresses the same thing in a more elaborate
summing up:--
The merciless character of organic evolution appears to us, first,
in reckless propagation and the consequent destruction. Every
species is as prolific as it can be compatibly with the development
of its individuals; and the deaths that ensue from inanition,
disease, violence, present a stupefying scene. The best one can say
for it is that, as life rises in the organic scale, the death rate
declines. Yet even man still suffers outrageously by violence,
disease, inanition; the notion that "Malthus's Law" no longer holds
of civilised man is a foolish delusion. But more sinister than the
direct destruction of life is the spectacle of innumerable species
profiting by a life, parasitic or predatory, at the expense of
others. The parasites refute the vulgar prejudice that evolution is
by the measure of man, progressive; adaptation is indifferent to
better or worse, except as to each species, that its offspring
shall survive by atrophy and degradation. The predatory species
flourish as if in derision of moral maxims; we see that though
human morality is natural to man, it is far from expressing the
whole of Nature. Animals, at first indistinguishable vegetables,
devour them and enjoy a far richer life. Animals that eat other
animals are nearly always superior not only in strength, grace and
agility but in intelligence. There are exceptions to this rule;
some snakes eat monkeys (thanking Providence), and the elephant is
content with foliage; but compare cats and wolves with the
ungulates that make a first concoction of herbs for their sake. It
is true that our monkey kin are chiefly frugivorous; for it may be
plausibly argued that man was first differentiated by becoming
definitely carnivorous, a sociable hunter, as it were, a wolf-ape.
Hence the advantage of longer legs, the use of weapons, the upright
gait and defter hands to use and make weapons, more strategic
brains, tribal organisation, and hence liberation from the tropical
forest, and citizenship of the world. The greater part of his
subsequent history is equally unedifying: having made the world his
prey, he says that God made the world to that end, and those who
have preyed upon their fellows, and enslaved them, and flourished
upon it, have declared that to have been the intention of nature.
(_The Metaphysics of Nature_; pp. 344-5).
A perpetual pulling down and building up, and the building altogether
dependent upon the demolition. The tiger built with tastes and
capacities for catching the gazelle: the gazelle built with capacities
that enable it to escape the tiger. There is no evidence here of the
existence of a single mind working out an intelligent plan. At most we
have either the proof for a number of warring powers, each one striving
to destroy what the other is striving to create, or a single mind that
has deliberately fashioned things so that each part may work for the
destruction of the other part, the whole to presently end in a grand
catastrophe.
But that is not all. If we limit our attention to man, can it be said
that we find in the human structure what we might reasonably expect to
find if man be indeed the crown of the divine plan, the event to which,
for untold ages, all things were designedly tending? What we actually do
find is that the structure of man, physically and mentally, is such as
to altogether negative the notion of complete or harmonious adjustment
to environment. That the human has within it a large number of vestigial
structures--some scientists place it as high as one hundred and
seventy--is now well known, and forms at the same time one of the
evidences of evolution and an impeachment of the theistic theory. There
is only need to instance now the vermiform appendage, which forms the
seat of appendicitis, the "wisdom" teeth, of very little use, and one of
the most fruitful of causes of disease of the teeth, the hair which
covers the human body, now of no use whatever, except to form a lodgment
for microbes, and so makes the acquisition of disease the more certain.
In addition to the number of rudimentary organs that actually encourage
disease--Metchnikoff counts among these the larger intestine--the body
is full of rudimentary muscles and structures that when not positively
harmful, impose a tax on the organism for which no corresponding service
is performed.
The meaning and significance of these structures are, however, so well
recognised that one need not dwell upon their existence. Not so well
known is the complementary fact that just as in his physical structure
man bears evidence of his emergence from lower forms of life, which
result in a certain degree of disharmony between him and an ideal
environment, so in his psychic life his instincts and feelings are often
such as to prevent that ideal adaptation which so many desire. The
earlier conception of optimistic evolutionists that the instincts of man
were, through the operation of natural selection, converted into
beneficent guides is quite faulty. In itself this was probably a
survival of the theism which tried to prove that this was the best of
all possible worlds, and which led evolutionists to try and prove that
their theory was also ethically desirable. At any rate, the theory of
the wholly beneficent nature of human instincts is not tenable. Our
instincts are inherited from our animal ancestors; they were brought to
fruition under conditions different in form from those which obtain with
human beings, with the result that whether an instinct is helpful or the
contrary depends largely upon the educational quality of the
environment, and even then inherited tendencies may be so strong as to
make them a source of danger to the community rather than of benefit.
It is noted, for example, that a deal of what may be called crime, or at
least lawlessness, is the result of an individual being born with
tendencies developed in a way that fits him for an environment of
centuries ago, rather than an environment of to-day. Very many of our
national heroes of a few centuries ago would rank as criminals to-day,
just as many of our criminals to-day would, had they been born a few
centuries since, have been handed down to us as examples of chivalry or
of national heroism. Instead of what one may call the natural endowments
of man pointing towards a more civilised form of life, they point to a
less civilised form, while it is the artificially or socially induced
feelings and ideas that point to a better future.
Thus, if we take the primitive or brute feeling of retaliation we find
it assuming the form of war. And without discussing the value of war in
the past, or even its admissibility in special circumstances in the
present, I do not think it will be seriously disputed that the great
need of the present is to transfer that feeling from the lower level of
brute force to the higher one of adventure in the interests of science
and human betterment. Here it is not the existence of a lofty
"god-given" endowment that puts man out of harmony with his environment;
it is, on the contrary, the operation of an earlier form of feeling
manifestation which retards the coming of a better day.
There is, in fact, not a single quality of human nature that can be
said to act with inerrancy. The baby seizes objects indiscriminately and
puts them in its mouth. The man falling into the water does the very
thing he should not do--throws up his arms. Intense cold lulls to
somnolency, instead of rousing to activity. The love of children, on
which the preservation of the race depends, is absent with many; while
with others the sexual instinct undergoes strange and morbid
manifestations. A complete list of these disharmonies would fill a
volume--indeed, Metchnikoff, in his "Nature of Man," has filled half a
volume with describing some of the instances of physiological
disharmony, and then has not exhausted the list.
It would indeed seem as if nature, with its method of never creating a
new organ or structure, but only transforming and utilising an old one,
had attached a penalty to every successful attempt to rise above a
certain level. If man will walk upright she sees to it that his doing so
shall involve a great liability to hernia. If he will live in cities,
she has ready the ravage of consumption. If he will use clothing she
makes him carry round a coating of useless hair as a method of trapping
disease microbes. So soon as one disease is conquered another is
discovered. Pleasures have their reverse side in pains, and to some
pains the pleasures bear a small relation, being chiefly of the
character of the pains being absent. As a social animal man is only
imperfectly adapted to the state, there going on a constant warfare
between his egoistic and altruistic impulses. In fact, it would
certainly be an arguable proposition, if we allow intention in nature,
to say that man was intended to remain at the animal level, and that,
having so far defeated nature's intention, he is dogged by a
disappointed creator, and made to pay the fullest price that can be
exacted for every step of progress achieved.
Of course, of proof of design in nature there is positively none.
Design, as I have said, is not a natural fact, but a purely human
construction. But, if admitted, it is a two edged weapon. For, if
assumed anywhere, it must be assumed to exist everywhere. And designing
intelligence must be made responsible for the whole scheme. But this the
most extravagant piety refuses to do. Either we have the primitive
theory of a devil who divides with God the responsibility for the state
of the world, or we have the plea that evil may be only good disguised,
or good in the making, or it is argued that we have to contemplate the
"plan" as a whole, and must wait for some future state to pass judgment.
And whichever view we take, there is the implied admission that the plan
of creation as we know it cannot be harmonised with the theory of God
that modern theism places before us. And instead of man being the
miracle of perfection that an earlier generation saw in his structure,
we know that the human structure is such that, given the power to
create, science could really fashion, in the light of its present
knowledge, a better organism.
Finally, disharmony is implied in and necessitated by the very fact of
progress. Progress means a better adjustment, and the discomfort of
maladjustment is the spur to improvement. A perfect equilibrium is as
impossible as perpetual motion, and it is only with a perfect
equilibrium that change, which is the condition of progress, would
cease. The ceaseless desire for something better is, therefore, in
itself an impeachment of things as they are. It is an indication of
there being something wanting, of the existence of a want of complete
harmony between man and his surroundings. Nor is the case of the theist
bettered if he retorts that without the sense of imperfection or of
dissatisfaction there would be no such thing as a conscious striving
after improvement. That may be admitted, but that is only proving that
perfection can never be achieved, and that even in this last resort
"God" has so designed things as to make a mock of man at the end. The
want of complete harmony that is seen in the physical structure of man
is carried over into his mental life. If theism be true man is mocked by
a mirage. And the knowledge is made the more depressing by the belief
that the plan is not accidental, it is not a product of the working of
non-conscious forces, it is the preordained outcome of a plan that was
deliberately resolved on by a being with full power to devise some thing
wiser and better. At the side of that, any theory of things is, by
comparison, hopeful and inspiring.