customs and institutions is continually finding usages, beliefs, or laws
existing in one part of the world that have long since ceased to exist
in another part; yet where they have ceased to exist they have often
left unmistakable traces of their former existence. In Australasia we
find types of savagery ignorant of the bow and arrow; in aboriginal
North America, a type of barbarism familiar with the art of pottery, but
ignorant of domestic animals or of the use of metals; among the earliest
Romans, a higher type of barbarism, familiar with iron and cattle, but
ignorant of the alphabet. Along with such gradations in material culture
we find associated gradations in ideas, in social structure, and in
deep-seated customs. Thus, some kind of fetishism is apt to prevail in
the lower stages of barbarism, and some form of polytheism in the
higher stages. The units of composition in savage and barbarous
societies are always the clan, the phratry, and the tribe. In the lower
stages of barbarism we see such confederacies as those of the Iroquois;
in the highest stage, at the dawn of civilization, we begin to find
nations imperfectly formed by conquest without incorporation, like
aboriginal Peru or ancient Assyria. In the lower stages we see captives
tortured to death, then at a later stage sacrificed to the tutelar
deities, then later on enslaved and compelled to till the soil. Through
the earlier stages of culture, as in Australasia and aboriginal America,
we find the marriage tie so loose and paternity so uncertain that
kinship is reckoned only through the mother; but in the highest stage of
barbarism, as among the earliest Greeks, Romans, and Jews, the more
definite patriarchal family is developed, and kinship begins to be
reckoned through the father. It is only after that stage is reached that
inheritance of property becomes fully developed, with the substitution
of individual ownership for clan ownership, and so on to the development
of testamentary succession, individual responsibility for delict and
crime, and the substitution of contract for status. In all such
instances--and countless others might be cited--we see the marks of an
intelligible progression, a line of development which human ideas and
institutions have followed. But in the most advanced societies we find
numerous traces of such states of things as now exist only among savage
or barbarous societies. Our own ancestors were once polytheists, with
plenty of traces of fetishism. They were organized in clans, phratries,
and tribes. There was a time when they used none but stone tools and
weapons; when there was no private property in land, and no political
structure higher than the tribe. Among the forefathers of the present
civilized inhabitants of Europe are unmistakable traces of human
sacrifices, and of the reckoning of kinship through the mother only.
When we have come to survey large groups of facts of this sort, the
conclusion is irresistibly driven home to us that the more advanced
societies have gone through various stages now represented here and
there by less advanced societies; that there is a general path of social
development, along which, owing to special circumstances, some peoples
have advanced a great way, some a less way, some but a very little way;
and that by studying existing savages and barbarians we get a valuable
clue to the interpretation of prehistoric times. All these things are
to-day commonplaces among students of history and archæology; sixty
years ago they would have been scouted as idle vagaries. It is the
introduction of such methods of study that is making history scientific.
It is enabling us to digest the huge masses of facts that are daily
poured in upon us by decipherers of the past,--monuments, inscriptions,
pottery, weapons, ethnological reports, and all that sort of thing,--and
to make all contribute toward a coherent theory of the career of mankind
upon the earth.
In the course of the foregoing survey one fact stands out with especial
prominence: it appears that about half a century ago the foremost minds
of the world, with whatever group of phenomena they were occupied, had
fallen, and were more and more falling, into a habit of regarding
things, not as having originated in the shape in which we now find them,
but as having been slowly metamorphosed from some other shape through
the agency of forces similar in nature to forces now at work. Whether
planets, or mountains, or mollusks, or subjunctive moods, or tribal
confederacies were the things studied, the scholars who studied them
most deeply and most fruitfully were those who studied them as phases in
a process of development. The work of such scholars has formed the
strong current of thought in our time, while the work of those who did
not catch these new methods has been dropped by the way and forgotten;
and as we look back to Newton's time we can see that ever since then the
drift of scientific thought has been setting in this direction, and with
increasing steadiness and force.
Now, what does all this drift of scientific opinion during more than two
centuries mean? It can, of course, have but one meaning. It means that
the world _is_ in a process of development, and that gradually, as
advancing knowledge has enabled us to take a sufficiently wide view of
the world, we have come to see that it is so. The old statical
conception of a world created all at once in its present shape was the
result of very narrow experience; it was entertained when we knew only
an extremely small segment of the world. Now that our experience has
widened, it is outgrown and set aside forever; it is replaced by the
dynamical conception of a world in a perpetual process of evolution from
one state into another state. This dynamical conception has come to stay
with us. Our theories as to what the process of evolution is may be more
or less wrong and are confessedly tentative, as scientific theories
should be. But the dynamical conception, which is not the work of any
one man, be he Darwin or Spencer or any one else, but the result of the
cumulative experience of the last two centuries,--this is a permanent
acquisition. We can no more revert to the statical conception than we
can turn back the sun in his course. Whatever else the philosophy of
future generations may be, it must be some kind of a philosophy of
evolution.
Such is the scientific conquest achieved by the nineteenth century, a
marvellous story without any parallel in the history of human
achievement. The swiftness of the advance has been due partly to the
removal of the ancient legal and social trammels that beset free
thinking in every conceivable direction. It is largely due also to the
use of correct methods of research. The waste of intellectual effort has
been less than in former ages. The substitution of Lavoisier's balance
for Stahl's _a priori_ reasoning is one among countless instances of
this. Sound scientific method is a slow acquisition of the human mind,
and for its more rapid introduction, in Priestley's time and since, we
have largely to thank the example set by those giants of a former age,
Galileo and Kepler, Descartes and Newton.
The lessons that might be derived from our story are many. But one that
we may especially emphasize is the dignity of Man whose persistent
seeking for truth is rewarded by such fruits. We may be sure that the
creature whose intelligence measures the pulsations of molecules and
unravels the secret of the whirling nebula is no creature of a day, but
the child of the universe, the heir of all the ages, in whose making and
perfecting is to be found the consummation of God's creative work.
_May, 1896._
II
THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION: ITS SCOPE AND PURPORT[5]
It was not strange that among the younger men whose opinions were
moulded between 1830 and 1840 there should have been one of organizing
genius, with a mind inexhaustibly fertile in suggestions, who should
undertake to elaborate a general doctrine of evolution, to embrace in
one grand coherent system of generalizations all the minor
generalizations which workers in different departments of science were
establishing. It is this prodigious work of construction that we owe to
Herbert Spencer. He is the originator and author of what we know to-day
as the doctrine of evolution, the doctrine which undertakes to formulate
and put into scientific shape the conception of evolution toward which
scientific investigation had so long been tending. In the mind of the
general public there seems to be dire confusion with regard to Mr.
Spencer and his relations to evolution and to Darwinism. Sometimes, I
believe, he is even supposed to be chiefly a follower and expounder of
Mr. Darwin! No doubt this is because so many people mix up Darwinism
with the doctrine of evolution, and have but the vaguest and haziest
notions as to what it is all about. As I explained above, Mr. Darwin's
great work was the discovery of natural selection, and the demonstration
of its agency in effecting specific changes in plants and animals; and
in that work he was completely original. But plants and animals are only
a part of the universe, though an important part, and with regard to
universal evolution or any universal formula for evolution Darwinism had
nothing to say. Such problems were beyond its scope.
The discovery of a universal formula for evolution, and the application
of this formula to many diverse groups of phenomena, have been the great
work of Mr. Spencer, and in this he has had no predecessor. His wealth
of originality is immense, and it is unquestionable. But as the most
original thinker must take his start from the general stock of ideas
accumulated at his epoch, and more often than not begins by following a
clue given him by somebody else, so it was with Mr. Spencer when, about
forty years ago, he was working out his doctrine of evolution. The clue
was not given by Mr. Darwin. Darwinism was not yet born. Mr. Spencer's
theory was worked out in all its parts, and many parts of it had been
expounded in various published volumes and essays before the publication
of the "Origin of Species."
The clue which Mr. Spencer followed was given him by the great
embryologist, Karl Ernst von Baer, and an adumbration of it may perhaps
be traced back through Kaspar Friedrich Wolf to Linnæus. Hints of it may
be found, too, in Goethe and in Schelling. The advance from simplicity
to complexity in the development of an egg is too obvious to be
overlooked by any one, and was remarked upon, I believe, by Harvey; but
the analysis of what that advance consists in was a wonderfully
suggestive piece of work. Baer's great book was published in 1829, just
at the time when so many stimulating ideas were being enunciated, and
its significant title was _Entwickelungsgeschichte_, or "History of
Evolution." It was well known that, so far as the senses can tell us,
one ovum is indistinguishable from another, whether it be that of a man,
a fish, or a parrot. The ovum is a structureless bit of organic matter,
and, in acquiring structure along with its growth in volume and mass, it
proceeds through a series of differentiations, and the result is a
change from homogeneity to heterogeneity. Such was Baer's conclusion, to
which scanty justice is done by such a brief statement. As all know, his
work marked an epoch in the study of embryology; for to mark the
successive differentiations in the embryos of a thousand animals was to
write a thousand life histories upon correct principles.
Here it was that Mr. Spencer started. As a young man, he was chiefly
interested in the study of political government and in history so far as
it helps the study of politics. A philosophical student of such subjects
must naturally seek for a theory of evolution. If I may cite my own
experience, it was largely the absorbing and overmastering passion for
the study of history that first led me to study evolution in order to
obtain a correct method. When one has frequent occasion to refer to the
political and social _progress_ of the human race, one likes to know
what one is talking about. Mr. Spencer needed a theory of progress. He
could see that the civilized part of mankind has undergone some change
from a bestial, unsocial, perpetually fighting stage of savagery into a
partially peaceful and comparatively humane and social stage, and that
we may reasonably hope that the change in this direction will go on. He
could see, too, that along with this change there has been a building-up
of tribes into nations, a division of labour, a differentiation of
governmental functions, a series of changes in the relations of the
individual to the community. To see so much as this is to whet one's
craving for enlarged resources wherewith to study human progress. Mr.
Spencer had a wide, accurate, and often profound acquaintance with
botany, zoölogy, and allied studies. The question naturally occurred to
him, Where do we find the process of development most completely
exemplified from beginning to end, so that we can follow and
exhaustively describe its consecutive phases? Obviously in the
development of the ovum. There, and only there, do we get the whole
process under our eyes from the first segmentation of the yolk to the
death of the matured individual. In other groups of phenomena we can
only see a small part of what is going on; they are too vast for us, as
in astronomy, or too complicated, as in sociology. Elsewhere our
evidences of development are more or less piecemeal and scattered, but
in embryology we do get, at any rate, a connected story.
So Mr. Spencer took up Baer's problem, and carried the solution of it
much further than the great Esthonian naturalist. He showed that in the
development of the ovum the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity is
accompanied by a change from indefiniteness to definiteness; there are
segregations of similarly differentiated units resulting in the
formation of definite organs. He further showed that there is a parallel
and equally important change from incoherence to coherence; along with
the division of labour among the units there is an organization of
labour: at first, among the homogeneous units there is no
subordination,--to subtract one would not alter the general aspect; but
at last, among the heterogeneous organs there is such subordination and
interdependence that to subtract any one is liable to undo the whole
process and destroy the organism. In other words, integration is as much
a feature of development as differentiation; the change is not simply
from a structureless whole into parts, but it is from a structureless
whole into an organized whole with a consensus of different functions,
and that is what we call an organism. So while Baer said that the
evolution of the chick is a change from homogeneity to heterogeneity
through successive differentiations, Mr. Spencer said that the evolution
of the chick is a continuous change from indefinite incoherent
homogeneity to definite coherent heterogeneity through successive
differentiations and integrations.
But Mr. Spencer had now done something more than describe exhaustively
the evolution of an individual organism. He had got a standard of high
and low degrees of organization; and the next thing in order was to
apply this standard to the whole hierarchy of animals and plants
according to their classified relationships and their succession in
geological time. This was done with most brilliant success. From the
earliest records in the rocks, the general advance in types of
organization has been an advance in definiteness, coherence, and
heterogeneity. The method of evolution in the life history of the animal
and vegetal kingdoms has been like the method of evolution in the life
history of the individual.
To go into the inorganic world with such a formula might seem rash. But
as the growth of organization is essentially a particular kind of
redistribution of matter and motion, and as redistribution of matter and
motion is going on universally in the inorganic world, it is interesting
to inquire whether, in such simple approaches toward organization as we
find, there is any approach toward the characteristics of organic
evolution as above described. It was easy for Mr. Spencer to show that
the change from a nebula into a planetary system conforms to the
definition of evolution in a way that is most striking and suggestive.
But in studying the inorganic world Mr. Spencer was led to modify his
formula in a way that vastly increased its scope. He came to see that
the primary feature of evolution is an integration of matter and
concomitant dissipation of motion. According to circumstances, this
process may or not be attended with extensive internal rearrangements
and development of organization. The continuous internal rearrangement
implied in the development of organization is possible only where there
is a medium degree of mobility among the particles, a plasticity such as
is secured only by those peculiar chemical combinations which make up
what we call organic matter. In the inorganic world, where there is an
approach to organization there is an adumbration of the law as realized
in the organic world. But in the former, what strikes us most is the
concentration of the mass with the retention of but little internal
mobility; in the latter, what strikes us most is the wonderful
complication of the transformations wrought by the immense amount of
internal mobility retained. These transformations are to us the mark,
the distinguishing feature, of life.
Having thus got the nature of the differences between the organic and
inorganic worlds into a series of suggestive formulas, the next thing
to be done was to inquire into the applicability of the law of evolution
to the higher manifestations of vital activity,--in other words, to
psychical and social life. Here it was easy to point out analogies
between the development of society and the development of an organism.
Between a savage state of society and a civilized state, it is easy to
see the contrasts in complexity of life, in division of labour, in
interdependence and coherence of operations and of interests. The
difference resembles that between a vertebrate animal and a worm.
Such analogies are instructive, because at the bottom of the phenomena
there is a certain amount of real identity. But Mr. Spencer did not stop
with analogies; he pursued his problem into much deeper regions. There
is one manifest distinction between a society and an organism. In the
organism, the conscious life, the psychical life, is not in the parts,
but in the whole; but in a society, there is no such thing as corporate
consciousness: the psychical life is all in the individual men and
women. The highest development of this psychical life is the end for
which the world exists. The object of social life is the highest
spiritual welfare of the individual members of society. The individual
human soul thus comes to be as much the centre of the Spencerian world
as it was the centre of the world of mediæval theology; and the history
of the evolution of conscious intelligence becomes a theme of surpassing
interest.
This is the part of his subject which Mr. Spencer has handled in the
most masterly manner. Nothing in the literature of psychology is more
remarkable than the long-sustained analysis in which he starts with
complicated acts of quantitative reasoning and resolves them into their
elementary processes, and then goes on to simpler acts of judgment and
perception, and then down to sensation, and so on resolving and
resolving, until he gets down to the simple homogeneous psychical shocks
or pulses in the manifold compounding and recompounding of which all
mental action consists. Then, starting afresh from that conception of
life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism
to outer relations in the environment,--a conception of which he made
such brilliant use in his "Principles of Biology,"--he shows how the
psychical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of
adjustments or correspondences, and how the development of psychical
life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration of such
correspondences. Intellectual life is shown to have arisen by slow
gradations, and the special interpretations of reflex action, instinct,
memory, reason, emotion, and will are such as to make the "Principles of
Psychology" indubitably the most suggestive book upon mental phenomena
that was ever written.
Toward the end of the first edition of the "Origin of Species,"
published in 1859, Mr. Darwin looked forward to a distant future when
the conception of gradual development might be applied to the phenomena
of intelligence. But the first edition of the "Principles of
Psychology," in which this was so successfully done, had already been
published four years before,--in 1855,--so that Mr. Darwin in later
editions was obliged to modify his statement, and confess that, instead
of looking so far forward, he had better have looked about him. I
remember hearing Mr. Darwin laugh merrily over this at his own expense.
This extension of the doctrine of evolution to psychical phenomena was
what made it a universal doctrine, an account of the way in which the
world, as we know it, has been evolved. There is no subject, great or
small, that has not come to be affected by the doctrine, and, whether
men realize it or not, there is no nook or corner in speculative science
where they can get away from the sweep of Mr. Spencer's thought.
This extension of the doctrine to psychical phenomena is by many people
misunderstood. The "Principles of Psychology" is a marvel of
straightforward and lucid statement; but, from its immense reach and
from the abstruseness of the subject, it is not easy reading. It
requires a sustained attention such as few people can command, except on
subjects with which they are already familiar. Hence few people read it
in comparison with the number who have somehow got it into their heads
that Mr. Spencer tries to explain mind as evolved out of matter, and is
therefore a materialist. How many worthy critics have been heard to
object to the doctrine of evolution that you cannot deduce mind from the
primeval nebula, unless the germs of mind were present already! But that
is just what Mr. Spencer says himself. I have heard him say it more than
once, and his books contain many passages of equivalent import.[6] He
never misses an opportunity for attacking the doctrine that mind can be
explained as evolved from matter. But, in spite of this, a great many
people suppose that the gradual evolution of mind _must_ mean its
evolution out of matter, and are deaf to arguments of which they do not
perceive the bearing. Hence Mr. Spencer is so commonly accredited with
the doctrine which he so earnestly repudiates.
But there is another reason why people are apt to suppose the doctrine
of evolution to be materialistic in its implications. There are able
writers who have done good service in illustrating portions of the
general doctrine, and are at the same time avowed materialists. One may
be a materialist, whatever his scientific theory of things; and to such
a person the materialism naturally seems to be a logical consequence
from the scientific theory. We have received this evening a
communication from Professor Ernst Haeckel, of Jena, in which he lays
down five theses regarding the doctrine of evolution:--
1. "The general doctrine appears to be already unassailably founded;
2. "Thereby every supernatural creation is completely excluded;
3. "Transformism and the theory of descent are inseparable constituent
parts of the doctrine of evolution;
4. "The necessary consequence of this last conclusion is the descent of
man from a series of vertebrates."
So far, very good; we are within the limits of scientific competence,
where Professor Haeckel is strong. But now, in his fifth thesis, he
enters the region of metaphysics,--the transcendental region, which
science has no competent methods of exploring,--and commits himself to a
dogmatic assertion:
5. "The beliefs in an 'immortal soul' and in 'a personal God' are
therewith" (_i. e._, with the four preceding statements) "completely
ununitable (_völlig unvereinbar_)."
Now, if Professor Haeckel had contented himself with asserting that
these two beliefs are not susceptible of scientific demonstration; if he
had simply said that they are beliefs concerning which a scientific man,
in his scientific capacity, ought to refrain from making assertions,
because Science knows nothing whatever about the subject, he would have
occupied an impregnable position. His fifth thesis would have been as
indisputable as his first four. But Professor Haeckel does not stop
here. He declares virtually that if an evolutionist is found
entertaining the beliefs in a personal God and an immortal soul,
nevertheless these beliefs are not philosophically reconcilable with his
scientific theory of things, but are mere remnants of an old-fashioned
superstition from which he has not succeeded in freeing himself.