becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot let these clans be
broken up and die out,--the clan becomes the chief object or care of
natural selection, because if you destroy it you retrograde again, you
lose all you have gained; consequently, those clans in which the
primeval selfish instincts were so modified that the individual conduct
would be subordinated to some extent to the needs of the clan,--those
are the ones which would prevail in the struggle for life. In this way
you gradually get an external standard to which man has to conform his
conduct, and you get the germs of altruism and morality; and in the
prolonged affectionate relation between the mother and the infant you
get the opportunity for that development of altruistic feeling which,
once started in those relations, comes into play in the more general
relations, and makes more feasible and more workable the bonds which
keep society together, and enable it to unite on wider and wider terms.
So it seems that from a very small beginning we are reaching a very
considerable result. I had got these facts pretty clearly worked out,
and carried them around with me some years, before a fresh conclusion
came over me one day with a feeling of surprise. In the old days before
the Copernican astronomy was promulgated, man regarded himself as the
centre of the universe. He used to entertain theological systems which
conformed to his limited knowledge of nature. The universe seemed to be
made for his uses, the earth seemed to have been fitted up for his
dwelling place, he occupied the centre of creation, the sun was made to
give him light, etc. When Copernicus overthrew that view, the effect
upon theology was certainly tremendous. I do not believe that justice
has ever been done to the shock that it gave to man when he was made to
realize that he occupied a kind of miserable little clod of dirt in the
universe, and that there were so many other worlds greater than this. It
was one of the first great shocks involved in the change from ancient to
modern scientific views, and I do not doubt it was responsible for a
great deal of the pessimistic philosophizing that came in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Now, it flashed upon me a dozen years or so ago--after thinking about
this manner in which man originated--that man occupies certainly just
as exceptional a position as before, if he is the terminal in a long
series of evolutionary events. If at the end of the long history of
evolution comes man, if this whole secular process has been going on to
produce this supreme object, it does not much matter what kind of a
cosmical body he lives on. He is put back into the old position of
theological importance, and in a much more intelligent way than in the
old days when he was supposed to occupy the centre of the universe. We
are enabled to say that while there is no doubt of the evolutionary
process going on throughout countless ages which we know nothing about,
yet in the one case where it is brought home to us we spell out an
intelligible story, and we do find things working along up to man as a
terminal fact in the whole process. This is indeed a consistent
conclusion from Wallace's suggestion that natural selection, in working
toward the genesis of man, began to follow a new path and make psychical
changes instead of physical changes. Obviously, here you are started
upon a new chapter in the history of the universe. It is no longer going
to be necessary to shape new limbs, and to thicken the skin and make new
growths of hair, when man has learned how to build a fire, when he can
take some other animal's hide and make it into clothes. You have got to
a new state of things.
After I had put together all these additional circumstances with regard
to the origination of human society and the development of altruism, I
began to see a little further into the matter. It then began to appear
that not only is man the terminal factor in a long process of evolution,
but in the origination of man there began the development of the higher
psychical attributes, and those attributes are coming to play a greater
and greater part in the development of the human race. Just take this
mere matter of "altruism," as we call it. It is not a pretty word, but
must serve for want of a better. In the development of altruism from the
low point, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together, up
to the point reached at the present day, there has been a notable
progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount of improvement.
The progress has been all in the direction of bringing out what we call
the higher spiritual attributes. The feeling was now more strongly
impressed upon me than ever, that all these things tended to set the
whole doctrine of evolution into harmony with religion; that if the past
through which man had originated was such as has been described, then
religion was a fit and worthy occupation for man, and some of the
assumptions which underlie every system of religion must be true. For
example, with regard to the assumption that what we see of the present
life is not the whole thing; that there is a spiritual side of the
question beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a
life eternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to
say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common
sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to produce a
merely ephemeral result. But since then another argument has occurred to
me: that just at the time when the human race was beginning to come upon
the scene, when the germs of morality were coming in with the family,
when society was taking its first start, there came into the human
mind--how one can hardly say, but there did come--the beginnings of a
groping after something that lies outside and beyond the world of sense.
That groping after a spiritual world has been going on here for much
more than a hundred thousand years, and it has played an enormous part
in the history of mankind, in the whole development of human society.
Nobody can imagine what mankind would have been without it up to the
present time. Either all religion has been a reaching out for a phantom
that does not exist, or a reaching out after something that does exist,
but of which man, with his limited intelligence, has only been able to
gain a crude idea. And the latter seems a far more probable conclusion,
because, if it is not so, it constitutes a unique exception to all the
operations of evolution we know about. As a general thing in the whole
history of evolution, when you see any internal adjustment reaching out
toward something, it is in order to adapt itself to something that
really exists; and if the religious cravings of man constitute an
exception, they are the one thing in the whole process of evolution that
is exceptional and different from all the rest. And this is surely an
argument of stupendous and resistless weight.
I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, in the
order in which they came before my mind, for the sake of illustration.
The net result of the whole is to put evolution in harmony with
religious thought,--not necessarily in harmony with particular religious
dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the great religious drift, so
that the antagonism which used to appear to exist between religion and
science is likely to disappear. So I think it will before a great while.
If you take the case of some evolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is
perfectly sure that materialism accounts for everything (he has got it
all cut and dried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is
really no need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the question
whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led him to
such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he started from some
purely arbitrary assumption, like the French materialists of the
eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latter would be the true
explanation. There are a good many people who start on their theories of
evolution with these ultimate questions all settled to begin with. It
was the most natural thing in the world that after the first assaults of
science upon old beliefs, after a certain number of Bible stories and a
certain number of church doctrines had been discredited, there should be
a school of men who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientific
researches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can prove by the
methods of physical science, and we will throw everything else
overboard." That was very much the state of mind of the famous French
atheists of the last century. But only think how chaotic nature was to
their minds compared to what she is to our minds to-day. Just think how
we have in the present century arrived where we can see the bearings of
one set of facts in nature as collated with another set of facts, and
contrast it with the view which even the greatest of those scientific
French materialists could take. Consider how fragmentary and how lacking
in arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universe we
can see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could be an
atheistic world. That hostility between science and religion continued
as long as religion was linked hand in hand with the ancient doctrine of
special creation. But now that the religious world has unmoored itself,
now that it is beginning to see the truth and beauty of natural science
and to look with friendship upon conceptions of evolution, I suspect
that this temporary antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way
of regarding as an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps
quicker than we realize.
There is one point that is of great interest in this connection,
although I can only hint at it. Among the things that happened in that
dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase of his
powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense importance.
Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he maintained that the
human race would never have become human if it had not been for the
hand. I do not know that there was so very much exaggeration about
that. It was certainly of great significance that the particular race of
mammals whose intelligence increased far enough to make it worth while
for natural selection to work upon intelligence alone was the race which
had developed hands and could manipulate things. It was a wonderful era
in the history of creation when that creature could take a club and use
it for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one
more lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day to this,
the career of man has been that of a person who has operated upon his
environment in a different way from any animal before him. An era of
similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man learned how to
build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating that course of culinary
development of which we have seen the climax in our dainty dinner this
evening. Here was another means of acting upon the environment. Here was
the beginning of the working of endless physical and chemical changes
through the application of heat, just as the first use of the club or
the crowbar was the beginning of an enormous development in the
mechanical arts.
Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past, when
ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found
expression in the crudest form of myths, the æsthetic sense was
germinating likewise. Away back in the glacial period you find pictures
drawn and scratched upon the reindeer's antler, portraitures of mammoths
and primitive pictures of the chase; you see the trinkets, the personal
decorations, proving beyond question that the æsthetic sense was there.
There has been an immense æsthetic development since then. And I believe
that in the future it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet
begun to realize. I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind
through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of his
thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations. This is
going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind. There is something
strongly educational and disciplinary in the mere dealing with matter,
whether it be in the manual training school, whether it be in carpentry,
in overcoming the inherent and total depravity of inanimate things,
shaping them to your will, and also in learning to subject yourself to
their will (for sometimes you must do that in order to achieve your
conquests; in other words, you must humour their habits and
proclivities). In all this there is a priceless discipline, moral as
well as mental, let alone the fact that, in whatever kind of artistic
work a man does, he is doing that which in the very working has in it an
element of something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for
motives not very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of
which is the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself;
he is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their
approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer relations to
his fellow man.
In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude
labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind of labour
which can command its price is the kind which has trained intelligence
behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the multiplication of
skilled and special labour. The demand for the products of intelligence
is far greater than that for mere crude products of labour, and it will
be more and more so. For there comes a time when the latter products
have satisfied the limit to which a man can consume food and drink and
shelter,--those things which merely keep the animal alive. But to those
things which minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man
there is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh
infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in
discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one
creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that
there is always something more for which he craves. To my mind, this
fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely more than a mere animate
machine.
_May, 1895._
V
THE ORIGINS OF LIBERAL THOUGHT IN AMERICA[17]
In approaching the subject of the origins of liberal thought in America,
one cannot help remembering that the discovery of the new continent was
itself such a stimulus to free thinking as the world had never before
witnessed. From time immemorial, the trade between Europe and the remote
parts of Asia had followed certain customary routes. From ancient days,
long before Olympiads were heard of, when Assyrian kings with curly
beards commemorated their victories in arrow-headed inscriptions, men
had used those same routes. Up the Red Sea, in the early prime of
hundred-gated Thebes, came ships from the Indian Ocean, with gems and
spices to exchange for Egyptian fine linens and amulets of amber from
the Baltic; and five thousand years later Venetian argosies at
Alexandria were laden with just such gems and spices to distribute to
the merchants of Augsburg, the royal household at Paris, the lords and
ladies of Haddon Hall. Empires rose and fell, creeds and pantheons came
and went, stately temples reared their heads for centuries and slowly
crumbled in ruins, and still amid all the secular change the world's
great stream of trade flowed through the same unshifting channels, and
there was nothing to show that this state of things, to which men's
ideas and habits had always been adjusted, was not to endure forever. So
it was in that recent time when Henry V. of England was smiting the
French chivalry at Agincourt, and his cousin Prince Henry of Portugal
was beginning the search for an ocean route to the Indies. Never did the
human mind get such a wrench out of its ancient grooves, never were such
vistas of new possibilities laid open, never was beheld such glorious
hardihood, such startling romance, as in the time when Columbus sailed
westward to find the East, and Cortes met warriors of the Stone Age face
to face. The men of Europe suddenly found themselves placed in new and
unsuspected relations to the planet on which they lived; worlds of
barbarism and savagery, unheard of and unspeakably bizarre, were brought
to their notice; strange constellations arose in the firmament; strange
beasts and birds were encountered amid outlandish trees and shrubs in
new climates beyond unknown seas. The old familiarity with nature's
aspects received an abrupt shock. On every side loomed up new questions
to be answered, new practical problems to be solved. All man's inventive
faculty, all his patient inquisitiveness, all the courage he could
summon, were forthwith called into play. The dreams of boundless riches,
the eager thirst for new knowledge, the superhuman bravery, which
characterized the epoch of maritime discovery, are symptoms that reveal
to us the highly wrought condition of the European mind at the time. A
study of contemporary chronicles and letters cannot fail to bring home
to us the singular intensity with which the thrill of venturesome
romance was felt in every fibre of man's being.
The impulse thus given to free thinking must have been extremely
powerful. It is customary to attribute the brilliant efflorescence of
the human mind in the sixteenth century to the revival of Greek
learning. Without seeking to diminish the respect due to that mighty
cause, it may be contended that the influence of maritime discovery was
equally important. While the Greek renaissance brought men into
wholesome and stimulating intercourse with the highest achievements of
literature, art, and philosophy, the discovery of the New World
impressed upon them, as nothing had ever done before, the feasibleness
of doing things in novel ways. With the wholesale displacement of
commercial relations, the European mind burst the bounds of the snug
little world to which its habits and theories, its politics civil and
ecclesiastical, its science and its theology, had been adapted. The
sudden and unprecedented widening of the environment soon set up a
general fermentation of ideas. There was nothing accidental in Martin
Luther's coming in the next generation after Columbus. Nor was it
strange that in the following age the English mind, wrought to its
highest tension under the combined influences of Renaissance,
Reformation, and maritime adventure, should have put forth a literature
the boldest and grandest that had ever appeared; that the era of Raleigh
and Frobisher and the early Puritans should have seen even the highest
mark of Greek achievement surpassed by Shakespeare. The gigantic
revolution set on foot by Copernicus was already in full progress, the
era of Descartes was just arriving, and the next century was to see
modern scientific method receive its supreme illustration at the hands
of Newton, while the principles of freedom in thought and speech were to
find invincible champions in Milton and Locke.
Such was the age in which the work of English colonization in America
was beginning. In looking for the origins of liberal thought in America,
it is chiefly with English-speaking America that we are concerned. The
Spanish mind, indeed, felt strongly the stimulus of the maritime
discoveries and the contact with strange races of men, until an age of
chivalrous enterprise bloomed forth in the literature of Calderon and
Lope de Vega and Cervantes; but the new spirit was not strong enough to
prevail over an ecclesiastical organization that had been growing in
power since the Visigothic times. The higher intellectual life of Spain
perished in the fires of the Inquisition, and art and song failed to
lead the way to science and free thought; no Spanish Locke or Newton
followed in the train of a Lope and a Murillo, but so lately as the year
1771 the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the law of
gravitation as discordant with revealed religion.[18] With such a state
of things in the mother country, liberal thought in the Spanish colonies
was a plant of very slow growth. As for France at the end of the
sixteenth century, there was a sturdy intellectual life there which no
efforts of tyranny could more than partially repress; but circumstances
threw the work of colonization into the hands of the Jesuits, and
accordingly the history of New France, while eminent for devoted bravery
and heroic endurance, shows scarcely a trace of liberal thinking either
in politics or in matters pertaining to religion. Not with the French
and Spanish portions of America, therefore, but with the colonies that
developed into the United States, is our inquiry concerned.
The first and most obvious consideration which strikes us is that while
the two centuries following the discovery of America witnessed an
unprecedented awakening of the European mind, yet it was only with those
nations that had retained self-government that this intellectual
awakening was to come to prompt and full fruition. From the British
islands and the Netherlands came the kind of public policy that allowed
free thinking to take deep root and send up a thrifty tree of liberty.
The planting of such seed in the spacious virgin soil of the New World
was doubtless the greatest of all the manifold unforeseen results for
which Columbus opened the way. It made political freedom the strongest
power on earth, and thus favoured the attainment of that equable
flexibility of mind which allows the thought to play freely about the
facts which are laid before it. Not in a moment was such a grand result
achieved; its complete realization has not yet come, and none of us may
live to see it, yet toward that goal the whole impetus of men's
civilizing work is tending, and there is no power that can prevent the
consummation. Year by year, no matter how grave the questions with which
we have to deal, we are becoming more and more able to let our minds
play freely with them, to turn them hither and thither till all sides be
seen and all aspects duly considered.
Not all in a moment, I say, has such a desirable result been achieved.
So far is it, moreover, from having been brought about by conscious
human effort that mankind have in general struggled desperately against
it. Compared with the mass of men, it is only a few minds that have
learned to regard absolute freedom of thought as something to be
desired. Though the colonization of America came at a time when men's
minds were stirred by novel ideas as never before, though the men of
that generation were moving irrepressibly toward liberality of thought,
yet there were very few who had any liking for liberal thought, or any
good word to bestow upon it. There were few who doubted that absolute
truth was attainable concerning the most abstruse questions of
philosophy and religion, and an exactly true belief on minute points of
theology was deemed necessary for one's personal salvation. Changes in
opinion simply wrought a transfer of allegiance from one orthodoxy to
another, and the new orthodoxy felt bound as much as the old one to
persecute all who refused such allegiance. From this point of view the
history of the progress of liberal thought becomes curiously
interesting, for it shows how one of the most momentous revolutions in
human life has steadily gone on in spite of the inveterate antagonism of
the very men concerned in bringing it about! To a considerable extent,
the history has been the same over a large part of the globe. The causes
which have been at work in America have also been at work in Europe, and
even beyond; and the liberal thought with which we are familiar is
characteristic not so much of America as of the latter part of the
nineteenth century. But along with the general causes there have been
local causes which have especially concerned the New World, and a clear
account of the matter requires us to indicate both the one and the
other.