Anthropocentricism, which drifted down as a tradition from ancient
times, and which for centuries shaped the theories of the Western
world, but whose respectability among thinking people has now nearly
passed away, was, perhaps, the boldest and most revolting expression
of human provincialism and conceit ever formulated by any people. It
was the doctrine that man was the centre about whom revolved all
facts and interests whatsoever; and Judaism and its two children,
Christianity and Mahometanism, were responsible for it. Everything,
according to this conception, was interpreted in terms of human
utility. Everything was made for man—including women. The sun and
moon were luminaries, not worlds, hung there by the fatherly
manufacturer of things for the convenience and delight of his
children. The stars were perforations in the overarching concave
through which eavesdropping prophets peered into celestial secrets,
and errand-angels came and went with messages between gods and men.
Not only the spheres in space, but the earth and all it
contained—the rivers, seas, and seasons, all the plants that grow,
and all the flowers that blow, and all the millions that swim and
suffer in the waters and skies—were, according to this remorseless
notion, the soulless adjuncts of man. Intrinsically they were
meaningless. They had significance only as they served the human
species. The hues and perfumes of flowers, the songs of birds, the
dews, the breezes, the rains, the rocks, the ‘beasts of the field
and the fowls of the air,’ the great forests, the mighty
mountains, the fearful solitudes, even famine and pestilence, were
all made for the being with the reinless imagination. Luther
believed that the fly—festive little _Musca domestica_, who
inhabits our homes, and sometimes unwittingly wanders over our
tender places—was a pestiferous invention of the devil,
maliciously sent to annoy him in his meditations. Garlic grew on the
swamp brim as a handy antidote for human malaria. Fruits ripened in
the summertime because the acids and juices which they contained
were believed to be necessary for man’s health and refreshment.
The great muscles of the ox were made to provide men with delicacies
and leisure. The cloak of the ewe was made without any special
thought, or without any thought at all, of the comforts of the ewe.
It was placed there on the ewe by an all-tender creator, to be torn
by his images from her bleeding back and worn. The fossil forms
found in the rocks were not the _bonâ fide_ remains of creatures
that had lived and perished when the calcareous foundations of the
continents were forming in ancient sea-beds. They were counterfeits,
slyly designed by a suspicious providence, and sandwiched among the
strata ‘to test human faith.’ The rainbow was a phenomenon with
which the laws of reflection and refraction had nothing whatever to
do. It was a sign or seal stamped on the retreating storms as a
pledge that submersion would not be again used as a punishment for
sinners. The universal ruler was conceived to be an individual of
transcendent power and respectability, but was supposed to spend the
most of his time and a good deal of anxiety on the regulation and
repair of his illustrious likenesses.
The history of intellectual evolution is the history of
disillusionment. The stars, we now know, are not hatchways, but
worlds. They burn because they are fire. They blaze and circle in
obedience to their own unchangeable inertias, just as the earth
does. They blazed and wheeled when the elemental matters of the
earth mingled indistinguishably with the vapours of the sun, and
they will blaze and wheel when the last inhabitant of this clod has
dissolved into the everlasting atoms. The earth is not the capital
of cosmos nor the subject of celestial anxiety. The earth is a
satrap of the sun—a subordinate among servants, not a sovereign
with a retinue of stars. The earth and its contents were not made
for man. They were not made at all. They were evolved. The concaves
of the sea have been hollowed, the mountains upheaved, and the
continents planted and peopled, by the same tendencies as those that
hold the universes in their grasp. The primal matters of the earth
came out of the substance of the sun, and by the play and activity
of these elements and the play and activity of their derivatives
were evolved all the multitudinous forms of land, fluid, plant,
animal, and society. The flowers that ‘blush unseen’ do not
necessarily ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air,’ as the
poet so melodiously imagines. The colours and scents of flowers
serve their purposes—which are to secure the services of insects
in fertilisation—quite as well when unperceived, as when perceived
by human senses. The non-human races of beings were not made for
human beings. They were evolved—the higher forms from the lower
forms, and the lower forms from still lower—just as the higher
societies of men have been evolved, under the eye of history, out of
barbarism and savagery. They are our ancestors. They have made human
life and civilisation possible. They made their homes on primeval
land patches when the continents we creep over were sleeping in the
seas. They lived and loved and suffered and died in order that a
being intelligent enough to analyse himself and recreant enough to
pick their bones might come into the world.
There are supposed to be something like a million (maybe there are
several million) species of inhabitants living on the earth. The
human species is one of these. Not more than a few thousand of these
species are seriously advantageous to men. The harmful and useless
species are many times more numerous than the helpful. Now, if the
999,999 non-human species were made for the human species, why were
the hundreds of thousands of species made that are of no possible
human importance, and the hundreds of thousands of other species
that are a positive injury? And if by some miraculous stretch of
imagination the 999,999 species now living on the earth are
conceived to have been made for man, why were the 10,000,000 or
15,000,000 of species made that lived and passed away before there
was a human being in existence. Perhaps the traditionist will
say—accustomed as he is to treat syllogisms with contempt—that
they were made to invigorate human ‘faith.’
If the age of the human species be estimated at 50,000 years and the
age of the life-process at 100,000,000 years, the time during which
man has been on the earth is, when compared with the entire period
during which the planet has been tenanted, as 1 to 2,000. And the
time during which the earth has been inhabited—immense as that
time is when compared with the little span of human history—is
also insignificant when compared with the enormous lapse of time
during which the planet was slowly cooling and solidifying
preliminary to the existence of life. And the entire life of the
planet—inconceivably vast as it is—is as nothing compared with
that eternity, that duration without beginning or close, during
which the sidereal millions have undergone, and are destined to
continue to undergo, their countless and immeasurable
transformations.
It is about as profound to suppose that the earth and its contents,
and the suns, stars, and systems of space, were all made for a
single species inhabiting an obscure ball located in a remote
quarter of the universe as it is to suppose that the gigantic body
of the elephant was made for the wisp of hair on the tip of its
tail. _Man_ is _not_ the _end_, he is but an _incident_, of the
infinite elaborations of Time and Space.