Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, its
cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, its
cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion of
that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which Darwin
by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements of genius
which, Goethe[232] declares, are "elevated above all earthly control."
If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed
and nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects
the secular and critical lead. "La philosophie reformatrice du
XVIII^{e} siecle[233] ramenait la nature et la societe a des
mecanismes que la pensee reflechie peut concevoir et recomposer." In
fact, religion in a mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a
mechanical tone. Butler's thought was too moving, too vital, too
evolutionary, for the sceptics of his time. In a rationalist,
encyclopaedic period, religion also must give hard outline to its
facts, it must be able to display its secret to any sensible man in
the language used by all sensible men. Milton's prophetic genius
furnished the eighteenth century, out of the depth of the passionate
age before it, with the theological tone it was to need. In spite of
the austere magnificence of his devotion, he gives to smaller souls a
dangerous lead. The rigidity of Scripture exegesis belonged to this
stately but imperfectly sensitive mode of thought. It passed away with
the influence of the older rationalists whose precise denials matched
the precise and limited affirmations of the static orthodoxy.
I shall, then, leave the specially biblical aspect of the
debate--interesting as it is and even useful, as in Huxley's
correspondence with the Duke of Argyll and others in 1892[234]--in
order to consider without complication the permanent elements of
Christian thought brought into question by the teaching of evolution.
Such permanent elements are the doctrine of God as Creator of the
universe, and the doctrine of man as spiritual and unique. Upon both
the doctrine of evolution seemed to fall with crushing force.
With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the
doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not
yet, as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction
to the stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin,
indeed, falls principally within the scope of that discussion which
has followed or displaced the Darwinian; and without it the Fall
cannot be usefully considered. For the question about the Fall is a
question not merely of origins, but of the interpretation of moral
facts whose moral reality must first be established.
I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man.
The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that the
differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their
behaviour and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that
is also; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not
unlike those we now see in progress; that what may be called proximate
origins are continuous in the way of force and matter, continuous in
the way of life, with actual occurrences and actual characteristics.
All this has no revolutionary bearing upon the question of ultimate
origins. The whole is a statement about process. It says nothing to
metaphysicians about cause. It simply brings within the scope of
observation or conjecture that series of changes which has given their
special characters to the different parts of the world we see. In
particular, evolutionary science aspires to the discovery of the
process or order of the appearance of life itself: if it were to
achieve its aim it could say nothing of the cause of this or indeed of
the most familiar occurrences. We should have become spectators or
convinced historians of an event which, in respect of its cause and
ultimate meaning, would be still impenetrable.
With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already
established, biological science has the well founded hopes and the
measure of success with which we are all familiar. All this has, it
would seem, little chance of collision with a consistent theism, a
doctrine which has its own difficulties unconnected with any
particular view of order or process. But when it was stated that
species had arisen by processes through which new species were still
being made, evolutionism came into collision with a statement,
traditionally religious, that species were formed and fixed once for
all and long ago.
What is the theological import of such a statement when it is regarded
as essential to belief in God? Simply that God's activity, with
respect to the formation of living creatures, ceased at some point in
past time.
"God rested" is made the touchstone of orthodoxy. And when, under the
pressure of the evidences, we found ourselves obliged to acknowledge
and assert the present and persistent power of God, in the maintenance
and in the continued formation of "types," what happened was the
abolition of a time-limit. We were forced only to a bolder claim, to
a theistic language less halting, more consistent, more thorough in
its own line, as well as better qualified to assimilate and modify
such schemes as Von Hartmann's philosophy of the Unconscious--a
philosophy, by the way, quite intolerant of a merely mechanical
evolution.[235]
Here was not the retrenchment of an extravagant assertion, but the
expansion of one which was faltering and inadequate. The traditional
statement did not need paring down so as to pass the meshes of a new
and exacting criticism. It was itself a net meant to surround and
enclose experience; and we must increase its size and close its mesh
to hold newly disclosed facts of life. The world, which had seemed a
fixed picture or model, gained first perspective and then solidity and
movement. We had a glimpse of organic _history_; and Christian thought
became more living and more assured as it met the larger view of life.
However unsatisfactory the new attitude might be to our critics, to
Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a
limitation, a negation. The movement was essentially conservative,
even actually reconstructive. For the language disused was a language
inconsistent with the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the
infinite, and by implication withdrew from the creative rule all such
processes as could be brought within the descriptions of research. It
ascribed fixity and finality to that "creature" in which an apostle
taught us to recognise the birth-struggles of an unexhausted progress.
It tended to banish mystery from the world we see, and to confine it
to a remote first age.
In the reformed, the restored, language of religion, Creation became
again not a link in a rational series to complete a circle of the
sciences, but the mysterious and permanent relation between the
infinite and the finite, between the moving changes we know in part,
and the Power, after the fashion of that observation, unknown, which
is itself "unmoved all motion's source."[236]
With regard to man it is hardly necessary, even were it possible, to
illustrate the application of this bolder faith. When the record of
his high extraction fell under dispute, we were driven to a
contemplation of the whole of his life, rather than of a part and that
part out of sight. We remembered again, out of Aristotle, that the
result of a process interprets its beginnings. We were obliged to read
the title of such dignity as we may claim, in results and still more
in aspirations.
Some men still measure the value of great present facts in
life--reason and virtue and sacrifice--by what a self-disparaged
reason can collect of the meaner rudiments of these noble gifts. Mr.
Balfour has admirably displayed the discrepancy, in this view, between
the alleged origin and the alleged authority of reason. Such an
argument ought to be used not to discredit the confident reason, but
to illuminate and dignify its dark beginnings, and to show that at
every step in the long course of growth a Power was at work which is
not included in any term or in all the terms of the series.
I submit that the more men know of actual Christian teaching, its
fidelity to the past, and its sincerity in face of discovery, the more
certainly they will judge that the stimulus of the doctrine of
evolution has produced in the long run vigour as well as flexibility
in the doctrine of Creation and of man.
I pass from Evolution in general to Natural Selection.
The character in religious language which I have for short called
mechanical was not absent in the argument from design as stated before
Darwin. It seemed to have reference to a world conceived as fixed. It
pointed, not to the plastic capacity and energy of living matter, but
to the fixed adaptation of this and that organ to an unchanging place
or function.
Mr. Hobhouse has given us the valuable phrase "a niche of organic
opportunity." Such a phrase would have borne a different sense in
non-evolutionary thought. In that thought, the opportunity was an
opportunity for the Creative Power, and Design appeared in the
preparation of the organism to fit the niche. The idea of the niche
and its occupant growing together from simpler to more complex mutual
adjustment was unwelcome to this teleology. If the adaptation was
traced to the influence, through competition, of the environment, the
old teleology lost an illustration and a proof. For the cogency of the
proof in every instance depended upon the absence of explanation.
Where the process of adaptation was discerned, the evidence of Purpose
or Design was weak. It was strong only when the natural antecedents
were not discovered, strongest when they could be declared
undiscoverable.
Paley's favourite word is "Contrivance"; and for him contrivance is
most certain where production is most obscure. He points out the
physiological advantage of the _valvulae conniventes_ to man, and the
advantage for teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed
by "action and pressure." What is not due to pressure may be
attributed to design, and when a "mechanical" process more subtle than
pressure was suggested, the case for design was so far weakened. The
cumulative proof from the multitude of instances began to disappear
when, in selection, a natural sequence was suggested in which all the
adaptations might be reached by the motive power of life, and
especially when, as in Darwin's teaching, there was full recognition
of the reactions of life to the stimulus of circumstance. "The
organism fits the niche," said the teleologist, "because the Creator
formed it so as to fit." "The organism fits the niche," said the
naturalist, "because unless it fitted it could not exist." "It was
fitted to survive," said the theologian. "It survives because it
fits," said the selectionist. The two forms of statement are not
incompatible; but the new statement, by provision of an ideally
universal explanation of process, was hostile to a doctrine of purpose
which relied upon evidences always exceptional however numerous.
Science persistently presses on to find the universal machinery of
adaptation in this planet; and whether this be found in selection, or
in direct-effect, or in vital reactions resulting in large changes, or
in a combination of these and other factors, it must always be opposed
to the conception of a Divine Power here and there but not everywhere
active.
For science, the Divine must be constant, operative everywhere and in
every quality and power, in environment and in organism, in stimulus
and in reaction, in variation and in struggle, in hereditary
equilibrium, and in "the unstable state of species"; equally present
on both sides of every strain, in all pressures and in all
resistances, in short in the general wonder of life and the world. And
this is exactly what the Divine Power must be for religious faith.
The point I wish once more to make is that the necessary readjustment
of teleology, so as to make it depend upon the contemplation of the
whole instead of a part, is advantageous quite as much to theology as
to science. For the older view failed in courage. Here again our
theism was not sufficiently theistic.
Where results seemed inevitable, it dared not claim them as God-given.
In the argument from Design it spoke not of God in the sense of
theology, but of a Contriver, immensely, not infinitely wise and good,
working within a world, the scene, rather than the ever dependent
outcome, of His Wisdom; working in such emergencies and opportunities
as occurred, by forces not altogether within His control, towards an
end beyond Himself. It gave us, instead of the awful reverence due to
the Cause of all substance and form, all love and wisdom, a
dangerously detached appreciation of an ingenuity and benevolence
meritorious in aim and often surprisingly successful in contrivance.
The old teleology was more useful to science than to religion, and
the design-naturalists ought to be gratefully remembered by
Biologists. Their search for evidences led them to an eager study of
adaptations and of minute forms, a study such as we have now an
incentive to in the theory of Natural Selection. One hardly meets with
the same ardour in microscopical research until we come to modern
workers. But the argument from Design was never of great importance to
faith. Still, to rid it of this character was worth all the stress and
anxiety of the gallant old war. If Darwin had done nothing else for
us, we are to-day deeply in his debt for this. The world is not less
venerable to us now, not less eloquent of the causing mind, rather
much more eloquent and sacred. But our wonder is not that "the
underjaw of the swine works under the ground" or in any or all of
those particular adaptations which Paley collected with so much skill,
but that a purpose transcending, though resembling, our own purposes,
is everywhere manifest; that what we live in is a whole, mutually
sustaining, eventful and beautiful, where the "dead" forces feed the
energies of life, and life sustains a stranger existence, able in some
real measure to contemplate the whole, of which, mechanically
considered, it is a minor product and a rare ingredient. Here, again,
the change was altogether positive. It was not the escape of a vessel
in a storm with loss of spars and rigging, not a shortening of sail to
save the masts and make a port of refuge. It was rather the emergence
from narrow channels to an open sea. We had propelled the great ship,
finding purchase here and there for slow and uncertain movement. Now,
in deep water, we spread large canvas to a favouring breeze.
The scattered traces of design might be forgotten or obliterated. But
the broad impression of Order became plainer when seen at due distance
and in sufficient range of effect, and the evidence of love and wisdom
in the universe could be trusted more securely for the loss of the
particular calculation of their machinery.
Many other topics of faith are affected by modern biology. In some of
these we have learnt at present only a wise caution, a wise
uncertainty. We stand before the newly unfolded spectacle of
suffering, silenced; with faith not scientifically reassured but still
holding fast certain other clues of conviction. In many important
topics we are at a loss. But in others, and among them those I have
mentioned, we have passed beyond this negative state and find faith
positively strengthened and more fully expressed.
We have gained also a language and a habit of thought more fit for the
great and dark problems that remain, less liable to damaging
conflicts, equipped for more rapid assimilation of knowledge. And by
this change biology itself is a gainer. For, relieved of fruitless
encounters with popular religion, it may advance with surer aim along
the path of really scientific life-study which was reopened for modern
men by the publication of _The Origin of Species_.
Charles Darwin regretted that, in following science, he had not done
"more direct good"[237] to his fellow-creatures. He has, in fact,
rendered substantial service to interests bound up with the daily
conduct and hopes of common men; for his work has led to improvements
in the preaching of the Christian faith.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 218: F. R. Tennant: "The Being of God in the light of
Physical Science," in _Essays on some theological questions of the
day_. London, 1905.]
[Footnote 219: _Evolutionisme et Platonisme_, pp. 45, 46, 47. Paris,
1908.]
[Footnote 220: _Essays of Elia_, "New Year's Eve," p. 41; Ainger's
edition. London, 1899.]
[Footnote 221: Such an example is given in Baron F. von Huegel's
recently finished book, the result of thirty years' research: _The
Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa
and her Friends_. London, 1908.]
[Footnote 222: G. Tyrrell, in _Mediaevalism_, has a chapter which is
full of the important _moral_ element in a scientific attitude. "The
only infallible guardian of truth is the spirit of truthfulness."
_Mediaevalism_, p. 182, London, 1908.]
[Footnote 223: _Queen of the Air_, Preface, p. vii. London, 1906.]
[Footnote 224: The scientific rank of its writer justifies the
insertion of the following letter from the late Sir John
Burdon-Sanderson to me. In the lecture referred to I had described the
methods of Professor Moseley in teaching Biology as affording a
suggestion of the scientific treatment of religion.
OXFORD,
_April 30, 1902_.
DEAR SIR:
I feel that I must express to you my thanks for the
discourse which I had the pleasure of listening to yesterday
afternoon.
I do not mean to say that I was able to follow all that you
said as to the identity of Method in the two fields of
Science and Religion, but I recognise that the "mysticism"
of which you spoke gives us the only way by which the two
fields can be brought into relation.
Among much that was memorable, nothing interested me more
than what you said of Moseley.
No one, I am sure, knew better than you the value of his
teaching and in what that value consisted.
Yours faithfully,
J. BURDON-SANDERSON.
]
[Footnote 225: H. P. Liddon, _The Recovery of S. Thomas_; a sermon
preached in St. Paul's, London, on April 23rd, 1882 (the Sunday after
Darwin's death).]
[Footnote 226: Dr. Pusey (_Unscience not Science adverse to Faith_,
1878) writes: "The questions as to 'species,' of what variations the
animal world is capable, whether the species be more or fewer, whether
accidental variations may become hereditary ... and the like,
naturally fall under the province of science. In all these questions
Mr. Darwin's careful observations gained for him a deserved
approbation and confidence."]
[Footnote 227: Aristotle, in Bacon, quoted by Newman in his _Idea of a
University_, p. 78. London, 1873.]
[Footnote 228: _Life and Letters_ and _More Letters of Charles
Darwin._]
[Footnote 229: _Life and Letters_, London, 1896. _Thoughts on
Religion_, London, 1895. _Candid Examination of Theism_, London,
1878.]
[Footnote 230: "Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity
befallen the race as that which all who look may now (viz. in
consequence of the scientific victory of Darwin) behold advancing as a
deluge black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most
cherished hopes, engulphing our most precious creed, and burying our
highest life in mindless destruction."--_A Candid Examination of
Theism_, p. 51.]
[Footnote 231: _Science and Christian Tradition._ London, 1904.]
[Footnote 232: "No productiveness of the highest kind ... is in the
power of anyone."--_Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret_.
London, 1850.]
[Footnote 233: Berthelot, _Evolutionisme et Platonisme_, Paris, 1908,
p. 45.]
[Footnote 234: _Times_, 1892, _passim._]
[Footnote 235: See Von Hartmann's _Wahrheit und Irrthum in
Darwinismus_. Berlin, 1875.]
[Footnote 236: Hymn of the Church--
Rerum Deus tenax vigor,
Immotus in te permanens.
]
[Footnote 237: _Life and Letters_, Vol. III. p. 359.]
IX
DARWINISM AND HISTORY
BY J. B. BURY, LITT.D., LL.D.
_Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge_
1. Evolution, and the principles associated with the Darwinian theory,
could not fail to exert a considerable influence on the studies
connected with the history of civilised man. The speculations which
are known as "philosophy of history," as well as the sciences of
anthropology, ethnography, and sociology (sciences which though they
stand on their own feet are for the historian auxiliary), have been
deeply affected by these principles. Historiographers, indeed, have
with few exceptions made little attempt to apply them; but the growth
of historical study in the nineteenth century has been determined and
characterised by the same general principle which has underlain the
simultaneous developments of the study of nature, namely the _genetic
idea_. The "historical" conception of nature, which has produced the
history of the solar system, the story of the earth, the genealogies
of telluric organisms, and has revolutionised natural science, belongs
to the same order of thought as the conception of human history as a
continuous, genetic, causal process--a conception which has
revolutionised historical research and made it scientific. Before
proceeding to consider the application of evolutional principles, it
will be pertinent to notice the rise of this new view.
2. With the Greeks and Romans history had been either a descriptive
record or had been written in practical interests. The most eminent
of the ancient historians were pragmatical; that is, they regarded
history as an instructress in statesmanship, or in the art of war, or
in morals. Their records reached back such a short way, their
experience was so brief, that they never attained to the conception of
continuous process, or realised the significance of time; and they
never viewed the history of human societies as a phenomenon to be
investigated for its own sake. In the middle ages there was still less
chance of the emergence of the ideas of progress and development. Such
notions were excluded by the fundamental doctrines of the dominant
religion which bounded and bound men's minds. As the course of history
was held to be determined from hour to hour by the arbitrary will of
an extra cosmic person, there could be no self-contained causal
development, only a dispensation imposed from without. And as it was
believed that the world was within no great distance from the end of
this dispensation, there was no motive to take much interest in
understanding the temporal, which was to be only temporary.