merely man's physical destruction, but his moral destruction also; that
the ruin of his body should be preceded by the ruin of his soul; that in
his regressive metamorphosis he should be compelled, by the struggle for
existence and the instinct of self-preservation, to play the traitor to
one after another of his ideals of tenderness, of pity, and of love. The
fittest to survive will be those who are most completely adapted to the
altered environment, who are resolved to succeed in a struggle for
existence in which success can be obtained by brutishness alone. The
least fitted to the new conditions, and the first to perish therefore,
will be those with whom self does not come first. With their destruction
the competition between their less scrupulous survivors will become
fiercer and still more cruel. And this process will be repeated again
and again, each generation transmitting cunning and cruelty intensified
to the next. Our great cities already breed men degraded below the level
of the lowest savages known to us, but even they can give us but little
idea of what the struggle for existence will yet produce from the ruins
of civilisation in the course of the Evolution of Inhumanity.
While proclaiming that "the ethical process is in opposition to the
principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the
qualities best fitted for success in that struggle," and that at the
best the ethical process can maintain itself only for a relatively short
time, "until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon
its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once
more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet," Mr.
Huxley held that our duty lay "not in imitating the cosmic process,
still less in running away from it, but in combating it."[3] "Cosmic
nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of
ethical nature," and though we know that the enemy's triumph must be
complete, that the defeat of the good cause is preordained, that we and
ours must be annihilated, we must remain at our posts, fighting to the
end without hope.
It seems, then, that man possesses two kinds of knowledge: he knows to
some extent what is, and to some extent he knows what ought to be. And
both kinds of knowledge are equally valid. He judges that a thing is,
and he judges also that a thing ought to be. Both judgments are equally
true, but apparently both are not equally final, for if man judges that
what is, ought not to be, he is impelled to alter what is, so that in
the end the thing that ought to be is also the thing that is. The
judgment of what ought to be, the ideal, is thus proved, or rather made,
to be the finally correct one. On the other hand, if man is defeated in
his attempts to adjust the things that are to his judgment of what they
ought to be, he does not acquiesce in his defeat; he refuses to accept
the result as final; the end of the matter is not there; things are not
what he strove to make them, but they ought to be. What is has nothing
to do with what ought to be. But what ought to be may make a good deal
of difference to what is.
The ethical process, in its conflict with the cosmic process, may not in
the end prove victorious; but that makes no difference to the fact that
it ought to be victorious. It is this deep-seated conviction which made
Mr. Huxley say that we must declare war to the last against cosmic
nature, the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The victory of
the enemy may be certain, but it will none the less be wrong; it may be
permanent, but as long as it lasts it will be wrong. If matter and
motion are eternal and indestructible, morality is equally everlasting
and immutable. Unless this is so, unless the triumph of the cosmic
process is wrong, once and always, why are we called upon to endure
sorrow and pain and suffering rather than submit to it? Our judgment
that it is wrong is as independent of time as is our judgment that
particles of matter gravitate towards one another. We have no reason for
believing that the latter will continue to be true for a longer time
than the former. Indeed, if matter and motion, having achieved their
victory over the ethical process, were then and there to be annihilated,
their victory would continue to be wrong, though they had ceased to be.
Right may triumph or wrong may triumph, but right is right and wrong is
wrong for evermore. It is vain to tell us in the same breath that we
must stake our all upon our moral judgments and that our moral judgments
are not to be relied on. Every impeachment of their validity is an
invitation to us to give up the struggle against the enemy of ethical
nature. And if we are really resolved to fight the good fight and quit
ourselves like men, we thereby affirm that our moral judgments are at
least as valid as our judgments on matters of fact, and that, if our
knowledge of what is is true objectively, our knowledge of what ought to
be has in it at least an equal element of objective truth.
If, then, the cosmic process is real and objective, in so far as it is a
perpetual manifestation of the Unknown Reality which underlies all
things, then the ethical process, having the same reality and
objectivity, is also a manifestation of the Unknowable. The perpetual
redistribution of matter and motion is not the only way in which the
Unknowable manifests itself to men: it also gives a shape to itself in
the form of the highest and purest aspirations of which man is conscious
within himself. It might seem, therefore, at first sight as though a
mere dispassionate consideration of the actual facts of life, quite
apart from any religious presuppositions or presumptions, forced us at
last into the presence of a God, the source and author of all goodness.
But, in the first place, those who hold to the dogma of Agnosticism,
that what underlies things as they are known to us is the Unknowable,
cannot admit that we know or can find out whether the Unknowable is good
or bad. Induction, the logical method to which science owes so many of
its discoveries, and by which we proceed from the known to the unknown,
does not avail us here. No logical method could discover what is not
merely unknown, but absolutely unknowable.
In the next place it is reasonable enough that those who begin by
believing in a Divine Providence should also believe that right will
triumph in the end, if not in the world as it is manifested to us now
and here, in space and time, then in that real world, that kingdom of
heaven, of which this world is but an imperfect manifestation, or to
which it is but a distant and slowly moving approximation. For those,
however, who refuse to assume the reality of a Divine Providence the
case is different. They base themselves on facts of experience: they
observe that to some small extent what ought to be tends to substitute
itself for what is, thanks to the action of man exclusively, and not to
any inherent tendency to good in cosmic nature, but rather in spite of
the resistance to good caused by the necessary action of the mechanical
laws of nature. From their observation of the conditions under which man
has succeeded in modifying what is into what ought to be, they forecast
the extent to which that process may be carried in the future; and their
conclusion is that the process is doomed to eventual failure, is doomed
not merely to cease, but to give way to a process in the opposite
direction, by which what ought to be will be displaced by what ought
not, by which ethical nature will succumb to cosmic nature.
Now, if there be no God, or if being Unknowable He must be eliminated
from our words, thoughts, and deeds as a negligible and useless quantity
for rational purposes, it is a natural enough conclusion that right must
eventually succumb to wrong. It is but a reassertion of the familiar
thesis that without religion morality cannot permanently be maintained.
On this occasion, however, the thesis is advanced not as a piece of
religious prejudice or theological insolence, but as the teaching of
science and the inevitable outcome of evolution.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] HUXLEY, _Evolution and Ethics_, p. 44.
[2] HUXLEY, _Evolution and Ethics_, p. 44.
[3] _Evolution and Ethics_, pp. 31, 45, 83.
IV.
IDEALISM
The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation
of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that
what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly,
what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos.
That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all
goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the
same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first
moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be
real. But whereas those losses are but personal, and possibly our
regrets selfish, this loss is more than personal, and the regret not
merely selfish. It is not merely that we personally have held a mistaken
opinion, or that any self-sacrifice--miserably small and unworthy in the
retrospect--that we have made has been made for a losing cause. It is
that apart from our personal share in the matter, which rated at its
true value is as naught, the thing is wrong; it ought not to be. Of that
we are just as certain as that our past life has not been what it ought
to have been, what it might have been. The past is past beyond recall,
but for the future hitherto there has been hope and faith, faith that
what ought to be may be, even for us, hope that it will be so. But now,
in place of hope and faith, we have the scientific certainty that the
future of humanity is devoted to the triumph of the thing that ought not
to be. The only consolation left to us is the inextinguishable, the
unconquerable conviction that right is right even though it should not
prevail. To this conviction we must hold, though the heavens should
fall. To it we must hold, though it bring, as bring it must, according
to Mr. Huxley, sorrow and pain and the renunciation of our own
happiness.
These are hard sayings. But there is a yet harder to be added to them.
Even though it should involve the renunciation of our intellectual
superiority to other people, we must hold to our conviction. If we are
in earnest about our moral convictions, we shall reject any suggestion
that they are not after all really true, even if that suggestion seems
to afford the only way of escaping from the conclusion that faith in
religion has the same basis in reason as faith in science.
In proclaiming our conviction that right is right, we affirm and intend
to affirm that it is so not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of
fact. In the same way, an established scientific truth is not one of
those matters about which reasonable persons, who are competent to
judge, may reasonably hold different opinions: it is not a matter of
opinion, but a matter of fact. Indeed, both kinds of truth, moral truths
and scientific truths, are quite independent of individual and personal
opinion. There are people in whose opinion the earth is flat; but the
earth is not flat, nor can their opinion alter the fact. There was a
time when all the laws of nature were unknown to man or misconceived by
him; but they operated as usual, quite unaffected by his ideas. So there
are people who consider successful roguery ideal, and who would make a
fortune by promoting fraudulent companies, if they could; but honesty
remains a duty, in spite of their ideas. Right is right, even though
there be brutes in human form; and right was right, even when the ape
and tiger ruled in man, and even though they were fine fellows, in their
own opinion. Cruelty and selfishness never were right at any time, and
never will be. The laws of morality, like the laws of science, are
objectively true: they do not vary with the opinions men entertain about
them; the earth, for instance, did not move or cease to move round the
sun according as men imagined Galileo to be right or wrong, nor has
right ceased to be right even when the world has been most depraved.
A moral judgment, then, like a scientific judgment, is objective, not
subjective; it is not the expression of a mere opinion, but the
statement of a fact which has an existence independent of man. If now we
ask what sort of an existence it has, it is clear that what is and what
ought to be have not in all cases the same kind of existence: the thing
which is may sometimes also be the thing that ought to be, but often it
is not. Now, when the latter is the case, when a thing is felt to be a
crying evil, a foul injustice that calls for remedy, in what sense does
the justice exist on which we call to drive out the injustice? The thing
which ought not to be exists, and is in possession. The thing which
ought to be delays its coming. Shall we say, then, that, while that is
so, it exists indeed, but exists as an ideal, as something which we know
ought to be and are resolved shall be? That it must present itself to
some mind or other as an object of desire, and as a possibility capable
of fulfilment, is certain. That it does so present itself to man is what
we mean when we attribute to him the power of moral judgment and moral
action. But when we speak of man's moral judgments as being objectively
true, we imply that they exist not merely in his mind, but also
elsewhere. But ideals can only exist in a mind; judgments can be
pronounced only by a judge. When, therefore, we affirm that in
objectivity and validity our moral judgments are on a par with our
scientific judgments, and that our knowledge of what ought to be is as
real and true as our knowledge of what is, that the existence of ethical
nature, with its demands upon our reason, is a fact as indisputable as
the existence of cosmic nature, we are implicitly affirming also the
existence of a mind, other than human, from whose moral judgments the
laws of morality derive their validity; and as those laws are eternal
and immutable, as right is right always and from eternity to eternity,
so must be the mind in which they are and from which they proceed.
To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying
that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a
shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it
is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On
the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the
highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our
highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as
to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. When the
desire to amend our life is strong upon us, when we are most conscious
of the heavy difference between actual amendment and amendment in idea
alone, then we are most certain of the reality of the moral ideal as a
fact, both of immediate consciousness at the moment and of permanent
significance for us and for all men. To say that our moral convictions
correspond to no real facts is simply to deny to them any validity at
all. To say that the facts to which they correspond are real, but are
purely subjective, being but moods, and often passing moods, of the
individual, is merely to say that our moral convictions are illusions
and right-doing only fancy. Nor do we mend matters if we add that all
men are more or less subject to these moods, that right and wrong are
purely human institutions; for if their value in the individual is
naught, their existence in the multitude does but add to ciphers
ciphers. On the other hand, if the moral ideal is no figment of man's
imagination, if its existence does not come and go with his fitful moral
struggles, then its permanent abode, the centre from which it manifests
itself, must be in some permanent intelligence at the centre of things.
The Pessimistic interpretation of evolution suggests another way of
reaching the same conclusion. That form of Pessimism represents cosmic
nature as indifferent, if not hostile, to ethical nature; the former by
its law of the struggle for existence favours the survival of the
strongest and the most selfish; the latter with its moral laws strives
to suspend the struggle for existence, and to defeat the selfishness
which the former seeks to perpetuate and extend. Human evolution is in
its essence the struggle of man as a moral being against nature as
non-moral or anti-moral; and the curve traced by human evolution is the
resultant of the opposition of the two forces--the microcosm, man, and
the macrocosm, nature. During the first part of its course the line of
human evolution rises, but during the latter part it is doomed to fall;
and the curve will be completed when man, having traversed every stage
of moral degradation, is merged once more in the brute matter to which
originally he owed his being. Against this victory of cosmic nature man,
as a moral being, protests and fights. He protests that it is
wrong--wrong, not because it brings him more pain than pleasure, for
right-doing also may have that result, but wrong without regard to his
feelings, so that any impartial spectator who witnessed the struggle
would condemn and regret the issue. If this is not so, if the
condemnation is the expression merely of human prejudice, then there is
nothing in the defeat of ethical nature or in the victory of its enemy,
cosmic nature, really to regret; the difference between right and wrong
is not an absolute or real distinction, corresponding to real facts, and
the victory of cosmic nature, even if it runs counter to man's
prejudices, is not thereby shown to be really wrong, though man
naturally is under the illusion that it is.
The coarse and immoral piece of vulgarity which condones an act of
wrong-doing on the ground that "it will be all the same a hundred years
hence," is, with an extension of time, as applicable to the race
generally as to the individual in particular. In a million, or a
billion, years hence it will, according to the pessimistic
interpretation of evolution, be all the same: matter and motion will
alone exist, completely indifferent to right and wrong. What does it
matter, then, whether we do right or wrong? Ultimately, it will make no
difference: the distinction between right and wrong is not one of
permanent value, or based on any lasting difference in things. Nor is it
strange that a cause which is based on an illusion should be doomed to
defeat. What is strange is that anyone should invite us to renounce
happiness for such an unmeaning struggle.
The only reply to such loose talk is that it does matter, here and now,
always and to all time, that right should triumph over wrong. It will
not do to say that it matters now, but will not matter hereafter, for,
if it is of no importance then, neither is it of any importance now. But
if right-doing is the most important thing in the world, more important
than happiness, more important to all time even than the perpetual
redistribution of matter and motion, to whom is it important? Not
exclusively, nor even primarily, to ourselves; for the essence of
right-doing is the attempt to put self away and forget it, the yearning
to be lifted above personal considerations and thought of self, the
conviction that whilst it matters all the world to me, to do the right,
the matter does not end with me. The matter is not of merely personal
importance to me, nor important simply because I choose to think it so.
Its value and significance are apprehended--alas! too rarely--by me,
they are not created by me. Its significance and importance are real,
not fictitious; that reality is not created by man, it is not a human
prejudice, but exists independent of man and what he thinks. To matter
and motion, those perpetual manifestations of the Power or Reality which
underlies them, nothing can have any meaning or importance: it is only
to a mind that things can be significant or important. If, then, the
importance of right-doing is real, it is because it really matters to
the Power, which underlies all things, that we should do right; and that
Power must be of the nature of an intelligence, for it is only a mind
which can either apprehend values or assign them. If the microcosm, man,
can pass a valid sentence of condemnation upon the macrocosm, nature, it
is only because and so far as his moral nature places him in direct
communication with the heart of things and gives him knowledge of the
will of that Power on which microcosm and macrocosm alike depend for
their existence. If the distinction between right and wrong is one by
which man can correctly judge between himself and the cosmos, the
distinction and the judgment must proceed from a source superior to
both. If it is not, then the Pessimistic interpretation of evolution
falls to the ground, because it is based on the assumption that its
condemnation of cosmic nature is a correct judgment. Not only does
Pessimism fall, but the element of truth and reality which Pessimism
contains must also be abandoned; if the distinction between right and
wrong is not sufficient for the task put upon it by Pessimism, neither
is it sufficient for us to build our lives on. In fine, either the
ultimate defeat of the ethical process matters, or it does not. If it
does not, why suffer sorrow and pain in the vain endeavour to stave it
off? If it does, then to whom? No longer to man, for he will have joined
the extinct fauna. Therefore to some moral intelligence to whom the
triumph of right is a matter of importance.
From this dilemma the only escape seems to be frankly to admit that a
billion years hence it will be "all the same," but to deny that, because
it will be all the same then, it is a matter of indifference now. This
argument, then, maintains that it will be all the same ultimately, and
that it is an illusion to imagine that when man is extinct it can
possibly matter. Here and now, however, and indeed as long as mankind
continues to exist, right-doing is of the highest conceivable importance
to man, more important even than happiness. But it is only as long as
mankind continues to exist that it can continue to be important: its
importance only exists in man's mind, and perishes with it. To say,
therefore, that the ultimate defeat of the ethical process will, when
established, be regrettable, is only to say that if we, or any other
moral judge, were there to see it, we should feel regret about it; but
we cannot possibly maintain that, because a moral judge would regret it,
if he were there, therefore there will be one there to regret it. Of
course, it is possible that the Unknowable may be a moral intelligence
of this kind, because everything is possible with regard to the
Unknowable. But we can neither affirm nor deny that or anything else
about the Unknowable, for then the Unknowable would cease so far to be
unknowable.