has been the law of evolution in the past and will increasingly be in
the future. They should so confirm us, for they do but carry out, as
far as history, individual experience, and imagination can take us, our
fundamental faith in the reality of those ideals that are revealed in
consciousness to all of us. Belief in the possibility of progress at all
carries with it, as its logical postulate, faith in the wisdom and
goodness of God. But if wisdom and goodness are the source of all
reality, and if the final purpose of evolution is the realisation of the
ideal--viz. love of truth, of our fellow-beings, and of God--what are we
to say of evil? Is it not real? It is real, in the same sense that our
pleasures and pains are real, but not in the same sense that the ideal
is real. The real things which our sense-experience reveals to us are
real in the sense that they are permanent, independent of us, and
self-identical. The same characteristics attach to the realities
revealed to us in our moral and spiritual experience. The laws of
morality and the goodness of God do not come and go with our fleeting
recognitions of them; they are permanent, independent of us, and are
ever the same: God's goodness faileth never. The uniformity of Nature is
but one expression of the uniformity of the Divine love for man: it is
that which makes it possible for man to know the truth and survive in
the struggle for existence. But evil is not independent of us men: it
exists only so far as we will it to exist. It is not permanent: it comes
and goes with our passing acts of will. It is not self-identical, but
tends to self-destruction. It is the will to believe nothing, and
therefore, as action involves belief, the will to do nothing--that is,
to revert to the condition of mere inert matter, as matter is conceived
by the materialist to exist.
But though evil be illusive, though it is the fool who says in his own
heart, "There is no God," or "Tush! He will not see it," the illusion is
voluntary. It is we who deceive or sophisticate ourselves, when we will
to believe that this act is not really wrong, or that our peculiar
circumstances constitute a special, a highly special exception, on this
occasion only, to the rules for ordinary occasions and ordinary men. And
though the illusion is subjective, _i.e._ is not generally shared by the
onlookers, and is consciously subjective (for we avoid onlookers,
because they would spoil the illusion), nevertheless, subjective though
it be, it is a fact in your particular subjective history, and a damning
fact. If the evil that you will is confined in its range to your will,
and if its existence can only be recreated by a fresh act of will in you
or another, that is an argument to show that there is mercy in the
scheme of things, but it does not prove that you incur no responsibility
in offering yourself or another the example and the opportunity of doing
wrong. We are not, and, if the will be free, we cannot be responsible
for what others do; but we are responsible for what we do--for evil, if
it be evil; for good, if we----but there is no pressing need to
consider that contingency.
The question underlying the previous paragraph is that of our social
environment and its effects. We are apt to forget that _we_ are the
social environment. If we bear the fact in mind, we shall perhaps be
less inclined to seek the origin of all our misdeeds outside ourselves:
we cannot shift the burden of our own wrong-doing on to the shoulders of
society by any process which does not bring back at least an equivalent
burden. The fact is that neither can we cause others, nor can others
cause us to do evil. What we can do is to supply them with an
opportunity, which, but for our action, would not indeed have existed,
but which also, so far from necessitating evil action on their part, may
by their free will be made the occasion for a victory over wrong. The
fact, however, that they alone are responsible for their evil-doing
prevents us from taking any credit for their good deeds. It is for our
own acts of will that we are responsible, and it is by willing evil that
we become evil. We create evil, consciously, by every wrong act of will
that we perform, and then we talk of the origin of evil as a mystery, so
thoroughly do we sophisticate ourselves! Why should there be evil? Why,
indeed? There is no reason, no rational answer can be given, because
evil is irrational--it is the will to reject the common reason or
common sense or faith of mankind, in this detail or that. It is the
arbitrary element, self-will, and if it could be eliminated we should
have a uniformity of human nature and of human love corresponding to the
uniformity of the Divine. Progress is the process of its elimination.
If we turn from the human to the pre-human period of evolution, the
first immediate fact which strikes us is that there has been throughout
the animal kingdom an evolution of mind, which has resulted in providing
man with the psychological apparatus necessary for conceiving, and, to
some extent, realising the ideal. When we reached the age of reflection,
we woke up to find that our psychological mechanism had been running for
some years in certain grooves. We now find that its direction can be
traced back by evolution to the beginnings of animal consciousness. If,
however, we believe that the evolution of mind, animal and human, has
been a process of progress, we do so not on the ground that mind has
been evolved, but that its evolution has been in the direction of those
ideals, approximation to which is believed by us to be progress.
Similarly, if the pre-animal period of the earth's evolution is shown by
science to have resulted in fitting the earth to be the home of animal
life, we judge that evolution to have been progress, not because it
prepared the world eventually for man, but because it is seen to have
been part of the process by which the ideal is in course of realisation,
by which the Divine purpose is in the course of being fulfilled.
The only value that we can assign to the pre-human period of evolution
is that which attaches to it as a means to an end; but though we believe
that by striving after the ideals revealed to us we are labouring
towards that end, and though everything that makes for the ideal
contributes to the end, yet we do not know the Divine purpose, and we
cannot say in what manifold other ways the pre-human period may have
subserved that purpose. It is sufficient if we can trace the steps by
which this one portion, the only portion known to us, of the whole
design has been carried forward. This reflection is one which it is
necessary to bear in mind when considering the alleged wastefulness of
the process of evolution and the price at which progress has been
purchased.
The theory of evolution, as a purely scientific theory, _i.e._ as an
objective statement of what actually has taken place on the earth in the
past, shows that the various species of animals which have survived
were--so long as they did survive--the only species which could survive
under the conditions which then prevailed; given the conditions, their
survival was necessary and inevitable. There the scientific explanation
of the matter ends: having shown the causes which produced the effect
in question, science has explained everything that it undertook to
explain. Had the conditions been different, the present state of the
world, doubtless, would have been different; but being what they were
they produced that which is, and there is an end of the matter--as far
as it is a matter for scientific investigation.
What we are to think of the survivors--whether we are to admire them;
whether we are to consider their survival an advance and an improvement;
whether anything has been gained by their survival, and, if so, from
what point of view the gain is a gain--are questions which science
excludes, because, however answered, they do not affect the scientific
fact that these species did survive, and, under the conditions, alone
could survive.
But we all take it for granted and as self-evident that man is not only
better adapted, under existing conditions, to survive and flourish at
the cost and to the extinction of other species, but that he is better
than the brute, that his survival is an advance, that his is a higher
type, and that his existence realises a higher ideal than that of the
brutes. We believe this not merely because we are men, and as such rate
our own comforts, our own interests, our own skins as the most important
things known to us, for there are things for which men sacrifice their
own interests and for which they have laid down their lives. It is
precisely because there are things more important than our own material
and animal existence, and because they are or may be realised by man and
not by the animals, by the ideal man and not by the brute man, that we
consider him to be worth more than many sparrows--though they too have
their value in His eyes--and man's existence to be of a higher type than
theirs.
Thus, then, when science--which, if it is truly scientific, makes no
distinction of value, moral or spiritual, between man and the
sparrow--has explained that a given species which did survive was the
only species that could have survived under the conditions, there still
remains the problem, for those to whom it is a problem, Why should the
species which was bound to survive also happen to be a species of a
higher type? Why have the survivors always happened to be both better
adapted to survive and better adapted to further the ideal which the
course of evolution reveals with increasing clearness?
In fine, science explains only a part, not the whole of the effect of
evolution. It concentrates its attention on one part or aspect of the
effect, on the survival of the fittest, and explains very simply and
satisfactorily that the environment kills off the creatures which are
not fit to cope with it, while the fittest to contend with it survive.
The fact that the survivors not only are best adapted to the
environment, but are also best adapted to bring the whole creation one
step nearer to those distant ideals in expectation of which it groaneth
and travaileth, is that part of the effect which science, for scientific
purposes, rightly ignores. Science does not undertake to estimate the
value of the effect produced, or even to consider whether when produced
it has any value.
But when the question is raised as to the cost at which the process of
evolution is carried on, it becomes necessary to bring into the account
the value of the result attained or to be attained. Possibly, creation
that groaned in her travail may rejoice that a man-child has been born.
But so much depends on what her child grows into. And he has free will.
We have the power now and here to dash her expectations to the ground.
The value of a thing to me is exactly what I am prepared to give or do
for it. I have no other way of estimating the value of the ideals for
which creation has laboured in the past, than by asking myself how far I
am prepared to go for the love of truth, of fellow-beings, and of God.
If I am prepared to give everything, and then count myself the gainer,
then indeed I may know that the cost of evolution has not been greater
than the value of the ideal: I know the highest price, and I know the
feelings of those who pay it. And they are the only persons who can
judge the value of the article, for they are the only people who get it.
The fact, however, that they do get it, that they get it in full, and
every man according to the measure with which he metes it, contains the
answer to our question. What is true now was true of earlier generations
and earlier men: the value of the ideal to every man was exactly what he
gave for it. It is the realisation of the ideal by me that is my reward,
though my object may be its realisation by others. But it is absurd to
say that their gain is my loss, or that their progress has been made at
my expense.
These considerations apply only of course to those men who have
sacrificed themselves for the sake of progress and the love of their
fellow-man. Most men, however, do not sacrifice themselves much; and
therefore they can hardly be brought out as martyrs to the cause of
progress, as the millions who have perished by the wayside in the march
of evolution.
It is not until we introduce the element of material progress that it
becomes possible to maintain with any plausibility that there is a
divergency of interests between the contributors to it, or that they who
sowed have been sacrificed to us who reap. It is when we compare the
shivering savage with our sheltered civilisation, primitive man's
struggle for existence with civilised man's enjoyment of existence, that
we begin to be anxious about the cost of evolution--that is to say, that
our little faith in the value of the ideal begins to torment us. In our
unreadiness to sacrifice ourselves we forget that it is possible for
civilised man also to make sacrifices--perhaps the greater because he
has the more to forego--and that the savage has his tribal traditions,
embodying his ideal of a good man, to live up to; his tribal customs,
which he may violate with self-reproach, or fulfil with satisfaction;
his conceptions of the truth about man's relations to the past, the
world, and the supernatural. The savage also has his ideal, which he
sets above his pleasure, and for which he faces pain in many a cruel
rite. Shall we say that its realisation is no reward to him? or that in
realising it he does not as faithfully contribute his mite to the
fulfilment of the Divine purpose as we? We make too much of our
superiority. We make, also, too little of the savage's enjoyment of
existence. Take the lowest savages known to us, the native tribes of
Central Australia, and turn to the most recent and the best accounts of
their manner of life; and it is certain that their existence is enjoyed
by them. Is ours without exception enjoyed by us?
If it is easy to be led by sentimentalism into mistakes about what our
fellow-man thinks of the question whether life is worth living, it is
still easier to be misled with regard to our fellow-creatures lower in
the scale. Here all is conjecture, and it is on this uncertain ground
that rests the charge brought against Nature of waste and cruelty. There
is the cruelty with which, in order to secure the survival of the few
and fittest, the environment kills off the many who are unfit--an
argument of great force, if the survivors were immortal. There is the
waste of bringing into life thousands of creatures unfit, and therefore
doomed to a speedy extinction. But death is the common lot; and as for
waste and failure, if the short-lived creatures fulfil their purpose,
they are not failures; and if their purpose is by competition to force
the development of the potentially fit, then they fulfil their purpose.
A man may be entered for a race for no other purpose than to force the
pace. As for happiness, wild animals, to judge by their usual fit
condition and by the evidence of sportsmen, do enjoy existence. But
they, at any rate, have no ideals--whatever the savage may have. Yet it
is conceivable that the bird that builds its nest finds some
satisfaction in doing so, and that the animal that lays down her life to
save her young ones has some sense of love. What is revealed as the
ideal in man may be inchoately manifested as instinct in the undeveloped
consciousness of the animal. If so, then the animal's life has
independent value and is not merely valuable as a means to a distant
future end.
To sum up: science declines to take the teleological view of Nature, or
to admit final causes or ends. To speak, therefore, of survival in the
struggle for existence as an end, may be excellent sense, but it is
unscientific: it implies an assumption of a kind about which science is
agnostic. If we do, however, make this one deviation from agnosticism,
we have then no difficulty in showing that evolution is a failure, for
its end is survival, and we all die; and there is no compensation, or,
if there is, posterity gets it, not we--an aggravation of the original
injustice.
If survival in the struggle for existence is the only end that we
personally recognise in the conduct of our own lives, we are quite
consistent in judging it to be the only end of other lives, and in
condemning the Universe, for then there is neither goodness nor any
wisdom in it.
On the other hand, our faith in that wisdom and goodness is not genuine
so long as we are prepared to stake only our arguments on it, and not
our lives.
XIII.
EVOLUTION AS PURPOSE
Evolution, as a scientific theory, is a description of the process by
which the totality of things has come to be what it is. The method
employed is that of science, and proceeds upon the assumption of the
uniformity of Nature and the universality of the law of causation. The
existence of a thing is proof that the conditions necessary to produce
it preceded it. Thus from what is we infer with certainty what has been:
the occurrence of Z is proof that Y preceded, and so from Y we can infer
X, and so on, to the beginning of the alphabet. Eventually, that is, we
are carried back, in theory at least, to an initial arrangement of
things which not only gave birth to the actual order of evolution, but
was such that no other order of events could have followed from it. Were
it possible, in fact, to get back to this original collocation of causes
and to formulate it, the formula would explain the universe as it is and
has been, the totality of things.
Unfortunately the formula, though it would explain everything else,
would not explain itself, and would therefore, so far, fail to explain
anything. Or, to put it in other words, though certain causes,
collocated in the proper way, would, on this view of evolution, explain
everything which ensued from that collocation, we should still want to
know why the causes were collocated in that particular way rather than
in any other. To say that that collocation was not the outcome of a
previous collocation is really to say that there was originally no
antecedent necessity why this or any other order of evolution should
take place at all; that Z hangs on Y, Y on X ... and A on nothing at
all; that the formula which is to render all things intelligible is
itself unmeaning. Or, if we say that things had no beginning--matter and
force being indestructible--then there is no initial collocation, that
is to say, no formula, even in theory, to explain all things: we cannot
even imagine the process of evolution to be intelligible.
The latter seems to be preferred by science as the final result of
scientific knowledge: the object of science is to demonstrate, not why,
but that things happen in a certain way; and it is admitted, or rather
insisted upon, _e.g._ by J. S. Mill, that if scientific knowledge were
carried to its utmost conceivable or inconceivable perfection, the
question why anything should happen or does happen would remain as great
a mystery as ever, and must remain so, for the simple reason that it is
a question which science does not even put, much less attempt to
answer. Nevertheless, it is said, science does prove what she undertakes
to show, viz. that things do happen in certain ways, which ways when
formulated appear as laws of science. That, however, is not strictly the
case if science, in order to prove her conclusions, has to postulate
that each and every state of things is the outcome of some antecedent
necessity. Ultimately the postulate proves untrue; for there can have
been no necessity antecedent to the initial arrangement of things. And
if the postulate be untrue, the conclusions based on it cannot be
accepted as certain. If we cannot tell whether it be true or not,
neither can we tell whether science be true or not. If it is
unintelligible, no wonder that things, as explained by it, are
mysterious.
But let us waive these theoretical objections. Does Science, as a matter
of fact, prove that things do happen in the ways she describes? In
justice to her, let us remember that she does not undertake to do even
that. Her laws only state the way in which things tend to happen, not
the way in which they actually do happen; only what would happen if
there were no counteracting causes and if certain conditions, which do
not prevail, did prevail--not what does really happen in the world as we
know it. Herein the scientific reason behaves in exactly the same way as
the moral or religious reason. Science no more alleges that all bodies
in motion do move for ever in the same straight line, at the same rate,
than the moral reason alleges that all men always do what is right or
that they always do God's will. The allegation is that the tendency
exists and can be discerned by those qualified to form an opinion on the
matter. That there is friction retarding the movement, and that there
are obstacles diverting it, is admitted; and, though the admission does
not affect the truth (in one way) of the laws of science, it does allow
that they convey no exact or faithful picture of what actually happens
in the world as it is.
But if the laws of science do not explain what happens--even in the
limited sense of scientific explanation--they are the indispensable
preliminary to that explanation. If they do not represent the world as
it is, they supply the means by which we may hereafter produce the
picture. They are ideals not in the sense that science hopes to show
eventually that feathers only appear to float leisurely to the ground,
and are really all the time falling sixteen feet in a second, but in the
sense that starting from the gravitation formula we could show that
every feather's fall is as rationally comprehensible as the gravitation
formula itself. They are not the ultimate truth, the final reality, or
Science's supreme ideal. They are shadows cast by the scientific ideal
before its coming; they are the principles by which science must
proceed, if she is to make the world of things intelligible. So, too,
the reality of the moral ideal does not imply that, in refusing to make
sacrifices for others, I only appear to be selfish, and shall be found
in the end really to have been actuated all the time by some high moral
principle. What is implied is that only by the acceptance of the moral
ideal can the world of men be moralised. From the same point of view it
seems hopeless to try to make out that atheism, though not in
appearance, will be found in reality to have been a manifestation of
religion. It is by accepting, not by denying the religious ideal or
doubting its existence, that the ideal of religion is achieved.
Now, in the theory of evolution we have the attempt made to effect this
transition from the abstractions of science to the concrete facts, to
show that the world as presented to sense is as intelligible and
rationally comprehensible as the laws of science themselves, and that
the hypothetical statements of science were but preliminary, though
necessary preliminaries, to a categorical statement of actual facts. In
evolution, as indeed in all the historical sciences, we abandon the
elasticity and the uncertainty of conditional conceptions for the
rigidity and certainty of accomplished fact. We no longer deal with what
may happen if given conditions are realised, but with what has been, and
therefore is subject to no "ifs." We start from the certainty of what
is, and thus we argue back positively to what must have been.
There is, however, one precaution which must be observed, and without
which the whole of the system just described is as uncertain and
conditional as the rest of science. Before we can argue from what is to
what has been, we must first know for certain what is. Before we can
conclude that a patient has been healed by faith or cured miraculously
of an incurable complaint, we must first have medical evidence to show
that he had the disease. Or, to take a better and closer illustration
from medicine, it is premature to assign a cause for a patient's
condition before his condition has been diagnosed; and physicians who
differ in their diagnosis will naturally differ as to the causes in the
patient's past history which are responsible for his state.