the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is,
he must first know what it is. Before we can trace the evolution of
morality, for instance, we must make up our minds as to what it is. If
we regard it as an illusion, we shall hold that it is subject to the
same laws as other illusions, and we shall have no difficulty in showing
that its evolution was a necessary consequence of those laws. Or, again,
if we hold that religion is mere foolery or hysteria, we shall
naturally infer a very different process for its evolution than if we
feel it to be a permanent manifestation of the common consciousness in
the same sense that morality is. A distinguished German mythologist,
starting from the former diagnosis, has no difficulty in evolving
primitive religion out of primitive drunkenness.
In fine, if we regard "what is" as giving the data by which we are to
determine what has been, it is clear that to understand what has been we
must properly appreciate what is. This is in accordance with the
conclusion which we have reached previously that it is only by studying
its effects that we can properly understand a cause. To judge a thing
properly we must know the effects it is capable of producing: to know
what a thing is we must observe what it becomes or what it is capable of
becoming at its best. We cannot judge the value of the moral character
or the moral ideal fairly if we take a low specimen to go by; nor if we
knew nothing more of morality than what we could observe of its
rudiments in the higher animals, should we know much about it. It is by
its highest manifestations that we most correctly judge either morality
or art, and it is only through them that we can be properly said even to
understand what either art or morality is. So, too, taking the religious
ideal as love of God and man, we must judge religion not by its
imperfect manifestations in imperfect beings, but by its perfect
revelation and realisation in Christ.
The case is not otherwise with science or evolution itself. From
primitive times man has always used his knowledge (however imperfect) of
what is as the basis of speculations as to what has been. It would,
however, be absurd to take the puerile and barbarous cosmogonies of the
savage as adequate expressions of the scientific ideal, or to imagine
that it is from them that we can judge what science is. It is no less
unreasonable to judge the theory of evolution by its present, passing
phase. In the first place, there are facts in its history which show
that it naturally started with a partial and one-sided view of the
facts. In the next place, we must judge it not by what it may be at its
worst, but by what it is capable of becoming at its best; and it is by
the latter that we must decide what evolution truly is, not by the
former.
At its worst the theory of evolution may require us to believe that the
whole process of evolution is essentially irrational--being the outcome
of unintelligent forces operating on reasonless matter--and that the
theory of evolution, accordingly, if faithful to the facts, is as
irrational as they; or, if rational, is a misleading account of the real
universe in which we live and move and have our being.
On the other hand, the theory at its best may require us to believe that
it reveals a universe run on rational principles, a real world perfectly
intelligible to perfect reason, and partially intelligible even to
beings who share but partially in the Divine reason that animates the
whole.
Both theories, however, base themselves upon what is, and profess that
their conclusions follow logically from it. If, then, they differ in
their conclusions it is because they differ in their diagnosis of what
is. Both admit the existence of faith; but one regards faith as a fact
in the pathology of human reason, the other regards it as the normal
mode of our common reason's operation. The latter, therefore, requires
to postulate causes which will account for the correctness of the common
faith of mankind; the latter, causes which have resulted in the common
illusion of mankind.
It seems, then, that even in evolution we do not escape after all from
the indeterminate and conditional knowledge, which science offers, to
the absolute certainty of accomplished fact. Every theory of the past
history of the world is just as conditional, just as much dependent on
an "if," as the hypothetical laws of science, for any such theory is
dependent on the view it takes of what is, and is correct only if that
view is correct.
The theories of evolution which we have called the Optimistic and the
Pessimistic interpretations of evolution are avowedly based on the
assumption that a large part of the common faith of mankind is a mental
or moral disease. According to Mr. Herbert Spencer the faith that we can
know what is real is an illusion: the Real is the Unknowable. According
to Professor Huxley the common faith in the freedom of the will is an
illusion: necessity is the law of the uniformity both of Nature and of
human nature. In thus declining to accept the testimony of the moral and
religious consciousness as evidence of what is, both philosophers were
influenced by the belief that it is science alone which is capable of
ascertaining and demonstrating what is and what actually does happen.
This belief, however, we have ventured to suggest, overlooks two facts.
One is that the abstract sciences do not even profess to state what
actually does happen: they simply affirm that, if the conditions stated
in their various laws are the only conditions operative, the only result
will be that stated by the particular law in question. Thus science does
not concern itself with what is or does happen, but solely with what
would be or would happen under certain (usually impossible) conditions.
The other point overlooked is that the historical or comparative
sciences are also only hypothetically true. All that their laws
undertake to demonstrate is that, if certain consequences constitute the
whole of an observed effect, then the only conditions antecedently
operative were those stated in the law. Here too, then, science does not
even claim to prove what is or demonstrate what does happen, but assumes
that we know it or find it out, in some way with which science does not
concern itself. If we do know and can know what is, science can tell us
what were the conditions that produced it.
The question, then, that we have to put to any theory of evolution--that
is, to any theory which professes to state the process by which the
totality of things has come to be what it is--is, "Does it account for
that totality? do the causes which it assumes to have been at work
account for all that is?" Now, _a priori_ it was not to be expected that
evolution would in its infancy, and it is still young, succeed in
accounting for all things; and there were special reasons in the
circumstances under which it first took its modern scientific shape
which necessarily limited its earliest attempts to grasp the totality of
things. It would, however, be absurd to judge the principle by the first
attempt to apply it, and to condemn it because it has not done in a
moment what with time it assuredly will succeed in effecting. At the
same time, it can only effect that wider success by refusing to
stereotype its first errors and by declining to bind itself to the dogma
that what it has succeeded in explaining is all that there is to
explain, or that that alone is or happens which its present assumptions
or laws are capable of accounting for. There lies the danger which
threatens to check the further development of the theory of
evolution--in the dogmatism which pretends to set aside common sense and
the common reason, and arrogates to itself the sole right of saying what
is; and succeeds in doing so by the simple but circular argument that
that alone is or happens which can be accounted for by the laws that
regulate the movements of things in space or that follow from the
struggle for animal existence.
Historically, the theory of evolution in its first manifestation was an
extension to the historical sciences generally of a purely biological
conception, that of the origin of species as a consequence of the
struggle for existence. It was found that much else in the manifold of
what is, many other differences between related things, besides the
differences which mark off one species of animals from another, might be
accounted for, historically, by the theory that those differences were
but the sum and the accumulation of an infinite number of small
modifications which had given the thing an advantage over its rivals in
the struggle for existence. Strictly speaking, all that this remarkable
and wide-reaching discovery implied as a matter of logic was that
between animals and things not animal there existed an analogy or
resemblance, in virtue of which it was logical to argue from things
animal to things not animal just so far as the resemblance between them
went, but not further. Very naturally, however, it happened that with
this originally biological conception all its biological implications
were taken over, and it was (and is) argued not merely that there are
great and fruitful resemblances between, say, society and an animal
organism, but that societies are animal organisms. In fine, sociology
was treated as a department of biology. The fallacy that science
demonstrates what is, and that what science does not account for has no
real existence, thus made its appearance simultaneously with the birth
of the evolution theory. The resemblances between the evolution of the
social organism and of animal organisms could be accounted for by the
biological theory of the struggle for existence; the differences,
therefore, must be denied or laboriously explained away. With the growth
of sociology, however, it is becoming apparent that the evolution of
society has laws, some of which do indeed coincide with those of animal
evolution, but others of which are peculiar to sociology in the same
sense as the laws of chemistry are distinct from those of physics.
Sociology is accordingly revolting from its bondage to biology: the
plain fact that society is not an animal is beginning to make itself
felt. The resemblances between the organisation of society and that of
an animal are freely admitted, but the differences are beginning to
claim consideration also; and the sound doctrine is beginning to assert
itself that by experience alone, experience of what is, and not by any
_a priori_ dogmatism as to what in the name of science must be, can we
tell how far the resemblances extend as a matter of fact and where the
differences begin. That the evolution theory must be the gainer by thus
admitting the facts instead of denying their existence is clear; if
sociology is not a branch of biology, and yet the two sciences have
certain laws in common, a great step is at once taken towards
demonstrating the existence of certain general principles of evolution
which are higher than the laws of either, or perhaps than of any,
particular science.
The tendency of the scientific theories prevailing for the moment to
deny the existence of what they cannot, for the moment, account for, is
exemplified in another way by the theory of the survival of the fittest.
It was shown by Darwin that, granted the tendency to variation in
animals, the struggle for existence was enough in its results--as he had
the genius to discern them--to account for the origin of species. The
struggle for existence is a fact, and thus animal evolution was based on
what is, on positive fact. To apply the same process of argument to
human and social evolution was perfectly scientific and legitimate. What
is neither scientific nor legitimate is to maintain, explicitly or
implicitly, that the totality of human activity is engaged and
exhausted in the struggle for existence. Self-preservation is
undoubtedly a powerful instinct, but it is not the only instinct even of
animals, and is not always the most powerful in man--or in the brute.
That there are resemblances between man and his fellow-creatures, the
brutes, and that so far as those resemblances extend, man and the
animals have been, and are, subject to the same laws of evolutions, are
facts which may be heartily admitted, but which neither authorise us to
deny the existence of specifically human peculiarities, nor warrant us
in trying to deduce the differences from a law which applies only to the
resemblances. If the evolution theory is to state the process by which
the totality of things has come to be what it is, it must begin by
facing the whole of the facts--in this case by admitting that not only
have the fittest to survive survived, as is natural in a struggle for
existence, but that progress, æsthetic, ethical, and religious, has been
made.
The denial of this fact may either be open and avowed, as, for instance,
when the reality of the religious ideal is formally denounced; or it may
be tacit and implied, as, for instance, when moral progress is defined
as adaptation to environment, _i.e._ as not progress at all, or when the
freedom of the will is denied, _i.e._ when approximation to the ethical
ideal is maintained to be a thing not under our control. Tacit or
avowed, this denial proceeds upon the fallacy that the laws of science,
as understood and formulated at any particular moment, are the sole
test and constitute our only knowledge of what is. But the interests
both of the common sense of mankind and that specially organised form of
common sense which we know as science require a protest against that
fallacy: it is opposed to the principle on which scientific knowledge
rests, and it would be fatal, if acted upon, to all further development
of that knowledge.
The principle upon which science rests is that its laws are capable of
verification, and that they are verified when and if they are confirmed
by experience. The final appeal of science is to the evidence of
consciousness, the only evidence of what is that we possess: the only
evidence of the truth and accuracy with which an eclipse has been
calculated is the evidence of our senses that the eclipse does take
place and is visible in the place and at the time predicted. If a
hypothesis predicts results which as a matter of observation do not take
place, the hypothesis is judged so far inaccurate or inadequate: what is
over-rides our preconceived opinions, even if they be the hypotheses of
science, as to what ought to be or will be. It is the ever-open appeal
to the final court of fact, of what is, that condemns false assumptions,
guarantees the truth of science, and safeguards the freedom of
scientific inquiry. To allow any group of men, however eminent, or any
body of science, however sound, to deprive us of this right of appeal
and bid us disbelieve in the evidence of our own senses, if it
contradicts their theories, would be to submit to the tyranny of
dogmatism, and to be faithless to the cause of truth.
Fortunately, though the unconscious and therefore ill-considered
metaphysics of some men of science have tended in the direction of
scientific dogmatism, the practice of science has been in the opposite
direction. In practice science has owed much of her progress to the
study of "residual phenomena." Phenomena which the laws of science for
the moment could not account for have not been denounced as illusions,
or ruled out of court as non-existent or beneath the notice of science:
they have been accepted as facts, as part of the totality of things
which it is the ambition of science to account for; and, accepted as
such, they have led, it may be, to the discovery of a new planet or a
new element, but always to the discovery of fresh truths, which never
would have enriched the page of science had science refused to take
cognisance of facts the laws of which it had not at the time discovered.
In demanding, then, that any theory which professes to account for the
totality of things should recognise the fact of ethical and æsthetic
progress, and that all progress is willed and purposed, we are seeking
not to cramp science but to enlarge its bounds, not to introduce a new
scientific method, but to extend the application of existing methods,
and to carry out the principle on which the truth of science and the
freedom of scientific inquiry are based. The laws which enable the
physicist to explain the mechanical action and reaction of things do not
suffice to explain the reactions studied by the chemist. The laws of
chemistry are inadequate for the purposes of the biologist. It is but an
extension of the same principle when the student of the anthropological
sciences finds it necessary to assume, or rather discovers, that the
laws of animal existence do not wholly account for everything that man
does; and it is to these sciences that we must look for the next
important and fruitful modification of the general theory of evolution.
It is to them, dealing as they do with the highest product of evolution,
that we must look for the truest interpretation of evolution. On the
principle that to understand what a thing is we must not reduce it to
its lowest terms, but look at it in its highest manifestation, we must
judge the evolution process by its highest phase, by all that it is
capable of, and not by the least we can, by scientific abstraction,
leave in it. And the sciences which, merely to maintain their scientific
existence, have a vital interest in insisting on the reality of will and
purpose as causes which have influenced the direction of the evolution
process are the sciences which deal with man.
Those who find it easy to believe that a society is an animal, like
those who proclaim that the real is unknowable, but that our knowledge
of it is just as good as if it were not unknowable, will have little
difficulty in believing that men's actions are not influenced by their
purposes; and both will probably subscribe to the doctrine that, first,
approximation to the ideal is an unintended result of the brute struggle
for mere animal existence; and, next, the purpose which appears to mark
the evolution process and to be the cause of progress is semblance only,
a mere illusion. Against the first article of this doctrine the final
and decisive appeal is and always must be to experience. It makes a
general statement with regard to particular facts of experience: like
every other statement made in the form of a scientific law, it affirms
that a certain proposition will be found, when tested by experience, to
be true of every one of a certain class of facts in our experience. It
is therefore competent for every man, who chooses to consult his
experience, to decide for himself whether the statement is true. In the
present case, it is for every man, who has struggled with temptation and
has achieved any progress, to say whether he gained the victory without
an effort of will, without any desire for better things, without any
purpose or resolution to try once more, without any intention not to
yield the next time. Are "secret commissions" in trade refused, when
refused, unintentionally? or is their refusal due solely to the blind
instinct of self-preservation in the struggle for commercial existence?
If reform is effected, will it be effected by those who declare that the
severity of the struggle for existence makes reform impossible? or by
those in whom the ideal of honesty has some operative force and who
purpose approximation to that ideal? When the conviction is expressed
that public opinion alone will be able to check this form of dishonesty,
what is that but an appeal to the common sense and common faith that
there are other things which man can will and purpose besides success in
the struggle for existence?
The doctrine that the universe presents the mere semblance of purpose,
that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is shared by materialistic
systems in common with all those which consider that the only
explanation that can be rendered of any given state of things is the
assumption that it is the issue of some antecedent necessity which
produced it. As we have already argued, the assumption of necessity as
the ultimate explanation of things breaks down when we come to consider
the beginning of the universe. If we assume an absolute beginning, then
there can have been no necessity antecedent to that, and the beginning
of things is left without explanation. On the other hand, to say that
there never was any beginning is to admit that there never was any
original necessity why things should follow the course of evolution
which they have pursued--the initial collocation of causes was due to
chance, was a purely fortuitous concurrence of atoms. When it is
remarked that this is a strange assumption, that really, if the whole
evolution process had been designed to reach the stage in which we know
it and to attain the ideal which we surmise it to be capable of, the
primeval atoms could not have been arranged better for the purpose, the
reply is that the appearance of purpose is a delusion: true, as a matter
of chance, the chances are millions to one against a fortuitous
concurrence of atoms producing the evolution process that has taken
place, but then the chances were just as great, neither more nor less,
against any other of the millions of evolution processes that might have
been evolved. We know the one that has taken place, and it is marvellous
in our eyes that precisely this and no other should have occurred; but
the wonder vanishes when we reflect that, had any other occurred, we
should have been equally convinced, and equally erroneously convinced,
that it could not have been produced by chance. The initial arrangement
of things was, as it happened, such as to produce our evolution process:
things might have chanced differently at the beginning; if they had, a
different evolution process would have taken place, that is all. But it
would still have looked like purpose, and would still have been due to
chance.
But would it? The whole question is whether the initial collocation was
due to chance or to purpose. To say that there might have been many
other collocations proves nothing: an Almighty Power could collocate
things in any of an infinite number of ways. To argue that every
possible collocation, and therefore the one that produced our evolution
process, must be due to chance, is simply to beg the question: the very
thing we want to know is whether this or any other process could be due
to chance. The argument that any and every other process would equally
testify to purpose and equally imply design, seems rather to indicate
that no conceivable evolution process could conceivably be due to
chance.
Next, the necessitarian argument lays it down that the marvel of
evolution vanishes when we reflect that if things had been different at
the beginning, the results would have been different. But they were not.
And the fact that they were not is just the marvel which the
necessitarian does not even explain away: in order to diminish the
probability of purpose, he postulates countless possible alternatives to
the original arrangement of atoms, and then he is embarrassed with the
difficulty of getting rid of them. Why was this particular collocation
determined on rather than one of the countless alternatives? To say it
was chance may be true; but we want to know what reason there is for
believing it to be true. If there is none, then neither is there any
reason for believing the purpose that makes the evolution process to be
an illusion.
But let us grant it was chance: chance, as everyone knows, is merely a
name for our ignorance as to the real cause; so that to say it was due
to chance is to say that, for anything we know to the contrary, the
original concurrence of atoms may have been due to purpose. In a word,
there is, on the theory of chance, no reason to believe that purpose
either is or is not an illusion.