NATURAL SELECTION AND THE LAW OF LOVE
“Truth justifies herself; and as she dwells
With hope, who would not follow where she leads?”
Wordsworth.
“La plus haute tâche de l'action morale est le travail pour le bien
des générations futures.”--Forel.
Before looking more closely than we are commonly apt to do at the
meaning of the phrases “natural selection” and “survival of the
fittest,” let us exercise the right of man the moral being, as
distinguished from man the scientist or observer of Nature, to pass
ethical judgments upon the facts which it is the business of all the
sciences, except ethics itself, merely to record and interpret in and
for themselves. We are beginning at last, half a century after the
publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859, to realise the power
of the law of selection; what is the moral judgment which is to be
passed upon it? In a passage from the last page of Herbert Spencer's
Autobiography, we find words which may be quoted on both sides: “When
we think of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have
arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small and great, which,
_murdering and being murdered, have gradually evolved_,[5] how shall we
answer the question--To what end?”
“Murdering and being murdered” suggests the adverse, and “have
gradually evolved,” the favourable, ethical judgment.
Many thinkers, finding Nature “so careless of the single life,” finding
the murderous struggle for existence the dominant fact of the history
of the living world, return an adverse verdict. Amongst them are to be
found not merely those who are inclined, by temperament or imperfect
education, to rebellion against any conclusions of science, but also,
as we saw in the second chapter, such a great biologist as Huxley.
In another part of the lecture already cited he says that the Stoics
failed to see
“... that cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters
of the enemy of ethical nature. The logic of facts was necessary to
convince them that the cosmos works through the lower nature of man,
not for righteousness, but against it.... The practice of that which
is ethically best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a course
of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to
success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”
In other words, honesty is the _worst_ policy: and to worship natural
selection is to deify the devil.
The reader will realise that, if we are to succeed in establishing
the claim of natural selection to be the natural model upon which
those who desire the progress of society are to base their policy, it
is necessary to controvert the doctrine that natural selection is an
anti-moral process. But let us hear the other side.
The directly contrary view, then, is taken that though, truly
enough, there has been and is much “murdering and being murdered,”
yet organisms “have gradually evolved” towards fitness for their
surroundings, or the _milieu environnant_ of Lamarck, which we
translate environment; and that since fitness or adaptation obviously
makes for happiness, and since the moral being man has himself been
thus evolved, the process of natural selection, “murdering and being
murdered” notwithstanding, is essentially beneficent.
The controversy is embittered and complicated by the fact that ultimate
questions of religion and philosophy are involved. Is the Universe
moral, as Emerson asserted it was, or is it immoral? A recent opponent
of the orthodox creed of a benevolent Deity teaches that “The Lesson
of Evolution” is to disprove the idea of benevolence behind or in
Nature: “The story of life has been a story of pain and cruelty of the
most ghastly description.” The age-long fact of “murdering and being
murdered” is the weapon with which he attacks the theist: who, _per
contra_, points to the beneficent result, the exquisite adaptation of
all species to the circumstances of their life, and the evolution of
love itself.
We may remind ourselves of those great lines of Mr. George Meredith,
“... sure reward
We have whom knowledge crowns;
Who see in mould the rose unfold,
_The soul through blood and tears_.”
The one camp points to the “blood and tears” and asks for a verdict
accordingly. The other points to “the soul” as their product, and asks
for a verdict accordingly. But surely we need only to have the case
fairly stated, in order to realise that the “blood and tears” are true
but only half the truth, “the soul” true but only half the truth.
Natural Selection is a colossal paradox--the doing evil that good may
come. The evil is undoubtedly done, and the good undoubtedly comes. Is
not this the only verdict that is in consonance with all the facts? Is
it not less than philosophic to look at the process alone, or to look
at the result alone? Is any real end to be served by the incessant cry
that we should keep our eyes fixed on the “blood and tears” alone, or
on “the soul” alone? Is not the poet right when he says that the sure
reward of knowledge is not to see either half of the truth as if it
were the whole, but to see unfold “the soul through blood and tears?”
Any attempt to cast up accounts between the evil of the process and
the good of the result--especially any attempt based on the assumption
that the process has yet achieved its final result--would be not
only premature in the eyes of those who can look forwards, but would
be irrelevant to our present enquiry. I certainly am with those who
repudiate as misleading Mill's description of Nature as a “vast
slaughter-house,” and will declare that, apart from self-conscious
and supremely sensitive man, it is easy to exaggerate the misery and
to minimise the joy of the sub-human world. But our business here
is with the process and its results in man himself, in whom alone
are possible the heights of ecstasy and the depths of agony: and the
thesis--the sublime thesis, we may avouch--of the present discussion
is that, whatever the balance between the evil of the process of
Natural Selection and the good of its results in the natural state,
yet when it is transmuted, as it may be, by the moral intelligence of
man, according to the principles of race-culture or eugenics, the good
of the result can be attained, more abundantly and incomparably more
rapidly, than ever heretofore, _whilst the evil of the process can be
abolished altogether_. True or false, is this not a sublime thesis?
=Nature must be cruel to be kind.=--If organic fitness or adaptation
to the circumstances of life is to be secured, Nature must choose
for future parents, out of every new generation, only those whose
inborn characters make for this adaptation, and who, in virtue of
the fact we call heredity, will tend to transmit this fitness to
their offspring. Now it is often convenient to personify Nature,
but we must not be misled. The process is really an automatic, not
an intelligently directed one. In order that it shall be possible,
certain conditions must obtain. The choice or selection depends not
merely upon the provision of a variety from which to choose--this
being afforded by what is called variation, which is the correlative
of heredity, both being obvious facts in any well-filled nursery--but
also upon the production of _more_ young creatures than there is or
will be room for. (If there be room for all, so that all survive,
there can be no selection, and instead of survival of the fittest
there will be indiscriminate survival.) The choice is effected amongst
this superfluity by an internecine “struggle for existence”: hence
the “murdering and being murdered,” hence the “blood and tears.” The
motor force of the whole process may be symbolised as the “will to
life,” ever seeking to realise itself in more abundance and with more
success--with more and more approximation to perfect adaptation. The
will to death is no ingredient of the will to life. Nature is, so
to say, by no means desirous of the process of “murdering and being
murdered”: very much on the contrary. It is life, more life, and
fitter life, that is her desire: the “murdering and being murdered,”
the “blood and tears” are no part of her aim. But they are inevitable,
though lamentable, if her aim is to be realised. She _must_ be cruel to
be kind--a little cruel to be very kind.[6]
It is _imaginable_, though no more, that natural selection, in certain
circumstances, might have worked otherwise: the penalty for less as
against greater fitness might _imaginably_ have been not death but
merely sterility--the denial of future parenthood. This is the ideal
of race-culture. Had this been possible, Nature could have effected
her end, which is fitter and fuller life, without having incidentally
to mete out premature death to such an overwhelming majority of all
her creatures. But, actually, this was not possible: and, unless
the end was to be sacrificed, Nature was compelled--to keep up the
figure--summarily to kill right and left. Permitted to reach maturity,
the unfit as well as the fit would multiply; and since, in general, the
lower the form of life the greater its fertility, the species could not
possibly advance, or even maintain itself at the level already gained.
To drop the figure, the process is a mechanical and automatic one, and
its appalling wastefulness and indisputable cruelty are inevitably
involved, whilst it so remains.
=Intelligence may be kind to be kinder.=--But--and here is the
great event--this mechanical, automatic, non-intelligent process
has latterly given birth to intelligence, the moral intelligence of
man: and the question now to be answered is, what modification can
intelligence effect in the moral-immoral process that has created
it? Must intelligence abrogate that process altogether, as Huxley
declares, on the grounds of its murderous methods? Must intelligence
simply look on, recognise, but not reconstruct? Must intelligence
reverse the process--as indeed it is now doing in many cases--so
that in the new environment of which itself is a factor, that which
formerly was unfitness shall become fitness, and _vice versâ_? _Or_
is it conceivable that intelligence can transmute the process, so
that, whilst hitherto mechanical, automatic, and therefore inevitably
murderous, it shall become _intelligent_, pressing towards the sublime
end, and reforming the murderous means?
Hear Mr. Galton himself (_Sociological Papers_, 1905, p. 52):--
“Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution, displays
the awe-inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic turmoil ... it
is moulded by blind and wasteful processes, namely, by an extravagant
production of raw material and the ruthless rejection of all that
is superfluous, through the blundering steps of trial and error....
Evolution is in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an
infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the
intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure,
capable of directing its course. Man has the power of doing this
largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has
already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so
widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through
his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognisable from a
distance as great as that of the moon.”
Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester, in the Romanes Lecture[7] for 1905:
“Man is ... a product of the definite and orderly evolution which is
universal, a being resulting from and driven by the one great nexus of
mechanism which we call Nature. He stands alone, face to face with that
relentless mechanism. It is his destiny to understand and to control
it.”
“Nature's insurgent son,” Professor Lankester calls man in this
lecture: and yet again there recurs that mighty aphorism of Bacon,
which might well be printed on every page of these chapters, “Nature
is to be commanded only by obeying her.” The struggle for existence is
the terrible fact of Nature, but is only a means to an end. It is our
destiny to command the end whilst _humanising_ the means.
=The struggle for existence.=--The ideal of eugenics or race-culture
is to abolish the brutal elements of the struggle for existence
whilst gaining its great end. The nature of this struggle is commonly
misapprehended and, as I cannot improve upon the words of Professor
Lankester, I shall freely use them in the attempt to show what it
really is. He says:--
“The world, the earth's surface, is practically full, that is to
say, fully occupied. Only one pair of young can grow up to take the
place of the pair--male and female--which have launched a dozen, or
it may be as many as a hundred thousand, young individuals on the
world.... The ‘struggle for existence’ of Darwin is the struggle
amongst all the superabundant young of a given species, in a given
area, to gain the necessary food, to escape voracious enemies, and
gain protection from excesses of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness.
One pair in the new generation--only one pair--survive for every
parental pair. Animal population does not increase: ‘Increase and
multiply’ has never been said by Nature to her lower creatures.
Locally, and from time to time, owing to exceptional changes, a
species may multiply here and decrease there; but it is important
to realise that the ‘struggle for existence’ in Nature--that is to
say, among the animals and plants of this earth untouched by man--is
a desperate one, however tranquil and peaceful the battlefield may
appear to us. The struggle for existence takes place, not as a
clever French writer glibly informs his readers, between different
species, but between individuals of the same species, brothers and
sisters and cousins.... In Nature's struggle for existence, death,
immediate obliteration, is the fate of the vanquished, whilst the
only reward to the victors--few, very few, but rare and beautiful in
the fitness which has carried them to victory--is the permission to
reproduce their kind--to carry on by heredity to another generation
the specific qualities by which they triumphed.
“It is not generally realised how severe is the pressure and
competition in Nature--not between different species, but between the
immature population of one and the same species, precisely because
they are of the same species and have exactly the same needs.... A
distinctive quality in the beauty of natural productions (in which
man delights) is due to the unobtrusive yet tremendous slaughter of
the unfit which is incessantly going on and the absolute restriction
of the privilege of parentage to the happy few who attain to the
standard described as ‘the fittest.’”
=The survival of the fittest.=--Now let us look closely at this most
famous of all Spencer's phrases, “the survival of the fittest,” and try
to understand its full and exact meaning. There is no phrase in any
language so frequently misinterpreted. Even a writer who should know
better makes this mistake. Mr. H. G. Wells speaks[8] of “that same lack
of a fine appreciation of facts that enabled Herbert Spencer to coin
those two most unfortunate terms _Evolution_ and the _Survival of the
Fittest_. The implication is that the _best_ reproduces and survives.
Now really it is the _better_ that survives and not the _best_.” What
the correction is supposed to signify I do not know, but the whole
passage is nonsense. The implication is neither that the _best_ nor
the _better_ survive, but the fittest--or if Mr. Wells prefers, for it
matters not one whit--the fitter. This lack of a fine appreciation of
words is not, unfortunately, peculiar to Mr. Wells. There is no word
in the language that more exactly expresses the fact than the word
fittest: as Darwin recognised when he promptly incorporated Spencer's
phrase in the second edition of the _Origin of Species_ as the best
interpretation of his own phrase “natural selection”![9] Fitness is
the capacity to fit: a thing that is fit is a thing that _fits_. A
living creature survives in proportion as it fits its environment--the
physical environment in the case of vegetables and the lower animals,
the physical, social, intellectual and moral environment in the case
of man. The kind of glove that most perfectly fits the hand is the
fittest glove and will survive in the struggle for existence between
gloves. If, instead of a glove, we take a living creature, say a
microbe, the kind of microbe that best fits into the environment
provided by, say, human blood, is the fittest and will survive and be
the cause of our commonest disease. Thus the tubercle bacillus is at
once the _fittest_ microbe and, not the best, but the worst. Among
ourselves, the newspaper devoted to yesterday's murder is the fittest
and survives, ousting the newspaper which reckons with the crucifixion,
or the murder of Socrates or Bruno. In a society of blackguardism, the
biggest blackguard is the fittest man and will survive: he is also the
worst. In another society the best man is the fittest and survives. The
capacity to fit into the environment is the capacity that determines
survival: it has no moral connotation whatever. If Herbert Spencer had
written the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells desires, he would have
written palpable nonsense: as it was he used the fittest word--in this
case also the best, because the truest. Referring to the queen-bee,
who destroys her own daughters, Darwin says, “undoubtedly this is for
the good of the community; maternal love or maternal hatred, though
the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable
principle of natural selection.”
If natural selection were the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells
would have us believe, there would be nothing for eugenics or
race-culture to do: and heaven would long ago have come to earth. If
in all ages the better men and women had survived and become parents,
earth would long ago have become a demi-paradise indeed, there would
have been no arrests, no reversals in the history of human progress,
and life would be already what, some day, it will be, when there is
achieved the eugenic ideal--which is precisely that the best or better
members of our race shall be the selected for the supreme profession
of parenthood. In other words, the eugenic ideal, the ideal of
race-culture, is _to ensure that the fittest shall be the best_.
Always, everywhere, without a solitary exception, human, animal or
vegetable, the fittest have ultimately survived and must survive. Once
realise what is the meaning of the word fit--best seen in the verb “to
fit”--and we shall see that, as Herbert Spencer pointed out in his
overwhelming reply to the late Lord Salisbury's attack on evolution,
the idea of the survival of the fittest is a necessity of thought.[10]
But, alas, the idea of the survival of the best or the better is not
a necessity of thought! The fittest microbes are the worst from our
point of view, because they are most inimical to the highest forms
of life; the fittest newspaper may be the worst, because it panders
to the worst but most widespread and irresponsible elements in human
nature; everything and every one that succeeds, succeeds because it or
he fits the conditions: but to succeed is not necessarily to be good.
Indeed everything that exists at all, living or lifeless, an atom or an
animal, a molecule or a moon, exists because it can exist, because it
fits the conditions of existence: there is no moral question involved,
but only a mechanical one. The business of eugenics or race-culture is
to make an environment, conditions of law and public opinion, _such
that the fittest shall be the best and the best the fittest therein_.
If memory may be trusted, the primary meaning of the word _fit_ has
not hitherto been called in by any one to elucidate the meaning of
Spencer's phrase: perhaps it may be hoped that we shall at last begin
to understand it, if we remember that a thing is fit because it fits.
It is best not to be too sanguine, however, and therefore we may
attempt to illustrate the case from another aspect.
=Survival-value.=--Every living thing and nearly every character
or feature of a living thing that survives, survives because it
has value or capacity for life--which may be called, in Professor
Lloyd Morgan's phrase, _survival-value_. The character that gives
an organism survival-value, or value for life, the character that
enables it to fit its environment, may be of any order. The atom, as
I have said elsewhere, is an organism writ small. The kinds of atoms
that have survived in the age-long struggle for existence between
atoms are those that have survival-value on account of their internal
stability: as Empedocles argued ages ago. In the case of living
things, which individually die, it is evident that the capacity to
reproduce themselves is one of supreme survival-value. If mankind lost
this capacity, all its other characters of survival-value, such as
intelligence, would obviously avail it nought. Certain valuable members
of society may fall short in this cardinal respect, and therefore
become extinct. Indeed, other forms of survival-value, as we shall see,
seem to be in large measure inimical to fertility: and this is perhaps
the chief obstacle to eugenics.[11]
Fertility apart, the character having survival-value may take a
thousand forms. In the case of the parasitic microbe it is an evil
character, the power to produce toxins or poisons. In the case of
the tiger it is the possession of large and powerful bones and claws
and muscles and teeth. In the case of the ox it is a complicated
and efficient digestive apparatus, enabling it to fit into a
food-environment which is too innutritious to sustain the life of
creatures not so endowed. Nature seeks only the fittest; not the best
but the best-adapted; she asks no moral questions. A Keats, a Spinoza,
or a Schubert must go under if his factors of survival-value do not
enable him to resist those of the tubercle bacillus, its toxins or
poisons. She welcomes the parasitic tapeworm, all hooks and mouth or
stomach, because these give it survival-value; and so on.
The business of eugenics or race-culture, then, is to create an
environment such that those characters which we desire as moral
and intelligent beings shall be endowed with the highest possible
survival-value, as against those which ally so many men with the
microbe and the tapeworm. There are those who live in society to-day,
and reproduce their like, in virtue of the poisons they produce, in
virtue of their tenacious hooks and voracious stomachs. If society be
organised so that these are factors of more survival-value than the
disinterested search for truth, or mother-love, or the power to create
great poetry or music--then, according to the inevitable and universal
law of the survival of the fittest, our parasites will oust our poets
and our poisoners our philosophers. These things have happened and may
happen again at any time. It does not matter that the good thing, in
virtue of survival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature never
gives a final verdict in favour of good or bad but only and always in
favour of the fit. Let the conditions change, so that rapacity fits
them better than righteousness, or--as in a completely “collectivist”
state--vegetableness rather than virility, and the thing we call high
will go under before the thing we call low. Nature recognises neither
high nor low but only fitness or value for life in the conditions that
actually obtain. These laws enthroned and dethroned the civilisations
of the past: they have enthroned and may dethrone us. But this end is
not inevitable, since man--and this is his great character--not merely
reacts to his environment, as all creatures must, but can create and
recreate it. The business of eugenics or race-culture is to create an
environment such that the human characters of which the human spirit
approves shall in it outweigh those of which we disapprove. Make it
fittest to be best and the best will win--not because it is the best,
but because it is the fittest: had the worst been the fittest it would
have won. In society to-day both forms of the process may be observed.
The balance between them determines its destiny. It is the business of
eugenics to throw the whole weight of human purpose into the scale of
the good.
=Evolution not necessarily progress.=--No excessive space has been
devoted to this distinction between the fittest and the best and to
the real meaning of Spencer's famous phrase, if perchance it should
avail in any degree to dispel one of the commonest of the many common
delusions regarding the nature of organic evolution and its outcome.
This delusion is that progress is an inevitable law of nature.[12]
The great process of history, as revealed by biology, displays as its
supreme fact the occurrence of progress. The principles of evolution
teach that this progress--as, for instance, in the evolution of man--is
a product of the survival of the fittest; whilst we are also reminded
that the survival of the fittest is a necessary truth: but it does not
follow that progress is inevitable.
In the first place, natural selection involves selection. Where all
the young members of a new generation of any species survive, and
parenthood becomes not a privilege but a common and universal function,
plainly the process is in abeyance: and, in the second place, since
the survival of the fittest is not the survival of the best, but only
the survival of the best adapted, the process may at any time take the
form of retrogression rather than that of progress. The assumption
that, because progress has been effected through natural selection, we
need do no more than fold our hands, or unfold them merely to applaud,
involves the denial of one of the most familiar facts of natural
history--the fact of racial degeneration. The parasitic microbes, the
parasitic worms, the barnacles, innumerable living creatures both
animal and vegetable, individuals and races of mankind, to-day as in
all ages--these prove only too clearly that the process of the survival
of the fittest may make as definitely for retrogression in one case as
for progress in another.
By all means let us infer from the facts of organic evolution the
conclusion that further progress must surely be possible, so much
progress having already been achieved as is represented by the
difference between inorganic matter or the amœba or microbe on the one
hand, and man on the other hand. But let us most earnestly beware of
the false and disastrous optimism which should suppose that because
the survival of the fittest has often, and indeed most often, meant
the survival of the best, it means always that and nothing else. On
the contrary, we must learn that, even in natural circumstances,
apart from any interference by man, the survival of the fittest often
means racial degeneration--a tapeworm kept in spirits should stand
upon the study mantelpiece of all who think with Mr. Wells that the
survival of the fittest means the survival of the better; and still
more notably we must learn that the interference of man in the case of
his own species, sometimes of evil intent, sometimes for the highest
ends, with the process of natural selection, has repeatedly led, and
is now in large part leading, to nothing other than that process of
racial degeneration of which the tapeworm and the barnacle should be
our perpetual reminders. The case becomes serious enough when man
interferes with the process of selection merely with the effect of
suspending it, wholly or in part: but it becomes far more serious
when his interference constitutes a reversal of the process. This
most supremely disastrous of all conceivable consequences of man's
intelligence and moral sense is known as reversed selection, and must
be carefully studied hereafter. Meanwhile, we must devote some space to
a most important consideration--namely, that though Nature is impartial
in her choice, and will, for instance, allow the poisons of a microbe
such as the tubercle bacillus to destroy the life of a Spinoza or a
Keats or a Schubert, yet, on the whole, the survival-value of the
mental, spiritual, or psychical in all its forms does persistently tend
to outweigh that of the physical or material--of this great truth the
evolution and dominance of man himself being the supreme example.
The very fact of progress, which I would define as the emergence
and increasing dominance of mind, demonstrates--it being remembered
that natural selection has no moral prejudices--that even in a world
of claws and toxins the psychical must have possessed sufficient
survival-value to survive. It is quite evident that even the lowliest
psychical characters, such as sharpness of sensation, discrimination,
and memory, must be of value in the struggle for life. More and more we
might expect to find, and do actually find in the course of evolution,
that creatures live by their wits, rather than by force of bone or
muscle. The psychical was certainly given no unfair start--on the
contrary. It has had to struggle for its emergence; it has emerged only
where there has been struggle and has done so because it could--because
of its superior survival-value. It has the right which belongs to
might--in the world of life there is no other.[13]
By no means less evident is the inherently superior survival-value
of the psychical, if we turn from its aspects of sensation and
intelligence to those which are all summed up under the word love.
Notwithstanding Nietzsche's mad misconception of the Darwinian theory,
no one who has studied the facts of reproduction and its conditions
in the world of life can question the incalculable survival-value
of love in animal history. The success of those most ancient of all
societies, of which the ant-heap and the bee-hive are the types,
depends absolutely upon the self-sacrifice of the individual. If we
pass upwards from the insects to the lowest vertebrates, we find
the survival-value of love proved by the comparison between various
species of fish, and its increasing importance may be traced upwards
through amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals in succession, up to
man. Natural selection thus actually selects morality. Without love no
baby could live for twenty-four hours. Every human being that exists
or ever has existed or ever will exist is a product of mother-love or
foster-mother-love, and I am well entitled to say, as I have so often
said, _no morals, no man_. The creature in whom organic morality is at
its height has become the lord of the earth in virtue of that morality
which natural selection has selected, not from any moral bias, but
because of its superior survival-value.