End of the Working of Natural Selection upon Man. Throwing off the
Brute-Inheritance.
As regards the significance of Man's position in the universe, this
gradual elimination of strife is a fact of utterly unparalleled
grandeur. Words cannot do justice to such a fact. It means that the
wholesale destruction of life, which has heretofore characterized
evolution ever since life began, and through which the higher forms of
organic existence have been produced, must presently come to an end in
the case of the chief of God's creatures. It means that the universal
struggle for existence, having succeeded in bringing forth that
consummate product of creative energy, the Human Soul, has done its work
and will presently cease. In the lower regions of organic life it must
go on, but as a determining factor in the highest work of evolution it
will disappear.
The action of natural selection upon Man has long since been essentially
diminished through the operation of social conditions. For in all grades
of civilization above the lowest, "there are so many kinds of
superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstanding
accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot by itself
rectify any particular unfitness." In a race of inferior animals any
maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection, because, owing to
the universal slaughter, the highest completeness of life possible to a
given grade of organization is required for the mere maintenance of
life. But under the conditions surrounding human development it is
otherwise.[14] There is a wide interval between the highest and lowest
degrees of completeness of living that are compatible with maintenance
of life.
Hence the wicked flourish. Vice is but slowly eliminated, because
mankind has so many other qualities, beside the bad ones, which enable
it to subsist and achieve progress in spite of them, that natural
selection--which always works through death--cannot come into play. The
improvement of civilized man goes on mainly through processes of direct
adaptation. The principle in accordance with which the gloved hand of
the dandy becomes white and soft while the hand of the labouring man
grows brown and tough is the main principle at work in the improvement
of Humanity. Our intellectual faculties, our passions and prejudices,
our tastes and habits, become strengthened by use and weakened by
disuse, just as the blacksmith's arm grows strong and the horse turned
out to pasture becomes unfit for work. This law of use and disuse has
been of immense importance throughout the whole evolution of organic
life. With Man it has come to be paramount.
If now we contrast the civilized man intellectually and morally with the
savage, we find that, along with his vast increase of cerebral surface,
he has an immensely greater power of representing in imagination objects
and relations not present to the senses. This is the fundamental
intellectual difference between civilized men and savages.[15] The power
of imagination, or ideal representation, underlies the whole of science
and art, and it is closely connected with the ability to work hard and
submit to present discomfort for the sake of a distant reward. It is
also closely connected with the development of the sympathetic feelings.
The better we can imagine objects and relations not present to sense,
the more readily we can sympathize with other people. Half the cruelty
in the world is the direct result of stupid incapacity to put one's self
in the other man's place. So closely inter-related are our intellectual
and moral natures that the development of sympathy is very considerably
determined by increasing width and variety of experience. From the
simplest form of sympathy, such as the painful thrill felt on seeing
some one in a dangerous position, up to the elaborate complication of
altruistic feelings involved in the notion of abstract justice, the
development is very largely a development of the representative faculty.
The very same causes, therefore, deeply grounded in the nature of
industrial civilization, which have developed science and art, have also
had a distinct tendency to encourage the growth of the sympathetic
emotions.
But, as already observed, these emotions are still too feebly developed,
even in the highest races of men. We have made more progress in
intelligence than in kindness. For thousands of generations, and until
very recent times, one of the chief occupations of men has been to
plunder, bruise, and kill one another. The selfish and ugly passions
which are primordial--which have the incalculable strength of
inheritance from the time when animal consciousness began--have had but
little opportunity to grow weak from disuse. The tender and unselfish
feelings, which are a later product of evolution, have too seldom been
allowed to grow strong from exercise. And the whims and prejudices of
the primeval militant barbarism are slow in dying out from the midst of
peaceful industrial civilization. The coarser forms of cruelty are
disappearing, and the butchery of men has greatly diminished. But most
people apply to industrial pursuits a notion of antagonism derived from
ages of warfare, and seek in all manner of ways to cheat or overreach
one another. And as in more barbarous times the hero was he who had
slain his tens of thousands, so now the man who has made wealth by
overreaching his neighbours is not uncommonly spoken of in terms which
imply approval. Though gentlemen, moreover, no longer assail one another
with knives and clubs, they still inflict wounds with cruel words and
sneers. Though the free--thinker is no longer chained to a stake and
burned, people still tell lies about him, and do their best to starve
him by hurting his reputation. The virtues of forbearance and
self-control are still in a very rudimentary state, and of mutual
helpfulness there is far too little among men.
Nevertheless in all these respects some improvement has been made, along
with the diminution of warfare, and by the time warfare has not merely
ceased from the earth but has come to be the dimly remembered phantom of
a remote past, the development of the sympathetic side of human nature
will doubtless become prodigious. The manifestation of selfish and
hateful feelings will be more and more sternly repressed by public
opinion, and such feelings will become weakened by disuse, while the
sympathetic feelings will increase in strength as the sphere for their
exercise is enlarged. And thus at length we see what human progress
means. It means throwing off the brute-inheritance,--gradually throwing
it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle
needless. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state in which
he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in
which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the
brute can be detected in it. The ape and the tiger in human nature will
become extinct. Theology has had much to say about original sin. This
original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which
every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance
toward true salvation. Fresh value is thus added to human life. The
modern prophet, employing the methods of science, may again proclaim
that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Work ye, therefore, early and
late, to prepare its coming.