[The Romanes Lecture, 1893.]
Soleo enim et in aliena castra transire, non tanquam transfuga sed
tanquam explorator. (L. ANNAEI SENECAE EPIST. II. 4.)
THERE is a delightful child's story, known by the title of "Jack and
the Bean-stalk," with which my contemporaries who are present will be
familiar. But so many of our grave and reverend Juniors have been
brought up on severer intellectual diet, and, perhaps, have become
acquainted with fairyland only through primers of comparative
mythology, that it may be needful to give an outline of the tale. It
is a legend of a bean-plant, which grows and grows until it reaches
the high heavens and there spreads out into a vast canopy of foliage.
The hero, being moved to climb the stalk, discovers that the leafy
expanse supports a world composed of the same elements as that below
but yet strangely new; and his adventures there, on which I may not
dwell, must [47] have completely changed his views of the nature of
things; though the story, not having been composed by, or for,
philosophers, has nothing to say about views.
My present enterprise has a certain analogy to that of the daring
adventurer. I beg you to accompany me in an attempt to reach a world
which, to many, is probably strange, by the help of a bean. It is, as
you know, a simple, inert-looking thing. Yet, if planted under proper
conditions, of which sufficient warmth is one of the most important,
it manifests active powers of a very remarkable kind. A small green
seedling emerges, rises to the surface of the soil, rapidly increases
in size and, at the same time, undergoes a series of metamorphoses
which do not excite our wonder as much as those which meet us in
legendary history, merely because they are to be seen every day and
all day long.
By insensible steps, the plant builds itself up into a large and
various fabric of root, stem, leaves, flowers, and fruit, every one
moulded within and without in accordance with an extremely complex
but, at the same time, minutely defined pattern. In each of these
complicated structures, as in their smallest constituents, there is an
immanent energy which, in harmony with that resident in all the
others, incessantly works towards the maintenance ,of the whole and
the efficient performance of the part which it has to play in the
economy of nature.
[48] But no sooner has the edifice, reared with such exact
elaboration, attained completeness, than it begins to crumble. By
degrees, the plant withers and disappears from view, leaving behind
more or fewer apparently inert and simple bodies, just like the bean
from which it sprang; and, like it, endowed with the potentiality of
giving rise to a similar cycle of manifestations. Neither the poetic
nor the scientific imagination is put to much strain in the search
after analogies with this process of going forth and, as it were,
returning to the starting-point. It may be likened to the ascent and
descent of a slung stone, or the course of an arrow along its
trajectory. Or we may say that the living energy takes first an upward
and then a downward road. Or it may seem preferable to compare the
expansion of the germ into the full-grown plant, to the unfolding of a
fan, or to the rolling forth and widening of a stream; and thus to
arrive at the conception of "development," or "evolution." Here, as
elsewhere, names are "noise and smoke"; the important point is to have
a clear and adequate conception of the fact signified by a name. And,
in this case, the fact is the Sisyphaean process, in the course of
which, the living and growing plant passes from the relative
simplicity and latent potentiality of the seed to the full epiphany of
a highly differentiated type, thence to fall back to simplicity and
potentiality.
[49] The value of a strong intellectual grasp of the nature of this
process lies in the circumstance that what is true of the bean is true
of living things in general. From very low forms up to the highest--in
the animal no less than in the vegetable kingdom--the process of life
presents the same appearance [Note 1] of cyclical evolution. Nay, we
have but to cast our eyes over the rest of the world and cyclical
change presents itself on all sides. It meets us in the water that
flows to the sea and returns to the springs; in the heavenly bodies
that wax and wane, go and return to their places; in the inexorable
sequence of the ages of man's life; in that successive rise, apogee,
and fall of dynasties and of states which is the most prominent topic
of civil history.
As no man fording a swift stream can dip his foot twice into the same
water, so no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the
sensible world that it is.[Note 2] As he utters the words, nay, as he
thinks them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the present has
become the past; the "is" should be "was." And the more we learn of
the nature of things, the more evident is it that what we call rest is
only unperceived activity; that seeming peace is silent but strenuous
battle. In every part, at every moment, the state of the cosmos is the
expression of a transitory adjustment of contending forces; a scene,
of strife, in which all the combatants fall in turn. What is [50] true
of each part, is true of the whole. Natural knowledge tends more and
more to the conclusion that "all the choir of heaven and furniture of
the earth" are the transitory forms of parcels of cosmic substance
wending along the road of evolution, from nebulous potentiality,
through endless growths of sun and planet and satellite; through all
varieties of matter; through infinite diversities of life and thought;
possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a
conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable
latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the
cosmos is its impermanence. It assumes the aspect not so much of a
permanent entity as of a changeful process in which naught endures
save the flow of energy and the rational order which pervades it.
We have climbed our bean-stalk and have reached a wonderland in which
the common and the familiar become things new and strange. In the
exploration of the cosmic process thus typified, the highest
intelligence of man finds inexhaustible employment; giants are subdued
to our service; and the spiritual affections of the contemplative
philosopher are engaged by beauties worthy of eternal constancy.
But there is another aspect of the cosmic process, so perfect as a
mechanism, so beautiful as a work of art. Where the cosmopoietic energy
[51] works through sentient beings, there arises, among its other
manifestations, that which we call pain or suffering. This baleful
product of evolution increases in quantity and in intensity, with
advancing grades of animal organization, until it attains its highest
level in man. Further, the consummation is not reached in man, the
mere animal; nor in man, the whole or half savage; but only in man,
the member of an organized polity. And it is a necessary consequence
of his attempt to live in this way; that is, under those conditions
which are essential to the full development of his noblest powers.
Man, the animal, in fact, has worked his way to the headship of the
sentient world, and has become the superb animal which he is, in
virtue of his success in the struggle for existence. The conditions
having been of a certain order, man's organization has adjusted itself
to them better than that of his competitors in the cosmic strife. In
the case of mankind, the self-assertion, the unscrupulous seizing upon
all that can be grasped, the tenacious holding of all that can be
kept, which constitute the essence of the struggle for existence, have
answered. For his successful progress, throughout the savage state,
man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with
the ape and the tiger; his exceptional physical organization; his
cunning, his sociability, his curiosity, and his imitativeness; his
ruthless and [52] ferocious destructiveness when his anger is roused
by opposition.
But, in proportion as men have passed from anarchy to social
organization, and in proportion as civilization has grown in worth,
these deeply ingrained serviceable qualities have become defects.
After the manner of successful persons, civilized man would gladly
kick down the ladder by which he has climbed. He would be only too
pleased to see "the ape and tiger die." But they decline to suit his
convenience; and the unwelcome intrusion of these boon companions of
his hot youth into the ranged existence of civil life adds pains and
griefs, innumerable and immeasurably great, to those which the cosmic
process necessarily brings on the mere animal. In fact, civilized man
brands all these ape and tiger promptings with the name of sins; he
punishes many of the acts which flow from them as crimes; and, in
extreme cases, he does his best to put an end to the survival of the
fittest of former days by axe and rope.
I have said that civilized man has reached this point; the assertion
is perhaps too broad and general; I had better put it that ethical man
has attained thereto. The science of ethics professes to furnish us
with a reasoned rule of life; to tell us what is right action and why
it is so. Whatever differences of opinion may exist among experts
there is a general consensus that the ape and [53] tiger methods of
the struggle for existence are not reconcilable with sound ethical
principles.
The hero of our story descended the bean-stalk, and came back to the
common world, where fare and work were alike hard; where ugly
competitors were much commoner than beautiful princesses; and where
the everlasting battle with self was much less sure to be crowned with
victory than a turn-to with a giant. We have done the like. Thousands
upon thousands of our fellows, thousands of years ago, have preceded
us in finding themselves face to face with the same dread problem of
evil. They also have seen that the cosmic process is evolution; that
it is full of wonder, full of beauty, and, at the same time, full of
pain. They have sought to discover the bearing of these great facts on
ethics; to find out whether there is, or is not, a sanction for
morality in the ways of the cosmos.
Theories of the universe, in which the conception of evolution plays a
leading part, were extant at least six centuries before our era.
Certain knowledge of them, in the fifth century, reaches us from
localities as distant as the valley of the Ganges and the Asiatic
coasts of the Aegean. To the early philosophers of Hindostan, no less
than to those of Ionia, the salient and characteristic feature of the
phenomenal world was its [54] changefulness; the unresting flow of all
things, through birth to visible being and thence to not being, in
which they could discern no sign of a beginning and for which they saw
no prospect of an ending. It was no less plain to some of these
antique forerunners of modern philosophy that suffering is the badge
of all the tribe of sentient things; that it is no accidental
accompaniment, but an essential constituent of the cosmic process. The
energetic Greek might find fierce joys in a world in which "strife is
father and king;" but the old Aryan spirit was subdued to quietism in
the Indian sage; the mist of suffering which spread over humanity hid
everything else from his view; to him life was one with suffering and
suffering with life.
In Hindostan, as in Ionia, a period of relatively high and tolerably
stable civilization had succeeded long ages of semi-barbarism and
struggle. Out of wealth and security had come leisure and refinement,
and, close at their heels, had followed the malady of thought. To the
struggle for bare existence, which never ends, though it may be
alleviated and partially disguised for a fortunate few, succeeded the
struggle to make existence intelligible and to bring the order of
things into harmony with the moral sense of man, which also never
ends, but, for the thinking few, becomes keen er with every increase
of knowledge and with every step towards the realization of a worthy
ideal of life.
[55] Two thousand five hundred years ago, the value of civilization was
as apparent as it is now; then, as now, it was obvious that only in
the garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is
capable of bearing be produced. But it had also become evident that
the blessings of culture were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn
into a hothouse. The stimulation of the senses, the pampering of the
emotions, endlessly multiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant
widening of the intellectual field indefinitely extended the range of
that especially human faculty of looking before and after, which adds
to the fleeting present those old and new worlds of the past and the
future, wherein men dwell the more the higher their culture. But that
very sharpening of the sense and that subtle refinement of emotion,
which brought such a wealth of pleasures, were fatally attended by a
proportional enlargement of the capacity for suffering; and the divine
faculty of imagination, while it created new heavens and new earths,
provided them with the corresponding hells of futile regret for the
past and morbid anxiety for the future. [Note 3] Finally, the
inevitable penalty of over-stimulation, exhaustion, opened the gates
of civilization to its great enemy, ennui; the stale and flat
weariness when man delights-not, nor woman neither; when all things
are vanity and vexation; and life seems not worth living except to
escape the bore of dying.
[56] Even purely intellectual progress brings about its revenges.
Problems settled in a rough and ready way by rude men, absorbed in
action, demand renewed attention and show themselves to be still
unread riddles when men have time to think. The beneficent demon,
doubt, whose name is Legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old
faiths, enters into mankind and thenceforth refuses to be cast out.
Sacred customs, venerable dooms of ancestral wisdom, hallowed by
tradition and professing to hold good for all time, are put to the
question. Cultured reflection asks for their credentials; judges them
by its own standards; finally, gathers those of which it approves into
ethical systems, in which the reasoning is rarely much more than a
decent pretext for the adoption of foregone conclusions.
One of the oldest and most important elements in such systems is the
conception of justice. Society is impossible unless those who are
associated agree to observe certain rules of conduct towards one
another; its stability depends on the steadiness with which they abide
by that agreement; and, so far as they waver, that mutual trust which
is the bond of society is weakened or destroyed. Wolves could not hunt
in packs except for the real, though unexpressed, understanding that
they should not attack one another during the chase. The most
rudimentary polity is a pack of men living under the like tacit, or
expressed, [57] understanding; and having made the very important
advance upon wolf society, that they agree to use the force of the
whole body against individuals who violate it and in favour of those
who observe it. This observance of a common understanding, with the
consequent distribution of punishments and rewards according to
accepted rules, received the name of justice, while the contrary was
called injustice. Early ethics did not take much note of the animus of
the violator of the rules. But civilization could not advance far,
without the establishment of a capital distinction between the case of
involuntary and that of wilful misdeed; between a merely wrong action
and a guilty one. And, with increasing refinement of moral
appreciation, the problem of desert, which arises out of this
distinction, acquired more and more theoretical and practical
importance. If life must be given for life, yet it was recognized that
the unintentional slayer did not altogether deserve death; and, by a
sort of compromise between the public and the private conception of
justice, a sanctuary was provided in which he might take refuge from
the avenger of blood.
The idea of justice thus underwent a gradual sublimation from
punishment and reward according to acts, to punishment and reward
according to desert; or, in other words, according to motive.
Righteousness, that is, action from right motive, [58] not only became
synonymous with justice, but the positive constituent of innocence and
the very heart of goodness.
Now when the ancient sage, whether Indian or Greek, who had attained to
this conception of goodness, looked the world, and especially human
life, in the face, he found it as hard as we do to bring the course of
evolution into harmony with even the elementary requirement of the
ethical ideal of the just and the good.
If there is one thing plainer than another, it is that neither the
pleasures nor the pains of life, in the merely animal world, are
distributed according to desert; for it is admittedly impossible for
the lower orders of sentient beings, to deserve either the one or the
other. If there is a generalization from the facts of human life which
has the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that
the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which
he deserves; that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while,
the righteous begs his bread; that the sins of the fathers are visited
upon the children; that, in the realm of nature, ignorance is punished
just as severely as wilful wrong; and that thousands upon thousands of
innocent beings suffer for the crime, or the unintentional trespass of
one.
Greek and Semite and Indian are agreed upon [59] this subject. The book
of Job is at one with the "Works and Days" and the Buddhist Sutras;
the Psalmist and the Preacher of Israel, with the Tragic Poets of
Greece. What is a more common motive of the ancient tragedy in fact,
than the unfathomable injustice of the nature of things; what is more
deeply felt to be true than its presentation of the destruction of the
blameless by the work of his own hands, or by the fatal operation of
the sins of others? Surely Oedipus was pure of heart; it was the
natural sequence of events--the cosmic process--which drove him, in
all innocence, to slay his father and become the husband of his
mother, to the desolation of his people and his own headlong ruin. Or
to step, for a moment, beyond the chronological limits I have set
myself, what constitutes the sempiternal attraction of Hamlet but the
appeal to deepest experience of that history of a no less blameless
dreamer, dragged, in spite of himself, into a world out of joint
involved in a tangle of crime and misery, created by one of the prime
agents of the cosmic process as it works in and through man?
Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos might well seem
to stand condemned. The conscience of man revolted against the moral
indifference of nature, and the microcosmic atom should have found the
illimitable macrocosm guilty. But few, or none, ventured to record
that verdict.
[60] In the great Semitic trial of this issue, Job takes refuge in
silence and submission; the Indian and the Greek, less wise perhaps,
attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable and plead for the defendant.
To this end, the Greeks invented Theodicies; while the Indians devised
what, in its ultimate form, must rather be termed a Cosmodicy. For,
although Buddhism recognizes gods many and lords many, they are
products of the cosmic process; and transitory, however long enduring,
manifestations of its eternal activity. In the doctrine of
transmigration, whatever its origin, Brahminical and Buddhist
speculation found, ready to hand[Note 4] the means of constructing a
plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man. If this world
is full of pain and sorrow; if grief and evil fall, like the rain,
upon both the just and the unjust; it is because, like the rain, they
are links in the endless chain of natural causation by which past,
present, and future are indissolubly connected; and there is no more
injustice in the one case than in the other. Every sentient being is
reaping as it has sown; if not in this life, then in one or other of
the infinite series of antecedent existences of which it is the latest
term. The present distribution of good and evil is, therefore, the
algebraical sum of accumulated positive and negative deserts; or,
rather, it depends on the floating balance of the account. For it was
not thought necessary that a complete settlement [61] should ever take
place. Arrears might stand over as a sort of "hanging gale;" a period
of celestial happiness just earned might be succeeded by ages of
torment in a hideous nether world, the balance still overdue for some
remote ancestral error. [Note 5]
Whether the cosmic process looks any more moral than at first, after
such a vindication, may perhaps be questioned. Yet this plea of
justification is not less plausible than others; and none but very
hasty thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity.
Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its
roots in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the
great argument from analogy is capable of supplying.
Everyday experience familiarizes us with the facts which are grouped
under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious
marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More
particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we
call "character," is often to be traced through a long series of
progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this
"character"--this moral and intellectual essence of a man--does
veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another, and does
really transmigrate from generation to generation. In the new-born
infant, the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is little
more [62] than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these
become acutalities; from childhood to age they manifest themselves in
dulness or brightness, weakness or strength, viciousness or
uprightness; and with each feature modified by confluence with another
character, if by nothing else, the character passed on to its
incarnation in new bodies.
The Indian philosophers called character, as thus defined,
"karma."[Note 6] It is this karma which passed from life to life and
linked them in the chain of transmigrations; and they held that it is
modified in each life, not merely by confluence of parentage, but by
its own acts. They were, in fact, strong believers in the theory, so
much disputed just at present, of the hereditary transmission of
acquired characters. That the manifestation of the tendencies of a
character may be greatly facilitated, or impeded, by conditions, of
which self-discipline, or the absence of it, are among the most
important, is indubitable; but that the character itself is modified
in this way is by no means so certain; it is not so sure that the
transmitted character of an evil liver is worse, or that of a
righteous man better, than that which he received. Indian philosophy,
however, did not admit of any doubt on this subject; the belief in the
influence of conditions, notably of self-discipline, on the karma was
not merely a necessary postulate of its theory of retribution, but it
presented [63] the only way of escape from the endless round of
transmigrations.
The earlier forms of Indian philosophy agreed with those prevalent in
our own times, in supposing the existence of a permanent reality, or
"substance," beneath the shifting series of phenomena, whether of
matter or of mind. The substance of the cosmos was "Brahma," that of
the individual man "Atman;" and the latter was separated from the
former only, if I may so speak, by its phenomenal envelope, by the
casing of sensations, thoughts and desires, pleasures and pains, which
make up the illusive phantasmagoria of life. This the ignorant take
for reality; their "Atman" therefore remains eternally imprisoned in
delusions, bound by the fetters of desire and scourged by the whip of
misery. But the man who has attained enlightenment sees that the
apparent reality is mere illusion, or, as was said a couple of
thousand years later, that there is nothing good nor bad but thinking
makes it so. If the cosmos is just "and of our pleasant vices makes
instruments to scourge us," it would seem that the only way to escape
from our heritage of evil is to destroy that fountain of desire whence
our vices flow; to refuse any longer to be the instruments of the
evolutionary process, and withdraw from the struggle for existence. If
the karma is modifiable by self-discipline, if its coarser desires,
one after another, can be extinguished, the ultimate [64] fundamental
desire of self-assertion, or the desire to be, may also be destroyed.
[Note 7] Then the bubble of illusion will burst, and the freed
individual "Atman" will lose itself in the universal "Brahma."
Such seems to have been the pre-Buddhistic conception of salvation, and
of the way to be followed by those who would attain thereto. No more
thorough mortification of the flesh has ever been attempted than-that
achieved by the Indian ascetic anchorite; no later monachism has so
nearly succeeded in reducing the human mind to that condition of
impassive quasi-somnambulism, which, but for its acknowledged
holiness, might run the risk of being confounded with idiocy.
And this salvation, it will be observed, was to be attained through
knowledge, and by action based on that knowledge; just as the
experimenter, who would obtain a certain physical or chemical result,
must have a knowledge of the natural laws involved and the persistent
disciplined will adequate to carry out all the various operations
required. The supernatural, in our sense of the term, was entirely
excluded. There was no external power which could affect the sequence
of cause and effect which gives rise to karma; none but the will of
the subject of the karma which could put an end to it.
Only one rule of conduct could be based upon the remarkable theory of
which I have endeavoured to give a reasoned outline. It was folly to
continue [65] to exist when an overplus of pain was certain; and the
probabilities in favour of the increase of misery with the
prolongation of existence, were so overwhelming. Slaying the body only
made matters worse; there was nothing for it but to slay the soul by
the voluntary arrest of all its activities. Property, social ties,
family affections, common companionship, must be abandoned; the most
natural appetites, even that for food, must be suppressed, or at least
minimized; until all that remained of a man was the impassive,
extenuated, mendicant monk, self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances,
which the deluded mystic took for foretastes of the final union with
Brahma.
The founder of Buddhism accepted the chief postulates demanded by his
predecessors. But he was not satisfied with the practical annihilation
involved in merging the individual existence in the unconditioned--the
Atman in Brahma. It would seem that the admission of the existence of
any substance whatever--even of the tenuity of that which has neither
quality nor energy and of which no predicate whatever can be
asserted--appeared to him to be a danger and a snare. Though reduced
to a hypostatized negation, Brahma was not to be trusted; so long as
entity was there, it might conceivably resume the weary round of
evolution, with all its train of immeasurable miseries. Gautama got
rid of even that [66] shade of a shadow of permanent existence by a
metaphysical tour de force of great interest to the student of
philosophy, seeing that it supplies the wanting half of Bishop
Berkeley's well-known idealistic argument.
Granting the premises, I am not aware of any escape from Berkeley's
conclusion, that the "substance" of matter is a metaphysical unknown
quantity, of the existence of which there is no proof. What Berkeley
does not seem to have so clearly perceived is that the non-existence
of a substance of mind is equally arguable; and that the result of the
impartial applications of his reasonings is the reduction of the All
to coexistences and sequences of phenomena, beneath and beyond which
there is nothing cognoscible. It is a remarkable indication of the
subtlety of Indian speculation that Gautama should have seen deeper
than the greatest of modern idealists; though it must be admitted
that, if some of Berkeley's reasonings respecting the nature of spirit
are pushed home, they reach pretty much the same conclusion. [Note 8]
Accepting the prevalent Brahminical doctrine that the whole cosmos,
celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, with its population of gods and
other celestial beings, of sentient animals, of Mara and his devils,
is incessantly shifting through recurring cycles of production and
destruction, in each of which every human being has his transmigratory
[67] representative, Gautama proceeded to eliminate substance
altogether; and to reduce the cosmos to a mere flow of sensations,
emotions, volitions, and thoughts, devoid of any substratum. As, on
the surface of a stream of water, we see ripples and whirlpools, which
last for a while and then vanish with the causes that gave rise to
them, so what seem individual existences are mere temporary
associations of phenomena circling round a centre, "like a dog tied to
a post." In the whole universe there is nothing permanent, no eternal
substance either of mind or of matter. Personality is a metaphysical
fancy; and in very truth, not only we, but all things, in the worlds
without end of the cosmic phantasmagoria, are such stuff as dreams are
made of.
What then becomes of karma? Karma remains untouched. As the peculiar
form of energy we call magnetism may be transmitted from a loadstone
to a piece of steel, from the steel to a piece of nickel, as it may be
strengthened or weakened by the conditions to which it is subjected
while resident in each piece, so it seems to have been conceived that
karma might be transmitted from one phenomenal association to another
by a sort of induction. However this may be, Gautama doubtless had a
better guarantee for the abolition of transmigration, when no wrack of
substance, either of Atman or of Brahma, was left behind; when, in
short, a man had but to [68] dream that he willed not to dream, to put
an end to all dreaming.
This end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is the learned do
not agree. But, since the best original authorities tell us there is
neither desire nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal
reappearance for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely
said of this acme of Buddhistic philosophy--"the rest is silence."
[Note 9] Thus there is no very great practical disagreement between
Gautama and his predecessors with respect to the end of action; but it
is otherwise as regards the means to that end. With just insight into
human nature, Gautama declared extreme ascetic practices to be useless
and indeed harmful. The appetites and the passions are not to be
abolished by mere mortification of the body; they must, in addition,
be attacked on their own ground and conquered by steady cultivation of
the mental habits which oppose them; by universal benevolence; by the
return of good for evil; by humility; by abstinence from evil thought;
in short, by total renunciation of that self-assertion which is the
essence of the cosmic process.
Doubtless, it is to these ethical qualities that Buddhism owes its
marvellous success.[Note 10] A system which knows no God in the
western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in
immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin; [69] which refuses any
efficacy to prayer and sacrifice; which bids men look to nothing but
their own efforts for salvation; which, in its original purity, knew
nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance, and never sought
the aid of the secular arm; yet spread over a considerable moiety of
the Old World with marvellous rapidity, and is still, with whatever
base admixture of foreign superstitions, the dominant creed of a large
fraction of mankind.
Let us now set our faces westwards, towards Asia Minor and Greece and
Italy, to view the rise and progress of another philosophy, apparently
independent, but no less pervaded by the conception of evolution.[Note
11]
The sages of Miletus were pronounced evolutionists; and, however dark
may be some of the sayings of Heracleitus of Ephesus, who was probably
a contemporary of Gautama, no better expressions of the essence of the
modern doctrine of evolution can be found than are presented by some
of his pithy aphorisms and striking metaphors. [Note 12] Indeed, many
of my present auditors must have observed that, more than once, I have
borrowed from him in the brief exposition of the theory of evolution
with which this discourse commenced.
But when the focus of Greek intellectual activity shifted to Athens,
the leading minds [70] concentrated their attention upon ethical
problems. Forsaking the study of the macrocosm for that of the
microcosm, they lost the key to the thought of the great Ephesian,
which, I imagine, is more intelligible to us than it was to Socrates,
or to Plato. Socrates, more especially, set the fashion of a kind of
inverse agnosticism, by teaching that the problems of physics lie
beyond the reach of the human intellect; that the attempt to solve
them is essentially vain; that the one worthy object of investigation
is the problem of ethical life; and his example was followed by the
Cynics and the later Stoics. Even the comprehensive knowledge and the
penetrating intellect of Aristotle failed to suggest to him that in
holding the eternity of the world, within its present range of
mutation, he was making a retrogressive step. The scientific heritage
of Heracleitus passed into the hands neither of Plato nor of
Aristotle, but into those of Democritus. But the world was not yet
ready to receive the great conceptions of the philosopher of Abdera.
It was reserved for the Stoics to return to the track marked out by
the earlier philosophers; and, professing themselves disciples of
Heracleitus, to develop the idea of evolution systematically. In doing
this, they not only omitted some characteristic features of their
master's teaching, but they made additions altogether foreign to it.
One of the most influential of these importations was the
transcendental [71] theism which had come into vogue. The restless,
fiery energy, operating according to law, out of which all things
emerge and into which they return, in the endless successive cycles of
the great year; which creates and destroys worlds as a wanton child
builds up, and anon levels, sand castles on the seashore; was
metamorphosed into a material world-soul and decked out with all the
attributes of ideal Divinity; not merely with infinite power and
transcendent wisdom, but with absolute goodness.
The consequences of this step were momentous. For if the cosmos is the
effect of an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent cause,
the existence in it of real evil, still less of necessarily inherent
evil, is plainly inadmissible. [Note 13] Yet the universal experience
of mankind testified then, as now, that, whether we look within us or
without us, evil stares us in the face on all sides; that if anything
is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are realities.
It would be a new thing in history if a priori philosophers were
daunted by the factious opposition of experience; and the Stoics were
the last men to allow themselves to be beaten by mere facts. "Give me
a doctrine and I will find the reasons for it," said Chrysippus. So
they perfected, if they did not invent, that ingenious and plausible
form of pleading, the Theodicy; for the purpose of showing firstly,
that there is no such [72] thing as evil; secondly, that if there is,
it is the necessary correlate of good; and, moreover, that it is
either due to our own fault, or inflicted for our benefit. Theodicies
have been very popular in their time, and I believe that a numerous,
though somewhat dwarfed, progeny of them still survives. So far as I
know, they are all variations of the theme set forth in those famous
six lines of the "Essay on Man," in which Pope sums up Bolingbroke's
reminiscences of stoical and other speculations of this kind--
"All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear: whatever is is right."
Yet, surely, if there are few more important truths than those
enunciated in the first triad, the second is open to very grave
objections. That there is a "soul of good in things evil" is
unquestionable; nor will any wise man deny the disciplinary value of
pain and sorrow. But these considerations do not help us to see why
the immense multitude of irresponsible sentient beings, which cannot
profit by such discipline, should suffer; nor why, among the endless
possibilities open to omnipotence--that of sinless, happy existence
among the rest--the actuality in which sin and misery abound should be
that selected.
[73] Surely it is mere cheap rhetoric to call arguments which have
never yet been answered by even the meekest and the least rational of
Optimists, suggestions of the pride of reason. As to the concluding
aphorism, its fittest place would be as an inscription in letters of
mud over the portal of some "stye of Epicurus"[Note 14]; for that is
where the logical application of it to practice would land men, with
every aspiration stifled and every effort paralyzed. Why try to set
right what is right already? Why strive to improve the best of all
possible worlds? Let us eat and drink, for as today all is right, so
to-morrow all will be.
But the attempt of the Stoics to blind themselves to the reality of
evil, as a necessary concomitant of the cosmic process, had less
success than that of the Indian philosophers to exclude the reality of
good from their purview. Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut
one's eyes to good than to evil. Pain and sorrow knock at our doors
more loudly than pleasure and happiness; and the prints of their heavy
footsteps are less easily effaced. Before the grim realities of
practical life the pleasant fictions of optimism vanished. If this
were the best of all possible worlds, it nevertheless proved itself a
very inconvenient habitation for the ideal sage.
The stoical summary of the whole duty of man, "Live according to
nature," would seem to imply that the cosmic process is an exemplar
for human [74] conduct. Ethics would thus become applied Natural
History. In fact, a confused employment of the maxim, in this sense,
has done immeasurable mischief in later times. It has furnished an
axiomatic foundation for the philosophy of philosophasters and for the
moralizing of sentimentalists. But the Stoics were, at bottom, not
merely noble, but sane, men; and if we look closely into what they
really meant by this ill-used phrase, it will be found to present no
justification for the mischievous conclusions that have been deduced
from it.
In the language of the Stoa, "Nature" was a word of many meanings.
There was the "Nature" of the cosmos and the "Nature" of man. In the
latter, the animal "nature," which man shares with a moiety of the
living part of the cosmos, was distinguished from a higher "nature."
Even in this higher nature there were grades of rank. The logical
faculty is an instrument which may be turned to account for any
purpose. The passions and the emotions are so closely tied to the
lower nature that they may be considered to be pathological, rather
than normal, phenomena. The one supreme, hegemonic, faculty, which
constitutes the essential "nature" of man, is most nearly represented
by that which, in the language of a later philosophy, has been called
the pure reason. It is this "nature" which holds up the ideal of the
supreme good and demands absolute submission of the will to its
behests. It is [75] which commands all men to love one another, to
return good for evil, to regard one another as fellow-citizens of one
great state. Indeed, seeing that the progress towards perfection of a
civilized state, or polity, depends on the obedience of its members to
these commands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure reason the
"political" nature. Unfortunately, the sense of the adjective has
undergone so much modification, that the application of it to that
which commands the sacrifice of self to the common good would now
sound almost grotesque. [Note 15]
But what part is played by the theory of evolution in this view of
ethics? So far as I can discern, the ethical system of the Stoics,
which is essentially intuitive, and reverences the categorical
imperative as strongly as that of any later moralists, might have been
just what it was if they had held any other theory; whether that of
special creation, on the one side, or that of the eternal existence of
the present order, on the other.[Note 16] To the Stoic, the cosmos had
no importance for the conscience, except in so far as he chose to
think it a pedagogue to virtue. The pertinacious optimism of our
philosophers hid from them the actual state of the case. It prevented
them from seeing 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 [76] that the cosmos works through the
lower nature of man, not for righteousness, but against it. And it
finally drove them to confess that the existence of their ideal "wise
man" was incompatible with the nature of things; that even a passable
approximation to that ideal was to be attained only at the cost of
renunciation of the world and mortification, not merely of the flesh,
but of all human affections. The state of perfection was that
"apatheia"[Note 17] in which desire, though it may still be felt, is
powerless to move the will, reduced to the sole function of executing
the commands of pure reason. Even this residuum of activity was to be
regarded as a temporary loan, as an efflux of the divine
world-pervading spirit, chafing at its imprisonment in the
flesh, until such time as death enabled it to return to its source in
the all-pervading logos.
I find it difficult to discover any very great difference between
Apatheia and Nirvana, except that stoical speculation agrees with
pre-Buddhistic philosophy, rather than with the teachings of Gautama,
in so far as it postulates a permanent substance equivalent to
"Brahma" and "Atman;" and that, in stoical practice, the adoption of
the life of the mendicant cynic was held to be more a counsel of
perfection than an indispensable condition of the higher life.
Thus the extremes touch. Greek thought and [77] Indian thought set out
from ground common to both, diverge widely, develop under very
different physical and moral conditions, and finally converge to
practically the same end.
The Vedas and the Homeric epos set before us a world of rich and
vigorous life, full of joyous fighting men
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine ....
and who were ready to brave the very Gods themselves when their blood
was up. A few centuries pass away, and under the influence of
civilization the descendants of these men are "sicklied o'er with the
pale cast of thought"--frank pessimists, or, at best, make-believe
optimists. The courage of the warlike stock may be as hardly tried as
before, perhaps more hardly, but the enemy is self. The hero has
become a monk. The man of action is replaced by the quietist, whose
highest aspiration is to be the passive instrument of the divine
Reason. By the Tiber, as by the Ganges, ethical man admits that the
cosmos is too strong for him; and, destroying every bond which ties
him to it by ascetic discipline, he seeks salvation in absolute
renunciation.[Note 18]
Modern thought is making a fresh start from the base whence Indian and
Greek philosophy set out; and, the human mind being very much what
[78] it was six-and-twenty centuries ago, there is no ground for
wonder if it presents indications of a tendency to move along the old
lines to the same results.
We are more than sufficiently familiar with modern pessimism, at least
as a speculation; for I cannot call to mind that any of its present
votaries have sealed their faith by assuming the rags and the bowl of
the mendicant Bhikku, or the cloak and the wallet of the Cynic. The
obstacles placed in the way of sturdy vagrancy by an unphilosophical
police have, perhaps, proved too formidable for philosophical
consistency. We also know modern speculative optimism, with its
perfectibility of the species, reign of peace, and lion and lamb
transformation scenes; but one does not hear so much of it as one did
forty years ago; indeed, I imagine it is to be met with more commonly
at the tables of the healthy and wealthy, than in the congregations of
the wise. The majority of us, I apprehend, profess neither pessimism
nor optimism. We hold that the world is neither so good, nor so bad,
as it conceivably might be; and, as most of us have reason, now and
again, to discover that it can be. Those who have failed to experience
the joys that make life worth living are, probably, in as small a
minority as those who have never known the griefs that rob existence
of its savour and turn its richest fruits into mere dust and ashes.
[79] Further, I think I do not err in assuming that, however diverse
their views on philosophical and religious matters, most men are
agreed that the proportion of good and evil in life may be very
sensibly affected by human action. I never heard anybody doubt that
the evil may be thus increased, or diminished; and it would seem to
follow that good must be similarly susceptible of addition or
subtraction. Finally, to my knowledge, nobody professes to doubt that,
so far forth as we possess a power of bettering things, it is our
paramount duty to use it and to train all our intellect and energy to
this supreme service of our kind.
Hence the pressing interest of the question, to what extent modern
progress in natural knowledge, and, more especially, the general
outcome of that progress in the doctrine of evolution, is competent to
help us in the great work of helping one another?
The propounders of what are called the "ethics of evolution," when the
"evolution of ethics" would usually better express the object of their
speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and
more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral
sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process
of evolution. I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on
the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been
evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the [80] one
as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as
the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the
evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is
incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is
preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt
not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the
æsthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither
increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is
beautiful and that is ugly.
There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called
"ethics of evolution." It is the notion that because, on the whole,
animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by
means of the struggle for existence and the consequent "survival of
the fittest;" therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must
look to the same process to help them towards perfection. I suspect
that this fallacy has arisen out of the unfortunate ambiguity of the
phrase "survival of the fittest." "Fittest" has a connotation of
"best;" and about "best" there hangs a moral flavour. In cosmic
nature, however, what is "fittest" depends upon the conditions. Long
since [Note 19], I ventured to point out that if our hemisphere were
to cool again, the survival of the fittest might bring about, in the
vegetable kingdom, a population of more and more stunted and humbler
[81] and humbler organisms, until the "fittest" that survived might be
nothing but lichens, diatoms, and such microscopic organisms as those
which give red snow its colour; while, if it became hotter, the
pleasant valleys of the Thames and Isis might be uninhabitable by any
animated beings save those that flourish in a tropical jungle. They,
as the fittest, the best adapted to the changed conditions, would
survive.
Men in society are undoubtedly subject to the cosmic process. As among
other animals, multiplication goes on without cessation, and involves
severe competition for the means of support. The struggle for
existence tends to eliminate those less fitted to adapt themselves to
the circumstances of their existence. The strongest, the most
self-assertive, tend to tread down the weaker. But the influence of
the cosmic process on the evolution of society is the greater the more
rudimentary its civilization. Social progress means a checking of the
cosmic, process at every step and the substitution for it of another,
which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the
survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the
whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically
the best.[Note 20]
As I have already urged, the practice of that which is ethically
best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a course of conduct
which, in all [82] respects, is opposed to that which leads to success
in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless
self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside,
or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual
shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is
directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the
fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the
gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters
into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of
his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take
heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been
permitted to live. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of
curbing the cosmic process and reminding the individual of his duty to
the community, to the protection and influence of which he owes, if
not existence itself, at least the life of something better than a
brutal savage.
It is from neglect of these plain considerations that the fanatical
individualism [Note 21] of our time attempts to apply the analogy of
cosmic nature to society. Once more we have a misapplication of the
stoical injunction to follow nature; the duties of the individual to
the state are forgotten, and his tendencies to self-assertion are
dignified by the name of rights. It is seriously debated whether the
members of a community are justified in using [83] their combined
strength to constrain one of their number to contribute his share to
the maintenance of it; or even to prevent him from doing his best to
destroy it. The struggle for existence which has done such admirable
work in cosmic nature, must, it appears, be equally beneficent in the
ethical sphere. Yet if that which I have insisted upon is true; if the
cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends; if the imitation
of it by man is inconsistent with the first principles of ethics; what
becomes of this surprising theory?
Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society
depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running
away from it, but in combating it. It may seem an audacious proposal
thus to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm and to set man to
subdue nature to his higher ends; but I venture to think that the
great intellectual difference between the ancient times with which we
have been occupied and our day, lies in the solid foundation we have
acquired for the hope that such an enterprise may meet with a certain
measure of success.
The history of civilization details the steps by which men have
succeeded in building up an artificial world within the cosmos.
Fragile reed as he may be, man, as Pascal says, is a thinking reed:
[Note 22] there lies within him a fund of energy operating
intelligently and so far akin to that which pervades the universe,
that it is competent [84] to influence and modify the cosmic process.
In virtue of his intelligence, the dwarf bends the Titan to his will.
In every family, in every polity that has been established, the cosmic
process in man has been restrained and otherwise modified by law and
custom; in surrounding nature, it has been similarly influenced by the
art of the shepherd, the agriculturist, the artisan. As civilization
has advanced, so has the extent of this interference increased; until
the organized and highly developed sciences and arts of the present
day have endowed man with a command over the course of non-human
nature greater than that once attributed to the magicians. The most
impressive, I might say startling, of these changes have been brought
about in the course of the last two centuries; while a right
comprehension of the process of life and of the means of influencing
its manifestations is only just dawning upon us. We do not yet see
our way beyond generalities; and we are befogged by the obtrusion of
false analogies and crude anticipations. But Astronomy, Physics,
Chemistry, have all had to pass through similar phases, before they
reached the stage at which their influence became an important factor
in human affairs. Physiology, Psychology, Ethics, Political Science,
must submit to the same ordeal. Yet it seems to me irrational to doubt
that, at no distant period, they will work as great a revolution in
the sphere of practice.
[85] The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations.
If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet,
some time, the summit will be reached and the downward route will be
commenced. The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the
suggestion that the power and the intelligence of man can ever arrest
the procession of the great year.
Moreover, the cosmic nature born with us and, to a large extent,
necessary for our maintenance, is the outcome of millions of years of
severe training, and it would be folly to imagine that a few centuries
will suffice to subdue its masterfulness to purely ethical ends.
Ethical nature may count upon having to reckon with a tenacious and
powerful enemy as long as the world lasts. But, on the other hand, I
see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by
sound principles of investigation, and organized in common effort, may
modify the conditions of existence, for a period longer than that now
covered by history. And much may be done to change the nature of man
himself. [Note 23] The intelligence which has converted the brother of
the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to
do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized
men.
But if we may permit ourselves at larger hope of abatement of the
essential evil of the world than was possible to those who, in the
infancy of [86] exact knowledge, faced the problem of existence more
than a score of centuries ago, I deem it an essential condition of the
realization of that hope that we should cast aside the notion that the
escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life.
We have long since emerged from the heroic childhood of our race, when
good and evil could be met with the same "frolic welcome;" the
attempts to escape from evil, whether Indian or Greek, have ended in
flight from the battle-field; it remains to us to throw aside the
youthful overconfidence and the no less youthful discouragement of
nonage. We are grown men, and must play the man
"...strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,"
cherishing the good that falls in our way, and bearing the evil, in
and around us, with stout hearts set on diminishing it. So far, we all
may strive in one faith towards one hope:
"... It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
... but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note may yet be done." [Note 24]
[187]