THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (_continued_)
We have still to see how the last of the difficulties of which we have
spoken was treated. It was a difficulty which could not be regarded
with indifference. For what would it avail to shew that men had a
right to cherish the belief in Power, and Purpose, and Personality,
unless they could also be assured that the Orderer of the world is
good? Nay, might they not feel, if there were no such assurance, that
it would be better to be altogether without His presence and influence?
On a matter so vital to happiness and well-being the mere possibility
of a doubt was torment enough. What was there to be said to bring
relief to the mind and heart when charges were made against the
benevolence and beneficence of Nature's ways? What satisfactory
account could be given of the waste and cruelty which were seen to
abound on every hand? The more clear the certainty that there is
design in the Universe, the more urgent became {54} the question as to
the character of that design, and of the motives that prompt it.
So long as the difficulty remained unrelieved, the thoughts of many of
the most sensitive minds in regard to Theism were held in suspense.
The shadow of misgiving was felt to be creeping over the mind of the
age, like the gloom of an approaching eclipse, even before the arrival
of the Darwinian hypothesis. In words too well known to need
repeating, Tennyson had given utterance to the half-realised anxiety of
his contemporaries in the stanzas of his _In Memoriam_, published in
1850.
What the finer spirits were already beginning to feel was soon to be
proclaimed, in terms which could not fail to be understood by the
multitude, as an inevitable truth brought to light by scientific
enquiry. We have seen how it was stated with the passion of eloquence
by Huxley and Romanes. And Darwin, with all his detachment and
philosophic calm, was at times deeply affected by the seriousness of
the problem which he had done so much to bring into prominence. It is
plain that he did his very utmost to retain the hopeful view, and to
put the most consoling interpretation he could upon the disquieting
facts.
He had no difficulty in shewing that the wholesale destruction of
living organisms was imperatively {55} necessary. "There is no
exception to the rule," he said, "that every organic being naturally
increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would
soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair."[1]
The truth of this has been demonstrated again and again. A pair of
rabbits, for example, would in the most favourable circumstances
increase in four or five years to a million. The roe of a cod may
contain eight or nine millions of eggs. More appalling still, the
female of the common flesh fly will at one time deposit 20,000 eggs.
At this rate of increase it has been calculated that, in less than a
year, a single pair would produce enough flies, if these were not
devoured by their natural foes, to cover the whole surface of the globe
to the depth of a mile and a quarter! But all this does not, of
course, make it clear why in a beneficently ordered world such a
necessity of slaughter should ever have been allowed to arise.
Darwin, as we have said, tried hard to take the most favourable view of
the whole process. He thus concluded his chapter on the struggle for
existence; "When we reflect on the struggle, we may console ourselves
with the full belief that {56} the war of nature is not incessant, that
no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous,
the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." And these are the
words with which he concluded the _Origin of Species_: "Thus from the
war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we are
capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals,
directly follows."
But a year or two later he shewed that his mind was by no means at rest
on the matter, by writing in this strain to his friend Asa Gray:
"I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish
to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There
seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself
that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the
Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the
living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice....
I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws,
with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what
we may call chance. Not that this notion _at all_ satisfies me....
Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you
that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical."[2]
{57}
Happily there were others who were able to see their way somewhat
further than this. Romanes, in a paper which he read before the
Aristotelian Society in 1889, shewed that he was reconsidering his
position. He questioned whether the assertion, made by a speaker in a
previous discussion, that "the fair order of Nature is only acquired by
a wholesale waste and sacrifice," could be accepted as strictly true,
for "how can it be said that, in point of fact, there _has_ been a
waste, or _has_ been a sacrifice? Clearly such things can only be said
when our point of view is restricted to the means (_i.e._, the
wholesale destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to
what, even within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably
the _end_ (_i.e._, the causal result in an ever improving world of
types)."[3]
He had intended to write more fully on the subject, but did not live to
do so. We only know that on the Sunday before his death he did express
to Bishop Gore his entire agreement with a statement that had been made
a short time before by Professor Knight, in his _Aspects of Theism_, to
the effect that "A larger good is evolved through the winnowing process
by which physical nature casts its weaker products {58} aside, etc."[4]
We cannot suppose that, if he had lived, he would have been content to
have left the argument thus. That the end justifies the means, is
scarcely a doctrine which can be accepted as the last word of an
ethical defence of the constitution of the world.
No doubt there were further pleas to be put in, and we shall do well to
give them their full value. There is the contention that the pleasures
of life as a whole outweigh the sum of its evils. This was maintained,
and we need not hesitate to say successfully maintained, by Lord
Avebury, and not by him alone. Indeed Darwin had emphatically said,
"According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails."[5] Then there
has always been urged the undoubted fact that pain, if an evil, is yet
the minister of good. Browning's optimism may have carried him too far
when he laid it down that "when pain ends gain ends," but it is not to
be questioned that men have profited by sufferings, and that they have
had to thank their pains, if only because these have served to protect
them from yet greater misfortunes. There is a true wisdom in the moral
of the old fable of the blacksmith, who prayed to heaven that the fire
might not burn his fingers, to discover that as {59} a result it had
charred his hand to the bone. Medical science has had much to say with
regard to the salutary office of pain. It has gone so far as to assert
that, "the symptoms of disease are marked by purpose, and the purpose
is beneficent." Nay more, "the processes of disease aim not at the
destruction of life, but at the saving of it."[6] None the less, with
what might seem a splendid inconsistency, the medical profession
devotes itself untiringly to the alleviation of the symptoms and to the
eradication of disease.
Again, we may be thankful to be assured that, whatever be the case with
man, the lower organisms feel pain less than he does, and much less
than he is often wont to imagine that they feel it. This has been
argued again and again by the veteran naturalist Wallace, whose right
to speak on the subject no one is likely to dispute. In his recently
published book, _The World of Life_, he has devoted a whole chapter to
answering the question, "Is Nature cruel?" and it is due to him, as
well as to the importance of the problem, that we should carefully note
what he has said. The following quotations may be taken as
sufficiently indicating his position.
"The widespread idea of the cruelty of Nature is {60} almost wholly
imaginary."[7] "Our whole tendency to transfer _our_ sensations of
pain to the other animals is grossly misleading."[8]
"No other animal _needs_ the pain-sensations that we need; it is
therefore absolutely certain--on principles of evolution--that no other
possesses such sensations in more than a fractional degree of ours."[9]
"In the category of painless or almost painless animals, I think we may
place almost all aquatic animals up to fishes, all the vast hordes of
insects, probably all mollusca and worms; thus reducing the sphere of
pain to a minimum throughout all the earlier geological ages, and very
largely even now."[10]
"The purpose and use of all parasitic diseases is to seize upon the
less adapted and less healthy individuals--those which are slowly dying
and no longer of value in the preservation of the species, and
therefore to a certain extent injurious to the race by requiring food
and occupying space needed by the more fit."[11]
Speaking of "the vicious-looking teeth and claws of the cat tribe, the
hooked beak and prehensile talons of birds of prey, the poison fangs of
serpents, the stings of wasps and many others," Dr. Wallace {61}
writes; "The idea that all these weapons exist for the _purpose_ of
shedding blood or giving pain is wholly illusory. As a matter of fact,
their effect is wholly beneficent even to the sufferers, inasmuch as
they tend to the diminution of pain. Their actual purpose is always to
prevent the escape of captured food--of a wounded animal, which would
then, indeed, suffer _useless_ pain, since it would certainly very soon
be captured again and be devoured." "All conclusions derived from the
house-fed cat and mouse are fallacious."[12] Finally he concludes by
inveighing against "the ludicrously exaggerated view adopted by men of
such eminence and usually of such calm judgment as Huxley--a view
almost as far removed from fact or science as the purely imaginary and
humanitarian dogma of the poet:
'The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.'
Whatever the giant may feel, if the theory of Evolution is true, the
'poor beetle' certainly {62} feels an almost irreducible minimum of
pain, probably none at all."[13]
We may add to all these considerations the further fact that we are
constantly finding out that things have their use which had been too
hastily assumed to be mere blots upon Nature. The desert and the
volcano, for instance, have often been regarded in that light. But we
have lately been assured that both are needed for the supply of
atmospheric dust, which is a necessary condition of the rain-fall; so
that they are really essential to life upon the planet. Beyond
question, then, there is very much to be said in mitigation of the
terrible difficulty occasioned by what appear to be the havoc and the
prodigality of Nature.
And yet--when all has been said--a residuum does remain of inexplicable
misery and distress, and there are times when we are all of us
constrained to cry out with Darwin that it is "too much," and to ask
whether there is not some further clue to the mystery. And then it may
well be that there comes to our mind an answer that has been given from
the very first moment at which human beings have thought at all. It is
an answer which has seemed inevitable alike to the simplest and the
wisest.
{63}
Carlyle once told of two Scottish peasants who found themselves for the
first time at Ailsa Crag. They stared in astonishment at the great
sea-precipices. At last one said to the other: "Eh, Jock, Nature's
deevilish!"[14] That was the view taken by the primitive races of the
world, as their worships and incantations bore witness. It is a view
which cannot be lightly dismissed as having nothing at all in its
support. We may minimise the evil that is at work around and within us
as we will, but, when we have done our utmost, we shall be unlike the
vast majority of our race if we are not compelled to admit that there
is that in the world which it is quite impossible to ascribe to the
immediate action of an entirely good and beneficent God.
Is it then to be thought incredible that the order of the world should
have been interfered with, at an early stage in its development, in
such a way that the disarrangement was left to work out its fatal
mischief by means of the very constancy of the great system of laws
which make for a regular development? How this might conceivably have
occurred has been set out by an anonymous writer in a remarkable book
which ought to be better known than it is. {64} It was published some
years ago,[15] and bears the suggestive title of _Evil and Evolution_.
The author maintains that the original motive in all living things was
self-preservation for self-realisation; and that this elementary law
was in itself necessary and good, the essential condition of progress.
But just as we to-day know well how hard it is to draw the line which
distinguishes a right self-seeking from the wrong, so it has been from
the outset. The distinction is a fine one, and the balance is easily
upset. We have but to suppose that this perversion of the right and
lawful happened at an early stage, to see that nothing more would have
been required to account for the subsequent heritage of woe.[16] After
speaking of the innocent "kind of comparative strife that we see in the
fields and forests around us," in which "there may be nothing that we
cannot reconcile with the perfect beneficence of the Great {65}
Designer and Creator," this writer goes on to say: "But the moment that
evolution has attained that point at which the struggle begins to
involve pain and unhappiness, it becomes quite another matter. The
moment that rudimentary but happy and congenial life begins to be
overshadowed by fear, or debased by conscious cruelty, the moment that
process of evolution begins to evolve not only cruel selfishness in its
most odious forms, but deceit and artifice and treacherous cunning in
the warfare which one animal wages with another, then I think you may
be certain of one of two things--either the Creator is not
all-benevolent, or that that scheme is somehow working out as He never
intended it should: there must have been some disturbing and hostile
influence."[17]
This is well put, but the interest of the book chiefly consists in its
attempts to show in detailed instances how things that are evil may
have been made so. The author boldly argues that, if the normal course
had been followed, "birds and beasts of prey and venomous reptiles
would never have been evolved." "Evolutionists," he says, "are agreed
that it is just the fierce struggle of created things that has produced
these birds and beasts of prey, and that there can be {66} little doubt
that it is the malignity of the struggle that has produced the venom of
so many reptiles."[18] Instances are given in which such venom may now
be developed as the result of rage or terror in an otherwise harmless
animal.
"A few years ago it was reported that the late M. Pasteur 'cultivated'
the poison of human saliva to such a point that he was able to produce
with it many of the effects of the most virulent snake poisons."[19]
Had they not been inflamed by the terror of the struggle for existence,
"tigers and hyaenas, vultures and sharks, ferrets and polecats, wasps
and spiders, puff-adders and skunks" might have turned their undoubted
abilities in other more desirable directions.[20] Again, "it is the
perpetual effort, generation after generation, through long ages, to
repair the mischief inflicted by enemies," that accounts for "the
fecundity of the codfish and other creatures. The more prolific it
becomes, the more enemies it can feed; and the more they multiply, the
more prolific it grows." A vicious circle indeed! Even "earthquakes,
storms, droughts, deluges," are explained as due to a certain want of
balance and failure in adjustment.[21]
Certainly, if we had to choose between the idea {67} of a careless or
indifferent God, and the belief in a God who has given us ample proofs
of a generally beneficent purpose, but who has, for reasons of the
meaning of which we as yet can have only the vaguest conceptions,
allowed Himself to be hindered and thwarted on the way to His goal,
with results of suffering to Himself even greater than those endured by
His creatures; if these were the alternatives before us, there can
scarcely be one of us who would hesitate to say towards which of them
his reason and conscience would confidently point him.
[1] _Origin of Species_, Chap. III.
[2] _Life and Letters_.
[3] _Thoughts on Religion_, pp. 92, f.
[4] p. 94.
[5] _Life and Letters_, I., p. 309.
[6] Address by Sir Frederick Treves at the Edinburgh Philosophical
Institution, October, 1905.
[7] p. 380.
[8] p. 377.
[9] p. 381.
[10] p. 375.
[11] p. 383.
[12] p. 377. Among the illustrations that have been adduced of the
insensibility of the lower organisms, none perhaps is more
extraordinary than this: "A crab will continue to eat, and apparently
relish, a smaller crab while being itself slowly devoured by a larger
one!"--(Transactions of Victoria Institute, Vol. XXV., p. 257).
[13] p. 384.
[14] William Allingham's _Diary_, p. 226.
[15] In 1896, by Messrs. Macmillan.
[16] In one instance, at least, Darwin had pictured in his imagination
the steps by which a "strange and odious instinct" may have been
developed from comparatively innocent beginnings. He was referring to
the ejection by the young cuckoo of its companions from the nest. "I
can see no special difficulty in its having gradually acquired, during
successive generations, the blind desire, the strength and structure
necessary for the work of ejection." "The first step towards the
acquisition of the proper instinct might have been mere unintentional
restlessness on the part of the young bird."--_Origin of Species_, p.
200.
[17] Pp. 135, f.
[18] P. 142.
[19] P. 143.
[20] P. 144.
[21] P. 232.
{68}