Assuming still that the facts collected and arranged by experimental
science in favour of the hypothesis are such as to demand some kind of
Evolution-philosophy; assuming that the very imperfect serial
classification of living things according to their degree of organic
definiteness, coherence, and heterogeneity not merely represents a
variety which has always coexisted since life was possible on this
earth, but rather traces out or hints at the genetic process by which
this variety has been produced, let us see if there be any other
governing principle directing the process, more intelligible than the
persistence of that mere organic life which cannot even be thought of as
distinct from those appliances and functions which it is supposed to
have evolved for its own service by "natural selection."
Let us admit, what is really evident, that life is nothing distinct from
the sum of those functions which minister to the preservation of life;
and that therefore it is not the same thing in a man and in a
mud-turtle. Man's superior faculties are not merely a more complicated
machinery for producing an identical effect which the mud-turtle
produces more simply and abundantly, but rather by their very play
_constitute_ an entirely different and higher kind of life. When Hume,
in his _Treatise on Human Nature_, says: "Reason is and ought to be the
slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to
serve and obey them," he implies that the exercise of reason is no
constituent factor of human life, but something outside it, subordinate
to it, whereas that life itself consists in passion, or pleasurable
sensation, of which man, in virtue of his reason and other advantages,
secures more than do his fellow-animals. This is just the conception of
life which we have seen to be incoherent on close inspection; and if it
be so, then the evolutionary process is a struggle not for bare life or
existence, but for the prevalence of the _higher kinds_ of life and
existence; and intelligence and morality are not only co-operative as
instruments in maintaining and extending human life, but are themselves
the principal elements of that complex life. True, the mind does
minister to the body and preserve it; but still more does the body
minister to the mind; or rather, each ministers to that whole in which
the play of the mind is the principal function and the play of the body
subordinate. If, then, we hold to the verdict of our common sense, and
regard our mental life not as subordinate to our sensitive and vegetal
life, but as co-ordinate and even superior, we must (so to speak) view
it as no less "for its own sake," as no less an "end in itself" than
they are, but rather much more; we must regard evolution as making for
the life of truth and the life of righteousness even more principally
than for bare existence or animal vitality. It is now no longer mere
life that tries to assert itself, and in the struggle shapes things to
what they are; but it is the very highest kind of life, that is trying
to come to the birth. Nature inherently tends to the higher through the
lower forms of life, and these minister to the higher and receive in
return from them the means of a yet more efficacious ministry.
In this conception, every function of the organism has two aspects,
under one of which it is its own end and exists for its own sake as an
element of the life of the whole; under the other it is ministerial,
serving other functions above and below it, as it in return is served by
them. Correspondence with the environment is, similarly, not merely a
condition of life, but also that wherein vitality principally consists.
"Living" is spontaneous self-adaptation to surrounding reality, taken in
the very widest sense. The more diverse and multiform this adaptability,
the fuller and higher is the life; and thus our ordinary common-sense
classifications are justified. Each new manifestation of life means some
new correspondence with surrounding reality as we piss from mere
vegetation, and then add local movement, and one sense after another,
till we come finally to intelligence and the life of reason and
right-doing, which again, consists in self-conformation to things as
they really are. In all this we are in agreement with common sense and
common language, which identify the fullest life with the fullest
activity; all activity being of the nature of response to stimulus, that
is, correspondence to reality. As soon as consciousness supervenes on
the lower forms of life it is evident that the pleasures of sight,
hearing, taste, mind, and affection all depend on, and consist in, the
consciousness of this successful accommodation of the subject to the
object; and that all pain and disease is simply the felt failure of such
adaptation. What was anciently and very wisely called the "natural
appetite" of living creatures is in this view nothing else but their
response to the modifying attraction exerted upon them by the objective
Reality which presses upon them on every side, and tends to draw them
into conformity with itself so far as they have latent capacity for such
a correspondence. It is the light that makes (or rather elicits) sight;
and it is sound that develops the sense of hearing: and it is the ideas
embodied in Nature that call our intellect into play. Hence it follows
that, desire for truth and justice, for society and for religion, which
assert themselves as invariably in the soul of man at certain stages of
progress, as the desire for mere life asserts itself from the first, is
simply the felt result of the as yet unsuccessful endeavour of Nature to
draw man into a fuller kind of correspondence with herself.
Thus conceived, the course of evolution is comparable, not as before, to
the gradual unveiling of a blank canvas, revealing simply a greater
extent of the same appearance, but to the gradual unveiling of a picture
whose full unity of meaning is held in suspense till the disclosure is
completed. We do not now interpret the higher by the lower, but the
lower by the higher; the beginning by the end. This may seem perilously
near to finalism, yet it is no more necessarily so, than the process of
photography; we only need a self-adaptive tendency in life-matter
responsive to the stimulating-tendency of the environment. Not, of
course, that this bundle of words really explains anything, but that
like other formulae of the kind, it prescinds from the question of ends
and origins, by making a statement of what happens serve as a cause of
what happens, and calling it a Law or a Tendency, or a Latent
Potentiality--thus filling the gap which mere agnosticism creates in our
thought.
With this conception of Evolution our ordinary estimates of "higher" and
"lower" are saved; also the value of our mental processes upon which
rests whatever proof the theory may admit of; while the "argument from
adaptability" is provided with a firm basis independent of finality. All
our "natural," as opposed to our personal and self-determined appetites
or cravings,--those which are, so to say, constitutional and inseparable
from our nature in certain conditions, are evidence of the influence of
some reality outside us seeking to draw us into more perfect
correspondence with itself, and whose nature can be more or less dimly
conjectured from the nature of those cravings. What are called "natural
religions" represent man's self-devised attempts to explain the reality
answering to his religious and moral cravings. Revelation is but a
divine interpretation of the same; as though one with dim vision were to
supplement his defect by the testimony of another more clear-sighted.
It may be practically admitted that no philosophy allows of strict
demonstration, since, being a conception of the totality of things, it
modifies our understanding of every principle by which one might attempt
to prove or disprove it. Eventually it is its harmony with the totality
of things as we perceive them that determines us to accept it, and no
two of us perceive just the same totality, however substantial an
agreement there may be in our experience; yet I think it can hardly be
denied that this conception of evolution is far more in agreement with
the world as most of us know it, and commonly think and speak of it,
than the former; that it not merely satisfies our intellect, but offers
some satisfaction to our whole spiritual nature. "Is it certain," asks
Mr. Bradley, in a fairly similar connection, "that the mere intellect
can be self-satisfied if the other elements of our nature remain
uncontented?" And, again: "A result, if it fails to satisfy our whole
nature, comes short of perfection: and I could not rest tranquilly in a
truth if I were compelled to regard it as hateful.... I should insist
that the inquiry was not yet closed and that the result was but partial.
And if metaphysics" [for which we may substitute: any philosophy, such
a& that of Evolution] "is to stand, it must, I think, take account of
all sides of our being. I do not mean that every one of our desires must
be met by a promise of particular satisfaction; for that would be absurd
and utterly impossible. But if the main tendencies of our nature do not
reach consummation in the Absolute, we cannot believe that we have
attained to perfection and truth."[7] From this point of view there can
be no doubt as to which of these conceptions of Evolution is the more
rational and satisfactory; that which would explain it by a simple
tendency in living matter to persist and spread, and would see in all
organic variety only the selected means to that somewhat colourless end;
or that conception which would explain it by a tendency in living matter
to come into ever fuller correspondence with its environment, seeing in
such spontaneous correspondence the very essence of life, and not merely
a condition of life.
We need only add a few criticisms on this second conception.
1. It is true that every creature struggles more intensely and
vigorously for the lower kind of life, or for "mere life," as we might
say, than for any of those things which alone would seem to make life
worth the having. But this only means that to live at all is the most
fundamental condition of living well and fully and enjoyably. The higher
life cannot stand without the lower, which it includes, but the lower is
not therefore the better, nor is it the end for whose sake the higher is
desirable; but conversely. Not until men have got bread enough to eat
will they have leisure or energy to spare for the animal grades of
vitality. When the means of bodily subsistence grow scarce, then the
faculties that were previously set free to seek the bread of a higher
and fuller life are diverted to the struggle for bare animal existence,
and progress is thrown back; but when there is abundance for all,
secured by the labour of a few from whom the remainder can buy, then
fuller life becomes once more possible for that remainder. The struggle
for bodily food gives an advantage to, and "selects" naturally, those
mental and other powers which facilitate its attainment; but just as man
does not only eat and labour in order to live, but also (however it may
shock conventional ethics) lives in order to eat and labour; so the new
energies called forth by competition do not merely secure that grade of
life in whose interests they are evoked and perfected, but extend the
sphere of vitality, in so much as their own play adds a new element to
life and gives it a new form.
The part played by struggle and competition in this process of Evolution
is naturally exaggerated by those who deny any latent tendency other
than that of mere persistence in being; who repudiate an internal
expansiveness towards fuller kinds of existence, drawn out or checked by
the environment.
Competition plays a prominent part when there is question of the lower
grades of life, in so far as these depend on a pabulum that is limited
in quantity. In such cases competition, within certain limits, will
secure the bringing-out of latent powers by which the lower level of
life is maintained and a higher level entered upon; the lower being
secured by the superimposition of the higher.
But how does it do so? Not by creating anything, but by giving the
victory to those individuals who already were ahead of their fellows in
virtue of a fuller development of their nature from within; in clearing
the ground for them and letting them increase and multiply.
2. Again, we should notice that development in one direction may be at
the cost of development in another. The struggle for any lower form of
existence than that already attained, is inevitably at the cost of the
higher. The degrading effects of destitution are proverbial. Craft,
cruelty, selfishness, and all the vices needed for success in a
gladiatorial contest are often the fruits of such competition. Also,
commercial progress seems on the whole to be at the expense of progress
in art and the higher tastes, sacrificing everything to the production
of the greatest possible quantity of material comforts. If it sharpens
the wits and sensibilities in some directions, it blunts them in others.
Now, the first sense suggested to us in these days by the word
"progress," is material progress--all that came in with steam; and this
narrow conception vitiates much of our reasoning. It is in this realm
undoubtedly that competition is such a factor of rapid advance; but we
forget that the food of what the best men have ever considered the best
life, is not limited or divisible; but like the light and air is
undiminished how many soever share it. Whatever advance there has been
in the life of the mind and of the higher tastes and sensibilities,
cannot directly be explained by competition, but simply by the quiet
upward working of Nature's inherent forces. We look with scorn at the
unprogressive East, satisfied that there can be no progress, no life
worth living, where there is no rush for dollars. But I think we have
yet to learn the meaning of _ex Oriente lux_.
Much of our immorality and our social evil comes from the fact that
those who have developed the faculties of a higher grade of life, seek
the lower as an end in itself, and not simply so far as it is a
condition of the higher and no further. The Gospel precept, as usual,
enunciates only the law of reason and nature, when it bids us to "Seek
first the Kingdom of God and its justice," that is, to put our best life
in the front, and to make it the measure and limit of any other quest.
The neglect of this principle gives us high living and plain thinking,
instead of "high thinking and plain living;" and takes the bread out of
the mouths of the poor. The competition for pleasures and luxuries and
amusements, may indeed develop certain industries and cause progress in
certain narrow lines, but it is at the cost of the only progress worth
the name.
The conflict between this "struggle-theory" and ethics has been freely
acknowledged by Professor Huxley and others; every attempt to educe
unselfishness from selfishness has failed. The moral man even in our day
has rather a bad time of it; what chance would he have had of surviving
to propagate his species in the supposed pre-moral states of human
society? Who can possibly conceive mere rottenness being cured by
progress in rottenness; or a man drinking himself into temperance? On
the other hand, it is at least conceivable that in the wildest savage
there is some little seed of a moral sense--weak, compared with the
lowest springs of action, just because it is the highest and therefore
only struggling into being; and that in the slow lapse of time events
may here and there prove that honesty is the best policy; and that
honesty once tasted may be found not only useful for other things, but
agreeable for itself, and may be cherished and strengthened by social
and religious sanctions.
There is, however, a reaction on foot which tends to reconcile the
breach between ethics and evolution, by reducing the part played by
competition within reasonable bounds, and making it subservient to the
survival, not of the most selfish, but of the most social individuals.
Definite variations from within, modified between narrow limits by
accidental variation from without, is coming to be acknowledged as the
chief factor of progress. But we should not forget that to allow an
internal principle of orderly development is, not merely to modify the
popular evolution theory by a slight concession to its adversaries; it
is rather to make it no longer the supreme explanation of development,
but at most a slight modification of the more mysterious theory which it
was its boast and merit to have supplanted. According to Geddes and
Foster and others of their school, it is the species-subserving
qualities that Nature selects; and these, in the higher grades of life,
are equivalent to the altruistic, social, and ethical qualities. It is
in virtue of the parental and maternal instincts of self-sacrifice,
self-diffusion, self-forgetfulness in the interests of the offspring,
that species are preserved and prevail. Selfish egoism leads eventually
(as we see in some modern countries where _laizzez-faire_ liberalism
prevails) to social disruption, decadence, and chaos; and this is the
universal law of life in every grade. At first indeed the unit struggles
to live, for life is the condition of propagation; but the root of this
instinct is altruistic; it is the whole asserting itself in the part;
and all "self-regarding" instincts are to be likewise explained as
subordinate to the "other-regarding" instincts. As soon as this
sub-ordination is ignored in practice, regress takes the place of
progress. The transit, we are told, from the unicellular to the
multicellular organism cannot be explained by individualism, but implies
a diminution of the competitive, an increase of the social and
subordinative tendency. The argument from economics to biology and back
again, is said to be nearing exposure; the "progress of the species
through the internecine struggle of its individuals at the margin of
subsistence," is the outgoing idea. Yes, and with it goes out all that
made Evolution a simple and therefore popular explanation of the world;
and there comes in that "organic" conception of the process which
clamours for theism and finalism as its only coherent complement.
3. But though Evolution so conceived makes the "argument from
adaptability," as well as the arguments for theism, stronger rather than
weaker; we must not shut our eyes to the difficulty created by the fact
(too little insisted upon by Evolutionists) that there is no solid
reason for thinking that progress is all-pervading. We have already said
that progress in commerce may be regress in art or in religion or in
morality. Also, progress in benevolence may co-exist with regress in
fortitude and purity; progress in one point of morality with regress in
another; progress in ethical judgment with regress in ethical practice.
And in every realm, growth and decay, life and death, seem so to
intertwine and oscillate that it is very gratuitous to designate the
total process as being one or the other. Spencer confesses that the
entire universe oscillates between extremes of integration and
disintegration. Why we should consider the universe at present to be
rising rather than falling, waxing rather than waning, one cannot say.
The easier presumption is that it is equally one and the other, and
always has been. Even were we rash enough to pronounce progress to be on
the whole prevalent within the narrow field of our own experience,
surely it were nothing but the inevitable "provincialism" of the human
mind to pass _per saltum_ from that, to a generalization for all
possible experience. Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and
order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive basis in actual
experience, and must draw its life from some deeper source.
Why then should we so presume that our moral and religious ideas are
really progressive and not regressive, as to regard their interpretation
as approximating to the truth? The answer is simply that our argument
from adaptability does not require the assumption in question, but only
that we should be able to distinguish higher from lower tendencies,
progressive from regressive movements, without holding the optimistic
view that on the whole the forward tendency is at present prevailing. It
is not because we live in the nineteenth century that we consider our
moral perceptions truer than those of the ancient Hebrews, but because
we at once comprehend and transcend their ideas (in some respects), as
the greater does the less. In many points surely the relation is
inverted and we feel ourselves transcended (or may at least suspect it),
by those who lived or live in ruder conditions than our own. David has
perhaps taught us more than we could have taught him; and there are
other vices than those proper to semi-barbarism. It is not by reference
to date or country, or grade of material progress, that we assess the
value of moral judgments, but by that subjective standard with which our
own moral attainments supply us in regard to all that is equal or less,
similar or dissimilar. To deny this discernment is to throw the doors
open to unqualified scepticism; to admit it, is all that we need for the
validity of our inference.
4. If Evolution is really of this oscillatory character; if at all times
much the same processes have been going on in different parts of this
universe as now--one system decaying as another is coming into being; is
it not more reasonable to imagine (for it is only a question of
imagining) that the primordial datum was not uniform nebula, but matter
in all stages of elaboration from the highest to the lowest--the same
sort of result as we should get from a cross-section at any subsequent
moment in the process? What reason is there for assuming primordial
homogeneity, since every backward step would show us, together with the
unravelling of what is now in process of weaving, a counter-balancing
weaving of what is now in process of disintegration? Were this earth
all, we might dream of universal advance by shutting our eyes to a great
many incompatible facts; but when our telescopes show us the
co-existence of integration and disintegration everywhere, what can we
conclude but that in the past as in the future, no alteration is to be
looked for beyond the shifting of the waves' crest from side to side of
the sea of matter--the total ratio of depressions to elevations
remaining exactly constant.
Were the other view of an original universal homogeneity correct, how
conies it that we have still co-existent every stage of advance from the
lowest to the highest, and that there is not a greater equality?--a
difficulty which does not exist if we suppose things to have been _on
the whole,_ as they are now, from the very first. But whichever view we
take; whether we suppose all things collectively to oscillate between
recurring extremes of "sameness" and "otherness;" or every stage of the
wave of progress from crest to trough, to be simultaneously manifested
in the universe at all times, the old difficulty of "the beginning" will
force itself upon us. A process _ab aeterno_ is at least as unimaginable
as the process of creation _ex nihilo;_ if it be not altogether
inconceivable to boot. And the alternative is, either a primordial state
of homogeneous matter which contains the present cosmos in germ, and
from which it is evolved without the aid of any environment--such a germ
claiming a designer as much as any ready-made perfect world; or else, a
primordial state of things like that which we should get at any
cross-section of the secular process, in which every stage of life and
death, growth and decay, evolution and involution, is represented as
now. This would include fossils and remains of past civilizations
which (in the hypothesis) would never have existed; and would be
in all respects as difficult as the crudest conception of the
creation-hypothesis. And if this absurdity drives us back to
primordial homogeneity, as before, we must remember that here, too,
though not so evidently, we should have all the signs of an antecedent
process that was non-existent. Life and death, corruption and
integration, are parts of one undulatory process. Cut the wave where
you will its curve claims to be finished in both directions and
suggests a before as well as an after. If, in the very nature of
things, the pendulum sways between confusion and order, chaos and
cosmos, each extreme intrinsically demands the other, not only as its
consequent, but as its antecedent; and the first chaos, no less than
any succeeding one, will seem the ruin of a previous cosmos. Therefore
we are driven back upon a process _ab aeterno_ with every stage of
evolution always simultaneously represented in one part or other of
the whole. Whatever mitigation such a conception may offer, surely we
may be excused for still adhering to that simpler explanation which
involves a mystery indeed, but nothing so positively unthinkable as a
process without a beginning.
5. This same conception of a process without beginning, favours the
notion that since life was possible on our globe all species may well
have co-existed in varying proportions. From the sudden spread of
population through almost accidental conditions, we can imagine how
certain species might have been so scarce as to leave no trace in
geological strata, whereas those which enormously preponderated at the
same time would have done so. A change of conditions might easily cause
the former to preponderate, and their sudden appearance in the strata
would look as though they had then first come into being. In a word, we
can have good evidence for the extinction of species, but scarcely any
for their origination.
This supposition is not adverse to the derivation of species from a
common stock, but rather favours the notion that as in the case of the
individual the period of plasticity is short compared with that of
morphological stability, so if there was such an arboreal branching out
of species from a common root, it took place rapidly in conditions as
different from ours as those of uterine from extra-uterine life; and
that the stage of inflexibility may have been reached before any time of
which we have record.
But in truth when we see in the world of chemical substances an
altogether similar sedation of species where there can be no question of
common descent as its cause, we may well suspend our judgment till the
established facts have excluded the many hypotheses other than Evolution
by which they may be explained.
As long as Evolution claims to be no more than a working scientific
hypothesis, like ether or electric fluid--a sort of frame or subjective
category into which observed facts are more conveniently fitted, it
cannot justly be pressed for a solution of ultimate problems; but when
it claims to be a complete philosophy and as such to extrude other
philosophies previously in possession, it must show that it can rest the
mind where they leave it restless; or that it has proved their proffered
solutions spurious. This, so far, it has absolutely failed to do. At
most it may determine more accurately the way in which God works out His
Idea in Creation. It can stand as long as it is content to prescind from
the question of ends and origins; but then it is no longer a complete
philosophy. As soon as it attempts to solve those problems it becomes
incoherent and unthinkable. Its true complement is theism and finality,
which flow from it as naturally, if not quite so immediately as the
"argument from adaptability." _Deus creavit_ is so far the only
moderately intelligible, or at least not demonstrably unintelligible,
answer given to the problem of _In principio_.
We have then in this second and soberer form of the philosophy of
Evolution, an attempt to explain the order of the universe without
explicit recourse to the hypothesis of an intelligent authorship and
government of the world: that is to say, independently of theism and
finality; and so far as this explanation admits all the effects and
consequences of an intelligent government, without ascribing them to
that cause, it admits among their number the value of the "argument from
adaptability," and allows us to infer that the postulates of man's
higher moral needs correspond approximately to reality, of which they
are in some sense the product; and that the "wish to believe" is less
likely to be a source of delusion in proportion as the belief in
question is higher in the moral scale.
But it is also clear how unsuccessful this attempted philosophy is in
many ways; and with what difficulties and mysteries it is burdened. At
best it can prescind from finalism by a confession of incompleteness and
philosophical bankruptcy; by resolutely refusing to face the problem of
the whole--of the ultimate whence and whither. If it would positively
exclude theism or finalism it must ascribe all seeming order and
adaptation to the persistence of some blind force, subduing all things
to itself, to "existence," or to "life" striving to assert and extend
itself. It is this conception that seems best to bring the mystery of
the universe within the comprehension of the popular mind, and is more
in keeping with those "aggregation theories" of our day which regard
dust as the one eternal reality whose combination and disguises delude
us into believing in soul and intelligence and divinity. But on closer
examination the words "life" and "existence" answer to no simple reality
or force which can be regarded as governing nature, and from this
radical fallacy of language a whole brood of further absurdities spring
up which make the popular form of Evolution-philosophy utterly
incoherent.
_June, Aug. Sept._ 1899.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: This will perhaps be the most convenient term. In the
_Summa of Aquinas_, the elaborate treatise _De vera religione_, called
into existence by more recent exigencies, had no place. Still, in so far
as it is constructed roughly on the same scheme and presupposes the same
philosophy, and (were it not a deepening of the roots rather than an
extension of the branches) might almost be regarded as a development of
scholasticism, it may rightly be called "scholastic" to distinguish it,
say, from such a work as the _Grammar of Assent_.]
[Footnote 2: _Science and a Future Life_, By F. W. Myers.]
[Footnote 3: i.e., If an object be adequately and exhaustively
conceived under the predicates A.B.C.D., it is inadequately conceived as
A.B.x.x. But if each of these properties be permeated and modified by
the rest, then A in this object is not as A in any other combination,
but is A as related to and modified by B.C.D.; and similarly, the other
properties are each unique. Hence any part is somewhat falsely
apprehended till the whole be apprehended, when we are dealing with
organic as opposed to mechanical totalities.]
[Footnote 4: Not that the transmutation of one species into another has
yet been detected in any instance, or perhaps, even were it a fact,
could be detected; but that such a serial graduation has been observed
as might be commodiously explained by that supposition,--and also by
fifty others.]
[Footnote 5: _Mind_, 1876, p. 185.]
[Footnote 6: _Mind_, 1876, p. 9.]
[Footnote 7: _Appearance and Reality_.]