“Given the existence of organic matter, given its tendencies to
transmit its characteristics. Given, finally, the life conditions of
the organic matter--these things in their totality are the causes of
the present and past conditions of organic nature.”
The greatness of this statement lies in its truly scientific
exactitude, in its purely mechanistic apprehension of things. Just
as the physicist, when he speaks of force and mass, intentionally
eliminates everything of the actual--he simply cannot work until
first all that is actual is eliminated, and pure relation-values
established--so Darwin eliminates everything actual and sets to work
with pure relation-values. Otherwise put: His teaching is nothing but
a new system of measurement for actuality; and his greatness consists
in this, that he was the first to take biology and apply to it the
methods of the physicist. He it was who first approached the biological
facts from the standpoint of differences of tension, differences of
potentiality. His doctrine of the survival of the fittest is simply
a kind of biological measure of force. What would one say of a man
who made it a matter of reproach in connection with a yard-stick that
it did not also at the same time indicate the nature and origin of
the object measured by it? Only when it is independent of all such
questions can anything serve as a standard of measurement. Where would
the physicist find himself were he to say, “I will not concern myself
with forces until I really know what force is?” He does not wish to
know what force is. Were one to tell him he would stop his ears. He
wants to make use of force, to be able to measure it; nothing more.
In the same way Darwin does not in the least want to know and tell
what living beings are. Should one say, “They are from God,” another,
“They are from the devil,” he, Darwin, happens to be of the former
opinion; but that has nothing to do with the problem before him. As the
physicist lays hold of the pendulum in its swing and says, “If now I
let it go, such and such phenomena must occur,” so Darwin--figuratively
speaking of course--lays hold of the biological pendulum and says,
“If now I let it go, this and this must happen.” The physicist so
arranges his preliminary conditions that he can measure what occurs,
and so also does Darwin. As the physical resultant is measured in the
form of work, so Darwin measures the biological resultant in the form
of the law of the survival of the fittest. Previous to him, biology
stood much on the same level as the Ptolemaic universe which is based
solely upon observation. Observation indeed permits of measurements of
mass but not of measurements of force. At one bound Darwin leaps to
an apprehension and treatment of biology strictly after the fashion
of energetics, and thereby makes good his claim to rank with Robert
Mayer and his successors. Comprehension, science, can only be carried
on where there is flux, where there is change. It is the glory of the
Darwinian theory that it sufficiently fluidized for thought, the world
of living beings, broke up the rigid conception of species, the belief
in single acts of creation, as to render them accessible to a physical
mode of apprehension; the which always amounts to a mechanistic mode,
to a falling, even where it calls itself the mode of energetics. His
theory of natural selection is, in the strictest sense of the words, a
liquidation of the inventory of antiquated ideas. But be it well noted:
like the greatness of every mechanistic view, the greatness of the
Darwinian thought resides in its purely re-active quality, in the fact
that it only furnishes biological relation-values.
I incline to look upon the reception and interpretation which the
Darwinian teaching has received at the hands of science as one of the
hugest jokes world-history--taken in the biological, not the historical
sense--has ever indulged in at the expense of the human mind. It
is more than a joke; it is a stroke of wit! In all seriousness men
wrangle as to whether Darwin’s doctrine is true or false; which is
the same as if they disputed, for example, about the truth or falsity
of the decimal system. Men find that the longer the theory of natural
selection is tested, the more frequently does it fail them; which is
the same as if a man bent upon measuring everything regardless of
distinctions with a yard-stick, should find, the longer he proceeds, an
ever increasing number of things that do not admit of being measured
by such a scale. In fine, men so comport themselves, that oftentimes
one could almost wish to live sufficiently long to hear the helpless
laughter of posterity. And, with it all, what erudition!
It is unfailingly interesting and instructive to observe the
difference between biology and physics. In the latter is found a sort
of well-bred _savoir vivre_, a clear perception of the relativity of
all knowledge-values--Pontius Pilate’s query translated with all the
refinements of mechanistics into physicist phraseology. In the former,
in modern monism, is heard the droning, “A mighty stronghold is our
God,” sung in unison by shepherd and sheep; wherein, to be sure, by
the word “God” one does not mean that jealous God who visits the sins
of the fathers upon the children, but that abstract creature of air,
“the law of evolution” which in retrospective wise, seeks to avenge the
follies of the children upon the fathers.
Yet once more be it said, The doctrine of the evolution of life out
of one primordial form to forms that mount by degrees ever higher and
higher, is of purely symbolical significance, as indeed every law is
of purely symbolical significance, inasmuch as it furnishes nothing
save the possibility of grouping together in one definite connection a
large, nay, a limitless number of phenomena.
Of course men point to the fact that modern biology is able to bring
about actual and genuine modifications in living creatures. Nothing is
further from my intention than to call in question the facts connected
with breeding. Daily life sufficiently proves them, and the laboratory
demonstrates them under a variety of elegant and surprising forms. But
what does one breed? One breeds peculiar conditions under which some
life-process or other runs its course--never by any means the process
itself--in the selfsame way that the physicist “breeds” the sunbeam as
a spectrum, as a polarised ray, as interference, and so forth. Never
yet has breeding brought about the transmutation of one life-form into
another higher in the scale of being.
Now comes the moment when the evolution theorist plays out his last and
highest trump. “Very good!” he says. “Let it be that in consequence of
our hitherto still defective technique we have not yet succeeded in
transmuting one species into a higher, nevertheless, in the facts that
have been grouped together under the name of the fundamental biogenetic
law and in rudimentary formations, Nature shows us that she herself has
actually come this way.”
Of a surety the Buddha knew of no fundamental biogenetic law, probably
also had no idea of so-called rudimentary formations; but I simply
cannot imagine anything that more conclusively proves the truth of
his thought than these same facts. For, to him who has learned of
the Buddha, these facts do not say that which the modern biologist
imputes to them; they testify to the existence of _actual_ associations
between living beings right down into what we call the lowest stages.
They bring immediately before our eyes the competency of human Kamma
to find foothold outside the human kingdom also. As a traveller bears
about with him this and the other trace of the dirt of the roads along
which he has journeyed, so does the embryo in the various stages of
its development exhibit the traces of Samsāra, demonstrate its power
to take hold in the heights and in the deeps, exactly according as its
Kamma is attuned, and demonstrate also that it _has taken_ hold in the
heights and deeps, exactly according as its Kamma _was_ attuned. The
embryonal forms show--to use the language of physics--the tremendous
amplitude of vibration of the _I_-process. They show _that we all eat
out of the one dish_.
I am quite prepared to find interpretations such as these evoke nothing
but merriment among orthodox men of science. But I address myself as
little to the slaves of science as to the slaves outside it. I address
myself to men who think with sufficient independence and possess
sufficient sense of actuality to allow facts to have unbiassed weight
with them.