antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. On the
contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be part and
parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my case by analogy. The working
of a clock is a model of uniform action; good time-keeping means
uniformity of action. But the striking of the clock is essentially a
catastrophe; the hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder,
or turn on a deluge of water; and, by proper arrangement, the clock,
instead of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular
periods, never twice alike, in the intervals, force, or number of its
blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular, and apparently lawless,
catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action;
and we might have two schools of clock-theorists, one studying the
hammer and the other the pendulum.
CCXXVI
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which
grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you
get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the
world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae
will not get a definite result out of loose data.
CCXXVII
The motive of the drama of human life is the necessity, laid upon every
man who comes into the world, of discovering the mean between
self-assertion and self-restraint suited to his character and his
circumstances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the drama lies in
this: that the problem set before us is one the elements of which can
be but imperfectly known, and of which even an approximately right
solution rarely presents itself, until that stern critic, aged
experience, has been furnished with ample justification for venting his
sarcastic humour upon the irreparable blunders we have already made.
CCXXVIII
That which endures is not one or another association of living forms,
but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these
are among the transitory expressions. And in the living world, one of
the most characteristic features of this cosmic process is the struggle
for existence, the competition of each with all, the result of which is
the selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the
whole, are best adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain;
and which are therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the
fittest. The acme reached by the cosmic process in the vegetation of the
downs is seen in the turf, with its weed and gorse. Under the
conditions, they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by
surviving, have proved that they are the fittest to survive.
CCXXIX
As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree
from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation
and all other kinds of supernatural intervention. As the expression of a
fixed order, every stage of which is the effect of causes operating
according to definite rules, the conception of evolution no less
excludes that of chance. It is very desirable to remember that evolution
is not an explanation of the cosmic process, but merely a generalized
statement of the method and results of that process. And, further, that,
if there is proof that the cosmic process was set going by any agent,
then that agent will be the creator of it and of all its products,
although, supernatural intervention may remain strictly excluded from
its further course.
CCXXX
All plants and animals exhibit the tendency to vary, the causes of which
have yet to be ascertained; it is the tendency of the conditions of
life, at any given time, while favouring the existence of the variations
best adapted to them, to oppose that of the rest and thus to exercise
selection; and all living things tend to multiply without limit, while
the means of support are limited; the obvious cause of which is the
production of offspring more numerous than their progenitors, but with
equal expectation of life in the actuarial sense. Without the first
tendency there could be no evolution. Without the second, there would be
no good reason why one variation should disappear and another take its
place; that is to say, there would be no selection. Without the third,
the struggle for existence, the agent of the selective process in the
state of nature, would vanish.
CCXXXI
The faith which is born of knowledge finds its object in an eternal
order, bringing forth ceaseless change, through endless time, in endless
space; the manifestations of the cosmic energy alternating between
phases of potentiality and phases of explication.
CCXXXII
With all their enormous differences in natural endowment, men agree in
one thing, and that is their innate desire to enjoy the pleasures and
escape the pains of life; and, in short, to do nothing but that which it
pleases them to do, without the least reference to the welfare of the
society into which they are born. That is their inheritance (the reality
at the bottom of the doctrine of original sin) from the long series of
ancestors, human and semi-human and brutal, in whom the strength of this
innate tendency to self-assertion was the condition of victory in the
struggle for existence. That is the reason of the _aviditas vitae_--the
insatiable hunger for enjoyment--of all mankind, which is one of the
essential conditions of success in the war with the state of nature
outside; and yet the sure agent of the destruction of society if allowed
free play within.
CCXXXIII
The check upon this free play of self-assertion, or natural liberty,
which is the necessary condition for the origin of human society, is the
product of organic necessities of a different kind from those upon which
the constitution of the hive depends. One of these is the mutual
affection of parent and offspring, intensified by the long infancy of
the human species. But the most important is the tendency, so strongly
developed in man, to reproduce in himself actions and feelings similar
to, or correlated with, those of other men. Man is the most consummate
of all mimics in the animal world; none but himself can draw or model;
none comes near him in the scope, variety, and exactness of vocal
imitation; none is such a master of gesture; while he seems to be
impelled thus to imitate for the pure pleasure of it. And there is no
such another emotional chameleon. By a purely reflex operation of the
mind, we take the hue of passion of those who are about us, or, it may
be, the complementary colour. It is not by any conscious "putting one's
self in the place" of a joyful or a suffering person that the state of
mind we call sympathy usually arises; indeed, it is often contrary to
one's sense of right, and in spite of one's will, that "fellow-feeling
makes us wondrous kind," or the reverse. However complete may be the
indifference to public opinion, in a cool, intellectual view, of the
traditional sage, it has not yet been my fortune to meet with any actual
sage who took its hostile manifestations with entire equanimity. Indeed,
I doubt if the philosopher lives, or ever has lived, who could know
himself to be heartily despised by a street boy without some irritation.
And, though one cannot justify Haman for wishing to hang Mordecai on
such a very high gibbet, yet, really, the consciousness of the Vizier of
Ahasuerus, as he went in and out of the gate, that this obscure Jew had
no respect for him, must have been very annoying.
It is needful only to look around us, to see that the greatest
restrainer of the anti-social tendencies of men is fear, not of the law,
but of the opinion of their fellows. The conventions of honour bind men
who break legal, moral, and religious bonds; and, while people endure
the extremity of physical pain rather than part with life, shame drives
the weakest to suicide.
Every forward step of social progress brings men into closer relations
with their fellows, and increases the importance of the pleasures and
pains derived from sympathy. We judge the acts of others by our own
sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sympathies of others, every
day and all day long, from childhood upwards, until associations, as
indissoluble as those of language, are formed between certain acts and
the feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It becomes impossible to
imagine some acts without disapprobation, or others without approbation
of the actor, whether he be one's self or anyone else. We come to think
in the acquired dialect of morals. An artificial personality, the "man
within," as Adam Smith calls conscience, is built up beside the natural
personality. He is the watchman of society, charged to restrain the
anti-social tendencies of the natural man within the limits required by
social welfare.
CCXXXIV
I have termed this evolution of the feelings out of which the primitive
bonds of human society are so largely forged, into the organized and
personified sympathy we call conscience, the ethical process. So far as
it tends to make any human society more efficient in the struggle for
existence with the state of nature, or with other societies, it works in
harmonious contrast with the cosmic process. But it is none the less
true that, since law and morals are restraints upon the struggle for
existence between men in society, the ethical process is in opposition
to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of
the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle.
CCXXXV
Moralists of all ages and of all faiths, attending only to the relations
of men towards one another in an ideal society, have agreed upon the
"golden rule," "Do as you would be done by." In other words, let
sympathy be your guide; put yourself in the place of the man towards
whom your action is directed; and do to him what you would like to have
done to yourself under the circumstances. However much one may admire
the generosity of such a rule of conduct; however confident one may be
that average men may be thoroughly depended upon not to carry it out to
its full logical consequences; it is nevertheless desirable to recognise
the fact that these consequences are incompatible with the existence of
a civil state, under any circumstances of this world which have
obtained, or, so far as one can see, are likely to come to pass.
For I imagine there can be no doubt that the great desire of every
wrongdoer is to escape from the painful consequences of his actions. If
I put myself in the place of the man who has robbed me, I find that I am
possessed by an exceeding desire not to be fined or imprisoned; if in
that of the man who has smitten me on one cheek, I contemplate with
satisfaction the absence of any worse result than the turning of the
other cheek for like treatment. Strictly observed, the "golden rule"
involves the negation of law by the refusal to put it in motion against
law-breakers; and, as regards the external relations of a polity, it is
the refusal to continue the struggle for existence. It can be obeyed,
even partially, only under the protection of a society which repudiates
it. Without such shelter the followers of the "golden rule" may indulge
in hopes of heaven, but they must reckon with the certainty that other
people will be masters of the earth.
What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds
and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated if he
were in their place?
CCXXXVI
In a large proportion of cases, crime and pauperism have nothing to do
with heredity; but are the consequence, partly, of circumstances and,
partly, of the possession of qualities, which, under different
conditions of life, might have excited esteem and even admiration. It
was a shrewd man of the world who, in discussing sewage problems,
remarked that dirt is riches in the wrong place; and that sound aphorism
has moral applications. The benevolence and open-handed generosity which
adorn a rich man may make a pauper of a poor one; the energy and courage
to which the successful soldier owes his rise, the cool and daring
subtlety to which the great financier owes his fortune, may very easily,
under unfavourable conditions, lead their possessors to the gallows, or
to the hulks. Moreover, it is fairly probable that the children of a
"failure" will receive from their other parent just that little
modification of character which makes all the difference. I sometimes
wonder whether people, who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit,
ever dispassionately consider their own history. Surely, one must be
very "fit" indeed not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's
life, when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among
the "unfit."
CCXXXVII
In the struggle for the means of enjoyment, the qualities which ensure
success are energy, industry, intellectual capacity, tenacity of
purpose, and, at least as much sympathy as is necessary to make a man
understand the feelings of his fellows. Were there none of those
artificial arrangements by which fools and knaves are kept at the top of
society instead of sinking to their natural place at the bottom, the
struggle for the means of enjoyment would ensure a constant circulation
of the human units of the social compound, from the bottom to the top
and from the top to the bottom. The survivors of the contest, those who
continued to form the great bulk of the polity, would not be those
"fittest" who got to the very top, but the great body of the moderately
"fit," whose numbers and superior propagative power enable them always
to swamp the exceptionally endowed minority.
I think it must be obvious to every one that, whether we consider the
internal or the external interests of society, it is desirable they
should be in the hands of those who are endowed with the largest share
of energy, of industry, of intellectual capacity, of tenacity of
purpose, while they are not devoid of sympathetic humanity; and, in so
far as the struggle for the means of enjoyment tends to place such men
in possession of wealth and influence, it is a process which tends to
the good of society. But the process, as we have seen, has no real
resemblance to that which adapts living beings to current conditions in
the state of nature; nor any to the artificial selection of the
horticulturist.
CCXXXVIII
Even should the whole human race be absorbed in one vast polity, within
which "absolute political justice" reigns, the struggle for existence
with the state of nature outside it, and the tendency to the return of
the struggle within, in consequence of over-multiplication, will remain;
and, unless men's inheritance from the ancestors who fought a good fight
in the state of nature, their dose of original sin, is rooted out by
some method at present unrevealed, at any rate to disbelievers in
supernaturalism, every child born into the world will still bring with
him the instinct of unlimited self-assertion. He will have to learn the
lesson of self-restraint and renunciation. But the practice of
self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be
something much better.
That man, as a "political animal," is susceptible of a vast amount of
improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of his
intelligence to the adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher
needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt. But, so long as he remains
liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as he is compelled to be
perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his
ends, without and within himself; so long as he is haunted by
inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the
recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him to acknowledge
his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; the prospect of
attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely,
deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an
illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there
have been many of them.
That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain
and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of
an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy
civilization, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself,
until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its
downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once
more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.
CCXXXIX
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 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.
CCXL
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. 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 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.
CCXLI
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
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.
CCXLII
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 keener with every increase of knowledge
and with every step towards the realization of a worthy ideal of life.
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.
CCXLIII
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,
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, not only became synonymous with justice, but
the positive constituent of innocence and the very heart of goodness.
CCXLIV