CHAPTER VI

THE DIRECTIVE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

“Who is there that cannot distinguish between the actual cause

of a thing and that without which the cause could never be a

cause?”—Plato, Phædo.

The problem set at the close of our first chapter was to find a fit

explanation of the guiding power apparent in natural phenomena. We

have not been able to interpret this guiding power either in terms of

conscious, intelligent contrivance or in terms of blind, mechanical

law. The investigations which followed have led us up to another

explanation. We have seen that the vivifying, transforming, progressive

power in nature may be conceived as a power of Response. Every particle

of matter, organic and inorganic, has this power. Every particle of

matter can react and respond to some stimulus. The more it can respond

to, the higher it is in the scale of being. And we have found, as I

think, one constant and universal stimulus to which both the fixity of

nature’s laws and the plasticity of her mysterious substance may be

conceived as a response. This stimulus is the call of Life. Stimulus

and response taken together constitute the directive force in obedience

to which the world unfolds itself in the evolutionary process. We have

been led to interpret nature as the concrete expression of the will to

live, a will which for the first time comes into rational consciousness

in man. Having brought this conception, I hope, into clear light, it

is the aim of the present chapter to illustrate and enforce it in more

detail, and thus to gain a secure foundation for the application of

the conception to the more strictly human problems with which we have

ultimately to deal.

It must be confessed that the existence in nature of any directive

power transcending and utilizing the mechanical forces and relations

of matter, call it ‘vital force,’ the ‘hand of Providence,’ the ‘_X_’

of evolution, or what one will, has never readily been admitted by

scientific naturalists. They feel that, if once admitted, it offers a

prompt and facile explanation of every difficulty, and is available as

the cheap resource of all those who study nature with a view to the

grinding of their moral or religious axes, rather than to the discovery

of truth. Those who feel obliged to believe in the existence of some

such power are therefore bound to be more than ordinarily on their

guard against all loose thinking. They must not be content with vague

generalities, but must be prepared to indicate as exactly as possible

the distinction existing between the mechanical and the non-mechanical

or transcendental agencies in nature. It does not follow that one’s

account of the matter will prove to be exactly true in every detail.

One must always speak in such matters with that wise reservation of

Socrates, “If this be not the truth, something of the kind is.” But it

is not allowable to fall back on that “something of the kind” until an

attempt has been made definitely to establish the “kind,” by searching

into the inmost heart of the fact.

The fact here is the responsive power of living protoplasm. It will be

well to examine it first in its operation in an individual organism

before we consider it in relation to the species.

Reaction or response of a chemical and mechanical type takes place

alike in dead matter and in living organisms, but certain stimuli

will induce action in an organism which they could not possibly

induce in a mineral. For in every cell, as Reinke well says, there

are a chemist and an architect who guide its energies, and who have

something quite different from chemistry and physics in view. Consider

the following case. Every tuber of a potato plant is covered with

a light skin composed of a corky substance intended to protect the

internal structure from injury. This skin is produced by the action of

the surface cells of the tuber. Chemically and physically these cells

are just the same as the cells in the interior of the tuber. But the

interior cells do not produce this corky substance, because it would

be injurious to the plant if they did. The cells below the surface

of the tuber, though they are by no means secluded from the chemical

influences of the earth around them, behave quite differently from

those actually in contact with the earth.

Now let us take our tuber, slice it in half, and replace it in the

earth again. If we look at it again in a few days we shall find that

the interior cells, now exposed by the cutting, have done what they

could not or did not do before—they have produced a layer of skin to

cover the exposed surface of the tuber just as if they had been surface

cells from the outset.

This kind of response seems to take us quite out of the region of

chemical and physical action as understood in the case of inorganic

matter. It is a response directed to maintaining as far as possible the

life and form of the organism, a thing which mere chemical action in

mineral substances never does.

It may perhaps, however, be argued that the actual contact with the

earth has a possible chemical stimulus which is not communicable to

cells even a hair’s-breadth below the surface, and that the cells laid

bare by slicing react as they do simply because they are exposed to

this stimulus. Let us take, then, another common and typical case of

response to altered conditions in plant life.

The taproot of a tree, as we have seen,[86] grows straight downwards

towards the centre of the earth in obedience to the stimulus given

by the pull of gravitation. The same stimulus impels the stem to

shoot upwards, and the other roots and the branches to grow more or

less laterally. New growth always takes place at the extreme tip of

the shoot or root. Lay bare the taproot, cut away this growing tip,

and that root can grow no more; no fresh tip charged with vegetative

vitality can form itself over the scar. But mark what happens!

The nearest lateral root, instead of pursuing its normal course,

straightway begins to bend downwards and takes the place of the

mutilated taproot. Similarly if the leading shoot of the stem is nipped

off, the nearest lateral branch will turn upwards. In this case the

lateral root or shoot has not been subjected to any new influences

whatever, or at least to none of a chemical or physical nature. Yet it

responds, not to anything affecting itself, but to the needs of the

organism as a whole.[87]

None of the forces which living organisms have in common with minerals

will account for this kind of response.

How are we to represent to our minds the nature of the forces which

apply to the innumerable cases of which the above is a type? Reinke,

who deals exhaustively with this question, conceives the vitality of

living things, manifested in growth, development, and reproduction,

as lodged in what he calls “Dominants.”[88] These dominants exist

in all parts of the organism, and govern those processes which

ordinary physical laws do not explain, _i.e._ the phenomena which

are specifically vital. They are not themselves chemical or physical

energies, but they guide these energies toward the fulfilment of the

objects of life.

“Dominants,” he writes,[89] “are those secondary[90] forces in the

organism whose existence we recognize in their operations, but

which we cannot further analyse. Thus I understand under this form

that principle of control which takes effect in every organism and

which sways whatever energies are available just as men use tools

and machines. Since this control is manifold in its manifestations,

one is obliged, when seeking for a technical designation for

it, to express it in the plural. The dominants are therefore an

abstraction; a symbol for phenomena, just like the conceptions,

Force, Matter, the Atom, etc.; the term has been devised in order

to provide a short explanatory description of certain essential

processes.

“I therefore repel the objection, if anyone should make it, that

the dominants are a fiction, a troop of ghosts with which I have

peopled the cells and organs of animals and plants. They are, in

some sense, merely a paraphrase of the description of certain

phenomena, a personification of forces not to be ranged under the

conception of energy—the _directive_ impulses in the animal and

vegetable world.”

To continue Reinke’s explanation: Two different classes of dominants

are to be recognized. These are the operative and the formative. The

former control principally the chemical activities of the organism, as

when a plant turns inorganic substances into sugar, albumen, etc.; the

latter are the invisible architects in the organism who control its

form and structure. Both are heritable, and are capable of modification

within certain limits. Closely bound up with matter and energy, they

are neither matter nor energy. They can be indefinitely multiplied and

(to all appearance) totally destroyed. Their multiplication does not

abstract energy from other known sources, nor does their destruction

restore it; they do not therefore come (visibly) under the law of the

conservation of energy. They operate entirely within the framework of

natural laws, and can only utilize what energies are available for

them at the given time and place. Every cell has its dominants; and as

an organism is a synthesis, not a mere aggregate, of cells, so its

individual dominant is a synthesis of the dominants of its parts. The

evolution of species, like the development of an embryo, is under the

control of dominants. The conditions under which they work for this end

are material and physical; these conditions can, to a great extent, be

ascertained and defined, but the driving force lies beyond scientific

analysis.

Such is the conception of Reinke; and taken as he presents it, that is

to say, merely as a kind of working hypothesis, as a means of making

intelligible a vast and various mass of phenomena, it seems admirably

suited to its purpose. It remains to add, though Reinke himself does

not say so, that this conception of the dominants appears to harmonize

remarkably with what has been put forward in regard to cell-structure

and reproduction. The chromosomes are probably the material vehicles

of the dominants; in fact, Weismann’s determinants seem to be the

same thing under another name, though Weismann conceives them rather

from the point of view of the scientist, and Reinke from that of the

metaphysician.

We have now arrived at an intellectual conception under which to range

the phenomena (not the ultimate nature) of vital response. Let us apply

it to the question of evolution. The following passage from Henslow’s

Origin of Plant Structures[91] may serve to introduce this part of our

discussion:—

“The question ... resolves itself into this: which probability or

hypothesis do _the facts_ of the case seem to favour most, viz.

that _indefinite_ variations arise from some assumed internal

causes, of which variations only those in harmony with the

environment survive, and are said, therefore, metaphorically,

to be selected by it; or is it that the external forces of the

environment excite the variability which is inherent in plants,

and call into action the responsive power of the protoplasm in the

various species of plants, which thus _all_ tend to put on the

same, or similar, or at least adaptive and _definite_ variations

of one sort or another, so that there are _no_ indiscriminate or

wasted variations[92] at all? I know an abundance of facts which

support the latter contention, but none whatever in illustration of

the former hypothesis.”

Here is the action of the dominants in evolution placed in the

clearest light. To prove the truth of Professor Henslow’s contention

it is necessary not only to study organisms in situations where they

have been established for many generations or centuries, but to see

how they behave on transportation to a new kind of environment. The

cases which can be adduced are numerous and convincing. Thus Mr. D.

Dewar reported to Mr. Henslow that on introducing at Kew a cress,

_Arabis anachortica_, found in cave-like situations in the Alps, and

having very thin, papery leaves, it turned, when raised from seed,

into a different species, _Arabis alpina_. The change took only three

generations to accomplish.[93]

Bulbous roots have it among their functions to store up moisture

for the plant they belong to. Haeckel has shown that the grass _Poa

bulbosa_, on being cultivated in moist soil, almost lost its bulbous

character. Contrariwise we find that many plants not bulbous elsewhere

are observed to be so when growing on the dry Karoo in South Africa.[94]

Spines on a plant are usual accompaniments of dryness in soil or

atmosphere. _Ononis spinosa_ has an excessively spiny variety, termed

_horrida_, which is found on maritime sands. Grown in very rich moist

situations, it gradually loses its spines and they ultimately disappear

entirely.[95]

In the animal world experimental cultivation is not at all so easy,

but the facts observed all go to support the view that the response to

environment is direct and definite. The small shrimp-like crustacean,

_Artemia salina_ is a case frequently quoted. It lives in salt pools

by the Black Sea, and it has been found that by breeding it in water

of which the salinity is gradually decreased, the creature in a few

generations assumes a type commonly assigned not merely to a different

species but to a different genus—_Branchipus stagnalis_.[96]

Perhaps the most remarkable instance of a transformation produced

by the influence of environment is that of the Mexican water-newt,

Axolotl. When gradually accustomed to live on dry land, this creature

usually throws off its gills, develops lungs, alters the shape of its

tail, and takes on all the characteristics of a terrestrial instead of

an aquatic reptile. This transformation does not take generations to

accomplish—it happens in one individual in the course of a few weeks

or months. When found in the terrestrial form, the Axolotl is called

_Amblystoma tigrinum_, and is classed among the salamanders. Its

progeny are then _Amblystomas_, and they do not naturally revert to the

Axolotl type, although under certain circumstances the steps of this

amazing transformation can be retraced. The Axolotl is not a larva in

the ordinary sense of the word, for it is not an imperfect creature;

it is sexually mature, and in most cases, in nature, probably never

develops into an _Amblystoma_, nor do the progeny of the _Amblystomas_

begin as Axolotls. What we have here is probably, as Weismann plausibly

suggests, a case of a species which has almost reached the stage of

evolution from an aquatic into a terrestrial form, so that a sufficient

impulse from its environment suffices to send it over the border.

Internal forces have evidently prepared the way for the change, and

the process does not in the least resemble the mechanical selection of

suitable characters from a crowd of fortuitous variations.[97]

The case of the Porto Santo rabbit may also be quoted in this

connexion. In the year 1419 the young born of a tame Spanish rabbit

were put ashore on the island of Porto Santo near Madeira. No rabbits

then existed on the island. They have since increased enormously, and

have quite changed their appearance. They have acquired a peculiar

colour, are very small, rat-like in shape, have nocturnal habits, and

are noted for their extreme wildness. They no longer pair with the

European rabbit. The case was observed by Haeckel, who styled the new

species _Lepus Huxleyi_.[98]

Cases like the foregoing show the organism affected during its process

of transformation by large elemental influences, and the response to

these influences is so familiar that often it does not surprise us. We

veil the real mystery of the process by talking of the chemical and

other physical properties of protoplasm which render this response

possible. But when we come to the protective mimicry of stinging

insects by stingless ones, of leaves by butterflies, and so forth,

these physical explanations manifestly fail us. The explanation

which assumes the building up of these extraordinary resemblances

bit by bit, through natural selection working upon a multitude of

fortuitous variations, fails us as completely. It would be difficult

to accept it if only a single species of insect showed these mimetic

markings. The unlikelihood of their production by mere chance in the

case not of one but of hundreds of species of butterflies, flies, and

caterpillars is stupendous, and defies all calculation. It must, we

repeat, always be borne in mind that, if chance variations are all we

can postulate, these variations must at first be confined to one or

few individuals, and that the influence of intercrossing would always

be at work to obliterate individual peculiarities before they could

develop to the point of affording any protection worth mentioning. We

are bound, therefore, so far as I can see, to conclude, first, that

these mimetic markings originate not in individuals but in the species

as a whole, and are an expression of the communal life of the species;

secondly, that they are a real and direct response to the external

conditions of danger from attacks of birds, etc., and of protection

afforded by deceiving these foes through mimicry of something which

they do not care to attack. They can only originate in the dominants

of the reproductive cells, and there, where undoubtedly forces and

affinities of which we have no conception are ever at work, the

initial changes take place. These changes, no doubt, take place by

forming new combinations or modifications of existing dominants. The

directive force must have something to work on. It does not follow

that because some things are possible to it therefore all things are.

It is not to be expected, for instance, that human beings, although it

would be a great advantage to them to fly, could ever develop wings,

like the conventional angels of mediæval art, for that would violate

the essential character of the archetypal form. It is true, however,

that life is ultimately responsible for the material with which it

works as well as the directive agency that breathes through it. This

point is of importance and must be made perfectly clear. The view of

cosmic action here put forward does not contemplate ‘interventions’

in the order of nature from a source outside it. There never was a

moment when, if _law_ prevailed, one result would take place, while

another result actually does occur in obedience to some mysterious

life-force. No; it is the life-impulse which makes the law, obeys it

and utilizes it. One can never say, “Such and such would have happened

if the life-force had not been in action, but, as it was, the event

was so-and-so”; for if it were not in action nothing would ever happen

at all—the Universe would be the Eternal Nothing. One might as well

speculate as to what would happen in a game of whist if nobody held

a trump. The voluntary limitations under which nature works resemble,

in the conception here put forward, the playing of a game, say a game

of ‘Patience,’ where there is only one player, who plays the game with

himself. There are laws to be obeyed, combinations which are necessary,

but a guiding force can take advantage of the conditions as they arise

and lead them to a certain end. If there were no laws and conditions

there would be no game. If, on the other hand, matter were absolutely

plastic life could not realize itself; nature’s game would be finished

ere it was begun. A concrete illustration may, while we are on this

topic, serve to suggest the kind of limitations under which nature

seems to work.[99] During the last century or so the African elephant

has been ruthlessly hunted down for its ivory, and since rifles and

expanding bullets came into play the process of extermination has been

greatly hastened. Elephants are now, I believe, protected by law over

a great part of South Africa, but if it were not for this the species

would at present be in considerable danger of extinction. The case is

very like that of the _Kallima_ butterfly and similar mimetic forms

before they acquired their protective markings. Now, how might we

expect nature to attempt the protection of the elephant? Doubtless by

increased fleetness, cunning, watchfulness, capacity of one kind or

another for concealing itself from hostile observation. But could we

look for any such development as, for example, a deterioration in the

quality of the ivory? Suppose, for example, the interior structure of

the tusk were to become spongy and cellular instead of being dense.

The tusk, if coated with hard enamel, might be almost if not quite as

useful to the elephant, but it would cease to be of any use for most

of the purposes to which it is now applied by man. The protection

would be most effective; yet we know that nothing of this kind can

possibly take place, though intrinsically the process would be far less

remarkable than the painting of the butterfly’s wing. It cannot take

place because it would either imply a supernatural knowledge on the

part of the evolution-dominants of the elephant tribe of the _reasons_

why it is hunted, or a conscious supervising and co-ordinating power

above nature, a manlike Deity, omnipotent and omniscient, such as Paley

assumed; to both of which explanations the actual processes of nature

stand uncompromisingly opposed.

It is much easier to say what the life-impulse is not than what it is.

I cannot, for my own part, conceive it as personal or conscious, in

the sense in which I feel myself a conscious person. If we ask, Has

it or has it not the quality of intelligence? we shall find both the

affirmative and the negative answers equally hard to square with the

facts. Our own intelligences working in a mysterious relation to a

bodily organism are perhaps fundamentally incapable of forming a clear

idea of the nature of the cosmic intelligence which is revealed to

us in the outside world, “like the dim view of a country seen in the

twilight, with forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken

lines, and isolated masses.”[100]

But those who find it difficult to believe that anything having

the nature of intelligence is at work in the physical world might

reflect on the striking analogy which that world offers to a certain

sphere where it is quite certain that the human spirit, including its

intelligence as well as its appetites and instincts, is the governing

power. Social institutions are a product of the human spirit. Yet the

development of these institutions is extraordinarily like that of the

functions and structures of an animal or vegetable organism. The value

of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s philosophic system may be disputed on many

points, but his elaborate analysis of the phenomena of social life and

his exposition of the minute analogies they exhibit to the processes

of evolution in nature must always remain a landmark indicating the

conquest of a great territory of human thought.[101] Here, as in

nature, we find a principle of movement and progress conflicting with

a principle of inertia. We find all grades of development existing at

the same time. We see the gradual progression, by means of all kinds

of by-ways, to a goal which one might have expected intelligence to

attain simply and directly. We see parallels in human societies to

arteries, nerves, to co-ordinating and ruling brain-centres, to the

specialization of different members or organs for different tasks;

and we see all these things growing up slowly, from point to point,

in obedience to immediate and pressing requirements. We find, both

in nature and in society, survivals of past structures, whose use is

gone, carried forward into new stages of development. A particularly

interesting analogy is that of structures which develop to meet one

kind of requirement, and, on the cessation of that, persist into a

further stage and are then modified to meet quite other requirements.

Thus the swim-bladder of the fish became, it is supposed, the lung

of the terrestrial animal. We may compare this with the development

of municipal institutions. Originally intended to enable bodies of

craftsmen and merchants to make head against the aggressions of a

feudal aristocracy they have survived the fall of feudalism, and have

become more important than ever as independent agencies for carrying on

the functions of social administration and education.

Thus, operations in the physical world which certainly do not look as

if they were the work of intelligence, as we understand it, are seen to

be closely paralleled by transactions in the history of man’s social

life. The development of life, in fact, is carried forward when the

plane of human consciousness is reached on just the same lines as those

which prevailed on the vegetable and the animal plane: there is no

breach of continuity in the broad outlines of evolutionary progress. It

is difficult to over-estimate the significance of this fact.

Perhaps nothing that man has evolved is so purely a work of mind as

Language. Here, the analogy with the phenomena of physical evolution is

very close and very illuminating. As in nature, the ultimate origins

are obscure—we can only form hypotheses as to how language came to

arise from the cries of animals, as we can only form hypotheses

how life arose from the play of molecular forces. But when both

are once established on the earth we see in them the same general

features—unity, in a few leading types, branching out into infinite

modifications in subordinate groups. Greek, Erse, German, Russian,

Sanskrit are all Aryan tongues and have all a common ancestry. They

differ widely among each other, but all alike are marked off from

the Semitic or the Mongolian families. So a man, a snake, a bear, a

fish are all vertebrates, and belong to a type essentially distinct

from that of a lobster or a snail. As in nature, we find all stages

of development existing at the same time—some lines of development

show a rapid advance, some a very slow one. Some types have, in both

cases, perished completely—there are fossil languages as there are

fossil species. A new invention, an advance _per saltum_, without

the utilization of existing constituents, is almost as rare in the

evolution of language as in that of species. Just as the lung is

developed from the swim-bladder, so the human mind, in the development

of language, takes hold of whatever existing form will suit its purpose

and transforms it to another end, as when it takes a word for ‘breath’

and makes it ‘spirit.’ There are laws governing the development of

root-forms, linguistic or physical, in various different orders or

species. The same osseous framework yields us in one class of animal a

hand, in another a hoof, in another a paw, in another (as in bats) a

wing. So in language the same root yields us the words, in different

languages, for _shining_, _showing_, _speaking_, _proving_, _a face_,

_a story_, _whiteness_. Another gives us, _young_, a _stepmother_,

a certain _musical string_, a _messenger_.[102] Contrariwise we see

both in nature and in language forms which have grown from entirely

different roots into a close external and functional similarity. What

unlearned observer would suspect that a whale was not a fish, and that

it descends from a furry land animal with four legs, or that the Latin

_Deus_ and the Greek _Theos_ with their perfect identity of meaning and

their almost perfect identity of sound have probably a widely divergent

etymological pedigree?[103]

On the other hand, the etymological identity of such words as _évêque_

and _bishop_ is as obscure on the surface as would probably be the

relationship of a greyhound with a bull-dog to an anatomist who saw

them only in fossil form.

Again we note that languages, like species, when they send out a

migratory colony, are capable of gradual transformation to meet new

conditions, and of marked divergence from the parent stock. Thus

English, as spoken and written in the United States, in spite of

the retaining influence of a common literary tradition, is steadily

diverging from the English of Great Britain.[104] So with the French

of Canada, the Spanish of South America, and the Dutch of the Cape. We

note also in both cases that curious phenomenon, the survival of the

useless relics of earlier structure, e.g. in the silent letters which

reveal the historic origin of innumerable English words, which are

paralleled in nature by the vermiform appendix of man, or the splint

bones in a horse, or the rudimentary legs of the whale or the python.

But analogies of detail like these, interesting as they are, are not

the main thing. The main thing is the _organic likeness_ prevailing

between the work of nature and this work of man—the likeness of growing

and developing structures, with their response to immediate needs,

their development by specialization of function, their lack of a

strict logical scheme, their anomalies and capricious variations, and

their control of these variations within certain archetypal forms. The

substance of language is sound, as the substance of life is protoplasm.

Phonetic laws govern the one as mechanical and chemical laws do the

other. But phonetic laws and the capability of producing sound could

never have made a language. The evolution of language is urged forward

by the constant pressure and expansion of human thought; and on human

thought, in its turn, it reacts, giving the stimulus and the starting

ground for fresh expansion. We have the heart of the analogy before

us now. _As thought acts on language so the pressure and expansion

of the life-impulse acts on the forms of matter._ Let us see whither

the comparison leads us. Language is a product of the human mind, but

not of _a_ mind. When a human mind consciously applies itself to the

fashioning of a language it produces Esperanto. If we were living in

an Esperanto universe, such as Paley makes out this to be, we might

draw Paley’s easy conclusions as to its Maker; but the reality is

very unlike that. On the other hand, if mind has produced the natural

languages which we see, with all their anomalies, imperfections, and

slow organic growth, then the corresponding phenomena in nature, as the

evolution doctrine has brought them out, are evidently no bar to the

belief that mind has had a part in this work also. I should go farther

and say that the facts compel a belief in the existence in nature of

something that can only be described in terms of mind. In other words,

the universe is, at bottom, rational.

It is true that the cosmic Reason acts not as a single personal

being, but more or less independently at a multitude of points. But

it must not be forgotten that it is observed, up to a certain point,

to act through groups as well as through units. Even the life and

structure of a single cell show us distinct parts acting in harmonious

subordination to the interests of the whole. An organism composed of

many of these cells exhibits a series of syntheses or groupings rising

in comprehensiveness and complexity till the individual is complete and

the wheel of development has come full circle, beginning with a single

unit and ending with a complex unit. But the synthetic movement of

cosmic control does not end there,[105] for aggregates of individuals

can be collectively animated by it. The numerous cases of co-operation

among animals of the same species are an instance of this. All animals

which live in communities exhibit this co-operation habitually, and

many others do so occasionally. When Professor Eimer, as we have seen,

reflected on the phenomena of reproduction and heredity in ants and

bees, he was driven, like Oken, to account for them by regarding these

creatures as “discontinuous organs” of one being, having the same

power of affecting each other as have the distinct, though connected,

parts of any single animal or plant.[106] As an illustrative analogy,

helping us to understand the invisible bond of the communal life of a

species, this conception is of service, but I hardly think that we are

in a position at present to affirm it in any exact and literal sense.

Can we, however, trace the analogy, as Oken did, beyond species, and

show anything of the nature of an adaptation of one order of beings

to the use of another? To do so convincingly, it is evident that

the adaptation must be of _no_ use to the creature possessing it;

for, if it were, we might expect to see it evolved, whether it were

incidentally of use to a neighbour species or not. Honey, for instance,

though apparently of no _direct_ use to flowers, is secreted by them

because it attracts insects, and insects fertilize the flowers. If

flowers secreted honey solely for insects’ use, deriving no benefit

from their visits, we should have a case of a synthesis of communal

life wider than that of the species. Are there such cases, or does

every species fight exclusively for its own hand?

“If,” wrote Darwin, “it could be proved that any part of the

structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good

of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could

not have been produced through natural selection.”[107]

Certainly it could not, but neither could other adaptations. Natural

selection, as Darwin knew well enough, does not “produce” anything—all

it can do is to depress the less favourable variations presented to

it in favour of the more favourable ones. As Darwin never professed

to have sounded the depths of the problem of variation, it is not

clear why variations favourable to another species than the one in

which they occur should be presumed to be impossible. It is true that

they would not illustrate or come under the operation of natural

selection, but neither would they contradict it—they would simply be

outside it. Individuals unquestionably exhibit modifications intended

not for their own personal benefit, but for that of the species—for

instance, the maternal instincts. The modification of a part in the

interest of the whole to which it belongs may, perhaps, turn out to

have the same essential significance whether the part is an organ

or instinct belonging to the synthesis called an individual, or an

individual belonging to the synthesis called a species, or a species

belonging to some fauna or flora of the globe. In any case, the

question where synthesis is arrested, and where the fight for one’s

own hand begins, is one of great interest and must be here briefly

discussed. Cases such as those of which Darwin rejected the possibility

certainly appear to be rare, if they exist at all. The naturalists of

the older school, of course, saw them everywhere—the rattlesnake’s

rattle was to warn its victims, the colouring of flowers was to give

pleasure to man, and so forth. Most of these cases have been exploded

by modern research. The modern naturalists, however, may not be right

in refusing to see them anywhere. The question demands much special

study and observation. Reverting to the case of flowers and their

secretion of honey, one is struck by the fact that in the _Viola_

family there exist flowers more or less conspicuous, and endowed

with scent and with honey-filled nectaries, which usually do not

play any part at all in fertilization. The process of fertilization

in _Viola_ is carried on by small flowers hidden under the leaves

which never open, and which fertilize themselves. Again, at the base

of the laurel leaf, on each side of the midrib, there are two small

glands filled with honey, and bees may be observed biting into these

in the early part of the year before flower-honey is plentiful.

Nägeli has an ingenious argument to show the existence, not exactly

of disinterested aid among species, but of something which would make

such aid look more possible than it does, of a mutual responsiveness,

namely, between the form of the honey-receptacles of certain flowers

and the probosces of the insects which frequent them. Taking a short

honey-tube as the normal and original condition among plants, and a

short proboscis among insects, he argues that the honey-tube could

not have lengthened without depriving the species in which it did so

of the chances of insect-fertilization unless the insect-proboscis

in certain species lengthened _simultaneously_.[108] Cases also have

been noticed of sea-anemones, which attach themselves to the shells

of hermit crabs and by their poisonous tentacles repel attacks on the

crab.[109] The crab is no doubt useful to its guest by providing it

with the means of locomotion. Still, the case of mutual help between

two such different orders of beings is remarkable. A very peculiar case

is that of the waterfern, _Azolla_, which has certain roomy cavities

on the underside of its leaves. These are always found to be occupied

by a small unicellular organism of the _Alga_ order (_Anabæna_). It

is of no apparent use to the _Azolla_, which provides it a home. The

arrangement must have been of immensely long standing, for it occurs in

all the four species of _Azolla_, one of which is found in America, two

distributed over Australia, Asia, and Africa, and one only in the Nile.

It must, therefore, have arisen before the original species split into

four.[110]

It would be rash to conclude from these and some similar curiosities

that we are really in the presence of the phenomenon of disinterested

aid given by one species to another. The question needs more

investigation. But an important general consideration arises in this

connexion. It is clear that there could be no advance in evolution if

nature consisted solely of a multitude of independent units of life,

fiercely competing against or warring with each other. It is equally

clear that no advance could take place if every organism found an

environment so perfectly adapted to it as to call for the very minimum

of effort and strain in the maintenance of life. Between the chaos of

the first supposition and the lubberland of the second there must be a

condition of nature in which synthetic organization is carried just to

the point at which life will have the maximum power to perfect and to

realize itself. Looking at the conditions of nature as we know them,

and at the majestic expression of material and spiritual life which

those conditions have permitted, we may well be content to believe

that both the synthetic process, as far as it goes, and its _apparent_

suspension at a certain point in the ascending scale, are the outcome

of one and the same motive and have one and the same significance—they

both alike mean and make for the conservation, the development, the

enrichment of life.

Against this view there is an argument which has hitherto only been

glanced at, but which must now be discussed in more detail. It is

represented in a recent work by Prof. Conrad Günther, one of the latest

champions of the theory of chance variations and natural selection

as the sole explanation of evolution, who has assembled a number of

instances to show that the “purposive force” which biologists are now

coming to believe in “often fails in living beings.” Such are, for

example, the fact that an _Amœba_ seeking nourishment will take in a

particle of stone or anything that comes in its way;[111] that the

mutual relations of flowers and insects are often unsuitable; that a

bee will sting a human being just as it will another insect, although

the sting, only meant for the latter kind of use, cannot be withdrawn

from the human skin; that embryos often go astray during development;

that a cricket which tries to escape in the open by burying itself

in the earth will act similarly if you set it on a glass plate; and

so forth. Nature, of course, teems with such cases—one might add the

singular degeneration of the slave-making ants already described in

some detail.[112] “If,” he concludes, “the purposive reaction in

the vital force of animals were independent of the external world,

they would be armed against all contingencies, and that is not the

case.”[113]

Thus, too, Prof. Eimer, who in dealing with cases where the alleged X

factor in Nature has gone wrong, writes:—

“The zoologist can hardly accept the existence of such a

dominant inner factor ever pushing toward advance, when he recalls

the host of regressive structures which he has to see.”[114]

Now when the cause of physico-chemical _versus_ vital agencies comes to

be tried, not in the laboratory but in the study, not by science but

by philosophy, the first question that will be asked is, What, then,

is your distinction between ‘vital’ and ‘physico-chemical’ energies?

How are we to recognize when we are in presence of the one or of the

other? The usual answer to this searching question is that in vital

agency we find a directive, a purposeful, a psychic element, whereas

physico-chemical energies seem to be nothing but the play of a blind,

indifferent mechanism. But, it will be rejoined, how can any one affirm

that physico-chemical energies are not also vital, directive, psychic?

Is there not, in fact, something psychic in the very conception of

energy? To these questions there seems to me no conceivable reply. When

a ‘vital’ energy has been reduced to a ‘physico-chemical,’ we have

evidently explained nothing—we have only exchanged one mystery for

another.

Yet if there is no difference in essential nature between one kind

of energy and another, there does appear a marked difference when

we come to consider them in relation to particular results of their

operation. Let us take an example. We explain that classic instance of

gravitation, the fall of an apple, by reference to the law formulated

by Newton which extends to every particle of matter in the visible

universe. But we also find that the fall of the apple is, for apples,

a necessity of life; if the seed did not fall to the ground when

ripe there would be no more apple trees. Yet gravitation acts quite

indifferently to the life of the apple. Whether the branches overhang

a river, or a street, or a plot of fertile ground, the apple will fall

straight towards the centre of the earth. The fulfilment, therefore,

of the vital needs of the apple is plainly a by-product of the force

of gravitation. In this relation, gravity has no directive or psychic

element. Yet in larger relations, we have to take note of the fact

that if there were no such thing as gravity, there would be no apples

and no earth. Thus the law of gravitation is a condition of life as we

now know it. The fact that it acts mechanically, without selection or

purpose, in relation to particular occurrences is quite consistent with

the view that it, or the conditions of the ether from which it possibly

arises, may be directive and psychic in relation to life as a whole,

or rather to what we recognize as the manifestation of life in the

material universe.

We have now got hold of a valid distinction between mechanical and

directive agencies. We can distinguish them not by their nature but

in relation to the particular phenomenon we are considering. We call

them mechanical where that phenomenon is a by-product of the agency,

and directive where, if the agency were conscious, we should say that

this was its main intent. I can see no more fundamental distinction. It

follows from this that the same action can be at once both mechanical

(physico-chemical) and directive. The old distinction between vital and

mechanical energy disappears. The question resolves itself simply into

that of the number of distinct agencies which are deemed necessary to

account for the universe.

Now the true way of dealing with this problem of the unity or

multiplicity of agencies in nature is, I would suggest, to assume the

existence of a single power which is of course psychic and directive

but which can only be communicated to matter by degrees and under

certain conditions still very obscure. These conditions it itself both

creates and uses. Its development in Time and that of matter go on,

as it were, on parallel paths, eternally apart (to our limited view)

yet eternally inseparable. The key to the course of its development

in nature lies in the word Synthesis.[115] Here we seem to have the

explanation of the apparent difference between the so-called ‘vital’

and the physico-chemical forces. When matter has been so grouped as

to form not a mere aggregate of particles but a synthesis, then that

synthesis is enabled to make use of energy in a manner not open to

its parts. Synthesis is a condition of the discovery of liberation

of unsuspected forces. Thus a synthesis of molecules produces the

stage for Life, a synthesis of living particles produces the Cell,

a synthesis of cells produces an organism, a synthesis of organisms

is a species—for the evidence (most notably that derived from the

consideration of bee and ant communities) seems to show that material

discontinuity in the members does not preclude the existence of a true

synthetic union.[116] The characteristic power gained by a species

is that of evolutionary development working in the obscure region of

germinal combination and variation. Of course, I am aware that all this

is merely a way of representing facts so as to make them intelligible

to and manageable by the mind. If any one should object that we do not

know what kind of grouping a synthesis is, except precisely through

that very organic activity which I have described as its product or

accompaniment, I entirely agree. All these terms are intellectual

forms—like atoms, molecules, and other concepts of physics. They do

not reveal anything; they merely help us to comprehend. In the region

of the controversy of Vitalism _versus_ Mechanism, the conceptions

which I have been trying to explain enable us, without introducing

a multiplicity of different energies, to understand how an organism

synthetized by life may exhibit directive action which looks entirely

different from any action possible in dead matter. Yet it works under

laws of its own, and no doubt the particles of such an organism, if

they were conscious, would be unaware that any but physico-chemical

processes were in operation; in fact, I should have no hesitation in

agreeing with the statement with which the great physiologist, Verworn,

concludes an exhaustive analysis of this obscure subject: “The general

fact must be regarded as established, that all the work of the organism

is based finally upon chemical energy.”[117] But what directs the

chemical energy? Something which is not itself a chemical energy and

which is associated with the organic synthesis which that energy serves

to maintain. Verworn’s statement, it must be borne in mind, is as true

of the composition of the Iliad as it is of the digestive process of an

animalcule.

The explanations above suggested are purely tentative; but so, it must

be remembered, are the theories which they combat. No one pretends

that the mechanical explanation of the universe, including the

phenomena of organic life, is at present made out so as to cover the

known facts, or even that expert opinion is at all unanimous in the

belief that it can ever do so.

I know no single work in which the present position of the controversy

is so well set forth as in Professor V. L. Kellogg’s Darwinism

To-day.[118] A great array of scientific authorities will there be

found mustered, and the verdict of Professor Kellogg (reluctantly

given, for he clings to the mechanical explanation of the universe)

is that evolution is not explained by any mechanical force at

present known to science. “With Osborn,” he concludes, “let us join

the believers in the unknown factors in evolution.”[119] He does

not, however, contemplate their remaining unknown—we have to say

_Ignoramus_, not _Ignorabimus_; and by ‘known’ he means apparently,

reducible to a mechanical process. He will have nothing to say to

any internal force directing the energies of matter, such as the

_Vervollkomnungsbewegung_ of Nägeli.[120]

“Such an assumption,” he writes, “of a mystic, essentially

teleologic force, wholly independent of and dominating all the

physico-chemical forces and influences that we do know, and the

reactions and behaviour of living matter to their influences

which we are beginning to recognize and understand with some

clearness and fulness—such a surrender of all our hardly won actual

scientific knowledge in favour of an unknown, unproved, mystic,

vital force we are not prepared to make.”[121]

The above passage is very well fitted to be the pivot of the whole

controversy. We shall examine it therefore in some detail.

It is, in the first place, hardly correct to say that the _X_

factor in life and evolution is supposed by thinkers like Driesch,

Reinke, and Nägeli to be ‘wholly independent of’ and to ‘dominate’

all the physico-chemical forces that we do scientifically know.

Man, for example, cannot be said to be ‘wholly independent’ of the

physico-chemical energies of which he makes use for a multitude of

objects. He is very dependent, both on those outside him and those

in his own organism. He cannot _originate_ the smallest quantum of

physical energy. Yet he is unquestionably capable of directive action

upon matter.

In the second place it must be pointed out that the _X_ factor,

conceived as it is in this book, though Prof. Kellogg may call it

‘mystic’ if he likes, is certainly anything but ‘unknown.’ There is

nothing more mystic than the human spirit—does not mysticism mean the

attribution of spiritual significance to material things?—but there

is nothing more real and certain. The very act of knowing, however

material or mechanical may be the object of knowledge, is an act of the

spirit, and we know the spirit itself better than anything else. How

did this spirit come into active being? There are only two conceivable

ways. Either it was at a certain moment projected into the universe

from without by a Supreme Spirit, or it was, like everything else,

evolved. If we accept the former view we may say good-bye to science.

Miraculous interventions will explain anything, and if we admit them in

one case they may be valid everywhere. But if we take the second view,

as do practically all men of science, we are bound to admit that spirit

had from the beginning some constant and natural relation to matter,

for evolution does not work miracles—it cannot make something out of

nothing. If, then, we regard Man not as an outside observer of the

universe but as an organic part of it—and I believe no thinking about

nature can be of any value until we have grasped and fully realized

that position—then there can be nothing to surprise us if we find

traces of a directive control in the elementary processes of life and

development. It would be more surprising if we did not. If we reduce

the whole universe, apart from the human spirit, to physico-chemical

processes we are at once confronted with the problem of evolving the

human spirit out of such processes; and that, on the face of it, is a

sheer impossibility. All physical and all chemical phenomena as such

are reducible to the movements and groupings of atoms and molecules.

These movements and groupings can affect the spirit which finds itself

mysteriously implicated in their activity, and the spirit can affect

them. But that molecular movements can _create_ spirit is unthinkable

by any one who realizes what spirit is and what movement. Rather should

we say that in the power of movement, in action, change of any kind, we

are to see the evidences of spirit.

We are now in a position to discuss the difficulty raised by Eimer and

by Günther, when they point to instances where the supposed psychic

force in nature has failed to achieve its end. It fails because,

on its mechanical side, it sometimes encounters obstacles which on

the psychic side were not provided for. The law of gravitation is a

condition of life, but it will kill a man who falls over a precipice.

The adaptability of protoplasm is a necessary condition of evolution,

but circumstances will occur in which the adaptation means degeneracy

for the organism as a whole. Eimer’s argument is good, indeed,

against the mythological conception of a supreme Creator, perfect in

prescience and in power, who orders the goings-on of the universe

from his throne above and outside it. But we seek for no such being

in natural phenomena. Perfection is no attribute of anything that

operates in Time, and so far as we regard the divine life as working

in Time we must regard it as becoming, not as being, perfect. Again,

Eimer’s objection shows that he conceives the psychic force against

which he is arguing as in itself something mechanical, a mechanized

kind of vitality, which ought to achieve its end with a flawless

exactitude. Of this, also, nature knows nothing. The universe is what

it is precisely because the Power behind its phenomena is neither blind

Chance on the one hand nor rigid determination on the other—because it

is vital, progressive, and free. This power is certainly capable of

making imperfect adaptations and of diverging into false side-tracks

of development. That is a fact of much significance, but it is no

argument against the existence of such a power—it merely reveals its

character. A special study of regressive structures and of the laws and

principles which lead to them would have extreme interest, both for

biology and for philosophy. But it could not affect the significance of

the broad fact that, in a world where the highest living being was once

a particle of shapeless protoplasm, we have now Man, a being lamentably

unfit, indeed, to be the last birth of Time, but uniquely great by his

very consciousness of that unfitness.

In contemplating this wonderful ascending movement let us not forget

that the warrant for its continuance rests in ourselves. The false

tracks, the regressive forms, which meet us in nature prove at least

this: that the line of development which we observe on earth may

conceivably end in a disaster which would bear to the course of Life

in general just such a relation as the degeneration of the Amazon

ants does to life on this globe. We are by no means entitled to sit

still and expect that the current of evolution will bear mankind along

irresistibly to its goal. With the development of the conscious will

_we_ are made responsible for the advance of life in the only sphere

which we know and which our actions can affect. Man is, as it were,

the growing-point of that progressive life. If his strange passion

for the perfection which he has never seen should be smothered in the

struggle for mere existence, or corrupted by brutal luxury, then growth

will be at an end, atrophy or degeneration will set in. The vision of

a nobler, freer, more humane life than is anywhere widely possible on

earth at present cannot be realized without the strenuous help of men

and women who have learned to subdue the Ego with its fierce egotisms

into harmony with the purposes of the divine Whole. But this much we

may say—that they will not fight alone. No one ever pursued a high and

worthy aim without finding that he had drawn to himself those ‘great

allies’ of whom Wordsworth has written so greatly; powers implicit

in the nature of the world, and always waiting to be unlocked by the

heroic Will.

The Power, some of whose workings it has been attempted to trace in the

foregoing pages, is a controlling and directive force, making, through

countless varieties of being, for one clear and definable end—the

realization of life. It may be asked, Are we to regard this divine

Power as wholly immanent in matter or as partly transcending it and

governing it from without?

The nature of the divine principle, so far as we are able to discern

it, cannot be fully discussed until we come to consider it in the

highest sphere of manifestation yet known to us, that of the human

soul. But with the question which has just been raised we are now in

some measure able to deal, and the consideration of it may bring this

section of our study to a close.

In the world of inorganic matter, the tendency of units to form

themselves into groups having relation to other groups is already

visible. A force immanent in the atom clearly becomes transcendent _in

relation to the atom_ when atoms group themselves into molecules. And

when molecular affinities come into play, and obey definite laws of

form, as in the wonderful phenomena of crystallization, we see that

the force immanent in each molecule becomes transcendent, as regards

the molecules taken separately, when we look at them from the point

of view of the completed group. Crystallization is a process which

trembles on the very verge of vital action. And in vital action the

alternation of immanence and transcendence in an ever-ascending scale

becomes still clearer and more significant. Every cell is a collection

of forces controlled by a power which transcends each one of them, or

any number of them below the whole. Every cell colony, like the _Alga_

described in an earlier chapter,[122] has a life which is immanent in

the colony but transcendent as regards its component members. Definite

groups of cells make up the structure of the highly organized plant

or animal, and exhibit the same combination of forces immanent in the

parts and transcendent, as regards those parts, in the whole. Again,

each whole, each individual, is moved by life-impulses immanent in

itself but transcendent in so far as they represent the communal life

of the species to which it belongs. This communal life of the species

becomes immanent again when we regard it as embraced in the life of

the totality of beings on the globe. The thought must at once occur,

as the ascending series passes out of reach of man’s intelligence:

Whither, then, does it lead us in the end? Is there any end? And is our

knowledge of Being absolutely limited to those parts of it which lie

_beneath_ us?

We are, I think, able, without going beyond the limits of observation

and experience, to frame a synthesis of all physical nature, and to

express its character in terms of Life and Response. But at the next

step we have to embrace man with his moral nature, his intelligence,

his personal consciousness, and there may for aught we know be beings

far higher than man who must also be included. Now here we are not only

_in_ the synthesis and therefore unable to grasp and survey it, but we

are also quite unaware of its contents and limits. We ask, Is the All

of Things personal? is It conscious? has It a manlike intelligence? and

so forth, and I confess I see no way of answering these questions with

our present capacities. We can only say—but this is much—that as the

universe is one, the part of it which we do not see cannot stand in any

essential contradiction to that which we do.

Furthermore we must remember that since, in that aspect of us which

observes and studies, we are distinct personalities, we are obliged, in

so observing and studying, to regard things as outside of ourselves.

This is the core of the whole difficulty. At bottom, the relativity

of human knowledge does not depend on the fact that time, space, and

causality are, as Kant has taught us, modes of thought imposed upon

our ‘I,’ with nothing external answering to them; it goes deeper,

it depends on the ultimate fact that I _am_ an ‘I,’ and _therefore_

separate (as such) from what I observe, and _therefore_ only capable

of studying my own states as affected by external things, not the very

things themselves. Real knowledge, then, must consist in getting out

of this prison of ‘I’-hood and entering into actual union with what we

observe. Could we do that, we should at once live not in our ‘selves’

but in the Whole. The question then is, whether it is ever possible so

to escape, and how?

We must note, however, that no one who has done this could ever tell

us precisely what he has done. For the moment he begins to put his

experiences into an intellectual form, the laws of the mind reassert

themselves, things externalize themselves again, the ‘I’ reappears, the

gulf yawns again between subject and object.

And yet the instinctive language of man shows that he does regard

it as possible to _lose himself_ in the contemplation of something

transcending his powers of ordinary intellectual apprehension. Why

should he not? If a transcendent Reality exists, as it must, then the

faculty of entering into conscious relation with it is one which Time

would surely some day bring to birth.

And although no man, as I have said, can ever express to other minds in

terms of the intellect the reality he has thus witnessed, he has found

means to do better than this—he can help them to share his vision.

These means we call Poetry, Art, and Religion which is the poetry of

Ethics. Through these it is that man most truly lives, because united

in spirit with a larger life than his ‘self’ and his senses are aware

of. Through them it is that while the eye sees the sunrise, the spirit

sees the glory, that while the intellect apprehends Truth, the soul

is ready to die for it, that while self-interest bands men together

in communities for mutual service, Love prompts to the services that

will never be recompensed. We are not then, it seems, absolutely

imprisoned in our ‘I,’ strait as the bonds may seem. But this must be

added, that they will never seem so strait as when we fancy that we can

get out of them by any purely intellectual conception of the Ultimate

Reality. “God,” says Æschylus most nobly, “is the Air, God is the

Earth, God is the Heavens; yea, God is all things, and That which is

above them.”[123] There is always a ‘beyond’ for the explorations of

the intellect. The function of the intellect is to combine and reduce

to order the experiences of sense, thus guiding us with definite aim

through the bewildering wonders of life. But let us not dream that

it can ever guide us to any goal or terminus. The goal is at once

infinitely distant and nearer than our breath and blood. The search

for it will last as long as Time. It is of the essence of the view of

the universe here put forward that the intellect can never embrace it

in any closed system of thought. Turn as we may to one after another

of these closed systems as each grows out of harmony with advancing

knowledge and insight, the true conclusion, at least for readers who

have followed these pages with assent, will be to stand cheerfully

ready to renounce all systems, trusting in the last resort to no

formulas, but to the play of eternal Powers on the imagination, the

heart, the will:—

“They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,

Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars,

to learn one of the meanings,

To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless

rings and never be quiet again.”[124]

PART II: ETHICS

CHAPTER VII

LAW, FREE WILL, PERSONALITY

“——And this main miracle that thou art thou,

With power on thine own act and on the world.”

Tennyson.

There is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, a question lying at the

root of all ethics, a question which must be “definitely raised and

answered before entering on any ethical discussion.”[125] This is “the

question of late much agitated, Is life worth living?”[126] I confess

that this question does not seem to me at all a radical or pressing one

in comparison with another of which Mr. Spencer, in his Data of Ethics,

takes no account whatever—the question whether we have any real choice

in the way we ought to live so as to make life of value, or in other

words whether there is an ‘ought’ in the business at all. Can any man

regulate his own living? Is he not, even while he lives and thinks,

Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees,

as much a helpless victim of external forces as they are? Does the

realm of natural _law_ extend to human actions and volitions; and if

so, must it not be an illusion to suppose that these can possess any

ethical quality whatever?

A great deal of the perplexity attaching to the old problem, how to

reconcile human free will with divine predestination and omniscience,

has, it seems to me, been carried forward quite needlessly into the new

problem of the reconciliation of free will with the reign of natural

law. The problem in the old form which occupied Milton’s rebel angels

has scarcely any meaning for modern thought. Human actions are a part

of the world of phenomena, existing in time and space. When we think

in that sphere of things we conceive the Deity as the synthesis of

all things, and as the intellect can never arrive at this synthesis,

it follows that we can never represent the Deity in terms of the

intellect. An infinitely wise, infinitely good and powerful Being _has

no definable relation to the phenomenal world at all_. Therefore there

can be no question either of reconcilement or of opposition between

the attributes of each. God has not planned beforehand the course of

the world because (speaking in this sphere) God _is_ the world—past,

present, and to come; and His being is in process of completion by

the world’s development. In another sphere, behind the veils of space

and time, of causality and of sense, resides the Eternal Beauty, the

Eternal Wisdom, the Eternal Love, approachable indeed by those who

come to it “as a little child,” but evading the questionings of the

intellect.

But the modern problem of Determinism and Free Will has meaning enough

for us all, without bringing any transcendental relation into the

question. Let us state briefly the position of the Determinists. It

is held by them that every human thought—in fact, every mental change

whether of the nature of volition, thought, or emotion—is a necessary

effect of certain antecedent causes, just like every change in the

material world. Every act of will is, on this view, the mechanically

accurate resultant of two forces: (_a_) the particular nature of the

man who wills; (_b_) the circumstances which supplied the occasion for

the volition. It would seem to follow from this that no man can be held

morally accountable for his actions. Were we sufficiently acquainted

with his nature and with the course of external circumstances, we could

predict his action throughout his whole lifetime as surely as we can

foretell an eclipse. He is what he has been made by the circumstances

of his life acting on the whole mental and temperamental make-up which

he inherited from his parents. He does good or ill as a tree bears

good fruit or bad according to its nature and to the treatment it has

received.

The old theory of Free Will, which was content to declare that each

man’s choice in any ethical situation presented to him by life was not

imposed on him by the will of a Deity but was _his own_ choice, thus

making him responsible to God and man for his acts, evidently requires

to be restated in view of the conception of scientific Determinism

just described, which does not seek to impose on man the will of any

other personal being. But when we come to restate it, the distinction

between Free Will and Determinism appears to be by no means so clear

and intelligible as it seemed at first sight. The essence of the

Determinist theory is simply that the same man will always, under the

same set of external circumstances, act in exactly the same way. But

how far does the advocate of Free Will really deny this? Imagine a man

whom we regard as a type of honour and integrity, a General Gordon, for

instance, in the position of being offered a bribe to betray a trust

reposed in him. We are quite assured that he would reject it, and that

he would reject it again and again to the end of the chapter. So long

as his mind and character remained unchanged, his action would never

vary. Was his will therefore not free? And if so, how do we distinguish

its freedom from scientific Determinism?

We shall find that while the statement of the Determinist position is

quite easy and simple, the statement of Free Will, the explanation of

what we really mean when we talk of the will being ‘free,’ is, when we

look closely into it, a matter of much intricacy. Believers in Free

Will, says J. S. Mill in his essay ‘On Social Freedom,’ are those who

“believe, in fact, that they themselves can, within certain limits,

do what they please.”[127] This is, indeed, the answer which comes at

once to the lips of the average man when Socratically interrogated as

to what he means by Free Will. But the nature of the limits is just

the critical part of the question. I cannot fly because I please. I

cannot write a line of poetry because I please. Can I live a saintly

life because I please? Perhaps not, it may be replied; but after all

Free Will does not essentially mean the external fact of doing, it

means the internal act of choosing—let us substitute the word ‘choose’

for the word ‘do’ and see what we arrive at. Very well, then; I can

choose what I please: let us try this formula. But at once we perceive

that this is a tautological expression, for what I ‘please’ to do is

simply what I choose. So the formula is finally stripped to this bare

expression, ‘I can choose.’ But now the Determinist will say, ‘Who

denies it?’ The psychological process known as ‘choosing’ is within

every one’s experience. The question as to what governs the choice

remains untouched. The core of the problem, then, has been found to

lie not in the word ‘do,’ not in the word ‘please,’ not in the word

‘choose.’ Where is it then? It is not in ‘can,’ for ‘I can choose’ adds

nothing philosophically to the contents of ‘I choose.’

_The core of the problem is the word ‘I.’_ And until we have settled

what ‘I’ am, we shall not reach a clear issue between Free Will and

Determinism.

So the test which we have applied to human actions with a view to

finding out whether they conform to law as do physical phenomena or

not—the test, namely, whether they always come out the same under the

same circumstances or not—breaks down. The ‘circumstances’ include the

man himself, and the question ‘What is a man?’ turns out to be the real

point at issue.

The Determinist usually belongs to a school which has a clear and

simple answer to this question. Man, for him, is a complex of vessels,

nerves, ganglia, and molecular configurations of brain matter

responding to external stimuli as uniformly and inevitably as a plant.

Consciousness is merely a sort of by-product of this mechanism, which

would go on just the same without it.[128]

But this view is in direct contradiction to the deepest and clearest

deliverance of human consciousness, which affirms that I am a

deliberative and ruling Mind, and bids me regard my Will as Reason in

action. I seem to know this so intimately and profoundly that if it

is an illusion there appears to be nothing else in the world of which

I can ever venture to feel sure. We know the outside world only at two

removes. The external object has first to impress itself in some as yet

unexplained manner on our physical organism, and the latter has then

in a manner equally mysterious to produce a state of consciousness in

the observer. But consciousness, in Man, can turn upon and interrogate

itself; it is subject and object in one; and its deliverances, so far

as they go, so far as they are pure deliverances of consciousness with

no argumentative deduction subtly mingled with them, are the truest

things we know or ever can know. I do not see how they can possibly be

brought to the test by any other kind of knowledge: _they_ are the test

of everything.

We find, then, that when we talk of ‘free’ choice as the prerogative

of man what we mean at bottom is the choice of a self-determining

Mind. We find, also, that while for every event in the physical world

we are obliged to assume an antecedent cause, we are under no such

obligation as regards Mind. When we have traced any sequence of causes

and effects up to a Mind, we require to go no further. We can conceive

a self-determining Mind. If man is such, or so far as he is such, his

will is what we call free.

But to say that we are profoundly conscious of the existence of our

will does not by any means get rid of the difficulties connected with

this belief, and it is incumbent on us either to attempt a solution of

them or frankly to dismiss them as, for the present, insoluble.

If possible, to begin with, we must obtain a clear idea of the

difference of the will from other forms of vital action.

At one end of the ascending scale of organic life we see an animalcule

swimming in the direction in which it is attracted by food. At the

other end, we find a man in the full flush of conscious life going

deliberately to a shocking death rather than deny his faith or break

a trust. What is the essential difference between the action of

the animalcule and that of the martyr? To the Determinist there is

none. Both are alike the inevitable response to certain stimuli from

the outside world acting on a certain nervous system. But there is

one difference in the _circumstances_ of the action which will be

admitted by all. The animalcule has no _choice_. The martyr has. The

animalcule-consciousness has not been developed to the point at which

it can take in alternative courses of action and compare them with

one another. It is doubtful to me whether any of the lower animals or

even of the lower races of man can really do this. At any rate there

can clearly be no Will where there is no distinct consciousness of

at least two possible courses of action. The Will, therefore, must

be regarded as coming for the first time into action when a certain

stage in the development of consciousness has been reached, the stage

at which man is fully conscious of more than one motive. Furthermore,

even when the consciousness has been developed to this point we cannot

recognize a true act of will unless, _on that particular occasion_,

two or more motives were fully present. For instance, a lad brought

up in a thieves’ kitchen, when he sees an opportunity for stealing a

purse, cannot properly be said to have any counter-motive to the theft.

And common sense, without having philosophically analyzed the matter,

quite recognizes this position of affairs and graduates the moral

responsibility of every criminal action roughly in accordance with the

facilities which the subject has had for ‘knowing better.’

Two or more motives, then, fully present to consciousness, form the

conditions under which alone the Will can be said to act. This is in

accord with the whole scheme of evolution. The presence of certain

conditions gradually evokes the faculty or organ which deals with them.

But here an important question arises. When these motives differ from

each other morally, can the Will be said ever to choose the evil one?

Has it any moral bent? And if not, what is the use of it?

There is no doubt that the ascription to the Will of a certain moral

character, and that a very lofty one, is characteristic of nearly

all thinkers who accept its existence at all. “Ill for him,” writes

Tennyson in lines of Sophoclean dignity,

“Who, bettering not with time

Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,”

as though evil came from the corruption and slackness of Will, not from

its wrong direction.

In the ethics of Plato it was a cardinal principle that men did evil

only through ignorance. Make the soul conscious of goodness, and

it could not fail to follow it. Yet it seems that this doctrine,

strongly as it appeals to the moral sense of man, would, if held with

philosophic rigour, really make the Will unfree. No man can truly

choose the good who is unable to choose the evil. The Platonic doctrine

may, however, be fully accounted for, and even put in a form in which

it can, to a great extent, be justified, if we give weight to the

following considerations. Moral action is usually recognized in the

renunciation of a strong personal gratification for the sake of some

social or other altruistic end. Now in such cases we are always sure

that the two motives have been duly present, the moral motive, for

otherwise it would not have been followed, and the personal motive,

for these are common to all living things, they are at the base of our

being, and our own experience tells us only too well how insistent

and powerful such motives are. The volitional character of such an

act is therefore manifest. But if the lower motive be followed, the

significance of the event is more obscure. For we all understand these

lower motives,[129] and they are fairly uniform over the whole of

humanity. We can always take for granted that they are present in full

force. The martyr undoubtedly hates the idea of being burnt. But we are

not so sure of the other class of motives. We cannot in every case feel

certain (unless the event has verified it) that _they_ were distinctly

in view, for man’s moral nature is still only at the beginning of its

development, we are still far from having evolved anything like a

universal moral code, not to speak of the instincts for obeying it. We

are inclined to assume, therefore, and I think we are perfectly right

in assuming, that when the Will appears in human action it is far more

often to good purpose than to evil. In order that it may be free to act

on any ethical question, there must be a sufficient degree of ethical

development; the character of moral worth must have been impressed upon

the spirit. In the strength and stay which it affords to such a spirit,

the faculty of Will is most clearly recognized and honoured.

We are now in a position to meet one of the gravest of the objections

which have been brought against the doctrine of Free Will. If

temperament and circumstance, it is urged, determine human action,

there is, of course, no place for the Will—it is a mere illusion.

But if Will is present and is supreme, how can temperament and

circumstance play the part they manifestly do—how does the history of

man come to present, as we have seen, an aspect so strikingly similar

to that of the orderly evolution of physical organisms under natural

law? If you bring in Will at all as an arbiter of human action, do you

not thereby drive out everything else?

The answer will be clear to those who accept the foregoing analysis of

the elements of choice. The Will is neither a faculty of perception

nor a faculty of judgment, but a power of free choice. Free as it

is, _it can only act on what is presented to it_; and here, beyond

question, it is subject to serious limitations. Every man has round

his soul, as it were, a refracting medium, through which the external

objects that excite the Will to action must normally pass before they

reach the centres of decision and control. And this medium is probably

never quite the same in any two individuals. Often it is very widely

different. The sight of an unguarded heap of treasure may appear to

one man simply in the aspect of a perfectly legitimate opportunity for

enriching himself. To another man it may come as a violent temptation

to do what he knows in his soul to be wrong. A third, equally needy,

equally capable of enjoying all that wealth represents, may never have

a thought on the subject except that of protecting the treasure for its

true owner. The object is the same, the physical perception of it is

the same, but the ‘apperception’ in each case is as different as Peter

Bell’s perception of the “primrose by the river’s brim” was from that

of Wordsworth. This difference is caused by the modifying influence

of temperament, training, all that forms a man’s disposition, whether

acquired or inherited. It is as though each man moved in an atmosphere,

an _aura_ of his own which colours all the objects of his thought.

Whether _every_ invitation to action that can be presented to the Will

must necessarily pass through this _aura_ is a very obscure question

and one on which I do not at present wish to dogmatize. But it is

certain that the great majority pass through it.

Thus on every occasion where the Will is exercised, it has to act not

only on the facts which are perceived but _as_ they are perceived. Now

so far as the influence of what is called apperception is concerned

we are in the realm of natural law. Each man, to that extent, is

unquestionably under the dominion of his environment, that is to say of

geographic, historic, social, and other influences which affect whole

communities, and which vary but slowly when they vary at all. The Will,

in fact, acts within the framework of nature and its laws exactly as

does that directive agency to which, in the view of the writer, is to

be attributed the phenomenon of progressive evolution from lower forms

of life to higher forms, that is, from forms which admit of less life

to those which admit of more. The Will is really this directive agency

coming into consciousness in Mind.

In all life, whether human, animal, or material, there is an element

of change and an element of constancy. Between these poles it moves

and has its being, nor could life, as we know it, exist for a moment

if either of these two opposing but complementary principles were

withdrawn. We have now seen that with a full belief in the innovating

and incalculable quality of the Will, with the infinite vistas which

that belief opens up to human hope and effort, there is yet ample room

for the opposing and equally necessary element in life, the element

of constancy, uniformity, law. Human Will does not come into nature

as a catastrophic force—it develops _pari passu_ with the development

of consciousness; and it will naturally be found in its highest

development where the whole nature is most wholesomely attuned to the

purposes of the cosmic Will.

We have now to notice certain grave objections which every student

of modern science and philosophy will expect to see dealt with by a

defender of the principle of Free Will.

It has been objected from the evolutionist standpoint that, as no

one attributes Free Will to the lower forms of animal life, it is

impossible to conceive it as having arisen in man except by a miracle.

At what point, it is asked, did it first appear? And if one cannot

fix the point, the presumption is supposed to be that it has never

appeared at all. It will be remembered that some scientific thinkers

such as Mr. A. R. Wallace, and one may add Prof. Reinke, have been so

much impressed by the mental difference between man and the beasts that

they have assumed the gulf to have been bridged by a catastrophic or

miraculous act and not by any evolutionary process.

Now I quite admit that one cannot conceive mind being evolved from

not-mind. But neither can I conceive life being evolved from not-life,

nor, in fact, when one looks into the process minutely, can I believe

in anything whatever, physical or spiritual, turning into something

else. I conceive the evolutionary process strictly as the ‘unfolding’

of latent capacities, faculties, organs, by means of psychic agencies

acting within the framework of the fixed relations which we call

natural law. The fact that one cannot lay one’s finger on the exact

point in the history of nature where mind and will began to be is not

relevant to the question whether they are now present or not. As well

might one be challenged to fix the moment when the embryo becomes a

man. There are _no_ such exact points in nature. If there were, nature

would be discontinuous, and the smallest real discontinuity in nature

would be enough to shatter the frame of the universe.

From another side it has been urged that the conception of the

continuity or oneness of the universe is fatal to Free Will. The

Monist, according to that brilliant champion of chaos, Mr. William

James,[130] must believe in a universe fixed like cast-iron in all its

parts, for, being all interrelated, not one of them can be different

without altering the whole structure of things.

But does not Mr. James here overlook the fact that essential oneness

is not incompatible with temporal incompleteness? The universe is one,

true—but this one universe comprises not only all that has been and

that is, but all that will be. It is to be conceived at present as

a growing organism; it will not be a fixed and completed whole till

time is at an end. On this basis I see no difficulty in fitting into a

Monistic scheme of thought Mr. James’s admirable statement of the Free

Will position:—

“Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make

ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are

closest, the parts of which our knowledge is most intimate and

complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may

they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places _of the

world_—why not the workshop of being where we catch _fact_ in the

making?”[131]

The next and last objection I propose to deal with cuts closer to

the heart of the question and will have to occupy us, I hope not

unfruitfully, for some time.

I instanced some time ago the case of martyrdom as one in which every

one would recognize the action of the Will, if it can be recognized

anywhere. Let me recall that extremest form of martyrdom which John

Stuart Mill once declared himself ready to face rather than outrage

his moral sense. Speaking in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s

Philosophy of what passed in his day for the ‘orthodox’ conception of

the Supreme Being he wrote:—

“Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing

which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I

will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that

epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a being can sentence me

to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.”[132]

Mill, as we see, relied on his personal freedom of Will to stiffen

his neck against any homage to a Power whom his moral sense declared

unworthy of reverence. But a modern physiologist would tell him—and

even if the fact be not fully demonstrated at present, it would,

I think, be very rash for any psychologist to deny it—that by a

slight change in the molecular configuration of the brain cells the

heroic recusant could have been turned into a devout worshipper of

any being who was able to exhibit the credentials of superior force.

Such a change would certainly not be beyond the powers of a being who

had heaven and hell at his disposal; even a skilful surgeon might

accomplish it. What, then, is the freedom of the Will worth (it may

be asked) if the direction it takes is at the mercy of the physical

configuration of our brain-matter? And the ‘I’ which, we say, wills—if

material changes can thus profoundly alter its character, how can we

attribute to it any kind of real and independent existence? Must not

the complete dispersal of the molecules of the brain at death cause

the ‘I’ to vanish altogether like a blown-out flame? Must it not be at

their mercy during the brief illusion of existence?

Our discussion has thus plunged us into the intricate question of the

relations of mind and matter, and we must pause to dwell on it for a

while.

What is matter? Nobody can tell. It is that which resists when we

push against it—a tactile or muscular sensation. It is that of which

two portions cannot occupy the same space at the same time—a visual

sensation. It is the source of certain sensations; and the most recent

physical investigations points to its being composed of innumerable

centres of _force_. But force manifesting itself in orderly and

harmonious fashion is Reason. If, then, Reason is at the base of

things, Matter ceases to be a bogey.

Still the fact remains that it is not I and it is not You, and the real

cogency of the physiological argument against Free Will and the soul

(which, as we saw, must stand or fall together) is that something done,

perhaps by mere accident, to this Not-me, can, it appears, powerfully

influence and change the Me in spite of all the will I can exert to the

contrary. The fact that I, the innermost I, can be got at through my

brain, means philosophically exactly the same as the old superstition

according to which I can be got at by an enemy who sticks a waxen image

of me full of pins and dissolves it before a fire. And _normally_

(there seem to me good reasons for not going further than that),

_normally_, it is _only_ through Matter that the Me can be reached and

influenced at all, even by the other Me’s in the universe. Now Matter,

whatever else we may say about it, is certainly under the law of

causation.

From the other, the spiritualistic, side of the argument, it has been

sought to meet the above considerations by an interesting analogy.

Matter (the brain in this case) may, it is urged, be regarded as the

instrument by which, under present conditions, Thought manifests itself

and acts. You can take a piano and put it out of tune or otherwise

damage it, so as to render it incapable of conveying the real mind of

the performer, who, nevertheless, remains quite unaffected. The soul

is the invisible performer. You can damage the brain so that the soul

_can no longer express itself_ under the conditions of our present

existence, but it is an entirely unwarrantable inference to say that

you have thereby damaged or destroyed the soul itself. The analogy of

physical energy will make this clear. You can make an engine work by

the oxidization of coal, but this process can only loosely be described

as the source of the energy which is manifested by the engine. All that

one does by burning the coal is to turn potential energy into active or

kinetic energy. When the engine goes to pieces, or the coal burns out,

not a particle of energy is lost; it merely goes back into the shape of

potential energy again.

I think this reply is substantially a sound and effective one. At the

same time it must be allowed that the physiological argument is more

subtle than is usually recognized by those who try to meet it as above.

You may so damage a piano as to render it incapable of being properly

played on—you may get from it the incoherent janglings of insanity,

without affecting our belief in the existence of a real musician

behind these unintelligible manifestations. But how if it can be shown

that certain mechanical alterations will result, not in nonsense but,

let us say, in bringing out mere Offenbach when the performer has

always hitherto been wont to play Beethoven? A simple injury to the

instrument, it may justly be argued, has no such vital significance as

this change in the nature of the thing expressed. Shall we not have to

conclude that the man really _is_ the instrument, that the mind is a

phenomenon accompanying the temporary combination of certain material

constituents, lasting only as long as that combination shall endure and

varying _pro tanto_ with everything that causes it to vary?

Now, for my own part, I must confess that if mind with all its nobler

manifestations such as Will, Love, Duty, and so forth, be a mere

rainbow hovering above the cataract of material force, it does not seem

to me worth while to discuss anything, for we, mere particles that

glimmer for a moment, can never affect anything, and must soon be where

nothing can any longer affect us. It is happily quite true as Santayana

says in his Reason in Science,[133] that people who do not think about

these matters at all may “know how to live cheerily and virtuously for

life’s own sake” on the strength of the normal source of vitality which

has made for its own ends from the beginning of things without the aid

of our consciousness or criticism. But this consciousness, turning

inward as well as outward, this questioning and speculative spirit,

are themselves forms of vitality, phases in the gradual conquest of

Nothingness (_i.e._ undifferentiated Being) by Life. We stunt and maim

ourselves if we try to keep them aloof. It is true that in encouraging

them we may often seem to be turning the terrible, two-edged weapon

of Analysis against our own higher life. Be it so! We have taken that

sword in hand; we have cut down with it a hundred forms of superstition

and wrong; and the time to sheath it is not yet. Whatever dangers there

may be in it, we must face those dangers; and though it may be left to

another generation completely to overcome them, let that generation,

at least, say of us that we did not drop our weapons on the field of

battle, even if our own life-blood sometimes flowed upon the blade.[134]

Let us now return to that analogy of the piano and the unseen player

and see if we can get some more light from it than has yet appeared. In

view of the last considerations which were urged in this connexion—the

possibility of effecting not merely the ruin of the instrument but

the more vital change of the character of the music it will perform,

we must slightly alter one of the terms of the comparison. The analogy

will be a strikingly close and suggestive one if we bring into view

the latest development in musical mechanism, the pianola. Suppose that

the music-rolls of a pianola were made of different sizes and shapes

according to the different classes of music. There would then, let

us say, be one kind of roll for classical music, another for Italian

opera, another for Palestrinian polyphony, another for music-hall

ditties, and subvarieties of all these. Now let us suppose that

each pianola were so constructed as to take some particular type of

music easily, other types with more difficulty, and others, again,

not at all, and let us assume that all these types are continually

being presented for performance. The construction of the pianola

will then correspond to the physical constitution of the brain.

This constitution, in each case, is the material equivalent of the

dominance of a particular kind of personality, or what we have called

above _aura_. But the records which have lately been so much studied

of cases of what is called ‘multiple personality’ tend to show that

in each of us there _are_ several distinct personalities—or if that

word seems to beg an important question as to the unitary character of

personality, let us say streams of consciousness—which are pressing

for manifestation. The brain selects automatically among these,

and normally keeps one particular type to the front. But just as a

mechanical alteration in our hypothetical pianola might entirely change

the type of music it would play, so a lesion or shock of any kind might

change, more or less, the type of personality which a particular brain

was fitted to express; and such cases are, of course, well known to

occur.

But now we come to a fact than which none is better known, none

more absolutely verifiable in experience, but to which there is

nothing in the least analogous in the pianola or any other piece of

mechanism taken by itself. I can, with time and toil, with patience

and resolution, _change the structure of my brain_ and make easy

for it that which before was difficult or impossible. Within limits

which cannot be defined (because human life is too short), I can even

adapt it to the expression of a new type of personality. No musical

instrument can do that to itself. One would have to call in for that

purpose the initiating and controlling force of the man who made

it.[135]

A conscious pianola, even if we supposed it to possess the endowment of

memory, would only recognize itself as a succession of sensations. The

hegemonic faculty, the sense of command and control, which Plato[136]

laid his finger on, as indicating the difference between a human

personality and a musical mechanism, and which Hermann Lotze,[137] in

the full light of modern science, still thought valid for the same

purpose, would be wanting. Man does not live in the moment. As Goethe

wrote in some of his greatest lines—lines that read like hammer-strokes

nailing up the charter of human right:—

Nur allein der Mensch

Vermag das Unmögliche;

Er unterscheidet,

Wählet und richtet;

Er kann dem Augenblick

Dauer verleihn.[138]

Behind the mechanism of the pianola, behind the mechanism of the brain,

there stands this living directive force of which we can give no

scientific account whatever—we can only say that it is there. Indeed,

it is just at this point that all comparison between mechanism, as

usually understood, and vital action of any kind must break down. But

the fact is that mechanism is usually not understood at all. I spoke

above of a piece of mechanism taken by itself. But in truth we cannot

take it by itself. Nothing in nature can be truly isolated, it only

exists in relation to other things. Every machine has a soul, the soul

of the man who made or who works it. Without that it would be merely

scrap-iron; and even as scrap-iron it has relations with things about

it—air, water, acids, and the like. In these relations we detect the

soul of nature. Nothing exists by itself—nor even, permanently, _as_

itself. The living universe of our experience is not a Being but an

Acting and a Becoming. It is precisely this fact which, on the one

hand, imposes a mysterious limit on the intellect, and, on the other,

opens a boundless horizon before the will.

The human brain, the most highly organized form of protoplasm known to

us, may be called in one sense a machine through which the personal

will, the moral emotions, the æsthetic sense, the faculties of

reasoning, have to assert themselves in action. But to say that they

would never have existed but for this special form of protoplasm is to

say that they were created by it out of nothing. And, no doubt, one

can say that, one can _say_ anything; but one cannot think it. I do

not see how to represent the matter to our thought except by supposing

that every stage in physical evolution is accompanied by what has been

called ‘involution,’ a drawing in, from the potentialities of Being,

of powers and faculties of living for which the opportunity to become

actual had ripened.

An image may make clearer what I mean, and I offer it only for this

purpose, well knowing that “the best in this kind are but shadows.”

Suppose that a man were enclosed in a sheath composed of metal having

certain peculiar properties: it is opaque when cold, but when heated

it becomes transparent, and the hotter it is the more transparent it

grows. Such a substance might easily exist, at any rate it is entirely

conceivable. We must assume in addition that the heat is not such as

to be injurious to the occupant. Now a man enclosed in such a sheath

would, when it was at the proper temperature, see what was going on

around him; he could also be seen, he could hold communication with

other men, and direct operations which he wished carried out. If the

sheath, in addition to being transparent at the right temperature,

were also, under the same conditions, flexible, and fitted him like a

skin, he could do things himself. If it got cold, however, and thereby

became, in the measure of its coolness, opaque and rigid, the man

would be shut off from all communication or interaction with the world

outside, he would be what we call dead.

I suggest that Consciousness with all its attendant phenomena is

represented by the man, the sheath is Matter, the heat is Life. Matter,

historically, precedes the manifestation of consciousness, but as it is

never without a certain degree of life, so, even in the nebular form in

which it exists before it has cohered into worlds and systems, it is

not without the element of directivity, of harmonious inter-relation

and interaction. A higher organization of life makes possible the

subtler sensitiveness of the vegetable kingdom. The most vital, the

most highly organized form of matter we know is the human brain and

nervous system. Here the sheath has assumed a considerable degree of

transparency and flexibility. But doubtless a far higher degree of

organization is possible, and when this is reached the capacities of

consciousness will have developed to an extent altogether inconceivable

to us at present, though every now and then some exceptionally

constituted individual gives us a hint of stages of development as yet

far beyond the capacities of the race in general.

We may conceive matter, then, as being constantly fanned up into the

heat of life, _i.e._ as elaborating forms into which consciousness can

enter and through which it can act. And we observe that consciousness,

when it has found a suitable form, can act on it and improve it. Two

questions now arise. The first is: Why should consciousness have need

of these forms at all? And the second is: If it has this need, what

becomes of the individual consciousness when the form has grown

finally cold in death and is resolved into its inorganic elements?

To the first question I cannot suggest any answer, except the obvious

one that an individual consciousness must have some forms through

which it can have relations with things not itself. In the world, as

we have it, it is _generally_ true—it would be unwise to venture any

absolute statement on the subject—that consciousness only enters into

relation with another consciousness, or with matter, by means of the

peculiarly organized form of matter which we call a brain. I must leave

the question there. Thought and research, and the advance in physical

organization which I have referred to, may, in the near or distant

future, throw further light upon it. It is not a difficulty, but it is

certainly a mystery.

As regards the second question, that of personal immortality, all

we are justified in concluding on the negative side is that when a

certain body and brain have perished, consciousness can express itself

through _that_ form no more. But consciousness itself cannot be less

indestructible than everything else that exists. We may, so far as I

can see, either conceive an individual consciousness at death as being

resolved into the general consciousness from which it sprang, even

as the matter composing any organic being is resolved into inorganic

matter, or we may suppose that, having won and consolidated its

selfhood by what it has done and what it has endured in the flesh, the

selfhood is thenceforth capable of an independent existence under forms

at present beyond our ken.

Either of these conceptions implies what we call the ‘immortality’ of

the soul, the real and permanent significance of the experiences of the

soul. Here a little further elucidation may be desirable. I have spoken

of the possibility of the soul or self being resolved into something

which one can only describe as a general spiritual substance related

to individual souls as matter in general is related to particular

material organisms. But the parallel with matter must not be pushed

too far. A material organism, being composed of different substances,

can be disintegrated. But consciousness cannot, strictly speaking,

suffer disintegration, for it has no different substances into which

to disintegrate. It can, however, as we see, appear in the form of

a number of different personalities; and this, the normal existing

condition, is the psychical analogue to physical disintegration.

If these personalities are again to merge into one impersonal

consciousness, the process would not be comparable to disintegration;

it would be the very reverse; it would be reintegration; and the

process, therefore, implies nothing resembling the loss or dissipation

of any form of psychic being.

Further, we have to observe that when a material organism perishes

and is disintegrated, there is, so far as we can see, an utter and

complete end of it. The human brain, for example, quite apart from its

association with a consciousness, has in the course of its development

and activity gone through a marvellous chain of processes, in which

electric and molecular force, undulations, radiations, and probably

other physical factors of which we have no conception at present,

have played a part. Yet when the brain dies and is resolved into so

much ammonia, phosphorus, carbon, gases, and what not, these elements

differ in no whit from other ammonia, phosphorus, and carbon in the

world. For any ulterior purpose they are neither better nor worse;

they are wholly unchanged, by all the extraordinary history which

they have passed through under the spell of life. This is equally

true of the elements, nervous and other, of any living being. But the

physical system of every living being below man is organized for two

ends only: (1) the upkeep, during its lifetime, of its own physical

powers; (2) the reproduction and multiplication of its kind.[139]

When an organism has fulfilled these functions, it is justified; the

object of life has been attained. These functions, of course, persist

in man, but he has added to them many others; his brain has to serve

him for ethics, art, philosophy, religion, and is therefore organized

with a subtlety quite unknown in the animal world. Here, then, is a

kind of organic action which has no significance whatever _except in

relation to consciousness_. If it have none there it has none at all,

it is absolutely irrational and futile. Now the molecular and other

action of a beast’s brain has reference to its physical life, and it

passes on this physical life to its descendants. But the action, or

a great part of the action, of a man’s brain has reference to his

consciousness, and of this he passes on at most the potentiality. A

lion’s cub is a lion; a philosopher’s child is not necessarily or even

probably a philosopher. That path of development, whatever we may say

about the lion, must have its goal elsewhere. We must, if the universe

is not irrational, believe that in some way consciousness, whether

after the death of the body it persists in individual form or not,

_carries forward into the new state the results of its experiences,

its acquisitions, its losses, in the bodily relation_. These are not

transitory, not indifferent; “great or small they furnish their parts

toward the soul.”

The reader will have probably noticed that one consideration of the

greatest moment has been left untouched. I have spoken of matter and

consciousness as of two separate things, and of the former as prior to

the latter. This is a form of thought imposed upon us by the space and

time relations by which our being is conditioned. But it is evident

that the interaction of the two cannot be fortuitous. We cannot suppose

that matter pursued its long course of evolution, refining and

subtilizing at every stage to admit more and more of the activity of

consciousness, in total disconnexion with that consciousness. The two

must be co-ordinated in some higher synthesis. Could we escape from the

limitations of our thought we should see them, therefore, not as two,

but one, and we should see that the meanest form of being has an aspect

in which it belongs to eternity.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ETHICAL CRITERION

“Things have life—God is life.”—Spinoza.

“I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it more

abundantly.”—Rabbi Bar-elahin.

The view of the meaning and purpose of cosmic development set forth in

the preceding chapters must clearly have a bearing on the principles

of human conduct. Men above a certain stage of culture do not live

by blind instinct. They endeavour to harmonize their lives with

some conception of the _ratio essendi_ of the world in which they

find themselves, and in so doing they are most truly men. The Stoic

expressed this attempt in the simple formula, ‘Live according to

Nature.’ But nature is not simple, and the endeavour to interpret

nature has led to some very divergent ideals of human conduct.

Every one who has meditated on the subject at all has become

aware that the world which we see and hear and feel, the world of

sense-perception, is not all that we have to do with. Behind the

visible and material world there lies the invisible, the _X_ world,

which we cannot weigh and analyze, but the existence and potency

of which we are compelled to assume. It is the literal truth to say

that no man can take a single step even in the most mundane and

practical affairs of life without a belief, implicit or explicit, in

the spiritual unity and reality underlying the fleeting panorama of

sense-impressions. Nothing else can give him any assurance of the

constancy, the orderly inter-relation, of the phenomena with which he

has to deal, and with which he could not deal intelligently did not

this constancy exist. Now when man begins to be aware that there is

something more in the world than is immediately apparent to sense,

his thinking on the subject may take several different lines, but it

is probable that all of them may be referred to one or other of two

main divisions, the Dualistic and the Monistic.[140] The Dualist will

regard the world of sense-perception, whether originally produced and

organized by the invisible or not, as now more or less independent of

the latter, or even hostile to it, and he will generally interpret

his own being as something properly belonging to the invisible world

but for a time mysteriously and unhappily entangled, through the

flesh, with the other. This is Platonic theology, carried by Paul into

Christianity, and it eventuates, when driven to its conclusion by a

rigorous and inhuman logic, in Asceticism. Instead of the Stoic, ‘Live

according to Nature’ (a formula in complete harmony, it may be noted,

with the Stoic Pantheism), we get, as the formula for ideal conduct,

‘Deny Nature, think the flesh a burden and a shame, fit yourself for

the time when your real self will cast it off as a filthy garment.’

On the other hand the Monistic view represented in ancient Europe by

the great Stoic school, and in modern times by names such as those of

Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Walt Whitman, refuses to separate

the visible and the invisible worlds. The former _is_ the latter, made

partially accessible to our minds. Man is a part of nature, bound

up in all his being with the framework of the Universe. The flesh

is not a bond on the spirit but an instrument of life, and what we

acquire through it is just as valuable and as eternal as anything

else. “Objects gross and the unseen soul are one,” says Whitman—the

distinction between subject and object, the perceiver and the

perceived, as Schopenhauer argues, is but a mode of cognition.

That the human mind can rest only in some kind of Monism, that Dualism

must be regarded as a natural but a passing phase of thought, based on

a hasty interpretation of certain aspects of man’s moral experience,

would seem to follow from what has been urged previously from the _a

priori_ side of the question.[141] Indeed, it may be doubted whether

there are any thinkers who seriously maintain the Dualistic view as

a philosophic doctrine. Many, however, including the whole school of

Catholic theology, with its ascetic ideal and its doctrine of eternal

hell, turn practically Dualist in the sphere of ethics, while they

would be horrified at a suspicion of anything but the purest Monism in

their conception of the ultimate reality of being. The cause of this

inconsistency is evident. We feel instinctively that no distinction in

the world of our present experience goes deeper than the distinction

between moral good and moral evil. We feel the danger of obliterating

this distinction, and setting loose the greedy and violent passions of

man to work their will unchecked by any sense of right and wrong. And

undoubtedly the Monistic principle might, by a shallow interpretation

of it, be held to obliterate the distinction. If God is One, it

might be argued, and God is All, then evil is justified in the world

equally with goodness, and the sense of duty is, what shall we say? an

illusion, a superstition, a relic of fetishism. Hence the practical

Dualism on the ethical and eschatological side which has found its

way into Monistic thought. It is brought in to save morality. But

inconsistencies like this do not last for ever; they can only persist

where thought has become atrophied, and Dualism is now rapidly

disappearing from the religious thought of Europe. What is to take its

place? The problem before us is to discover a basis for ethics on the

Monistic hypothesis without the slightest acceptance of the facile

solutions offered by Dualism. If we succeed in that, and establish a

real Monistic meaning for the terms _right_ and _wrong_, we shall next

have to deal with the sanction of the law of righteousness, and to show

_why_ it should be obeyed even, if necessary, at the cost of pain and

death.

And first, let us unreservedly admit that on the Monistic view the

distinction between right and wrong, moral good and moral evil, is not

fundamental. Both must be regarded as moving towards comprehension in

some unity as yet unimaginable by man. Without renouncing his faith,

the Monist can never escape from that position, and he must be true

to the light whatever the apparent consequences may be. A greater

Power than he will look after the consequences: ταῦτα τῷ θεῷ μελήσει.