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SOCIAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES
_The Volumes of the Series already Published are_:--
+Civilisation of Christendom, and other Studies.+ By BERNARD
BOSANQUET, M.A. (Oxon.), Hon. LL.D. (Glasgow). 4s. 6d.
+Short Studies in Character.+ By SOPHIE BRYANT, D.Sc. (Lond.). 4s.
6d.
+Social Rights and Duties.+ By LESLIE STEPHEN. 2 vols., 9s.
Other Volumes to follow by--
Professor A. SIDGWICK, Professor D. G. RITCHIE, and
J. H. MUIRHEAD, Esq. (the Editor).
The Ethical Library
SOCIAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES
ADDRESSES TO ETHICAL SOCIETIES
LESLIE STEPHEN
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
[Illustration: Logo]
LONDON
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1896
ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.
NOTE.
The following chapters are chiefly a republication of addresses
delivered to the Ethical Societies of London. Some have previously
appeared in the _International Journal of Ethics_, the _National
Review_, and the _Contemporary Review_. The author has to thank the
proprietors of these periodicals for their consent to the republication.
L. S.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
HEREDITY, 1
PUNISHMENT, 55
LUXURY, 95
THE DUTIES OF AUTHORS, 137
THE VANITY OF PHILOSOPHISING, 183
FORGOTTEN BENEFACTORS, 225
HEREDITY.
I found, the other day, that an address upon Heredity had been
announced, of which I was to be the deliverer. I admit that I was fully
responsible for the statement, although, for reasons with which I need
not trouble you, I was not quite prepared for it in this form. I mention
this fact in order simply to say that the title may possibly give rise
to false expectations. I am quite incompetent to express any opinion of
the slightest scientific value upon certain problems suggested by that
rather ugly word "heredity". The question as to the precise relationship
between any organism and its parents or remoter ancestors, is one of the
highest interest. The solution, for example, of the problem, whether is
it possible for a living being to transmit to its descendants qualities
which have only been acquired during its own lifetime, has an important
bearing upon the general theory of evolution. But I have nothing
whatever to suggest in regard to that problem. I simply take it for
granted that there is some relation between parents and children: and a
relation, speaking in the most general way, such that the qualities
with which we start in life, resemble more or less closely those of our
ancestors. I may also assume that, in some form or other, the doctrine
of evolution must be accepted: and that all living things now in the
world are the descendants, more or less modified, of the population
which preceded them. I proceed to ask whether, as some people appear to
believe, the acceptance of this doctrine in the most unqualified form,
would introduce any difficulty into our primary ethical conceptions. I
will also at once give my answer. I do not believe that it introduces
any difficulty whatever. I do believe that the general theory of
evolution tends in very important ways to give additional distinctness
to certain ethical doctrines; although, to go at all fully into the how
and the why would take me beyond my present purpose. All that I have to
argue to-day is, that a belief in "heredity" need not be a
stumbling-block to any reasonable person.
I cannot doubt that the popular mind is vaguely alarmed by the doctrine.
I read, the other day, a novel by a well-known author, of which, so far
as I can remember, the main substance was as follows: A virtuous doctor
(his virtue had some limitations) studied the problem of heredity, and
had read Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, and Weissmann, and all the proper
authorities. His own researches are carefully described, with the
apparent assumption that they were both profound and of tremendous
significance. He had, it appears, accumulated a vast amount of material;
and his method was to cut out slips from newspapers, whenever they
recorded any events in his own family history, and to preserve them in a
mysterious cabinet. These investigations proved that there was a decided
family likeness running through the descendants of a common ancestor. As
a general rule, they had all belonged to the class "blackguard". From
this result he inferred that there was no God and no soul. His relations
were dreadfully scandalised: one was converted to his views; but the
others contrived diabolical plots for setting fire to these marvellous
collections and so stopping the contagion of these dreadful doctrines at
their source. It struck me, I confess, that instead of burning the
collections, they would have done better to ask him what was the
connection between his premisses and his conclusions. What was this
terrible, heart-paralysing truth which the poor man had discovered? Has
any human being ever doubted, since mothers were invented, that children
are apt to resemble their parents? I do not personally remember the
fact, but I should be prepared to bet, if the point could be settled,
that, before I was a month old,--and in those days neither Darwin nor
Weissmann had published a line,--my nurse and my mother had affirmed
that the baby was like his papa. That, at any rate, is a remark, the
omission of which would show more originality than the assertion. If I
desired, again, to produce classical authority for the importance of
race, I should not have to extend my researches beyond the Latin
Grammar. If, once more, we look into the writings of famous theologians,
we meet it everywhere. I take the first that comes to hand. "Good men,"
says Calvin, "and beyond all others, Augustine, have laboured to
demonstrate, that we are not corrupted by any adventitious means but
that we derive an innate depravity from our very birth." The denial of
this was an instance of consummate impudence--reserved, as Calvin shows,
for such wicked heretics as Pelagius. The doctrine of heredity, in
short, in a theological version, is essentially involved in the dogmatic
foundations of the orthodox creed. I have no doubt that an investigation
of the reasonings of Augustine and others would exhibit much affinity to
modern controversy, though in a very different terminology. Whatever we
may think of its merits, the doctrine of original sin implies that a
depraved nature may have been transmitted to the whole human race; and,
if the commonly alleged cause of the original depravity strikes us as
insufficient, it is, at least, a very familiar argument of divines,
that the doctrine corresponds to undeniable facts. Why should it startle
us in a scientific dress? If we can transmit depravity, why not genius
and bodily health? In one respect, modern theories tend rather to limit
than to extend the applicability of the principle. No one ever doubted,
nor could doubt, that the child of a monkey is always a monkey; and that
the child of a negro, or even of a Mongol, has certain characteristics
which distinguish it from the child of a European. But the difference is
that, whereas it used to be held that there was an impassable barrier
between the monkey and the man, it is now widely believed that both may
be descendants from a common ancestor. Should this belief establish
itself, we shall have to admit that, in spite of heredity, organic forms
are capable of much wider variation than was believed by our fathers to
be even conceivable.
Let us try, then, to discover some more plausible explanation of the
fear excited by the doctrine. Now, I wish to give as wide a berth as
possible to that freewill controversy which perplexes so many minds, and
is apt to intrude at this point. I will try to assume,--though it is not
my own position,--the doctrine of the freedom of the will in the widest
sense that any reasonable person can devise. No such person will deny
that there is a close connection--the terms of which have not yet been
defined--between the physical constitution and the moral or intellectual
character. The man plainly grows out of the baby. If the baby's skull
has a certain conformation it can only be an idiot; with another skull
and brain it may be developed into a Shakespeare or a Dante. The
possibilities ranging between those limits are immovably fixed at birth.
And what determines the constitution with which the child is born?
Surely it can be nothing but the constitution and circumstances of its
parents. Whether I can be a great man, or cannot be more than a
commonplace man, or a fool,--nay, whether I shall be man or monkey or an
oak,--is settled before I have had any power of volition at all. Now, it
is curious how, even at this early period, we are led to use delusive
language. The difficulty is quaintly indicated in a remark by Jonathan
Swift. The dean "hath often been heard to say" (says a fragment of
autobiography) "that he felt the consequences of his parents' marriage,
not only through the whole course of his education, but during the
greater part of his life". If they had not married, he apparently
implies, he would have been born of other parents, and certainly would
have felt it for life. What the word "he" means in that connection, is a
puzzle for logicians. I fell into the difficulty myself, the other day,
when I had occasion to say that a man's character had been influenced,
both by his inheritance of certain qualities and by the later
circumstances of his education. Having said this, which, I think, aimed
at a real meaning, it occurred to me that the phrase was grossly
illogical, and I shall be still obliged if any one will put it straight
for me. The difficulty was, that I had used the same form of words to
indicate the influence of a separable accident, and to describe one
aspect of the essential character. To say that a man is influenced by
his education is to say that he would have been different had he gone,
for example, to another school. That is intelligible. But to say that
"he" would have been different if he had been born of other parents is
absurd, for "he" would not have been "he". He would not have existed at
all. "He" means the man who has grown out of the baby with all its
innate qualities; and not some, but all those qualities, the very
essence of the man himself, is, of course, the product of his
progenitors. Such phrases, in short, suggest the fancy that a man had a
pre-existence somewhere, and went about like Er the Pamphylian in
Plato's myth, selecting the conditions of his next stay upon earth. In
that case, no doubt, there might be some meaning in the doctrine. The
character of the future incarnation would depend upon the soul's choice
of position. But as we know nothing about any pre-existent soul, we must
agree that each of us starts as the little lump of humanity, every
characteristic of which is determined by the characteristics of the
parents, however much its later career may be affected by the
independent powers of thought and volition which it develops. So much,
it seems to me, must be granted on all hands, and is perhaps implicitly
denied by no one.
But granting this very obvious remark, what harm does "heredity" do us?
It is the most familiar of all remarks that you and I and all of us
depend upon our brains in some sense. If they are pierced, we die; if
they are inflamed, we go mad; and their constitution determines the
whole of our career. A grain of sand in the wrong place, as the old
epigrams have told us,--in Caesar's eye, for example,--may change the
course of history. That unlucky fly, which, as Fuller remarks, could
find no other place to creep into in the whole patrimony of St. Peter
except the Pope's throat, choked the unlucky man, and, for the time at
least, altered the ecclesiastical order of Christendom. In other words,
we are dependent at every instant upon elements in the outside
world,--bacteria, for instance,--and the working of our own physical
organism. But, that being so, what conceivable difference does it make
whether the brain, which we certainly did not ourselves make, has a
fixed resemblance to that of our parents, or be, if it be possible, the
product of some other series of processes? It is important, no doubt, to
recognise the fact; it would be of the highest importance if we could
define the exact nature of the fact; but the influence upon any general
ethical doctrine of the recognition of the bare fact itself seems to be
precisely nothing at all. It is part of the necessary data of all
psychological speculation, and has been recognised with more or less
precision from the very first attempts to speculate.
Trying, once more, to discover what it is that alarms, or is said to
alarm, some people, we are reminded of certain facts, which again are of
profound interest in some respects. I take a special instance,--not,
unfortunately, a rare or at all a strange instance,--to illustrate the
point. Many years ago I knew a clergyman, a man of most amiable
character and refined tastes. One morning he shocked his friends by
performing the Church service in a state of intoxication, and within a
few months had drunk himself to death. The case was explained,--that is,
a proper name for it was found,--when we learnt that more than one of
his nearest relations had developed similar propensities, and died in
much the same way. Then we called it an instance of "hereditary
dipsomania," and were more or less consoled by the classification. We
were not, I think, unreasonable. The discovery proved apparently that
the man whom we had respected and admired was not a vulgar debauchee,
who had been hypocritically concealing his vices; but that he had really
possessed the excellent qualities attributed to him, only combined with
an unfortunate constitutional tendency, which was as much a part of his
original nature as a tendency to gout or consumption. Now this, as I
think, suggests the problem which puzzles us at times. A man develops
some vicious propensity, for which we were quite unprepared. In some
cases, perhaps, he may show homicidal mania or kleptomania, or some of
the other manias which physicians have discovered in late years. They
say, though the lawyers are rather recalcitrant, that a man suffering
from such a mania is not "responsible"; and if asked, why not? they
reply, because he was the victim of a disease which made him unable to
resist the morbid impulse. But then, we say, are not all our actions
dependent upon our physical constitution? If a man develops homicidal
mania, may not a murderer of the average type excuse himself upon the
same ground? You have committed an action, we say, which shows you to be
a man of abnormal wickedness. You are a bloodthirsty, ferocious,
inhuman villain. Certainly, he may reply; but if you could examine my
brain you would see that I could not be anything else. There is
something wrong about its molecular construction, or about the shape of
the skull into which it was fitted, which makes bloodthirstiness quite
as inevitable in me as a tendency to drink is in others, or perhaps as
the most ardent philanthropy may be in some. In short, I am a murderer;
but wickedness is so natural to me that you must in all fairness excuse
me.
This is, of course, a kind of excuse which would not free a man from the
gallows. It would simply suggest that punishment should not be
considered from the moral, but, if I may say so, from the sanitary point
of view. We should hang the murderer--not to satisfy our sense of
justice, but to get rid of a nuisance. I will not now inquire what may
be said upon that undoubtedly difficult problem; but I must touch upon
the previous question which is raised by the argument. Would our
supposed murderer make out a good case for himself? Is there no
difference between him and the maniac; or, rather, what is the nature of
the difference which we clearly recognise in practice? In the extreme
case which our ancestors took as the typical case, the madman kills
because he is under some complete illusion: he supposes that he is only
breaking a glass when he is really taking a life, and so forth. He is
therefore not wicked, but accidentally mischievous. We have now come to
recognise the existence of many states of mind intervening between this
and complete sanity. Among them, for example, is the state of mind of
the homicidal monomaniac, whose propensity is considered to be the cause
of his actions, and which may be consistent with his being in many other
respects capable of acting upon the ordinary motives and judging
reasonably in most of the affairs of life. What, then, is the meaning of
the statement that he is a madman, and therefore excusable? The
contention must, of course, be, in the first place, that his character
is in some way abnormal. He is not governable by the ordinary motives
which determine human action. But, beyond this, it is evident that the
abnormality is taken to mean something more than the mere deviation from
the average. A man may be abominably wicked, and yet not in the least
abnormal in the sense here required. He may be deficient in the higher
motives, and the more brutal passions may be unusually developed; and
yet we do not hold that he therefore deviates from the type. So, in a
different sphere, we may have one man possessing enormous strength and
another exceedingly feeble, one very active and another very clumsy;
and yet they may all be perfectly normal, they are free from physical
disease, and all their physical functions may be performed according to
the normal system. Entire freedom from disease, in short, is perfectly
compatible with exceedingly wide deviations from the average, with
capacity for walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, or with
inability to walk a single mile; and yet such deviations do not imply a
departure from a certain common type. To say precisely what symptoms
indicate mere differences within the normal type, and what imply an
actual deviation from the type, is exceedingly difficult, if not
impossible; and yet that such a distinction exists has to be constantly
recognised. "So-and-so is delicate, but not diseased; feeble, but not
deformed," has a definite meaning, though we may be unable to define the
precise meaning of our words, or to decide which statement is true in
particular cases.
The great difficulty in the case of insanity corresponds to this. The
physician tells us that the madman's mind works abnormally, but not
abnormally in the sense merely of having some faculties weaker and
others stronger than is common; but in such a way as to indicate
disease, and, moreover, a particular kind of disease, or one, perhaps,
of several particular kinds of diseases. The vagueness of this statement
provokes lawyers, who have a natural love of definite external tests to
govern their decisions; and it has led to a number of delicate
discussions, upon which I need not enter. The legal problem seems
essentially to be, what tests should guide us in determining whether a
man should be regarded as a normal human being, or as a being so far
differing from the normal type that he should be treated exceptionally,
and especially put under the guidance of other persons, and excused from
legal responsibility, that is, liability to punishment.
I have to do with the moral problem alone. It is a still more difficult
problem; but it has this advantage, that we do not require so definite
an answer. We have not, happily, to decide whether our fellows shall go
to heaven or to hell, though we have to decide whether they shall be
hanged or locked up; and we must be content as a rule with very vague
estimates as to their moral character. What we practically have to take,
more or less roughly, into account is simply this: that our inference
from conduct to character has often to be modified by the existence of
these abnormal cases. A man is drunk on an important occasion; I infer,
as a rule, that he has all the qualities which go with low sensuality;
but in some cases the inference is wrong; the man may be really a person
of most admirable feelings; but one of his instincts has suddenly taken
an abnormal development, owing to a set of causes entirely different
from the usual causes. Another man suddenly and causelessly kills a
friend. The natural inference that he must be a bloodthirsty brute is
erroneous, if it turns out that he has acted from impulses not generated
by any habitual want of benevolence, but from some special defect in the
constitution of his brain. In other words, our moral judgment must vary
in the two cases, and may vary so much that the same action may rightly
suggest only pity in one case and abhorrence in the other; although, in
many cases, where it may be very difficult to say what is the precise
implication as to character, the judgment must, if we are properly
diffident, remain obscure. The moral problem always depends ultimately
upon this: What is the character implied by this conduct? If the moral
conduct shows malignity within the normal type, it justifies
condemnation; if it shows only a blind instinctive impulse, due to a
deflection from the type, it may justify no other feelings than those
which we have for the poor maniac who fancies himself a king, and takes
his limbs to be made of glass.
If we hold that such responsibility implies free will we shall argue
that the madman is deprived of free will, or that his freedom of will is
more or less restricted, and that he is therefore irresponsible. In my
own opinion, that proposition would be by no means an easy one to
establish. I fancy that a man may be insane and yet capable, within very
wide limits, of being good or bad, and that therefore we must at any
rate hold that he has still some power of free will. The bearing of this
upon the question of moral responsibility brings us within sight of some
delicate problems. But, however this may be, the criterion by which we
shall have to judge whether we are believers in free will or
determinists will be the same. The problem is essentially, is this man
accessible to the motives by which normal men regulate their conduct? or
does he so far deflect from the typical constitution, however that
constitution may be precisely defined, that his conscience or his
affections or his intellectual powers are unable to act according to the
general laws of human nature?
Having said so much, I think that I may proceed to this conclusion, that
the theory of heredity can make no real difference whatever to our
problem. There is a difficulty for the metaphysician--the difficulty
which is involved in discussions between materialists and idealists,
determinists and believers in free will. I do not deny the existence of
that difficulty. I only say that the question of heredity is altogether
irrelevant to the difficulty. The desire to treat ethical problems by
the methods of science may predispose a thinker to materialism, and may
at the same time lead him to attach particular importance to the
doctrine of heredity. But that doctrine only takes note of facts which
every theory has to state in its own phraseology, and do not alter the
ultimate problem.
Let us, in fact, go back to our murderer. I am not responsible, he says,
because I am determined by the processes in my brain. I am a mere
machine, grinding out one set of actions or another as external
accidents set my wheels and pulleys in motion. If that argument be fatal
to moral responsibility, or to the belief that any truly moral action
exists (a point which I do not argue), it will no doubt remove the moral
element from the treatment both of murderers and madmen. They might
still require different measures, just as we treat a machine differently
when we consider that it is not of the normal construction, or that its
various parts have somehow got out of gear, so that we can no longer,
for example, expect that the mainspring will transmit its motion to the
wheels. But, in any case, if the dependence upon the body be a fatal
objection to morality in the highest sense, the circumstance that the
body is made upon the plan of previously existing bodies makes no
additional difficulty. If we could suppose every brain to be started
afresh by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the difficulty would be
neither increased nor diminished. The problem, are we automatic? and the
validity of the inference, is morality meaningless? are questions
altogether independent of the question, what particular kind of automata
are we? and do we or do we not resemble a previous generation of
automata?
If, however, we reply to the criminal that he is not a machine or an
automaton, but a responsible, reasoning, and thinking being, we do not
get away from the facts. We then assert that he is responsible because
he possesses a certain moral constitution. But whatever words we may use
to express the facts correctly, we must still allow that there is such a
correlation between soul and body (if those old-fashioned words be
admissible) that the health of his moral constitution depends at every
instant upon the health of his nervous system and his brain. It may be
shattered or destroyed by an injury; and, if this be so, what does it
matter whether the injury--say the defective shape of the skull, which
causes pressure on the brain--is due to some accident or to a connate
malformation due to his parents? The difficulty, if it be difficulty, is
that the want of responsibility is due to some cause, accidental
relatively to him; and it matters not whether that cause be in his
parents' constitution or in some other combination of circumstances. In
any case, we have to suppose, whatever the relation of mind and body, we
must at least assume that a man is born with some character. Like
everything that exists, he has certain definite qualities which he did
not make for himself, and upon which his subsequent development depends.
And, if that be once admitted, the whole difficulty still occurs, and
the question as to whether the origin of these innate qualities be
derived from his parents or from a something else is a mere matter of
detail.
In fact, the confusion seems to me to arise from the vague phraseology
which induces us to accept, virtually at least, the mental attitude of
Dean Swift in Er the Pamphylian. We speak as if the man were an
independent entity, lying somehow outside the chain of cause and effect,
and arbitrarily plunged into it; nay, as if even his inner constitution
were something superinduced upon his nature. It is really an absurd
abstraction to distinguish between the man and his character, as though
he meant a something existing without a character, and afterwards run
into a mould by fate. The character is the man in certain relations, and
he can never exist without it, any more than a piece of matter can be
outside of all particular times and places. If the doctrine of free will
and moral responsibility be so interpreted as to imply our acceptance
of such fallacies, I can only say that it appears to me to be
irreconcilable with the most undeniable facts. But I am very far from
supposing that any intelligent supporter of the doctrine would state it
in such a form. He would admit as fully as I do the facts, and, if they
can be admitted and reconciled to the doctrine of moral responsibility,
certainly the doctrine of heredity can be so reconciled. The only
peculiarity of the doctrine is, that it has called attention to an order
of facts which must in any case be recognised by every philosopher; and
that it helps, therefore, to disperse a fallacy which only requires
articulate statement to show its radical want of logic or even
conceivability. We are, beyond all doubt, affected somehow, and affected
profoundly, by our environment; and this particular form of relation to
other beings has no more bearing upon the problem than the other forces
which have been recognised ever since speculation began.
There is, however, another side from which I must briefly consider the
question of heredity; and it is a side which, I think, is really more
important, because it involves issues of facts, and has suggested some
more reasonable prejudices. It is, undoubtedly, very common that when a
theory has obtained a certain currency it should be applied rashly
beyond its proper limits. When the speculations of Darwin encouraged us
to believe that the natural selection might be analogous to artificial
selection, that different species of animals have been produced as
varieties of dogs and pigeons have been produced by breeders, it was, at
least, tempting to apply the same formula directly to other cases. Some
men of science have endeavoured to show that genius or criminality is
hereditary; and that, if one man writes a great poem and another picks a
pocket, it is always in virtue of their hereditary endowment. Within
certain limits, this statement is not surprising, and I shall be very
glad when men of science can tell us what those limits may be. Without
being a man of science, I fully believe that our congenital
characteristics form, as I have said, certain impassable limits to our
development. One baby is a potential Shakespeare, and, probably, only
one in a million. The qualities with which he starts, again, are, no
doubt, derived from his parents, though we do not, as yet, understand in
what way; whether, for example, we should infer that Shakespeare's
parents had more than usual capacity, or were especially healthy, or had
some peculiar form of one-sided development which generated the disease
called poetical genius; or whether he may have inherited qualities from
a remote ancestor, which had remained latent for several generations.
In any case, he was at birth only a potential Shakespeare. He might have
died of the measles, or been made stupid by a sunstroke, or have taken
to drink in bad company, or have run away to sea, or been sent to the
University and become a mere bishop or professor of casuistry; in short,
though he could not easily have done very much better work than he did,
he might have done inconceivably less. That is to say, his congenital
qualities implied certain powers; but what he would do with them
remained to be partly determined by an indefinite variety of external
circumstances acting upon him in various ways. Hence, we have always the
complex problem, what, given certain raw material in the shape of
new-born babies, will be the characteristics of the finished product in
the shape of a grown-up population? If the social state is determined
from the inherited qualities directly, we should be able, for example,
to infer from a given proportion of criminals, that a certain number of
children were born with a corresponding physical constitution, with
"foreheads villainous low," and prognathous jaws, and with the other
peculiar signs which mark the felon from his birth. In that case, again,
we should infer, I suppose, that the only possible means of improving
the social state would be by somehow improving the breed; perhaps, by
appointing some of the inspectors who play so great a part in modern
society, to examine infants, and get rid of those who were thus
distinguished, by the means now adopted in the case of superfluous
puppies. One objection to this system is, of course, that men of science
have not yet shown that they are qualified for exercising such a
supervision; and there are other difficulties upon which I need not
dwell. This much, indeed, we may grant without any scientific
prepossessions whatever. It is clearly very desirable that every
generation should raise up for its successors as many children with
sturdy bodies and vigorous brains as possible; and it is to be hoped
that the objection to transmitting disease and imbecility may be more
generally recognised, and, in some shape or other, have an influence
even upon the strongest passions. But I am only concerned with the
general theory, which, if I understand it rightly, would appear to imply
that the characteristics of a society are irrevocably fixed by the
characteristics of the children born into it; and, whether this theory
be true or false, we must admit that it has a considerable bearing upon
morality. If, in fact, we hold it to be rigidly true, we should have to
suppose that no serious improvement can be produced in society at large,
except by breeding a superior race of men. This, again, is a
discouraging prospect. Let me quote what has been said by an authority
who expresses, I believe, the accepted scientific view. "There can be no
doubt," says Professor Huxley, "that vast changes have taken place in
English civilisation since the days of the Tudors. But I am not aware
that there is a single particle of evidence in favour of the conclusion
that this evolutionary process has been accompanied by any modification
of the physical or the mental characters of the men who have been the
subjects of it. I have not met with any grounds for suspecting that the
average Englishmen of to-day are sensibly different from those that
Shakespeare knew and drew." The statement, I imagine, might be very much
extended. I do not suppose that the average cockney of to-day is a
superior animal, physically or morally, to the average Athenian of the
days of Pericles, or even, it may be, to the pre-historic savages who
made flint implements for the amusement of our antiquaries. Briefly,
whatever change has taken place, within historical period, has been a
social change, not a change in the structure of the individual. This is
surely conceivable. We need only consider, for example, how vast a
change has been made in all the conditions of life by the modern
applications of practical science. Whether, in other respects, we are
better or worse than our forefathers, we have an enormously greater
aggregate of wealth now than we had, say, two centuries ago; we can
support four times the population, though the condition of the lowest
stratum may not be better. And this amazing advance of wealth is not due
to the fact that Englishmen of to-day have better brains for mathematics
than the Englishmen of Newton's time; but to the accumulation of
capital, the improvement of the natural conditions of the soil, the
turning to account of vast masses of material, previously neglected; to
the invention of machinery, and so forth; all of which imply, not
necessarily the very slightest improvement of natural capacity, but
simply the growth of knowledge, and the fact that each generation has
preserved more than it has consumed. What we call progress or
civilisation, which means, whatever else it may or may not mean, a
gigantic increase in the power of man over nature, is due, therefore, to
the one fact that man can accumulate. He can modify the earth in such a
way as to facilitate the labours of the coming generations; he can make
tools which last beyond his own time, and which themselves become, as it
were, the ancestors of incomparably superior tools; he can, moreover,
accumulate and transmit knowledge, not merely the knowledge of facts,
but the knowledge of scientific laws and of useful inventions, and of
the right methods of investigating facts. When Newton made a discovery,
he made it for all the following generations; and, though it may well be
that no superior or even equal intellect has since arisen to carry on
his work, the dwarf now stands on the shoulders of the giant. It is not
simply that we know more facts. The modes of mathematical inquiry differ
as much from those which Newton could employ, as the latest steam engine
from the crude fire machine before the time of Watt; and an average
undergraduate can solve with ease problems which once puzzled the
greatest intellects that ever appeared among men. Man, then, can
accumulate; and that simple fact enables every generation enormously to
surpass its predecessors. Accumulation, again, is, of course, a form of
inheritance. We are born heirs to the intellectual as well as to the
material fortunes of our ancestors. But, it is obvious, this is
something very different from heredity. It supposes an alteration, not
in the man, but in his surroundings or his education in the widest
sense; not in his intellectual capacity, but in the knowledge which it
can attain and the rules which it has worked out. In order that a man
may be capable either of bequeathing or inheriting, he must have certain
faculties; he must be an observing, remembering, reasoning animal; but
he may become indefinitely richer, not from any improvement in his
powers of observing and remembering and using, but simply from the
change in his position. People's memories, it is sometimes suggested,
have been weakened by the invention of printing. But, weakened or not,
we have an incomparably greater knowledge of the past than was formerly
possible, because we can now keep our memories upon our bookshelves, in
the form of histories and encyclopaedias, and know every fact that we
want to know when we want it, without troubling ourselves to fill our
minds with all the knowledge that may ever be possibly useful. A library
is an external and materialised memory. But without illustrating so
plain a point any further, I simply take note of what it implies: that
is, that, as Professor Huxley has pointed out, all that distinguishes
the present state of things from the state of things in the time of
Elizabeth, or, perhaps, at the time of remote Egyptian dynasties, may be
due, not to any change in the individual, but to what is called the
social factor. The inference from the individual to the society, or from
the society to the individual, is, therefore, rigidly impossible,
because, given the man, the position in which he is placed and the stage
of development of the society to which he belongs, are relevant facts
which exercise an incalculably great influence.
If this be true, what follows? We remark, in the first place, that the
evolution of which we speak in regard to natural history, the process by
which the present population of the globe has gradually grown out of the
population of remote geological epochs, is slow. The changes which it
may produce are not sensible within a generation--for, indeed, the very
nature of the case implies that they must take many generations--not
perhaps even within such a period as is covered by all authentic
history. It is not, of course, on that account to be overlooked for
scientific purposes. Monkeys must have grown into men before they could
begin to accumulate capital, either material or spiritual. The faculty
of accumulating must itself have been developed. Only when once it was
developed, another process would begin, the process of social evolution,
which, however it may resemble the other, or possibly be in some sense
its continuation, proceeds, at least, at a totally different rate. The
difference is comparable, one may say roughly, to the difference between
the speed of an express train and the speed of a four-wheeled waggon.
Beneath the surface, it may be, the slower process is still continuing;
men, for anything I can say to the contrary, may be acquiring larger
brains and more sensitive bodies; and it is further possible, or rather
obvious, that if we can do anything to facilitate this proceeding, to
behave so as to give nature a better chance of turning out better work,
we ought to do so. Only nature is pretty sure to take her time about it.
How far, again, one process is to be considered as a continuation of the
other, or as a modification, or even as in opposition to it, is a point
which I cannot now touch. What I have to say is simply this: that if we
take any two periods of society, the present, for example, and that of a
thousand or five thousand years ago, we shall find enormous or
incalculably great differences in the social structure, in the amount of
knowledge, in the character of the ethical, religious, and philosophical
beliefs, and in the relations between the individuals of which the
society is constructed; but between the individuals at the two periods
we may find hardly any definable difference whatever. For anything we
can say, we should be able, if we could move people about in time as
well as in space, to exchange a thousand infants of the nineteenth
century A.D., for a thousand of the nineteenth century B.C., and nobody
would be able to detect the difference which would result.
Hence it follows, in my opinion, that the evolutionary process with
which moralists and political philosophers have practically to deal, is
what I have called the social, and not the individual process. We
inherit thoughts as we inherit wealth; we inherit customs and laws and
forms of worship, and indeed our whole mental furniture; we can add
enormously to our inheritance, and can transmit the augmented fund to
our descendants. But the other process of inheritance, to which the word
"heredity" is taken to apply, is not, immediately at least, cumulative.
We inherit the old faculties, bodily and mental, unaltered, or with
infinitesimal alterations, though we live in a different environment,
and are ourselves as much altered as our environment. The modern social
organism is built up, if I may say so, of cells almost identical in
their properties with those of the old organism, although the mode of
combination gives entirely new properties to the whole, and brings out
new actions and reactions among the constituent cells themselves.
I have been touching the edge of certain problems of great interest but
enormous complexity, and I shall venture to indicate the difference
between these views and some which have recently attracted much
attention. Mr. Kidd's work upon "Social Evolution" has made the phrase
popular; but, instead of using it in my sense, he speaks as though
"social evolution" involved what I have called individual evolution. In
order to keep within limits, I will confine myself to one case upon
which he lays great stress. It will show sufficiently why I hold his
mode of reasoning to be inconclusive. Mr. Kidd has achieved success by
very excellent qualities, by remarkable literary ability, and by his
uniformly high tone of moral feeling. I should, therefore, be very sorry
to speak of him otherwise than respectfully. Mr. Kidd, however, chooses
to maintain a thesis in which he has certainly no personal
interest,--the thesis, namely, that a little stupidity may be a very
good thing. This view is, perhaps, intelligible when we observe that he
also maintains that the progress of the race depends upon its holding
"ultra-rational," which I think he would find it hard to distinguish
from "irrational," beliefs. In support of this view he writes a chapter
to prove that "progress is not primarily intellectual". The argument of
which I have spoken is part of this proof. The Greeks, he tells us, were
a race intellectually superior to ourselves. They were, so Mr. Galton
informs him, two degrees above modern Englishmen in the scale of
intelligence, and as superior to us as we are to the negro. And yet,
says Mr. Kidd, this marvellous race died out, and no trace of its blood
is now to be found in the present population of the world. Let us look
shortly into the logic of this argument, and consider how far it is
entitled to be regarded as scientific reasoning.
First of all, I should ask, what precisely is meant by "the Greeks"? The
argument is founded partly on the number of great thinkers, poets, and
artists, in proportion to the population. Now, it is obviously essential
to a scientific statement that we should know what is the population
indicated. If we compare the number of great men at Athens in its best
period with the number of free Athenians, we shall get one ratio; if we
admit the Athenian slaves, or add Boeotia and other Greek States to our
population, we get quite a different ratio. And the difference is of
immense importance. The smaller the population, the higher the
excellence indicated by a given number of great men; but, also, the
smaller the population, the less is the wonder that it should have died
out or been swallowed up in the whirlpools of political, religious, and
social convulsions. A similar remark applies in regard to the period
during which this race flourished. When did they begin and when did they
cease to be superior to other people? Till the statement is more precise
we do not even know what are the phenomena to be explained; and the case
is susceptible of any number of explanations. Did the superior race
cease to be prolific; or was it prolific, but of inferior descendants;
and, if so, was it because it was mixed with races of an inferior stamp;
or was it because its position exposed it to the attacks of more
numerous enemies; or because its energy led it to attempt impossible
feats? Has it died out, or has it been swamped by other races? To answer
such questions is absolutely necessary before we can say positively that
the higher organisation was the cause of the decay, or that it did not
cause the decay by some indirect process due to the special combination
of circumstances. But to answer such questions, if they be answerable at
all, would require the investigations of a lifetime, and a mastery of a
whole series of studies, historical, statistical, ethnological, and so
forth, in which I am an absolute ignoramus. But I cannot perceive that
Mr. Kidd claims more than second-hand information.