In my youth I once heard the then well-known lecturer Starr King speak
on "The Law of Disorder." I have no recollection of the main thought of
his discourse, but can see that it might have been upon the order and
harmony that finally come out of the disharmonies of nature and of man.
The whole universe goes blundering on, but surely arrives. Collisions
and dispersions in the heavens above, and failure and destruction among
living things on the earth below, yet here we all are in a world good to
be in! The proof that it is good to be in is that we are actually here.
It is as if the Creator played his right hand against his left--what one
loses the other gains.
It has been aptly said that while Darwin's theory of natural selection
may account for the survival of the fittest, it does not account for the
arrival of the fittest. The arrival of the fittest, sooner or later,
seems in some way guaranteed by tendencies that are beyond the
hit-and-miss method of natural selection.
When we look back over the course of organic evolution, we see the
unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon
millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms
of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other
millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms
upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air,
devouring and being devoured, a riot of blood and carnage. We see the
shifting of land and sea, the folding and crumpling of the earth's
crust, the rise of mountains, the engulfing of forests, a vast
destruction of life, immense numbers of animal forms becoming extinct
through inability to adapt themselves to new conditions, or from other
causes. We see creatures, half beast, half bird, or half dragon, half
fish; we see the evolutionary process thwarted or delayed apparently by
the hardening or fixing of its own forms. We see it groping its way like
a blind man, and experimenting with this device and with that, fumbling,
awkward, ineffectual, trying magnitude of body and physical strength
first, and then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy and
complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning
only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole
races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at
the end of Palæozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous,
arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab,
some insects with stings, some serpents with deadly fangs, the
production of pain as much a part of the scheme of things as the
production of pleasure; the creative impulse feeling its way through the
mollusk to the fish, and through the fish to the amphibian and the
reptile, through the reptile to the mammal, and through the mammal to
the anthropoid apes, and through the apes to man, then through the rude
and savage races of man, the long-jawed, small-brained, Pliocene man,
hairy and savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man of
Pleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly at
the dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of our
own era. What a record! What savagery, what thwartings and delays, what
carnage and suffering, what an absence of all that we mean by
intelligent planning and oversight, of love, of fatherhood! Just a clash
of forces, the battle to the strong and the race to the fleet.
It is hard to believe that the course of organic evolution would have
eventuated in man and the other higher forms of life without some
guiding principle; yet it is equally difficult to believe that the
course of any guiding intelligence down the ages would have been strewn
with so many failures and monstrosities, so much waste and suffering and
delay. Man has not been specially favored by one force or element in
nature. Behold the enemies that beset him without and within, and that
are armed for his destruction! The intelligence that appears to pervade
the organic world, and that reaches its conscious expression in the
brain of man, is just as manifest in all the forms of animals and plants
that are inimical to him, in all his natural enemies,--venomous snakes
and beasts of prey, and insect pests,--as in anything else. Nature is as
wise and solicitous for rats and mice as for men. In fact, she has
endowed many of the lower creatures with physical powers that she has
denied him. Evidently man is only one of the cards in her pack;
doubtless the highest one, but the game is not played for him alone.
There is no economy of effort or of material in nature as a whole,
whatever there may be in special parts. The universe is not run on
modern business-efficiency principles. There is no question of time, or
of profit, of solvency or insolvency. The profit-and-loss account in the
long run always balances. In our astronomic age there are probably
vastly more dead suns and planets strewing the depths of sidereal space
than there are living suns and planets. But in some earlier period in
the cycle of time the reverse may have been true, or it may be true in
some future period.
There is economy of effort in the individual organism, but not in the
organic series, at least from the human point of view. During the
biologic ages there have been a vast number of animal forms, great and
small, and are still, that had no relation to man, that were not in his
line of descent, and played no part in his evolution. During that
carnival of monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the ancestor
of man was probably some small and insignificant creature whose life was
constantly imperiled by the huge beasts about it. That it survived at
all in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during those early
ages, is one of the wonders of time. The drama or tragedy of evolution
has had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible to look upon, who
have played their parts and passed off the stage, as if the sole purpose
was the entertainment of some unseen spectator. When we reach human
history, what wasted effort, what failures, what blind groping, what
futile undertakings!--war, famine, pestilence, delaying progress or
bringing to naught the wisdom of generations of men! Those who live in
this age are witnessing in the terrible European war something analogous
to the blind, wasteful fury of the elemental forces; millions of men who
never saw one another, and who have not the shadow of a quarrel, engage
in a life-and-death struggle, armed with all the aids that centuries of
science and civilization can give them--a tragedy that darkens the very
heavens and makes a mockery of all our age-old gospel of peace and good
will to men. It is a catastrophe on a scale with the cataclysms of
geologic time when whole races disappeared and the face of continents
was changed. It seems that men in the aggregate, with all their science
and religion, are no more exempt from the operation of cosmic laws than
are the stocks and stones. Each party to this gigantic struggle declares
that he is in it against his will; the fate that rules in the solar
system seems to have them all in its grip; the working of forces and
tendencies for which no man was responsible seems to have brought it
about. Social communities grow in grace and good-fellowship, but
governments in their relations to one another, and often in relation to
their own subjects, are still barbarous. Men become christianized, but
man is still a heathen, the victim of savage instincts. In this struggle
one of the most admirable and efficient of nations, and one of the most
solicitous for the lives and well-being of its citizens, is suddenly
seized with a fury of destruction, hurling its soldiers to death as if
they were only the waste of the fields, and trampling down other peoples
whose geographic position placed them in their way as if they were
merely vermin, throwing international morality to the winds, looking
upon treaties as "scraps of paper," regarding themselves as the salt of
the earth, the chosen of the Lord, appropriating the Supreme Being as
did the colossal egotism of old Israel, and quickly getting down to the
basic principle of savage life--that might makes right.
Little wonder that the good people are asking, Have we lost faith? We
may or we may not have lost faith, but can we not see that our faith
does not give us a key to the problem? Our faith is founded on the old
prescientific conception of a universe in which good and evil are
struggling with each other, with a Supreme Being aiding and abetting the
good. We fail to appreciate that the cosmic laws are no respecters of
persons. Emerson says there is no god dare wrong a worm, but worms dare
wrong one another, and there is no god dare take sides with either. The
tides in the affairs of men are as little subject to human control as
the tides of the sea and the air. We may fix the blame of the European
war upon this government or upon that, but race antagonisms and
geographical position are not matters of choice. An island empire, like
England, is bound to be jealous of all rivals upon the sea, because her
very life, when nations clash, depends upon her control of it; and an
inland empire, like Germany, is bound to grow restless under the
pressure of contiguous states of other races. A vast empire, like
Russia, is always in danger of falling apart by its own weight. It is
fused and consolidated by a turn of events that arouse the patriotic
emotions of the whole people and unite them in a common enthusiasm.
The evolution of nations is attended by the same contingencies, the same
law of probability, the same law of the survival of the fit, as are
organic bodies. I say the survival of the fit; there are degrees of
fitness in the scale of life; the fit survive, and the fittest lead and
dominate, as did the reptiles in Mesozoic time, and the mammals in
Tertiary time. Among the mammals man is dominant because he is the
fittest. Nations break up or become extinct when they are no longer fit,
or equal to the exigencies of the struggles of life. The Roman Empire
would still exist if it had been entirely fit. The causes of its
unfitness form a long and intricate problem. Germany of to-day evidently
looks upon herself as the dominant nation, the one fittest to survive,
and she has committed herself to the desperate struggle of justifying
her self-estimate. She tramples down weaker nations as we do the stubble
of the fields. She would plough and harrow the world to plant her
Prussian _Kultur_. This _Kultur_ is a mighty good product, but we
outside of its pale think that French _Kultur_, and English _Kultur_,
and American _Kultur_ are good products also, and equally fit to
survive. We naturally object to being ploughed under. That Russian
_Kultur_ has so far proved itself a vastly inferior product cannot be
doubted, but the evolutionary processes will in time bring a finer and
higher Russia out of this vast weltering and fermenting mass of
humanity. In all these things impersonal laws and forces are at work,
and the balance of power, if temporarily disturbed, is bound, sooner or
later, to be restored just as it is in the inorganic realm.
Evolution is creative, as Bergson contends. The wonder is that,
notwithstanding the indifference of the elemental forces and the blind
clashing of opposing tendencies among living forms,--a universe that
seems run entirely on the trial-and-error principle,--evolution has gone
steadily forward, a certain order and stability has been reached in the
world of inert bodies and forces, and myriads of forms of wonderful
fitness and beauty have been reached in the organic realm. Just as the
water-system and the weather-system of the globe have worked themselves
out on the hit-and-miss plan, but not without serious defects,--much too
much water and heat at a few places, and much too little at a few
others,--so the organic impulse, warred upon by the blind inorganic
elements and preyed upon by the forms it gave rise to, has worked itself
out and peopled the world as we see it peopled to-day--not with forms
altogether admirable and lovely from our point of view, but so from the
point of view of the whole. The forests get themselves planted by the
go-as-you-please winds and currents, the pines in one place, the spruce,
the oaks, the elms, the beeches, in another, all with a certain fitness
and system. The waters gather themselves together in great bodies and
breathe salubrity and fertility upon the land.
A certain order and reasonableness emerges from the chaos and
cross-purposes. There are harmony and coöperation among the elemental
forces, as well as strife and antagonism. Life gets on, for all groping
and blundering. There is the inherent variability of living forms to
begin with--the primordial push toward the development from within
which, so far as we can see, is not fortuitous, but predestined; and
there is the stream of influences from without, constantly playing upon
and modifying the organism and taken advantage of by it.
The essence of life is in adaptability; it goes into partnership with
the forces and conditions that surround it. It is this trait which leads
the teleological philosopher to celebrate the fitness of the environment
when its fitness is a foregone conclusion. Shall we praise the fitness
of the air for breathing, or of the water for drinking, or of the winds
for filling our sails? If we cannot say explicitly, without speaking
from our anthropomorphism, that there is a guiding intelligence in the
evolution of living forms, we can at least say, I think, that the
struggle for life is favored by the very constitution of the universe
and that man in some inscrutable way was potential in the fiery nebula
itself.