Evolution Part 10

The theories of evolution which we have called the Optimistic and the Pessimistic interpretations of evolution are avowedly based on the a.s.sumption that a large part of the common faith of mankind is a mental or moral disease. According to Mr. Herbert Spencer the faith that we can know what is real is an illusion: the Real is the Unknowable. According to Professor Huxley the common faith in the freedom of the will is an illusion: necessity is the law of the uniformity both of Nature and of human nature. In thus declining to accept the testimony of the moral and religious consciousness as evidence of what is, both philosophers were influenced by the belief that it is science alone which is capable of ascertaining and demonstrating what is and what actually does happen.

This belief, however, we have ventured to suggest, overlooks two facts.

One is that the abstract sciences do not even profess to state what actually does happen: they simply affirm that, if the conditions stated in their various laws are the only conditions operative, the only result will be that stated by the particular law in question. Thus science does not concern itself with what is or does happen, but solely with what would be or would happen under certain (usually impossible) conditions.

The other point overlooked is that the historical or comparative sciences are also only hypothetically true. All that their laws undertake to demonstrate is that, if certain consequences const.i.tute the whole of an observed effect, then the only conditions antecedently operative were those stated in the law. Here too, then, science does not even claim to prove what is or demonstrate what does happen, but a.s.sumes that we know it or find it out, in some way with which science does not concern itself. If we do know and can know what is, science can tell us what were the conditions that produced it.

The question, then, that we have to put to any theory of evolution--that is, to any theory which professes to state the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is--is, "Does it account for that totality? do the causes which it a.s.sumes to have been at work account for all that is?" Now, _a priori_ it was not to be expected that evolution would in its infancy, and it is still young, succeed in accounting for all things; and there were special reasons in the circ.u.mstances under which it first took its modern scientific shape which necessarily limited its earliest attempts to grasp the totality of things. It would, however, be absurd to judge the principle by the first attempt to apply it, and to condemn it because it has not done in a moment what with time it a.s.suredly will succeed in effecting. At the same time, it can only effect that wider success by refusing to stereotype its first errors and by declining to bind itself to the dogma that what it has succeeded in explaining is all that there is to explain, or that that alone is or happens which its present a.s.sumptions or laws are capable of accounting for. There lies the danger which threatens to check the further development of the theory of evolution--in the dogmatism which pretends to set aside common sense and the common reason, and arrogates to itself the sole right of saying what is; and succeeds in doing so by the simple but circular argument that that alone is or happens which can be accounted for by the laws that regulate the movements of things in s.p.a.ce or that follow from the struggle for animal existence.

Historically, the theory of evolution in its first manifestation was an extension to the historical sciences generally of a purely biological conception, that of the origin of species as a consequence of the struggle for existence. It was found that much else in the manifold of what is, many other differences between related things, besides the differences which mark off one species of animals from another, might be accounted for, historically, by the theory that those differences were but the sum and the acc.u.mulation of an infinite number of small modifications which had given the thing an advantage over its rivals in the struggle for existence. Strictly speaking, all that this remarkable and wide-reaching discovery implied as a matter of logic was that between animals and things not animal there existed an a.n.a.logy or resemblance, in virtue of which it was logical to argue from things animal to things not animal just so far as the resemblance between them went, but not further. Very naturally, however, it happened that with this originally biological conception all its biological implications were taken over, and it was (and is) argued not merely that there are great and fruitful resemblances between, say, society and an animal organism, but that societies are animal organisms. In fine, sociology was treated as a department of biology. The fallacy that science demonstrates what is, and that what science does not account for has no real existence, thus made its appearance simultaneously with the birth of the evolution theory. The resemblances between the evolution of the social organism and of animal organisms could be accounted for by the biological theory of the struggle for existence; the differences, therefore, must be denied or laboriously explained away. With the growth of sociology, however, it is becoming apparent that the evolution of society has laws, some of which do indeed coincide with those of animal evolution, but others of which are peculiar to sociology in the same sense as the laws of chemistry are distinct from those of physics.

Sociology is accordingly revolting from its bondage to biology: the plain fact that society is not an animal is beginning to make itself felt. The resemblances between the organisation of society and that of an animal are freely admitted, but the differences are beginning to claim consideration also; and the sound doctrine is beginning to a.s.sert itself that by experience alone, experience of what is, and not by any _a priori_ dogmatism as to what in the name of science must be, can we tell how far the resemblances extend as a matter of fact and where the differences begin. That the evolution theory must be the gainer by thus admitting the facts instead of denying their existence is clear; if sociology is not a branch of biology, and yet the two sciences have certain laws in common, a great step is at once taken towards demonstrating the existence of certain general principles of evolution which are higher than the laws of either, or perhaps than of any, particular science.

The tendency of the scientific theories prevailing for the moment to deny the existence of what they cannot, for the moment, account for, is exemplified in another way by the theory of the survival of the fittest.

It was shown by Darwin that, granted the tendency to variation in animals, the struggle for existence was enough in its results--as he had the genius to discern them--to account for the origin of species. The struggle for existence is a fact, and thus animal evolution was based on what is, on positive fact. To apply the same process of argument to human and social evolution was perfectly scientific and legitimate. What is neither scientific nor legitimate is to maintain, explicitly or implicitly, that the totality of human activity is engaged and exhausted in the struggle for existence. Self-preservation is undoubtedly a powerful instinct, but it is not the only instinct even of animals, and is not always the most powerful in man--or in the brute.

That there are resemblances between man and his fellow-creatures, the brutes, and that so far as those resemblances extend, man and the animals have been, and are, subject to the same laws of evolutions, are facts which may be heartily admitted, but which neither authorise us to deny the existence of specifically human peculiarities, nor warrant us in trying to deduce the differences from a law which applies only to the resemblances. If the evolution theory is to state the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is, it must begin by facing the whole of the facts--in this case by admitting that not only have the fittest to survive survived, as is natural in a struggle for existence, but that progress, aesthetic, ethical, and religious, has been made.

The denial of this fact may either be open and avowed, as, for instance, when the reality of the religious ideal is formally denounced; or it may be tacit and implied, as, for instance, when moral progress is defined as adaptation to environment, _i.e._ as not progress at all, or when the freedom of the will is denied, _i.e._ when approximation to the ethical ideal is maintained to be a thing not under our control. Tacit or avowed, this denial proceeds upon the fallacy that the laws of science, as understood and formulated at any particular moment, are the sole test and const.i.tute our only knowledge of what is. But the interests both of the common sense of mankind and that specially organised form of common sense which we know as science require a protest against that fallacy: it is opposed to the principle on which scientific knowledge rests, and it would be fatal, if acted upon, to all further development of that knowledge.

The principle upon which science rests is that its laws are capable of verification, and that they are verified when and if they are confirmed by experience. The final appeal of science is to the evidence of consciousness, the only evidence of what is that we possess: the only evidence of the truth and accuracy with which an eclipse has been calculated is the evidence of our senses that the eclipse does take place and is visible in the place and at the time predicted. If a hypothesis predicts results which as a matter of observation do not take place, the hypothesis is judged so far inaccurate or inadequate: what is over-rides our preconceived opinions, even if they be the hypotheses of science, as to what ought to be or will be. It is the ever-open appeal to the final court of fact, of what is, that condemns false a.s.sumptions, guarantees the truth of science, and safeguards the freedom of scientific inquiry. To allow any group of men, however eminent, or any body of science, however sound, to deprive us of this right of appeal and bid us disbelieve in the evidence of our own senses, if it contradicts their theories, would be to submit to the tyranny of dogmatism, and to be faithless to the cause of truth.

Fortunately, though the unconscious and therefore ill-considered metaphysics of some men of science have tended in the direction of scientific dogmatism, the practice of science has been in the opposite direction. In practice science has owed much of her progress to the study of "residual phenomena." Phenomena which the laws of science for the moment could not account for have not been denounced as illusions, or ruled out of court as non-existent or beneath the notice of science: they have been accepted as facts, as part of the totality of things which it is the ambition of science to account for; and, accepted as such, they have led, it may be, to the discovery of a new planet or a new element, but always to the discovery of fresh truths, which never would have enriched the page of science had science refused to take cognisance of facts the laws of which it had not at the time discovered.

In demanding, then, that any theory which professes to account for the totality of things should recognise the fact of ethical and aesthetic progress, and that all progress is willed and purposed, we are seeking not to cramp science but to enlarge its bounds, not to introduce a new scientific method, but to extend the application of existing methods, and to carry out the principle on which the truth of science and the freedom of scientific inquiry are based. The laws which enable the physicist to explain the mechanical action and reaction of things do not suffice to explain the reactions studied by the chemist. The laws of chemistry are inadequate for the purposes of the biologist. It is but an extension of the same principle when the student of the anthropological sciences finds it necessary to a.s.sume, or rather discovers, that the laws of animal existence do not wholly account for everything that man does; and it is to these sciences that we must look for the next important and fruitful modification of the general theory of evolution.

It is to them, dealing as they do with the highest product of evolution, that we must look for the truest interpretation of evolution. On the principle that to understand what a thing is we must not reduce it to its lowest terms, but look at it in its highest manifestation, we must judge the evolution process by its highest phase, by all that it is capable of, and not by the least we can, by scientific abstraction, leave in it. And the sciences which, merely to maintain their scientific existence, have a vital interest in insisting on the reality of will and purpose as causes which have influenced the direction of the evolution process are the sciences which deal with man.

Those who find it easy to believe that a society is an animal, like those who proclaim that the real is unknowable, but that our knowledge of it is just as good as if it were not unknowable, will have little difficulty in believing that men's actions are not influenced by their purposes; and both will probably subscribe to the doctrine that, first, approximation to the ideal is an unintended result of the brute struggle for mere animal existence; and, next, the purpose which appears to mark the evolution process and to be the cause of progress is semblance only, a mere illusion. Against the first article of this doctrine the final and decisive appeal is and always must be to experience. It makes a general statement with regard to particular facts of experience: like every other statement made in the form of a scientific law, it affirms that a certain proposition will be found, when tested by experience, to be true of every one of a certain cla.s.s of facts in our experience. It is therefore competent for every man, who chooses to consult his experience, to decide for himself whether the statement is true. In the present case, it is for every man, who has struggled with temptation and has achieved any progress, to say whether he gained the victory without an effort of will, without any desire for better things, without any purpose or resolution to try once more, without any intention not to yield the next time. Are "secret commissions" in trade refused, when refused, unintentionally? or is their refusal due solely to the blind instinct of self-preservation in the struggle for commercial existence?

If reform is effected, will it be effected by those who declare that the severity of the struggle for existence makes reform impossible? or by those in whom the ideal of honesty has some operative force and who purpose approximation to that ideal? When the conviction is expressed that public opinion alone will be able to check this form of dishonesty, what is that but an appeal to the common sense and common faith that there are other things which man can will and purpose besides success in the struggle for existence?

The doctrine that the universe presents the mere semblance of purpose, that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is shared by materialistic systems in common with all those which consider that the only explanation that can be rendered of any given state of things is the a.s.sumption that it is the issue of some antecedent necessity which produced it. As we have already argued, the a.s.sumption of necessity as the ultimate explanation of things breaks down when we come to consider the beginning of the universe. If we a.s.sume an absolute beginning, then there can have been no necessity antecedent to that, and the beginning of things is left without explanation. On the other hand, to say that there never was any beginning is to admit that there never was any original necessity why things should follow the course of evolution which they have pursued--the initial collocation of causes was due to chance, was a purely fortuitous concurrence of atoms. When it is remarked that this is a strange a.s.sumption, that really, if the whole evolution process had been designed to reach the stage in which we know it and to attain the ideal which we surmise it to be capable of, the primeval atoms could not have been arranged better for the purpose, the reply is that the appearance of purpose is a delusion: true, as a matter of chance, the chances are millions to one against a fortuitous concurrence of atoms producing the evolution process that has taken place, but then the chances were just as great, neither more nor less, against any other of the millions of evolution processes that might have been evolved. We know the one that has taken place, and it is marvellous in our eyes that precisely this and no other should have occurred; but the wonder vanishes when we reflect that, had any other occurred, we should have been equally convinced, and equally erroneously convinced, that it could not have been produced by chance. The initial arrangement of things was, as it happened, such as to produce our evolution process: things might have chanced differently at the beginning; if they had, a different evolution process would have taken place, that is all. But it would still have looked like purpose, and would still have been due to chance.

But would it? The whole question is whether the initial collocation was due to chance or to purpose. To say that there might have been many other collocations proves nothing: an Almighty Power could collocate things in any of an infinite number of ways. To argue that every possible collocation, and therefore the one that produced our evolution process, must be due to chance, is simply to beg the question: the very thing we want to know is whether this or any other process could be due to chance. The argument that any and every other process would equally testify to purpose and equally imply design, seems rather to indicate that no conceivable evolution process could conceivably be due to chance.

Next, the necessitarian argument lays it down that the marvel of evolution vanishes when we reflect that if things had been different at the beginning, the results would have been different. But they were not.

And the fact that they were not is just the marvel which the necessitarian does not even explain away: in order to diminish the probability of purpose, he postulates countless possible alternatives to the original arrangement of atoms, and then he is embarra.s.sed with the difficulty of getting rid of them. Why was this particular collocation determined on rather than one of the countless alternatives? To say it was chance may be true; but we want to know what reason there is for believing it to be true. If there is none, then neither is there any reason for believing the purpose that makes the evolution process to be an illusion.

But let us grant it was chance: chance, as everyone knows, is merely a name for our ignorance as to the real cause; so that to say it was due to chance is to say that, for anything we know to the contrary, the original concurrence of atoms may have been due to purpose. In a word, there is, on the theory of chance, no reason to believe that purpose either is or is not an illusion.

It may, however, be said that not only do we not know, but that we cannot know, whether it is an illusion or not. In reply we may either admit that all our knowledge--scientific, moral, and religious--is based not on knowledge, but on faith; or we may ask on what grounds this alleged impossibility is based. If we put that question, we shall find that the grounds are not altogether cogent. It is alleged to be equally impossible for the human mind to conceive either the existence or the non-existence of a necessity antecedent to the absolute beginning of things: therefore, in face of this inherent incapacity of the human mind, the truth about the beginning of things is unknowable and inconceivable. But, we venture to suggest, this alleged incapacity of the human mind rests on a false ant.i.thesis: it rests on the a.s.sumption that whatever phase of the evolution process we regard as the initial arrangement must either have been determined by some prior phase (in which case it was not initial) or not determined at all. But as a mere matter of logic, there remains the possibility that it may have been self-determined; and, as regards the evidence of experience, we are familiar with a cause which operates every day and which is self-determined, viz. the free will. There is, therefore, no such inherent incapacity in the human mind as is alleged; and the only inconceivability is that which is inherent in the theory of antecedent necessity, and not in the facts themselves. It is simply incorrect to say that if things cannot be explained by the theory of antecedent necessity, they are not capable of being explained at all. If the evolution process had been designed to follow the course it has followed, the initial arrangement of things could not have been better adapted to produce the result; and, as adaptation of means to end is the mark of intelligence, it is neither inconceivable nor irrational to suppose that purpose was immanent in things from the beginning.

But as it is scientific to argue from the known to the unknown, or from the better known to the less known; and as to know fully what a thing is we must know what it is capable of becoming or producing, let us pa.s.s from the pre-animal to the animal stage of evolution. It is the more necessary to do this because it was Darwin's theory of the origin of species which impressed upon the modern mind the idea that Nature mimics purpose, having none. Man, with the purpose of breeding a certain type of animal, selects those animals to breed from which possess, in the most marked degree, the characteristics which he wishes to develop in the offspring. But, as Darwin demonstrated, Nature, or the environment, by killing off those creatures which did not possess (or least possessed) the qualities necessary to ensure survival, "selects" animals of a certain type to breed from. Thus "natural selection" produces its results in the same way as human selection does; and presents every appearance of purpose, though the environment which produced the results could have had no intentions or purpose at all. But just as man does not create the animals which he first selects to breed from, so the environment does not create those sports or varieties which it selects to breed from: if they did not exist, neither man nor Nature could breed from them--no results, purposed or unpurposed, could be got from them.

If now we inquire about these sports, we are told science is content with the fact that they undeniably occur: wherever there are animals there are varieties in their offspring. That those which are adapted to survive will survive, and those which are not will not, is a self-evident, indeed an identical, proposition. It is; and it gives away the whole case against purpose, for it admits that some varieties are originally adapted to survive, that without them neither man nor the environment would have anything to begin on or work on, and that though man and Nature may develop, they do not create the original adaptation.

They do but promote, by conscious or unconscious action, the purpose immanent in the sport. Of all the numerous, successive, imperceptible increments by which what was originally a sport is raised to a distinct species, not one is created by man or by the environment: all are the "gratuitous offerings" of the organism, manifestations of the organism's spontaneity, revelations of its latent capacities, fulfilments of the purpose immanent in it from the beginning.

If it be said that the survival of any or every given species was a matter of chance, because other sports would have developed into other species, if the environment had been different, the reply again is, But it was not; and, on the theory of necessity, could not be. The fact that both conditions--the organism's spontaneity and the environment's selective agency--were requisite to the production of the new species, and that both conditions were forthcoming, tells rather in favour of purpose than against it. The fact that this particular combination of conditions was effected, rather than any other, is on exactly the same footing as the initial concurrence of atoms: if the latter cannot be ascribed to any necessity antecedent to it, neither can the former; the reason of the combination is to be sought in the self-determining cause immanent in the conditions. The fact, if it be a fact, that countless other combinations were possible, and this alone was chosen, shows that the will immanent in the evolution process is free will.

In fine, Darwin has shown that the action of the environment is exactly what it would have been had it been designed for the purpose of selecting certain sports for development. All that is further necessary in order to show that this apparent purpose is an illusion, is to prove that the environment was not designed to act as it does. Pending the production of that proof, the argument remains incomplete.

The larger part of the process of evolution is known to us only from the outside: we observe its effects in the animal world and in inorganic nature, but its inner workings we have to reach by inference. One part of the evolution process, however, we know from the inside--that part which is carried on through us. We are some of the innumerable channels through which the motive force of the process is transmitted; and the knowledge which its transmission through us gives us is more intimate and direct than that which we get from observing the external effects it produces elsewhere. The evolution of society, for instance, is a part of the general process of evolution, and is a process which is carried on through us and expresses the resultant of the totality of our sentiments and actions towards one another. What light, then, if any, is thrown by sociology on the general question of purpose?

Mr. Herbert Spencer has familiarised us with the lesson that in politics and social experiments it is the unforeseen and unintended results of legislation which are far the most important, and that the industrial organisation of the country, or we may now say of the world, is not the fulfilment of any design preconceived by any governmental agency, but the unintended result of innumerable actions on the part of men who never dreamed that their action would have any such outcome. The reason of this is to be sought in the fact that society is an organism and that its growth follows the same laws as those which regulate the structural development of an amba or a rhizopod. Thus, both society and the animal organism must be fed. To be fed, both must appropriate nutriment from the environment. That nutriment must be taken up and must be distributed to all parts of the organism, social or animal, if all parts are to be fed--and all must be fed, because all are mutually dependent, and to neglect one would disorganise the whole. Channels of communication must be established between all parts, in order that food may be conveyed from the organ which took it from the environment to the organs which require it for support. What marks the process of evolution in both cases is the increasing division of labour and the increasing interdependence of the parts on one another. The animal organism, like the social organism, is made up of a mult.i.tude of living units, each one of which is continually adjusting itself to the requirements of all the rest. The increasing complexity in the structure of an animal organism is possible only because the living units of one part take upon themselves new functions, or devote themselves exclusively to one function, in order to benefit the units of a distant part. If they purposed or were purposed to produce that result, they could not behave differently or better. But this appearance of purpose is mere semblance: the minute cells of an animal organism have no intention of producing even a rhizopod or an amba. The explanation of this mimicry of purpose lies in the fact of the mutual interdependence of the parts: no change can take place in one organ of society or of the animal without being transmitted through the whole, just as you cannot remove one of the undermost of a cartload of bricks without more or less disturbing all the rest. But what is true of the bricks or of the units of the animal organism is true of the units of the social organism: what we discover in their action and reaction on one another is the operation, not of voluntary purpose, but of invariable laws of cause and effect.

According to this argument, then, the living units of the animal organism resemble in their action those of the social organism sufficiently to warrant us in arguing from the one to the other, and in concluding that there is purpose in the action of neither. But it is obvious that, if the resemblance is great enough to justify us in arguing from the animal to the social organism, it also opens the way for the argument to travel the return journey, from the social organism to the animal, and to reach the conclusion that there is purpose in both. Let us therefore consider what each of these two opposite conclusions requires us to believe.

On the one hand, before accepting the argument that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism because there is none in that of the animal, we must prove that there is none in that of the animal. But that, as we have already urged, is exactly what has not been proved: the utmost that science claims to prove is that the units of the animal organism do behave in a certain way. That way is exactly the way in which they would behave if they were designed to do so; and science leaves it, so far, a perfectly open question whether they were or were not so designed. The argument, therefore, that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism, because none in the animal, breaks down at the threshold. Yet it is on the unproved and unprovable a.s.sertion that the appearance of purpose in the animal organism cannot possibly be due to design, and must therefore be a delusion, that we are expected to deny the evidence of our own experience and consciousness and to believe that we, the units of the social organism, have no purpose in the daily acts by which we extend trade or discharge our social functions.

Thus the surmise that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is a conjecture which, so far as it is applied to the pre-human stages of the evolution process, simply plays upon our ignorance; and which, when applied to that part of the evolution process which is carried on through us, we know to be absurd. On the other hand, if there is such similarity between the laws of the one part of the process and the laws of the other part, it must be as allowable to argue from the part and the laws which we do know to the part and the laws that we do not know, as it is to explain the known by what is confessedly unknown. In other words, if the evolution of the social organism is known to be due to purpose, then it is a reasonable inference that animal evolution, which, we are told, follows the same line and laws, is due also to purpose--and if not to any purpose entertained by the cells of the animal organism, then to that of a Will of which their action is the expression.

It is, however, maintained that the continuous social changes which const.i.tute the evolution of society, so far from being the result of the purpose of any individual or of any government, are frequently the very opposite of what was intended by the authors of the changes, and always are notoriously beyond our power to forecast. But the fact that my plans are modified or diverted by my successors or by my coadjutors does not prove that there was no purpose in my plans, or that there was none in the modifications introduced by my successors. And the total result of our united action and purposes may be something different from what any of us individually intended and yet express a common purpose, which is shown by the result to have been more or less present to all of us. A cathedral begun in the Norman style may have taken generations to build and may end in Gothic; and it will express the ideas common to the several builders, in much the same way that a composite photograph reproduces most distinctly the features in which all the persons photographed coincide, and other features more or less distinctly according to the extent to which they are shared in common by the different subjects. Or, to express the effect of the successive actions of succeeding generations, we may borrow an ill.u.s.tration from the game of chess. It is possible for five players to play, taking it in turns to move, so that every player makes one move out of five, and plays alternately for White and Black. The result, with good players, is a brilliant and well-developed game, which is not the game as purposed or intended by any one of the five players, but as continually modified and improved by each every time that he took it up. When, then, we reflect how many players in the game of life there are even in a small society, we can well understand that, though each has his own way of serving the common purpose, none can forecast the result.

Perhaps it will be said that the chess-players have a common purpose, and the players in life's game have none. The reply is that science a.s.sumes they have; science a.s.sumes that they play to win in the struggle for existence; and only on the a.s.sumption that men have common purposes is it possible to frame any scientific account of their actions. The science of Political Economy a.s.sumes that it is a common purpose of men to acquire wealth, and that their actions are determined by that purpose. It then goes on to show that if that is their purpose, then the conditions under which it can be and is effected are of a certain kind, _e.g._ men must buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. It is not necessary to a.s.sume, nor does Political Economy a.s.sume, that man can only purpose to acquire wealth, or that he must under all circ.u.mstances do so. In the same way it is wholly unscientific in sociology to a.s.sume that success in the struggle for existence is either a thing that man must aim at, or the only thing that he can aim at: the soldier dies for his country, the martyr for his faith. The inst.i.tutions of a nation--legal, political, social, and religious--express the predominant purposes for which successive generations of the community have laboured; and the evolution of mankind is the history of the various degrees of success with which men have realised the ideals which they have purposed to attain. The successive reforms by which progress has been effected have all been purposed, and have all been purposed by men who believed, rightly or wrongly, that in so doing they were serving G.o.d and their fellow-men, and that the ideals of truth, justice, equality, fraternity, love, compa.s.sion, and mercy express G.o.d's will and the Divine purpose.

If, then, the outcome of the pre-human period of evolution has been, as a matter of fact, and amongst other things, such as to prepare the earth for man's habitation and to provide him with a mechanism, physiological and psychological, such that he can use it, if he will, to promote what he considers to be progress and advance, it is not unreasonable for him to regard past phases of evolution as so many steps leading to the realisation of the ideals which he cherishes, in his best moments, as his highest purposes. The continuity of evolution and the unity of its process authorise or even compel him to use that part of the process which is carried on through him as a means to interpret the rest. As, in the game of chess played by five players, each player inherits from his predecessor the game as it stands, and carries on, with improvements or modifications, the scheme which he inherits, so in life each player in turn becomes conscious of the ideals which he too may, or may not, as he wills, carry one step nearer to their goal. It is in the continuity with which these ideals are transmitted through one consciousness after another that the continuity of human evolution consists. We are, or may be if we choose, particles in the medium by which a purpose not our own (save inasmuch as we choose to make it so) is carried onwards to its destination. The medium through which progress has travelled in the past is Nature; the medium through which it is now travelling is human nature. By us the ideal, as it is transmitted through our consciousness, is recognised as implying the presence in us of a purpose higher than our own. Whether in the medium of Nature there is any dim consciousness of the progress towards which the changes in Nature conspire, we know not. But the uniformity of Nature and human nature requires us to see in those natural changes the operation of the same power travelling in the same direction as it does through us. In its pa.s.sage through us it is made known to us as the object of our highest aspirations; the ideal of purity, of holiness, and love; the G.o.d for whom the human heart, mistakenly or not, has always sought, and never sought in vain.

XIV.

CONCLUSION

The Pessimistic interpretation of evolution has taught us the lesson that, if we start without belief in the Divine government of the world, study of the process of evolution will not lead us to discern any Divine purpose in the process. Belief in religion cannot begin without faith in G.o.d to start with, just as belief in science or in morality is based not on evidence, but on faith. The question remains whether with faith we can believe that the process of evolution is a revelation of Divine love, and whether man's environment has been evolved in such a way as to promote in him that love of his fellow-man and G.o.d which is the religious ideal.

If we look at the structure of society, we see it is based on the fact that man has certain needs--of food, shelter, and clothing, etc.--which can be satisfied more effectually by co-operation and division of labour than by isolated, individual action. The man who earns his own living does so by rendering services for which he is paid: he cannot benefit himself without benefiting others to some extent. That is the law under which he lives, a law not of his own making, nor always to his own liking, but a law inherent in the nature of things, and part of the purpose, if purpose there be, in the scheme of things. As a free agent, man may co-operate with his fellows and take his share of the divided labour, or not, as he wills; but those peoples which have carried the principles of co-operation and organisation furthest have fared best.

They have availed themselves of the opportunity offered them, and have survived. The failure of the rest to do likewise has not impeded the fulfilment of the Divine purpose that men should help one another. On the contrary, those who decline to help one another voluntarily place themselves at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, and are slowly, but surely, crowded out by those who fulfil the Divine purpose less unsatisfactorily, and in consequence tend to inherit the earth.

We have already seen that when a man reaches years of discretion he finds that the physiological and psychological mechanism of which he is now in possession, and for the management of which he is henceforth responsible, has a tendency to run in certain grooves: he has, as a child, been taught and has inherited an apt.i.tude to think and act in certain ways. The same remark applies to the social organism. Before or when the individual awakes to the fact that he is a member of a society, he has already been or is the child of parents to whom he renders obedience, and between whom and himself there exist relations of affection. The evolution of man as a purely animal organism has been such that he begins life with a prolonged period of helpless infancy.

Unlike the lower animals, which very soon after birth are capable of providing for themselves, he is for years dependent on others. His prolonged infancy is a prolonged period of plasticity, during which he is moulded into a member, first of a family and then and thereby into a member of society. All the higher animals give their offspring some education, an education as good as they received themselves: in the human race alone do parents give their children a better education than they got themselves. It is, however, not the rising generation alone who benefit by the long period of dependence and plasticity which characterises childhood. It is, of course, true that labour expended on the perfecting of tools and machinery is peculiarly productive, inasmuch as the increased efficiency of the instrument more than repays the greater outlay. But as the workman who produces the tool becomes in consequence of his labour a more skilled mechanic, so the education given by the parent to the child is an education not only of the child, but of the parent, and makes both better fitted to be members of society. It not only secures that subordination of the younger men to the elder, which is necessary for the stability of society and the permanence of the tribe, but it also tempers power with responsibility, responsibility not to some external authority, but to the higher principle within the man.

Thus even in the earliest stage of society the anti-social forces of selfishness and the pa.s.sions do not operate _in vacuo_ and with nothing to impede them. Society at the very beginning is no _tabula rasa_: the field is already largely occupied, and the direction of social evolution already largely determined, by that affection between parents and children without which neither society as a whole nor the individual as a unit could come into being or continue to exist. It is an unwarrantable libel, even on savage society, to say that in it the ape and tiger predominate in man: the lowest forms of society survive only so far as there exists more humanity than brutality in the dealings of their members with one another. It is a false philosophy of evolution, not a true acquaintance with the facts of anthropology, which rashly a.s.sumes that the morally lowest must have been the only primitive elements in the evolution of humanity. The evil and the good in man have existed side by side from the beginning; unselfish affection, as well as selfish desires, has always been part of the equipment of human nature, though the evolution of the former may be a longer and more difficult process, both in the individual and the race, than the evolution of the latter.

In the race moral progress may be expected with much more confidence than it can in the case of the individual. The mere existence of a society, however simple in structure, is of itself proof that the anti-social forces of selfishness and pa.s.sion are in it less strong than the instincts of neighbourliness and mutual help. Of competing societies those eventually triumph which are least weakened by internal dissension--that is to say, those societies tend to thrive and extend most of which the members are most ready to subordinate their private ends to the public good. Ultimately it is only by the development of this type of individual character that a society can achieve success; and it is this type of character that the compet.i.tion between nations develops. But essential as it is to the survival of a society, it is by no means so essential to the survival of the individual in his struggle for existence against other individuals. If, then, society were simply a collection of warring atoms, or if the individual's whole activity were expended in struggling with his neighbour and trying to elbow him out, the type of character essential to the survival of society could never be developed, and society itself could neither come into being nor continue to be. The fact is that men not only compete, but co-operate: society is, and from the beginning has been, an organisation requiring from each of its parts some subordination to the interests of the whole.

As the organisation of society grows more complex, the individual becomes less and less capable of existing independently of society, society becomes more and more independent of the services of any individual member, and both these facts tend to foster the social and weaken the anti-social forces in man. Increasing division and subdivision of labour specialises the function of each member of the community more and more, and so deprives him of the general apt.i.tude for doing all kinds of work which is essential to every man who is, as for instance in a new colony, thrown largely on his own resources. Thus the solitary existence which might be just possible for the outcast from a savage tribe becomes a practical impossibility for the average member of any community that has risen above that stage of social evolution. At the same time the point is reached when no one man is indispensable to the community. Society is made up of units so similar to one another that any one can be replaced by some other, and, as a matter of fact, the place of everyone is at death filled by some successor.

The theory of a social contract, as a historical or prehistorical event in the development of any community, has long been rightly discredited: at no time did a number of men, living solitary lives, have a public meeting and formally contract to live together on certain conditions and for certain ends. Man has been a gregarious, if not social, animal from the beginning. Nevertheless, man has certain needs, desires, and ends which can only be satisfied by means of social organisation, and which are quite as potent in holding society together as if, instead of being tacitly at work, they had been proclaimed aloud in a formal social contract. If through any disease the social organism obstructs, or fails to a.s.sist in realising, those ends, the dissatisfaction of the individual and the danger to the state are just as great as if a formal contract had been violated: the disappointment of the normal and reasonable expectations of the members of the community is substantially injustice, and is not altogether erroneously stated to be a violation of the common and tacit understanding on which society is in fact if not formally established. Co-operation in labour does imply some sort of engagement, expressed or understood, that the joint product shall be divided more or less fairly between the joint producers. Unfairness in the distribution of social benefits may be of slow growth, but must eventually result in undisguised resentment--appeal is made openly and consciously to justice, which henceforth becomes the ideal of a section at least of the community, and is recognised as a condition without which a healthy social existence is impossible.

It is thus a monstrous perversion of the plain facts to represent the struggle for existence as having been the sole or the main factor in social evolution: every member of a community is born into an atmosphere of co-operation and maintains his existence by the co-operation of others. If he must labour to live, he cannot labour for himself without at the same time rendering service to others; the very same conditions which make him desire justice for himself constrain him to maintain justice for the community at large. The social environment is, and has always been, such as to lead man in the paths of justice and to train him for the service of his fellow-man. The units which const.i.tute the social environment are men, beings whose physical, mental, and moral structure is the result of a long process of evolution stretching back to beyond the beginnings of life upon this earth, a process which, a.s.suming it to have had purpose, was designed to include in its effects a creature capable of justice and of love.

The full development of the sentiment of justice has been the work of many centuries. At first, when the community is small and nomad, the idea that a stranger has a right to justice is incomprehensible. Even when with the growth of civilisation provision is made for according foreign merchants and others some protection from the law, the idea that the stranger has the same right to justice as the citizen is neither admitted by law nor entertained as a speculation. Indeed, the law, modest though it be, may be in advance of public opinion and of the practice of officials--witness the extortions practised by Roman governors on the Roman provinces. Eventually, however, public opinion outstrips the law and p.r.o.nounces that even the colour of a man's skin cannot bar his claims to justice, and that the inhabitants of a country, though they be aborigines, have some rights in it. Finally comes philosophy and p.r.o.nounces justice, absolute and stern, the one thing needful, the one and only duty which it is within the sphere and function of government to maintain.

Unfortunately for the philosophy which maintains this view, it happens that, just when the authority of justice is admitted by the conscience of civilisation to be paramount, justice as an ideal is recognised to be neither capable of realisation nor absolutely desirable. It is obvious that in the best-regulated even of free communities the amount of justice which can be secured by the action of the law and the intervention of the State falls very far short of the ideal; and the multiplication of laws and State inquisitors, which would be necessary if every form of injustice and wrong-doing were to be punished by the State, would be a remedy, if indeed it were a remedy, worse than the disease. It is impossible to pretend to believe that wealth is distributed according to merit in any existing community, or that any governmental system, even if designed solely with that end in view, could ever determine what a man's merits were, or what his reward should be. Nor is the ill distribution of wealth the only factor of injustice, though it is the only factor with which the State could make pretence to deal: sickness and sorrow, grief and pain--nay, the very capacity for suffering and for joy--are dealt to different men in very different measure. It is plain matter of fact that earthly goods and pleasures are not distributed according to merit; and it is just when man's conquest of Nature has become most complete, when society is no longer struggling for a bare subsistence, when the demand for justice is most fully and unreservedly admitted, that the impossibility of meeting the demand and the danger of failing to meet it become most manifest. The poverty which accompanies progress may in one generation be less than it was in the previous generation, but the extremes of poverty and wealth grow daily wider apart, and the number of those who are poor increases in a growing population much more rapidly than the number of the rich. The danger which this rent in the social fabric threatens to the whole structure of society may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. The mere justice of individualism which has. .h.i.therto sufficed to hold society together, suffices now no longer. The justice which limits itself to the fulfilment of those actions to the non-performance of which a legal penalty is attached, is not the one and only thing needful, nor does its force remedy the numerous cases of undeserved misfortune and suffering which the working of our social and industrial system entails. What heals the suffering and saves it from becoming a festering sore that might prove fatal to society, is that love of man for his fellow-man, which is manifested to the poor by the rich to some extent, but chiefly by the poor. The State can only prescribe and enforce external acts of justice; and the external acts which it prescribes are not the bond which holds or can hold society together. The State, in its attempts to modify society through the individual, is as clumsy as the breeder or the gardener in dealing with animals and plants, and must fain be content if it can modify some of the more prominent external characteristics. Nature is much more searching, and, if slower, much more thorough: the real nature of her work, the true character of the force on which she has made the cohesion of society to depend, becomes obvious at the time when the insufficiency of mere justice for the purpose becomes apparent. Imperfect though man's obedience has been to the commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," it is to his obedience that society owes its maintenance.

As a matter of fact, then, strict justice is not and cannot be realised in this world. Even the forces of the social environment which are, to a large extent, under man's own control are not and cannot be so directed by him as to secure rewards and punishments in exact proportion to merit and demerit; while the action of those natural forces which distribute fortune and misfortune, pain and the susceptibility to pain, pleasure and the capacity of enjoyment, is still less under his control and, as far as we can see, is still less proportionate to desert. The fields of the unjust benefit as much as those of the just by the rain from heaven; the labourers who enter the vineyard of civilisation at a late hour receive as great a reward as their predecessors who bore the heat and burden of the day, or even greater; when a tower in our social fabric falls, it is not the guilty who are alone or even specially involved in its ruin. From the time of Theognis, at least, men have inquired with despair how the G.o.ds could expect wors.h.i.+p when they suffered these things to be; and as long as we look upon life as though we were detached spectators, with no care for it save a disinterested desire to see justice done, it is easy for us to declaim upon the absolute indifference of the cosmic process to man and his deserts. But this detached att.i.tude is purely artificial, and we could not make even the semblance of long maintaining it, did we not unconsciously glide into the more natural, but less warrantable, position of tacitly a.s.suming that our own personal lot would be improved if strict justice were done. But is not our resentment against the injustice of the world partly premature and somewhat shallow and short-sighted? Are we sure we want strict justice? Are we so anxious to have our merits weighed? are they so imposing? Can we pray that we may be rewarded after our iniquities? If society could by some supernatural power deal strict justice to all its members, who _would_, who _could_ live in it? As a matter of fact--to say it once more--it is not by law alone that society lives, but by love, by the long-patient love of father or mother, of wife or husband, of friend or neighbour, which every one of us has accepted and none has fully requited. Our very hospitals are open to all who need them, to those whose suffering is due to their own negligence, or even crime, and not merely to those whose pain is undeserved. A palpable injustice, worthy of the cosmic process itself! And what excuse, if justice, absolute and relentless, be our highest and worthiest aspiration, can there be for appropriating the reward of honest toil to the often fruitless task of offering to those, who have by their own vice sunk into the depths, one last chance of life and of redemption? The mercy which falleth, like the gentle rain from heaven, alike upon the unjust and the just, must be judged by the same standard that we apply to the cosmic process. We may, like the elder brother of the prodigal son, refuse to see anything in man or Nature but a world given up to gross injustice--persons so superior as to stand in no need of forgiveness and no fear of judgment are able doubtless to judge the world and their fellow-man. But the prodigal himself may, perchance, better understand some of the workings of his father's heart, and trust he sees in the apparent injustice of Nature more instances of that mercy which would not have showed itself to him had justice measured love.

It seems, then, that the "ethical process" and the "cosmic process" are not so absolutely opposed to one another as Professor Huxley endeavoured to make out. Both at times act with a calm disregard of justice. In the one case we know that it is a higher principle which takes the place of justice; and it is a reasonable conjecture that the ethical process, which is one outcome or manifestation of the cosmic process, does but reproduce, in this case as in others, the action of the cosmic force which operates through the heart of man as well as through the rest of the universe. It is at any rate inconsistent to condemn the cosmos for exhibiting that quality of mercy which we rank highest amongst the attributes of man: if we take credit to our fellow-men for that quality, in fairness let us give the cosmos the same credit when it displays the same quality. If, as we a.s.sume in this chapter, there is purpose in evolution, let us admit that there is some presumption that it is a purpose of love and of mercy.

As it is by faith in science that men of science succeed in solving problems which, for a time, seem beyond the powers of science to deal with, so it is on faith in religion that the religious explanation of the universe depends for its slow but sure extension. With that faith we may succeed in seeing, to some slight extent, that the unequal distribution of pain, as well as of earthly prosperity, is not incompatible with a Divine purpose in evolution. For that faith we must believe that the suffering and sorrow from which none of us is exempt are not evil, unless we choose to make them so, but opportunities for good. Indeed, without that faith we seem forced upon the same conclusion: the man who devotes himself, his soul, his life to the relief of the needy and the suffering cannot make earthly prosperity his chief good, though, as Professor Huxley has said, he may attain something much better. But if we hold that there is something better than earthly prosperity, can we consistently declaim against sickness and sorrow as the worst of evils, or indict a universe because they are not unknown in it? The Stoicism which lent Professor Huxley the strength to teach that man must to the end declare defiance and resistance to the cosmos--resistance unavailing and defiance doomed to certain failure in the end--might also have taught him that the evil which he calls on us to war against is not in the cosmos; that the enemy of the ethical process has his headquarters not in Nature, but in the heart of man.

Pain and sorrow are evil to the sufferer who allows them to make him selfish, and to the spectator who chooses to be callous to his suffering. If our volitions do count for something in the course of things, if we are so far free that we can, in response to Professor Huxley's call, doggedly and repeatedly resist the cosmic process, then it is of our own free will, also, that we do evil when the opportunity of good is offered us. Yet we charge the evil upon the cosmos.