Part 15

If we turn from the human to the pre-human period of evolution, the first immediate fact which strikes us is that there has been throughout the animal kingdom an evolution of mind, which has resulted in providing man with the psychological apparatus necessary for conceiving, and, to some extent, realising the ideal. When we reached the age of reflection, we woke up to find that our psychological mechanism had been running for some years in certain grooves. We now find that its direction can be traced back by evolution to the beginnings of animal consciousness. If, however, we believe that the evolution of mind, animal and human, has been a process of progress, we do so not on the ground that mind has been evolved, but that its evolution has been in the direction of those ideals, approximation to which is believed by us to be progress. Similarly, if the pre-animal period of the earth's evolution is shown by science to have resulted in fitting the earth to be the home of animal life, we judge that evolution to have been progress, not because it prepared the world eventually for man, but because it is seen to have been part of the process by which the ideal is in course of realisation, by which the Divine purpose is in the course of being fulfilled.

The only value that we can assign to the pre-human period of evolution is that which attaches to it as a means to an end; but though we believe that by striving after the ideals revealed to us we are labouring towards that end, and though everything that makes for the ideal contributes to the end, yet we do not know the Divine purpose, and we cannot say in what manifold other ways the pre-human period may have subserved that purpose. It is sufficient if we can trace the steps by which this one portion, the only portion known to us, of the whole design has been carried forward. This reflection is one which it is necessary to bear in mind when considering the alleged wastefulness of the process of evolution and the price at which progress has been purchased.

The theory of evolution, as a purely scientific theory, _i.e._ as an objective statement of what actually has taken place on the earth in the past, shows that the various species of animals which have survived were--so long as they did survive--the only species which could survive under the conditions which then prevailed; given the conditions, their survival was necessary and inevitable. There the scientific explanation of the matter ends: having shown the causes which produced the effect in question, science has explained everything that it undertook to explain. Had the conditions been different, the present state of the world, doubtless, would have been different; but being what they were they produced that which is, and there is an end of the matter--as far as it is a matter for scientific investigation.

What we are to think of the survivors--whether we are to admire them; whether we are to consider their survival an advance and an improvement; whether anything has been gained by their survival, and, if so, from what point of view the gain is a gain--are questions which science excludes, because, however answered, they do not affect the scientific fact that these species did survive, and, under the conditions, alone could survive.

But we all take it for granted and as self-evident that man is not only better adapted, under existing conditions, to survive and flourish at the cost and to the extinction of other species, but that he is better than the brute, that his survival is an advance, that his is a higher type, and that his existence realises a higher ideal than that of the brutes. We believe this not merely because we are men, and as such rate our own comforts, our own interests, our own skins as the most important things known to us, for there are things for which men sacrifice their own interests and for which they have laid down their lives. It is precisely because there are things more important than our own material and animal existence, and because they are or may be realised by man and not by the animals, by the ideal man and not by the brute man, that we consider him to be worth more than many sparrows--though they too have their value in His eyes--and man's existence to be of a higher type than theirs.

Thus, then, when science--which, if it is truly scientific, makes no distinction of value, moral or spiritual, between man and the sparrow--has explained that a given species which did survive was the only species that could have survived under the conditions, there still remains the problem, for those to whom it is a problem, Why should the species which was bound to survive also happen to be a species of a higher type? Why have the survivors always happened to be both better adapted to survive and better adapted to further the ideal which the course of evolution reveals with increasing clearness?

In fine, science explains only a part, not the whole of the effect of evolution. It concentrates its attention on one part or aspect of the effect, on the survival of the fittest, and explains very simply and satisfactorily that the environment kills off the creatures which are not fit to cope with it, while the fittest to contend with it survive. The fact that the survivors not only are best adapted to the environment, but are also best adapted to bring the whole creation one step nearer to those distant ideals in expectation of which it groaneth and travaileth, is that part of the effect which science, for scientific purposes, rightly ignores. Science does not undertake to estimate the value of the effect produced, or even to consider whether when produced it has any value.

But when the question is raised as to the cost at which the process of evolution is carried on, it becomes necessary to bring into the account the value of the result attained or to be attained. Possibly, creation that groaned in her travail may rejoice that a man-child has been born. But so much depends on what her child grows into. And he has free will. We have the power now and here to dash her expectations to the ground.

The value of a thing to me is exactly what I am prepared to give or do for it. I have no other way of estimating the value of the ideals for which creation has laboured in the past, than by asking myself how far I am prepared to go for the love of truth, of fellow-beings, and of God. If I am prepared to give everything, and then count myself the gainer, then indeed I may know that the cost of evolution has not been greater than the value of the ideal: I know the highest price, and I know the feelings of those who pay it. And they are the only persons who can judge the value of the article, for they are the only people who get it. The fact, however, that they do get it, that they get it in full, and every man according to the measure with which he metes it, contains the answer to our question. What is true now was true of earlier generations and earlier men: the value of the ideal to every man was exactly what he gave for it. It is the realisation of the ideal by me that is my reward, though my object may be its realisation by others. But it is absurd to say that their gain is my loss, or that their progress has been made at my expense.

These considerations apply only of course to those men who have sacrificed themselves for the sake of progress and the love of their fellow-man. Most men, however, do not sacrifice themselves much; and therefore they can hardly be brought out as martyrs to the cause of progress, as the millions who have perished by the wayside in the march of evolution.

It is not until we introduce the element of material progress that it becomes possible to maintain with any plausibility that there is a divergency of interests between the contributors to it, or that they who sowed have been sacrificed to us who reap. It is when we compare the shivering savage with our sheltered civilisation, primitive man's struggle for existence with civilised man's enjoyment of existence, that we begin to be anxious about the cost of evolution--that is to say, that our little faith in the value of the ideal begins to torment us. In our unreadiness to sacrifice ourselves we forget that it is possible for civilised man also to make sacrifices--perhaps the greater because he has the more to forego--and that the savage has his tribal traditions, embodying his ideal of a good man, to live up to; his tribal customs, which he may violate with self-reproach, or fulfil with satisfaction; his conceptions of the truth about man's relations to the past, the world, and the supernatural. The savage also has his ideal, which he sets above his pleasure, and for which he faces pain in many a cruel rite. Shall we say that its realisation is no reward to him? or that in realising it he does not as faithfully contribute his mite to the fulfilment of the Divine purpose as we? We make too much of our superiority. We make, also, too little of the savage's enjoyment of existence. Take the lowest savages known to us, the native tribes of Central Australia, and turn to the most recent and the best accounts of their manner of life; and it is certain that their existence is enjoyed by them. Is ours without exception enjoyed by us?

If it is easy to be led by sentimentalism into mistakes about what our fellow-man thinks of the question whether life is worth living, it is still easier to be misled with regard to our fellow-creatures lower in the scale. Here all is conjecture, and it is on this uncertain ground that rests the charge brought against Nature of waste and cruelty. There is the cruelty with which, in order to secure the survival of the few and fittest, the environment kills off the many who are unfit--an argument of great force, if the survivors were immortal. There is the waste of bringing into life thousands of creatures unfit, and therefore doomed to a speedy extinction. But death is the common lot; and as for waste and failure, if the short-lived creatures fulfil their purpose, they are not failures; and if their purpose is by competition to force the development of the potentially fit, then they fulfil their purpose. A man may be entered for a race for no other purpose than to force the pace. As for happiness, wild animals, to judge by their usual fit condition and by the evidence of sportsmen, do enjoy existence. But they, at any rate, have no ideals--whatever the savage may have. Yet it is conceivable that the bird that builds its nest finds some satisfaction in doing so, and that the animal that lays down her life to save her young ones has some sense of love. What is revealed as the ideal in man may be inchoately manifested as instinct in the undeveloped consciousness of the animal. If so, then the animal's life has independent value and is not merely valuable as a means to a distant future end.

To sum up: science declines to take the teleological view of Nature, or to admit final causes or ends. To speak, therefore, of survival in the struggle for existence as an end, may be excellent sense, but it is unscientific: it implies an assumption of a kind about which science is agnostic. If we do, however, make this one deviation from agnosticism, we have then no difficulty in showing that evolution is a failure, for its end is survival, and we all die; and there is no compensation, or, if there is, posterity gets it, not we--an aggravation of the original injustice.

If survival in the struggle for existence is the only end that we personally recognise in the conduct of our own lives, we are quite consistent in judging it to be the only end of other lives, and in condemning the Universe, for then there is neither goodness nor any wisdom in it.

On the other hand, our faith in that wisdom and goodness is not genuine so long as we are prepared to stake only our arguments on it, and not our lives.

XIII.

EVOLUTION AS PURPOSE

Evolution, as a scientific theory, is a description of the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is. The method employed is that of science, and proceeds upon the assumption of the uniformity of Nature and the universality of the law of causation. The existence of a thing is proof that the conditions necessary to produce it preceded it. Thus from what is we infer with certainty what has been: the occurrence of Z is proof that Y preceded, and so from Y we can infer X, and so on, to the beginning of the alphabet. Eventually, that is, we are carried back, in theory at least, to an initial arrangement of things which not only gave birth to the actual order of evolution, but was such that no other order of events could have followed from it. Were it possible, in fact, to get back to this original collocation of causes and to formulate it, the formula would explain the universe as it is and has been, the totality of things.

Unfortunately the formula, though it would explain everything else, would not explain itself, and would therefore, so far, fail to explain anything. Or, to put it in other words, though certain causes, collocated in the proper way, would, on this view of evolution, explain everything which ensued from that collocation, we should still want to know why the causes were collocated in that particular way rather than in any other. To say that that collocation was not the outcome of a previous collocation is really to say that there was originally no antecedent necessity why this or any other order of evolution should take place at all; that Z hangs on Y, Y on X ... and A on nothing at all; that the formula which is to render all things intelligible is itself unmeaning. Or, if we say that things had no beginning--matter and force being indestructible--then there is no initial collocation, that is to say, no formula, even in theory, to explain all things: we cannot even imagine the process of evolution to be intelligible.

The latter seems to be preferred by science as the final result of scientific knowledge: the object of science is to demonstrate, not why, but that things happen in a certain way; and it is admitted, or rather insisted upon, _e.g._ by J. S. Mill, that if scientific knowledge were carried to its utmost conceivable or inconceivable perfection, the question why anything should happen or does happen would remain as great a mystery as ever, and must remain so, for the simple reason that it is a question which science does not even put, much less attempt to answer. Nevertheless, it is said, science does prove what she undertakes to show, viz. that things do happen in certain ways, which ways when formulated appear as laws of science. That, however, is not strictly the case if science, in order to prove her conclusions, has to postulate that each and every state of things is the outcome of some antecedent necessity. Ultimately the postulate proves untrue; for there can have been no necessity antecedent to the initial arrangement of things. And if the postulate be untrue, the conclusions based on it cannot be accepted as certain. If we cannot tell whether it be true or not, neither can we tell whether science be true or not. If it is unintelligible, no wonder that things, as explained by it, are mysterious.

But let us waive these theoretical objections. Does Science, as a matter of fact, prove that things do happen in the ways she describes? In justice to her, let us remember that she does not undertake to do even that. Her laws only state the way in which things tend to happen, not the way in which they actually do happen; only what would happen if there were no counteracting causes and if certain conditions, which do not prevail, did prevail--not what does really happen in the world as we know it. Herein the scientific reason behaves in exactly the same way as the moral or religious reason. Science no more alleges that all bodies in motion do move for ever in the same straight line, at the same rate, than the moral reason alleges that all men always do what is right or that they always do God's will. The allegation is that the tendency exists and can be discerned by those qualified to form an opinion on the matter. That there is friction retarding the movement, and that there are obstacles diverting it, is admitted; and, though the admission does not affect the truth (in one way) of the laws of science, it does allow that they convey no exact or faithful picture of what actually happens in the world as it is.

But if the laws of science do not explain what happens--even in the limited sense of scientific explanation--they are the indispensable preliminary to that explanation. If they do not represent the world as it is, they supply the means by which we may hereafter produce the picture. They are ideals not in the sense that science hopes to show eventually that feathers only appear to float leisurely to the ground, and are really all the time falling sixteen feet in a second, but in the sense that starting from the gravitation formula we could show that every feather's fall is as rationally comprehensible as the gravitation formula itself. They are not the ultimate truth, the final reality, or Science's supreme ideal. They are shadows cast by the scientific ideal before its coming; they are the principles by which science must proceed, if she is to make the world of things intelligible. So, too, the reality of the moral ideal does not imply that, in refusing to make sacrifices for others, I only appear to be selfish, and shall be found in the end really to have been actuated all the time by some high moral principle. What is implied is that only by the acceptance of the moral ideal can the world of men be moralised. From the same point of view it seems hopeless to try to make out that atheism, though not in appearance, will be found in reality to have been a manifestation of religion. It is by accepting, not by denying the religious ideal or doubting its existence, that the ideal of religion is achieved.

Now, in the theory of evolution we have the attempt made to effect this transition from the abstractions of science to the concrete facts, to show that the world as presented to sense is as intelligible and rationally comprehensible as the laws of science themselves, and that the hypothetical statements of science were but preliminary, though necessary preliminaries, to a categorical statement of actual facts. In evolution, as indeed in all the historical sciences, we abandon the elasticity and the uncertainty of conditional conceptions for the rigidity and certainty of accomplished fact. We no longer deal with what may happen if given conditions are realised, but with what has been, and therefore is subject to no "ifs." We start from the certainty of what is, and thus we argue back positively to what must have been.

There is, however, one precaution which must be observed, and without which the whole of the system just described is as uncertain and conditional as the rest of science. Before we can argue from what is to what has been, we must first know for certain what is. Before we can conclude that a patient has been healed by faith or cured miraculously of an incurable complaint, we must first have medical evidence to show that he had the disease. Or, to take a better and closer illustration from medicine, it is premature to assign a cause for a patient's condition before his condition has been diagnosed; and physicians who differ in their diagnosis will naturally differ as to the causes in the patient's past history which are responsible for his state.

If, then, the evolutionist is to attain accuracy in his description of the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is, he must first know what it is. Before we can trace the evolution of morality, for instance, we must make up our minds as to what it is. If we regard it as an illusion, we shall hold that it is subject to the same laws as other illusions, and we shall have no difficulty in showing that its evolution was a necessary consequence of those laws. Or, again, if we hold that religion is mere foolery or hysteria, we shall naturally infer a very different process for its evolution than if we feel it to be a permanent manifestation of the common consciousness in the same sense that morality is. A distinguished German mythologist, starting from the former diagnosis, has no difficulty in evolving primitive religion out of primitive drunkenness.

In fine, if we regard "what is" as giving the data by which we are to determine what has been, it is clear that to understand what has been we must properly appreciate what is. This is in accordance with the conclusion which we have reached previously that it is only by studying its effects that we can properly understand a cause. To judge a thing properly we must know the effects it is capable of producing: to know what a thing is we must observe what it becomes or what it is capable of becoming at its best. We cannot judge the value of the moral character or the moral ideal fairly if we take a low specimen to go by; nor if we knew nothing more of morality than what we could observe of its rudiments in the higher animals, should we know much about it. It is by its highest manifestations that we most correctly judge either morality or art, and it is only through them that we can be properly said even to understand what either art or morality is. So, too, taking the religious ideal as love of God and man, we must judge religion not by its imperfect manifestations in imperfect beings, but by its perfect revelation and realisation in Christ.

The case is not otherwise with science or evolution itself. From primitive times man has always used his knowledge (however imperfect) of what is as the basis of speculations as to what has been. It would, however, be absurd to take the puerile and barbarous cosmogonies of the savage as adequate expressions of the scientific ideal, or to imagine that it is from them that we can judge what science is. It is no less unreasonable to judge the theory of evolution by its present, passing phase. In the first place, there are facts in its history which show that it naturally started with a partial and one-sided view of the facts. In the next place, we must judge it not by what it may be at its worst, but by what it is capable of becoming at its best; and it is by the latter that we must decide what evolution truly is, not by the former.

At its worst the theory of evolution may require us to believe that the whole process of evolution is essentially irrational--being the outcome of unintelligent forces operating on reasonless matter--and that the theory of evolution, accordingly, if faithful to the facts, is as irrational as they; or, if rational, is a misleading account of the real universe in which we live and move and have our being.

On the other hand, the theory at its best may require us to believe that it reveals a universe run on rational principles, a real world perfectly intelligible to perfect reason, and partially intelligible even to beings who share but partially in the Divine reason that animates the whole.

Both theories, however, base themselves upon what is, and profess that their conclusions follow logically from it. If, then, they differ in their conclusions it is because they differ in their diagnosis of what is. Both admit the existence of faith; but one regards faith as a fact in the pathology of human reason, the other regards it as the normal mode of our common reason's operation. The latter, therefore, requires to postulate causes which will account for the correctness of the common faith of mankind; the latter, causes which have resulted in the common illusion of mankind.