Part 3
Adaptation to environment could only mean progress provided that the environment was uniformly such as to favour the survival of those alone who were ideally fit to survive. But it is not: instances are not uncommon in which organisms, having attained to a certain degree of complexity and heterogeneity of structure, subsequently, as a consequence of adapting themselves to their environment, lose it and revert to an earlier stage of development, relatively simple, homogeneous, and structureless. Such reversion or regressive metamorphosis is as much a part of the organism's evolution as its previous progressive metamorphosis; and progress and regress both are equally the result of adaptation to environment. Further, though reversion and regress may now be only occasional, it is certain that as the earth cools down they must become universal: the altered conditions of temperature, etc., will allow only the lower forms of life to survive, and will eventually extinguish even them.
As regards organic evolution in general, then, the struggle for existence and the action of the environment do not necessarily tend to result in progress. As regards the evolution of man in particular, Mr. Huxley went further and maintained that they were absolutely inimical to human progress, which has been effected, not because, but in spite of them, and is the result not of obeying the cosmic process, but of defying it.
The qualities which brought success in the struggle for existence to man as an animal were rapacity, greed, selfishness, and an absolute and cruel indifference to the wants and sufferings of others. On the gratification, at all cost to others, of his animal desires, his animal existence depended: it was the "ape and tiger" within him that made him victor in the struggle for existence; it was the environment that imposed this as the condition of success.
The qualities which make man a human being are tenderness, pity, mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, and love. It is in their growth--the "ethical process"--that human progress consists, and not in the ruthlessness by which the cosmic process effects the evolution of other organisms. These qualities--human and humane--do not make for success in the struggle for existence. They are not adapted to the environment provided by Nature. Their owners were not the fittest to survive, and consequently paid the penalty--physical destruction--as far as the cosmic process could exact it. If the struggle for existence and the action of the environment have not succeeded in keeping man down to the level of the brute, it is because man has deliberately set himself to oppose the cosmic process and the blind forces, knowing nothing of right and wrong, pity or love, by which it effects the evolution of the brute. The struggle for existence is fatal to the development of the qualities which are peculiarly characteristic of humanity, and man accordingly has suspended the struggle for existence. In place of warring with his fellow-man, he has begun to co-operate with him. He has learnt to some extent to postpone the gratification of his own wants to the satisfaction of those of others. He no longer destroys the weakly, the sick, the helpless, the useless, or even the criminal; and, if the environment threaten their destruction, he sets to work to alter the environment. Man no longer seeks to conquer Nature by obeying her: he studies her forces in order to command them to his will. Adaptation to environment is the implement by which she shapes human evolution to ends that are not his ends; he wrests the weapon from her hands, and by adaptation of the environment undoes her work, fosters the growth of those qualities which tend towards his ideal, and does away with the conditions which harbour ignorance and error, selfishness and sin.
Human progress, then, consists in perpetual approximation to the ideals of charity, love, and self-sacrifice. Life is exhibited as a struggle against evil, against the ape and tiger within us which we inherit from our ancestor--the brute. The evil is real, the struggle is hard but worthy, and not the less worthy because it is not directed to our personal happiness and gratification. "The practice of self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be something much better."[2]
Thus far this criticism of life, though stern, is not pessimistic. On the contrary, in it man seems to have recovered the freedom of action and the power of independent judgment which, as the mere product of the cosmic process, he could not enjoy according to the optimistic theory. If life is a struggle, at any rate man can fight the good fight, if he will; and he can judge for himself which is the higher, the adaptation to environment which puts man on a level with the ape and tiger, or the adaptation of environment which, for the sake of his ideals, sets him in conflict with the cosmic process.
It is when we proceed to conjecture the issue of the struggle, as thus stated, that pessimism begins to invade us. However valiantly man may fight, whatever temporary victories he may gain here or there, his defeat in the end is inevitable: the same cosmic forces which, working through him, have won him his trifling victories have preordained his ultimate destruction. As far as it is possible for science to forecast the future, it is certain that in the end man will fall a victim to his environment, and join the other extinct fauna of the earth. With him the ethical process ceases; with him perish the hopes, the aspirations, and the ideals for which he strove as being of greater worth than aught that evolution, the redistribution of matter and motion, could offer or produce.
If this were all, the picture would be sufficiently gloomy: man alone in the universe, surrounded by forces which act without regard to good or evil, without sympathy or heed for right or wrong, indeed, with the effect of impartially extinguishing both in the end. But it is not all. As the conditions grow more and more unfavourable to man's existence upon earth, as the margin of the means of subsistence contracts, and the presence of universal want increases, the ape and tiger in man will begin to assert themselves once more. In the face of starvation, the instinct of self-preservation will become imperious. Once more, as in the earliest days, man will live by rapacity, cruelty, and selfishness alone. Before man yields possession of the earth to the brutes, he will himself revert to brutishness. The puny barriers behind which man has for a moment sheltered himself from the action of the cosmic process, and nursed the feeble flame of those aspirations after higher things which distinguish him from the brute, must inevitably be swept away by the restless and relentless tide of insentient matter, perpetually redistributed by aimless motion, which constitutes the cosmic process.
The pity of it is that the process of evolution should require not merely man's physical destruction, but his moral destruction also; that the ruin of his body should be preceded by the ruin of his soul; that in his regressive metamorphosis he should be compelled, by the struggle for existence and the instinct of self-preservation, to play the traitor to one after another of his ideals of tenderness, of pity, and of love. The fittest to survive will be those who are most completely adapted to the altered environment, who are resolved to succeed in a struggle for existence in which success can be obtained by brutishness alone. The least fitted to the new conditions, and the first to perish therefore, will be those with whom self does not come first. With their destruction the competition between their less scrupulous survivors will become fiercer and still more cruel. And this process will be repeated again and again, each generation transmitting cunning and cruelty intensified to the next. Our great cities already breed men degraded below the level of the lowest savages known to us, but even they can give us but little idea of what the struggle for existence will yet produce from the ruins of civilisation in the course of the Evolution of Inhumanity.
While proclaiming that "the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle," and that at the best the ethical process can maintain itself only for a relatively short time, "until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet," Mr. Huxley held that our duty lay "not in imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it."[3] "Cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature," and though we know that the enemy's triumph must be complete, that the defeat of the good cause is preordained, that we and ours must be annihilated, we must remain at our posts, fighting to the end without hope.
It seems, then, that man possesses two kinds of knowledge: he knows to some extent what is, and to some extent he knows what ought to be. And both kinds of knowledge are equally valid. He judges that a thing is, and he judges also that a thing ought to be. Both judgments are equally true, but apparently both are not equally final, for if man judges that what is, ought not to be, he is impelled to alter what is, so that in the end the thing that ought to be is also the thing that is. The judgment of what ought to be, the ideal, is thus proved, or rather made, to be the finally correct one. On the other hand, if man is defeated in his attempts to adjust the things that are to his judgment of what they ought to be, he does not acquiesce in his defeat; he refuses to accept the result as final; the end of the matter is not there; things are not what he strove to make them, but they ought to be. What is has nothing to do with what ought to be. But what ought to be may make a good deal of difference to what is.
The ethical process, in its conflict with the cosmic process, may not in the end prove victorious; but that makes no difference to the fact that it ought to be victorious. It is this deep-seated conviction which made Mr. Huxley say that we must declare war to the last against cosmic nature, the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The victory of the enemy may be certain, but it will none the less be wrong; it may be permanent, but as long as it lasts it will be wrong. If matter and motion are eternal and indestructible, morality is equally everlasting and immutable. Unless this is so, unless the triumph of the cosmic process is wrong, once and always, why are we called upon to endure sorrow and pain and suffering rather than submit to it? Our judgment that it is wrong is as independent of time as is our judgment that particles of matter gravitate towards one another. We have no reason for believing that the latter will continue to be true for a longer time than the former. Indeed, if matter and motion, having achieved their victory over the ethical process, were then and there to be annihilated, their victory would continue to be wrong, though they had ceased to be. Right may triumph or wrong may triumph, but right is right and wrong is wrong for evermore. It is vain to tell us in the same breath that we must stake our all upon our moral judgments and that our moral judgments are not to be relied on. Every impeachment of their validity is an invitation to us to give up the struggle against the enemy of ethical nature. And if we are really resolved to fight the good fight and quit ourselves like men, we thereby affirm that our moral judgments are at least as valid as our judgments on matters of fact, and that, if our knowledge of what is is true objectively, our knowledge of what ought to be has in it at least an equal element of objective truth.
If, then, the cosmic process is real and objective, in so far as it is a perpetual manifestation of the Unknown Reality which underlies all things, then the ethical process, having the same reality and objectivity, is also a manifestation of the Unknowable. The perpetual redistribution of matter and motion is not the only way in which the Unknowable manifests itself to men: it also gives a shape to itself in the form of the highest and purest aspirations of which man is conscious within himself. It might seem, therefore, at first sight as though a mere dispassionate consideration of the actual facts of life, quite apart from any religious presuppositions or presumptions, forced us at last into the presence of a God, the source and author of all goodness. But, in the first place, those who hold to the dogma of Agnosticism, that what underlies things as they are known to us is the Unknowable, cannot admit that we know or can find out whether the Unknowable is good or bad. Induction, the logical method to which science owes so many of its discoveries, and by which we proceed from the known to the unknown, does not avail us here. No logical method could discover what is not merely unknown, but absolutely unknowable.
In the next place it is reasonable enough that those who begin by believing in a Divine Providence should also believe that right will triumph in the end, if not in the world as it is manifested to us now and here, in space and time, then in that real world, that kingdom of heaven, of which this world is but an imperfect manifestation, or to which it is but a distant and slowly moving approximation. For those, however, who refuse to assume the reality of a Divine Providence the case is different. They base themselves on facts of experience: they observe that to some small extent what ought to be tends to substitute itself for what is, thanks to the action of man exclusively, and not to any inherent tendency to good in cosmic nature, but rather in spite of the resistance to good caused by the necessary action of the mechanical laws of nature. From their observation of the conditions under which man has succeeded in modifying what is into what ought to be, they forecast the extent to which that process may be carried in the future; and their conclusion is that the process is doomed to eventual failure, is doomed not merely to cease, but to give way to a process in the opposite direction, by which what ought to be will be displaced by what ought not, by which ethical nature will succumb to cosmic nature.
Now, if there be no God, or if being Unknowable He must be eliminated from our words, thoughts, and deeds as a negligible and useless quantity for rational purposes, it is a natural enough conclusion that right must eventually succumb to wrong. It is but a reassertion of the familiar thesis that without religion morality cannot permanently be maintained. On this occasion, however, the thesis is advanced not as a piece of religious prejudice or theological insolence, but as the teaching of science and the inevitable outcome of evolution.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] HUXLEY, _Evolution and Ethics_, p. 44.
[2] HUXLEY, _Evolution and Ethics_, p. 44.
[3] _Evolution and Ethics_, pp. 31, 45, 83.
IV.
IDEALISM
The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly, what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be real. But whereas those losses are but personal, and possibly our regrets selfish, this loss is more than personal, and the regret not merely selfish. It is not merely that we personally have held a mistaken opinion, or that any self-sacrifice--miserably small and unworthy in the retrospect--that we have made has been made for a losing cause. It is that apart from our personal share in the matter, which rated at its true value is as naught, the thing is wrong; it ought not to be. Of that we are just as certain as that our past life has not been what it ought to have been, what it might have been. The past is past beyond recall, but for the future hitherto there has been hope and faith, faith that what ought to be may be, even for us, hope that it will be so. But now, in place of hope and faith, we have the scientific certainty that the future of humanity is devoted to the triumph of the thing that ought not to be. The only consolation left to us is the inextinguishable, the unconquerable conviction that right is right even though it should not prevail. To this conviction we must hold, though the heavens should fall. To it we must hold, though it bring, as bring it must, according to Mr. Huxley, sorrow and pain and the renunciation of our own happiness.
These are hard sayings. But there is a yet harder to be added to them. Even though it should involve the renunciation of our intellectual superiority to other people, we must hold to our conviction. If we are in earnest about our moral convictions, we shall reject any suggestion that they are not after all really true, even if that suggestion seems to afford the only way of escaping from the conclusion that faith in religion has the same basis in reason as faith in science.
In proclaiming our conviction that right is right, we affirm and intend to affirm that it is so not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. In the same way, an established scientific truth is not one of those matters about which reasonable persons, who are competent to judge, may reasonably hold different opinions: it is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact. Indeed, both kinds of truth, moral truths and scientific truths, are quite independent of individual and personal opinion. There are people in whose opinion the earth is flat; but the earth is not flat, nor can their opinion alter the fact. There was a time when all the laws of nature were unknown to man or misconceived by him; but they operated as usual, quite unaffected by his ideas. So there are people who consider successful roguery ideal, and who would make a fortune by promoting fraudulent companies, if they could; but honesty remains a duty, in spite of their ideas. Right is right, even though there be brutes in human form; and right was right, even when the ape and tiger ruled in man, and even though they were fine fellows, in their own opinion. Cruelty and selfishness never were right at any time, and never will be. The laws of morality, like the laws of science, are objectively true: they do not vary with the opinions men entertain about them; the earth, for instance, did not move or cease to move round the sun according as men imagined Galileo to be right or wrong, nor has right ceased to be right even when the world has been most depraved.
A moral judgment, then, like a scientific judgment, is objective, not subjective; it is not the expression of a mere opinion, but the statement of a fact which has an existence independent of man. If now we ask what sort of an existence it has, it is clear that what is and what ought to be have not in all cases the same kind of existence: the thing which is may sometimes also be the thing that ought to be, but often it is not. Now, when the latter is the case, when a thing is felt to be a crying evil, a foul injustice that calls for remedy, in what sense does the justice exist on which we call to drive out the injustice? The thing which ought not to be exists, and is in possession. The thing which ought to be delays its coming. Shall we say, then, that, while that is so, it exists indeed, but exists as an ideal, as something which we know ought to be and are resolved shall be? That it must present itself to some mind or other as an object of desire, and as a possibility capable of fulfilment, is certain. That it does so present itself to man is what we mean when we attribute to him the power of moral judgment and moral action. But when we speak of man's moral judgments as being objectively true, we imply that they exist not merely in his mind, but also elsewhere. But ideals can only exist in a mind; judgments can be pronounced only by a judge. When, therefore, we affirm that in objectivity and validity our moral judgments are on a par with our scientific judgments, and that our knowledge of what ought to be is as real and true as our knowledge of what is, that the existence of ethical nature, with its demands upon our reason, is a fact as indisputable as the existence of cosmic nature, we are implicitly affirming also the existence of a mind, other than human, from whose moral judgments the laws of morality derive their validity; and as those laws are eternal and immutable, as right is right always and from eternity to eternity, so must be the mind in which they are and from which they proceed.
To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. When the desire to amend our life is strong upon us, when we are most conscious of the heavy difference between actual amendment and amendment in idea alone, then we are most certain of the reality of the moral ideal as a fact, both of immediate consciousness at the moment and of permanent significance for us and for all men. To say that our moral convictions correspond to no real facts is simply to deny to them any validity at all. To say that the facts to which they correspond are real, but are purely subjective, being but moods, and often passing moods, of the individual, is merely to say that our moral convictions are illusions and right-doing only fancy. Nor do we mend matters if we add that all men are more or less subject to these moods, that right and wrong are purely human institutions; for if their value in the individual is naught, their existence in the multitude does but add to ciphers ciphers. On the other hand, if the moral ideal is no figment of man's imagination, if its existence does not come and go with his fitful moral struggles, then its permanent abode, the centre from which it manifests itself, must be in some permanent intelligence at the centre of things.