Chapter 2

To this it may be added that, under the influence of Christianity, man goes a step further and says: "I will endeavour that as many others as may be shall live, and live happy, healthy lives, and shall not untimely die." The law of Natural Selection could not be met by more direct opposition. I have said that this is under the influence of Christianity, yet the impulse seems to be older than that, to be part of that moral law which excited Kant's admiration, which he coupled with the sight of the starry heavens, an impulse, we can scarcely doubt, implanted in the heart of man by God Himself. It is a remarkable fact that in many--some would say most--of the less civilised races of mankind we find these social virtues, which some would have us believe are degenerate features foisted on to the race by an enervating superstition.

Dr. Marett has carefully examined into this matter, and his conclusions are of the greatest interest.[16]

"My own theory about the peasant, as I know him, and about people of lowly culture in general so far as I have learnt to know about them, is that the ethics of amity belong to their natural and normal mood, whereas the ethics of enmity, being but 'as the shadow of a passing fear,' are relatively accidental. Thus to the thesis that human charity is a by-product, I retort squarely with the counter-thesis that human hatred is a by-product. The brute that lurks in our common human nature will break bounds sometimes; but I believe that whenever man, be he savage or civilised, is at home to himself, his pleasure and pride is to play the good neighbour. It may be urged by way of objection that I overestimate the amenities, whether economic or ethical, of the primitive state; that a hard life is bound to produce a hard man. I am afraid that the psychological necessity of the alleged correlation is by no means evident to me. Surely the hard-working individual can find plenty of scope for his energies without needing, let us say, to beat his wife. Nor are the hard-working peoples of the earth especially notorious for their inhumanity. Thus the Eskimo, whose life is one long fight against the cold, has the warmest of hearts. Mr. Stefanson says of his newly discovered 'Blonde Eskimo,' a people still living in the stone age: 'They are the equals of the best of our own race in good breeding, kindness, and the substantial virtues.'[17] Or again, heat instead of cold may drive man to the utmost limit of his natural affections. In the deserts of Central Australia, where the native is ever threatened by a scarcity of food, his constant preoccupation is not how to prey on his companions. Rather he unites with them in guilds and brotherhoods, so that they may feast together in the spirit, sustaining themselves with the common hope and mutual suggestion of better luck to come. But there is no need to go so far afield for one's proofs. I appeal to those who have made it their business to be intimate with the folk of our own countryside. Is it not the fact that unselfishness in regard to the sharing of the necessaries of life is characteristic of those who find them most difficult to come by? The poor are by no means the least 'rich towards God.' At any rate, if poverty sometimes hardens, wealth, especially sudden wealth, can harden too, causing arrogance, boastfulness, and the bullying temper. 'A proud look, a lying tongue, and the shedding of innocent blood'--these go together."

On the whole, then, we may perhaps conclude that the natural bias of mankind is towards kindness to his neighbour, however much the brute in him may sometimes impel him to uncharitable words or actions. And certainly this natural bias is intensified and made into a binding law by the teachings of Christ. But there is the other point of view set forward in the philosophy of Nietzsche--if indeed such writings are worthy of the name philosophy. "The world is for the superman. Dominancy within the human kind must be secured at all costs. As for the old values, they are all wrong. Christian humility is a slavish virtue; so is Christian charity. Such values have become 'denaturalised.' They are the by-product of certain primitive activities, which were intended by Nature to subserve strictly biological ends, but have somehow escaped from Nature's control and run riot on their own account."

The prophets of this group of ideals, or some such group of ideals, have no hesitation in telling us how they would direct the affairs of humanity if they were entrusted with their conduct. It will not be without interest to consider their plans and to endeavour to form some sort of an idea of what kind of place the world would be if they had their way. We can then form our own opinion as to whether a world conducted on such lines would be in any way a tolerable place for human existence.

First of all we may dwell briefly on Natural Selection as a rule of life, since it has been put forward as such by quite a number of persons. Never, let it at once be said, by the great and gentle-hearted originator of that theory, who during his life had to protest as to the ignorant and exaggerated ideas which were expressed about it and who, were he now alive, would certainly be shocked at the teachings which are supposed to follow from his theory and the dire results which they have produced.[18]

In the first place such a doctrine leads directly to the conclusion that war, instead of being the curse and disaster which all reasonable people, not to say all Christians, feel it to be, is, as Bernhardi puts it, "a biological necessity, a regulative element in the life of mankind that cannot be dispensed with." It is "the basis of all healthy development." "Struggle is not merely the destructive but the life-giving principle. The law of the strong holds good everywhere. Those forms survive which are able to secure for themselves the most favourable conditions. The weaker succumb." Humanity has had at times evidences of the results of this teaching which are not, one may fairly say, of a kind to commend themselves to any person possessed of a moderately kindly, not to say of a Christian, disposition. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we have the opportunity of studying the experiment in actual operation in a race which, of course in entire ignorance of the fact, is actually putting into practice the teachings of Natural Selection, though it must be admitted that the practice has not been successful, nor does it look like being successful, in raising that race above the very lowest rung of the ladder of civilisation. Captain Whiffen[19] has given a very complete and a very interesting account of the peoples whom he met with during his wanderings in the regions indicated by the title of his book. And he tells us that "the survival of the most fit is the very real and the very stern rule of life in the Amazonian forests. From birth to death it rules the Indians' life and philosophy. To help to preserve the unfit would often be to prejudice the chances of the fit. There are no arm-chair sentimentalists to oppose this very practical consideration. The Indian judges it by his standard of common sense: why live a life that has ceased to be worth living when there is no bugbear of a hell to make one cling to the most miserable of existences rather than risk greater misery?" Let us now see the kind of life which the author, freed himself no doubt from "the bugbear of hell," considers eminently sensible--the kind of life of which only an "arm-chair sentimentalist" would disapprove; a kind of life, it may be added, which will appear to most ordinarily minded people as being one of selfishness raised to its highest power.

To begin with the earliest event in life. If a child, on its appearance in the world, appears to be in any way defective, its mother quietly kills it and deposits its body in the forest. If the mother dies in childbirth the child, unless someone takes pity on it and adopts it, is killed by the father, who, it may be presumed, is indisposed to take the trouble, perhaps indeed incapable of doing so, of rearing the motherless babe. That the child, in any case, immediately after birth, is plunged into cold water, is not perhaps a conscious method of eliminating the weak, though it must operate in that direction. At a later period of life should any disease believed to be infectious break out in a tribe, "those attacked by it are immediately left, even by their closest relatives, the house is abandoned, and possibly even burnt. Such derelict houses are no uncommon sight in the forest, grimly desolate mementoes of possible tragedies." When a person becomes insane, he is first of all exorcised by the medicine man, and if that fails is put to death by poison by the same functionary. The sick are dealt with on similar lines, unless there is or seems to be a probability of speedy recovery. "Cases of chronic illness meet with no sympathy from the Indians. A man who cannot hunt or fight is regarded as useless, he is merely a burden on the community." Under these circumstances he is either left at home untended or hunted out into the bush to die, or his end is accelerated by the medicine man. The same fate awaits the aged, unless they seem to be of value to the tribe on account of their wisdom and experience.

All these things placed together give us a perfect picture of life under Natural Selection, and having studied it we may fairly ask whether such a rule of life is one under which any one of us would like to live. In every respect it is the antipodes of the Christian rule of life, and of that rule of life which civilised countries, whether in fact Christian or not, have derived from Christianity and still practise. The non-Christian rule of the Indians is one under which might is right and no real individual liberty exists, all personal rights being sacrificed to the supposed needs and benefit of the community.

So much from the point of view of Natural Selection, but it would appear that those who have given up that factor as of anything but a very minor value, if even that, have also their rule of life founded on their interpretation of Nature. Thus Professor Bateson, the great exponent of Mendel's doctrines, who has told us in his Presidential Address to the British Association that we must think much less highly of Natural Selection than some would have us do, has, as has been set forth in the previous section of this essay, his opinion as to the rule of life which we should follow.

Professor Conklyn, an American enthusiast for extreme eugenistic views, has also set down in print his ideas as to the lines on which our lives are to be run under a scientific domination, and these are to be dealt with in another article.[20] His scheme entails a forcible visit, not, it may be supposed, to the Altar, but to the Registry Office, for all persons held to be fit to perpetuate the race, and forcible restraint, whether by imprisonment or by sterilisation, for all others.

The first thing which all these essays towards a scientific conduct of life reveal is a total want of perspective, for they proceed on the hypothesis--which no doubt their authors would defend--that this world and its concerns are everything, and that the intellectual and physical improvement of the human race by any measures, however harsh, is the "one thing needful." But beyond this the persons who hold such views seem to have entirely overlooked the fact that their proposed State would be one conducted on principles of the bitterest and most galling slavery imaginable by the mind of man, a form of slavery that never could persist if for a moment it be conceded that it could ever come into operation. The fact is that the whole thing is ludicrous when looked at from the point of view of common sense, but how few take the trouble to contemplate these schemes as they would be in operation! Were they thus to contemplate them, they would see that, apart altogether from any religious considerations, they are wholly impossible, even from a purely political point of view. That such ideas are intolerable to Catholic minds, indeed to any Christian mind, goes without saying.

Driesch (_Science and Philosophy of the Organism_, vol. ii., p. 358) has pointed out very clearly that "the mechanical theory of life is incompatible with morality," and that it is impossible to feel "morally" towards other individuals if one knows that they are machines and nothing more. Again, Professor Henslow (in _Present Day Rationalism Critically Examined_, p. 253) very pertinently asks those who discard all religious considerations and claim to rely for guidance on the lessons of Nature, "If you have no taste for virtue, why be virtuous at all, so long as you do not violate the laws of the land?"

Yet, in the face of these surely obvious facts, we find persons making such absurd claims as that made in a recent book by Rignano, an Italian writer (_Essays in Scientific Synthesis_, 1917). It is not often that one meets a book so full of philosophical fallacies as this. "We are certain of one fact," he says, "that the only organ actually brought into play to fight immorality is the organ of the collective conscience and not the religious organ." I suppose no more ludicrously inaccurate remark ever was set down in print; for, to begin with, the "collective conscience," whatever that may be, does not exist in Nature, _teste_ the farmyard and the fowl-run; and again, whatever force is connoted by those words must have been set agoing--by what? By Nature? Oh, most emphatically No! Nature has no law against immorality; there is no Categorical Imperative in Nature commanding us to be chaste or kindly or considerate or even just. We must go elsewhere if we are to look for teaching in the virtues. That is the fact that we must keep clearly before our minds when endeavouring to estimate at their proper value the nostrums of writers such as those with whose works we have been dealing.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Two addresses were delivered in 1914--one in Melbourne, the other in Sydney. These will be referred to in this article as M. & S.]

[Footnote 2: Sir Oliver Lodge: _Continuity_, p. 90.]

[Footnote 3: _Materials for the Study of Variation_, London, 1894.]

[Footnote 4: _The History and Theory of Vitalism_, p. 140.]

[Footnote 5: _Unconscious Memory._ Fifield. 1910.]

[Footnote 6: Those who desire further information may be referred to _A Century of Scientific Thought_, by the present writer. Burns & Oates.]

[Footnote 7: _Op. cit._, pp. 137-8.]

[Footnote 8: _The Philosophy of Biology_, p. 64.]

[Footnote 9: In an article in the volume _Darwin and Modern Science_, p. 100.]

[Footnote 10: _Op. cit._, p. 319.]

[Footnote 11: _Op. cit._, pp. 238-9.]

[Footnote 12: See the discussion on this subject in Wasmann's _The Problem of Evolution_.]

[Footnote 13: R. R. Marett, Presidential Address to Folk-Lore Society, 1915. _Folk-Lore_, vol. xxvii., pp. 1-14.]

[Footnote 14: _The Kingdom of Man._ London: Constable & Co. 1907.]

[Footnote 15: Lankester, _op. cit._, p. 26.]

[Footnote 16: _Op. cit._, pp. 21-27.]

[Footnote 17: _My Life with the Eskimo_ (1913), p. 188.]

[Footnote 18: For a discussion of this question, see _Bernhardi and Creation_, by Sir James Crichton-Browne, F.R.S. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons. 1916.]

[Footnote 19: _The Northwest Amazons._ London: Constable & Co. 1915.]

[Footnote 20: _Science and the War_, p. 120.]

II. THEOPHOBIA AND NEMESIS

§ 1. THEOPHOBIA: ITS CAUSE

_Initium sapientiæ timor Domini_; no doubt, but such fear is only the beginning, and is not the kind of fear--which also exists--a fear which engenders an actual revulsion against the idea of God.

It is to this kind of fear which the eminent Jesuit writer Wasmann alludes when he says that "in many scientific circles there is an absolute _Theophobia_, a dread of the Creator. I can only regret this," he continues, "because I believe that it is due chiefly to a defective knowledge of Christian philosophy and theology."

That he is entirely right as to the existence of this feeling there can be no doubt; no one can read at all widely in scientific literature without becoming aware of it. Contrary to all the tenets of science there is even a bias against any such idea as that of a Creator, though science is supposed to confront all problems without bias of any kind. I need not cite instances of this feeling; I have dealt with it elsewhere. We may take it for granted, and proceed to look for an explanation for the phenomenon. Wasmann attributes it to ignorance, and he is, I feel sure, right; but let us examine the matter a little more closely. Why should persons--even if ignorant--have the bias which some obviously present against the idea of a God? Why should they wish to think that there is no such Being, no future existence, nothing higher than Nature? Some persons maintain that precedent to a denial of God there must be a moral failure. That I am sure is quite wrong. I should be far from saying that in some materialists there is not a considerable weakening of moral fibre, or perhaps it would be better put, a distortion of moral vision, as evidenced by many of the statements and proposals of eugenists, for example, and by the political nostrums of some who wrest science to a purpose for which it was not intended. This no doubt is true, but it is not quite the argument with which I am now dealing, and that argument, if it implies moral failure in the persons concerned, has little if any genuine foundation in fact. Mr. Devas, in that very remarkable book, _The Key to the World's Progress_, gives us the useful phrase "post-Christians." These people are really pagans living in the Christian era, retaining many of the excellent qualities which they owe neither to Nature nor to paganism, but to the inheritance--perhaps involuntary and unrecognised--of the influences of Christianity. Many of these people are kind, benevolent, scrupulously moral. They have not learned to be such from Nature, for Nature teaches no such lessons. Nor have they learnt them from paganism, for these are not pagan virtues. They are an inheritance from Christianity. Those, therefore, who build arguments as to the needlessness of religion on the foundation that persons without any belief in God do exhibit all the moral virtues, build on sand. At any rate the answer to the question which we are discussing is not to be found in this direction.

Others again will perhaps maintain the thesis that fashion has a great deal to do with this. It is not fashionable to believe in God, or at least it was not. It was highly fashionable to call oneself an agnostic; perhaps it is not quite so much the vogue now as it was. No doubt there is something in this, though not very much. It is much easier to go with the tide than against it, and there are scientific tides as truly as there are tides in the fashion of dress. There was a Weismann tide, now nearly at dead water; there was an anti-vitalistic tide, now ebbing fast. When these were in full flow it was a hazardous thing for a young man who had to make his own way in the scientific world to swim against either or both of them. Fashions change, and fashion is not so set against the idea of a God as it was. The materialistic tide is "going out," and we shall see that there is some truth in the view which holds that the incoming tide is largely that of occultism, a thing disliked and despised--and indeed with some reason--by the materialistic school even more than it dislikes and despises theistic opinions.

Fashion, however, is not in any way a complete answer to the question we are proposing to ourselves, nor is the unquestionable fact that scientific men have a strong objection to putting their trust in anything which cannot be subjected either to scientific examination or to experiment. In this attitude there is more than a germ of truth. "Occam's razor" is as valuable an implement to-day as it ever was, and everyone will admit that we must exhaust all known causes before we proceed to postulate a new one.

We have gone beyond the day of the absurd statement that thought (which is of course unextended) is as much a secretion of the brain as bile (which, equally of course, is extended) is of the liver. No one nowadays would commit himself to such a statement, and men in general would be chary of urging that we should not believe anything which we cannot understand. I have myself heard a distinguished man of science of his day--he is dead this quarter of a century--make that statement in public, wholly ignoring the fact that any branch of science which we may pursue will supply us with a hundred problems we can neither understand nor explain, yet the factors of which we are bound to admit. But there is undoubtedly a dislike to accepting anything which cannot be proved by scientific means, and a tendency to describe as "mysticism"--a terrible and damning term to apply to anything, so its employers think!--any explanation which postulates something more in the universe than operations of a physical and chemical character.

My own opinion is that the state of things which we are considering finds its explanation in history, and I propose to devote a short space to developing this view. Of course we might, and in some ways should, go back to the Reformation and to the destruction of religion which then took place. Let us, however, pass from that period to a time some hundred and fifty years ago and commence our investigations there, and in carrying them out I propose to make considerable use of the novels of different periods.

It is a truism that very little but the dry bones of history can be learnt from histories.

Nowadays people are sick of reading about more or less immoral monarchs, and more or less corrupt politicians, and it may be suspected that most of us have had our bellyful of wars now that the recent contest has come to an end. What one really wants to learn from history is how the ordinary folk, like ourselves, were getting on; what their ideas were; how the world wagged for them. Such information we are much more likely to get from memoirs and, since such works have been published, from novels. The novelist is not to be supposed to be committed to acceptance of all the remarks put into the mouths of his characters, but, if he is of the second, not to say the first flight (and, if he is not, he is not worth quoting), his characters and the general tone of his book will not be out of touch with the times to which they belong. Since the novel came into existence as something more than an occasional rarity, it is the novelists and not the players who are "the abstract and brief chronicles of the times," and it is to them that we shall apply for some of the information we desire.