Chapter 18

Evolution may be considered both as an empirical fact and as an aetiological theory or philosophy. Considered as a fact, it is the statement of observed processes, and belongs to positive science like the observed courses of the planets, or any other observed regularities and uniformities. Science professes to have found everywhere as far as its experience has extended--in astronomy, geology, physiology, biology, psychology, ethics, sociology--a uniform process of change from the simple to the complex, from the indefinite and unstable to the stable and definite; and with this statement, so far as it can be verified, the positivist should rest content, seeking no theory, and drawing no generalization. But, the mind cannot hold together such collected facts without some binding theory, nor even observe a single fact without some preconception to give meaning to its suggested outlines: for what we really get from our senses bears but a slight ratio to what we fill in with our mind. Hence, answering to this supposed, but far from proven, universality of Evolution as a fact,[4] we have a certain philosophy of Evolution which takes us out of the sphere of facts into that of hypotheses and generalizations, and tries to give meaning and unity to the positive information that physical science has collected and classified; to finish, as it were, the suggested curves; to fill up the lacunae of observation; to extend to the whole world what is known of the part; and perhaps to erect into a cause what is only an orderly statement of facts. Undoubtedly it is this last fallacy that makes it more easy for evolutionists to dispense with or ignore finality. Law in its first sense is an expression of effectual human will. Call Evolution a law and the popular mind will soon vaguely conceive it as a rule or uniformity resulting from some kind of unconscious will-power at the back of everything; and this Will-Power stops the gap created in our thought by the exclusion of theism and finality. This confusion is furthered still more by not distinguishing between the cause of a fact and the cause of our knowledge of the fact. If I act in willing conformity with the civil law, I also act in obedience to it, in some way coerced by its authority and its sanctions. The law is really a cause of my action; because it represents the fixed will and effectual power of the ruler. But when this conception and name is transferred by analogy to physical uniformities of action, an event which conforms to the observed law or regularity of sequence, is not really caused by the law unless we suppose that law to be representative of something equivalent to a fixed will from which it originates. Yet we say loosely, such an event happens _in consequence of_ the law of attraction; meaning only, _in conformity with_ the law, so as to verify the law, to follow from it logically. Thus again the law comes to be mistaken for an effectual power of some kind, whereas it is merely a sort of regularity that might result either from an intelligent will or from something equivalent. But in thus adroitly slipping-in the conception of a governing force or tendency, or even in openly asserting it, with Schopenhauer or Hartmann, and in explaining the graduated resemblances of species by the origin of one from the other, and in extending this mode of Evolution in all directions from the known to the unknown so as to make it pervade the universe, we at once cease to be faithful positivists and, becoming philosophers, must submit to philosophic criticism, since these problems cannot be settled merely by an appeal to facts. Thus when Professor Mivart speaks of Evolution as "the continuous progress of the material universe by the unfolding of latent potentialities in harmony with a preordained end," the latent potentialities, the preordained end, the procession of one species from another, the extension of this law to every difference of time and place--all are matters of hypothesis or intuition; but by no means of exterior observation.

The most that observation gives us is the very imperfect suggestion of the track that such a movement would have left behind it, not unlike the scraps that boys litter along the road in a paper-chase. Similarly, if in the case of organic Evolution we deny all latent potentialities and preordained ends and throw the whole burden on accidental variations and natural selection; if we regard the whole process as no more intelligent or designed than that by which water seeks and finds its own level; yet as in the case of water we must perforce introduce "a gravitating tendency," so in the case of living organisms a "persisting" or "struggling tendency," as an hypothesis to give unity to our facts or to account for their uniformity. But these tendencies are as little matter of observation as the aforesaid latent potentialities or preordained ends. In fine, Evolution, whatever form it take, gets rid of theism and finality only by slipping into their place some tendency or indefinable power which it considers adequate to account for the facts to be explained.

Let us now see if there be room in this philosophy for our argument from adaptability, and whether it will allow us to infer that because belief in theism and in future retribution are beliefs postulated by our higher moral aspirations, therefore they answer to reality more or less approximately; whether, in short, under certain conditions (specified in our last essay) the wish to believe may be a valid reason for believing.

Now Evolution as a philosophy or explanatory hypothesis owes its popularity to its apparent simplicity. Wrapped in its wordy envelope, the notion as formulated by Spencer needs no subtilty of apprehension, but only a dictionary. Nor is the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection more difficult.

Other things equal, the simpler hypothesis is to be preferred to the less simple where no proof can be had of either. But none the less, the simpler may be false and the other true. Cheapness is no proof of goodness. We are naturally impatient of troublesome and complex theories; but what we gain in the simplicity of an hypothesis, we commonly lose in the difficulty of getting the facts to square with it. It is a simple theory that circular motion is the most perfect, and that the planets being the most perfect bodies must move with the most perfect motion; but so many epicycles must be introduced to explain apparent exceptions that the modern astronomical hypothesis, however more complex in statement, is on the whole welcomed as a simplification. So we are disposed to think it is with regard to the popular form of Evolutionism. Its simplicity in statement is more than cancelled by its difficulty in application; and at last we are driven to conceive it in a form which at once deprives it of its title to popularity. So far as it is simple it is fallacious and proves incoherent on closer inspection, when we try to translate its terms into clear and distinct ideas; but when we get it into intelligible form it is no simpler than the theistic hypothesis which it wants to displace, except inasmuch as it prescinds from the question of origin and last end. But in this, its only intelligible form, it leaves the argument from adaptability intact, and even requires theism as its rational complement.

This is what we must now endeavour to show. We cannot illustrate our contention better than from the popular simplification of Ethics introduced by Bentham. Taking pleasure as a simple and ultimate notion he affirms that our conduct is always determined by a balance of pleasure on one side or the other. The problem of practical ethics is to construct a calculus of pleasures, a sort of ready-reckoner whereby men may be able to invest in the most profitable course of action. "When we have a hedonistic calculus with its senior wranglers," says Mr. Bain, "we shall begin to know whether society admits of being properly reconstructed." [5] It is assumed that pleasures differ only in quantity, i.e., in intensity, extent, and duration, just as warmth does, which may be of high or low temperature; diffused over a greater or less extent of body; and that, for a shorter or a longer time. On this assumption pleasure is every bit as mathematically measurable as is warmth, the whole difficulty being due to its subjective and therefore inaccessible nature. Simple in statement, this theory proves in application infinitely complex, and indeed on closer inspection breaks up into a mere verbal fallacy--as Dr. Martineau, amongst others, has shown in his _Types of Ethical Theory_. For "pleasure," though one simple word, has an endless variety of meanings, not indeed wholly disconnected, but bound together only by a certain kind of analogy. The eye, the ear, the palate, the mind, the heart, have each their proper pleasure; which is nothing else than the resultant of their perfect operation in response to the stimulus of some all-satisfying object--a fact which may be expressed differently by different philosophies, but with substantial identity of meaning. But not till we find some common measure for sound and colour and flavour and thought and affection, will it be possible to compare in any hedonistic scales the pleasures they produce. Yet colour is to the eye what music is to the ear; and therefore the one word pleasure is used not unreasonably of both.

Quite similar seems to us the fallacy to which Evolution owes its seeming simplicity and its popularity. The word "existence" or "life" (which is the existence of organic beings, about which we are chiefly concerned), is taken as having one homogeneous meaning, like "heat" or "warmth;" the only difference being quantitative--a difference of intensity, of breadth, of duration; not a difference of kind such as would destroy all common measure. Life is something which we predicate of the most diversely organized beings, and therefore would seem to be something the same in all, which they secure in a diversity of ways.

Thus Darwin defines the general good or welfare which should be the aim of our conduct as "the rearing of the greatest number of individuals in full health and vigour with all their faculties perfect;" upon which Mr. Sidgwick remarks[6] with justice: "Such a reduction of the notion of 'well-being' to 'being' (actual and potential) would be a most important contribution from the doctrine of Evolution to ethical science. But it at least conflicts in a very startling manner with those ordinary notions of progress and development" in which "it is always implied that certain forms of life are qualitatively superior to others, independently of the number of individuals, present or future, in which each form is realized.... And if we confine ourselves to human beings, to whom alone the practical side of the doctrine applies, is it not too paradoxical to assert that 'rising in the scale of existence' means no more than 'developing the capacity to exist'? A greater degree of fertility would thus become an excellence outweighing the finest moral and intellectual endowments; and some semi-barbarous races must be held to have attained the end of human existence more than some of the pioneers and patterns of civilization." Nor is it only in the region of ethics but in every region that this false simplification is fertile in paradoxes; and yet if it be disowned, the charm to which Evolution owes its popularity is gone.

It would be indeed a short cut to knowledge if we might believe life to be, as this theory imagines it, a simple, self-diffusing force with an irrepressible tendency to spread itself in all directions, like fire in a prairie. True we should not have altogether got rid of innate tendencies, but we should have reduced them to one, namely, to the struggling, or persisting, or self-asserting tendency; a simplification like that offered by the matter-and-force theory of Buchner.

This flame of life once kindled (we are told) endeavours to subdue all things to itself, and all that we find in the way of variety of organic structure and function has been shaped and determined by its struggle--much as a river channels a way for its waters in virtue of its own onward force, checked and determined by the nature of the obstacles it has to encounter. Every organism is related to life as the candlestick to the candle; it is simply a device for supporting and spreading as much life as is possible with the surrounding conditions. Often, when conditions are favourable, the simplest contrivance will be more effectual, more life-producing than the most complex in less favourable conditions. Where food is not present the animal that can move about in search of it will survive, and the stationary animal perish; and likewise those that can escape their foes will live down those rooted in one spot. And if to motion we add perception and intelligence, and associative instincts and the rest, we increase the appliances for dealing with difficulties; and therewith the means of survival when such difficulties exist. Still, in the hypothesis we are dealing with, all these contrivances--movement, consciousness, intelligence, will, society--are distinct from life and ministerial to it; they are instruments by which it is preserved, increased, and multiplied--like those contrivances by which heat or electricity is generated, sustained, and transmitted; with this difference, that no one has designed these life-machines, but they are simply the result of life's innate tendency to struggle and spread. A great deal of the form and movement of the inorganic world is due simply to the stress of gravitation and not to design, and so we are asked to believe that the human and every other organism has been shaped and quickened by the action of as blind a power; that it is in some sense a casual result.

Now if seeing and hearing and thinking do not constitute life, but are only chance discoveries helpful to life; if we do not live in order to eat and to see and to think, but only think, see, and eat in order to live, we ask ourselves, what then is this life which is none of these things and to which they are all subordinate? And when once we begin subtracting those functions which minister to life and which life has selected for its own service, we find there is absolutely nothing left to serve. Taking the very earliest forms, if we subtract movement, nutrition, growth, generation, we find there is nothing over called "life" distinct from these. This is the first and fundamental incoherence of the theory; life has simply no meaning apart from those functions which we speak of as ministering to life; unless we mean by life the mere cohering together of the bodily organism--an end more effectually secured without any such complex apparatus, by a stone or by an elementary atom.

If existence in that sense, be the force or principle whose persistence and self-assertion is the cause of all evolution, it is impossible to conceive how primordial atoms, which are assumed to be indestructible and constant in quantity, should trouble themselves to struggle at all; since the amount of that kind of existence can neither be lessened nor increased. And as motion is also assumed to be a constant quantity, it is plain that what struggles to be and to multiply, must be some special collocation and grouping of atoms with some correspondingly particular determination of motion, called "life;" but what "life" is, apart from the means it is supposed to have selected for itself, does not appear.

Another difficulty attendant on this false simplification is the complete subversion of that scale of dignity or excellence upon which we range the various kinds of living creatures, putting ourselves at the top--not merely in obedience to a pardonable vanity, but, as has hitherto been supposed, in obedience to a trustworthy intuition which, without attempting to apply a common measure to things incommensurable, judges life to be higher than death; consciousness than unconsciousness; mind than mere sensation; and in general, what includes and surpasses, than what is included and surpassed. We see that the organic world presupposes the ministry of the inorganic; and the animal world, that of the plant world; and that the human world depends on the ministry of all three; and our whole conception of this world as "cosmos" is simply the filling in of this hierarchic framework. Yet this old structure falls to pieces under the new simplification. If "life" (as vaguely conceived) be the first beginning and the last end (or rather result) of the whole process of evolution, if it be the _summum bonum_, then the "highest" creature means, the most life-producing.

Now if we put "money" instead of "life," and begin to classify men by this standard, we see how it inverts the old-world ideas of social hierarchy. True it is, the man of letters or of high artistic gifts can produce a certain amount of money, but has little chance against the inventor of a new soap or a patent pill. Honesty at once becomes the worst policy, and a thousand other maxims have to be reformed. Yet this is a trifling _boule-versement_ compared with that which would have to be introduced into our scientific classification were "life-productivity" (in the vague) taken as the criterion of excellence.

For we cannot any longer determine the rank of an animal by its organic complexity, since, _ceteris paribus_, this is a defect rather than otherwise.

To secure life more simply is better than to secure the same amount by means of complex apparatus. Of course when the favouring conditions are altered, then any apparatus that makes life still possible is an advantage; but till that crisis arises it is only an encumbrance. When life can be secured only at the cost of greater labour and exertion and cunning, it is well to be capable of these things, but surely those animals are more to be envied that have no need of these things. It is only on the hypothesis of an unkindly environment that complexity of organization is an excellence.

Furthermore, although these accidental variations allow certain creatures to survive in crises of difficulty, yet they also make the conditions of their survival more complicated and hard to secure. All that differentiates man from an amoeba has enabled him to get safe through certain straits where the lower forms of life were left behind to perish; but it has also made it impossible for him to live in the simpler conditions he has escaped from; like a parvenu whose luxurious habits have gradually created a number of new necessities for him, which make a return to his original poverty and hardships quite impracticable. If the development of lungs has allowed animals to come out of the water into the air, it has also prevented their going back again. Furthermore, a considerable amount of vital energy is consumed in the production, support, and repair of all this supplementary, life-preserving apparatus; just as, much of the national wealth for whose protection they exist is absorbed by a standing army and other military preparations. And in fact of two countries otherwise equal in wealth, that is surely the better off which has no need of being thus armed up to the teeth. Thus man's superior organization may be compared to the overcoat and umbrella with which one sets out on a threatening morning; very desirable should it rain, but a great nuisance should it clear up.

It seems, then, that the highest organism is that which produces or secures the greatest quantity of life in the simplest manner, and at the cost of the least complexity of structure and function; while the lowest is that which yields the least quantity at the greatest cost; and between these two extremes organisms will be ranked by the ratio of their complexity to their life-productivity--life being measured mathematically (as something homogeneous) by its vigour, by its duration, and by the amount of matter animated, whether in the individual or in its progeny. It is obvious how, at this rate, our zoological hierarchy is turned topsy-turvy; and how difficult it will be to show that man is a better life-machine than, say, a mud-turtle with its centuries of vital existence.

It would be a monstrous allegation to say that any evolutionist would defend these conclusions in all their crudity; but is only by thus pushing implied principles to their results, that their incoherence can be made plain. Once more, if this simple uniform thing called life be the sole cause, determining organic Evolution and selecting accidental variations, just in so far as they favour its own maintenance and multiplication, then every organ, appliance, and faculty by which man differs from the simplest bioplast, is merely a life-preserving contrivance. To speak human-wise, Nature in that case has but one end--animal life; and chooses every means solely with a view to that end. She does not care about pain or pleasure, or consciousness, or knowledge, or truth, or morality, or society, or science, or religion, for their own sakes; she cares for life only, and for these so far as--like horns and teeth and claws--they are conducive to life. Evolution therefore is governed by a blind non-moral principle--as blind and ruthless as gravitation. This being so, the mind is for the sake of the body, and not conversely. Evolution is not making for truth and righteousness as for greater or even as for co-ordinate ends; but simply for life, to which sometimes truth and righteousness, but just as often illusion and selfishness, are means. There is nothing therefore in this process of Nature to make us trust that our mind really makes for truth as such, or that it has any essential tendency to greater correspondence with reality, beyond what subserves to fuller animal existence. The fact that a certain belief makes animal life possible is no proof of its truth, but only of its expediency. The extent to which many pleasures depend on illusion is proverbial; and pleasure is almost the note of vital vigour, according to this philosophy.

Plainly, our argument from the adaptability of a belief to man's higher moral needs, vanishes into thin air as soon as the key to the order of nature is thus sought in a blind non-moral tendency, and when that which is lowest is put at the top, and everything above it made to minister to it.

But then it is not only this particular argument that perishes, but all possibility of arguing at all, all faith in our mental faculties, except so far as they minister to the finding of food and the propagation of life. Thus the very attempt to prove such a system of Evolution is a contradiction, since it cuts away all basis of proof. On this I need not dwell longer, since it has been worked out so fully and clearly by others. We get rid of the argument from adaptability, by a conception of the order of Nature that reduces us to mental and moral chaos.