Chapter 19

In its semblance of simplicity this form of Evolution-philosophy shows itself kin to those other old-world attempts to dispense with a governing mind, and to educe the existing cosmos from the blind strife of primordial atoms. It has indeed a more plausible basis, seeing how many things, too quickly attributed to design in a theological age, can really be explained by the struggle for existence. But in trying to make an occasional and partial cause universal and ultimate, it has undertaken the impossible task of bringing the greater out of the less; which really means bringing their difference out of nothing--and this is creation with the First Cause left out; that is, spontaneous creation. It is from first to last an "aggregation" theory, and has to face the insupportable burdens which such a theory brings with it. Haunted by a false analogy drawn from the political organism whose members are intelligent and self-directive, and who put themselves under an intelligent government to be marshalled and directed to one common end--haunted by this anthropomorphic conception, it tries to explain how independent and indestructible units, void of all intelligence, come together into polities with no assignable government; and how these groups or polities, which are nothing separate from the sum of their components, are aggregated to one another in like manner; until at last we come to the highest organism, which again is only the sum of its ultimate atoms, and its activity the sum of their activities--the whole distinction between highest and lowest organism being such as exists between a society of two and a highly complex civilized state. And all this political life is the spontaneous work of unintelligent units; that is to say, we have results exceeding the highest ever attained by human intelligence, long before intelligence or sentience has yet been evolved.

Nobody will care to support "Pangenesis" as a theory of generation. To suppose that there is a mysterious power which breaks a little fraction off each of the bioplasts of which we are asserted to be the sum; that having collected these fractions it arranges them all in the right order within the compass of a single germ, and from that germ reproduces the parent organism, is an hypothesis compared with which the creation of the world in its entirety six thousand years ago, including the fossils and remains of aeonian civilizations, is lucid and intelligible. This is no hyperbole. For if once we allow creation at all, the creation of the world at any stage of Evolution is just as conceivable as the creation of primordial atoms. If any living thing were now created (e.g., a grain of corn or a full ear) it would bear in itself the apparent evidence of having _grown_ to its present state _ab ovo_; or the _ovum_ itself would seem to ground a similar false inference of having come from a parent. Strange as such an idea may be, it is easy and pellucid compared with the hypothesis of Pangenesis--still more when we remember that this complex germ, which is a lion or a horse in small--itself the elaboration of aeons of Evolution--can replicate itself with ease and rapidity, reproducing in adjacent pabulum a "cosmos" which differs in degree, not in kind, from that described in the story of the Six Days. Yet the more we look into it, the more clear is it that Pangenesis (and not Polarigenesis or Perigenesis) is the inevitable outcome of the aggregation-theory of life.

And therefore to return to our former assertion, whatever we seem to gain in simplicity of statement by this form of the Evolution theory, we pay for dearly when we come to its application; nay more, as soon as we attempt to translate the words into clear and distinct ideas, we are left with nothing coherent that the mind can get hold of; and it is only at this price that we can cut away the basis of the "argument from adaptability," and with it the basis of all reason and morality. We must therefore go on to examine if there be any alternative form of the same philosophy more bearable.

I have forborne all criticism of the supposed _facts_ on which Evolution is based; as others have dealt frequently with their various weaknesses. Nor do I think it necessary to deal with the extravagant subordinate hypotheses by aid of which facts are forced under the main hypothesis, e.g., those which explain how the horse grew out of the hipparion. The crudest finalists have been everywhere out-stripped by Evolutionists in dextrous application of the argument _a posse ad esse_.

III.

Assuming still that the facts collected and arranged by experimental science in favour of the hypothesis are such as to demand some kind of Evolution-philosophy; assuming that the very imperfect serial classification of living things according to their degree of organic definiteness, coherence, and heterogeneity not merely represents a variety which has always coexisted since life was possible on this earth, but rather traces out or hints at the genetic process by which this variety has been produced, let us see if there be any other governing principle directing the process, more intelligible than the persistence of that mere organic life which cannot even be thought of as distinct from those appliances and functions which it is supposed to have evolved for its own service by "natural selection."

Let us admit, what is really evident, that life is nothing distinct from the sum of those functions which minister to the preservation of life; and that therefore it is not the same thing in a man and in a mud-turtle. Man's superior faculties are not merely a more complicated machinery for producing an identical effect which the mud-turtle produces more simply and abundantly, but rather by their very play _constitute_ an entirely different and higher kind of life. When Hume, in his _Treatise on Human Nature_, says: "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them," he implies that the exercise of reason is no constituent factor of human life, but something outside it, subordinate to it, whereas that life itself consists in passion, or pleasurable sensation, of which man, in virtue of his reason and other advantages, secures more than do his fellow-animals. This is just the conception of life which we have seen to be incoherent on close inspection; and if it be so, then the evolutionary process is a struggle not for bare life or existence, but for the prevalence of the _higher kinds_ of life and existence; and intelligence and morality are not only co-operative as instruments in maintaining and extending human life, but are themselves the principal elements of that complex life. True, the mind does minister to the body and preserve it; but still more does the body minister to the mind; or rather, each ministers to that whole in which the play of the mind is the principal function and the play of the body subordinate. If, then, we hold to the verdict of our common sense, and regard our mental life not as subordinate to our sensitive and vegetal life, but as co-ordinate and even superior, we must (so to speak) view it as no less "for its own sake," as no less an "end in itself" than they are, but rather much more; we must regard evolution as making for the life of truth and the life of righteousness even more principally than for bare existence or animal vitality. It is now no longer mere life that tries to assert itself, and in the struggle shapes things to what they are; but it is the very highest kind of life, that is trying to come to the birth. Nature inherently tends to the higher through the lower forms of life, and these minister to the higher and receive in return from them the means of a yet more efficacious ministry.

In this conception, every function of the organism has two aspects, under one of which it is its own end and exists for its own sake as an element of the life of the whole; under the other it is ministerial, serving other functions above and below it, as it in return is served by them. Correspondence with the environment is, similarly, not merely a condition of life, but also that wherein vitality principally consists. "Living" is spontaneous self-adaptation to surrounding reality, taken in the very widest sense. The more diverse and multiform this adaptability, the fuller and higher is the life; and thus our ordinary common-sense classifications are justified. Each new manifestation of life means some new correspondence with surrounding reality as we piss from mere vegetation, and then add local movement, and one sense after another, till we come finally to intelligence and the life of reason and right-doing, which again, consists in self-conformation to things as they really are. In all this we are in agreement with common sense and common language, which identify the fullest life with the fullest activity; all activity being of the nature of response to stimulus, that is, correspondence to reality. As soon as consciousness supervenes on the lower forms of life it is evident that the pleasures of sight, hearing, taste, mind, and affection all depend on, and consist in, the consciousness of this successful accommodation of the subject to the object; and that all pain and disease is simply the felt failure of such adaptation. What was anciently and very wisely called the "natural appetite" of living creatures is in this view nothing else but their response to the modifying attraction exerted upon them by the objective Reality which presses upon them on every side, and tends to draw them into conformity with itself so far as they have latent capacity for such a correspondence. It is the light that makes (or rather elicits) sight; and it is sound that develops the sense of hearing: and it is the ideas embodied in Nature that call our intellect into play. Hence it follows that, desire for truth and justice, for society and for religion, which assert themselves as invariably in the soul of man at certain stages of progress, as the desire for mere life asserts itself from the first, is simply the felt result of the as yet unsuccessful endeavour of Nature to draw man into a fuller kind of correspondence with herself.

Thus conceived, the course of evolution is comparable, not as before, to the gradual unveiling of a blank canvas, revealing simply a greater extent of the same appearance, but to the gradual unveiling of a picture whose full unity of meaning is held in suspense till the disclosure is completed. We do not now interpret the higher by the lower, but the lower by the higher; the beginning by the end. This may seem perilously near to finalism, yet it is no more necessarily so, than the process of photography; we only need a self-adaptive tendency in life-matter responsive to the stimulating-tendency of the environment. Not, of course, that this bundle of words really explains anything, but that like other formulae of the kind, it prescinds from the question of ends and origins, by making a statement of what happens serve as a cause of what happens, and calling it a Law or a Tendency, or a Latent Potentiality--thus filling the gap which mere agnosticism creates in our thought.

With this conception of Evolution our ordinary estimates of "higher" and "lower" are saved; also the value of our mental processes upon which rests whatever proof the theory may admit of; while the "argument from adaptability" is provided with a firm basis independent of finality. All our "natural," as opposed to our personal and self-determined appetites or cravings,--those which are, so to say, constitutional and inseparable from our nature in certain conditions, are evidence of the influence of some reality outside us seeking to draw us into more perfect correspondence with itself, and whose nature can be more or less dimly conjectured from the nature of those cravings. What are called "natural religions" represent man's self-devised attempts to explain the reality answering to his religious and moral cravings. Revelation is but a divine interpretation of the same; as though one with dim vision were to supplement his defect by the testimony of another more clear-sighted.

It may be practically admitted that no philosophy allows of strict demonstration, since, being a conception of the totality of things, it modifies our understanding of every principle by which one might attempt to prove or disprove it. Eventually it is its harmony with the totality of things as we perceive them that determines us to accept it, and no two of us perceive just the same totality, however substantial an agreement there may be in our experience; yet I think it can hardly be denied that this conception of evolution is far more in agreement with the world as most of us know it, and commonly think and speak of it, than the former; that it not merely satisfies our intellect, but offers some satisfaction to our whole spiritual nature. "Is it certain," asks Mr. Bradley, in a fairly similar connection, "that the mere intellect can be self-satisfied if the other elements of our nature remain uncontented?" And, again: "A result, if it fails to satisfy our whole nature, comes short of perfection: and I could not rest tranquilly in a truth if I were compelled to regard it as hateful.... I should insist that the inquiry was not yet closed and that the result was but partial. And if metaphysics" [for which we may substitute: any philosophy, such a& that of Evolution] "is to stand, it must, I think, take account of all sides of our being. I do not mean that every one of our desires must be met by a promise of particular satisfaction; for that would be absurd and utterly impossible. But if the main tendencies of our nature do not reach consummation in the Absolute, we cannot believe that we have attained to perfection and truth."[7] From this point of view there can be no doubt as to which of these conceptions of Evolution is the more rational and satisfactory; that which would explain it by a simple tendency in living matter to persist and spread, and would see in all organic variety only the selected means to that somewhat colourless end; or that conception which would explain it by a tendency in living matter to come into ever fuller correspondence with its environment, seeing in such spontaneous correspondence the very essence of life, and not merely a condition of life.

We need only add a few criticisms on this second conception.

1. It is true that every creature struggles more intensely and vigorously for the lower kind of life, or for "mere life," as we might say, than for any of those things which alone would seem to make life worth the having. But this only means that to live at all is the most fundamental condition of living well and fully and enjoyably. The higher life cannot stand without the lower, which it includes, but the lower is not therefore the better, nor is it the end for whose sake the higher is desirable; but conversely. Not until men have got bread enough to eat will they have leisure or energy to spare for the animal grades of vitality. When the means of bodily subsistence grow scarce, then the faculties that were previously set free to seek the bread of a higher and fuller life are diverted to the struggle for bare animal existence, and progress is thrown back; but when there is abundance for all, secured by the labour of a few from whom the remainder can buy, then fuller life becomes once more possible for that remainder. The struggle for bodily food gives an advantage to, and "selects" naturally, those mental and other powers which facilitate its attainment; but just as man does not only eat and labour in order to live, but also (however it may shock conventional ethics) lives in order to eat and labour; so the new energies called forth by competition do not merely secure that grade of life in whose interests they are evoked and perfected, but extend the sphere of vitality, in so much as their own play adds a new element to life and gives it a new form.

The part played by struggle and competition in this process of Evolution is naturally exaggerated by those who deny any latent tendency other than that of mere persistence in being; who repudiate an internal expansiveness towards fuller kinds of existence, drawn out or checked by the environment.

Competition plays a prominent part when there is question of the lower grades of life, in so far as these depend on a pabulum that is limited in quantity. In such cases competition, within certain limits, will secure the bringing-out of latent powers by which the lower level of life is maintained and a higher level entered upon; the lower being secured by the superimposition of the higher.

But how does it do so? Not by creating anything, but by giving the victory to those individuals who already were ahead of their fellows in virtue of a fuller development of their nature from within; in clearing the ground for them and letting them increase and multiply.

2. Again, we should notice that development in one direction may be at the cost of development in another. The struggle for any lower form of existence than that already attained, is inevitably at the cost of the higher. The degrading effects of destitution are proverbial. Craft, cruelty, selfishness, and all the vices needed for success in a gladiatorial contest are often the fruits of such competition. Also, commercial progress seems on the whole to be at the expense of progress in art and the higher tastes, sacrificing everything to the production of the greatest possible quantity of material comforts. If it sharpens the wits and sensibilities in some directions, it blunts them in others.

Now, the first sense suggested to us in these days by the word "progress," is material progress--all that came in with steam; and this narrow conception vitiates much of our reasoning. It is in this realm undoubtedly that competition is such a factor of rapid advance; but we forget that the food of what the best men have ever considered the best life, is not limited or divisible; but like the light and air is undiminished how many soever share it. Whatever advance there has been in the life of the mind and of the higher tastes and sensibilities, cannot directly be explained by competition, but simply by the quiet upward working of Nature's inherent forces. We look with scorn at the unprogressive East, satisfied that there can be no progress, no life worth living, where there is no rush for dollars. But I think we have yet to learn the meaning of _ex Oriente lux_.

Much of our immorality and our social evil comes from the fact that those who have developed the faculties of a higher grade of life, seek the lower as an end in itself, and not simply so far as it is a condition of the higher and no further. The Gospel precept, as usual, enunciates only the law of reason and nature, when it bids us to "Seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice," that is, to put our best life in the front, and to make it the measure and limit of any other quest. The neglect of this principle gives us high living and plain thinking, instead of "high thinking and plain living;" and takes the bread out of the mouths of the poor. The competition for pleasures and luxuries and amusements, may indeed develop certain industries and cause progress in certain narrow lines, but it is at the cost of the only progress worth the name.

The conflict between this "struggle-theory" and ethics has been freely acknowledged by Professor Huxley and others; every attempt to educe unselfishness from selfishness has failed. The moral man even in our day has rather a bad time of it; what chance would he have had of surviving to propagate his species in the supposed pre-moral states of human society? Who can possibly conceive mere rottenness being cured by progress in rottenness; or a man drinking himself into temperance? On the other hand, it is at least conceivable that in the wildest savage there is some little seed of a moral sense--weak, compared with the lowest springs of action, just because it is the highest and therefore only struggling into being; and that in the slow lapse of time events may here and there prove that honesty is the best policy; and that honesty once tasted may be found not only useful for other things, but agreeable for itself, and may be cherished and strengthened by social and religious sanctions.

There is, however, a reaction on foot which tends to reconcile the breach between ethics and evolution, by reducing the part played by competition within reasonable bounds, and making it subservient to the survival, not of the most selfish, but of the most social individuals. Definite variations from within, modified between narrow limits by accidental variation from without, is coming to be acknowledged as the chief factor of progress. But we should not forget that to allow an internal principle of orderly development is, not merely to modify the popular evolution theory by a slight concession to its adversaries; it is rather to make it no longer the supreme explanation of development, but at most a slight modification of the more mysterious theory which it was its boast and merit to have supplanted. According to Geddes and Foster and others of their school, it is the species-subserving qualities that Nature selects; and these, in the higher grades of life, are equivalent to the altruistic, social, and ethical qualities. It is in virtue of the parental and maternal instincts of self-sacrifice, self-diffusion, self-forgetfulness in the interests of the offspring, that species are preserved and prevail. Selfish egoism leads eventually (as we see in some modern countries where _laizzez-faire_ liberalism prevails) to social disruption, decadence, and chaos; and this is the universal law of life in every grade. At first indeed the unit struggles to live, for life is the condition of propagation; but the root of this instinct is altruistic; it is the whole asserting itself in the part; and all "self-regarding" instincts are to be likewise explained as subordinate to the "other-regarding" instincts. As soon as this sub-ordination is ignored in practice, regress takes the place of progress. The transit, we are told, from the unicellular to the multicellular organism cannot be explained by individualism, but implies a diminution of the competitive, an increase of the social and subordinative tendency. The argument from economics to biology and back again, is said to be nearing exposure; the "progress of the species through the internecine struggle of its individuals at the margin of subsistence," is the outgoing idea. Yes, and with it goes out all that made Evolution a simple and therefore popular explanation of the world; and there comes in that "organic" conception of the process which clamours for theism and finalism as its only coherent complement.