Part 14

But long ago there began a popular revolt against the conception of the whole world of nature and man as ruled by a theory of continuous ruthless bloody struggle. Everyone knew that this was not the only relation of human beings to each other, and even most casual observation indicated that it was not the only relation of various kinds of the lower animals to each other. The obvious biological success of the social or communal insects, the numerous instances of commensalism, or the living together on terms of mutual advantage of individuals of different species--the various ants alone have more than a thousand known kinds of other insects living with them--and the innumerable observed instances of what might be called balanced adaptations, such as those of the flower-visiting insects and the insect-visited flowers resulting in the needed cross-fertilization of the flowers and the needed supply of nectar and pollen food for the insects--all these had convinced biologists and nature-students and just nature-lovers that _if_ natural selection were the all-ruling factor in determining the present character and the future of the living world it was a very different natural selection from that so redly painted by the Neo-Darwinians.

It is quite certain that Darwin himself never conceived of any such utterly brutal conception of natural selection as the Teutonized one. In all his writing he recognizes that the bringing about of adaptation to the conditions of life is the essential feature of evolution, and, when it seemed impossible or too far-fetched to explain adaptation by a ruthless struggle that extinguished some species and preserved others, he looked for other explanations, even accepting Lamarck's for certain cases. He accepted everything that could make for adaptation, and among these other things than bitter fighting that could bring about and perfect adaptation he especially recognized mutual aid, and repeatedly called attention to species change based on mutual aid both within and between species.

But however suggestive and important it is to note how out of tune with the facts concerned with general evolution are the natural selection extremists, our special present interest centers around the attempt to bring the explanation of human evolution into tune with this out of tune conception of evolution in general. For it is on this basis, the basis of an alleged identity between the character and control of human evolution and the character and control of brute evolution, that the Germans find their justification in natural law for their war philosophy and war practise.

The Germans are greatly given to explanations. These explanations always contain a specious show of reasoning and pseudo-reasoning. They are in line with some accepted philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. Their accepted pseudo-philosophy of human evolution is a thoroughly mechanistic one. It is one of economy of thought and argument. If man is an animal descended, or ascended, from the lower ones--as he is--and if animals are what they are today and will be what they will be tomorrow by virtue--or evil--of a natural law of bitter, brutal, bloody struggle, out of which emerge as survivors only those most brutally and fearfully qualified for such struggle, why, then, the case of man and of human evolution is simple. _Schluss_ with discussion!

But the trouble with this simple convincing argument is with the premises. They are wrong.

Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as "animal among animals," and despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing, ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation, leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have begun the course of our truly human evolution we have come an immensely long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits, and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity; and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters, which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech, writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in the race.

This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today contains all the present expression and future promise of man's higher evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man's natural traits, and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its natural validity in the great strength it adds to man's position in Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.

Now it is all this side of human evolution that the German natural philosophy, especially as applied to international relations, leaves out of account. The Germans do indeed recognize the value of social evolution inside the race or nation, but its advantage is all for the sake of building up a powerful organism to fight effectively and viciously with all other races and nations. The different peoples are to be looked on as the analogues of different brute species, all terribly and everlastingly at war with each other, each using everything possible to it to gain the upper hand. Everything that can be construed to be of military advantage in this struggle is justified as biological advantage, and there is no doubt that to be inhumanly ferocious, brutal and cunning is of biological advantage in tiger evolution.

The test of this war philosophy will come for the Germans when they are being beaten and are beaten. Will they hold then consistently to their thesis, and admit that their line of human evolution is proved by their defeat to be a wrong line because it is not the strongest line? They have a way out. This way was suggested to me by the principal expositor at Great Headquarters of the brute struggle and survival theory. He said that it was possible to conceive of a failure of natural selection to work its ennobling way because of the perverse opposition to it of the artificial character of much of human life, but if natural law was to be restrained or upset by such an interpolated artificial control he, at least, would prefer to die in the catastrophe and not have to live in a world perverse to natural law. Of course he did not admit of the probability of such a situation. The Germans would win because they were fighting with Nature on their side. They were biologically right, and biological law would work with them to success. But there was the bare possibility of such an outcome to be reckoned with. If this possibility came to reality, why then all was wrong with the world, and he, for one, would not care to live longer in it.

I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do; they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with promise of going better, they make little complaint. But when things are too hard for too long a time, they begin to question the infallibility of the All-Highest and the Near-Highest. And Germany already has suffered terribly and suffered long, and still suffers.

The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men who have sacrificed them in vain.

But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands. And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.

JOHN FISKE

A generation with every nerve strained by the war will probably have little patience with a statement that the generation whose activities began soon after the middle of the last century, went through a conflict of perhaps equal importance, but such is the fact.

Like the present conflict, that was one between an old and firmly rooted principle that had outlived most of its usefulness and was fettering liberty, and a new principle that meant emancipation.

The contest was between the superstition (it was not consistent enough to justify calling it an opinion) on the one hand that man has fallen from a condition of primitive perfection to one of degradation, and on the other hand, the scientific demonstration that man's experience has been one of virtually constant progress, up from protoplasm and probably from inorganic matter. On the former view hung the mass of putrescent and pestilent dogma that had fastened itself upon the sweet and simple teachings of Christ.

The conflict was probably the greatest of all between truth and superstition. The temper of it was perhaps most strikingly illustrated when, at the meeting of the British Association in 1860, Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was "through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey," and Huxley answered:

"I asserted--and I repeat--that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man--a man of restless and versatile intellect--who not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

A witness says: "The effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one jumped from my seat."

Another witness says: "I never saw such a display of fierce party spirit," and speaks of "the looks of bitter hatred" cast upon those who were on Huxley's side.

Perhaps it is not trying to shape great complexities too definitely, to say that the conflict of which that was one episode, was the third of the civilized world's greatest intellectual struggles--the establishment of the Christian church, the reformation of it, and the determination of its true relation to the progress of knowledge.

The last conflict, however, was a most hopeful illustration of the progress made since the first two, in that it involved no exposure of victims to the lions of the arena, no Nero's torches, no Inquisition, no Thirty-Years' War, no destruction of venerable and beautiful monuments, or of institutions for charity or education.

But of course that conflict of the last century, like all others, had its pains; yet as it did not directly touch the person or the pocket of the average man, he cared very little about it. Nevertheless it has filtered down into his very language, and when he is the sort of average man who likes to use big words, his share of the victors' spoils includes the pleasure of frequently uttering, without quite understanding, such terms as _environment_, _differentiation_, and even _integration_, while the word _evolution_ has become such a matter-of-course term that he and everybody else use it unconsciously--unconscious not only of most of what it implies, but even of their indebtedness to the men from whom they got it.[2]

[2] In this connection there was something said about Herbert Spencer in our Number 16.

Of those men, one of the most important, and far the most important in America, was John Fiske. The recent publication of his _Life and Letters, by John S. Clarke_, (Houghton-Mifflin Co.) gives occasion to say something about him and his part in the great conflict.

But first a word regarding the book. It is certainly a remarkable production for a man well over eighty. Though not entirely free from the diffuseness and repetition of age, it is nearer free than many respectable books of much younger men, while in faithfulness, patience and, on the whole, discrimination, it surpasses most. The author really understands the implications of Evolution, so far as yet worked out, and that is something that surprisingly few people do; and there are not a few places where he states them with a clearness and vigor which would do credit to anybody, and in a man of his years are no less than astonishing. Whatever imperfections the book may have, as a guide for the layman to the great revolution in thought which brought thought for the first time into stable equilibrium, the book is probably surpassed by no writing except Fiske's own.

But while the author's work is not to be estimated lightly, he would be the first to say that the charm and value of the book are mainly in Fiske's letters, especially those to his wife and mother, which in naturalness, vividness, beauty of expression and humor are unsurpassed, and in wealth and ease of illustrative learning are unequaled, by any letters of which we know. For readers fond of books of travel, many of them will be of the very highest interest. Moreover they include a fine portrait gallery of the greatest men who won the fight for Evolution, at play as well as at work; and the letters to and from Darwin, Spencer, and a few others are rich in discussion of the profoundest topics that have engaged the human mind. In short, we know of no other book which admits the reader to as much intimacy with as high society. Jenkins would not agree with our terms, but if high society means the men who made the greatest intellectual epoch in human history, our assertion is safe. Fiske himself had no small part in that great feat, and this book admits us into his intimate friendship with Lyell, Lewes, George Eliot, Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer and not a few others among the leaders of the race. It seems quite probable that this life of Fiske may give a clearer idea of Spencer than is given in Mr. Duncan's _Life_, or even in the _Autobiography_. Perhaps best of all, Fiske's letters set before us as example a character of rare simplicity, sincerity and tenderness.

Lest all this praise lead some to disappointment, we hasten to add the obvious fact that the attractions of cotemporary history or even of portable epigram, which have made most of the immortal letters in literature, are hardly to be expected from a writer whose mind was generally absorbed in the widest generalizations of Philosophy and the History of the past.

* * * * *

And now as to the life itself:

Edmund Fisk Green, later famous as John Fiske, was born of excellent New England stock at Hartford, Connecticut, on March 30, 1842. His mother was early widowed, and went to New York to teach, leaving her son with her mother in Middletown. When he was thirteen, his mother married in New York, and this change in her surname probably has something to do with the change in his, to that originally borne by the grandmother with whom he continued to live. The grandmother's father, John Fisk, was a remarkable man, and so his Christian name went with the surname.

The young John Fiske (the _e_ was his own addition when he found that it had been used by his earlier ancestors) was precocious, as, despite many assertions to the contrary, great scholars and geniuses generally have been; but unlike Mill and Spencer--the cotemporaries he nearest resembled--Fiske had not the benefit in his early education of any exceptionally competent guide. From childhood up, however, he stood out from his companions.

He had the usual schooling, interspersed with some special tutoring, and during two considerable intervals he pursued his studies unaided. All the while that his formal studies were going on, he read ravenously, and, from a very early age, only things worth reading. Thus in childhood he began the accumulation of what became a very exceptional private library.

When Fiske was fourteen, he joined the Congregational Church in Middletown, and for a time he was very religious indeed, taking an active part in the wave of "revival" which swept over the country two years later, in 1858. But early in 1859 he was reading Gibbon, Grote, Humboldt, and Buckle, and questioning the dogmas of Christianity, and quite probably was going through the reaction from the "revival," which, throughout the country, was about as great as the revival itself; and it was not long before Fiske abandoned the dogmas altogether. But his reverence for all in the religion that was worth the attention of a reasoning being, never left him; and through life he even used its terminology to a degree that was sometimes hardly consistent with his fundamental convictions. He became also far the most effective builder yet known of the new religious superstructure legitimately based on the philosophy which, at about the time we speak of, was removing from many minds the traditional bases of religion.

Fiske's infidelity led to his social ostracism in Middletown, but forty years later, the place had so far advanced that when it celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its foundation, it invited Fiske to be the orator of the occasion.

In 1860 he entered Harvard.

Later, of Darwin he said: "There is now and then a mind--perhaps one in four or five millions--which in early youth thinks the thoughts of mature manhood." Such a mind was emphatically Fiske's own: while he was still an undergraduate, two of his essays attracted attention on both sides of the water.

In college his marks in Philosophy were low: he knew more than his teachers did, and differed with them, and probably with his textbooks.

He was threatened with expulsion from college for disseminating among the students seditious ideas, including the doctrine of Evolution. Eight years later he was invited to expound the same ideas in a course of lectures in one of the chapels of the university.

A third instance of the revolution in opinion which marked the last century was the refusal, in 1872, because of Fiske's unorthodoxy, to invite him to lecture at the Lowell Institute, which was followed less than twenty years later by invitations to do it. Then the demand for seats was so great that the evening lectures had to be repeated in subsequent afternoons.

After graduation, Fiske studied law, did two years' work in nine months, passed a triumphant examination, and was admitted to the Bar. But after waiting for clients two years, during which he read more, in quantity and quality, than most fairly studious men read in a lifetime, and wrote several notable essays, he gave up law for the pursuits in which he was already eminent.

But though he gave up the law, nearly eighteen years later he could write thus to his wife (_Life and Letters_, II, p. 205):

"Judge Gantt thought he would stick me, and so propounded to me the barbarous law-Latin puzzle propounded by Sir Thomas More to a learned jurist at Amsterdam, 'whether a plough taken _in withernam_ can be replevied?' Didn't stick Hezekiah [The author does not give us the origin of this nickname] _not much_. I gave him a minute account of the ancient process of distraining and impounding and of the action of replevin,--considerably to my own amusement and his astonishment."

The conceptions of the Universe generally held at the time when Fiske was in college were fragmentary and chaotic, each phenomenon or each group of phenomena being, like language, a special creation of an anthropomorphic God, turning out different jobs piecemeal like a man. The conception of one power behind all had been a dream of not a few philosophers and poets, but as a fact comprehensible by the average mind, it was not known until the discovery of the Conservation of Force about 1860. About the same time was discovered the unity of all organic life, in its descent from protoplasm, and the identity of its forces with those of the inorganic universe. The nebular cosmogony, the persistence of force and the biologic genesis, united together, showed the power evolving, sustaining and carrying on the entire universe known to us, to be _one_, and constantly acting in unified process; and that every detail--from the most minute known to the chemist, physicist and biologist, up to the greatest known to the geologist and astronomer, and including all known to the psychologist, economist, and historian--was caused by a previous detail. It having been established that the same causes always produced the same results, these uniformities were recognized as Laws, and it was also recognized that conduct in conformity with these laws produced good, and conduct counter to them produced evil.

It became plain, too, to all normal minds, that the only conceivable object of these processes was the production of happiness, and that all records of them proved that they tend not only to produce happiness, but to increase it.

These facts rendered entirely superfluous all the previous imaginings of anthropomorphic deities issuing commands, to obey which was good, and to disobey which was bad. For all that, was substituted a beneficent Power transcending man's complete comprehension, but with infinitely greater claims to gratitude and reverence, and sanctions for morality infinitely more intelligible and authoritative.