The Ascent of Man
BY
HENRY DRUMMOND
THIRTY EIGHTH THOUSAND
LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
PATERNOSTER ROW
1904
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
"THE more I think of it," says Mr. Ruskin, "I
find this conclusion more impressed upon me--that the greatest thing a human
soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a
plain way." In these pages an attempt is made to tell "in a plain way" a few of
the things which Science is now seeing with regard to the Ascent of Man.
Whether these seeings are there at all is another matter. But, even if visions,
every thinking mind, through whatever medium, should look at them. What Science
has to say about himself is of transcendent interest to Man, and the
practical bearings of this theme are coming to be more vital than any on the
field of knowledge. The thread which binds the facts is, it is true, but a
hypothesis As the theory, nevertheless. with which at present all scientific
work is being done, it is assumed in every page that follows.
Though its stand-point is Evolution and its
subject Man, this book is far from being designed to prove that Man has
relations, compromising or otherwise, with lower animals. Its theme is Ascent,
not Descent. It is a History, not an Argument. And Evolution, in the narrow
sense in which it is often used when applied to Man, plays little part in the
drama outlined here. So far as the general scheme of Evolution is
introduced--and in the Introduction and elsewhere this is done at length --the
object is the important one of pointing out how its nature has been
misconceived, indeed how its greatest factor has been overlooked in almost all
contemporary scientific thinking. Evolution was given to the modern world out
of focus, was first seen by it out of focus, and has remained out of focus to
the present hour. Its general basis has never been re-examined since the time
of Mr. Darwin; and not only such speculative sciences as Teleology, but working
sciences like Sociology have been led astray by a fundamental omission. An
Evolution Theory drawn to scale, and with the lights and shadows properly
adjusted--adjusted to the whole truth and reality of Nature and of Man--is
needed at present as a standard for modern thought; and though a reconstruction
of such magnitude is not here presumed, a primary object of these pages is to
supply at least the accents for such a scheme.
Beyond an attempted readjustment of the accents
there is nothing here for the specialist--except, it may be, the reflection of
his own work. Nor, apart from Teleology, is there anything for the theologian.
The limitations of a lecture-audience made the treatment of such themes as
might appeal to him impossible; while owing to the brevity of the course, the
Ascent had to be stopped at a point where all the higher interest begins. All
that the present volume covers is the Ascent of Man, the Individual, during the
earlier stages of his evolution. It is a study in embryos, in rudiments, in
installations; the scene is the primeval forest; the date, the world's dawn.
Tracing his rise as far as Family Life, this history does not even follow him
into the Tribe; and as it is only then that social and moral life begin in
earnest, no formal discussion of these high themes occurs. All the higher
forces and phenomena with which the sciences of Psychology, Ethics, and
Theology usually deal come on the world's stage at a later date, and no one
need be surprised if the semi-savage with whom we leave off is found wanting in
so many of the higher potentialities of a human being.
The Ascent of Mankind, as distinguished from the
Ascent of the Individual, was originally summarized in one or two closing
lectures, but this stupendous subject would require a volume for itself, and
these fragments have been omitted for the present. Doubtless it may disappoint
some that at the close of all the bewildering vicissitudes recorded here, Man
should appear, after all, so poor a creature. But the great lines of his youth
are the lines of his maturity, and it is only by studying these, in themselves
and in what they connote, that the nature of Evolution and the quality of Human
progress can be perceived.
HENRY DRUMMOND.
INTRODUCTION
I. EVOLUTION IN GENERAL
II. THE MISSING FACTOR IN CURRENT THEORIES
III. WHY WAS EVOLUTION THE METHOD CHOSEN?
IV. EVOLUTION AND SOCIOLOGY
CHAPTER I
THE ASCENT OF THE BODY
CHAPTER II
THE SCAFFOLDING LEFT IN THE BODY
CHAPTER III
THE ARREST OF THE BODY
CHAPTER IV
THE DAWN OF MIND
CHAPTER V
THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
CHAPTER VI
THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
CHAPTER VII
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIFE OF OTHERS
CHAPTER VIII
THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER
CHAPTER IX
THE EVOLUTION OF A FATHER
CHAPTER X
INVOLUTION
I
EVOLUTION IN GENERAL
THE last romance of Science, the most daring
it has ever tried to pen, is the Story of the Ascent of Man. Withheld from all
the wistful eyes that have gone before, whose reverent ignorance forbade their
wisest minds to ask to see it, this final volume of Natural History has begun
to open with our century's close. In the monographs of His and Minot, the
Embryology of Man has already received a just expression; Darwin and Haeckel
have traced the origin of the Animal-Body; the researches of Romanes mark a
beginning with the Evolution of Mind; Herbert Spencer has elaborated theories
of the development of Morals; Edward Caird of the Evolution of Religion.
Supplementing the contributions of these authorities, verifying, criticizing,
combating, rebutting, there works a multitude of others who have devoted their
lives to the same rich problems, and already every chapter of the bewildering
story has found its editors.
Yet, singular though the omission may seem, no
connected outline of this great drama has yet been given us. These researches,
preliminary reconnaissances though they be, are surely worthy of being looked
upon as a whole. No one can say that this multitude of observers is not in
earnest, nor their work honest, nor their methods competent to the last powers
of science. Whatever the uncertainty of the field, it is due to these pioneer
minds to treat their labour with respect. What they see in the unexplored land
in which they travel belongs to the world. By just such methods, and by just
such men, the map of the world of thought is filled in--here from the tracing
up of some great river, there from a bearing taken roughly in a darkened sky,
yonder from a sudden glint of the sun on a far-off mountain-peak, or by a swift
induction of an adventurous mind from a momentary glimpse of a natural law. So
knowledge grows; and in a century which has added to the sum of human learning
more than all the centuries that are past, it is not to be conceived that some
further revelation should not await us on the highest themes of all.
The day is for ever past when science need
apologize for treating Man as an object of natural research. Hamlet's "being of
large discourse, looking before and after" is withal a part of Nature, and can
be made neither larger nor smaller, anticipate less nor prophesy less, because
we investigate, and perhaps discover, the secret of his past. And should that
past be proved to be related in undreamed-of ways to that of all other things
in Nature, "all other things" have that to gain by the alliance which
philosophy and theology for centuries have striven to win for them. Every step
in the proof of the oneness in a universal evolutionary process of this divine
humanity of ours is a step in the proof of the divinity of all lower things.
And what is of infinitely greater moment, each footprint discovered in the
Ascent of Man is a guide to the step to be taken next. To discover the
rationale of social progress is the ambition of this age. There is an
extraordinary human interest abroad about this present world itself, a yearning
desire, not from curious but for practical reasons, to find some light upon the
course; and as the goal comes nearer the eagerness passes into suspense to know
the shortest and the quickest road to reach it. Hence the Ascent of Man is not
only the noblest problem which science can ever study, but the practical
bearings of this theme are great beyond any other on the roll of knowledge.
Now that the first rash rush of the evolutionary
invasion is past, and the sins of its youth atoned for by sober concession,
Evolution is seen to be neither more nor less than the story of creation as
told by those who know it best. "Evolution," says Mr. Huxley, "or development
is at present employed in biology as a general name for the history of the
steps by which any living being has acquired the morphological and the
physiological characters which distinguish it."[1] Though applied specifically to plants and animals this
definition expresses the chief sense in which Evolution is to be used
scientifically at present. We shall use the word, no doubt, in others of its
many senses; but after all the blood spilt, Evolution is simply "history," a
"history of steps," a "general name" for the history of the steps by which the
world has come to be what it is. According to this general definition, the
story of Evolution is narrative. It may be wrongly told; it may be coloured,
exaggerated, over- or under-stated like the record of any other set of facts;
it may be told with a theological bias or with an anti-theological bias;
theories of the process may be added by this thinker or by that; but these are
not of the substance of the story. Whether history is told by a Gibbon or a
Green the facts remain, and whether Evolution be told by a Haeckel or a Wallace
we accept the narrative so far as it is a rendering of Nature, and no more. It
is true, before this story can be fully told, centuries still must pass. At
present there is not a chapter of the record that is wholly finished. The
manuscript is already worn with erasures, the writing is often blurred, the
very language is uncouth and strange. Yet even now the outline of a continuous
story is beginning to appear--a story whose chief credential lies in the fact
that no imagination of man could have designed a spectacle so wonderful, or
worked out a plot at once so intricate and so transcendently simple.
This story will be outlined here partly for the
story and partly for a purpose. A historian dare not have a prejudice, but he
cannot escape a purpose--the purpose, conscious or unconscious, of unfolding
the purpose which lies behind the facts which he narrates. The interest of a
drama--the authorship of the play apart--is in the players, their character,
their motives, and the tendency of their action. It is impossible to treat
these players as automata. Even if automata, those in the audience are not.
Hence, where interpretation seems lawful, or comment warranted by the facts,
neither will he withheld.
To give an account of Evolution, it need scarcely
be remarked, is not to account for it. No living thinker has yet found it
possible to account for Evolution. Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous definition of
Evolution as "a change from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite
coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations"[2] --the formula of which the Contemporary
Reviewer remarked that "the universe may well have heaved a sigh of relief
when, through the cerebration of an eminent thinker, it had been delivered of
this account of itself"--is simply a summary of results, and throws no light,
though it is often supposed to do so, upon ultimate causes. While it is true,
as Mr. Wallace affirms in his latest work, that "Descent with modification is
now universally accepted as the order of nature in the organic world," there is
everywhere at this moment the most disturbing uncertainty as to how the Ascent
even of species has been brought about. The attacks on the Darwinian theory
from the outside were never so keen as are the controversies now raging in
scientific circles, over the fundamental principles of Darwinism itself. On at
least two main points--sexual selection and the origin of the higher mental
characteristics of man--Mr Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of
the principle of Natural Selection though he be, directly opposes his
colleague. The powerful attack of Weismann on the Darwinian assumption of the
inheritability of acquired characters has opened one of the liveliest
controversies of recent years, and the whole field of science is hot with
controversies and discussions. In his `GermPlasm,' the German naturalist
believes himself to have finally disposed of both Darwin's "gemmules" and
Herbert Spencer's "primordial units," while Eimer breaks a lance with Weismann
in defence of Darwin, and Herbert Spencer replies for himself, assuring us that
"either there has been inheritance of acquired characters or there has been no
evolution."
It is the greatest compliment to Darwinism that
it should have survived to deserve this era of criticism. Meantime all prudent
men can but hold their judgment in suspense both as to that specific theory of
one department of Evolution which is called Darwinism, and as to the factors
and causes of Evolution itself. No one asks more of Evolution at present than
permission to use it as a working theory. Undoubtedly there are cases now
before Science where it is more than theory--the demonstration from Yale, for
instance, of the Evolution of the Horse; and from Steinheim of the
transmutation of Planorbis. In these cases the missing links have come in one
after another, and in series so perfect, that the evidence for their evolution
is irresistible. "On the evidence of Palaeontology," says Mr. Huxley in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "the evolution of many existing forms of
animal life from their predecessors is no longer an hypothesis but an
historical fact." And even as to Man, most naturalists agree with Mr. Wallace
who "fully accepts Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of
Man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia and his descent from
some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes," for "the evidence
of such descent appears overwhelming and conclusive."[3] But as to the development of the whole Man it is
sufficient for the present to rank it as a theory, no matter how impressive the
conviction be that it is more. Without some hypothesis no work can ever be
done, and, as everyone knows, many of the greatest contributions to human
knowledge have been made by the use of theories either seriously imperfect or
demonstrably false. This is the age of the evolution of Evolution. All thoughts
that the Evolutionist works with, all theories and generalizations, have been
themselves evolved and are now being evolved. Even were his theory perfected,
its first lesson would be that it was itself but a phase of the Evolution of
further opinion, no more fixed than a species, no more final than the theory
which it displaced. Of all men the Evolutionist, by the very nature of his
calling, the mere tools of his craft, his understanding of his hourly shifting
place in this always moving and ever more mysterious world, must be humble,
tolerant, and undogmatic.
These, nevertheless, are cold words with which to
speak of a Vision--for Evolution is after all a Vision---which is
revolutionizing the world of Nature and of thought, and, within living memory,
has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science
has never witnessed before. While many of the details of the theory of
Evolution are in the crucible of criticism, and while the field of modern
science changes with such rapidity that in almost every department the
textbooks of ten years ago are obsolete to-day, it is fair to add that no one
of these changes, nor all of them together, have touched the general theory
itself except to establish its strength, its value, and its universality. Even
more remarkable than the rapidity of its conquest is the authority with which
the doctrine of development has seemed to speak to the most authoritative minds
of our time. Of those who are in the front rank, of those who by their
knowledge have, by common consent, the right to speak, there are scarcely any
who do not in some form employ it in working and in thinking. Authority may
mean little; the world has often been mistaken; but when minds so different as
those of Charles Darwin and of T. H. Green, of Herbert Spencer and of Robert
Browning, build half the labours of their life on this one law, it is
impossible, and especially in the absence of any other even competing principle
at the present hour, to treat it as a baseless dream. Only the peculiar nature
of this great generalization can account for the extraordinary enthusiasm of
this acceptance. Evolution has done for Time what Astronomy has done for Space.
As sublime to the reason as the Science of the Stars, as overpowering to the
imagination, it has thrown the universe into a fresh perspective, and given the
human mind a new dimension. Evolution involves not so much a change of opinion
as a change in man's whole view of the world and of life. It is not the
statement of a mathematical proposition which men are called upon to declare
true or false. It is a method of looking upon Nature. Science for centuries
devoted itself to the cataloguing of facts and the discovery of laws. Each
worker toiled in his own little place--the geologist in his quarry, the
botanist in his garden, the biologist in his laboratory, the astronomer in his
observatory, the historian in his library, the archaeologist in his museum.
Suddenly these workers looked up; they spoke to one another; they had each
discovered a law; they whispered its name. It was Evolution. Henceforth their
work was one, science was one, the world was one, and mind, which discovered
the oneness, was one.
Such being the scope of the theory, it is
essential that for its interpretation this universal character be recognized,
and no phenomenon in nature or in human nature be left out of the final
reckoning. It is equally clear that in making that interpretation we must begin
with the final product, Man. If Evolution can be proved to include Man, the
whole course of Evolution and the whole scheme of Nature from that moment
assume a new significance The beginning must then be interpreted from the end,
not the end from the beginning. An engineering workshop is unintelligible until
we reach the room where the completed engine stands. Everything culminates in
that final product, is contained in it, is explained by it. The Evolution of
Man is also the complement and corrective of all other forms of Evolution. From
this height only is there a full view, a true perspective, a consistent world.
The whole mistake of naturalism has been to interpret Nature from the
standpoint of the atom --to study the machinery which drives this great moving
world simply as machinery, forgetting that the ship has any passengers, or the
passengers any captain, or the captain any course. It is as great a mistake, on
the other hand, for the theologian to separate off the ship from the passengers
as for the naturalist to separate off the passengers from the ship. It is he
who cannot include Man among the links of Evolution who has greatly to fear the
theory of development. In his jealousy for that religion which seems to him
higher than science, he removes at once the rational basis from religion and
the legitimate crown from science, forgetting that in so doing he offers to the
world an unnatural religion and an inhuman science. The cure for all the small
mental disorders which spring up around restricted applications of Evolution is
to extend it fearlessly in all directions as far as the mind can carry it and
the facts allow, till each man, working at his subordinate part, is compelled
to own, and adjust himself to, the whole.
If the theological mind be called upon to make
this expansion, the scientific man must be asked to enlarge his view in another
direction. If he insists upon including Man in his scheme of Evolution, he must
see to it that he include the whole Man. For him at least no form of Evolution
is scientific or is to be considered, which does not include the whole Man, and
all that is in Man, and all the work and thought and life and aspiration of
Man. The great moral facts, the moral forces so far as they are proved to
exist, the moral consciousness so far as it is real, must come within its
scope. Human History must be as much a part of it as Natural History. The
social and religious forces must no more be left outside than the forces of
gravitation or of life. The reason why the naturalist does not usually include
these among the factors in Evolution is not oversight, but undersight.
Sometimes, no doubt, he may take at their word those who assure him that
Evolution has nothing to do with those higher things, but the main reason is
simply that his work does not lie on the levels where those forces come into
play. The specialist is not to be blamed for this; limitation is his strength.
But when the specialist proceeds to reconstruct the universe from his little
corner of it, and especially from his level of it, he not only injures science
and philosophy, but may fatally mislead his neighbours. The man who is busy
with the stars will never come across Natural Selection, yet surely must he
allow for Natural Selection in his construction of the world as a whole. He who
works among star-fish will encounter little of Mental Evolution, yet will he
not deny that it exists. The stars have voices, but there are other voices; the
star-fishes have activities, but there are other activities. Man, body, soul,
spirit, are not only to be considered, but are first to be considered in any
theory of the world. You cannot describe the life of kings, or arrange their
kingdoms, from the cellar beneath the palace. "Art," as Browning reminds us,
"Must fumble for
the whole, once fixing on a part,
However poor, surpass the fragment, and aspire
To reconstruct thereby the ultimate entire."
II
THE MISSING FACTOR IN CURRENT THEORIES
But it is not so much in ignoring Man that
evolutionary philosophy has gone astray; for ,of that error it has seriously
begun to repent. What we have now to charge against it, what is a main object
of these pages to point out, is that it has misread Nature herself. In "fixing
on a part" whereby to "reconstruct the ultimate," it has fixed upon a part
which is not the most vital part, and the reconstructions, therefore, have come
to be wholly out of focus. Fix upon the wrong "part," and the instability of
the fabric built upon it is a foregone conclusion. Now, although
reconstructions of the cosmos in the light of Evolution are the chief feature
of the science of our time, in almost no case does even a hint of the true
scientific standpoint appear to be perceived. And although it anticipates much
that we should prefer to leave untouched until it appears in its natural
setting, the gravity of the issues makes it essential to summarize the whole
situation now.
The root of the error lies, indirectly rather
than directly, with Mr. Darwin. In 1859, through the publication of the
Origin of Species, he offered to the world what purported to be the
final clue to the course of living Nature. That clue was the principle of the
Struggle for Life. After the years of storm and stress which follow the
intrusion into the world of all great thoughts, this principle was universally
accepted as the key to all the sciences which deal with life. So ceaseless was
Mr. Darwin's emphasis upon this factor, and so masterful his influence, that,
after the first sharp conflict, even the controversy died down. With scarce a
challenge the Struggle for Life became accepted by the scientific world as the
governing factor in development, and the drama of Evolution was made to hinge
entirely upon its action. It became the "part" from which science henceforth
went on "to reconstruct the whole," and biology, sociology, and teleology, were
built anew on this foundation.
That the Struggle for Life has been a prominent
actor in the drama is certain. Further research has only deepened the
impression of the magnitude and universality of this great and far-reaching
law. But that it is the sole or even the main agent in the process of Evolution
must be denied. Creation is a drama, and no drama was ever put upon the stage
with only one actor. The Struggle for Life is the "Villain" of the piece, no
more; and, like the "Villain" in the play, its chief function is to re-act upon
the other players for higher ends. There is, in point of fact, a second
factor which one might venture to call the Struggle for the Life of
Others, which plays an equally prominent part. Even in the early stages of
development, its contribution is as real, while in the world's later
progress--under the name of Altruism-- it assumes a sovereignty before which
the earlier Struggle sinks into insignificance. That this second form of
Struggle should all but have escaped the notice of Evolutionists is the more
unaccountable since it arises, like the first, out of those fundamental
functions of living organisms which it is the main business of biological
science to investigate. The functions discharged by all living things, plant
and animal, are two[4] in number. The first is
Nutrition, the second is Reproduction. The first is the basis of the Struggle
for Life; the second, of the Struggle for the Life of Others. These two
functions run their parallel course--or spiral course, for they continuously
intertwine--from the very dawn of life. They are involved in the fundamental
nature of protoplasm itself. They affect the entire round of life; they
determine the whole morphology of living things; in a sense they are life. Yet,
in constructing the fabric of Evolution, one of these has been taken, the other
left.
Partly because of the limitations of its purely
physical name, and partly because it has never been worked out as an
evolutionary force, the function of Reproduction will require to be introduced
to the reader in some detail. But to realize its importance or even to
understand it, it will be necessary to recall to our minds the supreme place
which function generally holds in the economy of life.
Life to an animal or to a Man is not a random
series of efforts. Its course is set as rigidly as the courses of the stars.
All its movements and changes, its apparent deflections and perturbations are
guided by unalterable purposes; its energies and caprices definitely
controlled. What controls it are its functions. These and these only determine
life; living out these is life. Trace back any one, or all, of the countless
activities of an animal's life, and it will be found that they are at bottom
connected with one or other of the two great functions which manifest
themselves in protoplasm. Take any organ of the body-- hand or foot, eye or
ear, heart or lung--or any tissue of the body--muscle or nerve, bone or
cartilage--and it will be found to be connected either with Nutrition or with
Reproduction. Just as everything about an engine, every bolt, bar, valve,
crank, lever, wheel, has something to do with the work of that engine,
everything about an animal's body has something to do with the work prescribed
by those two functions. An animal, or a Man, is a consistent whole, a rational
production. Now the rationale of living stands revealed to us in protoplasm.
Protoplasm sets life its task. Living can only be done along its lines. There
start the channels in which all life must run, and though the channels
bifurcate endlessly as time goes on, and though more life and fuller is ever
coursing through them, it can never overflow the banks appointed from the
beginning.
But this is not all. The activities even of the
higher life, though not qualitatively limited by the lower, are determined by
these same lines. Were these facts only relevant in the domain of physiology,
they would be of small account in a study of the Ascent of Man. But the more
profoundly the Evolution of Man is investigated the more clearly is it seen
that the whole course of his development has been conducted on this fundamental
basis. Life, all life, higher or lower, is an organic unity. Nature may vary
her effects, may introduce qualitative changes so stupendous as to make their
affinities with lower things unthinkable, but she has never re-laid the
foundations of the world. Evolution began with protoplasm and ended with Man,
and all the way between, the development has been a symmetry whose secret lies
in the two or three great crystallizing forces revealed to us through this
first basis.
Having realized the significance of the
physiological functions, let us now address ourselves to their meaning and
connotations. The first, the function of Nutrition, on which the Struggle for
Life depends, requires no explanation. Mr. Darwin was careful to give to his
favourite phrase, the Struggle for Life, a wider meaning than that which
associates it merely with Nutrition; but this qualification seems largely to
have been lost sight of-- to some extent even by himself--and the principle as
it stands to-day in scientific and philosophical discussion is practically
synonymous with the Struggle for Food. As time goes on this Struggle --at first
a conflict with Nature and the elements, sustained by hunger, and intensified
by competition --assumes many disguises, and is ultimately known in the modern
world under the names of War and Industry. In these later phases the early
function of protoplasm is obscured, but on the last analysis, War and
Industry--pursuits in which half the world is now engaged--are seen to be
simply its natural developments.
The implications of the second function,
Reproduction, lie further from the surface. To say that Reproduction is
synonymous with the Struggle for the Life of Others conveys at first little
meaning, for the physiological aspects of the function persist in the mind, and
make even a glimpse of its true character difficult. In two or three chapters
in the text, the implications of this function will be explained at length, and
the reader who is sufficiently interested in the immediate problem, or who sees
that there is here something to be investigated, may do well to turn to these
at once. Suffice it for the moment to say that the physiological aspects of the
Struggle for the Life of Others are so overshadowed even towards the close of
the Animal Kingdom by the psychical and ethical that it is scarcely necessary
to emphasize the former at all. One's first and natural association with the
Struggle for the Life of Others is with something done for posterity--in the
plant the Struggle to produce seeds, in the animal to beget young. But this is
a preliminary which, compared with what directly and indirectly rises out of
it, may be almost passed over. The significant note is ethical, the development
of Other-ism, as Altruism--its immediate and inevitable outcome. Watch any
higher animal at that most critical of all hours--for itself, and for its
species--the hour when it gives birth to another creature like itself. Pass
over the purely physiological processes of birth; observe the behaviour of the
animal-mother in presence of the new and helpless life which palpitates before
her. There it lies, trembling in the balance between life and death. Hunger
tortures it; cold threatens it; danger besets it; its blind existence hangs by
a thread. There is the opportunity of Evolution. There is an opening appointed
in the physical order for the introduction of a moral order. If there is more
in Nature than the selfish Struggle for Life the secret can now be told.
Hitherto, the world belonged to the Food-seeker, the Self-seeker, the Struggler
for Life, the Father. Now is the hour of the Mother. And, animal though she be,
she rises to her task. And that hour, as she ministers to her young, becomes to
the world the hour of its holiest birth.
Sympathy, tenderness, unselfishness, and the long
list of virtues which make up Altruism, are the direct outcome and essential
accompaniment of the reproductive process. Without some rudimentary maternal
solicitude for the egg in the humblest forms of life, or for the young among
higher forms, the living world would not only suffer, but would cease. For a
time in the life history of every higher animal the direct, personal,
gratuitous, unrewarded help of another creature is a condition of existence.
Even in the lowliest world of plants the labours of Maternity begin, and the
animal kingdom closes with the creation of a class in which this function is
perfected to its last conceivable expression. The vicarious principle is shot
through and through the whole vast web of Nature; and if one actor has played a
mightier part than another in the drama of the past, it has been
self-sacrifice. What more has come into humanity along the line of the Struggle
for the Life of Others will be shown later. But it is quite certain that, of
all the things that minister to the welfare and good of Man, of all that make
the world varied and fruitful, of all that make society solid and interesting,
of all that make life beautiful and glad and worthy, by far the larger part has
reached us through the activities of the Struggle for the Life of Others.
How grave the omission of this supreme factor
from our reckoning, how serious the effect upon our whole view of nature, must
now appear. Time was when the science of Geology was interpreted exclusively in
terms of the action of a single force --fire. Then followed the theories of an
opposing school who saw all the earth's formations to be the result of water.
Any Biology, any Sociology any Evolution, which is based on a single factor, is
as untrue as the old Geology. It is only when both the Struggle for Life and
the Struggle for the Life of Others are kept in view, that any scientific
theory of Evolution is possible. Combine them, contrast them, assign each its
place, allow for their inter-actions, and the scheme of Nature may be worked
out in terms of them to the last detail. All along the line, through the whole
course of the development, these two functions act and react upon one another;
and continually as they co-operate to produce a single result, their specific
differences are never lost.
The first, the Struggle for Life, is, throughout,
the Self-regarding function; the second, the Other-regarding function. The
first, in lower Nature, obeying the law of self-preservation, devotes its
energies to feed itself; the other, obeying the law of species-preservation, to
feed its young. While the first develops the active virtues of strength and
courage, the other lays the basis for the passive virtues, sympathy, and love.
In the later world one seeks its end in personal aggrandizement, the other in
ministration. One begets competition, self-assertion, war; the other
unselfishness, self-effacement, peace. One is Individualism, the other,
Altruism.
To say that no ethical content can be put into
the discharge of either function in the earlier reaches of Nature goes without
saying. But the moment we reach a certain height in the development, ethical
implications begin to arise. These, in the case of the first, have been read
into Nature, lower as well as higher, with an exaggerated and merciless
malevolence. The other side has received almost no expression. The final result
is a picture of Nature wholly painted in shadow--a picture so dark as to be a
challenge to its Maker, an unanswered problem to philosophy, an abiding offence
to the moral nature of Man. The world has been held up to us as one great
battlefield heaped with the slain, an Inferno of infinite suffering, a
slaughter-house resounding with the cries of a ceaseless agony.
Before this version of the tragedy, authenticated
by the highest names on the roll of science, humanity was dumb, morality
mystified, natural theology stultified. A truer reading may not wholly relieve
the first, enlighten the second, or re-instate the third. But it at least
re-opens the inquiry; and when all its bearings come to be perceived, the light
thrown upon the field of Nature by the second factor may be more impressive to
reason than the apparent shadow of the first to sense.
To relieve the strain of the position forced upon
ethics by the one-sided treatment of the process of Evolution, heroic attempts
have been made. Some have attempted to mitigate the amount of suffering it
involves, and assure us that, after all, the Struggle, except as a metaphor,
scarcely exists. "There is," protests Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, "good reason
to believe . . . that the supposed `torments ` and `miseries ` of animals have
little real existence, but are the reflection of the imagined sensations of
cultivated men and women in similar circumstances; and that the amount of
actual suffering caused by the Struggle for Existence among animals is
altogether insignificant."[5] Mr. Huxley, on the
other hand, will make no compromise. The Struggle for Life to him is a
portentous fact, unmitigated and unexplained. No metaphors are strong enough to
describe the implacability of its sway. "The moral indifference of nature" and
"the unfathomable injustice of the nature of things" everywhere stare him in
the face. "For his successful progress, as far as the savage state, Man has
been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the
tiger."[6] That stage reached, "for thousands
and thousands of years, before the origin of the oldest known civilizations,
men were savages of a very low type. They strove with their enemies and their
competitors; they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves;
they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of
generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyaena, whose
lives were spent in the same way; and they were no more to be praised or
blamed, on moral grounds, than their less erect and more hairy compatriots....
Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations
of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of
existence. The human species, like others, plashed and floundered amid the
general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might, and
thinking neither of whence nor whither."[7]
How then does Mr. Huxley act--for it is
instructive to follow out the consequences of an error--in the face of this
tremendous problem? He gives it up. There is no solution. Nature is without
excuse. After framing an indictment against it in the severest language at his
command, he turns his back upon Nature--sub-human Nature, that is --and leaves
teleology to settle the score as best it can. "The history of civilization," he
tells us, "is the record of the attempts of the human race to escape from this
position." But whither does he betake himself? Is he not part of Nature, and
therefore a sharer in its guilt? By no means. For by an astonishing tour de
force--the last, as his former associates in the evolutionary ranks have
not failed to remind him, which might have been expected of him--he ejects
himself from the world-order, and washes his hands of it in the name of Ethical
Man. After sharing the fortunes of Evolution all his life, bearing its burdens
and solving its doubts, he abandons it without a pang, and sets up an
imperium in imperio, where, as a moral being, the `cosmic' Struggle
troubles him no more. "Cosmic Nature," he says, in a parting shot at his former
citadel, "is no school of virtue, but the head-quarters of the enemy of ethical
nature."[8] So far from the Ascent of Man
running along the ancient line, "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic
process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be
called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who
may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which
exist, but of those who are ethically the best."[9]
The expedient, to him, was a necessity. Viewing
Nature as Mr. Huxley viewed it there was no other refuge. The "cosmic process"
meant to him the Struggle for Life, and to escape from the Struggle for Life he
was compelled to turn away from the world-order, which had its being because of
it. As it happens, Mr. Huxley has hit upon the right solution, only the method
by which he reaches it is wholly wrong. And the mischievous result of it is
obvious --it leaves all lower Nature in the lurch. With a curious disregard of
the principle of Continuity, to which all his previous work had done such
homage, he splits up the world-order into two separate halves. The earlier
dominated by the `cosmic ` principle-- the Struggle for Life; the other by the
`ethical ` principle--virtually, the Struggle for the Life of Others. The
Struggle for Life is thus made to stop at the `ethical ` process; the Struggle
for the Life of Others to begin. Neither is justified by fact. The Struggle for
the Life of Others, as we have seen, starts its upward course from the same
protoplasm as the Struggle for Life; and the Struggle for Life runs on into the
`ethical' sphere as much as the Struggle for the Life of Others. One has only
to see where Mr. Huxley gets his `ethical ` world to perceive the extent of the
anomaly. For where does he get it, and what manner of world is it? "The history
of civilization details the steps by which men have succeeded in building up an
artificial world within the cosmos."[10] An
artificial world within the cosmos?
This suggested breach between the earlier and the
later process, if indeed we are to take it seriously, is scientifically
indefensible, and the more unfortunate since the same result, or a better, can
be obtained without it. The real breach is not between the earlier and the
later process, but between two rival, or two co-operating processes, which have
existed from the first, which have worked together all along the line, and
which took on `ethical ` characters at the same moment in time. The Struggle
for the Life of Others is sunk as deep in the "cosmic process" as the Struggle
for Life; the Struggle for Life has a share in the "ethical process" as much as
the Struggle for the Life of Others. Both are cosmic processes; both are
ethical processes; both are both cosmical and ethical processes. Nothing but
confusion can arise from a cross-classification which does justice to neither
half of Nature.
The consternation caused by Mr. Huxley's change
of front, or supposed change of front, is matter of recent history. Mr. Leslie
Stephen and Mr. Herbert Spencer hastened to protest; the older school of
moralists hailed it almost as a conversion. But the one fact everywhere
apparent throughout the discussion is that neither side apprehended either the
ultimate nature or the true solution of the problem. The seat of the disorder
is the same in both attackers and attacked--the one-sided view of Nature.
Universally Nature, as far as the plant, animal, and savage levels, is taken to
be synonymous with the Struggle for Life. Darwinism held the monopoly of that
lower region, and Darwinism revenged itself in a manner which has at least
shown the inadequacy of the most widely accepted premise of recent science.
That Mr. Huxley has misgivings on the matter
himself is apparent from his Notes. "Of course," he remarks, in reference to
the technical point, "strictly speaking, social life and the ethical process,
in virtue of which it advances towards perfection, are part and parcel of the
general process of Evolution."[11] And he
gets a momentary glimpse of the "ethical process" in the cosmos, which, if he
had followed it out, must have modified his whole position. "Even in these
rudimentary forms of society, love and fear come into play, and enforce a
greater or less renunciation of self-will. To this extent the general cosmic
process begins to be checked by a rudimentary ethical process, which is,
strictly speaking, part of the former, just as the `governor' in a steam-engine
is part of the mechanism of the engine."[12]
Here the whole position is virtually conceded;
and only the pre-conceptions of Darwinism and the lack of a complete
investigation into the nature and extent of the "rudimentary ethical process"
can have prevailed in the face of such an admission. Follow out the metaphor of
the `governor,' and, with one important modification, the true situation almost
stands disclosed. For what appears to be the `governor' in the rudimentary
ethical process becomes the `steam-engine' in the later process. The mere fact
that it exists in the "general cosmic process" alters the quality of that
process; and the fact that, as we hope to show, it becomes the prime mover in
the later process, entirely changes our subsequent conception of it. The
beginning of a process is to be read from the end and not from the beginning.
And if even a rudiment of a moral order be found in the beginnings of this
process it relates itself and that process to a final end and a final unity.
Philosophy reads end into the earlier process by
a necessity of reason. But how much stronger its position if it could add to
that a basis in the facts of Nature? "I ask the evolutionist," pertinently
inquires Mr. Huxley's critic, "who has no other basis than the Struggle for
existence, how he accounts for the intrusion of these moral ideas and standards
which presume to interfere with the cosmic process and sit in judgment upon its
results."[13] May we ask the philosopher how
he accounts for them? As little can he account for them as he who has
"no other basis than the Struggle for existence." Truly, the writer continues,
the question "cannot be answered so long as we regard morality merely as an
incidental result, a by-product, as it were, of the cosmical system." But what
if morality be the main product of the cosmical system--of even the
cosmical system? What if it can be shown that it is the essential and not the
incidental result of it, and that so far from being a by-product, it is
immorality that is the by-product?
These interrogations may be too strongly put.
`Accompaniments' of the cosmical system might be better than `products';
`revelations through that process' may be nearer the truth than `results' of
it. But what it is intended to show is that the moral order is a continuous
line from the beginning, that it has had throughout, so to speak, a basis in
the cosmos, that upon this, as a trellis-work, it has climbed upwards to the
top. The one--the trelliswork--is to be conceived of as an incarnation; the
other--the manifestation--as a revelation; the one is an Evolution from below,
the other an Involution from above. Philosophy has long since assured us of the
last, but because it was never able to show us the completeness of the first,
science refused to believe it. The defaulter nevertheless was not philosophy
but science. Its business was with the trellis-work. And it gave us a broken
trellis-work, a ladder with only one side, and every step on the other side
resting on air. When science tried to climb the ladder it failed; the steps
refused to bear any weight. What did men of science do? They condemned the
ladder and, balancing themselves on the side that was secure, proclaimed their
Agnosticism to philosophy. And what did philosophy do? It stood on the other
half of the ladder, the half that was not there, and rated them. That
the other half was not there was of little moment. It was in themselves. It
ought to be there; therefore it must be there. And it is quite true; it is
there. Philosophy, like Poetry, is prophetic: "The sense of the whole," it
says, "comes first."[14]
But science could not accept the alternative. It
had looked, and it was not there; from its standpoint the only refuge was
Agnosticism-- there were no facts. Till the facts arrived, therefore,
philosophy was powerless to relieve her ally. Science looked to Nature to put
in her own ends, and not to philosophy to put them in for her. Philosophy might
interpret them after they were there, but it must have something to start from;
and all that science had supplied her with mean time was the fact of the
Struggle for Life. Working from the standpoint of the larger Nature, Human
Nature itself, philosophy could put in other ends; but there appeared no solid
backing for these in facts, and science refused to be satisfied. The position
was a fair one. The danger of philosophy putting in the ends is that she cannot
convince everyone that they are the right ones.
And what is the valid answer? Of course, that
Nature has put in her own ends if we would take the trouble to look for them.
She does not require them to be secretly manufactured upstairs and credited to
her account. By that process mistakes might arise in the reckoning. The
philosophers upstairs might differ about the figures, or at least in equating
them. The philosopher requires fact, phenomenon, natural law, at every turn to
keep him right; and without at least some glimpse of these, he may travel far
afield. So long as Schopenhauer sees one thing in the course of Nature and
Rousseau another, it will always be well to have Nature herself to act as
referee. The end as read in Nature, and the end as re-read in, and interpreted
by, the higher Nature of Man may be very different things; but nothing can be
done till the End-in-the-phenomenon clears the way for the End-in-itself--till
science overtakes philosophy with facts. When that is done, everything can be
done. With the finding of the other half of the ladder, even Agnosticism may
retire. Science cannot permanently pronounce itself "not knowing," till it has
exhausted the possibilities of knowing. And in this case the Agnosticism is
premature, for science has only to look again, and it will discover that the
missing facts are there.
Seldom has there been an instance on so large a
scale of a biological error corrupting a whole philosophy. Bacon's aphorism was
never more true: "This I dare affirm in knowledge of Nature, that a little
natural philosophy, and the first entrance into it, doth dispose the opinion to
atheism, but on the other side, much natural philosophy, and wading deep into
it, will bring about men's minds to religion."[15] Hitherto, the Evolutionist has had practically no other
basis than the Struggle for Life. Suppose even we leave that untouched, the
addition of an Other-regarding basis makes an infinite difference. For when it
is then asked on which of them the process turns, and the answer is given `On
both,' we perceive that it is neither by the one alone, nor by the other alone,
that the process is to be interpreted, but by a higher unity which resolves and
embraces all. And as both are equally necessary to the antinomy, even that of
the two which seems irreconcilable with higher ends is seen to be necessary.
Viewed simpliciter, the Struggle for Life appears irreconcilable with
ethical ends, a prodigious anomaly in a moral world; but viewed in continuous
reaction with the Struggle for the Life of Others, it discloses itself as an
instrument of perfection the most subtle and far-reaching that reason could
devise.
The presence of the second factor therefore,
while it leaves the first untouched, cannot leave its implications untouched.
It completely alters these implications. It has never been denied that the
Struggle for Life is an efficient instrument of progress; the sole difficulty
has always been to justify the nature of the instrument. But if even it be
shown that this is only half the instrument, teleology gains something. If the
fuller view takes nothing away from the process of Evolution, it imports
something into it which changes the whole aspect of the case. For even from the
first that factor is there. The Struggle for the Life of Others, as we have
seen, is no interpolation at the end of the process, but radical, engrained in
the world-order as profoundly as the Struggle for Life. By what right, then,
has Nature been interpreted only by the Struggle for Life? With far greater
justice might science interpret it in the light of the Struggle for the Life of
Others. For, in the first place, unless there had been this second factor, the
world could not have existed. Without the Struggle for the Life of Others,
obviously there would have been no Others. In the second place, unless there
had been a Struggle for the Life of Others, the Struggle for Life could not
have been kept up. As will be shown later the Struggle for Life almost wholly
supports itself on the products of the Struggle for the Life of Others. In the
third place, without the Struggle for the Life of Others, the Struggle for Life
as regards its energies would have died down, and failed of its whole
achievement. It is the ceaseless pressure produced by the exuberant fertility
of Reproduction that creates any valuable Struggle for Life at all. The moment
"Others" multiply, the individual struggle becomes keen up to the disciplinary
point. It was this, indeed-- through the reading of Malthus on
Over-population--that suggested to Mr. Darwin the value of the Struggle for
Life. The law of Over-population from that time forward became the
foundation-stone of his theory; and recent biological research has made the
basis more solid than ever. The Struggle for the Life of Others on the plant
and animal plane, in the mere work of multiplying lives, is a final condition
of progress. Without competition there can be no fight, and without fight there
can be no victory. In other words, without the Struggle for the Life of Others
there can be no Struggle for Life, and therefore no Evolution. Finally, and all
the reasons already given are frivolous beside it, had there been no
Altruism--Altruism in the definite sense of unselfishness, sympathy, and
self-sacrifice for Others, the whole higher world of life had perished as soon
as it was created. For hours, or days, or weeks in the early infancy of all
higher animals, maternal care and sympathy are a condition of existence.
Altruism had to enter the world, and any species which neglected it was
extinguished in a generation.
No doubt a case could be made out likewise for
the imperative value of the Struggle for Life. The position has just been
granted. So far from disputing it, we assume it to be equally essential to
Nature and to a judgment upon the process of Evolution. But what is disputed is
that the Struggle for Life is either the key to Nature, or that it is more
important in itself than the Struggle for the Life of Others. It is pitiful
work pitting the right hand against the left, the heart against the head; but
if it be insisted that there is neither right hand nor heart, the proclamation
is necessary not only that they exist, but that absolutely they are as
important and relatively to ethical Man of infinitely greater moment than
anything that functions either in the animal or social organism.
But why, if all this be true of the Struggle for
the Life of Others, has a claim so imperious not been recognized by science?
That a phenomenon of this distinction should have attracted so little attention
suggests a suspicion. Does it really exist?
Is the biological basis sound? Have we not at
least exaggerated its significance? The biologist will judge. Though no doubt
the function of Reproduction is intimately connected in Physiology with the
function of Nutrition, the facts as stated here are facts of Nature; and some
glimpse of the influence of this second factor will be given in the sequel from
which even the non-biological reader may draw his own conclusions. Difficult as
it seems to account for the ignoring of an elemental fact in framing the
doctrine of Evolution, there are circumstances which make the omission less
unintelligible. Foremost, of course, there stands the overpowering influence of
Mr. Darwin. In spite of the fact that he warned his followers against it, this
largely prejudged the issue. Next is to be considered the narrowing, one had
almost said the blighting, effect of specialism. Necessary to the progress of
science, the first era of a reign of specialism is disastrous to philosophy.
The men who in field and laboratory are working out the facts, do not speculate
at all. Content with slowly building up the sum of actual knowledge in some
neglected and restricted province, they are too absorbed to notice even what
the workers in the other provinces are about. Thus it happens that while there
are many scientific men, there are few scientific thinkers. The complaint is
often made that science speculates too much. It is quite the other way. One has
only to read the average book of science in almost any department to wonder at
the wealth of knowledge, the brilliancy of observation, and the barrenness of
idea. On the other hand, though scientific experts will not think themselves,
there is always a multitude of onlookers waiting to do it for them. Among these
what strikes one is the ignorance of fact and the audacity of the idea. The
moment any great half-truth in Nature is unearthed, these unqualified
practitioners leap to a generalization; and the observers meantime, on the
track of the other half, are too busy or too oblivious to refute their
heresies. Hence, long after its foundations are undermined, a brilliant
generalization will retain its hold upon the popular mind; and before the
complementary, the qualifying, or the neutralizing facts can be supplied, the
mischief is done.
But while this is true of many who play with the
double-edged tools of science, it is not true of a third class. When we turn to
the pages of the few whose science is adequate and whose sweep is over the
whole vast horizon, we find, as we should expect, some recognition of the
altruistic factor. Though Mr. Herbert Spencer, to whom the appeal in this
connection is obvious, makes a different use of the fact, it has not escaped
him. Not only does the Other-regarding function receive recognition, but he
allots it a high place in his system. Of its ethical bearings he is equally
clear. "What," he asks, "is the ethical aspect of these [altruistic]
principles? In the first place, animal life of all but the lowest kinds has
been maintained by virtue of them. Excluding the Protozoa, among which
their operation is scarcely discernible, we see that without gratis
benefits to offspring, and earned benefits to adults, life could not have
continued. In the second place, by virtue of them life has gradually evolved
into higher forms. By care of offspring, which has become greater with
advancing organization, and by survival of the fittest in the competition among
adults, which has become more habitual with advancing organization, superiority
has been perpetually fostered and further advances caused."[16] Fiske, Littre, Romanes, Le Conte, L. Buchner, Miss
Buckley, and Prince Kropotkin have expressed themselves partly in the same
direction; and Geddes and Thomson, in so many words, recognize "the
co-existence of twin-streams of egoism and altruism, which often merge for a
space without losing their distinctness, and are traceable to a common origin
in the simplest forms of life."[17] The last
named--doubtless because their studies have taken them both into the fields of
pure biology and of bionomics--more clearly than any other modern writers, have
grasped the bearings of this theme in all directions, and they fearlessly take
their standpoint from the physiology of protoplasm. Thus, "in the hunger and
reproductive attractions of the lowest organisms, the self-regarding and
other-regarding activities of the higher find their starting-point. Though some
vague consciousness is perhaps co-existent with life itself, we can only speak
with confidence of psychical egoism and altruism after a central nervous system
has been definitely established. At the same time, the activities of even the
lowest organisms are often distinctly referable to either category.... Hardly
distinguishable at the outset, the primitive hunger and love become the
starting-points of divergent lines of egoistic and altruistic emotion and
activity."[18]
That at a much earlier stage than is usually
supposed, Evolution visibly enters upon the "rudimentary ethical" plane,
is certain, and we shall hope to outline the proof. But even if the thesis
fails, it remains to challenge the general view that the Struggle for Life is
everything, and the Struggle for the Life of Others nothing. Seeing not only
that the second is the more important, but also this far more significant
fact--which has not yet been alluded to--that as Evolution proceeds the one
Struggle waxes, and the other wanes, would it not be wiser to study the
drama nearer its denouement before deciding whether it was a moral, a
non-moral, or an immoral play?
Lest the alleged waning of the Struggle
for Life convey a wrong impression, let it be added that of course the word is
to be taken qualitatively. The Struggle in itself can never cease. What ceases
is its so-called anti-ethical character. For nothing is in finer evidence as we
rise in the scale of life than the gradual tempering of the Struggle for Life.
Its slow amelioration is the work of ages, may be the work of ages still, but
its animal qualities in the social life of Man are being surely left behind;
and though the mark of the savage and the brute still mar its handiwork, these
harsher qualities must pass away. In that new social order which the gathering
might of the altruistic spirit is creating now around us, in that reign of Love
which must one day, if the course of Evolution holds on its way, be realized,
the baser elements will find that solvent prepared for them from the beginning
in anticipation of a higher rule on earth. Interpreting the course of Evolution
scientifically, whether from its starting-point in the first protoplasm, or
from the rallying-point of its two great forces in the social organism of
to-day, it becomes more and more certain that only from the commingled
achievement of both can the nature of the process be truly judged. Yet, as one
sees the one sun set, and the other rise with a splendour the more astonishing
and bewildering as the centuries roll on, it is impossible to withhold a
verdict as to which may be most reasonably looked upon as the ultimate reality
of the world. The path of progress and the path of Altruism are one. Evolution
is nothing but the Involution of Love, the revelation of Infinite Spirit, the
Eternal Life returning to Itself. Even the great shadow of Egoism which darkens
the past is revealed as shadow only because we are compelled to read it by the
higher light which has come. In the very act of judging it to be shadow, we
assume and vindicate the light. And in every vision of the light, contrariwise,
we resolve the shadow, and perceive the end for which both light and dark are
given.
"I can believe,
this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else,
Devised--all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain--to evolve,
By new machinery in counterpart,
The moral qualities of Man--how else?--
To make him love in turn, and be beloved,
Creative and self-sacrificing too,
And thus eventually Godlike." [19]
III
WHY WAS EVOLUTION THE METHOD CHOSEN?
One seldom-raised yet not merely curious
question of Evolution is, why the process should be an evolution at all? If
Evolution is simply a method of Creation, why was this very extraordinary
method chosen? Creation tout d'un coup might have produced the
same result; an instantaneous act or an age-long process would both have given
us the world as it is? The answer of modern natural theology has been that the
evolutionary method is the infinitely nobler scheme. A spectacular act, it is
said, savours of the magician. As a mere exhibition of power it appeals to the
lower nature; but a process of growth suggests to the reason the work of an
intelligent Mind. No doubt this intellectual gain is real. While a catastrophe
puts the universe to confusion at the start, a gradual rise makes the beginning
of Nature harmonious with its end. How the surpassing grandeur of the new
conception has filled the imagination and kindled to enthusiasm the soberest
scientific minds, from Darwin downwards, is known to everyone. As the memorable
words which close the Origin of Species recall: "There is a grandeur in
this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by
the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone
cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being
evolved."[20]
But can an intellectual answer satisfy us any
more than the mechanical answer which it replaced? As there was clearly a moral
purpose in the end to be achieved by Evolution, should we not expect to find
some similar purpose in the means? Can we perceive no high design in selecting
this particular design, no worthy ethical result which should justify the
conception as well as the execution of Evolution?
We go too far, perhaps, in expecting answers to
questions so transcendent. But one at least suggests itself, whose practical
value is apology enough for venturing to advance it. Whenever the scheme was
planned, it must have been foreseen that the time would come when the directing
of part of the course of Evolution would pass into the hands of Man. A
spectator of the drama for ages, too ignorant to see that it was a drama, and
too impotent to do more than play his little part, the discovery must sooner or
later break upon him that Nature meant him to become a partner in her task, and
share the responsibility of the closing acts. It is not given to him as yet to
bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or to unloose the bands of Orion. In
part only can he make the winds and waves obey him, or control the falling
rain. But in larger part he holds the dominion of the world of lower life. He
exterminates what he pleases; he creates and he destroys; he changes; he
evolves; his selection replaces natural selection; he replenishes the earth
with plants and animals according to his will. But in a far grander sphere, and
in an infinitely profounder sense, has the sovereignty passed to him, For, by
the same decree, he finds himself the guardian and the arbiter of his personal
destiny, and that of his fellow-men. The moulding of his life and of his
children's children in measure lie with him. Through institutions of his
creation, through Parliaments, Churches, Societies, Schools, he shapes the path
of progress for his country and his time. The evils of the world are combated
by his remedies; its passions are stayed, its wrongs redressed, its energies
for good or evil directed by his hand. For unnumbered millions he opens or
shuts the gates of happiness, and paves the way for misery or social health.
Never before was it known and felt with the same solemn certainty that Man,
within bounds which none can pass, must be his own maker and the maker of the
world. For the first time in history not individuals only but multitudes of the
wisest and the noblest in every land take home to themselves, and unceasingly
concern themselves with, the problem of the Evolution of Mankind. Multitudes
more, philanthropists, statesmen, missionaries, humble men and patient women,
devote themselves daily to its practical solution, and everywhere some, in a
God-like culmination of Altruism, give their very lives for their fellow-men.
Who is to help these Practical Evolutionists--for those who read the book of
Nature can call them by no other name, and those who know its spirit can call
them by no higher--who is to help them in their tremendous task? There is the
will--where is the wisdom?
Where but in Nature herself. Nature may have
entrusted the further building to Mankind, but the plan has never left her
hands. The lines of the future are to be learned from her past, and her
fellow-helpers can most easily, most loyally, and most perfectly do their part
by studying closely the architecture of the earlier world, and continuing the
half-finished structure symmetrically to the top. The information necessary to
complete the work with architectural consistency lies in Nature. We might
expect that it should be there. When a business is transferred, or a partner
assumed, the books are shown, the methods of the business explained, its future
developments pointed out. All this is now done for the Evolution of Mankind. In
Evolution Creation has shown her hand. To have kept the secret from Man would
have imperilled the further evolution. To have revealed it sooner had been
premature. Love must come before knowledge, for knowledge is the instrument of
Love, and useless till it arrives. But now that there is Altruism enough in the
world to begin the new era, there must be wisdom enough to direct it. To make
Nature spell out her own career, to embody the key to the development in the
very development itself, so that the key might be handed over along with the
work, was to make the transference of responsibility possible and rational. In
the seventeenth century, Descartes, who with Leibnitz already foresaw the
adumbration of the evolutionary process, almost pointed this out; for speaking,
in another connection, of the intellectual value of a slow development of
things he observes, "their nature is much more easy to conceive when they are
seen originating by degrees in this way, than when they are considered as
entirely made."[21]
The past of Nature is a working-model of how
worlds can be made. The probabilities are there is no better way of making
them. If Man does as well it will be enough. In any case he can only begin
where Nature left off, and work with such tools as are put into his hands. If
the new partner had been intended merely to experiment with world-making, no
such legacy of useful law had been ever given him. And if he had been meant to
begin de novo on a totally different plan, it is unlikely either that
that should not have been hinted at, or that in his touching and beautiful
endeavour he should be embarrassed and thrown off the track by the old plan. As
a child set to complete some fine embroidery is shown the stitches, the
colours, and the outline traced upon the canvas, so the great Mother in setting
their difficult task to her later children provides them with one superb part
finished to show the pattern.
IV
EVOLUTION AND SOCIOLOGY
The moment it is grasped that we may have in
Nature a key to the future progress of Mankind, the study of Evolution rises to
an imposing rank in human interest. There lies the programme of the world from
the first of time, the instrument, the charter, and still more the prophecy of
progress. Evolution is the natural directory of the sociologist, the guide
through that which has worked in the past to what--subject to modifying
influences which Nature can always be trusted to give full notice of--may be
expected to work in the future. Here, for the individual, is a new and
impressive summons to public action, a vocation chosen of Nature which it will
profit him to consider, for thereby he may not only save the whole world, but
find his own soul. "The study of the historical development of man," says Prof.
Edward Caird, "especially in respect of his higher life, is not only a matter
of external or merely speculative curiosity; it is closely connected with the
development of that life in ourselves. For we learn to know ourselves, first of
all, in the mirror of the world: or, in other words, our knowledge of our own
nature and of its possibilities grows and deepens with our understanding of
what is without us, and most of all with our understanding of the general
history of man. It has often been noticed that there is a certain analogy
between the life of the individual and that of the race, and even that the life
of the individual is a sort of epitome of the history of humanity. But, as
Plato already discovered, it is by reading the large letters that we learn to
interpret the small.... It is only through a deepened consciousness of the
world that the human spirit can solve its own problem. Especially is this true
in the region of anthropology. For the inner life of the individual is deep and
full, just in proportion to the width of his relations to other men and things;
and his consciousness of what he is in himself as a spiritual being is
dependent on a comprehension of the position of his individual life in the
great secular process by which the intellectual and moral life of humanity has
grown and is growing. Hence the highest practical as well as speculative
interests of men are connected with the new extension of science which has
given fresh interest and meaning to the whole history of the race."[22]
If, as Herbert Spencer reminds us, "it is one of
those open secrets which seem the more secret because they are so open, that
all phenomena displayed by a nation are phenomena of Life, and are dependent on
the laws of Life," we cannot devote ourselves to study those laws too earnestly
or too soon. From the failure to get at the heart of the first principles of
Evolution the old call to "follow Nature" has all but become a heresy. Nature,
as a moral teacher, thanks to the Darwinian interpretation, was never more
discredited than at this hour; and friend and foe alike agree in warning us
against her. But a further reading of Nature may decide not that we must
discharge the teacher but beg her mutinous pupils to try another term at
school. With Nature studied in the light of a true biology, or even in the
sense in which the Stoics themselves employed their favourite phrase, it must
become once more the watchword of personal and social progress. With Mr.
Huxley's definition of what the Stoics meant by Nature as "that which holds up
the ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute submission of the will to
its behests . . . which commands all men to love one another, to return good
for evil, to regard one another as citizens of one great state,"[23] the phrase, "Live according to Nature," so far from
having no application to the modern world or no sanction in modern thought, is
the first commandment of Natural Religion.
The sociologist has grievously complained of late
that he could get but little help from science. The suggestions of Bagehot, the
Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, the proposals of multitudes of the
followers of the last who announced the redemption of the world the moment they
discovered the "Social Organism," raised great expectations. But somehow they
were not fulfilled. Mr. Spencer's work has been mainly to give this century,
and in part all time, its first great map of the field. He has brought all the
pieces on the board, described them one by one, defined and explained the game.
But what he has failed to do with sufficient precision, is to pick out the King
and Queen. And because he has not done so, some men have mistaken his pawns for
kings; others have mistaken the real kings for pawns; every ism has
found endorsement in his pages, and men have gathered courage for projects as
hostile to his whole philosophy as to social order. Theories of progress have
arisen without any knowledge of its laws, and the ordered course of things has
been done violence to by experiments which, unless the infinite conservatism of
Nature had neutralized their evils, had been a worse disaster than they are.
This inadequacy, indeed, of modern sociology to meet the practical problems of
our time, has become a by-word. Mr. Leslie Stephen pronounces the existing
science "a heap of vague empirical observation, too flimsy to be useful"; and
Mr. Huxley, exasperated with the condition in which it leaves the human family,
protests that "if there is no hope of a large improvement" he should "hail the
advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole affair away."
The first step in the reconstruction of Sociology
will be to escape from the shadow of Darwinism-- or rather to complement the
Darwinian formula of the Struggle for Life by a second factor which will turn
its darkness into light. A new morphology can only come from a new physiology,
and vice versa, and for both we must return to Nature. The one-sided
induction has led Sociology into a wilderness of empiricism, and only a
complete induction can reinstate it among the sciences. The vacant place is
there awaiting it; and every earnest mind is prepared to welcome it, not only
as the coming science, but as the crowning Science of all the sciences, the
Science, indeed, for which it will one day be seen every other science exists.
What it waits for meantime is what every science has had to wait for,
exhaustive observation of the facts and ways of Nature. Geology stood still for
centuries waiting for those who would simply look at the facts. Men speculated
in fantastic ways as to how the world could have been made, and the last thing
that occurred to them was to go and see it making. Then came the observers, men
who, waiving all theories of the process, addressed themselves to the natural
world direct, and in watching its daily programme of falling rain and running
stream laid bare the secret for all time. Sociology has had its Werners; it
awaits its Huttons. The method of Sociology must be the method of all the
natural sciences. It also must go and see the world making, not where the
conditions are already abnormal beyond recall, or where Man, by irregular
action, has already obscured everything but the conditions of failure; but in
lower Nature which makes no mistakes, and in those fairer reaches of a higher
world where the quality and the stability of the progress are guarantees that
the eternal order of Nature has had her uncorrupted way.
It cannot be that the full programme for the
perfect world lies in the imperfect part. Nor can it ever be that science can
find the end in the beginning, get moral out of non-moral states, evolve human
societies from ant-heaps, or philanthropies from protoplasm. But in every
beginning we get a beginning of an end; in every process a key to the single
step to be taken next. The full corn is not in the ear, but the first cell of
it is, and though `it doth not yet appear' what the million-celled ear shall
be, there is rational ground for judging what the second cell shall be. The
next few cells of the Social Organism are all that are given to Sociology to
affect. And, in dealing with them, its business is with the forces; the
phenomena will take care of themselves. Neither the great forces of Nature, nor
the great lines of Nature, change in a day, and however apparently unrelated
seem the phenomena as we ascend--here animal, there human; at one time
non-moral, at another moral--the lines of progress are the same. Nature, in
horizontal section, is broken up into strata which present to the eye of
ethical Man the profoundest distinctions in the universe; but Nature in the
vertical section offers no break, or pause, or flaw. To study the first
is to study a hundred unrelated sciences, sciences of atoms, sciences of cells,
sciences of Souls, sciences of Societies; to study the second is to deal with
one science--Evolution. Here, on the horizontal section, may be what Geology
calls an unconformability; there is overlap; changes of climate may be
registered from time to time, each with its appropriate reaction on the things
contained; upheavals, depressions, denudations, glaciations, faults, vary the
scene; higher forms of fossils appear as we ascend; but the laws of life are
continuous throughout, the eternal elements in an ever temporal world. The
Struggle for Life, and the Struggle for the Life of Others, in essential
nature, have never changed. They find new expression in each further sphere,
become coloured to our eye with different hues, are there the rivalries or the
affections of the brute, and here the industrial or the moral conflicts of the
race; but the factors themselves remain the same, and all life moves in
widening spirals round them. Fix in the mind this distinction between the
horizontal and the vertical view of Nature, between the phenomena and the law,
between all the sciences that ever were and the one science which resolves them
all, and the confusions and contradictions of Evolution are reconciled. The man
who deals with Nature statically, who catalogues the phenomena of life and
mind, puts on each its museum label, and arranges them in their separate cases,
may well defy you to co-relate such diverse wholes. To him Evolution is alike
impossible and unthinkable. But these items that he labels are not wholes. And
the world he dissects is not a museum, but a living, moving, and ascending
thing. The sociologist's business is with the vertical section, and he who has
to do with this living, moving, and ascending thing must treat it from the
dynamic point of view.
The significant thing for him is the study of
Evolution on its working side. And he will find that nearly all the phenomena
of social and national life are phenomena of these two principles--the Struggle
for Life, and the Struggle for the Life of Others. Hence he must betake himself
in earnest to see what these mean in Nature, what gathers round them as they
ascend, how each acts separately, how they work together, and whither they seem
to lead. More than ever the method of Sociology must be biological. More
urgently than ever "the time has come for a better understanding and for a more
radical method; for the social sciences to strengthen themselves by sending
their roots deep into the soil underneath from which they spring; and for the
biologist to advance over the frontier and carry the methods of his science
boldly into human society, where he has but to deal with the phenomena of life,
where he encounters life at last under its highest and most complex aspect."[24]
Would that the brilliant writer whose words these
are, and whose striking work appears while these sheets are almost in the
press, had "sent his roots deep enough into biological soil" to discover the
true foundation for that future Science of Society which he sees to be so
imperative. No modern thinker has seen the problem so clearly as Mr. Kidd, but
his solution, profoundly true in itself, is vitiated in the eyes of science and
philosophy by a basis wholly unsound. With an emphasis which Darwin himself has
not excelled, he proclaims the enduring value of the Struggle for Life. He sees
its immense significance even in the highest ranges of the social sphere. There
it stands with its imperious call to individual assertion, inciting to a
rivalry which Nature herself has justified, and encouraging every man by the
highest sanctions ceaselessly to seek his own. But he sees nothing else in
Nature; and he encounters therefore the difficulty inevitable from this
standpoint. For to obey this voice means ruin to Society, wrong and anarchy
against the higher Man. He listens for another voice; but there is no response.
As a social being he cannot, in spite of Nature, act on his first initiative.
He must subordinate himself to the larger interest, present and future, of
those around him. But why, he asks, must he, since Nature says "Mind thyself"?
Till Nature adds the further precept, "Look not every man on his own things,
but also on the things of Others," there is no rational sanction for morality.
And he finds no such precept. There is none in Nature. There is none in Reason.
Nature can only point him to a strenuous rivalry as the one condition of
continued progress; Reason can only endorse the verdict. Hence he breaks at
once with reason and with Nature, and seeks an "ultra-rational sanction" for
the future course of social progress.
Here, in his own words, is the situation. "The
teaching of reason to the individual must always be that the present time and
his own interests therein are all-important to him. Yet the forces which are
working out our development are primarily concerned not with those interests of
the individual, but with those widely different interests of a social organism
subject to quite other conditions and possessed of an indefinitely longer life.
. . . The central fact with which we are confronted in our progressive
societies is, therefore, that the interests of the social organism and those of
the individuals comprising it at any time are actually antagonistic; they can
never be reconciled; they are inherently and essentially irreconcilable."[25] Observe the extraordinary dilemma. Reason
not only has no help for the further progress of Society, but Society can only
go on upon a principle which is an affront to it. As Man can only attain his
highest development in Society, his individual interests must more and more
subordinate themselves to the welfare of a wider whole. "How is the possession
of reason ever to be rendered compatible with the will to submit to conditions
of existence so onerous, requiring the effective and continual subordination of
the individual's welfare to the progress of a development in which he can have
no personal interest whatever?"[26]
Mr. Kidd's answer is the bold one that it is not
compatible. There is no rational sanction whatever for progress. Progress, in
fact, can only go on by enlisting Man's reason against itself. "All those
systems of moral philosophy, which have sought to find in the nature of things
a rational sanction for human conduct in society, must sweep round and round in
futile circles. They attempt an inherently impossible task. The first great
social lesson of those evolutionary doctrines which have transformed the
science of the nineteenth century is, that there cannot be such a sanction.[27] . . . The extraordinary character of the
problem presented by human society begins thus slowly to come into view. We
find man making continual progress upwards, progress which it is almost beyond
the power of the imagination to grasp. From being a competitor of the brutes he
has reached a point of development at which he cannot himself set any limits to
the possibilities of further progress, and at which he is evidently marching
onwards to a high destiny. He has made this advance under the sternest
conditions, involving rivalry and competition for all, and the failure and
suffering of great numbers. His reason has been, and necessarily continues to
be, a leading factor in this development; yet, granting, as we apparently must
grant, the possibility of the reversal of the conditions from which his
progress results, those conditions have not any sanction from his reason. They
have had no such sanction at any stage of his history, and they continue to be
as much without such sanction in the highest civilizations of the present day
as at any past period."[28]
These conclusions will not have been quoted in
vain if they show the impossible positions to which a writer, whose
contribution otherwise is of profound and permanent value, is committed by a
false reading of Nature. Is it conceivable, a priori, that the
human reason should be put to confusion by a breach of the Law of Continuity at
the very point where its sustained action is of vital moment? The whole
complaint, which runs like a dirge through every chapter of this book, is
founded on a misapprehension of the fundamental laws which govern the processes
of Evolution. The factors of Darwin and Weismann are assumed to contain an
ultimate interpretation of the course of things. For all time the conditions of
existence are taken as established by these authorities. With the Struggle for
Life in sole possession of the field no one, therefore, we are warned, need
ever repeat the gratuitous experiment of the past, of Socrates, Plato, Kant,
Hegel, Comte, and Herbert Spencer, to find a sanction for morality in Nature.
"All methods and systems alike, which have endeavoured to find in the nature of
things any universal rational sanction for individual conduct in a progressive
society, must be ultimately fruitless. They are all alike inherently
unscientific in that they attempt to do what the fundamental conditions of
existence render impossible." And Mr. Kidd puts a climax on his devotion to the
doctrine of his masters by mourning over "the incalculable loss to English
Science and English Philosophy" because Herbert Spencer's work "was practically
complete before his intellect had any opportunity of realizing the full
transforming effect in the higher regions of thought, and, more particularly,
in the department of sociology, of that development of biological science which
began with Darwin, which is still in full progress, and to which Professor
Weismann has recently made the most notable contributions."[29] Whether Mr. Spencer's ignorance or his science has been
at the bottom of the escape, it is at least a lucky one. For if Mr. Kidd had
realized "the full transforming effect" of the following paragraph, much of his
book could not have been written. "The most general conclusion is that in order
of obligation, the preservation of the species takes precedence of the
preservation of the individual. It is true that the species has no existence
save as an aggregate of individuals; and it is true that, therefore, the
welfare of the species is an end to be subserved only as subserving the welfare
of individuals. But since disappearance of the species, implying absolute
disappearance of all individuals, involves absolute failure in achieving the
end, whereas disappearance of individuals, though carried to a great extent,
may leave outstanding such numbers as can, by continuance of the species, make
subsequent fulfilment of the end possible; the preservation of the individual
must, in a variable degree according to circumstances, be subordinated to the
preservation of the species, where the two conflict."[30]
What Mr. Kidd has succeeded, and splendidly
succeeded, in doing is to show that Nature as interpreted in terms of the
Struggle for Life contains no sanction either for morality or for social
progress. But instead of giving up Nature and Reason at this point, he should
have given up Darwin. The Struggle for Life is not "the supreme fact up
to which biology has slowly advanced." It is the fact to which Darwin advanced;
but if biology had been thoroughly consulted it could not have given so maimed
an account of itself. With the final conclusion reached by Mr. Kidd we have no
quarrel. Eliminate the errors due to an unrevised acceptance of Mr. Darwin's
interpretation of Nature, and his work remains the most important contribution
to Social Evolution which the last decade has seen. But what startles us is his
method. To put the future of Social Science on an ultra-rational basis is
practically to give it up. Unless thinking men have some sense of the
consistency of a method they cannot work with it, and if there is no guarantee
of the stability of the results it would not be worth while.
But all that Mr. Kidd desires is really to be
found in Nature. There is no single element even of his highest sanction which
is not provided for in a thorough-going doctrine of Evolution--a doctrine, that
is, which includes all the facts and all the factors, and especially which
takes into accounts that evolution of Environment which goes on pari passu
with the evolution of the organism and where the highest sanctions
ultimately lie. With an Environment which widens and enriches until it
includes--or consciously includes, for it has never been absent--the Divine;
and with Man so evolving as to become more and more conscious that that Divine
is there, and above all that it is in himself, all the materials and all the
sanctions for a moral progress are for ever secure. None of the sanctions of
religion are withdrawn by adding to them the sanctions of Nature. Even those
sanctions which are supposed to lie over and above Nature may be none the less
rational sanctions. Though a positive religion, in the Comtian sense, is no
religion, a religion that is not in some degree positive is an impossibility.
And although religion must always rest upon faith, there is a reason for faith,
and a reason not only in Reason, but in Nature herself. When Evolution comes to
be worked out along its great natural lines, it may be found to provide for all
that religion assumes, all that philosophy requires, and all that science
proves.
Theological minds, with premature approval, have
hailed Mr. Kidd's solution as a vindication of their supreme position.
Practically, as a vindication of the dynamic power of the religious factor in
the Evolution of Mankind, nothing could be more convincing. But as an
apologetic, it only accentuates a weakness which scientific theology never felt
more keenly than at the present hour. This weakness can never be removed by an
appeal to the ultra-rational. Does Mr. Kidd not perceive that anyone possessed
of reason enough to encounter his dilemma, either in the sphere of thought or
of conduct, will also have reason enough to reject any "ultra-rational"
solution? This dilemma is not one which would occur to more than one in a
thousand; it has tasked all Mr. Kidd's powers to convince his reader that it
exists; but if exceptional intellect is required to see it, surely exceptional
intellect must perceive that this is not the way out of it. One cannot, in
fact, think oneself out of a difficulty of this kind; it can only be
lived out. And that precisely is what Nature is making all of us, in
greater or less degree, do, and every day making us do more. By the time,
indeed, that the world as a whole is sufficiently educated to see the problem,
it will already have been solved. There is little comfort, then, for
apologetics in this direction. Only by bringing theology into harmony with
Nature and into line with the rest of our knowledge can the noble interests
given it to conserve retain their vitality in a scientific age. The first
essential of a working religion is that it shall be congruous with Man; the
second that it shall be congruous with Nature. Whatever its sanctions, its
forces must not be abnormal, but reinforcements and higher potentialities of
those forces which, from eternity, have shaped the progress of the world. No
other dynamic can enter into the working schemes of those who seek to guide the
destinies of nations or carry on the Evolution of Society on scientific
principles. A divorce here would be the catastrophe of reason, and the end of
faith. We believe with Mr. Kidd that "the process of social development which
has been taking place, and which is still in progress, in our Western
civilization, is not the product of the intellect, but the motive force behind
it has had its seat and origin in the fund of altruistic feeling with
which our civilization has become equipped." But we shall endeavour to show
that this fund of altruistic feeling has been slowly funded in the race by
Nature, or through Nature, and as the direct and inevitable result of that
Struggle for the Life of Others, which has been from all time a condition of
existence. What religion has done to build up this fund, it may not be within
the scope of this introductory volume to inquire; it has done so much that
students of religion may almost be pardoned the oversight of the stupendous
natural basis which made it possible. But nothing is gained by protesting that
"this altruistic development, and the deepening and softening of character
which has accompanied it, are the direct and peculiar product of the
religious system." For nothing can ever be gained by setting one half of Nature
against the other, or the rational against the ultra-rational. To affirm that
Altruism is a peculiar product of religion is to excommunicate Nature from the
moral order, and religion from the rational order. If science is to begin to
recognize religion, religion must at least end by recognizing science. And so
far from religion sacrificing vital distinctions by allying itself with Nature,
so far from impoverishing its immortal quality by accepting some contribution
from the lower sphere, it thereby extends itself over the whole rich field, and
claims all--matter, life, mind, space, time--for itself. The present danger is
not in applying Evolution as a method, but only in not carrying it far enough.
No man, no man of science even, observing the simple facts, can ever rob
religion of its due. Religion has done more for the development of Altruism in
a few centuries than all the millenniums of geological time. But we dare not
rob Nature of its due. We dare not say that Nature played the prodigal for
ages, and reformed at the eleventh hour. If Nature is the Garment of God, it is
woven without seam throughout; if a revelation of God, it is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever; if the expression of His Will, there is in it
no variableness nor shadow of turning. Those who see great gulfs fixed--and we
have all begun by seeing them--end by seeing them filled up. Were these gulfs
essential to any theory of the universe or of Man, even the establishment of
the unity of Nature were a dear price to pay for obliterating them. But the
apparent loss is only gain, and the seeming gain were infinite loss. For to
break up Nature is to break up Reason, and with it God and Man.
THE ASCENT OF THE BODY
THE earliest home of Primitive Man was a cave
in the rocks--the simplest and most unevolved form of human habitation. One
day, perhaps driven by the want within his hunting-grounds of the natural cave,
he made himself a hut--an artificial cave. This simple dwelling-place was a
one-roomed hut or tent of skin and boughs, and so completely does it satisfy
the rude man's needs that down to the present hour no ordinary savage improves
upon the idea. But as the hut surrounds itself with other huts and grows into a
village, a new departure must take place. The village must have its chief, and
the chief, in virtue of his larger life, requires a more spacious home. Each
village, therefore, adds to its one-roomed huts, a hut with two rooms. From the
two-roomed hut we pass, among certain tribes, to three- and four-roomed huts,
and finally to the many-chambered lodge of the Head-Chief or King.
This passage from the simple cave to the
many-chambered lodge is an Evolution, and a similar development may be traced
in the domestic architecture of all civilized societies. The labourer's cottage
of modern England and the shieling of the Highland crofter are the survivals of
the one-roomed hut of Primitive Man, scarcely changed in any essential with the
lapse of years. In the squire's mansion also, and the nobleman's castle, we
have the representatives, but now in an immensely developed form, of the
many-roomed home of the chief. The steps by which the cottage became the castle
are the same as those by which the cave in the rocks became the lodge of the
chief. Both processes wear the hall-mark of all true development--they arise in
response to growing necessities, and they are carried out by the most simple
and natural steps.
In this evolution of a human habitation we have
an almost perfect type of the evolution of that more august habitation, the
complex tenement of clay in which Man's mysterious being has its home. The Body
of Man is a structure of a million, or a million million cells. And the history
of the unborn babe is, in the first instance, a history of additions, of room
being added to room, of organ to organ, of faculty to faculty. The general
process, also, by which this takes place is almost as clear to modern science
as in the case of material buildings. A special class of observers has
carefully watched these secret and amazing metamorphoses, and so wonderful has
been their success with mind and microscope that they can almost claim to have
seen Man's Body made. The Science of Embryology undertakes to trace the
development of Man from a stage in which he lived in a one-roomed house--a
physiological cell. Whatever the multitude of rooms, the millions and millions
of cells, in which to-day each adult carries on the varied work of life, it is
certain that when he first began to be he was the simple tenant of a single
cell. Observe, it is not some animal-ancestor or some human progenitor of Man
that lived in this single cell--that may or may not have been--but the
individual Man, the present occupant himself. We are dealing now not with
phylogeny--the history of the race--but with ontogeny--the problem of Man's
Ascent from his own earlier self. And the point at the moment is not that the
race ascends; it is that each individual man has once, in his own life-time,
occupied a single cell, and starting from that humble cradle, has passed
through stage after stage of differentiation, increase, and development, until
the myriad-roomed adult-form was attained. Whence that first cradle came is at
present no matter. Whether its remote progenitor rocked among the waves of
primeval seas or swung from the boughs of forests long since metamorphosed into
coal does not affect the question of the individual ascent of Man. The answers
to these questions are hypotheses. The fact that now arrests our wonder
is that when the earliest trace of an infant's organization meets the eye of
science it is nothing but a one-celled animal. And so closely does its
development from that distant point follow the lines of the evolution just
described in the case of the primitive savage hut, that we have but to make a
few changes in phraseology to make the one process describe the other. Instead
of rooms and chambers we shall now read cells and tissues; instead of the
builder's device of adding room to room, we shall use the physiologist's term
segmentation; the employments carried on in the various rooms will
become the functions discharged by the organs of the human frame, and line for
line the history of the evolution will be found to be the same.
The embryo of the future man begins life. Like
the primitive savage, in a one-roomed hut, a single simple cell. This cell is
round and almost microscopic in size. When fully formed it measures only
one-tenth of a line in diameter, and with the naked eye can be barely discerned
as a very fine point. An outer covering, transparent as glass, surrounds this
little sphere, and in the interior, embedded in protoplasm, lies a bright
globular spot. In form, in size, in composition there is no apparent difference
between this human cell and that of any other mammal. The dog, the elephant,
the lion, the ape, and a thousand others begin their widely different lives in
a house the same as Man's. At an earlier stage indeed, before it has taken on
its pellucid covering, this cell has affinities still more astonishing. For at
that remoter period the earlier forms of all living things, both plant and
animal, are one. It is one of the most astounding facts of modern science that
the first embryonic abodes of moss and fern and pine, of shark and crab and
coral polyp, of lizard, leopard, monkey, and Man are so exactly similar that
the highest powers of mind and microscope fail to trace the smallest
distinction between them.
But let us watch the development of this
one-celled human embryo. Increase of rooms in architecture can be effected in
either of two ways by building entirely new rooms, or by partitioning old ones.
Both of these methods are employed in Nature. The first, gemmation, or budding,
is common among the lower forms of life. The second, differentiation by
partition, or segmentation, is the approved method among higher animals, and is
that adopted in the case of Man. It proceeds, after the fertilized ovum has
completed the complex preliminaries of karyokinesis, by the division of the
interior-contents into two equal parts, so that the original cell is now
occupied by two nucleated cells with the old cell-wall surrounding them
outside. The two-roomed house is, in the next development, and by a similar
process of segmentation, developed into a structure of four rooms, and this
into one of eight, and so on.[31] In a short
time the number of chambers is so great that count is lost, and the activity
becomes so vigorous in every direction that one ceases to notice individual
cells at all. The tenement in fact consists now of innumerable groups of cells
congregated together, suites of apartments as it were, which have quickly
arranged themselves in symmetrical, definite, and withal different forms. Were
these forms not different as well as definite we should hardly call it an
evolution, nor should we characterize the resulting aggregation as a higher
organism. A hundred cottages placed in a row would never form a castle. What
makes the castle superior to the hundred cottages is not the number of its
rooms, for they are possibly fewer; nor their difference in shape, for that is
immaterial. It lies in the number and nature and variety of useful purposes to
which the rooms are put, the perfection with which each is adapted to its end,
and the harmonious co-operation among them with reference to some common work.
This also is the distinction between a higher animal and a humble organism such
as the centipede or the worm. These creatures are a monotony of similar rings,
like a string of beads. Each bead is the counterpart of the other; and with
such an organization any high or varied life becomes an impossibility. The fact
that any growing embryo is passing through a real development is decided by the
new complexity of structure, by the more perfect division of labour, and of
better kinds of labour, and by the increase in range and efficiency of the
correlated functions discharged by the whole. In the development of the human
embryo the differentiating and integrating forces are steadily acting and
co-operating from the first, so that the result is not a mere aggregation of
similar cells, but an organism with different parts and many varied functions.
When all is complete we find that one suite of cells has been specially set
apart to provide the commissariat, others have devoted themselves exclusively
to assimilation. The ventilation of the house--respiration--has been attended
to by others, and a central force-pump has been set up, and pipes and ducts for
many purposes installed throughout the system. Telegraph wires have next been
stretched in every direction to keep up connection between the endless parts;
and other cells developed into bony pillars for support. Finally, the whole
delicate structure has been shielded by a variety of protective coverings, and
after months and years of further elaboration and adjustment the elaborate
fabric is complete. Now all these complicated contrivances --bones, muscles,
nerves, heart, brain, lungs--are made out of cells; they are themselves, and in
their furthest development, simply masses or suites of cells modified in
various ways for the special department of household work they are meant to
serve. No new thing, except building material, has entered into the embryo
since its first appearing. It seized whatever matter lay to hand, incorporated
it with its own quickening substance, and built it in to its appropriate place.
So the structure rose in size and symmetry, till the whole had climbed, a
miracle of unfolding, to the stature of a Man.
But the beauty of this development is not the
significant thing to the student of Evolution; nor is it the occultness of the
process nor the perfection of the result that fill him with awe as he surveys
the finished work. It is the immense distance Man has come. Between the early
cell and the infant's formed body, the ordinary observer sees the uneventful
passage of a few brief months. But the evolutionist sees concentrated into
these few months the labour and the progress of incalculable ages. Here before
him is the whole stretch of time since life first dawned upon the earth; and as
he watches the nascent organism climbing to its maturity he witnesses a
spectacle which for strangeness and majesty stands alone in the field of
biological research. What he sees is not the mere shaping or sculpturing of a
Man. The human form does not begin as a human form. It begins as an animal; and
at first, and for a long time to come, there is nothing wearing the remotest
semblance of humanity. What meets the eye is a vast procession of lower forms
of life, a succession of strange inhuman creatures emerging from a crowd of
still stranger and still more inhuman creatures; and it is only after a
prolonged and unrecognizable series of metamorphoses that they culminate in
some faint likeness to the image of him who is one of the newest yet the oldest
of created things. Hitherto we have been taught to look among the fossiliferous
formations of Geology for the buried lives of the earth's past. But Embryology
has startled the world by declaring that the ancient life of the earth is not
dead. It is risen. It exists to-day in the embryos of still-living things, and
some of the most archaic types find again a resurrection and a life in the
frame of man himself.
It is an amazing and almost incredible story. The
proposition is not only that Man begins his earthly existence in the guise of a
lower animal embryo, but that in the successive transformations of the human
embryo there is reproduced before our eyes a visible, actual, physical
representation of part of the life-history of the world. Human Embryology is a
condensed account, a recapitulation or epitome of some of the main chapters in
the Natural History of the world. The same processes of development which once
took thousands of years for their consummation are here condensed,
foreshortened, concentrated into the space of weeks. Each platform reached by
the human embryo in its upward course represents the embryo of some lower
animal which in some mysterious way has played a part in the pedigree of the
human race, which may itself have disappeared long since from the earth, but is
now and for ever built into the inmost being of Man. These lower animals, each
at its successive stage, have stopped short in their development; Man has gone
on. At each fresh advance his embryo is found again abreast of some other
animal-embryo a little higher in organization than that just passed. Continuing
his ascent that also is overtaken, the now very complex embryo making up to one
animal-embryo after another until it has distanced all in its series, and
stands alone. As the modern stem-winding watch contains the old clepsydra and
all the most useful features in all the timekeepers that were ever made; as the
Walter printing-press contains the rude hand-machine of Gutenberg, and all the
best in all the machines that followed it; as the modern locomotive of to-day
contains the engine of Watt, the locomotive of Hedley, and most of the
improvements of succeeding years, so Man contains the embryonic bodies of
earlier and humbler and clumsier forms of life. Yet in making the Walter press
in a modern workshop, the artificer does not begin by building again the press
of Gutenberg, nor in constructing the locomotive does the engineer first make a
Watt's machine and then incorporate the Hedley, and then the Stephenson, and so
on through all the improving types of engines that have led up to this. But the
astonishing thing is that, in making a Man, Nature does introduce the framework
of these earlier types, displaying each crude pattern by itself before
incorporating it in the finished work. The human embryo, to change the figure,
is a subtle phantasmagoria, a living theatre in which a weird transformation
scene is being enacted, and in which countless strange and uncouth characters
take part. Some of these characters are well known to science, some are
strangers. As the embryo unfolds, one by one these animal actors come upon the
stage, file past in phantom-like procession, throw off their drapery, and
dissolve away into something else. Yet, as they vanish, each leaves behind a
vital portion of itself, some original and characteristic memorial, something
itself has made or won, that perhaps it alone could make or win--a bone, a
muscle, a ganglion, or a tooth-- to be the inheritance of the race. And it is
only after nearly all have played their part and dedicated their gift, that a
human form, mysteriously compounded of all that has gone before, begins to be
discerned in their midst.
The duration of this process, the profound
antiquity of the last survivor, the tremendous height he has scaled, are
inconceivable by the faculties of Man. But measure the very lowest of the
successive platforms passed in the ascent, and see how very great a thing it is
even to rise at all. The single cell, the first definite stage which the human
embryo attains, is still the adult form of countless millions both of animals
and plants. Just as in modern England the millionaire's mansion--the evolved
form--is surrounded by labourers' cottages--the simple form--so in Nature,
living side by side with the many-celled higher animals, is an immense
democracy of unicellular artizans. These simple cells are perfect living
things. The earth, the water, and the air teem with them everywhere. They move,
they eat, they reproduce their like. But one thing they do not do--they do not
rise. These organisms have, as it were, stopped short in the ascent of life.
And long as Evolution has worked upon the earth, the vast numerical majority of
plants and animals are still at this low stage of being. So minute are some of
these forms that if their one-roomed huts were arranged in a row it would take
twelve thousand to form a street a single inch in length. In their watery
cities--for most of them are Lake-Dwellers--a population of eight hundred
thousand million could be accommodated within a cubic inch. Yet, as there was a
period in human history when none but cave-dwellers lived in Europe, so was
there a time when the highest forms of life upon the globe were these
microscopic things. See, therefore, the meaning of Evolution from the want of
it. In a single hour or second the human embryo attains the platform which
represents the whole life-achievement of myriads of generations of created
things, and the next day or hour is immeasurable centuries beyond them.
Through all what zoological regions the embryo
passes in its great ascent from the one-celled forms, one can never completely
tell. The changes succeed one another with such rapidity that it is impossible
at each separate stage to catch the actual likeness to other embryos. Sometimes
a familiar feature suddenly recalls a form well-known to science, but the
likeness fades, and the developing embryo seems to wander among the ghosts of
departed types. Long ago these crude ancestral forms were again the highest
animals upon the earth. For a few thousand years they reigned supreme,
furthered the universal evolution by a hair-breadth, and passed away. The
material dust of their bodies is laid long since in the Palaeozoic rocks, but
their life and labour are not forgotten. For their gains were handed on to a
succeeding race. Transmitted thence through an endless series of descendants,
sifted, enriched, accentuated, still dimly recognizable, they re-appeared at
last in the physical frame of Man. After the early stages of human development
are passed, the transformations become so definite that the features of the
contributary animals are almost recognizable. Here, for example, is a stage at
which the embryo in its anatomical characteristics resembles that of the Vermes
or Worms. As yet there is no head, nor neck, nor backbone, nor waist, nor
limbs. A roughly cylindrical headless trunk--that is all that stands for the
future man. One by one the higher Invertebrates are left behind, and then
occurs the most remarkable change in the whole life-history. This is the laying
down of the line to be occupied by the spinal chord, the presence of which
henceforth will determine the place of Man in the Vertebrate sub-kingdom. At
this crisis, the eye which sweeps the field of lower Nature for an analogue
will readily find it. It is a circumstance of extraordinary interest that there
should be living upon the globe at this moment an animal representing the
actual transition from Invertebrate to Vertebrate life. The acquisition of a
vertebral column is one of the great marks of height which Nature has bestowed
upon her creatures; and in the shallow waters of the Mediterranean she has
preserved for us a creature which, whether degenerate or not, can only be
likened to one of her first rude experiments in this direction. This animal is
the Lancelet, or Amphioxus, and so rudimentary is the backbone that it does not
contain any bone at all, but only a shadow or prophecy of it in cartilage. The
cartilaginous notochord of the Amphioxus nevertheless is the progenitor
of all vertebral columns, and in the first instance this structure appears in
the human embryo exactly as it now exists in the Lancelet. But this is only a
single example. In living Nature there are a hundred other animal
characteristics which at one stage or another the biologist may discern in the
ever-changing kaleidoscope of the human embryo.
Even with this addition, nevertheless, the human
infant is but a first rough draft, an almost formless lump of clay. As yet
there is no distinct head, no brain, no jaws, no limbs; the heart is imperfect,
the higher visceral organs are feebly developed, everything is elementary. But
gradually new organs loom in sight, old ones increase in complexity. By a magic
which has never yet been fathomed the hidden Potter shapes and re-shapes the
clay. The whole grows in size and symmetry. Resemblances, this time, to the
embryos of the lower vertebrate series, flash out as each new step is
attained--first the semblance of the Fish, then of the Amphibian, then of the
Reptile, last of the Mammal. Of these great groups the leading embryonic
characters appear as in a moving panorama, some of them pronounced and
unmistakable, others mere sketches, suggestions, likenesses of infinite
subtlety. At last the true Mammalian form emerges from the crowd. Far ahead of
all at this stage stand out three species--the Tailed Catarrhine Ape, the
Tailless Catarrhine, and last, differing physically from these mainly by an
enlargement of the brain and a development of the larynx, Man.
Whatever views be held of the doctrine of
Evolution, whatever theories of its cause, these facts of Embryology are
proved. They have taken their place in science wholly apart from the discussion
of theories of Evolution, and as the result of laboratory investigation, made
for quite other ends. What is true for Man, moreover, is true of all other
animals. Every creature that lives climbs up its own genealogical tree before
it reaches its mature condition. "All animals living, or that ever have lived,
are united together by blood relationship of varying nearness or remoteness,
and every animal now in existence has a pedigree stretching back, not merely
for ten or a hundred generations, but through all geologic time since life
first commenced on the earth. The study of development has revealed to us that
each animal bears the mark of its ancestry, and is compelled to discover its
parentage in its own development; the phases through which an animal passes in
its progress from the egg to the adult are no accidental freaks, no mere
matters of developmental convenience, but represent more or less closely, in
more or less modified manner, the successive ancestral stages through which the
present condition has been acquired."[32]
Almost foreseen by Agassiz, suggested by Von Baer, and finally applied by Fritz
Muller, this singular law is the key-note of modern Embryology. In no case, it
is true, is the recapitulation of the past complete. Ancestral stages are
constantly omitted, others are over-accentuated, condensed, distorted, or
confused; while new and undecipherable characters occasionally appear. But it
is a general scientific fact, that over the graves of a myriad aspirants the
bodies of Man and of all higher Animals have risen. No one knows why this
should be so. Science, at present, has no rationale of the process adequate to
explain it. It was formerly held that the entire animal creation had
contributed something to the anatomy of Man; or that as Serres expressed it,
"Human Organogenesis is a transitory Comparative Anatomy." But though Man has
not such a monopoly of the past as is here inferred--other types having here
and there diverged and developed along lines of their own--it is certain that
the materials for his body have been brought together from an unknown multitude
of lowlier forms of life.
Those who know the Cathedral of St. Mark's will
remember how this noblest of the Stones of Venice owes its greatness to the
patient hands of centuries and centuries of workers, how every quarter of the
globe has been spoiled of its treasures to dignify this single shrine. But he
who ponders over the more ancient temple of the Human Body will find
imagination fail him as he tries to think from what remote and mingled sources,
from what lands, seas, climates, atmospheres, its various parts have been
called together, and by what innumerable contributory creatures, swimming,
creeping, flying, climbing, each of its several members was wrought and
perfected. What ancient chisel first sculptured the rounded columns of the
limbs? What dead hands built the cupola of the brain, and from what older ruins
were the scattered pieces of its mosaic-work brought? Who fixed the windows in
its upper walls? What winds and weathers wrought strength into its buttresses?
What ocean-beds and forest glades worked up its colourings? What Love and
Terror and Night called forth the Music? And what Life and Death and Pain and
Struggle put all together in the noiseless workshop of the past, and removed
each worker silently when its task was done? How these things came to be,
Biology is one long record. The architects and builders of this mighty temple
are not anonymous. Their names, and the work they did, are graven forever on
the walls and arches of the Human Embryo. For this is a volume of that Book in
which Man's members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as
yet there was none of them.
The Descent of Man from the Animal Kingdom is
sometimes spoken of as a degradation. It is an unspeakable exaltation. Recall
the vast antiquity of that primal cell from which the human embryo first sets
forth. Compass the nature of the potentialities stored up in its plastic
substance. Watch all the busy processes, the multiplying energies, the
mystifying transitions, the inexplicable chemistry of this living laboratory.
Observe the variety and intricacy of its metamorphoses, the exquisite gradation
of its ascent, the unerring aim with which the one type unfolds--never pausing,
never uncertain of its direction, refusing arrest at intermediate forms,
passing on to its flawless maturity without waste or effort or fatigue. See the
sense of motion at every turn, of purpose and of aspiration. Discover how, with
identity of process and loyalty to the type, a hair-breadth of deviation is yet
secured to each so that no two forms come out the same, but each arises an
original creation, with features, characteristics, and individualities of its
own. Remember, finally, that even to make the first cell possible, stellar
space required to be swept of matter, suns must needs be broken up, and planets
cool, the agents of geology labour millennium after millennium at the
unfinished earth to prepare a material resting-place for the coming guest.
Consider all this, and judge if Creation could have a sublimer meaning, or the
Human Race possess a more splendid genesis.
From the lips of the Prophet another version, an
old and beautiful story, was told to the childhood of the earth, of how God
made Man; how with His own hands He gathered the Bactrian dust, modelled it,
breathed upon it, and it became a living soul. Later, the insight of the Hebrew
Poet taught Man a deeper lesson. He saw that there was more in Creation than
mechanical production. He saw that the Creator had different kinds of Hands and
different ways of modelling. How it was done he knew not, but it was not the
surface thing his forefathers taught him. The higher divinity and mystery of
the process broke upon him. Man was a fearful and wonderful thing. He was
modelled in secret. He was curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
When Science came, it was not to contradict the older versions. It but gave
them content and a still richer meaning. What the Prophet said, and the Poet
saw, and Science proved, all and equally will abide forever. For all alike are
voices of the Unseen, commissioned to different peoples and for different ends
to declare the mystery of the Ascent of Man.
THE SCAFFOLDING LEFT IN THE BODY
THE spectacle which we have just witnessed is
invisible, and therefore more or less unimpressive, except to the man of
science. Embryology works in the dark. Requiring not only the microscope, but
the comparative knowledge of intricate and inaccessible forms of life, its all
but final contribution to the theory of Evolution carries no adequate
conviction to the general mind. We must therefore follow the fortunes of the
Body further into the open day. If the Embryo in every changing feature of its
growth contains some reminiscence of an animal ancestry, the succeeding stages
of its development may be trusted to carry on the proof. And though here the
evidence is neither so beautiful nor so exact, we shall find that there is in
the adult frame, and even in the very life and movement of the newborn babe, a
continuous witness to the ancient animal strain.
We are met, unfortunately, at the outset by one
of those curious obstacles to inquiry which have so often barred the way of
truth and turned discovery into ridicule. It happens that the class of animals
in which Science, in the very nature of the case, is compelled to look for the
closest affinities to human beings is that of the Apes. This simple
circumstance has told almost fatally against the wide acceptance of the theory
of Descent. There is just as much truth in the sarcasm that man is a "reformed
monkey" as to prejudge the question to the unscientific mind. But the statement
is no nearer the truth itself than if one were to say that a gun is an adult
form of the pistol. The connection, if any, between Man and Ape is simply that
the most Man-like thing in creation is the Ape, and that, in his Ascent, Man
probably passed through a stage when he more nearly resembled the Ape than any
other known animal. Apart from that accident, Evolution owes no more to the Ape
than to any other creature. Man and Ape are alike in being two of the latest
terms of an infinite series, each member of which has had a share in making up
the genealogical tree. To single out the Ape, therefore, and use the
hypothetical relationship for rhetorical purposes is, to say the least,
unscientific. It is certainly the fact that Man is not descended from any
existing ape. The anthropoid apes branched off laterally at a vastly remote
period from the nearest human progenitors. The challenge even to produce links
between Man and the living man-like apes is difficult to take seriously. Should
anyone so violate the first principles of Evolution as to make it, it is only
to be said that it cannot be met. For an anthropoid ape could as little develop
into a Man as could a Man pass backwards into an anthropoid ape. References to
a Simian stem play no necessary part in the story of the Ascent of Man. In
those pages the compromising name will scarcely occur. If historical sequence
compels us to make an apparent exception here at the very outset, it will be
seen that the allusion is harmless. For the analogy we are about to make might
with equal relevancy have been drawn from a squirrel or a sloth.
On the theory that human beings were once allied
in habit as well as in body with some of the apes, that they probably lived in
trees, and that baby-men clung to their climbing mothers as baby-monkeys do
to-day, Dr. Louis Robinson prophesied that a baby's power of grip might be
found to be comparable in strength to that of a young monkey at the same period
of development. Having special facilities for such an investigation, he tested
a large number of just-born infants with reference to this particular. Now
although most people have some time or other been seized in the awful grasp of
a baby, few have any idea of the abnormal power locked up in the tentacles of
this human octopus. Dr. Robinson's method was to extend to infants, generally
of one hour old, his finger, or a walking stick, to imitate the branch of a
tree, and see how long they would hang there without, what the newspapers call,
"any other visible means of support." The results are startling. Dr. Robinson
has records of upwards of sixty cases in which the children were under a month
old, and in at least half of these the experiment was tried within an hour of
birth: "In every instance, with only two exceptions, the child was able to hang
on to the finger or a small stick, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, by
its hands, like an acrobat from a horizontal bar, and sustain the whole weight
of its body for at least ten seconds. In twelve cases, in infants under an hour
old, half a minute passed before the grasp relaxed, and in three or four nearly
a minute. When about four days old, I found that the strength had increased,
and that nearly all, when tried at this age, could sustain their weight for
half a minute. About a fortnight or three weeks after birth the faculty
appeared to have attained its maximum, for several at this period succeeded in
hanging for over a minute and a half, two for just over two minutes, and one
infant of three weeks old for two minutes thirty-five seconds. . . . In
one instance, in which the performer had less than one hour's experience of
life, he hung by both hands to my forefinger for ten seconds, and then
deliberately let go with his right hand (as if to seek a better hold), and
maintained his position for five seconds more by the left hand only. Invariably
the thighs are bent nearly at right angles to the body, and in no case did the
lower limbs hang down and take the attitude of the erect position. This
attitude, and the disproportionately large development of the arms compared
with the legs, give the photographs a striking resemblance to a well-known
picture of the celebrated Chimpanzee Sally at the Zoological Garden. I think it
will be acknowledged that the remarkable strength shown in the flexor muscle of
the fore-arm in these young infants, especially when compared with the flaccid
and feeble state of the muscular system generally, is a sufficiently striking
phenomenon to provoke inquiry as to its cause and origin. The fact that a
three-week-old baby can perform a feat of muscular strength that would tax the
powers of many a healthy adult is enough to set one wondering. A curious point
is that in many cases no sign of distress is evident, and no cry uttered until
the grasp begins to give way."[33]
Place side by side with this the following
account, which Mr. Wallace gives us in his Malay Archipelago of a baby
Orang-outang, whose mother he happened to shoot:
"This little creature was only about a foot long,
and had evidently been hanging to its mother when she first fell. Luckily it
did not appear to have been wounded, and after we had cleaned the mud out of
its mouth it began to cry out, and seemed quite strong and active. While
carrying it home it got its hands in my beard, and grasped so tightly that I
had great difficulty in getting free, for the fingers are habitually bent
inward at the last joint so as to form complete hooks. For the first few days
it clung desperately with all four hands to whatever it could lay hold of, and
I had to be careful to keep my beard out of its way, as its fingers clutched
hold of hair more tenaciously than anything else, and it was impossible to free
myself without assistance. When restless, it would struggle about with its
hands up in the air trying to find something to take hold of, and when it had
got a bit of stick or rag in two or three of its hands, seemed quite happy. For
want of something else, it would often seize its own feet, and after a time it
would constantly cross its arms and grasp with each hand the long hair that
grew just below the opposite shoulder. The great tenacity of its grasp soon
diminished, and I was obliged to invent some means to give it exercise and
strengthen its limbs. For this purpose I made a short ladder of three or four
rounds, on which I put it to hang for a quarter of an hour at a time. At first
it seemed much pleased, but it could not get all four hands in a comfortable
position, and, after changing about several times, would leave hold of one hand
after the other and drop on to the floor. Sometimes when hanging only by two
hands, it would loose one, and cross it to the opposite shoulder, grasping its
own hair; and, as this seemed much more agreeable than the stick, it would then
loose the other and tumble down, when it would cross both and lie on its back
quite contentedly, never seeming to be hurt by its numerous tumbles. Finding it
so fond of hair, I endeavoured to make an artificial mother, by wrapping up a
piece of buffalo-skin into a bundle, and suspending it about a foot from the
floor. At first this seemed to suit it admirably, as it could sprawl its legs
about and always find some hair, which it grasped with the greatest tenacity"[34]
Whatever the value of these facts as evidence,
they form an interesting if slight introduction to the part of the subject that
lies before us. For we have now to explore the Body itself for actual
betrayals--not mere external movements which might have come as well from early
Man as from later animal; but veritable physical survivals, the material
scaffolding itself--of the animal past. And the facts here are as numerous and
as easily grasped as they are authentic. As the traveller, wandering in foreign
lands, brings back all manner of curios to remind him where he has been--clubs
and spears, clothes and pottery, which represent the ways of life of those whom
he has met--so the body of Man, emerging from its age-long journey through the
animal kingdom, appears laden with the spoils of its distant pilgrimage. These
relics are not mere curiosities; they are as real as the clubs and spears, the
clothes and pottery. Like them, they were once a part of life's vicissitude;
they represent organs which have been outgrown; old forms of apparatus long
since exchanged for better, yet somehow not yet destroyed by the hand of time.
The physical body of Man, so great is the number of these relics, is an old
curiosity shop, a museum of obsolete anatomies, discarded tools, outgrown and
aborted organs. All other animals also contain among their useful organs a
proportion which are long past their work; and so significant are these
rudiments of a former state of things, that anatomists have often expressed
their willingness to stake the theory of Evolution upon their presence
alone.
Prominent among these vestigial structures, as
they are called, are those which smack of the sea. If Embryology is any guide
to the past, nothing is more certain than that the ancient progenitors of Man
once lived an aquatic life. At one time there was nothing else in the world but
water-life; all the land animals are late inventions. One reason why animals
began in the water is that it is easier to live in the water--anatomically and
physiologically cheaper--than to live on the land. The denser element supports
the body better, demanding a less supply of muscle and bone; and the perpetual
motion of the sea brings the food to the animal, making it unnecessary for the
animal to move to the food. This and other correlated circumstances call for
far less mechanism in the body, and, as a matter of fact, all the simplest
forms of life at the present day are inhabitants of the water.
A successful attempt at coming ashore may be seen
in the common worm. The worm is still so unacclimatized to land life that
instead of living on the earth like other creatures, it lives in it, as
if it were a thicker water, and always where there is enough moisture to keep
up the traditions of its past. Probably it took to the shore originally by
exchanging first the water for the ooze at the bottom, then by wriggling among
muddy flats when the tide was out, and finally, as the struggle for life grew
keen, it pushed further and further inland, continuing its migration so long as
dampness was to be found.
More striking examples are found among the
molluscs, the sea-faring animals par excellence of the past. A snail
wandering over the earth with a sea-shell on its back is one of the most
anomalous sights in nature--as preposterous as the spectacle of a Red Indian
perambulating Paris with a birch canoe on his head. The snail not only carries
this relic of the sea everywhere with it, but when it cannot get moisture to
remind it of its ancient habitat, it actually manufactures it. That the
creature itself has discovered the anomaly of its shell is obvious, for in
almost every class its state of dilapidation betrays that its up-keep is no
longer an object of much importance. In nearly every species the stony houses
have already lost their doors, and most have their shells so reduced in size
that not half of the body can get in. The degeneration in their cousins, the
slugs, is even more pathetic. All that remains of the ancestral home in the
highest ranks is a limpet-like cap on the tip of the tail; the lowest are
sans everything; and in the intermediate forms the former glory is
ironically suggested by a few grains of sand or a tiny shield so buried beneath
the skin that only the naturalist's eye can see it.
When Man left the water, however--or what was to
develop into Man--he took very much more ashore with him than a shell. Instead
of crawling ashore at the worm stage, he remained in the water until he evolved
into something like a fish; so that when, after an amphibian interlude, he
finally left it, many "ancient and fish-like" characters remained in his body
to tell the tale. The chief characteristic of a fish is its apparatus for
breathing the air dissolved in the water. This consists of gills--delicate
curtains hung on strong arches and dyed scarlet with the blood which
continually courses through them. In many fishes these arches are five or seven
in number, and communicating with them--in order to allow the aerated water,
which has been taken in at the mouth, to pass out again after bathing the
gills-- an equal number of slits or openings is provided in the neck. Sometimes
the slits are bare and open so that they are easily seen on the fish's
neck--anyone who looks at a shark will see them--but in modern forms they are
generally covered by the operculum or lid. Without these holes in their
neck all fishes would instantly perish, and we may be sure Nature took
exceptional care in perfecting this particular piece of the mechanism.
Now it is one of the most extraordinary facts in
natural history that these slits in the fish's neck are still represented in
the neck of Man. Almost the most prominent feature, indeed, after the head, in
every mammalian embryo, are the four clefts or furrows of the old gill-slits.
They are still known in Embryology by the old name--gill-slits--and so
persistent are these characters that children are known to have been born with
them not only externally visible which is a common occurrence but open through
and through, so that fluids taken in at the mouth could pass through and
trickle out at the neck. This last fact was so astounding as to be for a long
time denied. It was thought that, when this happened, the orifice must have
been accidentally made by the probe of the surgeon. But Dr. Sutton has recently
met with actual cases where this has occurred. "I have seen milk," he says,
"issue from such fistulae in individuals who have never been submitted to
sounding."[35] In the common case of children
born with these vestiges, the old gill-slits are represented by small openings
in the skin on the sides of the neck, and capable of admitting a thin probe.
Sometimes even the place where they have been in childhood is marked throughout
life by small round patches of white skin.
Almost more astonishing than the fact of their
persistence is the use to which Nature afterwards put them. When the fish came
ashore, its water-breathing apparatus was no longer of any use to it. At first
it had to keep it on, for it took a long time to perfect the air-breathing
apparatus destined to replace it. But when this was ready the problem arose,
What was to be done with the earlier organ? Nature is exceedingly economical,
and could not throw all this mechanism away. In fact, Nature almost never parts
with any structure she has once made. What she does is to change it into
something else. Conversely, Nature seldom makes anything new; her method of
creation is to adapt something old. Now, when Nature had done with the old
breathing-apparatus, she proceeded to adapt it for a new and important purpose.
She saw that if water could pass through a hole in the neck, air could pass
through likewise. But it was no longer necessary that air should pass through
for purposes of breathing, for that was already provided for by the
mouth. Was there any other purpose for which it was desirable that air should
enter the body? There was, and a very subtle one. For hearing. Sound is
the result of a wave-motion conducted by many things, but in a special way by
air. To leave holes in the head was to let sound into the head. The mouth might
have done for this, but the mouth had enough to do as it was, and, moreover, it
must often be shut. In the old days, certainly, sound was conveyed to fishes in
a dull way without any definite opening. But animals which live in water do not
seem to use hearing much, and the sound-waves in fishes are simply conveyed
through the walls of the head to the internal ear without any definite
mechanism. But as soon as land-life began, owing to the changed medium through
which sound-waves must now be propagated, and the new uses for sound itself, a
more delicate instrument was required. And hence one of the first things
attended to as the evolution went on was the construction and improvement of
the ear. And this seems to have been mainly effected by a series of remarkable
developments of one of the now superfluous gill-slits.
It has long been a growing certainty to
Comparative Anatomy that the external and middle ear in Man are simply a
development, an improved edition, of the first gill-cleft and its surrounding
parts. The tympano-Eustachian passage is the homologue or counterpart of the
spiracle associated in the shark with the first gill-opening. Prof. His of
Leipsic has worked out the whole development in minute detail, and conclusively
demonstrated the mode of origin of the external ear from the coalescence of six
rounded tubercles surrounding the first branchial cleft at an early period of
embryonic life.[36]
Now, bearing in mind this theory of the origin of
ears, an extraordinary corroboration confronts us. Ears are actually sometimes
found bursting out in human beings half-way down the neck, in the exact
position--namely, along the line of the anterior border of the sterno-mastoid
muscle--which the gill-slits would occupy if they still persisted. In some
human families, where the tendency to retain these special structures is
strong, one member sometimes illustrates the abnormality by possessing the
clefts alone, another has a cervical-ear, while a third has both a cleft and a
neck-ear--all these, of course, in addition to the ordinary ears. This cervical
auricle has all the characters of the ordinary ear, "it contains yellow elastic
cartilage, is skin-covered, and has muscle-fibre attached to it."[37] Dr Sutton calls attention to the fact that
on ancient statues of fauns and satyrs cervical auricles are sometimes found,
and he figures the head of a satyr from the British Museum, carved long before
the days of anatomy, where a sessile ear on the neck is quite distinct. A still
better illustration may be seen in the Art Museum at Boston on a full-sized
cast of a faun, belonging to the later Greek period; and there are other
examples in the same building. One interest of these neck-ears in statues is
that they are not, as a rule, modelled after the human ear, but taken from the
cervical-ear of the goat, from which the general idea of the faun was derived.
This shows that neck-ears were common on the goats of that period--as they are
on goats to this day. The occurrence of neck-ears in goats is no more than one
would expect. Indeed, one would look for them not only in goats and in Man, but
in all the Mammalia, for so far as their bodies are concerned all the higher
animals are near relations. Observations on vestigial structures in animals are
sadly wanting; but these cervical-ears are also certainly found in the horse,
pig, sheep, and others.
That the human ear was not always the squat and
degenerate instrument it is at present may be seen by a critical glance at its
structure. Mr. Darwin records how a celebrated sculptor called his attention to
a little peculiarity in the external ear, which he had often noticed both in
men and women. "The peculiarity consists in a little blunt point, projecting
from the inwardly folded margin or helix. When present, it is developed at
birth, and, according to Professor Ludwig Meyer, more frequently in man than in
woman. The helix obviously consists of the extreme margin of the ear folded
inwards; and the folding appears to be in some manner connected with the whole
external ear being permanently pressed backwards. In many monkeys who do not
stand high in the order, as baboons and some species of macacus, the upper
portion of the ear is slightly pointed, and the margin is not at all folded
inwards; but if the margin were to be thus folded, a slight point would
necessarily project towards the centre."[38]
Here then, in this discovery of the lost tip of the ancestral ear, is further
and visible advertisement of Man's Descent, a surviving symbol of the stirring
times and dangerous days of his animal youth. It is difficult to imagine any
other theory than that of Descent which could account for all these facts. That
Evolution should leave such clues lying about is at least an instance of its
candour.
But this does not exhaust the betrayals of this
most confiding organ. If we turn from the outward ear to the muscular apparatus
for working it, fresh traces of its animal career are brought to light. The
erection of the ear, in order to catch sound better, is a power possessed by
almost all mammals, and the attached muscles are large and greatly developed in
all but domesticated forms. This same apparatus, though he makes no use of it
whatever, is still attached to the ears of Man. It is so long since he relied
on the warnings of hearing, that by a well-known law, the muscles have fallen
into disuse and atrophied. In many cases, however, the power of twitching the
ear is not wholly lost, and every school-boy can point to some one in his class
who retains the capacity, and is apt to revive it in irrelevant
circumstances.
One might run over all the other organs of the
human body and show their affinities with animal structures and an animal past.
The twitching of the ear, for instance, suggests another obsolete, or
obsolescent power--the power, or rather the set of powers, for twitching the
skin, especially the skin of the scalp and forehead by which we raise the
eyebrows. Subcutaneous muscles for shaking off flies from the skin, or for
erecting the hair of the scalp, are common among quadrupeds, and these are
represented in the human subject by the still functioning muscles of the
forehead, and occasionally of the head itself. Everyone has met persons who
possess the power of moving the whole scalp to and fro, and the muscular
apparatus for effecting it is identical with what is normally found in some of
the Quadrumana.
Another typical vestigial structure is the
plica semi-lunaris, the remnant of the nictitating membrane
characteristic of nearly the whole vertebrate sub-kingdom. This membrane is a
semi-transparent curtain which can be drawn rapidly across the external surface
of the eye for the purpose of sweeping it clean. In birds it is extremely
common, but it also exists in fish, mammals, and all the other vertebrates.
Where it is not found of any functional value it is almost always represented
by vestiges of some kind. In Man all that is left of it is a little piece of
the curtain draped at the side of the eye.
Passing from the head to the other extremity of
the body one comes upon a somewhat unexpected but very pronounced
characteristic--the relic of the tail, and not only of the tail, but of muscles
for wagging it. Everyone who first sees a human skeleton is amazed at this
discovery. At the end of the vertebral column, curling faintly outward in
suggestive fashion, are three, four, and occasionally five vertebrae forming
the coccyx, a true rudimentary tail. In the adult this is always concealed
beneath the skin, but in the embryo, both in Man and ape, at an early stage it
is much longer than the limbs. What is decisive as to its true nature, however,
is that even in the embryo of Man the muscles for wagging it are still found.
In the grown-up human being these muscles are represented by bands of fibrous
tissue, but cases are known where the actual muscles persist through life. That
a distinct external tail should not still be found in Man may seem
disappointing to the evolutionist. But the want of a tail argues more for the
theory of Evolution than its presence would have done. For all the anthropoids
most allied to Man have long since also parted with theirs.
With regard to the presence of Hair on the body,
and its disposition and direction, some curious facts may be noticed. No one,
until Evolution supplied the impulse to a fresh study of the commonplace,
thought it worth while to study such trifles as the presence of hair on the
fingers and hands, and the slope of the hair on the arms. But now that
attention is called to it, every detail is seen to be full of meaning. In all
men the rudimentary hair on the arm, from the wrist to the elbow, points one
way, from the elbow to the shoulder it points the opposite way. In the first
case it points upwards from the wrist towards the elbow, in the other downwards
from the shoulder to the elbow. This occurs nowhere else in the animal kingdom,
except among the anthropoid apes and a few American monkeys, and has to do with
the arboreal habit. As Mr. Romanes, who has pointed this out, explains it,
"When sitting on trees, the Orang, as observed by Wallace, places its hands
above its head with its elbows pointing downwards; the disposition of hair on
the arms and fore-arms then has the effect of thatch in turning the rain.
Again, I find that in all species of apes, monkeys, and baboons which I have
examined (and they have been numerous), the hair on the back of the hands and
feet is continued as far as the first row of phalanges; but becomes scanty, or
disappears altogether, on the second row. I also find that the same peculiarity
occurs in man. We have all rudimentary hair on the first row of phalanges, both
of hands and feet, when present at all, it is more scanty on the second row:
and in no case have I been able to find any on the terminal row. In all cases
those peculiarities are congenital, and the total absence or partial presence
of hair on the second phalanges is constant in different species of Quadrumana.
. . . The downward direction of the hair on the backs of the hands is
exactly the same in man as it is in all the anthropoid apes. Again, with regard
to hair, Darwin notices that occasionally there appear in man a few hairs in
the eyebrows much longer than the others; and that they seem to be a
representation of similarly long and scattered hairs which occur in the
chimpanzee, macacus, and baboon. Lastly, about the sixth month the human foetus
is often thickly covered with somewhat long dark hair over the entire body,
except the soles of the feet and palms of the hands, which are likewise bare in
all quadrumanous animals. This covering, which is called the lanugo, and
sometimes extends even to the whole forehead, ears, and face, is shed before
birth. So that it appears to be useless for any purpose other than that of
emphatically declaring man a child of the monkey."[39] The uselessness of these relics, apart from the
remarkable and detailed nature of the homologies just brought out, is a
circumstance very hard to get over on any other hypothesis than that of
Descent.
Caution, of course, is required in
deciding as to the inutility of any character, since its seeming uselessness
may only mean that we do not know its use. But there are undoubtedly cases
where we know that certain vestigial structures are not only useless to Man but
worse than useless. Coming under this category is perhaps the most striking of
all the vestigial organs, that of the Vermiform Appendix of the Caecum. Here is
a structure which is not only of no use to man now, but is a veritable
death-trap. In herbivorous animals this "blind-tube" is very large--longer in
some cases than the body itself--and of great use in digestion, but in Man it
is shrunken into the merest rudiment, while in the Orang-outang: it is only a
little larger. In the human subject, owing to its diminutive size, it can be of
no use whatever, while it forms an easy receptacle for the lodgment of foreign
bodies, such as fruit-stones, which set up inflammation, and in various ways
cause death. In man this tube is the same in structure as the rest of the
intestine; it is "covered with peritoneum, possesses a muscular coat, and is
lined with mucous membrane. In the early embryo it is equal in calibre to the
rest of the bowel, but at a certain date it ceases to grow pari passu
with it, and at the time of birth appears as a thin tubular appendix to the
caecum. In the newly-born child it is often absolutely as long as in the
full-grown man. This precocity is always an indication that the part was of
great importance to the ancestors of the human species."[40]
So important is the key of Evolution to the
modern pathologist that in cases of malformation his first resort is
always to seek an explanation in earlier forms of life. It is found that
conditions which are pathological in one animal are natural in others of a
lower species. When any eccentricity appears in a human body the anatomist no
longer sets it down as a freak of Nature. He proceeds to match it lower down.
Mr. Darwin mentions a case of a man who, in his foot alone, had no less than
seven abnormal muscles. Each of these was found among the muscles of lower
animals. Take, again, a common case of malformation--club-foot. All children
before birth display the most ordinary form of this deformity--that, namely,
where the sole is turned inwards and upwards and the foot is raised--and it is
only gradually that the foot attains the normal adult position. The abnormal
position, abnormal that is in adult Man, is the normal condition of things in
the case of the gorilla. Club-foot, hence, is simply gorilla-foot--a case of
the arrested development of a character which apparently came along the line of
the direct Simian stock. So simple is this method of interpreting the present
by the past, and so fruitful, that the anatomist has been able in many
instances to assume the role of prophet. Adult man possesses no more than
twelve pair of ribs; the prediction was hazarded by an older Comparative
Anatomy that in the embryonic state he would be found with thirteen or
fourteen. This prophecy has since been verified. It was also predicted that at
this early stage he would be found to possess the insignificant remnant of a
very small bone in the wrist, the so-called os centrale, which must have
existed in the adult condition of his extremely remote ancestors. This
prediction has also been fulfilled, as Weismann aptly remarks, "just as the
planet Neptune was discovered after its existence had been predicted from the
disturbances induced in the orbit of Uranus."[41]
But the enumeration becomes tedious. Though we
are only at the beginning of the list, sufficient has been said to mark the
interest of this part of the subject, and the redundancy of the proof. In the
human body alone, there are at least seventy of these vestigial structures.
Take away the theory that Man has evolved from a lower animal condition, and
there is no explanation whatever of any one of these phenomena. With such facts
before us, it is mocking human intelligence to assure us that Man has not some
connection with the rest of the animal creation, or that the processes of his
development stand unrelated to the other ways of Nature. To say that
Providence, in making a new being, should deliberately have inserted these
eccentricities, without their having any real connection with the things they
so well imitate, or any working relation to the rest of his body, is, with our
present knowledge, simple irreverence.
Were it the present object to complete a proof of
the descent of Man, one might go on to select from other departments of science
evidence not less striking than that from vestigial structures. From the side
of palaeontology it might be shown that Man appears in the earth's crust like
any other fossil, and in the exact place where science would expect to find
him. When born, he is ushered into life like any other animal; he is subject to
the same diseases; he yields to the same treatment. When fully grown there is
almost nothing in his anatomy to distinguish him from his nearest allies among
other animals--almost bone for bone, nerve for nerve, muscle for muscle he is
the same. There is in fact a body of evidence now before science for the animal
origin of Man's physical frame which it is impossible for a thinking mind to
resist. Up to this point two only out of the many conspiring lines of testimony
have been drawn upon for their contribution; but enough has been said to
encourage us, with this as at least a working theory, to continue the journey.
It is the Ascent of Man that concerns us and not the Descent. And these amazing
facts about the past are cited for a larger purpose than to produce conviction
on a point which, after all, is of importance only in its higher implications.
THE ARREST OF THE BODY
"ON the Earth there will never be a higher
Creature than Man."[42] It is a daring
prophecy, but every probability of Science attests the likelihood of its
fulfilment. The goal looked forward to from the beginning of time has been
attained. Nature has succeeded in making a Man; she can go no further; Organic
Evolution has done its work.
This is not a conceit of Science, nor a
reminiscence of the pre-Copernican idea that the centre of the universe is the
world, and the centre of the world Man. It is the sober scientific probability
that with the body of Man the final fruit of the tree of Organic Evolution has
appeared; that the highest possibilities open to flesh and bone and nerve and
muscle have now been realized; that in whatever direction, and with whatever
materials, Evolution still may work, it will never produce any material thing
more perfect in design or workmanship; that in Man, in short, about this time
in history, we are confronted with a stupendous crisis in Nature, --the Arrest
of the Animal. The Man, the Animal Man, the Man of Organic Evolution, it is at
least certain, will not go on. It is another Man who will go on, a Man within
this Man; and that he may go on the first Man must stop. Let us try for a
moment to learn what it is to stop. Nothing could teach Man better what is
meant by his going on.
One of the most perfect pieces of mechanism in
the human body is the Hand. How long it has taken to develop may be dimly seen
by a glance at the long array of less accurate instruments of prehension which
shade away with ever decreasing delicacy and perfectness as we descend the
scale of animal life. At the bottom of that scale is the Amoeba. It is a speck
of protoplasmic jelly, headless, footless, and armless. When it wishes to seize
the microscopic particle of food on which it lives a portion of its body
lengthens out, and, moving towards the object, flows over it, engulfs it, and
melts back again into the body. This is its Hand. At any place, and at any
moment, it creates a Hand. Each Hand is extemporized as it is needed; when not
needed it is not. Pass a little higher up the scale and observe the
Sea-Anemone. The Hand is no longer extemporized as occasion requires, but
lengthened portions of the body are set apart and kept permanently in shape for
the purpose of seizing food. Here, in the capital of twining tentacles which
crowns the quivering pillar of the body, we get the rude approximation to the
most useful portion of the human Hand--the separated fingers. It is a vast
improvement on the earlier Hand, but the jointless digits are still imperfect;
it is simply the Amoeba Hand cut into permanent strips.
Passing over a multitude of intermediate forms,
watch, in the next place, the Hand of an African Monkey. Note the great
increase in usefulness due to the muscular arm upon which the Hand is now
extended, and the extraordinary capacity for varied motion afforded by the
three-fold system of jointing at shoulder, elbow, and wrist. The Hand itself is
almost the human Hand; there are palm and nail and articulated fingers. But
observe how one circumstance hinders the possessor from taking full advantage
of these great improvements,--this Hand has no thumb, or if it has, it is but a
rudiment. To estimate the importance of this apparently insignificant organ,
try for a moment without using the thumb to hold a book, or write a letter, or
do any single piece of manual work. A thumb is not merely an additional finger,
but a finger so arranged as to be opposable to the other fingers,
and thus possesses a practical efficacy greater than all the fingers put
together. It is this which gives the organ the power to seize, to hold, to
manipulate, to do higher work; this simple mechanical device in short endows
the Hand of intelligence with all its capacity and skill. Now there are
animals, like the Colobi, which have no thumb at all; there are others, like
the Marmoset, which possess the thumb, but in which it is not opposable; and
there are others, the Chimpanzee for instance, in which the Hand is in all
essentials identical with Man's. In the human form the thumb is a little
longer, and the whole member more delicate and shapely, but even for the use of
her highest product, Nature has not been able to make anything much more
perfect than the hand of this anthropoid ape.
Is the Hand then finished? Can Nature take out no
new patent in this direction? Is the fact that no novelty is introduced in the
case of Man a proof that the ultimate Hand has appeared? By no means. And yet
it is probable for other reasons that the ultimate Hand has appeared; that
there will never be a more perfectly handed animal than Man. And why? Because
the causes which up to this point have furthered the evolution of the Hand have
begun to cease to act. In the perfecting of the bodily organs, as of all other
mechanical devices, necessity is the mother of invention. As the Hand was given
more and more to do, it became more and more adapted to its work. Up to a
point, it responded directly to each new duty that was laid upon it. But only
up to a point. There came a time when the necessities became too numerous and
too varied for adaptation to keep pace with them. And the fatal day came, the
fatal day for the Hand, when he who bore it made a new discovery. It was the
discovery of Tools. Henceforth what the Hand used to do, and was slowly
becoming adapted to do better, was to be done by external appliances. So that
if anything new arose to be done, or to be better done, it was not a better
Hand that was now made but a better tool. Tools are external Hands. Levers are
the extensions of the bones of the arm. Hammers are callous substitutes for the
fist. Knives do the work of nails. The vice and the pincers replace the
fingers. The day that Cave-man first split the marrow bone of a bear by
thrusting a stick into it, and striking it home with a stone--that day the doom
of the Hand was sealed.
But has not Man to make his tools, and will not
that induce the development of the Hand to an as yet unknown perfection? No.
Because tools are not made with the Hand. They are made with the Brain. For a
time, certainly, Man had to make his tools, and for a time this work
recompensed him physically, and the arm became elastic and the fingers
dexterous and strong. But soon he made tools to make these tools. In place of
shaping things with the Hand, he invented the turning-lathe; to save his
fingers he requisitioned the loom; instead of working his muscles he gave out
the contract to electricity and steam. Man, therefore, from this time forward
will cease to develop materially these organs of his body. If he develops them
outside his body, filling the world everywhere with artificial Hands, supplying
the workshops with fingers more intricate and deft than Organic Evolution could
make in a millennium, and loosing energies upon them infinitely more gigantic
than his muscles could generate in a life-time, it is enough. Evolution after
all is a slow process. Its great labour is to work up to a point where
Invention shall be possible, and where, by the powers of the human mind, and by
the mechanical utilization of the energies of the universe, the results of ages
of development may be anticipated. Further changes, therefore, within the body
itself are made unnecessary. Evolution has taken a new departure. For the
Arrest of the Hand is not the cessation of Evolution but its immense
acceleration, and the re-direction of its energies into higher channels.
Take up the functions of the animal body one by
one, and it will be seen how the same arresting finger is laid upon them all.
To select an additional illustration, consider the power of Sight. Without
pausing to trace the steps by which the Eye has reached its marvellous
perfection, or to estimate the ages spent in polishing its lenses and adjusting
the diaphragms and screws, ask the simple question whether, under the
conditions of modern civilization, anything now is being added to its
quickening efficiency, or range. Is it not rather the testimony of experience
that if anything its power has begun to wane? Europe even now affords the
spectacle of at least one nation so short-sighted that it might almost be
called a myopic race. The same causes, in fact, that led to the Arrest of the
Hand are steadily working to stop the development of the Eye. Man, when he sees
with difficulty, does not now improve his Eye; he puts on a pince-nez.
Spectacles--external eyes--have superseded the work of Evolution. When his
sight is perfect up to a point, and he desires to examine objects so minute as
to lie beyond the limit of that point, he will not wait for Evolution to catch
up upon his demand and supply him, or his children's children, with a more
perfect instrument. He will invest in a microscope. Or when he wishes to extend
his gaze to the moon and stars, he does not hope to reach to-morrow the
distances which to-day transcend him. He invents the telescope. Organic
Evolution has not even a chance. In every direction the external eye has
replaced the internal, and it is even difficult to suggest where any further
development of this part of the animal can now come in. There are still, and in
spite of all instruments, regions in which the unaided organs of Man may
continue to find a field for the fullest exercise, but the area is slowly
narrowing, and in every direction the appliances of Science tempt the body to
accept those supplements of the Arts, which, being accepted, involve the
discontinuance of development for all the parts concerned. Even where a
mechanical appliance, while adding range to a bodily sense, has seemed to open
a door for further improvement, some correlated discovery in a distant field of
science, as by some remorseless fate, has suddenly taken away the opportunity
and offered to the body only an additional inducement for neglect. Thus it
might be thought that the continuous use of the telescope, in the attempt to
discover more and more indistinct and distant heavenly bodies, might tend to
increase the efficiency of the Eye. But that expectation has vanished already
before a further fruit of Man's inventive power. By an automatic photographic
apparatus fixed to the telescope, an Eye is now created vastly more delicate
and in many respects more efficient than the keenest eye of Man. In at least
five important particulars the Photographic Eye is the superior of the Eye of
Organic Evolution. It can see where the human Eye, even with the best aids of
optical instruments, sees nothing at all; it can distinguish certain objects
with far greater clearness and definition; owing to the rapidity of its action
it can instantly detect changes which are too sudden for the human eye to
follow; it can look steadily for hours without growing tired; and it can record
what it sees with infallible accuracy upon a plate which time will not efface.
How long would it take Organic Evolution to arrive at an Eye of such amazing
quality and power? And with such a piece of mechanism available, who, rather
than employ it even to the neglect of his organs of vision, would be content to
await the possible attainment of an equal perfection by his descendants some
million years hence? Is there not here a conspicuous testimony to the
improbability of a further Evolution of the sense of Sight in civilized
communities--in other words, another proof of the Arrest of the Animal? What
defiance of Evolution, indeed, what affront to Nature, is this? Man prepares a
complicated telescope to supplement the Eye created by Evolution, and no sooner
is it perfected than it occurs to him to create another instrument to aid the
Eye in what little work is left for it to do. That is to say, he first makes a
mechanical supplement to his Eye, then constructs a mechanical Eye, which is
better than his own, to see through it, and ends by discarding, for many
purposes, the Eye of Organic Evolution altogether.
As regards the other functions of civilized Man,
the animal in almost every direction has reached its maximum. Civilization--and
the civilized state, be it remembered, is the ultimate goal of every race and
nation--is always attended by deterioration of some of the senses. Every man
pays a definite price or forfeit for his taming. The sense of smell, compared
with its development among the lower animals, is in civilized Man already all
but gone. Compared even with a savage, it is an ascertained fact that the
civilized Man in this respect is vastly inferior. So far as hearing is
concerned, the main stimulus--fear of surprise by enemies--has ceased to
operate, and the muscles for the erection of the ears have fallen into disuse.
The ear itself in contrast with that of the savage is slow and dull, while
compared with the quick sense of the lower animals, the organ is almost deaf.
The skin, from the continuous use of clothes, has forfeited its protective
power. Owing to the use of viands cooked, the muscles of the jaw are rapidly
losing strength. The teeth, partly for a similar reason, are undergoing marked
degeneration. The third molar, for instance, among some nations is already
showing symptoms of suppression, and that this threatens ultimate extinction
may be reasoned from the fact that the anthropoid apes have fewer teeth than
the lower monkeys, and these fewer than the preceding generation of
insectivorous mammals.
In an age of vehicles and locomotives the lower
limbs find their occupation almost gone. For mere muscle, that on which his
whole life once depended, Man has almost now no use. Agility, nimbleness,
strength, once a stern necessity, are either a luxury or a pastime. Their
outlet is the cricket-field or the tennis-court. To keep them up at all,
artificial means--dumb-bells, parallel-bars, clubs--have actually to be
devised. Vigour of limb is not to be found in common life, we look for it in
the Gymnasium; agility is relegated to the Hippodrome. Once all men were
athletes; now you have to pay to see them. More or less with all the animal
powers it is the same. To some extent at least some phonograph may yet speak
for us, some telephone hear for us, the typewriter write for us, chemistry
digest for us, and incubation nurture us. So everywhere the Man as Animal is in
danger of losing ground. He has expanded until the world is his body. The
former body, the hundred and fifty pounds or so of organized tissue he carries
about with him, is little more than a mark of identity. It is not he who
is there, he cannot be there, or anywhere, for he is everywhere. The material
part of him is reduced to a symbol; it is but a link with the wider framework
of the Arts, a belt between machinery and machinery. His body no longer
generates, but only utilizes energy; alone he is but a tool, a medium, a
turncock of the physical forces.
Now with what feelings do we regard all this? Is
not the crowning proof of the thesis under review that we watch this evidence
accumulating against the body with no emotion and hear the doom of our clay
pronounced without a regret? It is nothing to aspiring Man to watch the lower
animals still perfecting their mechanism and putting all his physical powers
and senses to the shame. It is nothing to him to be distanced in nimbleness by
the deer: has he not his bullet? Or in strength by the horse: has he not bit
and bridle? Or in vision by the eagle: his field-glass out-sees it. How easily
we talk of the body as a thing without us, as an impersonal it And how
naturally when all is over, do we advertise its irrelevancy to ourselves
by consigning its borrowed atoms to the anonymous dust. The fact is, in one
aspect, the body, to Intelligence, is all but an absurdity. One is almost
ashamed to have one. The idea of having to feed it, and exercise it, and humour
it, and put it away in the dark to sleep, to carry it about with one
everywhere, and not only it but its wardrobe--other material things to make
this material thing warm or keep it cool--the whole situation is a comedy. But
judge what it would be if this exacting organism went on evolving, multiplied
its members, added to its intricacy, waxed instead of waned? So complicated is
it already that one shrinks from contemplating a future race having to keep in
repair an apparatus more involved and delicate. The practical advantage is
enormous of having all improvements henceforth external, of having insensate
organs made of iron and steel rather than of wasting muscle and palpitating
nerve. For these can be kept at no physiological cost, they cannot impede the
other machinery, and when that finally comes to the last break-down there will
be the fewer wheels to stop.
So great indeed is the advantage of increasing
mechanical supplements to the physical frame rather than exercising the
physical frame itself, that this will become nothing short of a temptation; and
not the least anxious task of future civilization will be to prevent
degeneration beyond a legitimate point, and keep up the body to its highest
working level. For the first thing to be learned from these facts is not that
the Body is nothing and must now decay, but that it is most of all and more
than ever worthy to be preserved. The moment our care of it slackens, the Body
asserts itself. It comes out from under arrest--which is the one thing to be
avoided. Its true place by the ordained appointment of Nature is where it can
be ignored; if through disease, neglect, or injury it returns to consciousness
the effect of Evolution is undone. Sickness is degeneration; pain the signal to
resume the evolution. On the one hand, one must "reckon the Body dead"; on the
other, one must think of it in order not to think of it.
This arrest of physical development at a specific
point is not confined to Man. Everywhere in the organic world science is
confronted with arrested types. While endless groups of plant and animal forms
have advanced during the geological ages, other whole groups have apparently
stood still-- stood still, that is to say, not in time but in organization. If
Nature is full of moving things, it is also full of fixtures. Thirty-one years
ago Mr. Huxley devoted the anniversary Address of the Geological Society to a
consideration of what he called "Persistent Types of Life," and threw down to
Evolutionists a puzzle which has never yet been fully solved. While some forms
attained their climacteric tens of thousands of years ago and perished, others
persevered, and, without advancing in any material respect, are alive to this
day. Among the most ancient Carboniferous plants, for instance, are found
certain forms generically identical with those now living. The cone of the
existing Araucaria is scarcely to be distinguished from that of an Oolite form.
The Tabulate Corals of the Silurian period are similar to those which exist
to-day. The Lamp-shells of our present seas so abounded at the same ancient
date as to give their name to one of the great groups of Silurian rocks--the
Lingula Flags. Star-fishes and urchins, almost the same as those which tenant
the coast-lines of our present seas, crawled along what are now among the most
ancient fossiliferous rocks. Both of the forms just named, the Brachiopods and
the Echinoderms, have come down to us almost unchanged through the nameless gap
of time which separates the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone periods from the
present era.
This constancy of structure reveals a
conservatism in Nature, as unexpected as it is widespread. Does it mean that
the architecture of living things has a limit beyond which development cannot
go? Does it mean that the morphological possibilities along certain lines of
bodily structure have exhausted themselves, that the course of conceivable
development in these instances has actually run out? In Gothic Architecture, or
in Norman, there are terminal points which, once reached, can be but little
improved upon. Without limiting working efficiency, they can go no further.
These styles in the very nature of things seem to have limits. Mr. Ruskin has
indeed assured us that there are only three possible forms of good architecture
in the world; Greek, the architecture of the Lintel; Romanesque, the
architecture of the Rounded Arch; Gothic, the architecture of the Gable. "All
the architects in the world will never discover any other way of bridging a
space than these three, the Lintel, the Round Arch, the Gable; they may vary
the curve of the arch, or curve the sides of the gable, or break them down; but
in doing this they are merely modifying or sub-dividing, not adding to the
generic form."[43]
In some such way, there may be terminal generic
forms in the architecture of animals; and the persistent types just named may
represent in their several directions the natural limits of possible
modification. No further modification of a radical kind, that is to say, could
in these instances be introduced without detriment to practical efficiency.
These terminal forms thus mark a normal maturity, a goal; they represent the
ends of the twigs of the tree of life.
Now consider the significance of that fact.
Nature is not an interminable succession. It is not always a becoming.
Sometimes things arrive. The Lamp-shells have arrived, they are part of the
permanent furniture of the world; along that particular line, there will
probably never be anything higher. The Star-fishes also have arrived, and the
Sea-urchins, and the Nautilus, and the Bony Fishes, the Tapirs, and possibly
the Horse--all these are highly divergent forms which have run out the length
of their tether and can go no further. When the plan of the world was made, to
speak teleologically, these types of life were assigned their place and limit,
and there they have remained. If it were wanted to convey the impression that
Nature had some large end in view, that she was not drifting aimlessly towards
a general higher level, it could not have been done more impressively than by
everywhere placing on the field of Science these fixed points, these
innumerable consummations, these clean-cut mountain peaks, which for
millenniums have never grown. Even as there is a plan in the parts, there is a
plan in the whole.
But the most certain of all these "terminal
points" in the evolution of Creation is the body of Man. Anatomy places Man at
the head of all other animals that were ever made; but what is infinitely more
instructive, with him, as we have just seen, the series comes to an end. Man is
not only the highest branch, but the highest possible branch Take as a last
witness the testimony of anatomy itself with regard to the human brain. Here
the fact is not only re-affirmed but the rationale of it suggested in terms of
scientific law. "The development of the brain is in connection with a whole
system of development of the head and face which cannot be carried further than
in Man. For the mode in which the cranial cavity is gradually increased in size
is a regular one, which may be explained thus: we may look on the skull as an
irregular cylinder, and at the same time that it is expanded by increase of
height and width it also undergoes a curvature or bending on itself, so that
the base is crumpled together while the roof is elongated. This curving has
gone on in Man till the fore end of the cylinder, the part on which the brain
rests above the nose, is nearly parallel to the aperture of communication of
the skull with the spinal canal, i.e. the cranium has a curve of 180deg.
or a few degrees more or less. This curving of the base of the skull involves
change in position of the face bones also, and could not go on to a further
extent without cutting off the nasal cavity from the throat. . . . Thus
there is anatomical evidence that the development of the vertebrate form has
reached its limit by completion in Man."[44]
This author's conception of the whole field of
living nature is so suggestive that we may continue the quotation: "To me the
animal kingdom appears not in indefinite growth like a tree, but a temple with
many minarets, none of them capable of being prolonged--while the central dome
is completed by the structure of man. The development of the animal kingdom is
the development of intelligence chained to matter; the animals in which the
nervous system has reached the greatest perfection are the vertebrates, and in
Man that part of the nervous system which is the organ of intelligence reaches,
as I have sought to show, the highest development possible to a vertebrate
animal, while intelligence has grown to reflection and volition. On these
grounds, I believe, not that Man is the highest possible intelligence, but that
the human body is the highest form of human life possible, subject to the
conditions of matter on the surface of the globe, and that the structure
completes the design of the animal kingdom."[45]
Never was the body of Man greater than with this
sentence of suspension passed on it, and never was Evolution more wonderful or
more beneficent than when the signal was given to stop working at Man's animal
frame. This was an era in the world's history. For it betokened nothing less
than that the cycle of matter was now complete, and the one prefatory task of
the ages finished. Henceforth the Weltanschauung is for ever changed.
From this pinnacle of matter is seen at last what matter is for, and all the
lower lives that ever lived appear as but the scaffolding for this final work.
The whole sub-human universe finds its reason for existence in its last
creation, its final justification in the new immaterial order which opened with
its close. Cut off Man from Nature, and, metaphysical necessity apart, there
remains in Nature no divinity. To include Man in Evolution is not to lower Man
to the level of Nature, but to raise Nature to his high estate. There he was
made, these atoms are his confederates, these plant cells raised him from the
dust, these travailing animals furthered his Ascent: shall he excommunicate
them now that their work is done? Plant and animal have each their end, but Man
is the end of all the ends. The latest science reinstates him, where poet and
philosopher had already placed him, as at once the crown, the master, and the
rationale of creation. "Not merely," says Kant, "is he like all organized
beings an end in nature, but also here on earth the last end of nature, in
reference to whom all other natural things constitute a system of ends." Yet it
is not because he is the end of ends, but the beginning of beginnings, that the
completion of the Body marks a crisis in the past. At last Evolution had
culminated in a creation so complex and exalted as to form the foundation for
an inconceivably loftier super-organic order. The moment an organism was
reached through which Thought was possible, nothing more was required of
matter. The Body was high enough. Organic Evolution might now even resign its
sovereignty of the world; it had made a thing which was now its master.
Henceforth Man should take charge of Evolution even as up till now he had been
the one charge of it. Henceforth his selection should replace Natural
Selection; his judgment guide the struggle for life; his will determine for
every plant upon the earth whether it should bloom or fade, for every animal
whether it should increase, or change, or die. So Man entered into his
Kingdom.
Science is charged, be it once more recalled,
with numbering Man among the beasts, and levelling his body with the dust. But
he who reads for himself the history of creation as it is written by the hand
of Evolution will be overwhelmed by the glory and honour heaped upon this
creature. To be a Man, and to have no conceivable successor; to be the fruit
and crown of the long past eternity, and the highest possible fruit and crown;
to be the last victor among the decimated phalanxes of earlier existences, and
to be nevermore defeated; to be the best that Nature in her strength and
opulence can produce; to be the first of that new order of beings who by their
dominion over the lower world and their equipment for a higher, reveal that
they are made in the Image of God--to be this is to be elevated to a rank in
Nature more exalted than any philosophy or any poetry or any theology have ever
given to Man. Man was always told that his place was high; the reason for it he
never knew till now; he never knew that his title deeds were the very laws of
Nature, that he alone was the Alpha and Omega of Creation, the beginning and
the end of Matter, the final goal of Life.
Nature is full of new departures; but never since
time began was there anything approaching in importance that period when the
slumbering animal, Brain, broke into intelligence, and the Creature first felt
that it had a Mind. From that dateless moment a higher and swifter progress of
the world began. Henceforth, Intelligence triumphed over structural adaptation.
The wise were naturally selected before the strong. The Mind discovered better
methods, safer measures, shorter cuts. So the body learned to refer to it, then
to defer to it. As the Mind was given more to do, it enlarged and did its work
more perfectly. Gradually the favours of Evolution-- exercise, alteration,
differentiation, addition--which were formerly distributed promiscuously among
the bodily organs--were now lavished mainly upon the Brain. The gains
accumulated with accelerating velocity; and by sheer superiority and fitness
for its work, the Intellect rose to commanding power, and entered into final
possession of a monopoly which can never be disturbed.
Now this means not only that an order of higher
animals has appeared upon the earth, but that an altogether new page in the
history of the universe has begun to be written. It means nothing less than
that the working of Evolution has changed its course. Once it was a physical
universe, now it is a psychical universe. And to say that the working of
Evolution has changed its course, and set its compass in psychical directions,
is to call attention to the most remarkable fact in Nature. Nothing so original
or so revolutionary has ever been given to science to discover, to ponder, or
to proclaim. The power of this event to strike and rouse the mind will depend
upon one's sense of what the working of Evolution has been to the world; but
those who realize this even dimly will see that no emphasis of language can
exaggerate its significance. Let imagination do its best to summon up the past
of Nature. Beginning with the panorama of the Nebular Hypothesis, run the eye
over the field of Palaeontology, Geology, Botany, and Zoology. Watch the
majestic drama of Creation unfolding, scene by scene and act by act. Realize
that one power, and only one, has marshalled the figures for this mighty
spectacle; that one hand, and only one, has carried out these transformations;
that one principle, and only one, has controlled each subsidiary plot and
circumstance; that the same great patient unobtrusive law has guided and shaped
the whole from its beginnings in bewilderment and chaos to its end in order,
harmony, and beauty. Then watch the curtain drop. And as it moves to rise
again, behold the new actor upon the stage. Silently, as all great changes
come, Mental Evolution has succeeded Organic. All the things that have been now
lie in the far background as forgotten properties. And Man stands alone in the
foreground, and a new thing, Spirit, strives within him.
THE DAWN OF MIND
THE most beautiful witness to the Evolution
of Man is the Mind of a little child. The stealing in of that inexplicable
light--yet not more light than sound or touch--called consciousness, the first
flicker of memory, the gradual governance of will, the silent ascendancy of
reason--these are studies in Evolution the oldest, the sweetest, and the most
full of meaning for mankind. Evolution, after all, is a study for the nursery.
It was ages before Darwin or Lamarck or Lucretius that Maternity, bending over
the hollowed cradle in the forest for a first smile of recognition from her
babe, expressed the earliest trust in the doctrine of development. Every mother
since then is an unconscious Evolutionist, and every little child a living
witness to Ascent.
Is the Mind a new or an old thing in the world?
Is it an Evolution from beneath or an original gift from heaven? Did the Mind,
in short, come down the ages like the Body, and does the mother's faith in the
intellectual unfolding of her babe include a remoter origin for all human
faculty? Let the mother look at her child and answer. "It is the very breath of
God," she says; "this Child-Life is Divine." And she is right. But let her look
again. That forehead, whose is it? It is hers. And the frown which darkened it
just now? Is hers also. And that which caused the frown to darken, that
something or nothing, behind the forehead, that flash of pride, or scorn, or
hate? Alas, it is her very own. And as the years roll on, and the budding life
unfolds, there is scarcely a mood or gesture or emotion that she does not know
is borrowed. But whence in turn did she receive them? From an earlier mother.
And she? From a still earlier mother. And she? From the savage-mother in the
woods. And the savage-mother?
Shall we hesitate here? We well may. So Godlike a
gift is intellect, so wondrous a thing is consciousness, that to link them with
the animal world seems to trifle with the profoundest distinctions in the
Universe. Yet to associate these supersensuous things with the animal kingdom
is not to identify them with the animal-body. Electricity is linked with metal
rods, it is not therefore metallic. Life is associated with protoplasm, it is
not therefore albuminous. Instinct is linked with matter, but it is not
therefore material; Intellect with animal matter, but is not therefore animal.
As we rise in the scale of Nature we encounter new orders of phenomena, Matter,
Life, Mind, each higher than that before it, each totally and forever
different, yet each using that beneath it as the pedestal for its further
progress. Associated with animal-matter-- how associated no psychology, no
physiology, no materialism, no spiritualism, has even yet begun to hint--may
there not have been from an early dawn the elements of a future Mind? Do the
wide analogies of Nature not make the suggestion worthy at least of inquiry?
The fact, to which there is no exception, that all lesser things evolve, the
suggestion, which is daily growing into a further certainty, that there is a
mental evolution among animals from the Coelenterate to the Ape; the fact that
the unfolding of the Child-Mind is itself a palpable evolution; the infinitely
more significant circumstance that the Mind in a child seems to unfold in the
order in which it would unfold if its mental faculties were received from the
Animal world, and in the order in which they have already asserted themselves
in the history of the race. These seem formidable facts on the side of those
consistent evolutionists who, in the face of countless difficulties and
countless prejudices, still press the lawful inquiry into the development of
human faculty.
The first feeling in most minds when the idea of
mental evolution is presented, is usually one of amusement. This not seldom
changes, when the question is seen to be taken seriously, into wonder at the
daring of the suggestion or pity for its folly. All great problems have been
treated in this way. All have passed through the inevitable phases of laughter,
contempt, opposition. It ought to be so. And if this problem is "perhaps the
most interesting that has ever been submitted to the contemplation of our
race,"[46] its basis cannot be criticized with
too great care. But none have a right to question either the sanity or the
sanctity of such investigations, still less to dismiss them idly on a
priori grounds, till they have approached the practical problem for
themselves, and heard at least the first few relevant words from Nature. For
one has only to move for a little among the facts to see what a world of
interest lies here, and to be forced to hold the judgment in suspense till the
sciences at work upon the problem have further shaped their verdict. Thinkers
who are entitled to respect have even gone further. They include mental
evolution not only among the hypotheses of Science but among its facts and its
necessary facts. "Is it conceivable," asks Mr. Romanes, "that the human mind
can have arisen by way of a natural genesis from the minds of the higher
quadrumana? I maintain that the material now before us is sufficient to show,
not only that this is conceivable, but inevitable."[47]
It is no part of the present purpose to discuss
the ultimate origin or nature of Mind. Our subject is its development. At the
present moment the ultimate origin of Mind is as inscrutable a mystery as the
origin of Life. It is sometimes charged against Evolution that it tries to
explain everything and to rob the world of all its problems. There does not
appear the shadow of a hope that it is about to rob it of this. On the contrary
the foremost scientific exponents of the theory of mental evolution are
ceaselessly calling attention to the inscrutable character of the element whose
history they attempt to trace. "On the side of its philosophy," says Mr.
Romanes, "no one can have a deeper respect for the problem of
self-consciousness than I have; for no one can be more profoundly convinced
than I am that the problem on this side does not admit of solution. In other
words, so far as this aspect of the matter is concerned, I am in complete
agreement with the most advanced idealist I am as far as any one can be from
throwing light upon the intrinsic nature of the probable origin of that which I
am endeavouring to trace."[48] Mr. Darwin
himself recoiled from a problem so transcendent: "I have nothing to do with the
origin of the mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself."[49] "In what manner," he elsewhere writes, "the
mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms, is as hopeless an
inquiry as how life itself first originated."[50]
Notwithstanding his appreciation of the
difficulty of the ultimate problem, Mr. Darwin addressed his whole strength to
the question of the Evolution of Mind--the Evolution as distinguished from its
origin and nature; and in this he has recently had many followers, as well as
many opponents. Among the latter stand the co-discoverer with him of Natural
Selection, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, and Mr. St. George Mivart. Mr. Wallace's
opposition, from a scientific point of view, is not so hostile, however, as is
generally supposed. While holding his own view as to the origin of Mind, what
he attacks in Mr. Darwin's theory of mental evolution is, not the development
itself, but only the supposition that it could have been due to Natural
Selection. Mr. Wallace's authority is frequently quoted to show that the
mathematical, the musical and the artistic faculties could not have been
evolved, whereas all he has really emphasized is that "they could not have been
developed under the law of Natural Selection."[51] In short the conclusion of Mr. Darwin which his colleague
found "not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to
many well ascertained facts," was not a general theorem, but a specific one.
And many will agree with Mr. Wallace in doubting "that man's entire nature and
all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived
from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same manner and by the action
of the same general laws as his physical structure has been derived."[52]
The more this problem has been investigated, the
difficulties of the whole field increase, and the off-hand acceptance of any
specific evolution theory finds less and less encouragement. No serious
thinker, on whichever side of the controversy, has succeeded in lessening to
his own mind the infinite distance between the Mind of Man and everything else
in Nature, and even the most consistent evolutionists are as unanimous as those
who oppose them, in their assertion of the uniqueness of the higher
intellectual powers. The concensus of scientific opinion here is extraordinary.
"I know nothing," says Huxley, in the name of biology, "and never hope to know
anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states
of consciousness is effected."[53] "The two
things," emphasizes the physicist, "are on two utterly different platforms, the
physical facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by
themselves."[54] "It is all through and for
ever inconceivable," protests the German physiologist, "that a number of atoms
of Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and so on, shall be other than
indifferent as to how they are disposed and how they move, how they were
disposed and how they moved, how they will be disposed and how they will be
moved. It is utterly inconceivable how consciousness shall arise from their
joint action."[55] So impressed is even Mr.
Lloyd Morgan, mental evolutionist though he be, with the gap between the Minds
of Man and brute that his language is almost as strong: "I for one do not for a
moment question that the mental processes of man and animals are alike products
of evolution. The power of cognizing relations, reflection and introspection,
appear to me to mark a new departure in evolution,"[56] and "I am not prepared to say that there is a difference
in kind between the mind of man and the mind of a dog. This would imply a
difference in origin or a difference in the essential nature of its being.
There is a great and marked difference in kind between the material processes
which we call physiological and the mental processes we call psychical. They
belong to wholly different orders of being. I see no reason for believing that
mental processes in man differ thus in kind from mental processes in animals.
But I do think that we have, in the introduction of the analytic faculty, so
definite and marked a new departure that we should emphasize it by saying that
the faculty of perception, in its various specific grades, differs generically
from the faculty of conception. And believing, as I do, that conception is
beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that
his mind differs generically from my own."[57]
Should anyone feel it necessary either to his
view of Man or of the Universe to hold that a great gulf lies here, it is open
to him to cling to his belief. The present thesis is simply that Man has
ascended. After all, little depends on whether the slope is abrupt or gentle,
whether Man reaches the top by a uniform flight or has here and there by
invisible hands to be carried across a bridgeless space. In any event it is
Nature's staircase. To say that self-consciousness has arisen from sensation,
and sensation from the function of nutrition, let us say, in the Mimosa
pudica or Sensitive Plant, may be right or wrong; but the error can only be
serious when it is held that that accounts either for self-consciousness or for
the transition. Mimosa can be defined in terms of Man; but Man cannot be
defined in terms of Mimosa. The first is possible because there is the least
fraction in that which is least in Man of that which is greatest in Mimosa; the
last is impossible because there is nothing in Mimosa of that which is greatest
in Man. What the two possess in common, or seem to possess, may be a basis for
comparison, for what it is worth; but to include in the comparison the
ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of what is over and above that common
fraction is by no sort of reasoning lawful. Man, in the last resort, has
self-consciousness, Mimosa sensation; and the difference is qualitative as well
as quantitative.
If, however, it is a fallacy to ignore the
qualitative differences arising in the course of the transition, it may be a
mistake, on the other hand, to make nothing of the transition. If in the name
of Science the advocate of the Law of Continuity demands that it be rectified,
he may well make the attempt. The partial truth for the present perhaps amounts
to this, that earlier phases of life exhibit imperfect manifestations of
principles which in the higher structure and widened environment of later forms
are more fully manifested and expressed, yet are neither contained in the
earlier phases nor explained by them. At the same time, everything that enters
into Man, every sensation, emotion, volition, enters with a difference, a
difference due to the fact that he is a rational and self-conscious being, a
difference therefore which no emphasis of language can exaggerate. The music
varies with the ear; varies with the soul behind the ear; relates itself with
all the music that ear has ever heard before; with the mere fact that what that
ear hears, it hears as music; that it hears at all; that it knows that it
hears. Man differs from every other product of the evolutionary process in
being able to see that it is a process, in sharing and rejoicing in its unity,
and in voluntarily working through the process himself. If he is part of it he
is also more than part of it, since he is at once its spectator, its director,
and its critic. "Even on the hypothesis of a psychic life in all matter we come
to an alteration indeed, but not an abolition, of the contrast between body and
soul. Of course on that hypothesis they are distinguished by no qualitative
difference in their natures, but still less do they blend into one; the one
individual ruling soul always remains facing, in an attitude of complete
isolation, the homogeneous but ministrant monads, the joint multitude of which
forms the living body."[58]
With these preliminary cautions, let us turn for
a little to the facts. The field here is so full of interest in itself that
apart from its forming a possible chapter in the history of Man it is worth a
casual survey.
The difficulty of establishing even the general
question of Ascent is of course obvious. After Mind emerged from the animal
state, for a long time, and in the very nature of the case, no record of its
progress could come down to us. The material Body has left its graduated
impress upon the rocks in a million fossil forms; the Spirit of Man, at the
other extreme of time, has traced its ascending curve on the tablets of
civilization, in the drama of history, and in the monuments of social life; but
the Mind must have risen into its first prominence during a long, silent and
dateless interval which preceded the era of monumental records. Mind - cannot
be exhumed by Palaeontology or fully embalmed in unwritten history, and apart
from the analogies of Embryology we have nothing but inference to guide us
until the time came when it was advanced enough to leave some tangible register
behind.
But so far as knowledge is possible there are
mainly five sources of information with regard to the past of Mind. The first
is the Mind of a little child; the second the Mind of lower animals; the third,
those material witnesses--flints, weapons, pottery--to primitive states of Mind
which are preserved in anthropological museums; the fourth is the Mind of a
Savage; and the fifth is Language.
The first source--the Mind of a little child--has
just been referred to Mind, in Man, does not start into being fully ripe. It
dawns; it grows; it mellows; it decays. This growing moreover is a gradual
growing, an infinitely gentle, never abrupt unfolding--the kind of growing
which in every other department of Nature we are taught by Nature to associate
with an Evolution. If the Mind of the infant had been evolved, and that not
from primeval Man, but from some more ancient animal, it could not to more
perfection have simulated the appearance of having so come.
But this is not all. The Mind of a child not only
grows, but grows in a certain order. And the astonishing fact about that order
is that it is the probable order of evolution of mental faculty as a
whole. Where Science gets that probable order will be referred to by and by.
Meantime, simply note the fact that not only in the manner but in the order of
its development, the human Mind simulates a product of Evolution. The Mind of a
child, in short, is to be treated as an unfolding embryo; and just as the
embryo of the body recapitulates the long life-history of all the bodies that
led up to it, so this subtler embryo in running its course through the swift
years of early infancy runs up the psychic scale through which, as evidence
from another field will show, Mind probably evolved. We have seen also that in
the case of the body, each step of progress in the embryo has its equivalent
either in the bodies, or in the embryos of lower forms of life. Now each phase
of mental development in the child is also permanently represented by some
species among the lower animals, by idiots, or by the Mind of some existing
savage.
Let us turn, however, to the second source of
information--Mind in the lower Animals.
That animals have "Minds" is a fact which
probably no one now disputes. Stories of "Animal Intelligence" and "Animal
Sagacity" in dogs and bees and ants and elephants and a hundred other creatures
have been told us from childhood with redundant reiteration. The old protest
that animals have no Mind but only instinct has lost its point. In addition to
instincts, animals betray intelligence, and often a high degree of
intelligence; they share our feelings and emotions; they have memories; they
form percepts; they invent new ways of satisfying their desires, they learn by
experience. It is true their Minds want much, and all that is highest; but the
point is that they actually have Minds, whatever their quantity and whatever
their quality.[59] If abstraction, as Locke
says, "is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain
to," we cannot on that account deny them Mind, but only that height of Mind
which men have, and which Evolution would never look for in any living thing
but Man. An Evolutionist would no more expect to find the higher rational
characteristics in a wolf or a bear than to unearth the modern turbine from a
Roman aqueduct.
Though the possession even of a few rudiments of
Mind by animals is a sufficient starting point for Mental Evolution, to say
that they have only a few rudiments is to understate the facts. But we know so
little what Mind is that speculation in this region can only be done in the
rough. On one hand lies the danger of minimizing tremendous distinctions, on
the other, of pretending to know all about these distinctions, because we have
learned to call them by certain names. Mind, when we come to see what it is,
may be one; perhaps must be one. The habit of unconsciously regarding the
powers and faculties of Mind as separate entities, like the organs of the body,
has its risks as well as its uses; and we cannot too often remind ourselves
that this is a mere device to facilitate thought and speech.
It is mainly to Mr. Romanes that we owe the
working out of the evidence in this connection; and even though his researches
be little more than a preliminary exploration their general results are
striking. Realizing that the most scientific way to discover whether there are
any affinities between Mind in Animals and Mind in Man is to compare the one
with the other, he began a laborious study of the Animal world. His conclusions
are contained in Animal Intelligence and Mental Evolution in
Animals--volumes which no one can read without being convinced at least of
the thoroughness and fairness of the investigation. That abundant traces were
found of Mind in the lower animals goes without saying. But the range of mental
phenomena discovered there may certainly excite surprise. Thus, to consider
only one set of phenomena--that of the emotions--all the following products of
emotional development are represented at one stage or another of animal life:
FEAR, EMULATION, BENEVOLENCE, SURPRISE,
PRIDE, REVENGE, AFFECTION, RESENTMENT, RAGE, PUGNACITY, EMOTION OF THE
BEAUTIFUL, SHAME, CURIOSITY, REGRET, JEALOUSY, GRIEF, DECEITFULNESS,
ANGER, HATE, EMOTION OF THE LUDICROUS, PLAY, CRUELTY, SYMPATHY
But this list is something more than a bare
catalogue of what human emotions exist in the animal world. It is an
arranged catalogue, a more or less definite psychological scale. These
emotions did not only appear in animals, but they appeared in this order. Now
to find out order in Evolution is of first importance. For order of events is
history, and Evolution is history. In creatures very far down the scale of
life--the Annelids--Mr. Romanes distinguished what appeared to him to be one of
the earliest emotions--Fear. Somewhat higher up, among the Insects, he met with
the Social Feelings, as well as Industry, Pugnacity, and Curiosity. Jealousy
seems to have been born into the world with Fishes; Sympathy with Birds. The
Carnivora are responsible for Cruelty, Hate, and Grief; the Anthropoid Apes for
Remorse, Shame, the Sense of the Ludicrous, and Deceit.
Now, when we compare this table with a similar
table compiled from a careful study of the emotional states in a little child,
two striking facts appear. In the first place, there are almost no emotions in
the child which are not here--this list, in short, practically exhausts the
list of human emotions. With the exception of the religious feelings, the moral
sense, and the perception of the sublime, there is nothing found even in adult
Man which is not represented with more or less vividness in the Animal Kingdom.
But this is not all. These emotions, as already hinted, appear in the Mind of
the growing child in the same order as they appear on the animal scale.
At three weeks, for instance, Fear is perceptibly manifest in a little child.
When it is seven weeks old the Social Affections dawn. At twelve weeks emerges
Jealousy, with its companion Anger. Sympathy appears after five months; Pride,
Resentment, Love of Ornament, after eight; Shame, Remorse, and Sense of the
Ludicrous after fifteen. These dates, of course, do not indicate in any
mechanical way the birthdays of emotions; they represent rather stages in an
infinitely gentle mental ascent, stages nevertheless so marked that we are able
to give them names, and use them as landmarks in psychogenesis. Yet taken even
as representing a rough order it is a circumstance to which some significance
must be attached that the tree of Mind as we know it in lower Nature, and the
tree of Mind as we know it in a little child, should be the same tree, starting
its roots at the same place, and though by no means ending its branches at the
same level, at least growing them so far in a parallel direction.
Do we read these emotions into the lower animals
or are they really there? That they are not there in the sense in which we
think them there is probably certain. But that they are there in some sense, a
sense sufficient to permit us cautiously to reason from, seems an admissible
hypothesis. No doubt it takes much for granted,--partly, indeed, the very thing
to be proved. But discounting even the enormous limitations of the inquiry,
there is surely a residuum of general result to make it at least worth
making.
If we turn from emotional to intellectual
development, the parallelism though much mole faint is at least shadowed. Again
we find a list of intellectual products common to both Animal and Man, and
again an approximate order common to both. It is true, Man's development beyond
the highest point attained by any animal in the region of the intellect, is all
but infinite. Of rational judgment he has the whole monopoly. Wherever the
roots of Mind be, there is no uncertainty as to where, and where exclusively,
the higher branches are. Grant that the mental faculties of Man and Animal part
company at a point, there remains to consider the vast distance--in the case of
the emotions almost the whole distance--where they run parallel with one
another. Comparative psychology is not so advanced a science as comparative
embryology; yet no one who has felt the force of the recapitulation argument
for the evolution of bodily function, even making all allowances for the
differences of the things compared, will deny the weight of the corresponding
argument for the evolution of Mind. Why should the Mind thus recapitulate in
its development the psychic life of animals unless some vital link connected
them?
A singular complement to this argument has been
suggested recently--though as yet only in the form of the vaguest hint--from
the side of Mental Pathology. When the Mind is affected by certain diseases,
its progress downward can often be followed step by step. It does not tumble
down in a moment into chaos like a house of cards, but in a definite order,
stone by stone, or storey by storey. Now the striking thing about that order
is, that it is the probable order in which the building has gone up. The order
of descent, in short, is the inverse of the order of ascent. The first faculty
to go, in many cases of insanity, is the last faculty which arrived; the next
faculty is affected next; the whole spring uncoiling as it were in the order
and direction in which, presumably, it had been wound up. Sometimes even in the
phenomenon of old age the cycle may be clearly traced. "Just as consciousness
is slowly evolved out of vegetative life, so is it, through the infirmities of
old age, the gradual approach of death, and in advanced mental disease, again
resolved into it. The highest, most differentiated phenomena of consciousness
are the first to give way; impulse, instinct, and reflex movements become again
predominant. The phrase `to grow childish` expresses the resemblance between
the first stage and the stage of dissolution."[60]
That the highest part of man should totter first
is what, on the theory of mental evolution, one would already have expected.
The highest part is the latest added part, and the latest added part is the
least secured part. As the last arrival, it is not yet at home; it has not had
time to get lastingly embedded in the brain; the competition of older faculties
is against it; the hold of the will upon it is slight and fitful; its tenure as
a tenant is precarious and often threatened. Among the older and more permanent
residents, therefore, it has little chance. Hence if anything goes wrong, as
the last added, the most complex, the least automatic of all the functions, it
is the first to suffer.
We are but too familiar with cases where men of
lofty intellect and women of most pure mind, seized in the awful grasp of
madness, are transformed in a few brief months into beings worse than brutes.
How are we to account, on any other principle than this, for that most shocking
of all catastrophes the sudden and total break-up, the devolution, of a saint?
That the wise man should become a chattering idiot is inexplicable enough, but
that the saintly soul should riot in blasphemy and immorality so foul that not
among the lowest races is there anything to liken to it-- these are phenomena
so staggering that if Evolution hold any key to them at all, its suggestion
must come as at least a partial relief to the human mind. These are possibly
cases of actual reversion, cases where all the beautiful later buildings of
humanity had been swept away and only the elemental brute foundations left.
Devolution is thus assumed to be a co-relative of Evolution. And as the morbid
states of the Mind are more and more studied in this relation, it may yet be
possible from the phenomena of insanity to lay bare to some extent the outline
of intellectual ascent. In the present state both of psychology, and especially
of our knowledge of the brain, nothing probably could be more precarious than
this as an argument. The very statement involves modes of expression which
exact science would rule out of court. The best that can be said is that it is
a suggestion awaiting further light before it can even rank as a theory.
Complex as the source of knowledge is, the Mind itself must ever be the final
authority on its own biography. Analogy from lower nature may do much to
confirm the reading; the mental history of the human race, from the rudiments
of intellect in the savage to its development in civilized life, may contribute
some closing chapters; but unless the Mind tell its own story it will never be
fully told. Yet should it ever thus be told, the mystery of Mind itself would
remain the same. For the most this could do would be to replace one mystery by
a greater. For what greater mystery could there be than that within the mystery
of the Mind itself there should lie concealed the very key to unlock its
mystery?
To pass from this fascinating region to the
material contributions of Anthropology is a somewhat abrupt transition. But
this third line of approach to a knowledge of the earlier phases of Mind need
not detain us long.
So patient has been the search over almost the
whole world for relics of pre-historic Man, that vast collections are now
everywhere available where the arts, industries, weapons, and, by inference,
the mental development, of the earlier inhabitants of this planet can be
practically studied. On the two main points at issue in the discussion of
mental evolution these collections are unanimous. They reveal in the first
instance, traces of Mind of a very low order existing from an unknown
antiquity; and in the second place, they show a gradual improving of this Mind
as we approach the present day. It may be that in some cases the evidence
suggests a degenerating rather than an ascending civilization; but
perturbations of this sort do not affect the main question, nor neutralize the
other facts. Evolution is constantly confronted with statements as to the
former glory of now decadent nations, as if that were an argument against the
theory. Granting that nations have degenerated, it still remains to account for
that from which they degenerated. That Egypt has fallen from a great height is
certain; but the real problem is how it got to that height. When a boy's kite
descends in our garden, we do not assume that it came from the clouds. That it
went up before it came down is obvious, from all that we know of kite-making.
And that nations went up before they came down is obvious from all that we know
of nation-making. The gravitation, moreover, which brings down nations is just
as real as the gravitation which brings down kites; and instead of a falling
nation being a stumbling block to Evolution, it is a necessity of the theory.
The degeneration and extinction of the unfit are as infallibly brought about by
natural laws as the survival of the fit. Evolution is by no means synonymous
with uninterrupted progress, but at every turn means relapse, extinction, and
decay.
It is pretty clear that, applying the old
Argument from Design to the case of the most ancient human relics, Man began
the Ascent of Civilization at zero. There has been a time in the history of
every nation when the only supplements to the organs of the body for the uses
of Man were the stones of the field and the sticks of the forest. To use these
natural, abundant, and portable objects, was an obvious resource with early
tribes. If Mind dawned in the past at all, it is with such objects that we
should expect its first associations, and as a matter of fact it seems
everywhere to have been so. Relics of a Stick Age would of course be
obliterated by time, but traces of a Stone Age have been found, not in
connection with the first beginnings of a few tribes only, but with the first
beginnings--from the point that any representation is possible--of probably
every nation in the world. The wide geographical use of stone implements is one
of the most striking facts in Anthropology. Instead of being confined to a few
peoples, and to outlying districts, as is sometimes asserted, their
distribution is universal. They are found throughout the length and breadth of
Europe, and on all its islands; they occur everywhere in Western Asia, and
north of the Himalayas. In the Malay Peninsula they strew the ground in endless
numbers; and again, in Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides,
and the Coral Islands of the Pacific. Known in China, they are scattered
broadcast throughout Japan, and the same is true of America, Mexico, and Peru.
If a child playing with a toy spade is a proof that it is a child, a nation
working with stone axes is proved to be a child-nation. Erroneous conclusions
may easily be drawn, and indeed have been, from the fact of a nation using
stone, but the general law stands. Partly, perhaps, by mutual intercourse, this
use of stone became universal; but it arose, more likely, from the similarity
in primitive needs, and the available means of gratifying them. Living under
widely different conditions, and in every variety of climate, all early peoples
shared the instincts of humanity which first called in the use of tools and
weapons. All felt the same hunger; all had the instinct of self-preservation;
and the universality of these instincts and the commonness of stone led the
groping Mind to fasten upon it, and make it one of the first steps to the Arts.
A Stone Age, thus, was the natural beginning. In the nature of things there
could have been no earlier. If Mind really grew by infinitely gradual ascents,
the exact situation the theory requires is here provided in actual fact.
The next step from the Stone Age, so far as
further appeal to ancient implements can guide us is also exactly what one
would expect. It is to a better Stone Age. Two distinct grades of stone
implements are found, the rough and the smooth, or the unground and the ground.
For a long period the idea never seems to have dawned that a smooth stone made
a better axe than a rough one. Mind was as yet unequal to this small discovery,
and there are vast remains representing long intervals of time where all the
stone implements and tools are of the unground type. Even when the hour did
come, when savage vied with savage in putting the finest polish on his flints,
his inspiration probably came from Nature. The first lapidary was the sea; the
smoothed pebble on the beach, or the rounded stone of a mountain stream,
supplied the pattern. There is no question that the rough stone came earlier
than the ground stone. Thus the implements of the Drift Period, those of the
Danish Mounds, the Bone Caves, and the gravels of St. Acheul are mostly
unground, while those of the later Lake-Dwellers are almost wholly of the
smooth type.
To follow the Stone Age upward into the Bronze
Period, and from that to the Age of Iron, is not necessary for the present
purpose. For at this point the order of succession passes from shell-mound and
crannog, into living hands. There are nations with us still who have climbed so
short a distance up the psychic scale as to be still in the Age of
Stone--peoples whose mental culture and habits are often actual witnesses to
the mental states of early Man. These children of Nature take up the thread of
mental progress where the Troglodyte and Drift Man left it; and the modern
traveller, starting from the civilization of Europe can follow Mind downwards
step by step, in ever descending order, tracing its shadings backwards to a
first simplicity, till he finds himself with the still living Lake-dweller of
Nyasaland or the Bushman of the African forest. Time was when these humble
tribes, with their strange and artless ways, were mere food for the curious.
Now the study of the lower native races has risen to the first rank in
comparative psychology; and the student of beginnings, whether they be the
beginnings of Art or of Ethics, of Language or of Letters, of Law or of
Religion, goes to seek the roots of his science in the ways, traditions,
faiths, and institutions of savage life.
This leads us, however, to the fourth of the
sources from which we were to gather a hint or two with regard to the past of
Mind--the savage. No one should pronounce upon the Evolution of Mind till he
has seen a savage. By this is not meant the show savage of an Australian town,
or the quay Kaffir of a South African port, or the Reservation Indian of a
Western State; but the savage as he is in reality, and as he may be seen to-day
by any who care to look upon so weird a spectacle. No study from the life can
compare with this in interest or in pathos, nor stir so many strange emotions
in the mind of a thoughtful man. To sit with this incalculable creature in the
heart of the great forest; to live with him in his natural home as the guest of
Nature; to watch his ways and moods and try to resolve the ceaseless mystery of
his thoughts--this, whether the existing savage represents the primitive savage
or not, is to open one of the workshops of Creation and behold the
half-finished product from which humanity has been evolved.
The world is getting old, but the traveller who
cares to follow the daybreak of Mind for himself can almost do so still.
Selecting a region where the wand of western civilization has scarcely reached,
let him begin with a cruise in the Malay Archipelago or in the Coral Seas of
the Southern Pacific. He may find himself there even yet on spots on which no
white foot has ever trod, on islands where unknown races have worked out their
destiny for untold centuries, whose teeming peoples have no name, and whose
habits and mode of life are only known to the outer world through a ship's
telescope. As he coasts along, he will see the dusky figures steal like shades
among the trees, or hurry past in their bark canoes, or crouch in fear upon the
coral sand. He can watch them gather the bread-fruit from the tree and pull the
cocoa-nut from the palm and root out the taro for a meal which, all the year
round and all the centuries through, has never changed. In an hour or two he
can compass almost the whole round of their simple life, and realize the gulf
between himself and them in at least one way--in the utter impossibility of
framing to himself an image of the mental world of men and women whose only
world is this.
Let him pass on to the coast of Northern
Queensland, and, landing where fear of the white man makes landing possible,
penetrate the Australian bush. Though the settlements of the European have been
there for a generation, he will find the child of Nature still untouched, and
neither by intercourse nor imitation removed by one degree from the lowest
savage state. These aboriginal peoples know neither house nor home. They
neither sow nor reap. Their weapons are those of Nature, a pointed stick and a
knotted club. They live like wild things on roots and berries and birds and
wallabies, and in the monotony of their life and the uncouthness of their Mind
represent almost the lowest level of humanity.[61]
From these rudiments of mankind let him make his
way to the New Hebrides, to Tanna, and Santo, and Ambrym, and Aurora. These
islands, besides Man, contain only three things, coral, lava, and trees. Until
but yesterday their peoples had never seen anything but coral, lava, and trees.
They did not know that there was anything else in the world. One hundred years
ago Captain Cook discovered these islanders and gave them a few nails. They
planted them in the ground that they might grow into bigger nails. It is true
that in other lands a very rich life and a very wide world could be made out of
no more varied materials than coral, lava, and trees; but on these Tropical
Islands Nature is disastrously kind. All that her children need is provided for
them ready-made. Her sun shines on them so that they are never either cold or
hot; she provides crops for them in unexampled luxuriance, and arranges the
year to be one long harvest; she allows no wild animals to prowl among the
forests; and surrounding them with the alienating sea she preserves them from
the attacks of human enemies. Outside the struggle for life, they are out of
life itself. Treated as children, they remain children. To look at them now is
to recall the long holiday of the childhood of the world. It is to behold one's
natural face in a glass.
Pass on through the other Cannibal Islands and,
apart from the improvement of weapons and the construction of a hut, throughout
vast regions there is still no sign of mental progress. But before one has
completed the circuit of the Pacific the change begins to come. Gradually there
appear the beginnings of industry and even of art. In the Solomon Group and in
New Guinea, carving and painting may be seen in an early infancy. The canoes
are large and good, fish-hooks are manufactured, and weaving of a rude kind has
been established. There can be no question at this stage that the Mind of Man
has begun its upward path. And what now begins to impress one is not the
poverty of the early Mind, but the enormous potentialities that lie within it,
and the exceeding swiftness of its Ascent towards higher things. When the
Sandwich Islands are reached, the contrast appears in its full significance.
Here, a century ago, Captain Cook, through whom the first knowledge of their
existence reached the outer world, was killed and eaten. To-day the children of
his murderers have taken their place among the civilized nations of the world,
and their Kings and Queens demand acknowledgment at modern Courts.
Books have been given to the world on the Mind of
animals. It is strange that so little should have been written specifically on
the Mind of the savage. But though this living mine has not yet been drawn upon
for its last contribution to science, facts to suggest and sustain a theory of
mental evolution are everywhere abundant. Waiving individual cases where
nations have fallen from a higher intellectual level the proof indicates a
rising potentiality and widening of range as we pass from primitive to
civilized states. It is open to debate whether during the historic period mere
intellectual advance has been considerable, whether more penetrating or
commanding intellects have ever appeared than those of Job, Isaiah, Plato,
Shakespeare. But that is matter of yesterday. What concerns us now to note is
that the Mind of Man as a whole has had a slow and gradual dawn: that it has
existed, and exists to-day, among certain tribes at almost the lowest point of
development with which the word human can be associated; and that from that
point an Ascent of Mind can be traced from tribe to nation in an ever
increasing complexity and through infinitely delicate shades of improvement,
till the highest civilized states are reached. In the very nature of things we
should have expected such a result. For this is not only a question of faculty.
In a far more intimate sense than we are apt to imagine, it is a question of a
gradually evolving environment. Every infinitesimal enrichment of the soil for
Mind to grow in meant an infinitesimal enrichment of the Mind itself. "It needs
but to ask what would happen to ourselves were the whole mass of existing
knowledge obliterated, and were children with nothing beyond their
nursery-language left to grow up without guidance or instruction from adults,
to perceive that even now the higher intellectual faculties would be almost
inoperative, from lack of the materials and aids accumulated by past
civilization. And seeing this, we cannot fail to see that development of the
higher intellectual faculties has gone on pari passu with social advance
alike as cause and consequence; that the primitive man could not evolve these
higher intellectual faculties in the absence of a fit environment; and that in
this, as in other respects, his progress was retarded by the absence of
capacities which only progress could bring."[62]
The last testimony is that of Language. It has
already been pleaded in excuse for the absence of actual proof for mental
evolution that Mind leaves no material footprints by which the palaeontologist
can trace its upward path. Yet this is not wholly true. The flints and
arrow-heads, the celts and hammers, of early Man are fossil intelligence; the
remains of primitive arts and industries are petrified Mind. But there is one
mould into which Mind has run more large and beautiful than any of these. When
its contents are examined they carry us back not only to what men worked at
with their hands, but to what they said to one another as they worked and what
they thought as they spoke. That mould is Language. Language, says Jean Paul,
is "ein Worterbuch erblasster Metaphern"-- a dictionary of faded metaphors. But
it is much more. A word is a counter of the brain, a tangible expression of a
mental state, an heirloom of the wealth of culture of a race. And an old word,
like an ancient coin, speaks to us of a former currency of thought, and by its
image and superscription reveals the mental life and aspiration of those who
minted it. "Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle
thoughts have been safely embalmed and preserved. It is the embodiment, the
incarnation, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea
often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have
attained to and won. It stands like the Pillars of Hercules, to mark how far
the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like
those pillars, fixed and immovable, but even itself advancing with the progress
of these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular
mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the single kinglier
spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things have oftentimes
gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched
upon the world, and with which they have enriched it for ever--making in the
new word a new region of thought to be henceforward in some sort the common
heritage of all."[63]
What then, when we open this marvellous
structure, is the revelation yielded us of the mental states of those who lived
at the dawn of speech? An impression of poverty, great and pathetic. All
fossils teach the same lesson--the lesson of life, beauty, structure, waning
into a poverty-stricken past. Whether they be the shells which living creatures
once inhabited, or the bones of departed vertebrate types, or the forms of
words where wisdom lay entombed, the structures became simpler and simpler,
cruder and cruder, less full of the richness and abundance of life as we near
the birth of time. They tell of days when the world was very young, when plants
were flowerless and animals backboneless, of later years when primeval Man
prowled the forest and chipped his flints and chattered in uncouth syllables of
battle and the chase. No words entered at that time into human speech except
those relating to the activities, few and monotonous, of an almost animal lot.
These were the days of the protoplasm of speech. There was no differentiation
between verbs or adverbs, nouns or adjectives. The sentence as yet was not;
each word was a sentence. There was no grammatical inflection but the
inflection of the voice; the moods of the verb were uttered by intonation or
grimace. The pronouns "him" and "you" were made by pointing at him and you. Man
had even no word for himself, for he had not yet discovered himself. This fact,
when duly considered, raises the witness of Language to the Ascent of Mind to
an almost unique importance. Nothing more significant could be said as to Man's
mental past than that there was a time when he was scarcely conscious of
himself, as a self. He knew himself, not as subject, but like a little child,
as one of the objects of the external world. The words might have been written
historically of mankind, "When I was a child, I spake as a child."
This evidence will meet us again in other forms
when we pass to consider the Evolution of Language itself. Meantime let us
close this chapter by pointing out a relation of a much more significant order
between Language and the whole subject of Mental Evolution. For the point is
not only of special interest, but it touches upon, and helps to solve, one of
the vital problems of the Ascent of Man.
The enormous distance travelled by the Mind of
Man beyond the utmost limit of intelligence reached by any animal is a puzzling
circumstance, a circumstance only equalled in strangeness by another-- the
suddenness with which that rise took place. Both facts are without a parallel
in nature. Why, of the countless thousands of species of animals, each with
some shadowy rudiment of a Mind, all should have remained comparatively at the
same dead level, while Man alone shot past and developed powers of a quality
and with a speed unknown in the world's history, is a question which it is
impossible not to raise. That by far the greatest step in the world's history
should not only have been taken at the eleventh hour, but that it took only an
hour to do it--for compared with the time when animals began their first
activities, the birth of Man is a thing of yesterday--seems almost the denial
of Evolution. What was it in Man's case that gave his mental powers their
unprecedented start or facilitated a growth so rapid and so vast?
The factors in all Evolution, and above all in
this, are too subtle to encourage one to speculate with final assurance on so
fine a problem. Nevertheless, when it is asked, What brought about this sudden
rise of intelligence in the case of Man? there is a wonderful unanimity among
men of science as to the answer. It came about, it is supposed, in connection
with the acquisition by Man of the power to express his mind, that is to
speak. Evolution, up to this time, had only one way of banking the gains
it won--heredity. To hand on any improvement physically was a slow and
precarious work. But with the discovery of language there arose a new method of
passing on a step in progress. Instead of sowing the gain on the wind of
heredity, it was fastened on the wings of words. The way to make money is not
only to accumulate small gains steadily, but to put them out at a good rate of
interest. Animals did the first with their mental acquisitions: Man did the
second. At a comparatively early date, he found out a first-rate and permanent
investment for his money, so that he could not only keep his savings and put
them out at the highest rate of interest, but have a share in all the gain that
was made by other men. That discovery was Language. Many animals had hit upon
an imperfect form of this discovery; but Man alone succeeded in improving it up
to a really paying point. The condition of all growth is exercise, and till he
could find a further field and a larger opportunity to work what little brains
he had, he had little chance of getting more. Speech gave him this opportunity.
He rapidly ran up a fortune in brain-matter, because he had found out new uses
for it, new exercises of it, and especially a permanent investment for
husbanding in the race each gain as it was made in the individual. When he did
anything he could now say it; when he learned anything he could pass it
on; when he became wise wisdom did not die with him, it was banked in the Mind
of humanity. So one man lent his mind to another. The loans became larger and
larger, the interest greater and greater; Man's fortune was secured. In the
mere Struggle for Life, his wits were sharpened up to a point; but unless he
had learned to talk, he could never have passed very far beyond the animal.
Apart from the saving of time and the facility
for increased knowledge, the acquisition of speech meant a saving of brain. A
word is a counter for a thought. To use language is to make thinking easy.
Hence the release of brain energy for further developments in new directions.
In these and other ways speech became the main factor in the intellectual
development of mankind. Language formed the trellis on which Mind climbed
upward, which continuously sustained the ripening fruits of knowledge for later
minds to pluck. Before the savage's son was ten years old he knew all that his
father knew. The ways of the game, the habits of birds and fish, the
construction of traps and snares--all these would be taught him. The physical
world, the changes of season, the location of hostile tribes, the strategies of
war, all the details and interests of savage life would be explained. And
before the boy was in his teens he was equipped for the Struggle for Life as
his forefathers had never been even in old age. The son, in short, started to
evolve where his father left off. Try to realize what it would be for each of
us to begin life afresh, to be able to learn nothing by the experiences of
others, to live in a dumb and illiterate world, and see what chance the animal
had of making pronounced progress until the acquisition of speech. It is not
too much to say that speech, if mental evolution is to come to anything or is
to be worth anything, is a necessary condition. By it alone, in any degree
worth naming, can the fruits of observation and experience of one generation be
husbanded to form a new starting point for a second, nor without it could there
be any concerted action or social life. The greatness of the human Mind, after
all, is due to the tongue, the material instrument of reason, and to Language,
the outward expression of the inner life.
THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
IF Evolution is the method of Creation, the
faculty of Speech was no sudden gift. Man's mind is not to be thought of as the
cylinder of a phonograph to which ready-made words were spoken and stored up
for future use. Before Homo sapiens was evolved he must necessarily have
been preceded for a longer or shorter period by Homo alalus, the
not-speaking man; and this man had to make his words, and beginning with dumb
signs and inarticulate cries to build up a body of Language word by word as the
body was built up cell by cell.
The alternative theory of the origin of Language
universally held until lately, and expressed in so many words even by the
eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that "our first parents
received it by immediate inspiration," has the same relation to exact science
as the view that the world was made in six days by direct creative fiat. Both
are poetically true. But to science, seeking for precise methods of operation,
neither is an adequate statement of now ascertained facts. The same processes
of research that made the poetic view of creation untenable in the physical
realm are now slowly beginning to displace the older view of the origin of
speech. That Language should be outside a law whose universality is being
established with every step of progress is itself improbable; and now that the
field is being exhaustively explored, the proofs that it is no exception
multiply on every side. The living interest the mere suggestion gives to the
study of Language is obvious. Evolution enters no region--dull, neglected, or
remote--of the temple of knowledge without transforming it. Philology, since
this wizard touched it, has become one of the most entrancing of the sciences.
And Language, from a study which interested only a few specialists, is
disclosed as one vast palimpsest, every word and phrase luminous with the inner
mind and soul of the past. To penetrate far into this tempting region is beyond
our province now. The immediate object is to give a simple sketch of the
possible conditions which first led Man to speak; of the principles which
apparently guided the formation of his early vocabulary; and of the gradual
refining of the means of intercommunication between him and his fellow-men as
time passed on. Instead of beginning with words, therefore, we shall begin with
Man. For the first condition for understanding the Evolution of Speech is that
we take it up as a study from the life, that we place ourselves in the primeval
forest with early Man, in touch with the actual scenes in which he lived, and
note the real experiences and necessities of such a lot. We may indeed discover
in this research small trace of a miraculous inbreathing of formal words. But
to make Speech and fit it into a man, after all is said, is less miraculous
than to fit a man to make Speech.
One of the earliest devices hit upon in the
course of Evolution was the principle of co-operation. Long before men had
learned to form themselves into tribes and clans for mutual strength and
service, gregariousness was an established institution. The deer had formed
themselves into herds, and the monkeys into troops; the birds were in flocks,
and the wolves in packs; the bees in hives, and the ants in colonies. And so
abundant and dominant in every part of the world are these social types to-day
that we may be sure the gregarious state has exceptional advantages in the
upward struggle.
One of these advantages, obviously, is the mere
physical strength of numbers. But there is another and a much more important
one--the mental strength of a combination. Here is a herd of deer, scattered,
as they love to be, in a string, quarter of a mile long. Every animal in the
herd not only shares the physical strength of all the rest, but their powers of
observation. Its foresight in presence of possible danger is the foresight of
the herd. It has as many eyes as the herd, as many ears, as many organs of
smell, its nervous system extends throughout the whole space covered by the
line; its environment, in short, is not only what it hears, sees, smells,
touches, tastes, but what every single member hears, sees, smells, touches,
tastes. This means an enormous advantage in the Struggle for Life. What deer
have to arm themselves most against is surprise. When it comes to an actual
fight, comrades are of little use. At that crisis the others run away and leave
the victims to their fate. But in helping one another to avert that crisis, the
value of this mutual aid is so great that gregarious animals, for the most part
timid and defenceless as individuals, have survived to occupy in untold
multitudes the highest places in Nature.
The success of the co-operative principle,
however, depends upon one condition: the members of the herd must be able to
communicate with one another. It matters not how acute the senses of each
animal may be, the strength of the column depends on the power to transmit from
one to another what impressions each may receive at any moment from without.
Without this power the sociality of the herd is stultified; the army, having no
signalling department, is powerless as an army. But if any member of the herd
is able by motion of head or foot or neck or ear, by any sign or by any sound,
to pass on the news that there is danger near, each instantly enters into
possession of the faculties of the whole. Each has a hundred eyes, noses, ears.
Each has quarter of a mile of nerves. Thus numbers are strength only when
strength is coupled with some power of inter-communication by signs. If one
herd develops this signalling system and another does not, its chances of
survival will be greater. The less equipped herds will be slowly decimated and
driven to the wall; and those which survive to propagate their kind will be
those whose signal-service is most efficient and complete. Hence the Evolution
of the signal-system. Under the influence of Natural Selection its progress was
inevitable. New circumstances and relations would in time arise, calling for
additions, vocal, visible, audible, to the sign-vocabulary. And as time went on
each set of animals would acquire a definite signal-service of its own,
elementary to the last degree, yet covering the range of its ordinary
experiences and adequate to the expression of its limited mental states.
Now what interests us with regard to these signs
is that they are Language. The evolution we have been tracing is nothing
less than the first stage in the evolution of Speech. Any means by which
information is conveyed from one mind to another is Language. And Language
existed on the earth from the day that animals began to live together. The mere
fact that animals cling to one another, live together, move about together,
proves that they communicate. Among the ants, perhaps the most social of the
lower animals, this power is so perfect that they are not merely endowed with a
few general signs but seem able to convey information upon matters of detail.
Sweeping across country in great armies they keep up communication throughout
the whole line, and succeed in conveying to one another information as to the
easiest routes, the presence of enemies or obstacles, the proximity of food
supplies, and even of the numbers required on emergencies to leave the main
band for any special service. Everyone has observed ants stop when they meet
one another and exchange a rapid greeting by means of their waving antennae,
and it is possibly through these perplexing organs that definite intercourse
between one creature and another first entered the world. The exact nature of
the antenna-language is not yet fathomed, but the perfection to which it is
carried proves that the idea of language generally has existed in nature from
the earliest time. Among higher animals various outward expressions of emotions
are made, and these become of service in time for the conveyance of information
to others. The howl of the dog, the neigh of the horse, the bleat of the lamb,
the stamp of the goat, and other signs are all readily understood by other
animals. One monkey utters at least six different sounds to express its
feelings; and Mr. Darwin has detected four or five modulations in the bark of
the dog: "the bark of eagerness, as in the chase; that of anger as well as
growling; the yelp or howl of despair when shut up; the baying at night; the
bark of joy when starting on a walk with his master; and the very distinct one
of demand or supplication, as when wishing for a door or window to be
opened."[64]
Now these signs are as much language as spoken
words. You have only to evolve this to get all the language the
dictionary-maker requires. Any method of communication, as already said, is
Language, and to understand Language we must fix in our minds- the idea that it
has no necessary connection with actual words. In the simple instances just
given there are illustrations of at least three kinds of Language. When a deer
throws up its head suddenly, all the other deer throw up their heads. That is a
sign. It means "listen." If the first deer sees the object, which has called
its attention, to be suspicious, it utters a low note. That is a word. It means
"caution." If next it sees the object to be not only suspicious but dangerous
it makes a further use of Language--intonation. Instead of the low note
"listen," it utters a sharp loud cry that means "Run for your life." Hence
these three kinds of Language--a sign or gesture, a note or word, an
intonation.
Down to this present hour these are still the
three great kinds of Language. The movement of foot or ear have been evolved
into the modern gesture or grimace; the note or cry into a word, and the
intonation into an emphasis or inflexion of the voice. These are still, indeed,
not only the main elements in Language but the only elements. The eloquence
which enthrals the legislators of St Stephen's, or the appeal which melts the
worshippers at St. Paul's, originated in the voices of the forest and the
activities of the ant-hill. To those who have not realized the exceeding
smallness of the beginnings of all new developments, the suggestion of science
as to the origin of Language, like many of its other suggestions about early
stages, will seem almost ludicrous. But a knowledge of two things warns one not
to look for surprises at the beginning of Evolution but at the end. In the
first place, it is all but a cardinal principle that developments are brought
about by minute, slow and insensible degrees. The second fact is even more
important. The theatre of change is the actual world, and the exciting cause
something really happening in every-day life. Few departures are not made in
the air. They arise in connection with some commonplace event; and usually take
the shape of some slightly new response. In other connections, of course, the
converse is also true, but when a change occurs for the first time in the life
of an organism the exciting cause, whatever the internal adaptation, or want of
it, is some change in the environment. Among the events then, actually
happening in the day's round, we are to seek for the exciting cause of the
earliest forms of speech.
The simplest Language open to Man was that which
we have already seen to mark the beginning of all Language, the Language of
gesture or sign. To the word gesture, however, it is necessary to attach a
larger meaning than the term ordinarily expresses to us. It is not to be
limited, for example, to visible movements of the limbs or facial muscles. The
ejaculations of the savage, the drumming of the gorilla, the screech of the
parrot, the crying, growling, purring, hissing, and spitting of other animals
are all forms of gesture. Nor is it possible to separate the Language of
gesture from the Language of intonation. These have grown up side by side and
can neither be distinguished psychologically nor as to priority in the order of
Evolution. Intonation, though it has grown to be infinitely the more delicate
instrument of the two and is still so important a part of some Languages --the
Chinese, for example--as to be an integral part of them, has its roots in the
same soil and must be looked upon as, along with it, the earliest form of
Language.
That this Gesture-Language marked, if not the
dawn, at least a very early stage of Language in the case of Man, there is
abundant evidence. Apart from analogy, there are at least three witnesses who
may be cited in proof not only of the fact, but of the high perfection to which
a Gesture-Language may be carried. The first of these witnesses is the homo
alalus, the not-speaking man, of to-day, the deaf-mute. As an actual case
of a human being reduced as regards the power of speech to the level of early
Man his evidence, even with all allowances for the high development of his
mental faculties, is of scientific value. The mere fact that a deaf man is also
a dumb man is almost a final answer to the affirmation that the power of speech
is an original and intuitive faculty of Man. If it were so, there is no reason
why a deaf man should not speak. The vocal apparatus in his case is complete;
all that is required to make him utter a definite sound is to hear one. When he
hears one, but not till then, he can imitate it. Language, so far as the
testimony of the deaf-mute goes, is clearly a matter of imitation. Unable to
attain the second stage of Language--words--he has to content himself with the
first--signs. And this Language he has evolved to its last perfection. It shows
how little the mere utterance of words has to do with Language, that the
deaf-mute is able to converse on every-day subjects almost as perfectly as
those who can speak. The permutations and combinations that can be produced
with ten pliable fingers, or with the varying expressions of the muscles of the
face, are endless, and everything that he cares to know can be uttered or
translated to him by motion, gesture, and grimace. To give an idea how far
gestures can be made to do the work of spoken words, the signs may be described
in which a deaf-and-dumb man once told a child's story in presence of Mr.
Tylor. "He began by moving his hand, palm down, about a yard from the ground,
as we do to show the height of a child-- this meant that it was a child he was
thinking of. Then he tied an imaginary pair of bonnet-strings under his chin
(his usual sign for female), to make it understood that the child was a little
girl. The child's mother was then brought on the scene in a similar way. She
beckons to the child and gives her twopence, these being indicated by
pretending to drop two coins from one hand into the other; if there had been
any doubt as to whether they were copper or silver coins, this would have been
settled by pointing to something brown or even by one's contemptuous way of
handling coppers which at once distinguishes them from silver. The mother also
gives the child a jar, shown by sketching its shape with the forefingers in the
air, and going through the act of handing it over. Then by imitating the
unmistakable kind of twist with which one turns a treacle-spoon, it is made
known that it is treacle the child has to buy. Next, a wave of the hand shows
the child being sent off on her errand, the usual sign of walking being added,
which is made by two fingers walking on the table. The turning of an imaginary
door-handle now takes us into the shop, when the counter is shown by passing
the flat hands as it were over it. Behind this counter a figure is pointed out;
he is shown to be a man by the usual sign of putting one's hand to one's chin
and drawing it down where the beard is or would be; then the sign of tying an
apron around one's waist adds the information that the man is the shopman. To
him the child gives her jar, dropping the money into his hand, and moving her
forefinger as if taking up treacle to show what she wants. Then we see the jar
put into an imaginary pair of scales which go up and down; the great
treacle-jar is brought from the shelf and the little one filled, with the
proper twist to take up the last trickling thread; the grocer puts the two
coins in the till, and the little girl sets off with the jar. The deaf-and-dumb
story-teller went on to show in pantomime how the child, looking down at the
jar, saw a drop of treacle on the rim, wiped it off with her finger, and put
the finger in her mouth, how she was tempted to take more, how her mother found
her out by the spot of treacle on her pinafore, and so forth."[65]
A second witness is savage Man. Some of the more
primitive races, far as they have evolved past the alalus stage, still
cling to the gesture-language which bulked so largely in the intercourse of
their ancestors. No one who has witnessed a conversation--one says "witnessed,"
for it is more seeing than hearing--between two different tribes of Indians can
have any doubt of the working efficiency of this method of speech. After ten
minutes of almost pure pantomime each will have told the other everything that
it is needful to say. Indians of different tribes, indeed, are able to
communicate most perfectly on all ordinary subjects with no more use of the
voice than that required for the emission of a few different kinds of grunts.
The fact that stranger tribes make so large a use of gesture in expressing
themselves to one another does not, of course, imply that each has not a
word-language of its own. But few of the Languages of primitive peoples are
complete without the additions which gesture offers. There are gaps in the
vocabulary of almost all savage tribes due to the fact that in actual speech
the lacunae are bridged by signs, and many of their words belong more to
the category of signs than to that of words.
The final witness is the first attempt at
Language of a little child. Universally an infant opens communication with the
mental world around it in the primitive language of gesture and tone. Long
before it has learned to speak, without the use of a single word it conveys
information as to fundamental wants, and expresses all its varying moods and
wishes with a vehemence and point which are almost the envy of riper years. The
interesting thing about this is that it is spontaneous. In later childhood it
has to be taught to speak--because speech is a fine art--but to utter
the hereditary and primitive Language of mankind requires no prompting. Words
are conventional, movements and sounds are natural. The Language of the nursery
is the native Language of the forest, the inarticulate cry of the animal, the
intonation of the savage. To quote from Mallery:--"The wishes and emotions of
very young children are conveyed in a small number of sounds, but in a great
variety of gestures and facial expressions. A child's gestures are intelligent
long in advance of speech; although very early and persistent attempts are made
to give it instruction in the latter but none in the former, from the time when
it begins risu cognoscere matrem. It learns words only as they are
taught, and learns them through the medium of signs which are not expressly
taught. Long after familiarity with speech it consults the gestures and facial
expressions of its parents and nurses, as if seeking them to translate or
explain their words. These facts are important in reference to the biologic law
that the order of development of the individual is the same as that of the
species. . . . The insane understand and obey gestures when they have
no knowledge whatever of words. It is also found that semi-idiotic children who
cannot be taught more than the merest rudiment of speech can receive a
considerable amount of information through signs, and can express themselves by
them. Sufferers from aphasia continue to use appropriate gestures. A stammerer,
too, works his arms and features as if determined to get his thoughts out, in a
manner not only suggestive of the physical struggle, but of the use of gesture
as a hereditary expedient."[66]
The survival both of gesture and intonation in
modern adult speech, and especially the unconsciousness of their use,
illustrate how indelibly these primitive forms of Language are embedded in the
human race. There are doubtless exceptions, but it is probably the rule that
gestures are mainly called in to supplement expression when the subject-matter
of discourse does not belong to the highest ranges of thought, or the speaker
to the loftiest type of oratory. The higher levels of thought were reached when
the purer forms of spoken Language had become the vehicle of expression; and,
as has often been noticed, when a speaker soars into a very lofty region, or
allows his mind to grapple intensely and absorbingly with an exalted theme, he
becomes more and more motionless, and only resumes the gesture-language when he
descends to commoner levels. It is not only that a fine speaker has a greater
command of words and is able to dispense with auxiliaries --as a master of
style can dispense with the use of italics--but that, at all events, in the
case of abstract thought, it is untranslatable into gesture-speech. Gestures
are suggestions and reminders of things seen and heard. They are nearly all
attached to objects or to moods, and rival words only when used of every-day
things. "No sign talker," Mr. Romanes reminds us, "with any amount of time at
his disposal, could translate into the language of gesture a page of Kant."[67]
The next stage in the Evolution of Language must
have been reached as naturally as the Language of gesture and tone. From the
gesture-language to mixtures of signs and sounds, and finally to the
specialization of sound into words, is a necessary transition. Apart from the
fact that gestures and tones have limits, circumstances must often have arisen
in the life of early Man when gesture was impossible. A sign Language is of no
use when one savage is at one end of a wood and his wife at the other. He must
now roar; and to make his roar explicit, he must have a vocabulary of roars,
and of all shades of roars. In the darkness of night also, his signs are
useless, and he must now whisper and have a vocabulary of whispers. Nor is it
difficult to conceive where he got his first brief list of words. Instead of
drawing things in the air with his finger, he would now try to imitate their
sounds. Everything around him that conveyed any impression of sound would have
associated with it some self-expressive word, which all familiar with the
original sound could instantly recognize. Imagine, for instance, a herd of
buffalo browsing in a glade of the African forest. The vanguard, some little
distance from its neighbours, hears the low growl of a lion. That growl, of
course, is Language, and the buffalo understands it as well as we do when the
word "lion" is pronounced. Between the word "lion" spoken, and the object lion
growled, there is no difference in the effect. Suppose, next, the buffalo
wished to convey to its comrades the knowledge that a lion was near, a lion and
not some other animal, it might imitate this growl. It is not likely that it
would do so; some other sign expressing alarm in general would probably be
used, for the discrimination of the different sources of danger is probably an
achievement beyond this animal's power. But if Primitive Man was placed under
the same circumstances, granting that he had begun in a feeble way to exercise
mind, he would almost certainly come in time to denote a lion by an imitated
growl, a wolf by an imitated whine, and so on. The sighing of the wind, the
flowing of the stream, the beat of the surf, the note of the bird, the chirp of
the grasshopper, the hiss of the snake, would each be used to express these
things. And gradually a Language would be built up which included all the
things in the environment with which sound was either directly, indirectly, or
accidentally associated.
That this method of word-making is natural is
seen in the facility with which it is still used by children; and from the
early age at which they begin to employ it, the sound Language is clearly one
of the very first forms of speech. All a child's words are of course gathered
through the sense of hearing, but if it can itself pick up a word direct from
the object, it will use it long before it elects to repeat the conventional
name taught it by its nurse. The child who says moo for cow, or
bow-wow for dog, or tick-tick for watch, or puff-puff for
train, is an authority on the origin of human speech. Its father, when he talks
of the hum of machinery or the boom of the cannon, when he calls
champagne fizz or a less aristocratic beverage pop, is following
in the wake of the inventors of Language. Among savage peoples, and especially
those encountering the first rush of new things and thoughts brought them by
the advancing wave of civilization, word-making is still going on; and wherever
possible the favourite principle seems to be that of sound.[68]
How full all Languages are of these sound-words
is known to the philologist, though multitudes of words in every Language have
had their pedigree effaced or obscured by time. "An Englishman would hardly
guess from the present pronunciation and meaning of the word pipe what its
origin was; yet when he compares it with the Low Latin pipa, French pipe,
pronounced more like our word peep, to chirp, and meaning such a reed-pipe as
shepherds played on, he then sees how cleverly the very sound of the musical
pipe has been made into a word for all kinds of tubes, such as tobacco-pipes
and water-pipes. Words like this travel like Indians on the war-path, wiping
out their footmarks as they go. For all we know multitudes of our ordinary
words may have thus been made from real sounds, but have now lost beyond
recovery the traces of their first expressiveness."[69] In the Chinuk language of the West Coast of America, to
cite a few more of Tylor's instances, a tavern is called a
"heehee-house," that is a laughter house, or an amusement house, the
word for amusement being taken by an obvious association from the laughter
which it excites. How indirect a derivation may be is illustrated by the word
which the Basutos of South Africa use for courtier. The buzz of a
certain fly resembles the sound ntsi-ntsi, and they apply this word to
those who buzz round the chief as a fly buzzes round a piece of meat. As
everyone knows "papa" for father, is evolved into papa the pope, and "abba" the
Hebrew for father into abbot. For plurals, a doubling of the word is often
used, but no doubt at first quantity was expressed by gestures or by numbering
on the fingers. "Orang" is the Malay for Man, "Orang-orang" for men, while
"Orangutan" is wild man. Verbs are formed on the same principle as nouns. In
the Tecuna language of Brazil the verb to sneeze is haitschu, while the
Welsh for a sneeze is tis. Other verbs which came to have large and
comprehensive meanings arose out of the simple activities and occupations of
primitive life. Thus the first verb in the Bible, the Hebrew "bara" now meaning
create, was originally used for cutting or hewing, the first step in making
things. In the Borneo language of Africa, the verb "to make" comes from the
word tando, to weave. In English, "to suffer" meant to bear as a burden,
and to "apprehend an idea" was originally to "catch hold" of some "sight." Even
Max Muller, who opposes the onomatopoetic theory with regard to the origin of
most words, agrees that the sounds of the occupation of men, and especially of
men working together, and making special sounds at their task--such as
builders, soldiers, and sailors--are widely represented in modern speech.
Though mimicry, sometimes exact, but probably
more often a mere echo or suggestion of the sound to be recalled, is
responsible for some of the material of Language, multitudes of words appear to
have no such origin. There are infinitely more words than sounds in the world;
and even things which have very distinct sounds have been named without any
regard to them. The inventors of the word watch, for instance, did not call it
tick-tick but watch, the idea being taken from the
watchman who walked about at night and kept the time; and when the
steam-engine appeared, instead of taking the obvious sound-name
puff-puff, it was called engine (Lat. ingenium), to signify that
it was a work of genius. These modern words, however, are the coinages
of an intellectual age, and it was to be expected that the inventors should
look deeper below the surface. How those words which have no apparent
association with sound were formed in early times remains a mystery. With some
the original sound-association has probably been lost; in the case of others,
the association may have been so indirect as to be now untraceable. The sounds
available in savage life for word-making could never have been so numerous as
the things requiring names, and as civilization advanced the old words would be
used in new connections, while wholly new terms must have been coined from time
to time. Both these methods--the habit of generalizing unconsciously from
single terms, and the trick of coining new words in a wholly conventional
way--are still continually employed by savages as well as by children. Thus, to
take an example of the first, Mr. John Moir, one of the earliest white men to
settle in East Central Africa, was at once named by the natives Mandala,
which means "a reflection in still water," because he wore on his eyes what
looked to them a still water (spectacles). Afterwards they came to call
not only Mr. Moir by that name, but spectacles, and finally--when it entered
the country--glass itself. Examples of generalization among children abound in
every nursery. A child is taken to the window by his nurse to see the moon. The
easy monosyllable is caught up at once, and for some time the child applies it
indiscriminately to anything bright or shining--the gas, the candle, the
firelight are each "the moon." Mr. Romanes records a case where a child made a
similar use of the word star--the gas, the candle, the firelight were each "a
star." If the makers of Language proceeded on this principle, no wonder the
philologist has riddles to read. How often must the savage children of the
world have started off naming things from two such different points? Mr.
Romanes mentions a still more elaborate example which was furnished him by Mr.
Darwin: "The child, who was just beginning to speak, called a duck `quack,'
and, by special association, it also called water `quack.' By an appreciation
of the resemblance of qualities, it next extended the term `quack' to denote
all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on the other.
Lastly, by a still more delicate appreciation of resemblance, the child
eventually called all coins `quack,' because on the back of a French sou it had
once seen the representation of an eagle. Hence, to the child, the sign
`quack,' from having originally had a very specialized meaning, became more and
more extended in its significance, until it now seems to designate such
apparently-different objects as `fly,' `wine,' and `coin.' "[70]
The instructiveness of this, in showing the
reason why philology is often so helplessly at a loss in tracking far-strayed
words to their original sense, is plain. In the nature of the case, the
onomatopoetic theory can never be proved in more than a fraction of cases. So
cunning is the mind in associating ideas, so swift in making new departures,
that the clue to multitudes of words must be obliterated by time, even if the
first forms and spellings of the words themselves remain in their original
integrity --which rarely happens--to offer a feasible point to start the search
from.
But it is far from necessary to assume that all
words should have had a rational ancestry. On the contrary many words are
probably deliberate artificial inventions. When not only every human being, but
every savage and every child has the ability as well as the right to call
anything it likes by any name it chooses, it is vain in every case to seek for
any general principle underlying the often arbitrary conjunctions of letters
and sounds which we call words. Words cannot all at least be treated with the
same scientific regard as we would treat organic forms. When dissected, in the
nature of the case, they cannot be expected to reveal specific structure such
as one finds in a fern or a cray-fish. A fern or a cray-fish is the expression
of an infinitely subtle and intricate adaptation, while a word may be a mere
caprice. Perhaps, indeed, the greatest marvel about philology is that there
should be a philology at all--that Languages should be so rich in association,
so pregnant with the history and poetry of the past. Into the problem,
therefore, of how the infinite variety of words in a Language was acquired it
is unnecessary to enter at length. Once the idea had dawned of expressing
meaning by sounds, the formation of words and even of Languages is a mere
detail. We have probably all invented words. Almost every family of children
invents words of its own, and cases are known where quite considerable
Languages have been manufactured in the nursery. When boys play at brigands and
pirates they invent pass-words and names, and from mere love of secrets and
mysteries concoct vocabularies which no one can understand but themselves.
This simple fact indeed has been used with great
plausibility to account for differences in dialect among different tribes, and
even for the partial origin of new Languages. Thus the structure of the Indian
languages has long puzzled philologists. Whitney informs us that as regards the
material of expression, there is "irreconcilable diversity" among them. "There
are a very considerable number of groups between whose significant signs exist
no more apparent correspondences than between those of English, Hungarian, and
Malay; none namely which may not be merely fortuitous." To account for these
dialects a suggestion, as interesting as it is ingenious, has been advanced by
Dr. Hale. Imagine the case of a family of Red Indians, father, mother, and half
a dozen children, in the vicissitudes of war, cut off from their tribe. Suppose
the father to be scalped and the mother soon to die. The little ones left to
themselves in some lonely valley, living upon roots and herbs, would converse
for a time by using the few score words they had heard from their parents. But
as they grew up they would require new words and would therefore coin them. As
they became a tribe they would require more words, and so in time a Language
might arise, all the words expressive of the simpler relations--father, mother,
tent, fire--being common to other Indian Languages, but all the later words
purely arbitrary and necessarily a standing puzzle to philology. The curious
thing is that this theory is borne out by some most interesting geographical
facts. "If, under such circumstances, disease, or the casualties of a hunter's
life should carry off the parents, the survival of the children would, it is
evident, depend mainly upon the nature of the climate and the ease with which
food could be procured at all seasons of the year. In ancient Europe, after the
present climatal conditions were established, it is doubtful if a family of
children under ten years of age could have lived through a single winter. We
are not, therefore, surprised to find that no more than four or five linguistic
stocks are represented in Europe. Of North America, east of the Rocky Mountains
and north of the tropics, the same may be said. The climate and the scarcity of
food in winter forbid us to suppose that a brood of orphan children could have
survived, except possibly, by a fortunate chance, in some favoured spot on the
shore of the Mexican Gulf, where shell-fish, berries, and edible roots are
abundant and easy of access. But there is one region where Nature seems to
offer herself as the willing nurse and bountiful stepmother of the feeble and
unprotected. Of all countries on the globe, there is probably not one in which
a little flock of very young children would find the means of sustaining
existence more readily than in California. Its wonderful climate, mild and
equable beyond example, is well known. Half the months are rainless. Snow and
ice are almost strangers. There are fully two hundred cloudless days in every
year. Roses bloom in the open air through all seasons. Berries of many sorts
are indigenous and abundant. Large fruits and edible nuts on low and pendant
boughs may be said in Milton's phrase to `hang amiable.' Need we wonder that in
such a mild and fruitful region, a great number of separate tribes were found
speaking languages which careful investigation has classed in nineteen distinct
linguistic stocks?" Even more striking is the case of Oregon on the Californian
border, which is also a favoured and luxuriant land. "The number of linguistic
stocks in this narrow district is more than twice as large as in the whole of
Europe."[71]
In such ways as these we may conceive of early
Man building up the fabric of speech. In time his vocabulary would enlarge and
become, so far as objects in the immediate environment were concerned, fairly
complete. As Man gained more knowledge of the things around him, as he came
into larger relations with his fellows, as life became more rich and complex,
this accumulation of words would go on, each art as it was introduced creating
new terms, each science pouring in contributions to the fund, until the
materials of human speech became more and more complete. This process was never
finished. The evolution of Language is still going on. No corroboration of the
theory of the evolution of Language could be more perfect than the simple fact
that it has gone on steadily down to the present hour and is going on now. Tens
of thousands of words--no longer now onomatopoetic--have been evolved since
Johnson compiled his dictionary, and every year sees additions not only to
technical terms but to the Language of the people. The English Language is now
being grown on two or three different kinds of soil, and the different fruits
and flavours that result are intercharged and mixed, to enrich, or adulterate,
the common English tongue. The mere fact that Language-making is a living art
at the present hour, if not an argument against the theory that Language is a
special gift, at least shows that Man has a special gift of making Language. If
Man could manufacture words in any quantity, there was little reason why he
should have been presented with them ready-made. The power to manufacture them
is gift enough, and none the less a gift that we know some of the steps by
which it was given, or at least through which it was exercised. But if the very
words were given him as they stand, it is more than singular that so many of
them should bear traces of another origin. Even Trench at this point succumbs
to the theory of development, and his testimony is the more valuable that it is
evidently so very much against the grain to admit it. He begins by stating
apparently the opposite:--"The truer answer to the inquiry how language arose
is this: God gave man language just as He gave him reason, and just because He
gave him reason; for what is man's word but his reason coming
forth that it may behold itself? They are indeed so essentially one and the
same that the Greek language has one word for them both. He gave it to him,
because he could not be man, that is, a social being, without it." Yet he is
too profound a student of words to fail to qualify this, and had he failed to
do so every page in his well-known book had judged him. "Yet," he continues,
"this must not be taken to affirm that man started at the first furnished with
a full-formed vocabulary of words, and as it were with his first dictionary and
first grammar ready-made to his hands. He did not thus begin the world with
names, but with the power of naming: for man is not a mere
speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as one of us teaches a parrot,
from without; but gave him a capacity, and then evoked the capacity which He
gave."[72]
If the theory just given as to the formation of
Language, or at least as to the possible formation of Language, be more than a
fairy tale, there is another quarter in which corroboration of an important
kind should lie. Hitherto we have examined, as witnesses, the makers of words;
it may be worth while for a moment to place in the witness-box the words
themselves. A chemist has two methods of determining the composition of any
body, analysis and synthesis. Having seen how words may be built up, it remains
for us to see whether on analysis they bear trace of having been built up in
the way, and from the elements, suggested. Comparative Philology has now made
an actual investigation into the words and structure of all known Languages,
and the information sought by the evolutionist lies ready-made to his hand. So
far as controversy might be expected to arise here on the theory of development
itself, there is none. For the first fact to interest us in this new region is
that every student of Language seems to have been compelled to give in his
adherence to the general theory of Evolution. All agree with Renan that "Sans
doute les langues, comme tout ce qui est organise, sont sujettes a la loi du
development graduel." And even Max Muller, the least thorough-going from an
evolutionary point of view of all philologists, asserts that "no student of the
science of Language can be anything but an evolutionist, for, wherever he
looks, he sees nothing but evolution going on all around him."
The outstanding discovery of the dissector of
words is that, vast and complex as Languages appear, they are really composed
of few and simple elements. Take the word "evolutionary." The termination "ary"
is a late addition added to this and to thousands of other words for a special
purpose; the same applies to the syllable "tion." The first letter e
distinguishes evolution from convolution, revolution, involution, and is also a
later growth. None of these extra syllables is of first importance; by
themselves they have almost no meaning. The part which will not
disappear or melt away into mere grammar, on which the stress of the sense
hangs, is the syllable "vol" or "volv," and, so far as the English language is
concerned, it is to be looked upon as the root. By running it to earth in older
languages its source is found in a still more radical word, and therefore it
must next be blotted out of the list of primitive words. By patient comparison
of all other words with all other words, of Languages with Languages, and
apparent roots with apparent roots, the supposed primitive roots of Language
have been found. Just as all the multifarious objects in the material
world--water, air, earth, flesh, bone, wood, iron, paper, cloth--are resolvable
by the chemist into some sixty-eight elements, so all the words in each of the
three or four great groups of Language yield on the last analysis only a few
hundred original roots. That still further analysis may break down some or many
of these is not impossible. But the facts as they stand are all significant.
The further we go back into the past the Languages become thinner and thinner,
the words fewer and fewer, the grammar poorer and poorer. Of the thousand known
Languages it has been found possible to reduce all to three or four--probably
three --great families; and each of these in turn is capable of almost
unlimited philological pruning. In analyzing the Sanskrit language, Professor
Max Muller reduces its whole vocabulary to 121 roots--the 121 "original
concepts." "These 121 concepts constitute the stock-in-trade with which I
maintain that every thought that has ever passed through the mind of India, so
far as known to us in its literature, has been expressed. It would have been
easy to reduce that number still further, for there are several among them
which could be ranged together under more general concepts. But I leave this
further reduction to others, being satisfied as a first attempt with having
shown how small a number of seeds may produce, and has produced, the enormous
intellectual vegetation that has covered the soil of India from the most
distant antiquity to the present day."[73]
That a "first attempt" should have succeeded in
reducing this vast family of Languages to 121 words is significant. The
exhumation by philology of this early cluster reminds one of the discovery of
the segmented ovum in embryology. Such clusters appear at an early stage in the
history of all developments. The processes which precede this stage are of the
utmost subtlety, but in embryology they have yielded to the later analysis of
the microscope. So it may be one day with the natural history of Language. We
may never, for obvious reasons, get back to the actual beginning, but we may
get nearer. When the embryologist reached his cluster of cells in the segmented
ovum, he did not believe he had found the dawn of life. What further the
philologist may find remains a mystery. Where these 121 words came from may
never be known. But the development from that point sufficiently shows that
words, like everything else, have followed the universal law, and that
Languages, starting from small beginnings, have grown in volume, intricacy, and
richness, as time rolled on. "All philologists," says Romanes, "will now agree
with Geiger--'Language diminishes the further we look back, in such a way that
we cannot forbear concluding it must once have had no existence at all.'"
The history of progress for a long time
henceforth is the history of the progress of language and the increase in
intelligence which necessarily went along with it. From being able to say what
he knew, Man went on to write what he knew. The Evolution of writing went
through the same general stages as the Evolution of Speech. First there was the
onomatopoetic writing--as it were, the growl-writing--the ideograph, the
imitation of an actual object. This is the form we find fossil in the Egyptian
hieroglyphic. For a man a man was drawn, for a camel a camel, for a hut a hut.
Then intonation was added--accents, that is, for extra meaning or extra
emphasis. Then to save time the objects were drawn in shorthand--a couple of
dashes for the limbs and one across, as in the Chinese for man; a square in the
same language for a field; two strokes at an obtuse angle, suggesting the roof,
for a house. To express further qualities, these abbreviated pictures were next
compounded in ingenious ways. A man and a field together conveyed the idea of
wealth, and because a man with a field was rich, he was supposed to be happy,
and the same combination stood, and stands to this day, for contentment. When a
roof is drawn and a woman beneath it--or the strokes which represent a roof and
a woman--we have the idea of a woman at home, a woman at peace, and hence the
symbol comes to stand for quietness and rest. Chinese writing is
picture-writing with the pictures degenerated into dashes--a lingual form of
the modern impressionism.
When writing was fully evolved, this height was
only the starting-point for some new development. Every summit in Evolution is
the base of some grander peak. Speech, whether by writing or by spoken word, is
too crude and slow to keep pace with the needs of the now swiftly ascending
mind. Man's larger life demands a further specialization of this power. He
learned to speak at first because he could not convey his thoughts to his wife
at the other side of the wood. It was Space that made him speak. He now learns
to speak better because he cannot convey his thoughts to the other end of the
world. This new distance-language began again at the beginning, just as all
Language does, by employing signs. Man invented the telegraph--a little needle
which makes signs to some one at the other side of the world. The telegraph is
a gesture-language, and is therefore only a primitive stage. Man found this out
and from signs went on to sounds--he invented the telephone. By all the
traditions of Evolution this marvellous instrument ought to be, and is even now
on the verge of being, the vehicle of the distance-language of the future.
Is this the end? It is by no means likely. The
mind is feeling about already for more perfect forms of human intercourse than
telegraphed or telephoned words. As there was a stage in the ascent of Man at
which the body was laid aside as a finished product, and made to give way to
Mind, there may be a stage in the Evolution of Mind when its material
achievements--its body --shall be laid aside and give place to a higher form of
Mind. Telepathy has already become a word, not a word for thought-reading or
muscle-reading, but a scientific word. It means "the ability of one mind to
impress, or to be impressed by another mind otherwise than through the
recognized channels of sense."[74] By men of
science, adepts in mental analysis, aware of all sources of error, armed
against fraud, this subject is now being made the theme of exhaustive
observation. It is too soon to pronounce. Practically we are in the dark. But
there are those in this fascinating and mysterious region who tell us that the
possibilities of a more intimate fellowship of man with man, and soul with
soul, are not to be looked upon as settled by our present views of matter or of
mind. However little we know of it, however remote we are from it, whether it
ever be realized or not, telepathy is theoretically the next stage in the
Evolution of Language. As we have seen, the introduction of speech into the
world was delayed, not because the possibilities of it were not in Nature, but
because the instrument was not quite ready. Then the instrument came, and Man
spoke. The development of the organ and the development of the function went on
together, arrived together, were perfected together. What delayed the
gesture-language of the telegraph was not that electricity was not in Nature,
but the want of the instrument. When that came, the gesture-language came, and
both were perfected together. What delayed the telephone was not that its
principle was not in Nature, but that the instrument was not ready. What now
delays its absolute victory of space is not that space cannot be bridged, but
that it is not ready. May it not be that that which delays the power to
transport and drive one's thought as thought to whatever spot one wills, is not
the fact that the possibility is withheld by Nature, but that the hour is not
quite come--that the instrument is not yet fully ripe? Are there no signs, is
the feeling after it no sign, are there not even now some facts, to warrant us
in treating it, after all that Evolution has given us, as a still possible gift
to the human race? What strikes one most in running the eye up this graduated
ascent is that the movement is in the direction of what one can only call
spirituality. From the growl of a lion we have passed to the whisper of a soul;
from the motive fear, to the motive sympathy; from the icy physical barriers of
space, to a nearness closer than breathing; from the torturing slowness of time
to time's obliteration. If Evolution reveals anything, if science itself proves
anything, it is that Man is a spiritual being and that the direction of his
long career is towards an ever larger, richer, and more exalted life. On the
final problem of Man's being the voice of science is supposed to be dumb. But
this gradual perfecting of instruments, and, as each arrives, the further
revelation of what lies behind in Nature, this gradual refining of the mind,
this increasing triumph over matter, this deeper knowledge, this efflorescence
of the soul, are facts which even Science must reckon with. Perhaps, after all,
Victor Hugo is right: "I am the tadpole of an archangel."
Before closing this outline two of the many
omitted points may be briefly referred to. In thinking of Language as a
"discovery," it is not necessary to assume that that discovery involved the
pre-existence of very high mental powers. These were probably developed pari
passu with Speech, but did not necessarily ante-date it to such a degree as
to make the preceding argument a petitio principii. Obviously the
discovery of Language could not in the first instance have been responsible for
the Evolution of Mind since Man must already have had Mind enough to discover
it. But this does not necessarily imply any very high grade of intellect--very
high, that is to say, as compared with other contemporary animals--for it is
possible that a comparatively slight rise in intelligence might have led to the
initial step from which all the others might follow in rapid succession. An
illustration, suggested by a remark of Cope's, may help to make plain how a
very slight cause may initiate changes of an almost radical order and on the
most gigantic scale.
In part of the Arctic regions at this moment
there is no such thing as liquid. Matter is only known there in the solid form.
The temperature may be thirty-one degrees below zero, or thirty-one degrees
above zero without making the slightest difference; there can be nothing there
but ice, glacier, and those crystals of ice which we call snow. But suppose the
temperature rose two degrees, the difference would be indescribable. While no
change for sixty degrees below that point made the least difference, the almost
inappreciable addition of two degrees changes the country into a world of
water. The glaciers, under the new conditions, retreat into the mountains, the
vesture of ice drops into the sea, a garment of greenness clothes the land. So,
in the animal world, a very small rise beyond the animal maximum may open the
door for a revolution. With a brain of so many cubic inches, and so many pounds
of brain matter, we have animal intelligence. Everything below that limit is
animal, and the number of inches or pounds below it makes no difference. But
pass to a brain not a few but many pounds heavier, many cubic inches larger,
and very much more convoluted, and it is conceivable that in passing from the
lower to the higher figures some such change might occur as that which
differentiates solid from liquid in the case of water. What the chemist calls a
"critical point" might thus be passed, and from a condition associated with
certain properties--though in the brain we must speak of accompaniments rather
than properties--a condition associated with certain other properties might be
the result. Thus, as Cope says, "some Rubicon has been crossed, some flood-gate
has been opened, which marks one of Nature's great transitions, such as have
been called `expression-points' of progress." A slight rise in intelligence
might lead to the first acquisition of Speech, and from this point the rise
might be at once exceedingly swift and in directions wholly new. The
illustration is not to be taken for more than it seeks to illustrate--which is
not the method of transition as to qualitative detail, but simply the fact that
an apparently slight change may have startling and indefinite results.
The last difficulty is this. If the connection
between Mind and Language is so vital, why do not Birds, many of which
apparently speak, emulate Man in mental power? If his speech is largely
responsible for his intelligence, why have not Birds --the parrot, for
instance--attained the same intelligence? Several answers might be suggested to
the question, and several kinds of answers-- biological, physiological,
philological, and psychological. But the real answer is the general one, that
to make animals human required a conspiracy of circumstances which neither
Birds nor any other animal fell heir to. It was one chance in a million that
the multitude of co-operating conditions which pushed Man onward were
fulfilled; and though it may never be known what these conditions were, it was
doubtless from the failure on the one hand to meet one or more of them, and on
the other from the success with which openings in other directions were pursued
by competing species, that Man was left alone during the later aeons of his
ascent.
The progenitors of Birds and the progenitors of
Man at a very remote period were probably one. But at a certain point they
parted company and diverged hopelessly and for ever. The Birds took one road,
the Mammals another; the Mammals for the most part kept to the ground, the
Birds took to the air. One consequence of this expedient in the case of the
Birds was disastrous. For observe the cost to them of the aerial mode of life.
The wing was made at the expense of the hand. With this consummate organ
buried in feathers, the use which the higher Vertebrates made of it was denied
them. Birds have the bones for a hand, could have had a hand, but they waived
their right to it. When it is considered how much Man owes to the hand it may
be conceived how much they have lost by the want of it. Had Man not been a
"tool-using animal," he had probably never become a Man; the Bird, partly
because it placed itself out of the running here, has never been anything but a
Bird. To one organism only was it given to keep on the path of progress from
the beginning to the end, and so fulfil without deviation or relapse the final
purpose of Evolution.
THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE
MATTHEW Arnold, in a well -remembered line,
describes a bird in Kensington Gardens "deep in its unknown day's employ." But,
peace to the poet, its employ is all too certain. Its day is spent in
struggling to get a living; and a very hard day it is. It awoke at daybreak and
set out to catch its morning meal; but another bird was awake before it, and it
lost its chance. With fifty other breakfastless birds, it had to bide its time,
to scour the country; to prospect the trees, the grass, the ground; to lie in
ambush; to attack and be defeated; to hope and be forestalled. At every meal
the same programme is gone through, and every day. As the seasons change the
pressure becomes more keen. Its supplies are exhausted, and it has to take wing
for hundreds and thousands of miles to find new hunting-ground. This is how
birds live, and this is how birds are made. They are the children of Struggle.
Beak and limb, claw and wing, shape, strength, all down to the last detail, are
the expressions of their mode of life.
This is how the early savage lived, and this is
how he was made. The first practical problem in the Ascent of Man was to get
him started on his upward path. It was not enough for Nature to equip him with
a body, and plant his foot on the lowest rung of the ladder. She must introduce
into her economy some great principle which should secure, not for him alone
but for every living thing, that they should work upward toward the top. The
inertia of things is such that without compulsion they will never move. And so
admirably has this compulsion been applied that its forces are hidden in the
very nature of life itself--the very act of living contains within it the
principles of progress. An animal cannot be without becoming.
The first great principle into the hands of which
this mighty charge was given is the Struggle for Life. It is one of the chief
keys for unlocking the mystery of Man's Ascent, and so important in all
development that Mr. Darwin assigns it the supreme rank among the factors in
Evolution. "Unless," he says "it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole
economy of Nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance,
extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood." How,
under the pressures of this great necessity to work for a living, the Ascent of
Man has gone on, we have now to inquire. Though not to the extent that is
usually supposed, yet in part under this stimulus, he has slowly emerged from
the brute-existence, and, entering a path where the possibilities of
development are infinite, has been pushed on from stage to stage, without
premeditation, or design, or thought on his part, until he arrived at that
further height where, to the unconscious compulsions of a lower environment,
there were added those high incitements of conscious ideals which completed the
work of creating him a Man.
Start with a comparatively unevolved savage, and
see what the Struggle for Life will do for him. When we meet him first he is
sitting, we shall suppose, in the sun. Let us also suppose--and it requires no
imagination to suppose it--that he has no wish to do anything else than sit in
the sun, and that he is perfectly contented, and perfectly happy. Nature around
him, visible and invisible, is as still as he is, as inert apparently, as
unconcerned. Neither molests the other; they have no connection with each
other. Yet it is not so. That savage is the victim of a conspiracy. Nature has
designs upon him, wants to do something to him. That something is to move him.
Why does it wish to move him? Because movement is work, and work is exercise,
and exercise may mean a further evolution of the part of him that is exercised.
How does it set about moving him? By moving itself. Everything else being in
motion, it is impossible for him to resist. The sun moves away to the west and
he must move or freeze with cold. As the sun continues to move, twilight falls
and wild animals move from their lairs and he must move or be eaten. The food
he ate in the morning has dissolved and moved away to nourish the cells of his
body, and more food must soon be moved to take its place or he must starve. So
he starts up, he works, he seeks food, shelter, safety; and those movements
make marks in his body, brace muscles, stimulate nerves, quicken intelligence,
create habits, and he becomes more able and more willing to repeat these
movements and so becomes a stronger and a higher man. Multiply these movements
and you multiply him. Make him do things he has never done before, and he will
become what he never was before. Let the earth move round in its orbit till the
sun is far away and the winter snows begin to fall. He must either move away,
and move away very fast, to find the sun again; or he must chase, and also very
fast, some thick-furred animal, and kill it, and clothe himself with its skin.
Thus from a man he has become a hunter, a different kind of a man, a further
man. He did not wish to become a hunter; he had to become a hunter. All
that he wished was to sit in the sun and be let alone, and but for a Nature
around him which would not rest, or let him alone, he would have sat on there
till he died. The universe has to be so ordered that that which Man would not
have done alone he should be compelled to do. In other words it was necessary
to introduce into Nature, and into Human Nature, some such principle as the
Struggle for Life. For the first law of Evolution is simply the first law of
motion. "Every body continues in a state of rest, or of uniform motion in a
straight line, unless it is compelled by impressed forces to change that
state." Nature supplied that savage with the impressed forces, with something
which he was compelled to respond to. Without that, he would have continued for
ever as he was.
Apart from the initial appetite, Hunger, the
stimulus of Environment--that which necessitates Man to struggle for life--is
two-fold. The first is inorganic nature, including heat and cold, climate and
weather, earth, air, water--the material world. The second is the world of
life, comprehending all plants and animals, and especially those animals
against whom primitive Man has always to struggle most--other primitive Men.
All that Man is, all the arts of life, all the gifts of civilization, all the
happiness and joy and progress of the world, owe much of their existence to
that double war.
Follow it a little further. Go back to a time
when Man was just emerging from the purely animal state, when he was in the
condition described by Mr. Darwin, "a tailed quadruped probably arboreal in its
habits," and when in his glimmering consciousness mind was feeling about for
its first uses in snatching some novel success in the Struggle for Life. This
hypothetical creature, so far as bodily structure was concerned, was presumably
not very vigorous. Had he been more vigorous he might never have evolved at
all; as it was, he fled for refuge not to his body but to a stratagem of the
Mind. When threatened by a comrade, or pressed by an alien-species, he called
in a simple foreign aid to help him in the Struggle--the branch of a tree.
Whether the discovery was an accident; whether the idea was caught from the
falling of a bough, or a blow from a branch waving in the wind, is of no
consequence. This broken branch became the first weapon. It was the
father of all clubs. The day this discovery was made, the Struggle for
Life took a new departure. Hitherto animals fought with some specialized part
of their own bodies--tooth, limb, claw. Now they took possession of the armoury
of material Nature.
This invention of the club was soon followed by
another change. To use a club effectively, or to keep a good look-out for
enemies or for food, a man must stand erect. This alters the centre of gravity
of the body, and as the act becomes a habit, subsidiary changes slowly take
place in other parts. In time the erect position becomes confirmed. Man owes
what Burns calls his "heaven-erected face" to the Struggle for Life. How recent
this change is, how new the attitude still is to him, is seen from the simple
fact that even yet he has not attained the power of retaining the erect
position long. Most men sit down when they can, and so unnatural is the
standing position, so unstable the equilibrium, that when slightly sick or
faint, Man cannot stand at all.
Possibly both the erect position and the Club had
another origin, but the detail is immaterial. This "hairy-tailed quadruped,
arboreal in its habits," must sometimes have wandered or been driven into
places where trees were few and far between. It is conceivable that an animal,
accustomed to get along mainly by grasping something, should have picked up a
branch and held it in its hand, partly to use as a crutch, partly as a weapon,
and partly to raise itself from the ground in order to keep a better look-out
in crossing treeless spaces. An Orang-outang may now be seen in the Zoological
gardens in Java which promenades about its bower continually with the help of a
stick, and seems to prefer the erect position so long as the stick or any
support is at hand.
The next stage after the invention of anything is
to improve upon it, or to make a further use of it. Both these things now
happened. One day the stick, wrenched rapidly from the tree, happened to be
left with a jagged end. The properties of the point were discovered. Now
there were two classes of weapons in the world--the blunt stick and the pointed
stick--that is to say, the Club and the Spear.
In using these weapons at first, neither probably
was allowed to leave the hand. But already their owners had learned to hurl
down branches from the tree-tops and bombard their enemies with nuts and
fruits. Hence they came to throw their clubs and spears, and so missiles
were introduced. Under this new use the primitive weapons themselves received a
further specialization. From the heavy bludgeon would arise on the one hand the
shaped war-club, and on the other the short throwing club, or waddy. The spear
would pass into the throwing assegai, or the ponderous weapon such as the South
Sea Islanders use to-day. From the natural point of a torn branch to the
sharpening of a point deliberately is the next improvement. From rubbing the
point against the sharp edge of a large stone, to picking up a sharp-edged
small stone and using it as a knife, is but a step. So, by the mere necessities
of the Struggle for Life, development went on. Man became a tool-using animal,
and the foundations of the Arts were laid. Next, the man who threw his missile
furthest, had the best chance in the Struggle for Life. To throw to still
greater distances, and with greater precision, he sought out mechanical
aids--the bow, the boomerang, the throwing-stick, and the sling. Then instead
of using his own strength he borrowed strength from nature, mixed different
kinds of dust together and invented gunpowder. All our modern weapons of
precision, from the rifle to the long range gun, are evolutions from the
missiles of the savage. These suggestions are not mere fancies; in savage
tribes existing in the world to-day these different stages in Evolution may
still be seen.
After weapons of offence came weapons of defence.
At first the fighting savage sheltered himself at the back of a tree. Then when
he wished to pass to another tree he tore off part of the bark, took it with
him, and made the first shield. Where the trees were without suitable bark, he
would plait his shield from canes, grasses, and the midribs of the leaves, or
construct them from frameworks of wood and skins. In times of peace these
hollow shields, lying idly about the huts, would find new uses--baskets,
cradles, and, in an evolved form, coracles or boats. In leisure hours also, new
virtues discovered themselves in the earlier implements of war and of the
chase. The twang of his bow suggested memories that were pleasant to his ear;
he kept on twanging it, and so made music. Because two bows twanged
better than one, he twanged two bows; then he made himself a two-stringed bow
from the first, and ended with a "ten-stringed instrument." By and by came the
harp; later, the violin. The whistling of the wind in a hollow reed prepared
the way for the flute; a conch-shell, broken at the helix, gave him the
trumpet. Two flints struck together yielded fire.
Trifling, almost puerile, as these beginnings
look to us now, remember they were once the serious realities of life. The club
and spear of the savage are toys to us to-day; but we forget that the rude
shafts of wood which adorn our halls were all the world to early Man, and
represented the highest expression and daily instrument of his evolution. These
primitive weapons are the pathetic expression of the world's first Struggle. As
the earliest contribution of mankind to solve its still fundamental difficulty
--the problem of Nutrition--they are of enduring interest to the human race. So
far from being, as one might suppose, mere implements of destruction, they are
implements of self-preservation; they entered the world not from hate of Man
but for love of life. Why was the spear invented, and the sling, and the bow?
In the first instance because Man needed the bird and the deer for food. Why
from implements of the chase did they change into implements of war? Because
other men wanted the bird and the deer, and the first possessor, as populations
multiplied, must protect his food-supply. The parent of all industries is
Hunger: the creator of civilization in its earlier forms is the Struggle for
Life.
By hollowing a pit in the ground, planting his
spear, or a pointed stake, upright in the centre, and covering the mouth with
boughs, Man could trap even the largest game. When the climate became cold, he
stripped off the skin and became the possessor of clothes. With a stone for a
hammer, he broke open molluscs on the shore, or speared or trapped the fish in
the shoals. Digging for roots with his pointed stick in time suggested
agriculture. From imitating the way wild fruits and grains were sown by Nature
he became a gardener and grew crops. To possess a crop means to possess an
estate, and to possess an estate is to give up wandering and begin that more
settled life in which all the arts of industry must increase. Catching the
young of wild animals and keeping them, first as playthings, then for supplies
of meat or milk, or in the case of the dog for helping in the chase, he
perceived the value of domestic animals. So Man slowly passed from the animal
to the savage, so his mind was tamed, and strengthened, and brightened, and
heightened; so the sense of power grew strong, and so virtus, which is
to say virtue, was born.
In struggling with Nature, early Man not only
found material satisfactions: he found himself. It was this that made
him, body, mind, character, and disposition; and it was this largely that gave
to the world different kinds of men, different kinds of bodies, minds,
characters, and dispositions. The first moral and intellectual diversifiers of
men are to be sought for in geography and geology--in the factors which
determine the circumstances in which men severally conduct their Struggle for
Life. If the land had been all the same the Struggle for Life had been all the
same, and if the Struggle for Life had been all the same, life itself had been
all the same. But to no two sets of men is the world ever quite the same. The
theatre of struggle varies with every degree of latitude, with every change of
altitude, with every variation of soil. In most countries three separate
regions are found--a maritime region, an agricultural region, a pastoral
region. In the first, the belt along the shore, the people are fishermen; in
the second, the lowlands and alluvial plains, the people are farmers; in the
third, the highlands and plateaux, they are shepherds. As men are nothing but
expressions of their environments, as the kind of life depends on how men get
their living, each set of men becomes changed in different ways. The
fisherman's life is a precarious life; he becomes hardy, resolute,
self-reliant. The farmer's life is a settled life; he becomes tame, he loves
home, he feeds on grains and fruits which take the heat out of his blood and
make him domestic and quiet. The shepherd is a wanderer; he is much alone; the
monotonies of grass make him dull and moody; the mountains awe him: the
protector of his flock, he is a man of war. So arise types of men, types of
industries; and by and bye, by exogamous marriage, blends of these types, and
further blends of infinite variety. "It is so ordered by Nature, that by so
striving to live they develop their physical structure; they obtain faint
glimmerings of reason; they think and deliberate; they become Man. In the same
way, the primeval men have no other object than to keep the clan alive. It is
so ordered by Nature that in striving to preserve the existence of the clan,
they not only acquire the arts of agriculture, domestication, and navigation;
they not only discover fire, and its uses in cooking, in war, and in
metallurgy; they not only detect the hidden properties of plants, and apply
them to save their own lives from disease, and to destroy their enemies in
battle; they not only learn to manipulate Nature and to distribute water by
machinery; but they also, by means of the life-long battle, are developed into
moral beings."[75] Nature being "everything
that is," and Man being in every direction immersed in it and dependent on it,
can never escape its continuous discipline. Some environment there must always
be; and some change of environment, no matter how minute, there must always be;
and some change, no matter how imperceptible, must be always wrought in him.
We now see, perhaps, more clearly why Evolution
at the dawn of life entered into league with so strange an ally as Want.
The Evolution of Mankind was too great a thing to entrust to any uncertain
hand. The advantage of attaching human progress to the Struggle for Life is
that you can always depend upon it. Hunger never fails. All other human
appetites have their periods of activity and stagnation; passions wax and wane;
emotions are casual and capricious. But the continuous discharge of the
function of Nutrition is interrupted only by the final interruption--Death.
Death means, in fact, little more than an interference with the function of
Nutrition; it means that the Struggle for Life having broken down, there can be
no more life, no further evolution. Hence, it has been ordained that Life and
Struggle, Health and Struggle, Growth and Struggle, Progress and Struggle,
shall be linked together; that whatever the chances of misdirection, the
apparent losses, the mysterious accompaniments of strife and pain, the Ascent
of Man should be bound up with living. When it is remembered that, at a later
day, Morality and Struggle, and even Religion and Struggle, are bound so
closely that it is impossible to conceive of them apart, the tremendous value
of this principle and the necessity for providing it with indestructible
foundations, will be perceived.
This association of the Struggle for Life with
the physiological function of Nutrition must be continually borne in mind. For
the essential nature of the principle has been greatly obscured by the very
name which Mr. Darwin gave to it. Probably no other was possible; but the
effect has been that men have emphasized the almost ethical substantive
`Struggle' and ignored the biological term `Life.' A secondary implication of
the process has thus been elevated into the prime one; and this, exaggerated by
the imagination, has led to Nature being conceived of as a vast murderous
machine for the annihilation of the majority and the survival of the few. But
the Struggle for Life, in the first instance, is simply living itself; at the
best, it is living under a healthily normal maximum of pressure; at the worst,
under an abnormal maximum. As we have seen, initially, it is but another name
for the discharge of the supreme physiological function of Nutrition. If life
is to go on at all, this function must be discharged and continuously
discharged. The primary characteristic of protoplasm, the physical basis of all
life, is Hunger, and this has dictated the first law of being--"Thou shalt
eat." What distinguishes scientifically the organic from the inorganic, the
animal from the stone? That the animal eats, the stone does not. Almost all
achievement in the early history of the living world has been due to Hunger.
For millenniums nearly the whole task of Evolution was to perfect the means of
satisfying it, and in so doing to perfect life itself. The lowest forms of life
are little more than animated stomachs, and in higher groups the nutritive
system is the first to be developed, the first to function, and the last to
cease its work. Almost wholly, indeed, in the earlier vicissitude of the race,
and largely in the more ordered course of later times, Hunger rules the life
and work and destiny of men; and so profoundly does this mysterious deity still
dominate the round of even the highest life that the noblest occupations which
engage the human mind must be interrupted two or three times a day to do it
homage.
Whatever Man came ultimately to wish and to
achieve for himself, it was essential at first that such arrangements should be
made for him. The machinery for his development had not only to be put into
Nature, but he had to be placed in the machine and held there, and brought back
there as often as he tried to evade it. To say that man evolved himself,
nevertheless, is as absurd as to say that a newspaper prints itself. To say
even that the machinery evolved him is as preposterous as to say of a poem that
the printing-press made it. The ultimate problem is, Who made the machine? and
Who thought the poem that was to be printed?
If you say that you do not unreservedly approve
of the machine, that it lacerates as well as binds, the difficulty is more
real. But it is a principle in the study of history to suspend judgment both of
the meaning and of the value of a policy until the chain of sequences it sets
in motion should be worked out to its last fulfilment. When the full tale of
the Struggle for Life is told, when the record of its victories is closed, when
the balance of its gains and losses has been struck, and especially when it is
proved that there actually have been losses, it will be time to pass judgment
on its moral value. Of course this principle cuts both ways; it warns off a
favourable as well as an unfavourable verdict on the beneficence of the system
of things. But Evolution is a study in history, and its results are largely
known. And it would be affectation to deny that on the whole these results are
good, and appear the worthier the more we penetrate into their inner meaning.
Men forget when they denounce the Struggle for Life, that it is to be judged
not only on the ground of sentiment but of reason, that not its local or
surface effects only, but its permanent influence on the order of the world,
must be taken into account.
Even on the lower ranges of Nature the
unfavourable implications of the Struggle for Life have probably been
exaggerated. While it is essential to an understanding of the course of
evolution to retain in the imagination a vivid sense of the Struggle itself, we
must beware of over-colouring the representation, or flooding it with
accompaniments of emotion borrowed from our own sensations. The word Struggle
at all in this connection is little more than a metaphor. When it is said that
an animal struggles, all that is really meant is that it lives. An animal, that
is to say, does not, in addition to all its other activities, have to employ a
vast number of special activities, to the exercise of which the term Struggle
is to be applied. It is Life itself which is the Struggle: and the whole Life,
and the whole of the activities and powers which make up Life are involved in
it. To speak of Struggle in the sense of some special and separate struggle, to
conceive of battle, or even a series of battles, is misleading, where all is
struggle and where all is battle. Especially must we beware of reading into it
our personal ideas with regard to accompaniments of pain. The probabilities are
that the Struggle for Life in the lower creation is, to say the least, less
painful than it looks. Whether we regard the dulness of the states of
consciousness among lower animals, or the fact that the condition of danger
must become habitual, or that death when it comes is sudden, and unaccompanied
by that anticipation which gives it its chief dread to Man, we must assume that
whatever the Struggle for Life subjectively means to the lower animals, it can
never approach in terror what it means to us. And as to putting any moral
content into it, until a late stage in the world's development, that is not to
be thought of. Judged of even by later standards there is much to relieve one's
first unfavourable impression. With exceptions, the fight is a fair fight. As a
rule there is no hate in it, but only Hunger. It is seldom prolonged, and
seldom wanton. As to the manner of death, it is generally sudden. As to the
fact of death, all animals must die. As to the meaning of an existence
prematurely closed, it is better to be to be eaten than not to be at all. And,
as to the last result, it is better to be eaten out of the world and, dying,
help another to live, than pollute the world by lingering decay. The most,
after all, that can be done with life is to give it to others. Till Nature
taught her creatures of their own free will to offer the sacrifice, is it
strange that she took it by force?
There are those indeed who frown upon Science for
predicating a Struggle for Life in Nature at all, lest the facts should impugn
the beneficence of the universe. But Science did not invent the Struggle for
Life. It is there. What Science has really done is to show not only its meaning
but its great moral purpose. There are others, again, like Mill, who, seeing
the facts, but not seeing that moral purpose, impugn natural theology for still
believing in the beneficence of that purpose. Neither attitude, probably, is
quite worthy of the names with which these conclusions are associated. Much
more reasonable are the verdicts of the two men who are first responsible for
bringing the facts before the world, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace and Mr. Darwin.
"When we reflect," says Mr. Darwin, "on this struggle, we may console ourselves
with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is
felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and
the happy survive and multiply." And in much stronger language Mr. Wallace: "On
the whole, the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and
pain on the animal world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really
brings about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment of life, with the
minimum of suffering and pain. Given the necessity of death and reproduction,
and without these there could have been no progressive development of the
organic world--and it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater
balance of happiness could have been secured."[76]
We may safely leave Nature here to look after her
own ethic. That a price, a price in pain, and assuredly sometimes a very
terrible price, has been paid for the evolution of the world, after all is
said, is certain. There may be difference of opinion as to the amount of this
price, but on one point there can be no dispute--that even at the highest
estimate the thing which was bought with it was none too dear. For that thing
was nothing less than the present progress of the world. The Struggle for Life
has been a victorious struggle; it has succeeded in its stupendous task; and
there is nothing of order or beauty or perfection in living Nature that does
not owe something to its having been carried on. The first duty of those who
demur to the cost of progress is to make sure that they comprehend in all its
richness the infinity of the gift this sacrifice has purchased for humanity.
The end of the Struggle for Life is not battle; it is not even victory, it is
evolution. The result is not wounds, it is health. Nature is a vast and
complicated system of devices to keep things changing, adjusting, and, as it
seems, progressing. The Struggle for Life is a species of necessitated
aspiration, the vis a tergo which keeps living things in motion. It does
not follow, of course, that that motion should be upward; that is dependent on
other considerations. But the point to mark is, that without the struggle for
food and the pressure of want, without the conflict with foes and the challenge
of climate, the world would be left to stagnation. Change, adventure,
temptation, vicissitude even to the verge of calamity, these are the life of
the world.
There is another side to this principle from
which its higher significance becomes still more apparent. It follows from the
Struggle for Life that those animals which struggle most successfully will
prosper, while the less successful will disappear--hence the well-known
principle of Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest. Waiving the
discussion of this law in general, and the. varying meanings which "fitness"
assumes as we rise in the scale of being, observe the role it plays in Nature.
The object of the Survival of the Fittest is to produce fitness. And it does so
both negatively and positively. In the first place it produces fitness by
killing off the unfit. Without the rigorous weeding out of the imperfect the
progress of the world had not been possible. If fit and unfit indiscriminately
had been allowed to live and reproduce their kind, every improvement which any
individual might acquire would be degraded to the common level in the course of
a few generations. Progress can only start by one or two individuals shooting
ahead of their species; and their life-gain can only be conserved by their
being shut off from their species--or by their species being shut off from
them. Unless shut off from their species their acquisition will either be
neutralized in the course of time by the swamping effect of inter-breeding with
the common herd, or so diluted as to involve no real advance. The only chance
for Evolution, then, is either to carry off these improved editions into
"physiological isolation," or to remove the unimproved editions by wholesale
death.. The first of these alternatives is only occasionally possible; the
second always. Hence the death of the unevolved, or of the unadapted in
reference to some new and higher relation with environment, is essential to the
perpetuation of a useful variation. Although Natural Selection by no means
invariably works in the direction of progress,--in parasites it has consummated
almost utter degeneration,--no progress can take place without it. It is only
when one considers the working of the Struggle for Life on the large scale, and
realizes its necessity to the Evolution of the world as a whole, that one can
even begin to discuss its ethical or teleological meanings. To make a fit
world, the unfit at every stage must be made to disappear; and if any
self-acting law can bring this about, though its bearing upon this or that
individual case may seem unjust, its necessity for the world as a whole is
vindicated. If more of any given species are born into the world than can
possibly find food, and if a given number must die, that number must be singled
out upon some principle; and we cannot quarrel with the principle in Physical
Nature which condemns to death the worst. By placing the death-penalty upon the
slightest shortcoming, Natural Selection so discourages imperfection as
practically to eliminate it from the world. The fact that any given animal is
alive at all is almost a token of its perfectness. Nothing living can be wholly
a failure. For the moment that it fails, it ceases to live. Something more fit,
were it even by a hairbreadth, secures its place; so that all existing lives
must, with reference to their environment, be the best possible lives. Natural
Selection is the means employed in Nature to bring about perfect health,
perfect wholeness, perfect adaptation, and in the long run the Ascent of all
living things.
This being so, the Law of the Struggle for Life
is elevated to a unique place in Nature as a first necessity of progress. It
involves that every living thing in Nature shall live its best, that every
resource shall be called out to its utmost, that every individual faculty shall
be kept in the most perfect order and work up to its fullest strength. So far
from being a drag on life, it is the one thing which not only makes life go on
at all, but which in the very act perfects it. The result may sometimes involve
the dethroning of a species, or its entire extinction: it may lead in the case
of others to degeneration; but in the end it must result in the gradual
perfecting of organisms upon the whole, and the steady advance of the final
type. In fixing the eye on the murderous side of this Struggle, it is therefore
well to remember to what it leads. There could be no higher end in the universe
than to make a perfect world, and no more perfect law than that which at the
same moment eliminates the unfit and establishes the fit. Too frequently the
moralist's attention is diverted to the negative side, to what seems the quite
immoral spectacle of the massacre of the innocent, the rout and murder of the
unfit. But in earlier Nature there is no such word as innocent; and no ethical
meaning at that stage can attach itself to the term `unfit.' Fitness in the
stormy days of the world's animal youth was necessarily fighting-fitness; no
higher end was present anywhere than simply to gain for life a footing in the
world, and perfect it up to the highest physical form. The creature which did
that fulfilled its destiny, and no higher destiny was possible or conceivable.
The Survival of the Fittest, of course, does not mean the survival of the
strongest. It means the Survival of the Adapted--the survival of the most
fitted to the circumstances which surround it. A fish survives in water when a
leaking ironclad goes to the bottom, not because it is stronger but because it
is better adapted to the element in which it lives. A Texas bull is stronger
than a mosquito, but in an autumn drought the bull dies, the mosquito lives.
Fitness to survive is simply fittedness, and has nothing to do with strength or
courage, or intelligence or cunning as such, but only with adjustments as fit
or unfit to the world around. A prize-fighter is stronger than a cripple; but
in the environment of modern life the cripple is cared for by the people, is
judged fit to live by a moral world, while the pugilist, handicapped by his
very health, has to conduct his own struggle for existence. Physical fitness
here is actually a disqualification; what was once unfitness is now fitness to
survive. As we rise in the scale, the physical fitness of the early world
changes to fitness of a different quality, and this law becomes the guardian of
a moral order. In one era the race is to the swift, in another the meek inherit
the earth. In a material world social survival depends on wealth, health,
power; in a moral world the fittest are the weak, the pitiable, the poor. Thus
there comes a time when this very law, in securing survival for those who would
otherwise sink and fall, is the minister of moral ends.
When we pass from the animal and the savage
states to watch the working of the Struggle for Life in later times, the
impression deepens that, after all, the "gladiatorial theory" of existence has
much to say for itself. To trace its progress further is denied us for the
present, but observe before we close what it connotes in modern life. Its
lineal descendants are two in number, and they have but to be named to show the
enormous place this factor has been given to play in the world's destiny. The
first is War, the second is Industry. These in all their forms and
ramifications are simply the primitive Struggle continued on the social and
political plane. War is not a casual thing like a thunderstorm, nor a specific
thing like a battle. It is that ancient Struggle for Life carried over from the
animal kingdom, which, in the later as in the earlier world, has been so
perfect an instrument of evolution. Along with Industry, and for a time before
it, War was the foster-mother of civilization. The patron of the heroic
virtues, the purifier of societies, the solidifier of states, the military form
of this Struggle--despite the awful balance on the other side--stands out on
every page of history as the maker and educator of the human race. Industry is
but the same Struggle in another disguise. The industrial conflict of to-day is
the old attempt of primitive Man to get the most out of Nature--to grow foods,
to find clothes, to raise fuel, to gain wealth. Owing to the ever-increasing
number of the Strugglers the supplies fall short of the demands, with the
result of perpetuating on the industrial plane, and often in hard and degrading
forms, the primitive Struggle for Life. When society wonders at its labour
troubles it forgets that Industry is a stage but one or two removes from the
purely animal Struggle. And when morality impugns the Struggle for Life, it
forgets that nearly the whole later fabric of civilization is its creation.
But one has only to look at these further phases
of the Struggle to observe the most important fact of all--the change that
passes over the principle as time goes on. Examine it on the higher levels as
carefully as we have examined it on the lower, and though the crueler elements
persist with fatal and appalling vigour, there are whole regions, and daily
enlarging regions, where every animal feature is discredited, discouraged, or
driven away. Already, with the social tragedy still at its height around us,
the amelioration in many directions makes constant progress; and partly through
the rise of opposing forces, and partly through the very civilization which it
has helped to create, the maligner power must disappear. The Struggle for Life,
as life's dynamic, can never wholly cease. In the keenness of its energies, the
splendour of its stimulus, its bracing effect on character, its wholesome
tensions throughout the whole range of action, it must remain with us to the
end. But in the virulence of its animal qualities it must surely pass away.
There are those who, without reflecting on this qualitative change, would
govern Society by the merely animal Struggle; those who claim for this the
sanction of Nature, and lay down the principle of selfishness as the eternally
working law. The eternal law, as we shall presently see, is unselfishness. But
even the selfishness of early Nature loses its sting with time; the self that
is in it becomes a higher self; and the world in which it acts is so much a
better world that if self gave full rein to the animal it would be instantly
extinguished.
The amelioration of the Struggle for Life is the
most certain prophecy of Science. If this universe is a moral universe, it was
a necessity that sooner or later this conflict should abate, that in the course
of Evolution this particular change should come, that there should be put into
the very machinery of Nature that which should bring it about. And what do we
find? We find the Animal side of the Struggle for Life attacked in such
directions, and with such weapons, that its defeat is sure. These weapons are
in the armoury of Nature; they have been there from the beginning; and they are
now engaged upon the enemy so hotly and so openly that we can discover what
some of them are. The first is one which has begun to mine the Struggle for
Life at its roots. Essentially, as we have seen, the Struggle for Life is the
attempt to solve the fundamental problem of all life--Nutrition. If that could
be solved apart from the Struggle for Life, its occupation would be gone. Now,
it is more than probable that that problem will be otherwise solved. It will be
solved by science. At the present moment Chemistry is devoting itself to the
experiment of manufacturing nutrition, and with an enthusiasm which only
immediate hope begets. It is not the visionaries who have dared to prophesy
here. In a hundred laboratories the problem is being practically worked out,
and, as one of the highest authorities assures us, "The time is not far distant
when the artificial preparation of articles of food will be accomplished."[77] Already, through the labours of other
sciences, the Struggle for Food has been made infinitely easier than it was;
but when the immediate quest succeeds, and the food of Man is made direct from
the elements, the Struggle in all its coarser forms will practically be
abolished. Civilization cannot ease the whole burden at once; the Struggle for
Life will go on, but it will be the Struggle with its fangs drawn.
But there is a higher hope than Science. Attacked
from below by Man's intellect, the final blow will be struck from a deeper
source. It is impossible to conceive that the Ascent of Man should always
depend upon his appetites, that in God's world there should be nothing better
to attract him than food and raiment, that he should take no single step
towards a higher life except when driven to it. As there comes a time in a
child's life when coercion gives place to free and conscious choice, the day
comes to the world when the aspirations of the spirit begin to compete with, to
neutralize, and to supplant the compulsions of the body. Against that day, in
the heart of humanity, Nature had made full provision. For there, prepared by a
profounder chemistry than that which was to relieve the strain on the physical
side, had gathered through the ages a force in whose presence the energies of
the Animal Struggle are as naught. Beside the Struggle for the Life of
Others the Struggle for Life is but a passing phase. As old, as deeply sunk
in Nature, this further force was destined from the first to replace the
Struggle for Life, and to build a nobler superstructure on the foundations
which it laid. To establish these foundations was all that the Animal Struggle
was ever designed to do. It has laid them well; yet it is only when the
Struggle for Life stands projected against the larger influence with which all
through history--and in an infinitely profound sense through moral history --it
has been allied, that at once its worth and its ignominy are seen.
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIFE OF OTHERS
WE now open a wholly new, and by far the most
important, chapter in the Evolution of Man. Up to this time we have found for
him a Body, and the rudiments of Mind. But Man is not a Body, nor a Mind. The
temple still awaits its final tenant--the higher human Soul.
With a Body alone, Man is an animal: the highest
animal, yet a pure animal; struggling for its own narrow life, living for its
small and sordid ends. Add a Mind to that and the advance is infinite. The
Struggle for Life assumes the august form of a struggle for light: he who was
once a savage, pursuing the arts of the chase, realizes Aristotle's ideal man,
"a hunter after Truth." Yet this is not the end. Experience tells us that Man's
true life is neither lived in the material tracts of the body, nor in the
higher altitudes of the intellect, but in the warm world of the affections.
Till he is equipped with these, Man is not human. He reaches his full height
only when Love becomes to him the breath of life, the energy of will, the
summit of desire. There at last lies all happiness, and goodness, and truth,
and divinity:
"For the loving
worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God."
That
Love did not come down to us through the Struggle for Life, the only great
factor in Evolution which up to this time has been dwelt upon, is self-evident.
It has a lineage all its own. Yet inexplicable though the circumstance be, the
history of this force, the most stupendous the world has ever known, has
scarcely even begun to be investigated. Every other principle in Nature has had
a thousand prophets; but this supreme dynamic has run its course through the
ages unobserved; its rise, so far as science is concerned, is unknown; its
story has never been told. But if any phenomenon or principle in Nature is
capable of treatment under the category of Evolution, this is. Love is not a
late arrival, an after-thought, with Creation. It is not a novelty of a
romantic civilization. It is not a pious word of religion. Its roots began to
grow with the first cell of life which budded on this earth. How great it is
the history of humanity bears witness; but how old it is and how solid, how
bound up with the very constitution of the world, how from the first of time an
eternal part of it, we are only now beginning to perceive. For the Evolution of
Love is a piece of pure Science. Love did not descend out of the clouds like
rain or snow. It was distilled on earth. And few of the romances which in after
years were to cluster round this immortal word are more wonderful than the
story of its birth and growth. Partly a product of crushed lives and
exterminated species, and partly of the choicest blossoms and sweetest essences
that ever came from the tree of life, it reached its spiritual perfection after
a history the most strange and chequered that the pages of Nature have to
record. What Love was at first, how crude and sour and embryonic a thing, it is
impossible to conceive. But from age to age, with immeasurable faith and
patience, by cultivations continuously repeated, by transplantings endlessly
varied, the unrecognizable germ of this new fruit was husbanded to its
maturity, and became the tree on which humanity, society, and civilization were
ultimately borne.
As the story of Evolution is usually told, Love--
the evolved form, as we shall see, of the Struggle for the Life of Others--has
not even a place. Almost the whole emphasis of science has fallen upon the
opposite--the animal Struggle for Life. Hunger was early seen by the
naturalists to be the first and most imperious appetite of all living things,
and the course of Nature came to be erroneously interpreted in terms of a
never-ending strife. Since there are vastly more creatures born than can ever
survive, since for every morsel of food provided a hundred claimants appear,
life to an animal was described to us as one long tragedy; and Poetry,
borrowing the imperfect creed, pictured Nature only as a blood-red fang. Before
we can go on to trace the higher progress of Love itself, it is necessary to
correct this misconception. And no words can be thrown away if they serve, in
whatever imperfect measure, to restore to honour what is in reality the supreme
factor in the Evolution of the world. To interpret the whole course of Nature
by the Struggle for Life is as absurd as if one were to define the character of
St. Francis by the tempers of his childhood. Worlds grow up as well as infants;
their tempers change, the better nature opens out, new objects of desire
appear, higher activities are added to the lower. The first chapter or two of
the story of Evolution may be headed the Struggle for Life; but take the book
as a whole and it is not a tale of battle. It is a Love-story.
The circumstances, as has been already pointed
out in the Introduction, under which the world at large received its main
impression of Evolution, obscured these later and happier features. The modern
revival of the Evolution theory occurred almost solely in connection with
investigations in the lower planes of Nature, and was due to the stimulus of
the pure naturalists, notably of Mr. Darwin. But what Mr. Darwin primarily
undertook to explain was simply the Origin of Species. His work was a study in
infancies, in rudiments; he emphasized the earliest forces and the humblest
phases of the world's development. The Struggle for Life was there the most
conspicuous fact--at least, on the surface; it formed the key-note of his
teaching; and the tragic side of Nature fixed itself in the popular mind. The
mistake the world made was two-fold: it mistook Darwinism for Evolution--a
specific theory of Evolution applicable to a single department for a universal
scheme; and it misunderstood Mr. Darwin himself. That the foundations of
Darwinism--or what was taken for Darwinism--were the foundations of all Nature
was assumed. Dazzled with the apparent solidity of this foundation, men made
haste to run up a structure which included the whole vast range of
life--vegetal, animal, social--based on a law which explained but half the
facts, and was only relevant, in the crude form in which it was universally
stated, for the childhood of the world. It was impossible for such an edifice
to stand. Natural history cannot in any case cover the whole facts of human
history, and, so interpreted, can only fatally distort them. The mistake had
been largely qualified had Mr. Darwin's followers even accepted his foundation
in its first integrity; but, perhaps because the author of the theory himself
but dimly apprehended the complement of his thesis, few seem to have perceived
that anything was amiss. Mr. Darwin's sagacity led him distinctly to foresee
that narrow interpretations of his great phrase "Struggle for Existence" were
certain to be made; and in the opening chapters of the Origin of
Species, he warns us that the term must be applied in its "large and
metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including
(which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in
leaving progeny."[78] In spite of this
warning, his overmastering emphasis on the individual Struggle for Existence
seems to have obscured, if not to his own mind, certainly to almost all his
followers, the truth that any other great factor in Evolution existed.
The truth is there are two Struggles for
Life in every living thing--the Struggle for Life, and the Struggle for the
Life of Others. The web of life is woven upon a double set of threads, the
second thread distinct in colour from the first, and giving a totally different
pattern to the finished fabric. As the whole aspect of the after-world depends
on this distinction of strands in the warp, it is necessary to grasp the
distinction with the utmost clearness. Already, in the introductory chapter,
the nature of the distinction has been briefly explained. But it is necessary
to be explicit here, even to redundancy. We have arrived at a point from which
the Ascent of Man takes a fresh departure, a point from which the course of
Evolution begins to wear an entirely altered aspect. No such consummation ever
before occurred in the progress of the world as the rise to potency in human
life of the Struggle for the Life of Others. The Struggle for the Life of
Others is the physiological name for the greatest word of ethics--Other-ism,
Altruism, Love. From Self-ism to Other-ism is the supreme transition of
history. It is therefore impossible to lodge in the mind with too much solidity
the simple biological fact on which the Altruistic Struggle rests. Were this a
late phase of Evolution, or a factor applicable to single genera, it would
still be of supreme importance; but it is radical, universal, involved in the
very nature of life itself. As matter is to be interpreted by Science in terms
of its properties, life is to be interpreted in terms of its functions. And
when we dissect down to that form of matter with which all life is associated,
we find it already discharging, in the humblest organisms visible by the
microscope, the function on which the stupendous superstructure of Altruism
indirectly comes to rest. Take the tiniest protoplasmic cell, immerse it in a
suitable medium, and presently it will perform two great acts--the two which
sum up life, which constitute the eternal distinction between the living and
the dead--Nutrition and Reproduction. At one moment, in pursuance of the
Struggle for Life, it will call in matter from without, and assimilate it to
itself; at another moment, in pursuance of the Struggle for the Life of Others,
it will set a portion of that matter apart, add to it, and finally give it away
to form another life. Even at its dawn life is receiver and giver; even in
protoplasm is Self-ism and Other-ism. These two tendencies are not fortuitous.
They have been lived into existence. They are not grafts on the tree of life,
they are its nature, its essential life. They are not painted on the canvas,
but woven through it.
The two main activities, then, of all living
things are Nutrition and Reproduction. The discharge of these functions
in plants, and largely in animals, sums up the work of life. The object of
Nutrition is to secure the life of the individual; the object of Reproduction
is to secure the life of the Species. These two objects are thus wholly
different. The first has a purely personal end; its attention is turned
inwards; it exists only for the present. The second in a greater or less degree
is impersonal; its attention is turned outwards; it lives for the future. One
of these objects, in other words, is Self-regarding; the other is
Other-regarding. Both, of course, at the outset are wholly selfish; both are
parts of the Struggle for Life. Yet see already in this non-ethical region a
parting of the ways. Selfishness and unselfishness are two supreme words in the
moral life. The first, even in physical Nature, is accompanied by the second.
In the very fact that one of the two mainsprings of life is Other-regarding
there lies a prophecy, a suggestion, of the day of Altruism. In organizing the
physiological mechanism of Reproduction in plants and animals Nature was
already laying wires on which, one far-off day, the currents of all higher
things might travel.
In itself, this second Struggle, this effort to
maintain the life of the species, is not less real than the first; the
provisions for effecting it are not less wonderful; the whole is not less a
part of the system of things. And, taken prophetically, the function of
Reproduction is as much greater than the function of Nutrition as the Man is
greater than the Animal, as the Soul is higher than the Body, as Co-operation
is stronger than Competition, as Love is stronger than Hate. If it were ever to
be charged against Nature that she was wholly selfish, here is the refutation
at the very start. One of the two fundamental activities of all life, whether
plant or animal, is Other-regarding. It is not said that the function of
Reproduction, say in a fern or in an oak, is an unselfish act, yet in a sense,
even though begotten of self, it is an other-regarding act. In the physical
world, to speak of the Struggle for Food as selfish, or to call the Struggle
for Species unselfish, are alike incongruous. But if the morality of Nature is
impugned on the ground of the universal Struggle for Life, it is at least as
relevant to refute the charge - by putting moral content into the universal
Struggle for Species. No true moral content can be put into either, yet the one
marks the beginning of Egoism, the other of Altruism. Almost the whole
self-seeking side of things has come down the line of the individual Struggle
for Life; almost the whole unselfish side of things is rooted in the Struggle
to preserve the life of others.
That an Other-regarding principle should sooner
or later appear on the world's stage was a necessity if the world was ever to
become a moral world. And as everything in the moral world has what may be
called a physical basis to begin with, it is not surprising to find in the mere
physiological process of Reproduction a physical forecast of the higher
relations, or, more accurately, to find the higher relations manifesting
themselves at first through physical relations. The Struggle for the Life of
Others formed an indispensable stepping-stone to the development of the
Other-regarding virtues. Nature always works with long roots. To conduct
Other-ism upward into the higher sphere without miscarriage, and to establish
it there for ever, Nature had to embed it in the most ancient past, so
organizing and endowing protoplasm that life could not go on without it, and
compelling its continuous activity by the sternest physiological necessity.
To say that there is a certain protest of the
mind against associating the highest ethical ends with forces in their first
stage almost physical, is to confess a truth which all must feel. Even Haeckel,
in contrasting the tiny rootlet of sex-attraction between two microscopic cells
with the mighty after-efflorescence of love in the history of mankind, is
staggered at the audacity of the thought, and pauses in the heart of a profound
scientific investigation to reflect upon it. After a panegyric in which he
says, "We glorify love as the source of the most splendid creations of art; of
the noblest productions of poetry, of plastic art and of music; we reverence in
it the most powerful factor in human civilization, the basis of family life,
and, consequently, of the development of the state"; . . . he adds, "So
wonderful is love, and so immeasurably important is its influence on mental
life, that in this point, more than in any other, `supernatural' causation
seems to mock every natural explanation." It is the mystery of Nature, that
between the loftiest spiritual heights and the lowliest physical depths, there
should seem to run a pathway which the intellect of Man may climb. Haeckel has
spoken, and rightly, from the standpoint of humanity; yet he continues, and
with equal right, from the standpoint of the naturalist. "Notwithstanding all
this, the comparative history of evolution leads us back very clearly and
indubitably to the oldest and simplest source of love, to the elective affinity
of two differing cells."[79]
SELF-SACRIFICE IN NATURE
It is not, however, in Haeckel's "elective
affinity of differing cells" that we must seek the physical basis of Altruism.
That may be the physical basis of a passion which is frequently miscalled Love;
but Love itself, in its true sense as Self-sacrifice, Love with all its
beautiful elements of sympathy, tenderness, pity, and compassion, has come down
a wholly different line. It is well to be clear about this at once, for the
function of Reproduction suggests to the biological mind a view of this factor
which would limit its action to a sphere which in reality forms but the merest
segment of the whole. The Struggle for the Life of Others has certainly
connected with it sex relations, as we shall see; but we can only use it
scientifically in its broad physiological sense, as literally a Struggling for
Others, a giving up self for Others. And these others are not Other-sexes. They
have nothing to do with sex. They are the fruits of Reproduction--the egg, the
seed, the nestling, the little child. So far from its chief manifestation being
within the sphere of sex it is in the care and nurture of the young, in the
provision everywhere throughout Nature for the seed and egg, in the endless and
infinite self-sacrifices of Maternity, that Altruism finds its main
expression.
That this is the true reading of the work of this
second factor appears even in the opening act of Reproduction in the lowest
plant or animal. Pledged by the first law of its being--the law of
self-preservation--to sustain itself, the organism is at the same moment
pledged by the second law to give up itself. Watch one of the humblest
unicellular organisms at the time of Reproduction. The cell, when it grows to
be a certain size, divides itself into two, and each part sets up an
independent life. Why it does so is now known. The protoplasm inside the
cell--the body as it were--needs continually to draw in fresh food. This is
secured by a process of imbibition or osmosis through the surrounding wall. But
as the cell grows large, there is not wall enough to pass in all the food the
far interior needs, for while the bulk increases as the cube of the diameter
the surface increases only as the square. The bulk of the cell, in short, has
outrun the absorbing surface; its hunger has outgrown its satisfactions; and
unless the cell can devise some way of gaining more surface it must starve.
Hence the splitting into two smaller cells. There is now more absorbing surface
than the two had when combined. When the two smaller cells have grown as large
as the original parent, income and expenditure will once more balance. As
growth continues, the waste begins to exceed the power of repair and the life
of the cell is again threatened. The alternatives are obvious. It must divide,
or die. If it divides, what has saved its life? Self-sacrifice. By giving up
its life as an individual it has brought forth two individuals, and these will
one day repeat the surrender. Here, with differences appropriate to their
distinctive spheres, is the first great act of the moral life. All life, in the
beginning, is self-contained, self-centred, imprisoned in a single cell. The
first step to a more abundant life is to get rid of this limitation. And the
first act of the prisoner is simply to break the walls of its cell. The plant
does this by a mechanical or physiological process; the moral being by a
conscious act which means at once the breaking-up of Self-ism and the recovery
of a larger self in Altruism. Biologically, Reproduction begins as rupture. It
is the release of the cell, full-fed, yet unsatiated, from itself. "Except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit."
These facts are not coloured to suit a purpose.
There is no other language in which science itself can state them.
"Reproduction begins as rupture. Large cells beginning to die, save their lives
by sacrifice. Reproduction is literally a life-saving against the approach of
death. Whether it be the almost random rupture of one of the more primitive
forms such as Schizogenes, or the overflow and separation of multiple
buds as in Arcella, or the dissolution of a few of the Infusorians, an
organism, which is becoming exhausted, saves itself and multiplies in
reproducing."[80] There is no Reproduction in
plant, animal, or Man which does not involve self-sacrifice. All that is moral,
and social, and other-regarding has come along the line of this function.
Sacrifice, moreover, as these physiological facts disclose, is not an accident,
nor an accompaniment of Reproduction, but an inevitable part of it. It is the
universal law and the universal condition of life. The act of fertilization is
the anabolic restoration, renewal, and rejuvenescence of a katabolic cell: it
is a resurrection of the dead brought about by a sacrifice of the living, a
dying of part of life in order to further life.
Pass from the unicellular plant to one of the
higher phanerogams, and the self-sacrificing function is seen at work with
still greater definiteness, for there we have a clearer contrast with the other
function. To the physiologist a tree is not simply a tree, but a complicated
piece of apparatus for discharging, in the first place, the function of
Nutrition. Root, trunk, branch, twig, leaf, are so many organs--mouths, lungs,
circulatory-system, alimentary canal--for carrying on to the utmost perfection
the Struggle for Life. But this is not all. There is another piece of apparatus
within this apparatus of a wholly different order. It has nothing to do with
Nutrition. It has nothing to do with the Struggle for Life. It is the flower.
The more its parts are studied, in spite of all homologies, it becomes more
clear that this is a construction of a unique and wonderful character. So
important has this extra apparatus seemed to science, that it has named the
great division of the vegetable kingdom to which this and all higher plants
belong, the Phanerogams--the flowering plants; and it recognizes the complexity
and physiological value of this reproductive specialty by giving them the place
of honour at the top of the vegetable creation. Watch this flower at work for a
little, and behold a miracle. Instead of struggling for life it lays down its
life. After clothing itself with a beauty which is itself the minister of
unselfishness, it droops, it wastes, it lays down its life. The tree still
lives; the other leaves are fresh and green; but this life within a life is
dead. And why? Because within this death is life. Search among the withered
petals, and there, in a cradle of cunning workmanship, are a hidden progeny of
clustering seeds--the gift to the future which this dying mother has brought
into the world at the cost of leaving it. The food she might have lived upon is
given to her children, stored round each tiny embryo with lavish care, so that
when they waken into the world the first helplessness of their hunger is met.
All the arrangements in plant-life which concern the flower, the fruit, and the
seed are the creations of the Struggle for the Life of Others.
No one, though science is supposed to rob all the
poetry from Nature, reverences a flower like the biologist. He sees in its
bloom the blush of the young mother; in its fading, the eternal sacrifice of
Maternity. A yellow primrose is not to him a yellow primrose. It is an
exquisite and complex structure added on to the primrose plant for the purpose
of producing other primrose plants. At the base of the flower, packed in a
delicate casket, lie a number of small white objects no larger than
butterflies' eggs. These are the eggs of the primrose. Into this casket, by a
secret opening, filmy tubes from the pollen grains--now enticed from their
hiding-place on the stamens and clustered on the stigma--enter and pour their
fertilizing fovilla through a microscopic gateway which opens in the wall of
the egg and leads to its inmost heart. Mysterious changes then proceed. The
embryo of a future primrose is born. Covered with many protective coats, it
becomes a seed. The original casket swells, hardens, is transformed into a
rounded capsule opening by valves or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this
capsule, crowded with seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of
Reproduction by dispersing them over the ground. There, by and by, they will
burst their enveloping coats, protrude their tiny radicles, and repeat the
cycle of their parents' sacrificial life.
With endless variations in detail, these are the
closing acts in the Struggle for the Life of Others in the vegetable world. We
have illustrated the point from plants, because this is the lowest region where
biological processes can be seen in action, and it is essential to establish
beyond dispute the fundamental nature of the reproductive function. From this
level onwards it might be possible to trace its influence, and growing
influence, throughout the whole range of the animal kingdom until it culminates
in its most consummate expression-- a human mother. Some of the links in this
unbroken ascent will be filled in at a later stage-- for the Evolution of
Maternity is so wonderful and so intricate as to deserve a treatment of its own
--but meantime we must pass on to notice a few of the other gifts which
Reproduction has bestowed upon the world. In a rigid sense, it is impossible to
separate the gains to humanity from the Reproductive function as distinguished
from those of the Nutritive. They are co-operators, not competitors, and their
apparently rival paths continuously intertwine. But mark a few of the things
that have mainly grown up around this second function, and decide whether or
not it be a worthy ally of the Struggle for Life in the Evolution of Man.
To begin at the most remote circumference,
consider what the world owes to-day to the Struggle for the Life of Others in
the world of plants. This is the humblest sphere in which it can offer any
gifts at all, yet these are already of such a magnitude that without them the
higher world would not only be inexpressibly the poorer, but could not continue
to exist. As we have just seen, all the arrangements in plant life which
concern the flower are the creations of the Struggle for the Life of Others.
For Reproduction alone the flower is created; when the process is over it
returns to the dust. This miracle of beauty is a miracle of Love. Its splendour
of colour, its variegations, its form, its symmetry, its perfume, its honey,
its very texture, are all notes of Love--Love-calls or Love-lures or
Love-provisions for the insect world, whose aid is needed to carry the pollen
from anther to stigma, and perfect the development of its young. Yet this is
but a thing thrown in, in giving something else. The Flower, botanically, is
the herald of the Fruit. The Fruit, botanically, is the cradle of the Seed.
Consider how great these further achievements are, how large a place in the
world's history is filled by these two humble things--the Fruits and Seeds of
plants. Without them the Struggle for Life itself would almost cease. The
animal Struggle for Life is a struggle for what? For Fruits and Seeds. All
animals in the long run depend for food upon Fruits and Seeds, or upon lesser
creatures which have utilized Fruits and Seeds. Three-fourths of the population
of the world at the present moment subsist upon rice. What is rice? It is a
seed; a product of Reproduction. Of the other fourth, three-fourths live upon
grains--barley, wheat, oats, millet. What are these grains? Seeds--stores of
starch or albumen which, in the perfect forethought of Reproduction, plants
bequeath to their offspring. The foods of the world, especially the children's
foods, are the foods of the children of plants, the foods which unselfish
activities store round the cradles of the helpless, so that when the sun wakens
them to their new world they may not want. Every plant in the world lives for
Others. It sets aside something, something costly, cared for, the highest
expression of its nature. The Seed is the tithe of Love, the tithe which Nature
renders to Man. When Man lives upon Seeds he lives upon Love. Literally,
scientifically, Love is Life. If the Struggle for Life has made Man, braced and
disciplined him, it is the Struggle for Love that sustains him.
Pass from the foods of Man to drinks, and the,
gifts of Reproduction once more all but exhaust the list. This may be mere
coincidence, but a coincidence which involves both food and drink is at least
worth noting The first and universal food of the world is milk, a product of
Reproduction. All distilled spirits are products of Reproduction. All malted
liquors are made from the embryos of plants. All wines are juices of the grape.
Even on the plane of the animal appetites, in mere relation to Man's hunger and
his thirst, the factor of Reproduction is thus seen to be fundamental. To
interpret the course of Evolution without this would be to leave the richest
side even of material Nature without an explanation. Retrace the ground even
thus hastily travelled over, and see how full Creation is of meaning, of
anticipation of good for Man, how far back begins the undertone of Love.
Remember that nearly all the beauty of the world is Love-beauty--the corolla of
the flower and the plume of the grass, the lamp of the firefly, the plumage of
the bird, the horn of the stag, the face of a woman; that nearly all the music
of the natural world is Love-music--the song of the nightingale, the call of
the mammal, the chorus of the insect, the serenade of the lover; that nearly
all the foods of the world are Love-foods--the date and the raisin, the banana
and the bread-fruit, the locust and the honey, the eggs, the grains, the seeds,
the cereals, and the legumes; that all the drinks of the world are
Love-drinks--the juices of the sprouting grain and the withered hop, the milk
from the udder of the cow, the wine from the Love-cup of the vine. Remember
that the Family, the crown of all higher life, is the creation of Love; that
Co-operation, which means power, which means wealth, which means leisure, which
therefore means art and culture, recreation and education, is the gift of Love.
Remember not only these things, but the diffusions of feeling which accompany
them, the elevations, the ideals, the happiness, the goodness, and the faith in
more goodness, and ask if it is not a world of Love in which we live.
CO-OPERATION IN NATURE
Though Co-operation is not exclusively the
gift of Reproduction, it is so closely related to it that we may next observe a
few of the fruits of this most definitely altruistic principle. For here is a
principle, not merely a series of interesting phenomena, profoundly rooted in
Nature and having for its immediate purpose the establishment of Other-ism. In
innumerable cases, doubtless, Co-operation has been induced rather by the
action of the Struggle for Life--a striking circumstance in itself, as showing
how the very selfish side of life has had to pay its debt to the larger
law--but in multitudes more it is directly allied with the Struggle for the
Life of Others.
For illustrations of the principle in general we
may begin with the very dawn of life. Every life at first was a single cell.
Co-operation was unknown. Each cell was self-contained and self-sufficient, and
as new cells budded from the parent they moved away and set up life for
themselves. This self-sufficiency leads to nothing in Evolution. Unicellular
organisms may be multiplied to infinity, but the vegetable kingdom can never
rise in height, or symmetry, or productiveness without some radical change. But
soon we find the co-operative principle beginning its mysterious integrating
work. Two, three, four, eight, ten cells club together and form a small mat, or
cylinder, or ribbon--the humblest forms of corporate plant-life--in which each
individual cell divides the responsibilities and the gains of living with the
rest. The colony succeeds; grows larger; its co-operations become more close
and varied. Division of labour in new directions arises for the common good;
leaves are organized for nutrition, and special cells for reproduction. All the
organs increase in specialization; and the time arrives when from cryptogams
the plant world bursts into flowers. A flower is organized for Co-operation. It
is not an individual entity, but a commune, a most complex social system.
Sepal, petal, stamen, anther, each has its separate role in the economy, each
necessary to the other and to the life of the species as a whole. Mutual aid
having reached this stage can never be arrested short of the extinction of
plant-life itself.
Even after this stage, so triumphant is the
success of the Co-operative Principle, that having exhausted the possibilities
of further development within the vegetable kingdom, it overflowed these
boundaries and carried the activities of flowers into regions which the
plant-world never invaded before. With a novelty and audacity unique in organic
Nature, the higher flowering plants, stimulated by Co-operation, opened
communication with two apparently forever unrelated worlds, and established
alliances which secured from the subjects of these distant states a perpetual
and vital service. The history of these relations forms the most entrancing
chapter in botanical science. But so powerfully has this illustration of the
principle appealed already to the popular imagination that it becomes a mere
form to re-state it. What interests us anew in these novel enterprises,
nevertheless, is that they are directly connected with the Reproductive
Struggle. For it is not for food that the plant-world voyages into foreign
spheres, but to perfect the supremer labour of its life.
The vegetable world is a world of still life. No
higher plant has the power to move to help its neighbour, or even to help
itself, at the most critical moment of its life. And it is through this very
helplessness that these new Co-operations are called forth. The fertilizing
pollen grows on one part of the flower, the stigma which is to receive it grows
on another, or it may be on a different plant. But as these parts cannot move
towards one another, the flower calls in the aid of moving things. Unconscious
of their vicarious service, the butterfly and the bee, as they flit from flower
to flower, or the wind as it blows across the fields, carry the fertilizing
dust to the waiting stigma, and complete that act without which in a generation
the species would become extinct. No flower in the world, at least no
entomophalous flower, can continuously develop healthy offspring without the
Co-operations of an insect; and multitudes of flowers without such aid could
never seed at all. It is to these Co-operations that we owe all that is
beautiful and fragrant in the flower-world. To attract the insect and
recompense it for its trouble, a banquet of honey is spread in the heart of the
flower; and to enable the visitor to find the nectar, the leaves of the flower
are made showy or conspicuous beyond all other leaves. To meet the case of
insects which love the dusk, many flowers are coloured white; for those which
move about at night and cannot see at all, the night-flowers load the darkness
with their sweet perfume. The loveliness, the variegations of shade and tint,
the ornamentations, the scents, the shapes, the sizes of flowers, are all the
gifts of Co-operation. The flower in every detail, in fact, is a monument to
the Co-operative Principle.
Scarcely less singular are the Co-operations
among flowers themselves, the better to attract the attention of the insect
world. Many flowers are so small and inconspicuous that insects might not
condescend to notice them. But Altruism is always inventive. Instead of
dispersing their tiny florets over the plant, these club together at single
points, so that by the multitude of numbers an imposing show is made. Each of
the associating flowers in these cases preserves its individuality, and--as we
see in the Elder or the Hemlock--continues to grow on its own flower-stalk. But
in still more ingenious species the partners to a floral advertisement
sacrifice their separate stems and cluster close together on a common head. The
Thistle, for example, is not one flower, but a colony of flowers, each complete
in all its parts, but all gaining the advantage of conspicuousness by densely
packing themselves together. In the Sunflowers and many others the sacrifice is
carried still further. Of the multitude of florets clustered together to form
the mass of colour, a few cease the development of the reproductive organs
altogether, and allow their whole strength to go towards adding visibility to
the mass. The florets in the centre of the group, packed close together, are
unable to do anything in this direction; but those on the margin expand the
perianth into a blazing circle of flame, and leave the deep work of
Reproduction to those within. What are the advantages gained by all this mutual
aid? That it makes them the fittest to survive. These Co-operative Plants are
among the most numerous, most vigorous, and most widely diffused in Nature.
Self-sacrifice and Co-operation are thus recognized as sound in principle. The
blessing of Nature falls upon them. The words themselves, in any more than a
merely physical sense, are hopelessly out of court in any scientific
interpretation of things. But the point to mark is, that on the mechanical
equivalents of what afterwards come to have ethical relations Natural Selection
places a premium. Non-co-operative or feebly co-operative organisms go to the
wall. Those which give mutual aid survive and people the world with their
kind.
Without pausing to note the intricate
Co-operations of flowers which reward the eye of the specialist--the subtle
alliance with Space in Dioecious flowers; with Time in Dichogamous species, and
with Size in the Dimorphic and Trimorphic forms--consider for a moment the
extension of the principle to the Seed and Fruit. Helpless, single-handed, as
is a higher plant, with regard to the efficient fertilizing of its flowers, an
almost more difficult problem awaits it when it comes to the dispersal of its
seeds. If each seed fell where it grew, the spread of the species would shortly
be at an end. But Nature, working on the principle of Co-operation, is once
more redundant in its provisions. By a series of new alliances the offspring
are given a start on distant and unoccupied ground; and so perfect are the
arrangements in this department of the Struggle for the Life of Others that
single plants, immovably rooted in the soil, are yet able to distribute their
children over the world. By a hundred devices the fruits and seeds when ripe
are entrusted to outside hands provided with wing or parachute and launched
upon the wind, attached by cunning contrivances to bird and beast, or dropped
into stream and wave and ocean-current, and so transported over the earth.
If we turn to the Animal Kingdom, the Principle
of Co-operation everywhere once more confronts us. It is singular that, with
few exceptions, science should still know so little of the daily life of even
the common animals. A few favourite mammals, some birds, three or four of the
more picturesque and clever of the insects--these almost exhaust the list of
those whose ways are thoroughly known. But, looking broadly at Nature, one
general fact is striking--the more social animals are in overwhelming
preponderance over the unsocial. Mr. Darwin's dictum, that "those communities
which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would
flourish best" is wholly proved. Run over the names of the commoner or more
dominant mammals, and it will be found that they are those which have at least
a measure of sociability. The cat-tribe excepted, nearly all live together in
herds or troops--the elephant, for instance, the buffalo, deer, antelope,
wild-goat, sheep, wolf, jackal, reindeer, hippopotamus, zebra, hyena, and seal.
These are mammals, observe--an association of sociability in its highest
developments with reproductive specialization. Cases undoubtedly exist where
the sociability may not be referable primarily to this function; but in most
the chief Co-operations are centred in Love. So advantageous are all forms of
mutual service that the question may be fairly asked, whether after all
Co-operation and Sympathy--at first instinctive, afterwards reasoned--are not
the greatest facts even in organic Nature? To quote the words of Prince
Kropotkin: "As soon as we study animals--not in laboratories and museums only,
but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppes and the mountains--we at once
perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination
going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of
animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps more, of mutual
support, mutual aid, and mutual defence, amidst animals belonging to the same
species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of
Nature as mutual struggle. . . . If we resort to an indirect test and
ask Nature `Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each
other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals
which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more
chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest
development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts
which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we
may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual
struggle; but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far
greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and
character as ensure the maintenance and further development of the species,
together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the
individual, with the least waste of energy."[81]
In the large economy of Nature, almost more than
within these specific regions, the interdependence of part with part is
unalterably established. The system of things, from top to bottom, is an
uninterrupted series of reciprocities. Kingdom corresponds with kingdom,
organic with inorganic. Thus, to carry on the larger agriculture of Nature,
myriads of living creatures have to be retained in the earth itself--in
the earth--and to prepare and renew the soils in which the otherwise exhausted
ground may keep up her continuous gifts of vegetation. Ages before Man appeared
with his tools of husbandry, these agriculturists of Nature--in humid countries
the Worm, in sub-tropical regions the White Ant--ploughed and harrowed the
earth, so that without the Co-operations of these most lowly forms of life, the
higher beauty and fruitfulness of the world had been impossible. The very
existence of animal life, to take another case of broad economy, is possible
only through the mediation of the plant. No animal has the power to satisfy one
single impulse of hunger without the Co-operation of the vegetable world. It is
one of the mysteries of organic chemistry that the Chlorophyll contained in the
green parts of plants alone among substances has the power to break up the
mineral kingdom and utilize the products as food. Though detected recently in
the tissues of two of the very lowest animals, Chlorophyll is the peculiar
possession of the vegetable kingdom, and forms the solitary point of contact
between Man and all higher animals and their supply of food. Every grain of
matter therefore eaten by Man, every movement of the body, every stroke of work
done by muscle or brain, depends upon the contribution of a plant, or of an
animal which has eaten a plant. Remove the vegetable kingdom, or interrupt the
flow of its unconscious benefactions, and the whole higher life of the world
ends. Everything, indeed, came into being because of something else, and
continues to be because of its relations to something else. The matter of the
earth is built up of co-operating atoms; it owes its existence, its motion, and
its stability to co-operating stars. Plants and animals are made of
co-operating cells, nations of cooperating men. Nature makes no move, Society
achieves no end, the Cosmos advances not one step that is not dependent on
Co-operation; and while the discords of the world disappear with growing
knowledge, Science only reveals with increasing clearness the universality of
its reciprocities.
But to return to the more direct effects of
Reproduction. After creating Others there lay before Evolution a not less
necessary task--the task of uniting them together. To create units in
indefinite quantities and scatter them over the world is not even to take one
single step in progress. Before any higher evolution can take place these units
must by some means be brought into relation so as not only to act together, but
to react upon each other. According to well-known biological laws, it is only
in combinations, whether of atoms, cells, animals, or human beings, that
individual units can make any progress, and to create such combinations is in
every case the first condition of development. Hence the first commandment of
Evolution everywhere is "Thou shalt mass, segregate, combine, grow large."
Organic Evolution, as Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us, "is primarily the formation
of an aggregate." No doubt the necessities of the Struggle for Life tended in
many ways to fulfil this condition, and the organization of primitive
societies, both animal and human, are largely its creation. Under its influence
these were called together for mutual protection and mutual help; and
Co-operations induced in this way have played an important part in Evolution.
But the Co-operations brought about by Reproduction are at once more radical,
more universal, and more efficient. The Struggle for Life is in part a
disruptive force. The Struggle for the Life of Others is wholly a social force.
The social efforts of the first are secondary; those of the last are primary.
And had it not been for the stronger and unbreakable bond which the Struggle
for the Life of Others introduced into the world, the organization of Societies
had never even been begun. How subtly Reproduction effects its purpose an
illustration will make plain. And we shall select it again from the lowest
world of life, so that the fundamental nature of this factor may be once more
vindicated on the way.
More than two thousand years ago Herodotus
observed a remarkable custom in Egypt. At a certain season of the year the
Egyptians went into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and,
bringing them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the
date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but they knew
that if they neglected it the date crop would be poor or wholly lost. Herodotus
offers the quaint explanation that along with these branches there came from
the desert certain flies possessed of a "vivific virtue," which somehow lent an
exuberant fertility to the dates. But the true rationale of the incantation is
now explained. Palm trees, like human beings, are male and female. The garden
plants, the date bearers, were females; the desert plants were males; and the
waving of the branches over the females meant the transference of the
fertilizing pollen dust from the one to the other.
Now consider, in this far away province of the
vegetable kingdom, the strangeness of this phenomenon. Here are two trees
living wholly different lives, they are separated by miles of desert sand; they
are unconscious of one another's existence; and yet they are so linked together
that their separation into two is a mere illusion. Physiologically they are one
tree; they cannot dwell apart. It is nothing to the point that they are neither
dowered with locomotion nor the power of conscious choice. The point is that
there is that in Nature which unites these seemingly disunited things, which
effects combinations and co-operations where one would least believe them
possible, which sustains by arrangements of the most elaborate kind
inter-relations between tree and tree. By a device the most subtle of all that
guard the higher Evolution of the world--the device of Sex--Nature accomplishes
this task of throwing irresistible bonds around widely separate things, and
establishing such sympathies between them that they must act together or
forfeit the very life of their kind. Sex is a paradox; it is that which
separates in order to unite. The same mysterious mesh which Nature threw over
the two separate palms, she threw over the few and scattered units which were
to form the nucleus of Mankind.
Picture the state of primitive Man; his fear of
other primitive Men; his hatred of them; his unsocialibility; his isolation;
and think how great a thing was done by Sex in merely starting the
crystallization of humanity. At no period, indeed, was Man ever utterly alone.
There is no such thing in nature as a man, or for the matter of that as
an animal, except among the very humblest forms. Wherever there is a
higher animal there is another animal; wherever there is a savage there is
another savage--the other half of him, a female savage. This much, at least Sex
has done for the world-it has abolished the numeral one. Observe, it has
not simply discouraged the existence of one; it has abolished the existence of
one. The solitary animal must die, and can leave no successor. Unsociableness,
therefore, is banished out of the world: it has become the very condition of
continued existence that there should always be a family group, or at least
pair. The determination of Nature to lay the foundation stone of corporate
national life at this point, and to embed Sociability for ever in the
constitution of humanity, is only obvious when we reflect with what
extraordinary thoroughness this Evolution of Sex was carried out. There is no
instance in Nature of Division of Labour being brought to such extreme
specialization. The two sexes were not only to perform different halves of the
same function, but each so entirely lost the power of performing the whole
function that even with so great a thing at stake as the continuance of the
species, one could not discharge it. Association, combination, mutual help,
fellowship, affection--things on which all material and moral progress would
ultimately turn--were thus forced upon the world at the bayonet's point.
This hint, that the course of development is
taking a social, rather than an individual direction, is of immense
significance. If that can be brought about by the Struggle for the Life of
Others--and in the next chapters we shall see that it has been--there can be no
dispute about the rank of the factor which consummates it. Along the line of
the physiological function of Reproduction, in association with its induced
activities and relations, not only has Altruism entered the world, but along
with it the necessary field for its expansion and full expression. If Nature is
to be read solely in the light of the Struggle for Life, these ethical
anticipations--and as yet we are but at the beginning of them--for a social
world and a moral life, must remain the stultification both of science and of
teleology.
THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SEX
Next among the gifts of Reproduction fall to
be examined some further contributions yielded by the new and extraordinary
device which a moment ago leaped into prominence--Sex. The direct, and
especially the collateral, issues here are of such significance that it will be
essential to study them in detail. Realize the novelty and originality of this
most highly specialized creation, and it will be seen at once that something of
exceptional moment must lie behind it. Here is a phenomenon which stands
absolutely alone on the field of Nature. There is not only nothing at all like
it in the world, but while everything else has homologues or analogues
somewhere in the cosmos, this is without any parallel. Familiarity has so
accustomed us to it that we accept the sex separation as a matter of course;
but no words can do justice to the wonder and novelty of this strange line of
cleavage which cuts down to the very root of being in everything that lives.
No theme of equal importance has received less
attention than this from evolutionary philosophy. The single problems which sex
suggests have been investigated with a keenness and brilliance of treatment
never before brought to bear in this mysterious region; and Mr. Darwin's theory
of sexual selection, whether true or false, has called attention to a multitude
of things in living Nature which seem to find a possible explanation here. But
the broad and simple fact that this division into maleness and femaleness
should run between almost every two of every plant and every animal in
existence, must have implications of a quite exceptional kind.
How deep, from the very dawn of life, this rent
between the two sexes yawns is only now beginning to be seen. Examine one of
the humblest water weeds--the Spirogyra. It consists of waving threads or
necklaces of cells, each plant to the eye the exact duplicate of the other. Yet
externally alike as they seem, the one has the physiological value of the male,
the other of the female. Though a primitive method of Reproduction, the process
in this case foreshadows the law of all higher vegetable life. From this point
upwards, though there are many cases where Reproduction is asexual, in nearly
every family of plants a Reproduction by spores takes place, and where it does
not take place its absence is abnormal, and to be accounted for by
degeneration. When we reach the higher plants the differences of sex become as
marked as among the higher animals. Male and female flowers grow upon separate
trees, or live side by side on the same branch, yet so unlike one another in
form and colour that the untrained eye would never know them to be relatives.
Even when male and female are grown on the same flower-stalk and enclosed in a
common perianth, the hermaphroditism is generally but apparent, owing to the
physiological barriers of heteromorphism and dichogamy. Sex-separation, indeed,
is not only distinct among flowering plants, but is kept up by a variety of
complicated devices, and a return to hermaphroditism is prevented by the most
elaborate precautions.
When we turn to the animal kingdom again, the
same great contrast arrests us. Half a century ago, when Balbiani described the
male and female elements in microscopic infusorians, his facts were all but
rejected by science. But further research has placed it beyond all doubt that
the beginnings of sex are synchronous almost with those shadowings in of life.
From a state marked by a mere varying of the nuclear elements, a state which
might almost be described as one antecedent to sex, the sex-distinction slowly
gathers definition, and passing through an infinite variety of forms, and with
countless shades of emphasis, reaches at last the climax of separateness which
is observed among birds and mammals. Often, even in the Metazoa, this
separateness is outwardly obscured, as in star-fishes and reptiles; often it is
matter of common observation; while sometimes it is carried to such a pitch of
specialization that only the naturalist identifies the two wholly unlike
creatures as male and female. Through the whole wide field of Nature then this
gulf is fixed. Each page of the million-leaved Book of Species must be as it
were split in two, the one side for the male, the other for the female.
Classification naturally takes little note of this distinction; but it is
fundamental. Unlikenesses between like things are more significant than
unlikenesses of unlike things. And the unlikenesses between male and female are
never small, and almost always great. Though the fundamental difference is
internal the external form varies; size, colour, and a multitude of more or
less striking secondary sexual characteristics separate the one from the other.
Besides this, and more important than all, the cycle of a year's life is never
the same for the male as for the female; they are destined from the beginning
to pursue different paths, to live for different ends.
Now what does all this mean? To say that the
sex-distinction is necessary to sustain the existence of life in the world is
no answer, since it is at least possible that life could have been kept up
without it. From the facts of Parthenogenesis, illustrated in bees and
termites, it is now certain that Reproduction can be effected without
fertilization; and the circumstance that fertilization is nevertheless the
rule, proves this method of Reproduction, though not a necessity, to be in some
way beneficial to life. It is important to notice this absence of necessity for
sex having been created--the absence of any known necessity-- from the merely
physiological standpoint. Is it inconceivable that Nature should sometimes do
things with an ulterior object, an ethical one, for instance? To no one with
any acquaintance with Nature's ways will it be possible to conceive of such a
purpose as the sole purpose. In these early days when sex was instituted it was
a physical universe. Undoubtedly sex then had physiological advantages; but
when in a later day the ethical advantages become visible, and rise to such
significance that the higher world nearly wholly rests upon them, we are
entitled, as viewing the world from that higher level, to have our own
suspicions as to a deeper motive underlying the physical.
Apart from bare necessity, it is further
remarkable that no very clear advantage of the sex-distinction has yet been
made out by Science. Hensen and Van Beneden are able to see in conjugation no
more than a Verjungung or rejuvenescence of the species. The living
machinery in its wearing activities runs down and has to be wound up again; to
keep life going some - fresh impulse must be introduced from time to time; or
the protoplasm, exhausting itself, seeks restoration in fertilization and
starts afresh.[82] To Hatschek it is a remedy
against the action of injurious variations; while to Weismann it is simply the
source of variations. "I do not know," says the latter, "what meaning can be
attributed to sexual reproduction other than the creation of hereditary
individual characters to form the material on which natural selection may work.
Sexual reproduction is so universal in all classes of multicellular organisms,
and nature deviates so rarely from it, that it must necessarily be of
pre-eminent importance. If it be true that new species are produced by
processes of selection, it follows that the development of the whole organic
world depends on these processes, and the part that amphigony has to play in
nature, by rendering selection possible among multicellular organisms, is not
only important, but of the very highest imaginable importance."[83]
These views may be each true; and probably, in a
measure, are; but the fact remains that the later psychical implications of sex
are of such transcendent character as to throw all physical considerations into
the shade. When we turn to these, their significance is as obvious as in the
other case it was obscure. This will appear if we take even the most
distinctively biological of these theories--that of Weismann. Sex, to him, is
the great source of variation in Nature, in plainer English, of the variety of
organisms in the world. Now this variety, though not the main object of sex, is
precisely what it was essential for Evolution by some means to bring about. The
first work of Evolution always is, as we have seen, to create a mass of similar
things--atoms, cells, men--and the second is to break up that mass into as many
different kinds of things as possible. Aggregation masses the raw material,
collects the clay for the potter; differentiation destroys the featureless
monotonies as fast as they are formed, and gives them back in new and varied
forms. Now if Evolution designed, among other things, to undertake the
differentiation of Mankind, it could not have done it more effectively than
through the device of sex. To the blending, or to the mosaics, of the different
characteristics of father and mother, and of many previous fathers and mothers,
under the subtle wand of heredity, all the varied interest of the human world
is due. When one considers the passing on, not so much of minute details of
character and disposition, but of the dominant temperament and type; the new
proportion in which already inextricably mingled tendencies are re-arranged,
and the changed environment in which, with each new generation, they must
unfold; it is seen how perfect an instrument for variegating humanity lies
here. Had sex done nothing more than make an interesting world, the debt of
Evolution to Reproduction had been incalculable.
THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MATERNITY
But let us not be diverted from the main
stream by these secondary results of the sex-distinction. A far more important
implication lies before us. The problem that remains for us to settle is as to
how the merely physical forms of Other-ism began to be accompanied or overlaid
by ethical characters. And the solution of this problem requires nothing more
than a consideration of the broad and fundamental fact of sex itself. In what
it is, and in what it necessarily implies, we shall find the clue to the
beginnings of the social and moral order of the world. For, rising on the one
hand out of maleness and on the other hand out of femaleness, developments take
place of such a kind as to constitute this the turning-point of the world's
moral history. Let it be said at once that these developments are not to be
sought for in the direction in which, from the nature of the factors, one might
hastily suppose that they lay. What seems to be imminent at this stage, and as
the natural end to which all has led up, is the institution of affection in
definite forms between male and female. But we are on a very different track.
Affection between male and female is a later, less fundamental, and, in its
beginnings, less essential growth; and long prior to its existence, and largely
the condition of it, is the even more beautiful development whose progress we
have now to trace. The basis of this new development is indeed far removed from
the mutual relations of sex with sex. For it lies in maleness and femaleness
themselves, in their inmost quality and essential nature, in what they lead to
and what they become. The superstructure, certainly, owes much to the psychical
relations of father and mother, husband and wife, but the Evolution of Love
began ages before these were established.
What exactly maleness is, and what femaleness,
has been one of the problems of the world. At least five hundred theories of
their origin are already in the field, but the solution seems to have baffled
every approach. Sex has remained almost to the present hour an ultimate mystery
of creation, and men seem to know as little what it is as whence it came. But
among the last words of modern science there are one or two which spell out a
partial clue to both of these mysterious problems. The method by which this has
been reached is almost for the first time a purely biological one, and if its
inferences are still uncertain, it has at least established some important
facts.
Starting with the function of nutrition as the
nearest ally of Reproduction, the newer experimenters have discovered cases in
which sex apparently has been determined by the quantity and quality of the
food-supply. And in actual practice it has been found possible, in the case of
certain organisms, to produce either maleness or femaleness by simply varying
their nutrition--femaleness being an accompaniment of abundant food, maleness
of the reverse. When Yung, to take an authentic experiment, began his
observations on tadpoles, he ascertained that in the ordinary natural condition
the number of males and females produced was not far from equal--the percentage
being about 57 female to 43 male, thus giving the females a preponderance of
seven. But when a brood of tadpoles was sumptuously fed the percentage of
females rose to 78, and when a second brood was treated even more liberally,
the number amounted to 81. In a third experiment with a still more highly
nutritious diet, the result of the high feeding was more remarkable, for in
this case 92 females were produced and only 8 males. In the case of butterflies
and moths, it has been found that if caterpillars are starved before entering
the chrysalis state the offspring are males, while others of the same brood,
when highly nourished, develop into females. A still more instructive case is
that of the aphides, the familiar plant-lice of our gardens. During the warmth
of summer, when food is abundant, these insects produce parthenogenetically
nothing but females, while in the famines of later autumn they give birth to
males. In striking confirmation of this fact it has been proved that in a
conservatory where the aphides enjoy perpetual summer, the parthenogenetic
succession of females continued to go on for four years and stopped only when
the temperature was lowered and food diminished. Then males were at once
produced.[84] It will no longer be said that
science is making no progress with this unique problem when it is apparently
able to determine sex by turning off or on the steam in a green house. With
regard to bees the relation between nutrition and sex seems equally
established. "The three kinds of inmates in a bee-hive are known to everyone as
queens, workers, and drones; or, as fertile females, imperfect females, and
males. What are the factors determining the differences between these three
forms? In the first place, it is believed that the eggs which give rise to
drones are not fertilized, while those that develop into queens and workers
have the normal history. But what fate rules the destiny of the two latter,
determining whether a given ovum will turn out the possible mother of a new
generation, or remain at the lower level of a non-fertile working female? It
seems certain that the fate mainly lies in the quantity and quality of the
food. Royal diet, and plenty of it, develops the future queens . . Up to a
certain point the nurse bees can determine the future destiny of their charge
by changing the diet, and this in some cases is certainly done. If a larva on
the way to become a worker receive by chance some crumbs from the royal
superfluity, the reproductive function may develop, and what are called
`fertile workers,' to a certain degree above the average abortiveness, result;
or, by direct intention, a worker grub may be reared into a queen bee."[85]
It is unnecessary to prolong the illustration,
for the point it is wished to emphasize is all but in sight. As we have just
witnessed, the tendency of abundant nutrition is to produce females, while
defective nutritive conditions produce males. This means that in so far as
nutrition reacts on the bodies of animals--and nothing does so more--there will
be a growing difference, as time begins to accumulate the effects, between the
organization and life-habit of male and female respectively. In the male,
destructive processes, a preponderance of waste over repair, will prevail; the
result will be a katabolic habit of body; in the female the constructive
processes will be in the ascendant, occasioning an opposite or anabolic habit.
Translated into less technical language, this means that the predominating note
in the male will be energy, motion, activity; while passivity, gentleness,
repose, will characterize the female. These words, let it be noticed, psychical
though they seem, are yet here the coinages of physiology. No other terms
indeed would describe the difference. Thus Geddes and Thomson: "The female
cochineal insect, laden with reserve-products in the form of the well-known
pigment, spends much of its life like a mere quiescent gall on the cactus
plant. The male, on the other hand, in his adult state, is agile, restless, and
short-lived. Now this is no mere curiosity of the entomologist, but in reality
a vivid emblem of what is an average truth throughout the world of animals--the
preponderating passivity of the females, the freedomness and activity of the
males." Rolph's words, because he writes neither of men nor of animals, but
goes back to the furthest recess of Nature and characterizes the cell itself,
are still more significant: "The less nutritive and therefore smaller,
hungrier, and more mobile organism is the male; the more nutritive and usually
more quiescent is the female."
Now what do these facts indicate? They indicate
that maleness is one thing and femaleness another, and that each has been
specialized from the beginning to play a separate role in the drama of life.
Among primitive peoples, as largely in modern times, "The tasks which demand a
powerful development of muscle and bone, and the resulting capacity for
intermittent spurts of energy, involving corresponding periods of rest, fall to
the man; the care of the children and all the various industries which radiate
from the hearth, and which call for an expenditure of energy more continuous,
but at a lower tension, fall to the woman."[86] Whether this or any theory of the origin of Sex be proved
or unproved, the fact remains, and is everywhere emphasized in Nature, that a
certain constitutional difference exists between male and female, a difference
inclining the one to a robuster life, and implanting in the other a certain
mysterious bias in the direction of what one can only call the womanly
disposition.
On one side of the great line of cleavage have
grown up men--those whose lives for generations and generations have been
busied with one particular set of occupations; on the other side have lived and
developed women--those who for generations have been busied with another and a
widely different set of occupations. And as occupations have inevitable
reactions upon mind, character, and disposition, these two have slowly become
different in mind and character and disposition. That cleavage therefore, which
began in the merely physical region, is now seen to extend into the psychical
realm, and ends by supplying the world with two great and forever separate
types. No efforts, or explanations, or expostulations can ever break down that
distinction between maleness and femaleness, or make it possible to believe
that they were not destined from the first of time to play a different part in
human history. Male and female never have been and never will be the same. They
are different in origin; they have travelled to their destinations by different
routes; they have had different ends in view. The result is that they are
different, and the contribution therefore of each to the evolution of the human
race is special and unique. By and by it will be our duty to mark what Man, in
virtue of his peculiar gift, has done for the world; part indeed of his
contribution has been already recorded here. To him has been mainly assigned
the fulfilment of the first great function--the Struggle for Life. Woman, whose
higher contribution has not yet been named. is the chosen instrument for
carrying on the Struggle for the Life of Others. Man's life, on the whole, is
determined chiefly by the function of Nutrition; Woman's by the function of
Reproduction. Man satisfies the one by going out into the world, and in the
rivalries of war and the ardours of the chase, in conflict with Nature, and
amid the stress of industrial pursuits, fulfilling the law of
Self-preservation; Woman completes her destiny by occupying herself with the
industries and sanctities of the home, and paying the debt of Motherhood to her
race.
Now out of this initial difference--so slight at
first as to amount to no more than a scarcely perceptible bias--have sprung the
most momentous issues. For by every detail of their separate careers the two
original tendencies--to outward activity in the man; to inward activity,
miscalled passivity, in the woman--became accentuated as time went on. The one
life tended towards selfishness, the other towards unselfishness. While one
kept Individualism alive, the other kept Altruism alive. Blended in the
children, these two master-principles from this their starting-point acted and
reacted all through history, seeking that mean in which true life lies. Thus by
a Division of Labour appointed by the will of Nature, the conditions for the
Ascent of Man were laid.
But by far the most vital point remains. For we
have next to observe how this bears directly on the theme we set out to
explore--the Evolution of Love. The passage from mere Other-ism, in the
physiological sense, to Altruism, in the moral sense, occurs in connection with
the due performance of her natural task by her to whom the Struggle for the
Life of Others is assigned. That task, translated into one great word, is
Maternity--which is nothing but the Struggle for the Life of Others
transfigured, transferred to the moral sphere. Focused in a single human being,
this function, as we rise in history, slowly begins to be accompanied by those
heaven-born psychical states which transform the femaleness of the older order
into the Motherhood of the new. When one follows Maternity out of the depths of
lower Nature, and beholds it ripening in quality as it reaches the human
sphere, its character, and the character of the processes by which it is
evolved, appear in their full divinity. For of what is Maternity the mother? Of
children? No; for these are the mere vehicle of its spiritual manifestation. Of
affection between female and male? No; for that, contrary to accepted beliefs,
has little to do in the first instance with sex-relations. Of what then? Of
Love itself, of Love as Love, of Love as Life, of Love as Humanity, of Love as
the pure and undefiled fountain of all that is eternal in the world. In the
long stillness which follows the crisis of Maternity, witnessed only by the new
and helpless life which is at once the last expression of the older function
and the unconscious vehicle of the new, Humanity is born. By an alchemy which
remains, and must ever remain, the secret of Nature, the physiological forces
give place to those higher principles of sympathy, solicitude, and affection
which from this time onwards are to change the course of Evolution and
determine a diviner destiny for a Human Race:
"Earth's
insufficiency
Here grows to event;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The woman-soul leadeth us
Upward and on."[87]
So stupendous is
this transition that the mere possibility staggers us. Separated by the whole
diameter of conscious intelligence and will, what possible affinities can exist
between the Reproductive and the Altruistic process? What analogy can ever
exist between the earlier physiological Struggle for the Life of Others and the
later Struggle of Love? Yet, different though their accompaniments may be, when
closely examined they are seen, at every essential point, running parallel with
each other. The object in either case is to continue the life of the Species;
the essence of both is self-sacrifice; the first manifestation of the sacrifice
is to make provision for Others by helping them to draw the first few breaths
of life. But what has Love to do with Species? Can Altruism have reference to
mere life? The answer is, that in its first beginnings it has almost nothing to
do with anything else. For, consider the situation. Reproduction, let us
suppose, has done its most perfect work on the physiological plane: the result
is that a human child is born into the world. But the work of Reproduction
being to Struggle for the Life of the Species, its task is only complete when
it secures that the child, representing the Species, shall live. If the child
dies, Reproduction has failed; the Species, so far as this effort is concerned,
comes to an end. Now, can Reproduction as a merely physiological function
complete this process? It can not. What can? Only the Mother's Care and Love.
Without these, in a few hours or days, the new life must perish; the earlier
achievement of Reproduction is in vain. Hence there comes a moment when these
two functions meet, when they act as complements to each other; when Physiology
hands over its unfinished task to Ethics; when Evolution--if for once one may
use a false distinction--depends upon the `moral' process to complete the work
the `cosmic ` process has begun.
At what precise stage of the Ascent, in
association with what class of animals, Other-ism began to shade into Altruism
in the ethical sense, is immaterial. Whether the Altruism in the early stages
is real or apparent, profound or superficial, voluntary or automatic, does not
concern us. What concerns us is that the Altruism is there; that the day came
when, even though a rudiment, it was a reality; above all that the arrangements
for introducing and perfecting it were realities. The prototype, for ages, may
have extended only to form, to the outward relation; for further ages no more
Altruism may have existed than was absolutely necessary to the preservation of
the species. But to fix the eye upon it at that remote stage and assert that,
because it was apparently then automatic, it must therefore have been automatic
ever after, is to forget the progressive character of Evolution as well as to
ignore facts. While many of the apparent Other-regarding acts among animals are
purely selfish and purely automatic, undoubtedly there are instances where more
is involved. Apart from their own offspring--in relation to which there may
always be the suspicion of automatism; and apart from domestic animals--which
are open to the further suspicion of having been trained to it-- animals act
spontaneously towards other animals; they have their playmates; they make
friendships, and very attached friendships. Much more, indeed, has been claimed
for them; but it is not necessary to claim even this much. No evolutionist
would expect among animals--domestic animals always excepted--any considerable
development of Altruism, because the physiological and psychical conditions
which directly led to its development in Man's case were fulfilled in no other
creature.[88]
Simple as seems the method by which the first few
sparks of Love were nursed into flame in the bosom of Maternity, the details of
the evolution are so intricate as to require a chapter to themselves. But the
emphasis which Nature puts on this process may be judged of by the fact that
one half the human race had to be set apart to sustain and perfect it. To the
evolutionist who discerns the true proportions of the forces which made for the
Ascent of Man, one of the two or three great events in the natural history of
the world was the institution of sex. It is here that the master-forces which
were to dominate the latest and highest stages of the process start; here,
specialized into Egoism and Altruism, they part; and here, each having run its
different course, they meet to distribute their gains to a succeeding race.
With the initial impulses of their sex strengthened by the different
life-routine to which each led, these two forces ran their course through
history, determining by their ceaseless reactions the order and progress of the
world, or when wrongly balanced, its disorder and decay. According to
evolutional philosophy there are three great marks or necessities of all true
development--Aggregation, or the massing of things; Differentiation, or the
varying of things ; and Integration, or the re-uniting of things into higher
wholes. All these processes are brought about by sex more perfectly than by any
other factor known. From a careful study of this one phenomenon, science could
almost decide that Progress was the object of Nature, and that Altruism was the
object of Progress.
This vital relation between Altruism in its early
stages and physiological ends, neither implies that it is to be limited by
these ends nor defined in terms of them. Everything must begin somewhere. And
there is no aphorism which the labours of Evolution, at each fresh beginning,
have tended more consistently to endorse than "first that which is natural,
then that which is spiritual." How this great saying also disposes of the
difficulty, which appears and reappears with every forward step in Evolution,
as to the qualitative terms in which higher developments are to be judged, is
plain. Because the spiritual to our vision emerges from the natural, or, to
speak more accurately, is convoyed upwards by the natural for the first
stretches of its ascent, it is not necessarily contained in that natural, nor
is it to be defined in terms of it. What comes "first" is not the criterion of
what comes last. Few things are more forgotten in criticism of Evolution than
that the nature of a thing is not dependent on its origin, that one's whole
view of a long, growing, and culminating process is not to be governed by the
first sight the microscope can catch of it. The processes of Evolution evolve
as well as the products; evolve with the products. In the Environments they
help to create, or to make available, they find a field for new creations as
well as further reinforcements for themselves. With the creation of human
children Altruism found an area for its own expansion such as had never before
existed in the world. In this new soil it grew from more to more, and reached a
potentiality which enabled it to burst the trammels of physical conditions, and
overflow the world as a moral force. The mere fact that the first uses of Love
were physical shows how perfectly this process bears the stamp of Evolution.
The later function is seen to relieve the earlier at the moment when it would
break down without it, and continue the ascent without a pause.
If it be hinted that Nature has succeeded in
continuing the Ascent of Life in Animals without any reinforcement from
psychical principles, the first answer is that owing to physiological
conditions this would not have been possible in the case of Man. But even among
animals it is not true that Reproduction completes its work apart from higher
principles, for even there, there are accompaniments, continually increasing in
definiteness, which at least represent the instincts and emotions of Man. It is
no doubt true that in animals the affections are less voluntarily directed than
in the case of a human mother. But in either case they must have been
involuntary at first. It can only have been at a late stage in Evolution that
Nature could trust even her highest product to carry on the process by herself.
Before Altruism was strong enough to take its own initiative, necessity had to
be laid upon all mothers, animal and human, to act in the way required. In part
physiological, this necessity was brought about under the ordinary action of
that principle which had to take charge of everything in Nature until the will
of Man appeared--Natural Selection. A mother who did not care for her children
would have feeble and sickly children. Their children's children would be
feeble and sickly children. And the day of reckoning would come when they would
be driven off the field by a hardier, that is a better-mothered, race. Hence
the premium of Nature upon better mothers. Hence the elimination of all the
reproductive failures, of all the mothers who fell short of completing the
process to the last detail. And hence, by the law of the Survival of the
Fittest, Altruism, which at this stage means good-motherism, is forced upon the
world.
This consummation reached, the foundations of the
human world are finished. Nothing foreign remains to be added. All that need
happen henceforth is that the Struggle for the Life of Others should work out
its destiny. To follow out the gains of Reproduction from this point would be
to write the story of the nations, the history of civilization, the progress of
Social Evolution. The key to all these processes is here. There is no
intelligible account of the world which is not founded on the realization of
the place of this factor in development. Sociology, practically, can only beat
the air, can make no step forward as a science, until it recognizes this basis
in biology. It is the failure, not so much to recognize the supremacy of this
second factor, but to see that there is any second factor at all, that has
vitiated almost every attempt to construct a symmetrical social philosophy. It
has long, indeed, been perceived that society is an organism, and an organism
which has grown by natural growth like a tree. But the tree to which it is
usually likened is such a tree as never grew on this earth. For it is a tree
without flowers; a tree with nothing but stem and leaves; a tree that performed
the function of Nutrition, and forgot all about Reproduction. The great
unrecognized truth of social science is that the Social Organism has grown and
flowered and fruited in virtue of the continuous activities and inter-relations
of the two co-related functions of Nutrition and Reproduction, that these two
dominants being at work it could not but grow, and grow in the way it has
grown. When the dual nature of the evolving forces is perceived; when their
reactions upon one another are understood; when the changed material with which
they have to work from time to time, the further obstacles confronting them at
every stage, the new Environments which modify their action as the centuries
add their growths and disencumber them of their withered leaves,-- when all
this is observed, the whole social order falls into line. From the dawn of life
these two forces have acted together, one continually separating, the other
continually uniting; one continually looking to its own things, the other to
the things of Others. Both are great in Nature--but "the greatest of these is
Love."
THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER
THE Evolution of a Mother, in spite of its
half-humorous, half-sacrilegious sound, is a serious study in Biology. Even on
its physical side this was the most stupendous task Evolution ever undertook.
It began when the first bud burst from the first plant-cell, and was only
completed when the last and most elaborately wrought pinnacle of the temple of
Nature crowned the animal creation.
What was that pinnacle? There is no more
instructive question in science. For the answer brings into relief one of the
expression-points of Nature--one of these great teleological notes of which the
natural order is so full, and of which this is by far the most impressive. Run
the eye for a moment up the scale of animal life. At the bottom are the first
animals, the Protozoa. The Coelenterates follow, then in mixed array, the
Echinoderms, Worms, and Molluscs. Above these come the Pisces, then the
Amphibia, then the Reptilia, then the Aves, then--What? The Mammalia, THE
MOTHERS. There the series stops. Nature has never made anything since.
Is it too much to say that the one motive of
organic Nature was to make Mothers? It is at least certain that this was the
chief thing she did. Ask the Zoologist what, judging from science alone, Nature
aspired to from the first, he could but answer Mammalia--Mothers. In as real a
sense as a factory is meant to turn out locomotives or clocks, the machinery of
Nature is designed in the last resort to turn out Mothers. You will find
Mothers in lower Nature at every stage of imperfection; you will see attempts
being made to get at better types; you find old ideas abandoned and higher
models coming to the front. And when you get to the top you find the last great
act was but to present to the world a physiologically perfect type. It is a
fact which no human Mother can regard without awe, which no man can realize
without a new reverence for woman and a new belief in the higher meaning of
Nature, that the goal of the whole plant and animal kingdoms seems to have been
the creation of a family, which the very naturalist has had to call
Mammalia.
That care for others, from which the Mammalia
take their name, though reaching its highest expression there, is introduced
into Nature in cruder forms almost from the dawn of life. In the vegetable
kingdom, from the motherlessness of the early Cryptogams, we rise to find a
first maternity foreshadowed in the flowering tree. It elaborates a seed or nut
or fruit with infinite precaution, surrounding the embryo with coat after coat
of protective substance, and storing around it the richest foods for its future
use. And rudimentary though the manifestation be, when we remember that this is
not an incident in the tree's life but its whole blossom and crown, it is
impossible but to think of this solicitude and Motherhood together. So exalted
in the tree's life is this provision for others that the Botanist, like the
Zoologist, places the mothering plants at the top of his department of Nature.
His highest division is the Phanerogams--named, literally, in terms of
their reproductive specialization.
Crossing into the animal kingdom we observe the
same motherless beginning, the same cared-for end. All elementary animals are
orphans; they know neither home nor care; the earth is their only mother or the
inhospitable sea; they waken to isolation, to apathy, to the attentions only of
those who seek their doom. But as we draw nearer the apex of the animal
kingdom, the spectacle of a protective Maternity looms into view. At what
precise point it begins it is difficult to say. But that it does not begin at
once, that there is a long and gradual Evolution of Maternity, is clear. From
casual observation, and from popular books, it might be inferred that care of
offspring--we cannot yet speak of affection--is characteristic of the whole
field of Nature. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether in the Invertebrate
half of Nature it exists at all. If it does it is very rare; and in the
Vertebrates it is met with only exceptionally till we reach the two highest
classes. What does exist, and sometimes in marvellous perfection, is care for
eggs; but that is a wholly different thing, both in its physical and psychical
aspect, from love of offspring. The truth is, Nature so made animals in the
early days that they did not need Mothers. The moment they were born they
looked after themselves, and were perfectly able to look after themselves.
Mothers in these days would have been a superfluity. All that Nature worked at
at that dawning date was Maternity in a physical sense-- Motherhood came as a
later and a rarer growth. The children of those days were not really children
at all; they were only offspring, springers off, deserters from home. At one
bound they were out into life on their own account, and she who begat them knew
them no more. That early world, therefore, for millions and millions of years
was a bleak and loveless world. It was a world without children and a world
without Mothers. It is good to realize how heartless Nature was till these
arrived.
In the lower reaches of Nature, things remain
still unchanged. The rule is not that the Mother ignores, but that she never
sees her child. The land-crabs of the West Indies descend from their homes in
the mountains once a year, march in procession to the sea, commit their eggs to
the waves, and come away. The burying-beetles deposit their fragile capsules in
the dead carcase of a mouse or bird, plant all together in the earth, and leave
them to their fate. Myriads of other creatures are born into the world, and
ordained so to be born, whose Mothers are dead before they begin to live. The
moment of birth with the Ephemeridae is also the moment of death. These are not
cases nevertheless where there has been no care. On the contrary, there is a
solicitude for the egg of the most extreme kind--for its being placed exactly
in the right spot, at the right time, protected from the weather, shielded from
enemies, and provided with a first supply of food. The butterfly places the
eggs of its young on the very leaf which the coming caterpillar likes the most,
and on the under side of the leaf, where they will be least exposed--a case
which illustrates in a palpable way the essential difference between Motherhood
and Maternity. Maternity here, in the restricted sense of merely adequate
physical care, is carried to its utmost perfection. Everything that can be done
for the egg is done. Motherhood, on the other hand, is non-existent, is even an
anatomical impossibility. If a butterfly could live till its egg was
hatched--which does not happen--it would see no butterfly come out of the egg,
no airy likeness of itself, but an earth-bound caterpillar. If it recognized
this creature as its child, it could never play the Mother to it. The
anatomical form is so different that were it starving it could not feed it,
were it threatened it could not save it, nor is it possible to see any
direction in which it could be of the slightest use to it. It is obvious that
Nature never intended to make a Mother here; that all that she desired as yet
was to perfect the first maternal instinct. And the tragedy of the situation is
that on that day when its training to be a true Mother should begin, the
butterfly passes out of the world.
But there is another reason, in addition to the
precocity of the offspring, why parental care is a drug in the market in lower
Nature. There are such multitudes of these creatures that it is scarcely worth
caring for them. The humbler denizens of the world produce offspring, not by
units or tens, but by thousands and millions; and with populations so vast,
maternal protection is not required to sustain the existence of the species. It
was probably on the whole a better arrangement to produce a million and let
them take their chance, than to produce one and take special trouble with it.
It was easier, moreover, a thousand times easier, for Nature to make a million
young than one Mother. But the ethical effect, if one may use such a term here,
of this early arrangement was nil. All this saving of Motherly trouble meant
for a long space in Nature complete absence of maternal training. With children
of this sort Motherhood had no chance. I here was no time to love, no
opportunity to love, and no object to love. It was a period of physical
installations; and of psychical installations only as establishing the first
stages of the maternal instinct--the prenatal care of the egg. This is a
necessary beginning, but it is imperfect; it arrests itself at the critical
point--where care can react upon the Mother.
Now, before Maternal Love can be evolved out of
this first care, before Love can be made a necessity, and carried past the
unhatched egg to the living thing which is to come out of it, Nature must alter
all her ways. Four great changes at least must be introduced into her
programme. In the first place, she must cause fewer young to be produced at a
birth. In the second place, she must have these young produced in such outward
form that their Mothers will recognize them. In the third place, instead of
producing them in such physical perfection that they are able to go out into
life the moment they are born, she must make them helpless, so that for a time
they must dwell with her if they are to live at all. And fourthly, it is
required that she shall be made to dwell with them; that in some way they also
should be made necessary--physically necessary-- to her to compel her to attend
to them. All these beautiful arrangements we find carried out to the last
detail. A mother is made, as it were, in four processes. She requires, like the
making of a coloured picture, four separate printings, each adding some new
thing to the effect. Let us note the way in which woman--savage woman--became
caretaker, and watcher, and nurse, and passed from femaleness to the higher
heights of Motherhood.
The first great change that had to be introduced
into Nature was the diminishing of the number of young produced at a birth. As
we have seen, nearly all the lower animals produce scores, or hundreds, or
thousands, or millions, at one time. Now, no mother can love a million.
Clearly, if Nature wishes to make care-takers, she must moderate her demands.
And so she sets to work to bring down the numbers, reducing them steadily until
so few remain that Motherhood becomes a possibility. How great this change is
can only be understood when one realizes the almost incalculable fecundity of
the first created forms of life. When we examine the progeny of the lowest
plants we find ourselves among figures so high that no microscope can count
them. The Protococcus Nivalis shows its exuberant reproductive power by
reddening the Arctic landscape with its offspring in a single night. When we
break or shake the Puff-ball of the well-known fungus, the cloud of progeny
darkens the air with a smoke made up of uncountable millions of spores.
Hydatina Senta, one of the Rotifera, propagates four times in
thirty-four hours, and in twelve days is the parent of sixteen million young.
Among fish the number is still very great. The herring and the cod give birth
to a million ova, the frog spawns eggs by the thousand, and most of the
creatures at and below that level in a like degree. Then comes a gradual
change. When we pass on to the Reptiles, the figures fall into hundreds. On
reaching the birds the young are to be counted by tens or units. In the highest
of Mammals the rule is one. This bringing down of the numbers is a remarkable
circumstance. It means the calling in of a diffused care, to focus it upon one,
and concentrate it into Love.
The next thing was to make it possible for the
parent to recognize its young. If it was difficult to love a million it was
impossible to love an embryo. In the lower reaches the young are never in the
smallest degree like their parents, and, granting the highest power of
recognition to the Mother, it is impossible that she should recognize her own
offspring. For generations even Science was imposed upon here, for many forms
of life were described and classified as distinct species which have turned out
to be simply the young of other species. It may be useless to contrast so
striking a case as the ciliated Planula with the adult
Aurelia--vagaries of form which for generations deceived the
naturalist-- for it is doubtful whether creatures of the Medusoid type have
eyes; but in the higher groups where power of recognition is more certain, the
unlikeness of progeny to parent is often as decided. The larval forms of the
Star-fish or the Sea Urchin, or their kinsman the Holothurian, are disguised
past all recognition; and among the Insects the relation between Butterflies
and Moths and their respective caterpillars is beyond any possible clue. No
doubt there are other modes of recognition in Nature than those which depend on
the sense of sight. But looked at on every side, the fact remains that the
power to identify their young is all but absent until the higher animals
appear.
The next work of Nature, therefore, was to make
the young resemble the parent, to make, in short, the children presentable at
birth. And the means taken to effect this are worth noting. Nature always makes
her changes with a marvellous economy, and generally, as in this case, with a
quite startling simplicity. To start making a new kind of embryo, a plan
obvious to us, was not thought of. That would have been to have lost all the
time spent on them already. If Nature begins a thing and wishes to make a
change, she never goes back to the beginning and starts de novo. Her
respect for her own work is profound. To begin at the beginning again would not
only be lost work, but waste of future time; and Evolution, slow as it may
seem, never fails to take the quickest path. She did not then start making new
embryos. She did not even touch up the old embryos. All that she did was to
keep them hidden till they grew more presentable. She left them exactly
as they were, only she drew a veil over them. Instead of saying "Let us
re-create these little things," she passed the word "Let us delay them till
they are fair to see." And from the day that word was passed, the embryos were
hindered in the eggs, and the eggs were hindered in the nest, and the young
were hindered in the body, retained in the dark for weeks and months, so that
when first they caught the Mother's eye they were "strong and of a good
liking."
Though in no case in higher Nature is the young
an exact reproduction of its parent, it will be admitted that the likeness is
very much greater than among any of the lower animals. The young of many birds
are at least a colourable imitation of their parents; Nature's young geese are
at least like enough geese not to be mistaken for swans; no dog could be misled
into mistaking--even apart from the sense of smell--a kitten for a puppy, nor
would a hare ever be taken in by the young of a rabbit. Among domestic animals
like the sheep and cow there is a culmination of adaptation in this direction,
the lamb and the calf when born being almost facsimiles of their Mothers. But
this point need not be dwelt on. It is of insignificant importance, and belongs
to the surface. The idea of Nature going out of her way to make better family
likenesses will not stand scrutiny as a final end in physiology. These
illustrations are simply adduced to confirm the impression that Nature is
working not aimlessly, not even mysteriously, but in a specific direction; that
somehow the idea of Mothers is in her mind, and that she is trying to
draw closer and closer the bonds which are to unite the children of men. It
will be enough if we have gathered from this parenthesis that some time in the
remote past, parent and child came to be introduced to one another; that the
young when born into the world gradually approached the parental form, that
they no longer "shocked them by their larval ugliness"; so that "the first
human mother on record, seeing her first-born son, exclaimed: `I have gotten a
Man from the Lord.'"[89]
If this second process in the Evolution of
Motherhood is of minor importance, the necessity for the third will not be
doubted. What use is there for perfecting the power of recognition between
parent and child if the latter act like the run of offspring in lower
nature--spring off into independent life the moment they are born? If the
Mother is to be taught to know her progeny, surely the progeny also must be
taught not to abandon their Mother. And hence Nature had to set about a
somewhat novel task--to teach the youth of the world the Fifth Commandment.
Glance once more over the Animal series and see how thoroughly she taught them
the lesson. It is sometimes said that Nature has no imperatives. In reality it
is all imperative. This Commandment was thrust upon the early world under
penalties for disobedience the most exacting that could be devised--the threat
of death. Pick out a few children and inspect them. Take one from the bottom of
Nature, one from the middle, and one from the top, and see if any progress in
filial duty is visible as we ascend. The first,--the young of Aurelia will do,
or a ciliated Infusorian,--representing countless millions like itself, is the
Precocious Child. The moment this embryo is born it leaves the domestic hearth;
the chances are it has never seen its parents. If it has, it disowns them on
the spot. A better swimmer in many cases--for many of the parents have
forgotten how to swim--it cannot be overtaken. It ignores its Mother and
despises her. The second is the Good Intentioned Child. This child--a bird, let
us say--begins well, stays much at home in the early days, but plays the
prodigal towards the close. For some weeks it remains quietly in the egg; for
more weeks it remains--not quite so quietly--in the nest; and for more weeks
still--but with an obvious itching to be off--in the neighbourhood of the nest.
This, nevertheless, is a good subject. It is really a kind of child, and its
Mother is truly a Mother. The third is the Model Child--the Mammal. In this
child, which is only found in the high places of Nature, infancy reaches its
last perfection. Housed, protected, sumptuously fed, the luxurious children
keep to their Mother's side for months and years, and only quit the parental
roof when their filial education is complete.
On a casual view of the Examiner's Report on
these various children of Nature, the physiologist, as distinguished from the
educationalist, might object that so far from being the subject of
congratulation it is a clear case for censure. If early Nature could turn out
ready-made animals in a single hour, is it not a retrograde move to have to
take so long about it later on? When one contrasts the free swimming embryo of
a Medusa, dashing out into its heroic life the moment it is born, with the
helpless kitten or the sightless pup, is it unfair to ask if Nature has not
lost the trick of making lusty lives? Is she not trying the new experiment at
the risk of blundering the old one, and why cannot she continue the earlier and
more brilliant device of making her children knight-errants from the first?
Because brilliance is not her object. Her object is ethical as well as
physiological; and though when we look below the surface a purely physiological
explanation of the riddle will appear, the ethical gain is not less clear. By
curbing them she is educating them, taming them, rescuing them from a wild and
lawless life. These roving embryos are mere bandits; their nature and habits
must be changed; not a sterner race but a gentler race must be born. New words
must come into the world--Home, Love, Mother. And these imperceptibly slow
drawings together of parent and child are the inevitable preliminaries of the
domestication of the Human Race. Regarded from the ethical point of view there
are few things more significant than this reining-in of the world's rampant
youth, this tightening the bonds of family life, this most gentle introduction
of gentleness into a world cold with motherless children and heartless with
childless mothers.
The personal tie once formed between parent and
offspring could never be undone, and from this moment onwards must grow from
more to more. For observe what has happened. A generation has grown up to whom
this tie is the necessity of existence. Every Mammalian child born into the
world must come to be fed, must, for a given number of hours each day, be in
the maternal school, and whether it like it or not, learn its lessons. No young
of any Mammal can nourish itself. There is that in it therefore at this stage
which compels it to seek its Mother; and there is that in the Mother which
compels it even physically--and this is the fourth process, on which it is
needless to dwell--to seek her child. On the physiological side, the name of
this impelling power is lactation; on the ethical side, it is Love. And there
is no escape henceforth from communion between Mother and child, or only
one--death. Break this new bond and the Mammalia become extinct. Nature is in
earnest here, if anywhere. The training of Humanity is seen to be under a
compulsory education act. It is in the severity and dread of her penalties,
coupled with the impossibility of evading the least of them, that the will of
Nature and the seriousness of her purposes are most declared. For the
physiological gains which underlie these ethical relations are all-important.
It is largely owing to them that the Mammalia have taken their place in the van
of the procession of life. Under the earlier system life had a bad start; each
animal had to push its way upward single-handed from the egg. It was planted,
so to speak, on the first rung of the ladder, and as the risks of life are
immeasurably great in infancy, it had all these risks to take. Under the new
system it is launched into the battle already nourished and strong, and passed
scatheless through the first vicissitudes of youth. In the higher Mammalia, in
virtue of the possession by this group of a placenta in addition to the
ordinary Mammalian characteristics, the young have a double chance of a
successful start. The development, in fact, of higher forms of life on the
earth has depended on the physical perfecting of Mothers, and of the
physiological ties which bind them to their young. With the immense structural
advance of the Mammalia, an order of being was introduced into Nature whose
continuity as an all but immortal series could never be broken. Thus whatever
moral relations underlie the extraordinary physical characteristic of this
highest class of animals, there is the added guarantee that they can never be
destroyed.
With the physical programme carried out to the
last detail, the ethical drama opened. An early result, partly of her sex, and
partly of her passive strain, is the founding through the instrumentality of
the first savage Mother of a new and a beautiful social state--Domesticity.
While Man, restless, eager, hungry, is a wanderer on the earth, Woman makes a
Home. And though this Home be but a platform of sticks and leaves, such as the
gorilla builds on a tree, it becomes the first great schoolroom of the human
race. For one day there appears in this roofless room that which is to teach
the teachers of the world--a Little Child.
No greater day ever dawned for Evolution than
this on which the first human child was born. For there entered then into the
world the one thing wanting to complete the Ascent of Man--a tutor for the
affections. It may be that a Mother teaches a Child, but in a far deeper sense
it is the Child who teaches the Mother. Millions of millions of Mothers had
lived in the world before this, but the higher affections were unborn.
Tenderness, gentleness, unselfishness, love, care, self-sacrifice--these as yet
were not, or were only in the bud. Maternity existed in humble forms, but not
yet Motherhood. To create Motherhood and all that enshrines itself in that holy
word required a human child. The creation of the Mammalia established two
schools in the world--the two oldest and surest and best equipped schools of
Ethics that have ever been in it--the one for the Child, who must now at least
know its Mother, the other for the Mother, who must as certainly attend to her
Child. The only thing that remains now is to secure that they shall both be
kept in that school as long as it is possible to detain them. The next effort
of Evolution, therefore--the fifth process as one might call it--is to lengthen
out these school days, and give affection time to grow.
No animal except Man was permitted to have his
education thus prolonged. Many creatures were allowed to stay at school for a
few days or weeks, but to one only was given a curriculum complete enough to
accomplish its exalted end. Watch two of the highest organisms during their
earliest youth, and observe the striking contrast in the time they are made to
remain at their Mother's side. The first is a human infant; the second, born,
let us suppose, on the same day is a baby monkey. In a few days or weeks the
baby monkey is almost able to leave its Mother. Already it can climb, and eat,
and chatter like its parents; and in a few weeks more the creature is as
independent of them as the winged-seed is of the parent tree. Meantime, and for
many months to come, its little twin is unable to feed itself, or clothe
itself, or protect itself; it is a mere semi-unconscious chattel, a sprawling
ball of helplessness, the world's one type of impotence. The body is there in
all its parts, bone for bone and muscle for muscle, like the other. But somehow
this body will not do its work. Something as yet hangs fire. The body has eyes
but they see not, ears but they hear not, limbs but they walk not. This body is
a failure. Why does the human infant lie like a log on the forest-bed while its
nimble prototype mocks it from the bough above? Why did that which is not human
step out into life so long before that which is?
The question has been answered for us by Mr. John
Fiske, and the world here owes to him one of the most beautiful contributions
ever made to the Evolution of Man. We know what this delay means ethically--it
was necessary for moral training that the human child should have the longest
possible time by its Mother's side--but what determines it on the physical
side? The thing that constitutes the difference between the baby monkey and the
baby man is an extra piece of machinery which the last possesses and the first
does not. It is this which is keeping back the baby man. What is that piece of
machinery? A brain, a human brain. The child, nevertheless, is not using it.
Why? Because it is not quite fitted up. Nature is working hard at it; but owing
to its intricacy and delicacy the process requires much time, and till all is
ready the babe must remain a thing. And why does the monkey-brain get
ready first? Because it is an easier machine to make. And why should it be
easier to make? Because it is only required to do the life-work of an Animal;
the other has to do the life-work of a Man. Mental Evolution, in fact, here
steps in, and makes an unexpected contribution to the ethical development of
the world.
An apparatus for controlling one of the lower
animals can be turned out from the workshop of Nature sometimes in a day. The
wheels are few, the works are simple, the connections require little time for
adjustment or correction. Everything that a humble organism will do has been
done a million times by its parents, and already the faculties have been
carefully instructed by heredity and will automatically repeat the whole life
and movement of their race. But when a Man is made, it is not an automaton that
is made. This being will do new things, think new thoughts, originate new ways
of life. His immediate ancestors have done the same, but done some of them so
seldom, and others of them for so short a time, that heredity has failed to
notice them. For half the life therefore that lies before the human offspring
no storage of habit has been handed down from the past. Each descendant must
carve a way through the world for itself, and learn to comport itself through
all the varying incidents of life as best it can. Now the equipment for this is
very complex. Into the infant's frame must be fitted not only the apparatus for
automatic repetition of what its parents have done, but the apparatus for
intelligent initiation; not only the machinery for carrying on the involuntary
and reflex actions--involuntary and reflex because they have been done so often
by its ancestors as to have become automatic--but for the voluntary and
self-conscious life which will do new things, choose fresh alternatives, seek
higher and more varied ends. The instrument which will attend to breathing even
when we forget it; the apparatus which will make the heart beat even though we
try to stop it; the self-acting spring which makes the eyelid close the moment
it is threatened--these and a hundred others are old and well-tried inventions
which, from ceaseless practice generation after generation, work perfectly in
each new individual from the start. Nature therefore need waste no time at this
late day on their improvement. But the higher brain is comparatively a new
thing in the world. It has to undertake a vaster range of duties, often totally
new orders of duties; it has to do things which its forerunners had not quite
learned to do, or had not quite learned to do unthinkingly, and the
inconceivably complex machinery requires time to settle to its work. The older
brain-processes have been greatly accelerated even now, and appear in full
activity at an early stage in the infant's life, but the newer and the higher
are in perfect order only after a considerable interval of adjustment and
elaboration.
Now Infancy, physiologically considered, means
the fitting up of this extra machinery within the brain; and according to its
elaborateness will be the time required to perfect it. A sailing vessel may put
to sea the moment the rigging is in; a steamer must wait for the engines. And
the compensation to the steamer for the longer time in dock is discovered by
and by in its vastly greater usefulness, its power of varying its course at
will, and in its superior safety in time of war or storm. For its greater
after-usefulness also, its more varied career, its safer life, humanity has to
pay tribute to Evolution by a delayed and helpless Infancy, a prolonged and
critical constructive process. Childhood in its early stage is a series of
installations and trials of the new machinery, a slow experimenting with powers
and faculties so fresh that heredity in handing them down has been unable to
accompany them with full directions as to their use.
The Brain of Man, to change the figure--if indeed
any figure of that marvellous molecular structure can be attempted without
seriously misleading--is an elevated table-land of stratified nervous matter,
furrowed by deep and sinuous canons, and traversed by a vast net-work of
highways along which Thoughts pass to and fro. The old and often-repeated
Thoughts, or mental processes, pass along beaten tracks; the newer Thoughts
have less marked footpaths; the newer still are compelled to construct fresh
Thought-routes for themselves. Gradually these become established
thoroughfares; but in the increasing traffic and complexity of life, new paths
in endless multitudes have to be added, and bye lanes and loops between the
older highways must be thrown into the system. The stations upon these roads
from which the travellers set out are cells; the roads are transit fibres; the
travellers themselves are in physiological language nervous discharges, in
psychological language mental processes. Each new mental process involves a new
redistribution of nervous matter among the cells, a new travelling of nervous
discharge along one or many of the transit fibres. Now in every new connection
of ideas multitudes of cells and even multitudes of groups of cells may be
concerned, so that should it happen that a combination of these precise centres
had never been made before, it is obvious that no routes could possibly exist
between them, and these must then and there be prospected. Each new Thought is
therefore a pioneer, a road-maker, or road-chooser, through the brain; and the
exhaustless possibilities of continuous development may be judged from the
endlessness of the possible combinations. In the oldest and most-used brain
there must always remain vast territories still to be explored, and, as it
were, civilized; and in all men multitudes of possible connections continue to
the last unrealized. When it is remembered, indeed, that the brain itself is
very large, the largest mass of nerve-matter in the organic world; when it is
further realized that each of the cells of which it is built up measures only
one ten-thousandth of an inch in diameter, that the transit fibres which
connect them are of altogether unimaginable fineness, the limitlessness of the
powers of Thought and the inconceivable complexity of these processes will
begin to be understood.
Now it is owing to the necessity for having a
certain number of the more useful routes established before the babe can be
trusted from its Mother's side, that the delay of Infancy is required. And even
after the child has begun to practise the art of living for itself, time has
still to be granted for many purposes--for new route-making, for becoming
familiar with established thoroughfares, for practising upon obstacles and
gradients, for learning to perform the journeys quickly and without fatigue,
for allowing acts repeated to accelerate and embody themselves as habits. In
the savage state, where the after-life is simple, the adjustments are made with
comparative ease and speed; but as we rise in the scale of civilization the
necessary period of Infancy lengthens step by step until in the case of the
most highly educated man, where adjustments must be made to a wide intellectual
environment, the age of tutelage extends for almost a quarter of a century.
The use of all this to morals, the reactions
especially upon the Mother, are too obvious to dwell on. Till the brain
arrived, everything was too brief, too rapid for ethical achievements; animals
were in a hurry to be born, children thirsted to be free. There was no
helplessness to pity, no pain to relieve, no quiet hours, no watching; to the
Mother no moment of suspense--the most educative moment of all--when the spark
of life in her little one burned low. Parents could be no use to their
offspring physically, and the offspring could be no use to their parents
psychically. The young required no Infancy; the old acquired no Sympathy. Even
among the other Mammalia or the Birds the Mother's chance was small. There
Infancy extends to a few days or weeks, yet is but an incident in a life
preoccupied with sterner tasks. A lioness will bleed for her cub to-day, and in
tomorrow's struggle for life contend with it to the death. A sheep knows its
lamb only while it is a lamb. The affection in these cases, fierce enough while
it lasts, is soon forgotten, and the traces it left in the brain are
obliterated before they have furrowed into habit. Among the Carnivora it is
instructive to observe that while the brief span of infancy admits of the
Mother learning a little Love, the father, for want of even so brief a lesson,
remains untouched, so wholly untouched indeed that the Mother has often to hide
her offspring from him lest they be devoured. Love then had no chance till the
Human Mother came. To her alone was given a curriculum prolonged enough to let
her graduate in the school of the affections. Not for days or weeks, but for
months, as the cry of her infant's helplessness went forth, she must stand
between the flickering flame and death; and for years to come, until the
budding intellect could take its own command, this Love dare not grow cold, or
pause an hour in its unselfish ministry
Begin at the beginning again and recall the fact
of woman's passive strain. A tendency to passivity means, among other things, a
capacity to sit still. Be it but for a minute or an hour does not matter; the
point is that the faintest possible capacity is there. For this is the embryo
of Patience, and if much and long nursed a fully fledged Patience will come out
of it. Supply next to this new virtue some definite object on which to
practise, let us say a child. When this child is in trouble the Mother will
observe the signs of pain. Its cry will awaken associations, and in some dull
sense the Mother will feel with it. But "feeling with another" is the literal
translation of the name of a second virtue--Sympathy. From feeling with it, the
parent will sooner or later be led to do something to help it; then it will do
more things to help it; finally it will be always helping it. Now, to care for
things is to become Careful; to tend things is to become Tender. Here are four
virtues--Patience, Sympathy, Carefulness, Tenderness--already dawning upon
mankind.
On occasion Sympathy will be called out in
unusual ways. Crises will occur--dangers, famines, sicknesses. At first the
Mother will be unable to meet these extreme demands--her fund of Sympathy is
too poor. She cannot take any exceptional trouble, or forget herself, or do
anything very heroic. The child, unable to breast the danger alone, dies. It is
well that this should be so. It is the severity and righteous justice of
Nature--the tragedy of Ivan Ivanovitch anticipated by Evolution. A Mother who
has failed in helpfulness must leave no successor to perpetuate her
unworthiness in posterity. Somewhere else, however, developing along similar
lines, there is another fractionally better Mother. When the emergency occurs,
she rises to the occasion. For one hour she transcends herself. That day a
cubit is added to the moral stature of mankind; the first act of Self-Sacrifice
is registered in favour of the human race. It may or may not be that the child
will acquire its Mother's virtue. But unselfishness has scored; its child has
proved itself fitter to survive than the child of Selfishness. It does not
follow that in all circumstances the nobler will be always victorious: but it
has a great chance. A few score more of centuries, a few more millions of
Mothers, and the germs of Patience, Carefulness, Tenderness, Sympathy, and
Self-Sacrifice will have rooted themselves in Humanity.
See then what the Savage Mother and her Babe have
brought into the world. When the first Mother awoke to her first tenderness and
warmed her loneliness at her infant's love, when for a moment she forgot
herself and thought upon its weakness or its pain, when by the most
imperceptible act or sign or look of sympathy she expressed the unutterable
impulse of her Motherhood, the touch of a new creative hand was felt upon the
world. However short the earliest infancies, however feeble the sparks they
fanned, however long heredity took to gather fuel enough for a steady flame, it
is certain that once this fire began to warm the cold hearth of Nature and give
humanity a heart, the most stupendous task of the past was accomplished. A
softened pressure of an uncouth hand, a human gleam in an almost animal eye, an
endearment in an inarticulate voice--feeble things enough. Yet in these faint
awakenings lay the hope of the human race. "From of old we have heard the
monition, `Except ye be as babes ye cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven`; the
latest science now shows us--though in a very different sense of the
words--that unless we had been as babes, the ethical phenomena which give all
its significance to the phrase `Kingdom of Heaven` would have been non-existent
for us. Without the circumstances of Infancy we might have become formidable
among animals through sheer force of sharp-wittedness. But except for these
circumstances we should never have comprehended the meaning of such phrases as
`self-sacrifice` or `devotion.' The phenomena of social life would have been
omitted from the history of the world, and with them the phenomena of ethics
and religion."[90]
THE EVOLUTION OF A FATHER
IN last chapter we watched the beautiful
experiment of Nature making Mothers. We saw how the young produced at one birth
were gradually reduced in numbers until it was possible for affection to
concentrate upon a single object; how that object was delayed in birth till it
was a likeable and presentable thing; how it was tied to its mother's side by
physical bonds, and hindered there for years to give time for the Mother's care
to ripen into love. We saw, what was still more instructive, that Nature, when
she had laid the train for perfecting these arrangements, gave up making any
more animals; and that there were physiological reasons why this well-mothered
class should survive beyond all others, and, by sheer physiological fitness,
henceforth dominate the world.
But there was still a crowning task to
accomplish. The world was now beginning to fill with Mothers, but there were no
Fathers. During all this long process the Father has not even been named.
Nothing that has been done has touched or concerned him almost in the least
degree. He has gone his own way, lived outside all these changes; and while
Nature has succeeded in moulding a human Mother and a human child, he still
wanders in the forest a savage and unblessed soul.
This time for him, nevertheless, is not lost. In
his own way he is also at school, and learning lessons which will one day be
equally needed by humanity. The acquisitions of the manly life are as necessary
to human character as the virtues which gather their sweetness by the cradle;
and these robuster elements--strength, courage, manliness, endurance,
self-reliance--could only have been secured away from domestic cares. Apart
from that, it was not necessary to put the Father through the same mill as the
Mother. Whatever the Mother gained would be handed on to her boys as well as to
her girls, and with the law of heredity to square accounts, it was unnecessary
for each of the two great sides of humanity to make the same investments. By
one acquiring one set of virtues and the other another, the blend in the end
would be the richer; and, without obliterating the eternal individualities of
each, the measure of completeness would be gained more quickly for the race.
Before heredity, however, could do its work upon the Father a certain basis had
to be laid. With his original habits he would squander the hereditary gains as
fast as he received them, and unless some change was brought about in his mode
of life the old wild blood in his veins would counteract the gentler influence,
and leave all the Mother's work in vain. Hence Nature had to set about another
long and difficult process--to make the savage Father a reformed character.
The Evolution of a Father is not so beautiful a
process as the Evolution of a Mother, but it was almost as formidable a problem
to attack. As much depended on it, as we shall see, as the training of the
mother; and though it began later, it required the bringing about of one or two
changes in Nature as novel as any that preceded it. When the work was begun,
the Father was in a much worse plight, so far as training for family life was
concerned, than the Mother. If Maternity was at a feeble level in the lower
reaches of Nature, Paternity was non-existent. Among a few Invertebrates the
male parent took a passing share in the care of the egg, but it is not until we
are all but at the top that fatherly interest finds any real expression. Among
the Birds, the parents unite together in most cases to build the nest, the
Father doing the rough work of bringing in moss and twigs, while the more
trusty Mother does the actual work. When the eggs are laid, the male parent
also takes his turn at incubation; supplies food and protection; and lingers
round the place of birth to defend the fledglings to the last. When we leave
the Birds, however, and pass on to the Mammals, the Fathers are nearly all
backsliders. Many are not only indifferent to their young, but hostile: and
among the Carnivora the Mothers have frequently to hide their little ones in
case the father eats them.
We have another and a more serious count against
early Fatherhood. If the Love of Father for child was in this backward state,
infinitely more grave was the condition of things between him and the Mother.
Probably we have all taken it for granted that husbands and wives have always
loved one another. Evolution takes nothing for granted. The affection between
husband and wife is, of all the immeasurable forms of Love, the most beautiful,
the most lasting, and the most divine: yet up to this time we have not been
able even to record its existence. The finished results of Evolution appear so
natural to us, looking back from this late day, that we continually ignore the
difficulties it had to meet, and forget how every single step in progress from
the lowest to the highest had to be carried at the bayonet's point. The most
informed naturalist probably has never given Nature credit for a thousandth
part of the work she has done, or has succeeded in presenting to his mind more
than a surface outline of the gigantic series of problems she had to solve. In
lower Nature, as a simple fact, male and female do not love one another; and in
the lower reaches of Human-Nature, husband and wife do not love one another.
Among exceptional nations, for the last few hours of the world's history,
husbands and wives have truly loved; but for the vast mass of Mankind, during
the long ages which preceded historic times, conjugal love was probably all but
unknown.
Now here is a very pretty problem for Evolution.
She has at once to make good Husbands and good Fathers out of lawless savages.
Unless this problem is solved the higher progress of the world is at an end. It
is the mature opinion of every one who has thought upon the history of the
world, that the thing of highest importance for all times and to all nations is
Family Life. When the Family was instituted, and not till then, the higher
Evolution of the world was secured. Hence the exceptional value of the Father's
development. As the other half of the arch on which the whole higher world is
built, his taming, his domestication, his moral discipline, are vital; and in
the nature of things this was the next great operation undertaken by
Evolution.
The first step in the transition was to relate
him, definitely and permanently, to the Mother. And here a formidable initial
obstacle had to be encountered. The apathy and estrangement between husband and
wife in the animal world is radical and universal. There is almost no such
thing there as married life. Marriage, in anthropology, is not a word for an
occasion, but for a state; it is not, that is to say, a wedding, but a dwelling
together throughout life of husband and wife. Now when Man emerged from the
animal creation this institution of conjugal life had not been arrived at.
Marriage like everything else has been slowly evolved, and until it was
evolved, until they learned to dwell continually together, there was no chance
for mutual love to spring up between male and female. In Nature the pairing
season is usually but an incident. It lasts only a very short time, and during
the rest of the year, with some exceptions, the sexes remain apart. From the
investigations of Westermarck, who has lately contributed to sociology the most
masterly account of the Evolution of Marriage we possess--it appears more than
probable that the earliest progenitors of Man had also a pairing season, and
that the young were born at a particular time of the year, and never at any
other time. All the animals nearest to Man in Nature have such a season, and
there are only a few known--the elephant for instance, and some of the
whales--which have none. Now the brevity of this period in the father's case
must have told against his developing any real affection. If he is to run away
a few days after the young are born he will miss all the discipline of the
home, and as this discipline is essential, as this is the only way in which
love can be acquired, or inherited love developed, some method must be adopted
in his case to extend the period of home life during which it can act.
Now let us see how this was done. The problem
being to give Love time, the solution was in some way to alter the
circumstances which confined the pairing season to a specific date--to abolish,
in fact, the pairing season in the case of Man, and lengthen out the time in
which husband and wife should stay together. And as this was actually the
method adopted, we have first to ask what these special circumstances were. Why
should animals have specific dates at all? . The clue will be found if we
examine carefully what these dates are and the reasons Nature has had for
choosing them. Some wise principle must underlie this, or it would not be the
universal rule it is. The pairing time with Birds, as everyone knows, occurs in
the Spring. With Reptiles this is also the case; but among Mammals each species
has a season peculiar to itself, every separate month being selected by one or
other, and invariably adhered to. "The bat pairs in January and February; the
wild camel in the desert to the east of Lake Lob-nor, from the middle of
January nearly to the end of February; the Canis Azarae and the Indian bison in
winter; the weasel in March; the kulan from May to July; the musk-ox at the end
of August; the elk, in the Baltic Provinces, at the end of August, and, in
Asiatic Russia, in September or October; the wild Yak in Tibet in September;
the reindeer in Norway at the end of September; the badger in October; the
Capra pyrenaica in November; the chamois, the musk-deer, and the
orongo-antelope in November and December; the wolf, from the end of December to
the middle of February."[91] It might seem
that no law governed these various dates, but their very variety is the proof
of an underlying principle. For these dates show that each animal in each
particular country chooses that time of the year to give birth to her young
when they will have the best chance of surviving--that is to say, when the
climate is mildest, food most abundant, and the prospects of life on the whole
most favourable. The dormouse thus brings forth its young in August, when the
nuts begin to ripen; and the young deer sees the light just before the first
grass shoots into greenness. Because those born at this season survived and
those born out of it perished, by the prolonged action of Natural Selection
these dates in time probably became engrained in the species, and would only
alter with climate itself.
But when Man's Evolution made a certain progress,
and when the Mother's care reached mature perfection, it was no longer
imperative for children to be born only when the sun was shining, and the
fruits grew ripe. The parents could now make provision for any weather and for
any dearth. They could give their little ones clothes when nights grew cold;
they could build barns and granaries against times of famine. In any climate,
and at any time, their young were safe; and the old marriage dates, with their
subsequent desertions, were struck from the human calendar. So arose, or at
least was inaugurated, Family Life, the first and the last nursery of the
higher sympathies, and the home of all that was afterwards holy in the world.
One could not find a simpler instance of the growing sovereignty of Mind over
the powers of Nature. So remote a cause as the inclination of the earth's axis,
and the consequent changes of the seasons, determines the time of Marriage for
almost the whole animal creation, while Man, and a few other forms of life
whose environment is exceptional, are able to refuse all such dictations. It
was when Man's mind became capable of making its own provisions against the
weather and the crops that the possibility of Fatherhood, Motherhood, and the
Family were realized.
The supporters of the hypothesis of promiscuity
have tried to show, what would almost follow from their theory, that the
children in primitive times belonged rather to the tribe. But it is not likely
that this was the case. The hypothesis of promiscuity itself, notwithstanding
its support from M'Lennan, Morgan, Lubbock, Bastian, Post, and other
authorities, has probably received its death-blow; and the ancientness of the
family as well as of the institution of Marriage are both vindicated by later
facts. "Everywhere," writes Westermarck, "we find the tribes or clans composed
of several families, the members of each family being more closely connected
with one another than with the rest of the tribe. The Family, consisting of
parents, children, and often also their next descendants, is a universal
institution among existing people. And it seems extremely probable that among
our early human ancestors, the Family proved, if not the Society itself, at
least the nucleus of it. I do not, of course, deny that the tie which bound the
children to the Mother was much more intimate and more lasting than that which
bound them to the Father; but it seems to me that the only result to which a
critical investigation of facts can lead us is, that in all probability there
has been no stage of human development where marriage has not existed, and that
the father has always been, as a rule, the protector of his Family."[92]
But the process is not yet quite completed. With
the longer time together husband and wife may get to know and lean upon one
another a little, but the time is still too short for deep affection, and there
remain one or two serious obstacles to remove. Indeed, unless some further
steps are taken, this first achievement must end in failure. As a matter of
fact, it has often ended in failure, and there have been and still are tribes
and nations where love between husband and wife is non-existent. Among the
Hovas, we are assured by authorities, the idea of love between husband and wife
is "hardly thought of"; that at Winnebah "not even the appearance of affection"
exists between them; that among the Beni-Amer it is "considered even
disgraceful for a wife to show any affection for her husband"; that the
Chittagong Hill tribes have "no idea of tenderness nor of chivalrous devotion";
and that the Eskimo treat their wives "with great coldness and neglect." The
savage cruelty with which wives are treated by the Australian aborigines is
indicated even in their weapons. The very names "Servant, Slave," by which the
Brahman address their wives, and the wife's reply, "Master, Lord," symbolize
the gulf between the two. There are exceptions, it is true, and often touching
exceptions. Travellers cite instances of constancy among savage peoples which
reach the region of romance. Probably there never was a time, indeed, nor a
race, when some measure of sympathy did not stir between husband and wife. But
when we consider all the facts, it is impossible to doubt that in the region of
all the higher affections the savage wife and the savage husband were all but
strangers to each other.
What then was wanting for the perfecting of the
domestic tie, and how did Evolution secure it? In the animal creation, we have
already witnessed the methods which Nature took to get more care out of little
care, to make a short-lived sympathy grow into a great sympathy. Her method was
first, concentration; and second, extension of time. By giving a Mother one or
two young to care for instead of a hundred, she made care practicable, and by
lengthening the period of infancy from hours to years she made it inevitable.
And these are again her methods in perfecting love between man and wife. By
abolishing the pairing season she lengthened the time for love to grow in; the
next step is to perfect the object on which it shall focus. For there was again
the same sort of barrier to a full-blown love which we saw before in the animal
kingdom. An animal mother could not truly love in the early days because she
had a hundred or a thousand young. Man could not love in the early days because
he had a dozen wives. This love was too diluted to come to anything. What
Evolution next worked at was to get a quintessence. Polygamy, in other words,
the scattered love of many, must, from this time forward, be changed into
monogamy--the absorbing love of one. And this transposition was gradually
introduced. A few polygamous people, a very few at first, become monogamous.
The new system worked better, it spread, and was finally adopted by those
higher nations which it also helped to create. It is an instance, nevertheless,
of the slowness with which radical changes succeed in leavening great masses of
mankind, that the older system, with the ban of Evolution upon it, still
survives in Modern Europe. Yet there are signs, even among the uncivilized,
that polygamy is passing away. Among some almost savage tribes it is unknown;
among others prohibited. Even in a polygamous community it is usually only a
minority who have more wives than one. And where the plural system is in full
force, the tendency--the Evolutionist would say the transition --to monogamy is
plainly marked, for among the many wives possessed by any individual, there is
generally one who is first favourite and ranks as helpmeet or wife. The stress
just laid upon the ethical gains of the monogamous state as contrasted with the
polygamous, of course only emphasizes one side of the question, and by the pure
naturalist might be ruled out of court. Were the physiologist to go over the
same ground he could give a parallel account of the development, and show that
on the merely Physiological plane the transition to monogamy and the rise of
the Family was a likely if not an inevitable result. It is at least certain
that during those later stages of social Evolution in which Monogamy has
prevailed, the change has been in the best physical interests alike of the
parents, the offspring, and of society.
This barrier removed, Evolution had still much to
do to the other--the brevity of the time during which husband and wife remained
together. What short work Nature had already made of this obstacle--by
abolishing the pairing season--we have just seen. But that requires
supplementing. It is not enough to give time for mutual knowledge and affection
after marriage. Nature must deepen the result by extending it to the
time before marriage. In primitive times there was no such thing as
courtship. Men secured their wives in three ways, and in uncivilized nations so
find them still. Among barbarous nations marriage is not a case of love, but of
capture; among the semi-barbarous it is a case of barter; and among the
imperfectly civilized-- among whom we must often include ourselves--a matter of
convention. The second of these, the purchase system--a slightly evolved form
of marriage by capture--is probably one through which all human Marriage has
passed; and relics of it still exist in the dos and other symbols among
nations with whom the custom of buying a bride has long since passed away. By
degrading the object of barter to the level of a chattel, this system is a
barrier to high affection. But in most cases this is heightened by the
impossibility of that preliminary courtship which leads to mutual knowledge and
intelligent love. The bride and bridegroom, in the extremer cases, meet as
total strangers; and though affection may bud in after years, the mingling of
unknown temperaments, together with the destruction of reverence for woman by
treating her as an article of barter, make the chances small of it blossoming
into a flower.
Courtship, with its vivid perceptions and
quickened emotions, is a great opportunity for Evolution; and to institute and
lengthen reasonably a period so rich in impression is one of its latest and
highest efforts. To give love time, indeed, has been all along, and through a
great variety of arrangements, the chief means of establishing it on the earth.
Unfortunately, the lesson of Nature here is being all too slowly learned, even
among nations with its open book before them. In some of the greatest of
civilized countries real mutual knowledge between the youth of the sexes is
unattainable; marriages are made only by a higher kind of purchase, and the
supreme step in life is taken in the dark. Whatever safeguards this method
provides, it cannot be final, nor can those nations rise to any exalted social
height or moral greatness till some change occurs. It has been given especially
to one nation to lead the world in its assault upon this mistaken law, and to
demonstrate to mankind that in the unconstrained and artless relations of youth
lie higher safeguards than the polite conventions of society can afford. The
people of America have proved that the blending of the sweet currents of
different family-lives in social intercourse, in recreation, and--most original
of all--in education, can take place freely and joyously without any sacrifice
of man's reverence for woman, or woman's reverence for herself; and, springing
out of these naturally mingled lives, there must more and more come those
sacred and happy homes which are the surest guarantees for the moral progress
of a nation. So long as the first concern of a country is for its homes, it
matters little what it seeks second or third. Long before Evolution showed its
scientific interest in this first social aggregate, and proclaimed it the
strategic point in moral progress, poetry, philosophy, and history assigned the
same great place to Family-life. The one point, indeed, where all students of
the past agree, where all prophets of the future meet, where all the sciences
from biology to ethics are enthusiastically at one, is in their faith in the
imperishable potentialities of this yet most simple institution.
With all these barriers removed it might now be
supposed that the process was at last complete. But one of the surprises of
Evolution here awaits us. All the arrangements are finished to fan the flame of
love, yet out of none of them was love itself begotten. The idea that the
existence of sex accounts for the existence of love is untrue. Marriage among
early races, as we have seen, has nothing to do with love. Among savage peoples
the phenomenon everywhere confronts us of wedded life without a grain of love.
Love then is no necessary ingredient of the sex relation; it is not an
outgrowth of passion. Love is love, and has always been love, and has never
been anything lower. Whence, then, came it? If neither the Husband nor the Wife
bestowed this gift upon the world, Who did? It was A Little Child. Till this
appeared, Man's affection was non-existent; Woman's was frozen. The Man did not
love the Woman; the Woman did not love the Man. But one day from its Mother's
very heart, from a shrine which her husband never visited nor knew was there,
which she herself dared scarce acknowledge, a Child drew forth the first fresh
bud of a Love which was not Passion, a Love which was not selfish, a Love which
was an incense from its Maker, and whose fragrance from that hour went forth to
sanctify the world. Later, long later, through the same tiny and unconscious
intermediary, the father's soul was touched. And one day, in the love of a
little child, Father and Mother met.
That this is the true lineage of love, that it
has descended not from Husbands and Wives but through children, is proved by
the simplest study of savage life. Love for children is always a prior and a
stronger thing than love between Father and Mother. The indifference of the
Husband to his Wife--though often greatly exaggerated by anthropology--is all
too manifest, and throughout whole regions the Wife does not love but only
fears her Husband. For the children on the other hand both parents have almost
always a regard. The universality of a Mother's Love is one of the revelations
of travel. Even among cannibals, where the shocking treatment of Wives by their
Husbands is in daily evidence, a case of cruelty to children from the Mother's
side--apart from infanticide, which has a rationale of its own--is rarely heard
of. The status of children if not ideal forms a most striking contrast to the
general moral and social level: and one cannot but decide that they have been
unconsciously the true moral teachers of the world. Had the institution of the
Family depended on Sex and not on affection it would probably never have
endured for any time. Love is eternal; Sex, transient. Its unbridled expression
in individual natures, and its recklessness when thwarted, have given rise to
exaggerated ideas of its power. In all uncontrolled forms, however, it becomes
so immediate a menace to social order that if it does not die out in
self-destruction it is checked by the community and forced into lawful
channels. The only thing that could bear the heavy burden of social order and
adapt itself to every change and fresh demand was the indestructibly solid, yet
elastic, strength of love. The care and culture of love therefore became
thenceforth the first great charge of Evolution, and every obstruction to its
path began to be swept away. Whatever facilities could further its career were
gradually adopted, and changes which soon began to pass over the face of all
human societies seemed but parts of one great conspiracy to hasten its final
reign.
For a prolonged and protective Fatherhood, once
introduced into the world, was immediately taken charge of by Natural
Selection. The children who had fathers to fight for them grew up; those who
had not were killed or starved. The lengthening of the period during which
Father and Mother kept together meant double protection for the little ones;
and the more they kept together for the first few days or weeks, and the more
the Father helped to defend mother and child, the more chance for all three in
the end. The picture which Koppenfells draws of the female Gorilla and her
young ensconced in a nest upon the fork of a tree, while Gorilla pere
sat all night at the foot with his back against the trunk to protect them from
the leopards, is a fair object-lesson in the first or protective stage of the
Father's Evolution. When Man passed, however, as he probably did, from the
frugivorous to the carnivorous state, the Father had the additional
responsibility of keeping his family in food. It would be impossible for a
Mother to hunt for game and attend to her young; and for a long time the young
themselves were useless in the chase, and must be entirely dependent on their
parents' bounty. But this means promotion to the Father. He is not only
protector but food-provider. It is impossible to. believe that in process of
time the discharge of this office did not bring some faint satisfactions to
himself, that the mere sight of his offspring fed instead of famished did not
give him a certain pleasure. And though the pleasure at first may have been no
more than the absence of the annoyance they caused by the clamorousness of
their want, it became a stimulus to exertion, and led in the end to rudimentary
forms of sympathy and self-denial.
Once established in the world as a winning force,
love could only yield to a greater force than itself, and greater force there
is none. In the hands of Natural Selection, therefore, it ran its course.
Whatever physiological adjustments continued to go on beneath the surface,
ethical factors now determined extinction or survival. Bad parents mean starved
children, and starved children will be replaced in the Struggle for Life by
full-fed children, and ere a few generations parents without love will exist no
more. The child, on the other hand, which has drunk most deeply of its Father's
or its Mother's love lives to hand on that which has spared it to a succeeding
race. How much of affection is handed on, or how little, matters not, for
Heredity works with the finest microscope, and sees, and seizes, the invisible.
In a second child, reared by parents one degree more loving than the last, this
ultimate particle of love will grow a little more, and each succeeding Family
in this royal line will be richer in the elements which make for progress than
the last.
When we reach the human Family, we find that this
simple combination was already strong enough to become the nucleus of the
social and national life of the world. For the moment the new forces of
Sympathy, Brotherhood, Self-denial, or Love, began to work among the isolated
units which made up primitive Man, the whole composition and character of the
aggregate began to change. Sooner or later in the recurring necessities of
savage existence there came an opportunity for the members of the first
combination, the little group of Father, Mother, and Sons, to act together.
However unworthily this primitive group merited the name of Family, there was
here what at that time was of final importance-- the elements of physical
strength. He who formerly stood alone in the Struggle for Life now found
himself backed on occasion by an inner circle. Those who outside this circle
ventured to oppose or offend an individual within it had the Family to reckon
with. Ends were gained by the new alliance which were unattainable
single-handed by any individual member of the tribe, and whether enlisted to
evade disaster or secure a prey, to resist an injustice or avenge a wrong, the
odds henceforth and always were in favour of the combination. When it is
remembered how, owing to the comparative equality of the competitors in the
conflict of savage existence, even an infinitesimal advantage on one side or
the other determines health or starvation, survival or extinction, the
importance of the first feeble effort at federation must be recognized.
Shoulder to shoulder has been the watchword all through history of national
development. Almost from the very first, indeed, the Family and not the
individual must have been the unit of Tribal life; and as Families grew more
and more definite, they became the recognized piers of the social structure and
gave a first stability to the race of men.
But great as are the physical advantages of the
Family, the ethical uses, even in the early days of its existence, place this
institution at the head of all the creations of Evolution. For the Family is
not only its greatest creation, but its greatest instrument for further
creation. The ethical changes begin almost the moment it is formed. One
immediate effect, for instance, of the formation of Family groups was to take
off from any single individual the perpetual strain of the Struggle for Life.
The Family as a whole must sometimes fight, but the responsibility and the duty
are now distributed, and those who were once solely preoccupied with the
personal struggle will have respites, during which other things will occupy
their minds. Attention thus called off from environing enemies, the members of
the Family will, as it were, discover one another. New relations among them
will spring up, new adjustments to one another's presence and to one another's
needs, and hitherto unknown elements of character will be gradually called to
the surface. That unselfishness, in some rude form, should now grow up is a
necessity of living together. A man cannot be a member of a Family and remain
an utter egoist. His interests are perforce divided, and though the Family
group is a small surface for unselfishness to spread to and to practise on, no
greater feat could as yet be attempted, and Evolution never runs risks of too
rapid development or over-strain. With the incorporation of the Family into a
Clan or Tribe the area will presently be extended, and the necessity of
controlling self-interest more thoroughly, or merging it in a wider interest,
become more obligatory. But to prepare the altruistic sentiment for so great an
abnegation, the simpler discipline of the Family was required. How firmly
Families in time became welded together in mutual interest and support, and how
much crude Altruism this implies, is evident from the place of Family feuds and
the power of great Families and Houses both in ancient and modern history. A
striking instance is the Vendetta. To avenge a Family insult in countries where
this prevails was a sacred duty to all the relatives, and even the last
surviving member willingly gave up his life to vindicate its honour. So strong
indeed sometimes has grown the power of individual Families that the more
desirable spread of Altruism to the Nation was threatened, and wider interests
so much forgotten that the Family became the enemy of the State. Nothing could
more forcibly show the tremendous power of self-development contained within
the Family circle, and the solidity and strength to which it can grow, than
that, time after time in history, it has had to be crushed and broken up by all
the forces of the State.
Among other elements in human nature fostered in
the Family is one of exceptional interest. The attempt has been made to show
that from the inevitable relations of early Family life, the sense of Duty
first dawned upon the world. The theme is too great, too intricate, and too
dangerous to open under the limitations of the present inquiry, for these deny
us the appeal to Society, to Religion, and even to the Conscience of the higher
Man. But it is due to the Father, whose Evolution we are tracing, that the
share he is supposed by some authorities to take in it should be at least
named.
That morality in general has something to do with
the relations of people to one another is evident, as everyone knows, from the
mere derivation of the word. Mores, morals are in the first instance
customs, the customs or ways which people have when they are together.
Now, the Family is the first occasion of importance where we get people
together. And as there are not only a number of people in a Family, but
different kinds of people, there will be a variety in the relations subsisting
between them, in the customs which stereotype the most frequently repeated
actions necessitated by these relations, and in the moods and attitudes of mind
accompanying them. Leaving out of sight differences of kind among brothers and
sisters, consider the probably more divergent and certainly more dominant
influences of Father and Mother. What the relation of child to Mother has
crystallized into we have sufficiently marked--it is a relation of direct
dependence, and its product is Love. But the Father is a wholly different
influence. What attitude does the Child take up in this austerer presence, and
what ways of acting, what customs, mores, morals, are engrained in the
child's mind through it? The acknowledged position of the Father in most early
tribes is head of the Family. To the children, and generally even to the
Mother, he represents Authority. He is the children's chief. Bachoven has
familiarized us with the idea of a Matriarchate, or Maternal Family; but
although exceptional tribes have given supremacy to the Mother, the rule is for
the Father to be supreme. As head of the Family, therefore, it was his business
to make the Family laws. No doubt the Mother also made laws; but the Father, as
the more terrible person, exacted obedience with greater severity, and his laws
acquired more force. To do what was pleasing in his eyes was a necessity with
the children, and his favour or his frown became standards of what was "good"
and what was "bad." Low as this standard was--the fear or favour of a savage
Father--it was a beginning of right mores, good conduct, proper manners.
Plant in the mind, or evoke from it, the idea of acting in a given way with
reference to some half-dozen daily trifles when done in the presence of one
authoritative individual, and Evolution has already found something to work on.
The children have got six, if not ten commandments. Extend the half-dozen
things done rightly to a whole dozen, and then to a score, and then to a
hundred; and let it become habitual to do these things rightly. When the right
doing of these things commends the doer to one person, he will next be apt to
commend himself by similar conduct to other persons, if their standard happens
to be the same. Whether good behaviour purchases favour or simply succeeds in
evading penalties is at first immaterial. All that is required, under whatever
sanctions, is that some standard of good or bad shall arise. No abstract sense
of duty, of course, here exists; no perfect law; it is a purely personal and
local code; but the word duty has at least received a first imperfect meaning;
and the Father, in some rough way, forms an external conscience to those
beneath him.
Such is the tentative theory of the advocates of
Evolutional Ethics. It may or may not be a possible account of the rise of a
sense of obligation, but it is certain that it does not account for the whole
of it. Why, also, that particular thing should be elicited under the
circumstances described is an unanswered question. In attempting to trace its
rise, no rationale appears of its origin; all proofs, in short, of its
evolution take for granted its previous existence. A latent thing has become
active; an invisible thing has become apparent. In one sense a relation has
been created, in another sense a quality in that relation has been revealed. A
new experiment upon human nature has been tried; a new discovery of its
properties has been the result.
That these moral elements, on the other hand,
must have a beginning somewhere in space and time is certain enough. Not less
necessary to the world than the Mother's gift of Love is the twin offering of
the Father--Righteousness. And if, almost before the soul is born, the shadowy
outline of a moral order should begin to loom out in history, the later phases
and the later sanctions lose nothing of their quality, are all the more
wonderful and all the more divine, because met by moral adumbrations in the
distant past. If the later children had their ten commandments given them in
one way, they cannot grudge that the world's earlier children should have been
given their two or three commandments in another way--another way which,
nevertheless, did we know all, might turn out to be but another phase of the
same way. But it is impossible even to approach the Evolution of Morality until
we have carried Man some stages further up his Ascent. It is only when he
reaches the social stage, when he becomes aggregated into clans, tribes, and
nations, that this problem opens. For the present we must content ourselves
with having witnessed his arrival in the Human Family--the starting-point and
threshold of the true moral life.
For a long time, it is true, the Family circle,
as a circle, was incomplete. Machinery must itself evolve before its products
evolve. Scarcely defined at all, broken as soon as formed, the earlier circles
allowed their strongest forces to escape almost at the moment they generated.
But the walls grew higher and higher with the advance of history. The leakage
became less and less. With the Christian era the machinery was complete; the
circle finally closed in, and became a secluded shrine where the culture of
everything holy and beautiful was carried on. The path by which this ideal
consummation was reached was not, as we have seen, a straight path; nor has the
integrity of the institution been always preserved through the later centuries.
The difficulty of realizing the ideal may be judged of by the fewness of the
nations now living who have reached it, and by the multitude of peoples and
tribes who have vanished from the earth without attaining. From the failure to
fulfil some one or other of the required conditions people after people and
nation after nation have come together only to disperse, and leave no legacy
behind except the lesson--as yet in few cases understood--of why they
failed.
Yet whether the road be straight or devious is of
little moment. The one significant thing is that it rises. We have reached a
stage in Evolution at which physiological gains are guarded and accentuated, if
not in an ethical interest, at least by ethical factors becoming utilized by
natural selection. Henceforth affection becomes a power in the world; and
whatever physiological adjustments continue to perfect themselves, the most
attached Families will have a better chance of surviving and of transmitting
their moral characteristics to succeeding generations. The completion of the
arch of Family Life forms one of the great, if not the greatest of the
landmarks of history. If the crowning work of Organic Evolution is the
Mammalia, the consummation of the Mammalia is the Family. Physically,
psychically, ethically, the Family is the masterpiece of Evolution. The
creation of Evolution, it was destined to become the most active instrument and
ally which Evolution has ever had. For what is its evolutionary significance?
It is the generator and the repository of the forces which alone can carry out
the social and moral progress of the world. There they rally when they become
enfeebled, there their excesses are counterbalanced, and thence they radiate
out, refined and reinforced, to do their holy work.
Looking at the mere dynamics of the question, the
Family contains all the machinery, and nearly all the power, for the moral
education of mankind. Feebly, but adequately, in the early chapters of Man's
history it fulfilled its function of nursing Love, the Mother of all morality,
and Righteousness, the Father of all morality, so preparing a parentage for all
the beautiful spiritual children which in later years should spring from them.
If life henceforth is to go on at all, it must be a better life, a more loving
life, a more abundant life; and this premium upon Love means--if it means
anything--that Evolution is taking henceforth an ethical direction. It is no
more possible to interpret Nature physically from this point than to interpret
a "Holy Family" of Raphael's in terms of the material structure of canvas or
the qualities of pigments. Canvas may be coarse or fine, pigments may be
vegetable or mineral; but whether the colours be crushed out of madder or
ground out of arsenic or lead is of no importance now. Once these things were
important; by infinitely slow processes Nature formed them; by clever arts the
colourman prepared them. But the "Holy Family" did not lie potentially in the
madder-bud, nor in the earth with the lead and arsenic, nor in the laboratory
with the colourman. He who claims Nature for Matter and Physical force makes
the same assumption that these would do if they claimed the painting. In a far
truer sense than Raphael produced his "Holy Family" Nature has produced a Holy
Family. Not for centuries but for millenniums the Family has survived. Time has
not tarnished it; no later art has improved upon it; nor genius discovered
anything more lovely; nor religion anything more divine. From the bee's cell
and the butterfly's wing men draw what they call the Argument from Design; but
it is in the kingdoms which come without observation, in these great immaterial
orderings which Science is but beginning to perceive, that the purposes of
Creation are revealed.
INVOLUTION
MANY years ago, in the clay which in every
part of the world is found underlying beds of coal, a peculiar fossil was
discovered and named by science Stigmaria. It occurred in great abundance and
in many countries, and from the strange way in which it ramified through the
clay it was supposed to be some extinct variety of a gigantic water-weed. In
the coal itself another fossil was discovered, almost as abundant but far more
beautiful, and from the exquisite carving which ornamented its fluted stem it
received the name of Sigillaria. One day a Canadian geologist, studying
Sigillaria in the field, made a new discovery. Finding the trunk of a
Sigillaria standing erect in a bed of coal, he traced the column downwards to
the clay beneath. To his surprise he found it ended in Stigmaria. This
branching fossil in the clay was no longer a water-weed. It was the root of
which Sigillaria was the stem, and the clay was the soil in which the great
coal-plant grew.
Through many chapters, often in the dark,
everywhere hampered by the clay, we have been working among roots. Of what are
they the roots? To what order do they belong? By what process have they grown?
What connection have they with the realm above, or the realm beneath? Is it a
Stigmaria or a Sigillaria world?
Till yesterday Science did not recognize them
even as roots. They were classified apart. They led to nothing. No organic
connection was known between lower Nature and that wholly separate and all but
antagonistic realm, the higher world of Man. Atoms, cells, plants, animals were
the material products of a separate creation, the clay from which Man took his
clay-body, and no more. The higher world, also, was a system by itself. It rose
out of nothing; it rested upon nothing. Clay, where the roots lay, was the
product of inorganic forces; Coal, which enshrined the tree, was a creation of
the sunlight. What fellowship had light with darkness? What possible connection
could exist between that beautiful organism which stood erect in the living,
and that which lay prone in the dead? Yet, by a process doubly verified, the
organic connection between these two has now been traced. Working upwards
through the clay the biologist finds what he took to be an organism of the clay
leaving his domain and passing into a world above --a world which he had
scarcely noticed before, and into which, with such instruments as he employs,
he cannot follow it. Working downward through the higher world, the
psychologist, the moralist, the sociologist, behold the even more wonderful
spectacle of the things they had counted a peculiar possession of the upper
kingdom, burying themselves in ever attenuating forms in the clay beneath. What
is to be made of this discovery? Once more, Is it a Stigmaria or a Sigillaria
world? Is the biologist to give up his clay or the moralist his higher kingdom?
Are Mind, Morals, Men, to be interpreted in terms of roots, or are atoms and
cells to be judged by the flowers and fruits of the tree?
The first fruit of the discovery must be that
each shall explore with new respect the other's world, and, instead of
delighting to accentuate their contrasts, strive to magnify their infinite
harmonies. Old as is the world's vision of a cosmos, and universal as has been
its dream of the unity of Nature, neither has ever stood before the imagination
complete. Poetry felt, but never knew, that the universe was one; Biology
perceived the profound chemical balance between the inorganic and organic
kingdoms, and no more; Physics, discovering the correlation of forces,
constructed a cosmos of its own; Astronomy, through the law of gravitation,
linked us, but mechanically, with the stars. But it was reserved for Evolution
to make the final revelation of the unity of the world, to comprehend
everything under one generalization, to explain everything by one great end.
Its omnipresent eye saw every phenomenon and every law. It gathered all that is
and has been into one last whole--a whole whose very perfection consists in the
all but infinite distinctions of the things which it unites.
What is often dreaded in Evolution--the danger of
obliterating distinctions that are vital--is a groundless fear. Stigmaria can
never be anything more than root, and Sigillaria can never be anything less
than stem. To show their connection is not to transpose their properties. The
wider the distinctions seen among their properties the profounder is the
Thought which unites them, the more rich and rational the Cosmos which
comprehends them. For "the unity which we see in Nature is that kind of Unity
which the Mind recognizes as the result of operations similar to its own--not a
unity which consists in mere sameness of material, or in mere identity of
composition, or in mere uniformity of structure; but a unity which consists in
the subordination of all these to similar aims, not to similar principles of
action--that is to say, in like methods of yoking a few elementary forces to
the discharge of special functions, and to the production, by adjustment, of
one harmonious whole."[93]
Yet did Sigillaria grow out of Stigmaria? Did
Mind, Morals, Men, evolve out of Matter? Surely if one is the tree and the
other the root of that tree, and if Evolution means the passage of the one into
the other, there is no escape from this conclusion--no escape therefore from
the crassest materialism? If this is really the situation, the lower must then
include the higher, and Evolution, after all, be a process of the clay? This is
a frequent, a natural, and a wholly unreflecting inference from a very common
way of stating the Evolution theory. It arises from a total misconception of
what a root is. Because a thing is seen to have roots, it is assumed that it
has grown out of these roots, and must therefore belong to the root-order. But
neither of these things is true in Nature. Are the stem, branch, leaf, flower,
fruit of a tree roots? Do they belong to the root-order? They do not. Their
whole morphology is different; their whole physiology is different; their
reactions upon the world around are different. But it must be allowed that they
are at least contained in the root? No single one of them is contained in the
root. If not in the root, then in the clay? Neither are they contained in the
clay. But they grow out of clay, are they not made out of clay? They do not
grow out of clay, and they are not made out of clay. It is astounding sometimes
how little those who venture to criticize biological processes seem to know of
its simplest facts. Fill a flower-pot with clay, and plant in it a seedling. At
the end of four years it has become a small tree; it is six feet high; it
weighs ten pounds. But the clay in the pot is still there? A moiety of it has
gone, but it is not appreciably diminished; it has not, except the moiety,
passed into the tree; the tree does not live on clay nor on any force contained
in the clay. It cannot have grown out of the seedling, for the seedling
contained but a grain for every pound contained in the tree. It cannot have
grown from the root, because the root is there now, has lost nothing to the
tree, has itself gained from the tree, and at first was no more there than the
tree.
Sigillaria, then, as representing the ethical
order, did not grow out of Stigmaria as representing the organic or the
material order. Trees not only do not evolve out of their roots, but whole
classes in the plant world--the sea-weeds for instance-- have no roots at all.
If any possible relation exists it is exactly the opposite one--it is the root
which evolves from the tree. Trees send down roots in a far truer sense than
roots send up trees. Yet neither is the whole truth. The true function of the
root is to give stability to the tree, and to afford a medium for conveying
into it inorganic matter from without. And this brings us face to face with the
real relation. Tree and root--the seed apart--find their explanation not in one
another nor in something in themselves, but mainly in something outside
themselves. The secret of Evolution lies, in short, with the
Environment. In the Environment, in that in which things live and move and
have their being, is found the secret of their being, and especially of their
becoming. And what is that in which things live and move and have their being?
It is Nature, the world, the cosmos--and something more, some One more, an
Infinite Intelligence and an Eternal Will. Everything that lives, lives in
virtue of its correspondences with this Environment. Evolution is not to unfold
from within; it is to infold from without. Growth is no mere extension from a
root but a taking possession of, or a being possessed by, an ever widening
Environment, a continuous process of assimilation of the seen or Unseen, a
ceaseless redistribution of energies flowing into the evolving organism from
the Universe around it. The supreme factor in all development is Environment.
Half the confusions which reign round the process of Evolution, and half the
objections to it, arise from considering the evolving object as a
self-sufficient whole. Produce an organism, plant, animal, man, society, which
will evolve in vacuo and the right is yours to say that the tree lies in
the root, the flower in the bud, the man in the embryo, the social organism in
the family of an anthropoid ape. If an organism is to be judged in terms of the
immediate Environment of its roots, the tree is a clay tree; but if it is to be
judged by stem, leaves, fruit, it is not a clay tree. If the moral or social
organism is to be judged in terms of the Environment of its roots, the moral
and social organism is a material organism; but if it is to be judged in terms
of the higher influences which enter into the making of its stem, leaves,
fruit, it is not a material organism. Everything that lives, and every part of
everything that lives, enters into relation with different parts of the
Environment and with different things in the Environment; and at every step of
its Ascent it compasses new ranges of the Environment, and is acted upon, and
acts, in different ways from those in which it was acted upon, or acted, at the
previous stage.
For what is most of all essential to remember is
that not only is Environment the prime factor in development, but that the
Environment itself rises with every evolution of any form of life. To regard
the Environment as a fixed quantity and a fixed quality is, next to ignoring
the altruistic factor, the cardinal error of evolutional philosophy. With every
step a climber rises up a mountain side his Environment must change. At a
thousand feet the air is lighter and purer than at a hundred, and as the effect
varies with the cause, all the reactions of the air upon his body are altered
at the higher level. His pulse quickens ; his spirit grows more buoyant; the
energies of the upper world flow in upon him. All the other phenomena
change--the plants are Alpine, the animals are a hardier race, the temperature
falls, the very world he left behind wears a different look. At three thousand
feet the causes, the effects, and the phenomena change again. The horizon is
wider, the light intenser, the air colder, the top nearer; the nether world
recedes from view. At six thousand feet, if we may accentuate the illustration
till it contains more of the emphasis of the reality, he enters the region of
snow. Here is a change brought about by a small and perfectly natural rise
which yet amounts to a revolution. Another thousand feet and there is another
revolution--he is ushered into the domain of mist. Still another thousand, and
the climax of change has come. He stands at the top, and, behold, the Sun. None
of the things he has encountered in his progress toward the top are new things.
They are the normal phenomena of altitude--the scenes, the energies, the
correspondences, natural to the higher slopes. He did not create any of these
things as he rose; they were not created as he rose; they did not lie
potentially in the plains or in the mountain foot. What has happened is simply
that in rising he has encountered them-- some for the first time, which are
therefore wholly new to him; others which, though known before, now flow into
his being in such fuller measure, or enter into such fresh relations among
themselves, or with the changed being which at every step he has become, as to
be also practically new.
Man, in his long pilgrimage upwards from the
clay, passes through regions of ever varying character. Each breath drawn and
utilized to make one upward step brings him into relation with a fractionally
higher air, a fractionally different world. The new energies he there receives
are utilized, and in virtue of them he rises to a third, and from a third to a
fourth. As in the animal kingdom the senses open one by one--the eye
progressing from the mere discernment of light and darkness to the blurred
image of things near, and then to clearer vision of the more remote; the ear
passing from the tremulous sense of vibration to distinguish with ever
increasing delicacy the sounds of far-off things --so in the higher world the
moral and spiritual senses rise and quicken till they compass qualities unknown
before and impossible to the limited faculties of the earlier life. So Man, not
by any innate tendency to progress in himself, nor by the energies inherent in
the protoplasmic cell from which he first set out, but by a continuous feeding
and reinforcing of the process from without, attains the higher altitudes, and
from the sense-world at the mountain foot ascends with ennobled and ennobling
faculties until he greets the Sun.
What is the Environment of the Social tree? It is
all the things, and all the persons, and all the influences, and all the forces
with which, at each successive stage of progress, it enters into
correspondence. And this Environment inevitably expands as the Social tree
expands and extends its correspondences. At the savage stage Man compasses one
set of relations, at the rude social stage another, at the civilized stage a
third, and each has its own reactions. The social, the moral, and the religious
forces beat upon all social beings in the order in which the capacities for
them unfold, and according to the measure in which the capacities themselves
are fitted to contain them. And from what ultimate source do they come? There
is only one source of everything in the world. They come from the same source
as the Carbonic Acid Gas, the Oxygen, the Nitrogen, and the Vapour of Water,
which from the outer world enter into the growing plant. These also visit the
plant in the order in which the capacities for them unfold, and according to
the measure in which these capacities can contain them.
The fact that the higher principles come from the
same Environment as those of the plant, nevertheless does not imply that they
are the same as those which enter into the plant. In the plant they are
physical, in Man spiritual. If anything is to be implied it is not that the
spiritual energies are physical, but that the physical energies are spiritual.
To call the things in the physical world "material" takes us no nearer the
natural, no further away from the spiritual The roots of a tree may rise from
what we call a physical world; the leaves may be bathed by physical atoms; even
the energy of the tree may be solar energy, but the tree is itself; The tree is
a Thought, a unity, a rational purposeful whole; the "matter" is but the medium
of their expression. Call it all--matter, energy, tree --a physical production,
and have we yet touched its ultimate reality? Are we even quite sure that what
we call a physical world is, after all, a physical world? The preponderating
view of science at present is that it is not. The very term "material world,"
we are told, is a misnomer; that the world is a spiritual world, merely
employing "matter" for its manifestations.
But surely here is still a fallacy. Are not these
so-called social forces the effect of Society and not its cause? Has not
Society to generate them before they regenerate Society? True, but to generate
is not to create. Society is machinery, a medium for the transmission of
energy, but no more a medium for its creation than a steam engine is for the
creation of its energy. Whence then the social energies? The answer is as
before. Whence the physical energies? And Science has only one answer to that.
"Consider the position into which Science has brought us. We are led by
scientific logic to an unseen, and by scientific analogy to the spirituality of
this unseen. In fine, our conclusion is, that the visible universe has been
developed by an intelligence resident in the Unseen."[94] There is only one theory of the method of Creation in the
field, and that is Evolution; but there is only one theory of origins in the
field, and that is Creation. Instead of abolishing a creative Hand, Evolution
demands it. Instead of being opposed to Creation, all theories of Evolution
begin by assuming it. If Science does not formally posit it, it never posits
anything less. "The doctrine of Evolution," writes Mr. Huxley, "is neither
theistic nor anti-theistic. It has no more to do with theism than the first
book of Euclid has. It does not even come in contact with theism considered as
a scientific doctrine." But when it touches the question of origins, it is
either theistic or silent. "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature," says
Weismann, "which aim at a purpose, we must admit a cause, . . .
inconceivable in its nature. of which we can only say one thing with certainty,
that it must be theological."
The fallacy of the merely quantitative theory of
Evolution is apparent. To interpret any organism in terms of the organism
solely is to omit reference to the main instrument of its Evolution, and
therefore to leave the process, scientifically and philosophically,
unexplained. It is as if one were to construct a theory of the career of a
millionaire in terms of the pocket-money allowed him when a schoolboy.
Disregard the fact that more pocket-money was allowed the schoolboy as he
passed from the first form to the sixth; that his allowance was increased as he
came of age; that now, being a man, not a boy, he was capable of more wisely
spending it; that being wise he put his money to paying uses; and that interest
and capital were invested and re-invested as years went on--disregard all this
and you cannot account for the rise of the millionaire. As well construct the
millionaire from the potential gold contained in his first sixpence--a sixpence
which never left his pocket--as construct a theory of the Evolution of Man from
the protoplasmic cell apart from its Environment. It is only when interpreted,
not in terms of himself, but in terms of Environment, and of an Environment
increasingly appropriated, quantitatively and qualitatively, with each fresh
stage of the advance, that a consistent theory is possible, or that the true
nature of Evolution can appear.
A child does not grow out of a child by
spontaneous unfoldings. The process is fed from without. The body assimilates
food, the mind assimilates books, the moral nature draws upon affection, the
religious faculties nourish the higher being from Ideals. Time brings not only
more things, but new things; the higher nature inaugurates possession of, or
by, the higher order. "It lies in the very nature of the case that the earliest
form of that which lives and develops is the least adequate to its nature, and
therefore that from which we can get the least distinct clue to the inner
principle of that nature. Hence to trace a living being back to its beginning,
and to explain what follows by such beginning, would be simply to omit almost
all that characterizes it, and then to suppose that in what remains we have the
secret of its existence. That is not really to explain it, but to explain it
away; for on this method, we necessarily reduce the features that distinguish
it to a minimum and, when we have done so, the remainder may well seem
to be itself reducible to something in which the principle in question does not
manifest itself at all. If we carry the animal back to protoplasm, it may
readily seem possible to explain it as a chemical compound. And, in like
manner, by the same minimizing process, we may seem to succeed in reducing
consciousness and self-consciousness in its simplest form to sensation, and
sensation in its simplest form to something not essentially different from the
nutritive life of plants. The fallacy of the sorites may thus be used to
conceal all qualitative changes under the guise of quantitative addition
or diminution, and to bridge over all difference by the idea of gradual
transition. For, as the old school of etymologists showed, if we are at liberty
to interpose as many connecting links as we please, it becomes easy to imagine
that things the most heterogeneous should spring out of each other. While,
however, the hypothesis of gradual change--change proceeding by infinitesimal
stages which melt into each other so that the eye cannot detect where one
begins and the other ends--makes such a transition easier for
imagination, it does nothing to diminish the difficulty or the wonder of
it for thought."[95]
The value of philosophical criticism to science
has seldom appeared to more advantage than in these words of the Master of
Balliol. The following passage from Martineau may be fitly placed beside
them:--"In not a few of the progressionists the weak illusion is unmistakable,
that, with time enough, you may get everything out of next-to-nothing. Grant
us, they seem to say, any tiniest granule of power, so close upon zero that it
is not worth begrudging--allow it some trifling tendency to infinitesimal
movement--and we will show you how this little stock became the kosmos, without
ever taking a step worth thinking of, much less constituting a case for design.
The argument is a mere appeal to an incompetency in the human imagination, in
virtue of which magnitudes evading conception are treated as out of existence;
and an aggregate of inappreciable increments is simultaneously equated,--in its
cause to nothing, in its effect to the whole of things. You
manifestly want the same causality, whether concentrated in a moment or
distributed through incalculable ages; only in drawing upon it a logical theft
is more easily committed piecemeal than wholesale. Surely it is a mean device
for a philosopher thus to crib causation by hair-breadths, to put it out at
compound interest through all time, and then disown the debt."[96]
It is not said that the view here given of the
process of Evolution has been the actual process. The illustrations have been
developed rather to clear up difficulties than to state a theory. The time is
not ripe for daring to present to our imaginations even a partial view of what
that transcendent process may have been. At present we can only take our ideas
of growth from the growing things around us, and in this analogy we have taken
no account of the most essential fact--the seed. Nor is it asserted, far as
these illustrations point in that direction, that the course of Evolution has
been a continuous, uninterrupted, upward rise. On the whole it has certainly
been a rise; but whether a rise without leap or break or pause, or--what is
more likely--a progress in rhythms, pulses, and waves, or--what is unlikely-- a
cataclysmal ascent by steps abrupt and steep, may possibly never be proved.
There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the
fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps--gaps which they
will fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps? What view of Nature or of Truth
is theirs whose interest in Science is not in what it can explain but in what
it cannot, whose quest is ignorance not knowledge, whose daily dread is that
the cloud may lift, and who, as darkness melts from this field or from that,
begin to tremble for the place of His abode? What needs altering in such
finely-jealous souls is at once their view of Nature and of God. Nature is
God's writing, and can only tell the truth; God is light, and in Him is no
darkness at all.
If by the accumulation of irresistible evidence
we are driven--may not one say permitted--to accept Evolution as God's method
in creation, it is a mistaken policy to glory in what it cannot account for.
The reason why men grudge to Evolution each of its fresh claims to show how
things have been made is the groundless fear that if we discover how they are
made we minimize their divinity. When things are known, that is to say, we
conceive them as natural, on Man's level; when they are unknown, we call them
divine--as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its divinity. If God
is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we be when these
gaps are filled up? And if they are never to be filled up, is God only to be
found in the dis-orders of the world? Those who yield to the temptation to
reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to
forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God
appears periodically, He disappears periodically. If He comes upon the scene at
special crises, He is absent from the scene in the intervals. Whether is
all-God or occasional-God the nobler theory? Positively, the idea of an
immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the
occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology. Negatively, the
older view is not only the less worthy, but it is discredited by science. And
as to facts, the daily miracle of a flower, the courses of the stars, the
upholding and sustaining day by day of this great palpitating world, need a
living Will as much as the creation of atoms at the first. We know growth as
the method by which things are made in Nature, and we know no other method. We
do not know that there are not other methods; but if there are, we do not know
them. Those cases which we do not know to be growths, we do not know to be
anything else, and we may at least suspect them to be growths. Nor are they any
the less miraculous because they appear to us as growths. A miracle is not
something quick. The doings of these things may seem to us no miracle,
nevertheless it is a miracle that they have been done.
But, after all, the miracle of Evolution is not
the process but the product. Beside the wonder of the result, the problem of
the process is a mere curiosity of Science. For what is the product? It is not
mountain and valley, sky and sea, flower and star, this glorious and beautiful
world in which Man's body finds its home. It is not the god-like gift of Mind
nor the ordered cosmos where it finds so noble an exercise for its illimitable
powers. It is that which of all other things in the universe commends itself,
with increasing sureness as time goes on, to the reason and to the heart of
Humanity--Love. Love is the final result of Evolution. This is what stands out
in Nature as the supreme creation. Evolution is not progress in matter. Matter
cannot progress. It is a progress in spirit, in that which is limitless, in
that which is at once most human, most rational, and most divine. Whatever
controversy rages as to the factors of Evolution, whatever mystery enshrouds
its steps, no doubt exists of its goal. The great landmarks we have passed, and
we are not yet half-way up the Ascent, each separately and all together have
declared the course of Nature to be a rational course, and its end a moral end.
At the furthest limit of time, in protoplasm itself, we saw start forth the two
great currents which by their action and reaction, as Selfishness and
Unselfishness, were to supply in ever accentuating clearness the conditions of
the moral life. Following their movements upward through the organic kingdom,
we watched the results which each achieved --always high, and always waxing
higher; and though what we call Evil dogged each step with sinister and
sometimes staggering malevolence, the balance when struck was always good upon
the whole. Then came the last great act of the organic process, the act which
finally revealed to teleology its hitherto obscured end, the organization of
the Mammalia, the Kingdom of the Mothers. So full of ethical possibility is
this single creation that one might stake the character of Evolution upon the
Mammalia alone. On the biological side, as we have seen, the Evolution of the
Mammalia means the Evolution of Mothers; on the sociological side, the
Evolution of the Family; and on the moral side, the Evolution of Love. How are
we to characterize a process which ripened fruits like these? That the very
animal kingdom had for its end and crown a class of animals who owe their name,
their place, and their whole existence to Altruism; that through these Mothers
society has been furnished with an institution for generating, concentrating,
purifying, and redistributing Love in all its enduring forms; that the
perfecting of Love is thus not an incident in Nature but everywhere the largest
part of her task, begun with the first beginnings of life, and continuously
developing quantitatively and qualitatively to the close--all this has been
read into Nature by our own imaginings, or it is the revelation of a purpose of
benevolence and a God whose name is Love. The sceptic, we are sometimes
reminded, has presented crucial difficulties to the theist founded on the
doctrine of Evolution. Here is a problem which the theist may leave with the
sceptic. That that which has emerged has the qualities it has, that even the
Mammalia should have emerged, that that class should stand related to the life
of Man in the way it does, that Man has lived because he loved, and that he
lives to love--these, on any theory but one, are insoluble problems.
Forbidden to follow the Evolution of Love into
the higher fields of history and society, we take courage to make a momentary
exploration in a still lower field--a field so far beneath the plant and animal
level that hitherto we have not dared it conceivable that in inorganic Nature,
among the very material bases of the world, there should be anything to remind
us of the coming of this Tree of Life? To expect even foreshadowings of ethical
characters there were an anachronism too great for expression. Yet there is
something there, something which is at least worth recalling in the present
connection.
The earliest condition in which Science allows us
to picture this globe is that of a fiery mass of nebulous matter. At the second
stage it consists of countless myriads of similar atoms, roughly outlined into
a ragged cloud-ball, glowing with heat, and rotating in space with
inconceivable velocity. By what means can this mass be broken up, or broken
down, or made into a solid world? By two things-- mutual attraction and
chemical affinity. The moment when within this cloud-ball the conditions of
cooling temperature are such that two atoms could combine together the cause of
the Evolution of the Earth is won. For this pair of atoms are chemically
"stronger" than any of the atoms immediately surrounding them. Gradually, by
attraction or affinity, the primitive pair of atoms--like the first pair of
savages-- absorb a third atom, and a fourth, and a fifth, until a "Family" of
atoms is raised up which possesses properties and powers altogether new, and in
virtue of which it holds within its grasp the conquest and servitude of all
surrounding units. From this growing centre, attraction radiates on every side,
until a larger aggregate, a family group--a Tribe--arises and starts a more
powerful centre of its own. With every additional atom added, the power as well
as the complexity of the combination increases. As the process goes on, after
endless vicissitudes, repulsions, and readjustments, the changes become fewer
and fewer, the conflict between mass and mass dies down, the elements passing
through various stages of liquidity finally combine in the order of their
affinities, arrange themselves in the order of their densities, and the solid
earth is finished.
Now recall the names of the leading actors in
this stupendous reformation. They are two in number, mutual attraction and
chemical affinity. Notice these words--Attraction, Affinity. Notice that the
great formative forces of physical Evolution have psychical names. It is idle
to discuss whether there is or can be any identity between the thing
represented in the one case and in the other. Obviously there cannot be. Yet
this does not exhaust the interest of the analogy. In reality, neither here nor
anywhere, have we any knowledge whatever of what is actually meant by
Attraction; nor, in the one sphere or in the other, have we even the means of
approximating to such knowledge. To Newton himself the very conception of one
atom or one mass, attracting through empty space another atom or another mass,
put his mental powers to confusion. And as to the term Affinity, the most
recent Chemistry, finding it utterly unfathomable in itself, confines its
research at present to the investigation of its modes of action. Science does
not know indeed what forces are; it only classifies them. Here, as in every
deep recess of physical Nature, we are in the presence of that which is
metaphysical, that which bars the way imperiously at every turn to a
materialistic interpretation of the world. Yet name and nature of force apart,
what affinity even the grossest, what likeness even the most remote, could one
have expected to trace between the gradual aggregation of units of matter in
the condensation of a weltering star, and the slow segregation of men in the
organization of societies and nations? However different the agents, is there
no suggestion that they are different stages of a uniform process, different
epochs of one great historical enterprise, different results of a single
evolutionary law?
Read from the root, we define this age-long
process by a word borrowed from the science of roots--a word from the
clay--Evolution. But read from the top, Evolution is an impossible word to
describe it. The word is Involution. It is not a Stigmaria world, but a
Sigillaria world; a spiritual, not a material universe. Evolution is
Advolution; better, it is Revelation--the phenomenal expression of the Divine,
the progressive realization of the Ideal, the Ascent of Love. Evolution is a
doctrine of unimaginable grandeur. That Man should discern the prelude to his
destiny in the voices of the stars; that the heart of Nature should be a so
human heart; that its eternal enterprise should be one with his ideals; that
even in the Universe beyond, the Reason which presides should have so strange a
kinship with that measure of it which he calls his own; that he, an atom in
that Universe, should dare to feel himself at home within it, should stand
beside Immensity, Infinity, Eternity, unaffrighted and undismayed--these things
bewilder Man the more that they bewilder him so little.
But one verdict is possible as to the practical
import of this great doctrine, as to its bearing upon the individual life and
the future of the race. Evolution has ushered a new hope into the world. The
supreme message of science to this age is that all Nature is on the side of the
man who tries to rise. Evolution, development, progress are not only on her
programme, these are her programme. For all things are rising, all worlds, all
planets, all stars and suns. An ascending energy is in the universe, and the
whole moves on with one mighty idea and anticipation. The aspiration in the
human mind and heart is but the evolutionary tendency of the universe becoming
conscious. Darwin's great discovery, or the discovery which he brought into
prominence, is the same as Galileo's--that the world moves. The Italian prophet
said it moves from west to east; the English philosopher said it moves from low
to high. And this is the last and most splendid contribution of science to the
faith of the world.
The discovery of a second motion in the earth has
come into the world of thought only in time to save it from despair. As in the
days of Galileo, there are many even now who do not see that the world
moves--men to whom the earth is but an endless plain, a prison fixed in a
purposeless universe where untried prisoners await their unknown fate. It is
not the monotony of life which destroys men, but its pointlessness; they can
bear its weight, its meaninglessness crushes them. But the same great
revolution that the discovery of the axial rotation of the earth effected in
the realm of physics, the announcement of the doctrine of Evolution makes in
the moral world. Already, even in these days of its dawn, a sudden and
marvellous light has fallen upon earth and heaven. Evolution is less a doctrine
than a light; it is a light revealing in the chaos of the past a perfect and
growing order, giving meaning even to the confusions of the present,
discovering through all the deviousness around us the paths of progress, and
flashing its rays already upon a coming goal. Men begin to see an undeviating
ethical purpose in this material world, a tide, that from eternity has never
turned, making for perfectness. In that vast progression of Nature, that vision
of all things from the first of time moving from low to high, from
incompleteness to completeness, from imperfection to perfection, the moral
nature recognizes in all its height and depth the eternal claim upon itself.
Wholeness, perfection, love--these have always been required of Man. But never
before on the natural plane have they been proclaimed by voices so commanding,
or enforced by sanctions so great and rational.
Is Nature henceforth to become the ethical
teacher of the world? Shall its aims become the guide, its spirit the
inspiration of Man's life? Is there no ground here where all the faiths and all
the creeds may meet--nay, no ground for a final faith and a final creed? For
could but all men see the inner meaning and aspiration of the natural order
should we not find at last the universal religion--a religion congruous with
the whole past of Man, at one with Nature, and with a working creed which
Science could accept?
The answer is a simple one: We have it already.
There exists a religion which has anticipated all these requirements--a
religion which has been before the world these eighteen hundred years, whose
congruity with Nature and with Man stands the tests at every point. Up to this
time no word has been spoken to reconcile Christianity with Evolution, or
Evolution with Christianity. And why? Because the two are one. What is
Evolution? A method of creation. What is its object? To make more perfect
living beings. What is Christianity? A method of creation. What is its object?
To make more perfect living beings. Through what does Evolution work? Through
Love. Through what does Christianity work? Through Love. Evolution and
Christianity have the same Author, the same end, the same spirit. There is no
rivalry between these processes. Christianity struck into the Evolutionary
process with no noise or shock; it upset nothing of all that had been done; it
took all the natural foundations precisely as it found them; it adopted Man's
body, mind, and soul at the exact level where Organic Evolution was at work
upon them; it carried on the building by slow and gradual modifications; and,
through processes governed by rational laws, it put the finishing touches to
the Ascent of Man.
No man can run up the natural lines of Evolution
without coming to Christianity at the top. One holds no brief to buttress
Christianity in this way. But science has to deal with facts and with all
facts, and the facts and processes which have received the name of Christian
are the continuations of the scientific order, as much the successors of these
facts and the continuations of these processes--due allowances being made for
the differences in the planes, and for the new factors which appear with each
new plane--as the facts and processes of biology are of those of the mineral
world. We land here, not from choice, but from necessity. Christianity--it is
not said any particular form of Christianity--but Christianity, is the Further
Evolution.
"The glory of Christianity," urged Jowett, "is
not to be as unlike other religions as possible, but to be their perfection and
fulfilment." The divinity of Christianity, it might be added, is not to be as
unlike Nature as possible, but to be its coronation; the fulfilment of its
promise; the rallying point of its forces; the beginning not of a new end, but
of an infinite acceleration of the processes by which the end, eternal from the
beginning, was henceforth to be realized. A religion which is Love and a Nature
which is Love can never but be one. The infinite exaltation in quality is what
the progressive revelation from the beginning has taught us to expect.
Christianity, truly, has its own phenomena: its special processes; its factors
altogether unique. But these do not excommunicate it from God's order. They are
in line with all that has gone before, the latest disclosure of Environment.
Most strange to us and new, most miraculous and supernatural when looked at
from beneath, they are the normal phenomena of altitude, the revelation natural
to the highest height. While Evolution never deviates from its course, it
assumes new developments at every stage of the Ascent; and here, as the last
and highest, these specializations, accelerations, modifications, are most
revolutionary of all. For the evolving products are now no longer the prey and
tool of the Struggle for Life--the normal dynamic of the world's youth. For
them its appeal is vain; its force is spent ; a quicker road to progress has
been found. No longer driven from below by the Animal Struggle, they are drawn
upward from above; no longer compelled by hate or hunger, by rivalry or fear,
they feel impelled by Love; they realize the dignity reserved for Man alone in
evolving through Ideals. This development through Ideals, the Perfect Ideal
through which all others come, are the unique phenomena of the closing
act--unique not because they are out of relation to what has gone before, but
because the phenomena of the summit are different from the phenomena of the
plain. Apart from these, and not absolutely apart from these--for nothing in
the world can be absolutely apart from anything else, there is nothing in
Christianity which is not in germ in Nature. It is not an excrescence on Nature
but its efflorescence. It is not a side track where a few enthusiasts live
impracticable lives on impossible ideals. It is the main stream of history and
of science, and the only current set from eternity for the progress of the
world and the perfecting of a human race.
We began these chapters with the understanding
that Evolution is history, the scientific history of the world. Christianity is
history, a history of some of the later steps in the Evolution of the world.
The continuity between them is a continuity of spirit; their forms are
different, their forces confluent. Christianity did not begin at the Christian
era, it is as old as Nature; did not drop like a bolt from Eternity, came in
the fulness of Time. The attempt to prove an alibi for Christianity; to
show that it was in the skies till the Christian era opened, is as fatal to its
acceptance by Science as it is useless for defence to Theology. What emerges
from Nature as the final result of Creation is none other than that immortal
principle which, reinforced, is the instrument and end of the new Creation.
The attempt of Science, on the other hand, to
hold itself aloof from the later phases of developments which in their earlier
stages it so devotes itself to trace, is either ignorance or sheer affectation.
For that Altruism which we found struggling to express itself throughout the
whole course of Nature, What is it? "Altruism is the new and very affected name
for the old familiar things which we used to call Charity, Philanthropy, and
Love."[97] Only by shutting its eyes can
Science evade the discovery of the roots of Christianity in every province that
it enters; and when it does discover them, it is only by disguising words that
it can succeed in disowning the relationship. There is nothing unscientific in
accepting that relationship; there is much that is unscientific in dishonouring
it. The Will behind Evolution is not dead; the heart beneath Nature is not
stilled. Love not only was; it is; it moves; it spreads. To ignore the later
and most striking phases is to fail to see what the earlier process really was,
and to leave the ancient task of Evolution historically incomplete. That
Christian development, social, moral, spiritual, which is going on around us,
is as real an evolutionary movement as any that preceded it, and at least as
capable of scientific expression. A system founded on Self-Sacrifice, whose
fittest symbol is the Leaven, whose organic development has its natural analogy
in the growth of a Mustard Tree, is not a foreign thing to the Evolutionist;
and that prophet of the Kingdom of God was no less the spokesman of Nature who
proclaimed that the end of Man is "that which we had from the beginning, that
we love."
In the profoundest sense, this is scientific
doctrine. The Ascent of Man and of Society is bound up henceforth with the
conflict, the intensification, and the diffusion of the Struggle for the Life
of Others. This is the Further Evolution, the page of history that lies before
us, the closing act of the drama of Man. The Struggle may be short or long; but
by all scientific analogy the result is sure. All the other Kingdoms of Nature
were completed; Evolution always attains; always rounds off its work. It spent
an eternity over the earth, but finished it. It struggled for millenniums to
bring the Vegetable Kingdom up to the Flowering Plants, and attained. In the
Animal Kingdom it never paused until the possibilities of organization were
exhausted in the Mammalia. Kindled by this past, Man may surely say, "I shall
arrive." The succession cannot break. The Further Evolution must go on, the
Higher Kingdom come--first the blade, where we are to-day; then the ear, where
we shall be to-morrow; then the full corn in the ear, which awaits our
children's children, and which we live to hasten.
END
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY
ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
[1] Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 9th Ed.
[2] Data of Ethics, p. 65.
[3] Darwinism, p. 461.
[4] There is a third function--that of
Co-relation--but, to avoid confusing the immediate issue, this may remain at
present in the background.
[5] Darwinism, p. 37.
[6] Evolution and Ethics, p.6.
[7] Nineteenth Century, Feb., l888.
[8] Evolution and Ethics, p. 27.
[9] Evolution and Ethics, p. 33.
[10] Evolution and Ethics, p. 35.
[11] Evolution and Ethics, note 19.
[12] Evolution and Ethics, note 19.
[13] Prof Seth, Blackwood's Magazine,
Dec., 1893.
[14] Prof. H. Jones, Browning, p.
28.
[15] Meditationes Sacrae, X.
[16] Principles of Ethics, Vol. II.,
p. 5.
[17] The Evolution of Sex, p. 279.
[18] Ibid., p. 279.
[19] The Ring and the Book--The Pope,
1375.
[20] Origin of Species, p. 429.
[21] Discourse on Method.
[22] The Evolution of Religion, Vol.
I, pp. 26, 29.
[23] Evolution and Ethics, p. 27.
[24] Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution,
p. 28.
[25] Op. cit., p. 78.
[26] Op. cit., p. 64.
[27] Op. cit., p. 79.
[28] Op. cit., p. 77-8.
[29] Op. cit., p. 80.
[30] Principles of Ethics, Vol. II.,
p. 6.
[31] When the multicellular globe, made up of
countless offshoots or divisions of the original pair, has reached a certain
size, its centre becomes filled with a tiny lakelet of watery fluid. This fluid
gradually increases in quantity, and, pushing the cells outward, packs them
into a single layer, circumscribing it on every side as with an elastic wall.
At one part a dimple soon appears, which slowly deepens, until a complete
hollow is formed. So far does this invagination of the sphere go on that the
cells at the bottom of the hollow touch those at the opposite side. The ovum
has now become an open bag or cup, such as one might make by doubling in an
india-rubber ball, and thus is formed the gastrula of biology. The
evolutional interest of this process lies in the fact that probably all animals
above the Protozoa pass through this gastrula stage. That some of the lower
Metazoa, indeed, never develop much beyond it, a glance at the structure
of the humbler Coelenterates will show--the simplest of all illustrations of
the fact that embryonic forms of higher animals are often permanently
represented by the adult forms of lower. The chief thing however to mark here
is the doubling-in of the ovum to gain a double instead of a single wall of
cells. For these two different layers, the ectoderm and the endoderm, or the
animal layer and the vegetal layer, play a unique part in the after-history.
All the organs of movement and sensation spring from the one, all the organs of
nutrition and reproduction develop from the other.
[32] Marshall, Vertebrate
Embryology. p. 26.
[33] Nineteenth Century, November,
1891.
[34] Malay Archipelago, 53-5.
[35] Evolution and Disease, p.
81.
[36] Haeckel has given an earlier account of
the process in the following words:--"All the essential parts of the middle
ear--the tympanic membrane, tympanic cavity, and Eustachian tube--develop from
the first gill-opening with its surrounding parts, which in the Primitive
Fishes (Selachii) remains throughout life as an open blow-hole, situated
between the first and second gill-arches. In the embryos of higher Vertebrates
it closes in the centre, the point of concrescence forming the tympanic
membrane. The remaining outer part of the first gill-opening is the rudiment of
the outer ear-canal. From the inner part originates the tympanic cavity, and
further inward, the Eustachian tube. In connection with these, the three
bonelets of the ear develop from the first two gill-arches; the hammer and
anvil from the first, and the stirrup from the upper end of the second
gill-arch. Finally, as regards the external ear, the ear-shell (concha auris),
and the outer ear canal, leading from the shell to the tympanic membrane--
these parts develop in the simplest way from the skin-covering which borders
the outer orifice of the first gill-opening. At this point the ear-shell rises
in the form of a circular fold of skin, in which cartilage and muscles
afterwards form." --Haeckel, Evolution of Man, Vol. II., p. 269.
[37] Sutton, Evolution and Disease, p.
87.
[38] Descent of Man, p. 15.
[39] Darwin and After Darwin, pp.
89-92
[40] Sutton, Evolution and Disease, p.
65
[41] Weismann, Biological Memoirs, p.
255.
[42] Fiske, Destiny of Man, p. 26. What
follows owes much to this suggestive brochure.
[43] Stones of Venice, II. 236.
[44] Prof J. Cleland, M.D., F.R.S., Journal
of Anatomy, Vol. XVIII., pp. 360-1.
[45] Journal of Anatomy, Vol. XVIII.,
p. 362.
[46] Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man,
p. 2.
[47] 0p. cit., p. 213.
[48] Mental Evolution in Man, pp.
194-5.
[49] Origin of Species, p. 191.
[50] Descent of Man, p. 66.
[51] Darwinism, p. 469.
[52] Ibid., p. 461.
[53] Contemporary Review, 1871.
[54] Clifford, Fortnightly Review,
1874.
[55] Du Bois-Reymond, Ueber die Grenzen des
Naturerkennens, p 42.
[56] C. Lloyd Morgan, Nature, Sept. 1,
1892, p. 417.
[57] C. Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and
Intelligence, p. 350.
[58] Lotze, Microcosmus, p. 162.
[59] As to the exact point of the difference,
Mr. Romanes draws the line at the exclusive possession by Man of the power of
introspective reflection in the light of self-consciousness. "Wherein," he
asks, "does the distinction truly consist? It consists in the power which the
human being displays of objectifying ideas, or of setting one state of mind
before another state, and contemplating the relation between them. The power to
think is--or, as I should prefer to state it, the power to think at all is--the
power which is given by introspective reflection in the light of
self-consciousness. . . . We have no evidence to show that any animal is
capable of thus objectifying its own ideas; and, therefore, we have no evidence
that any animal is capable of judgment. Indeed, I will go further and affirm
that we have the best evidence which is derivable from what are necessarily
ejective sources, to prove that no animal can possibly attain to these
excellencies of subjective life." Mr. Romanes proceeds to state the reason why.
It is because of "the absence in brutes of the needful conditions to the
occurrence of those excellencies as they obtain in themselves . . . the
great distinction between the brute and the man really lies behind the
faculties both of conception and prediction; it resides in the conditions to
the occurrence of either."--Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 175.
[60] Hoffding, Psychology, p. 92.
[61] The situation is dramatic, that from end
to end of the region occupied by these tribes, there stretches the Telegraph
connecting Australia with Europe. But what is at once dramatic and pathetic is
that the natives know it only in its material relations --as so much wire, the
first metal they have ever seen, to cut into lengths for spear-heads.
[62] Herbert Spencer, Principles of
Sociology, Vol. I, pp. 90, 91.
[63] Trench, The Study of Words, p.
28.
[64] Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 84.
[65] Tylor, Anthropology.
[66] First Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology, Washington, 1881.
[67] Mental Evolution, p. 147.
[68] Among the Coral Islands of the Pacific
the savages everywhere speak of the white residents in New Caledonia as the
Wee-wee men, or Wee-wees. Cannibals on a dozen different islands,
speaking as many languages, have all this name in common. New Caledonia is a
French Penal Settlement, containing thousands of French convicts, and one's
first crude thought is that the Wee-wees are so named from their size. A
moment's reflection, however, shows that it is taken from their
sounds--that in fact we have here a very pretty example of modern
onomatopoeia. These convicts, freed or escaped, find their way over the Pacific
group; and the natives, seizing at once upon their characteristic sound, know
them as Oui-oui's--a name which has now become general for all Frenchmen in the
Southern Pacific.
[69] Tylor Anthropology, p. 127.
[70] Mental Evolution, p. 283.
[71] The construction of the mouth and lips
has of course had something to do with differences in Languages, and even with
the possibility of language in the case of Man. You must have your trumpet
before you can get the sound of a trumpet. One reason why many animals have no
speech is simply that they have not the mechanism which by any possibility
could produce it. They might have a Language, but nothing at all like human
Language. It is one of the significant notes in Evolution that Man, almost
alone among vertebrates, has a material body so far developed as to make it an
available instrument for speech. There was almost certainly a time when this
was to him a physical impossibility.
"The acquisition of articulate speech," says Prof. Macalister, "became possible
to man only when the alveolar arch and palatine area became shortened and
widened, and when his tongue, by its accommodation to the modified mouth,
became shorter and more horizontally flattened, and the higher refinements of
pronunciation depend for their production upon the more extensive modifications
in the same direction." Even for differences in dialect, as the same writer
points out, there is a physical basis. "With the macrodont alveolar arch and
the corresponding modified tongue, sibilation is a difficult feat to
accomplish, and hence the sibilant sounds are practically unknown in all the
Australian dialects."--British Association: Anthropological Section. Edinb.,
1891.
[72] Archbishop Trench, The Study of
Words, pp. 14, 15.
[73] Science of Thought, p. 549.
[74] Phantasms of the Living, p. 6.
[75] Winwood Reade, Martyrdom of Man,
p. 464.
[76] Darwinism, pp. 30-40.
[77] Prof. Remsen, M'Clure's Magazine,
Jan., 1894.
[78] Origin of Species, 6th edition, p.
50.
[79] Haeckel, Evolution of Man, Vol.
II., p. 394.
[80] The Evolution of Sex, page 232.
[81] Nineteenth Century, 1890, p.
340.
[82] Geddes and Thomson, The Evolution of
Sex, p. 163.
[83] Biological Memoirs, p. 281.
[84] The Evolution of Sex, pp. 41-6.
[85] The Evolution of Sex, p. 42. See
also pp. 41-46.
[86] Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, p.
2.
[87] Faust, Pt. II. Bayard Taylor's
tr.
[88] The answer to the argument in favour of
automatism is thus summarized by C. M. Williams: "(1) That functions which are
preserved and inherited must evidently be, not only in animals and plants, but
also and equally in man, such as favour the preservation of the species; those
which do not so favour it must perish with the individuals or species to which
they belong; (2) that it cannot, indeed, be assumed that a result which has
never come within the experience of the species can be willed as an end,
although, with the species, function securing results which, from a human point
of view, might be regarded as such, may be preserved; but (3) that, as far as
we assume the existence of consciousness at all in any species or individual,
we must assume pleasure and pain, pleasure in customary function, pain in its
hindrance; and (4) that, as far as we can assume memory, we may also feel
authorized to assume that a remembered action may be associated with remembered
results that come within the experience of the animal, some phases of which may
thus become, as combined with pleasure or pain, ends to seek or consequences to
avoid."--Evolutional Ethics, p. 386.
[89] Mammalian Descent, Prof. W. P.
Parker, F.R.S., p. 14.
[90] Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. II.
p. 363.
[91] Westermarck's History of Human Marriage,
p. 26.
[92] Op. cit., pp. 42-50.
[93] Duke of Argyll, The Unity of
Nature, p. 44.
[94] Balfour Stewart and Tait, The Unseen
Universe, 6th edition, p. 221.
[95] Edward Caird, The Evolution of
Religion, Vol. I., pp. 49-50.
[96] Martineau, Essays, Philosophical and
Theological, p. 141.
[97] Duke of Argyll, Edinburgh Review,
April, 1894.