Kitabı oku: «Through Nature to God», sayfa 3

IX
Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brutehood

We have first to note that in various ways the action of natural selection has been profoundly modified in the course of the development of mankind from a race of inferior creatures. One of the chief factors in the production of man was the change that occurred in the direction of the working of natural selection, whereby in the line of man's direct ancestry the variations in intelligence came to be seized upon, cherished, and enhanced, to the comparative neglect of variations in bodily structure. The physical differences between man and ape are less important than the physical differences between African and South American apes. The latter belong to different zoölogical families, but the former do not. Zoölogically, man is simply one genus in the old-world family of apes. Psychologically, he has travelled so far from apes that the distance is scarcely measurable. This transcendent contrast is primarily due to the change in the direction of the working of natural selection. The consequences of this change were numerous and far-reaching. One consequence was that gradual lengthening of the plastic period of infancy which enabled man to became a progressive creature, and organized the primeval semi-human horde into definite family groups. I have elsewhere expounded this point, and it is known as my own especial contribution to the theory of evolution.

Another associated consequence, which here more closely concerns us, was the partial stoppage of the process of natural selection in remedying unfitness. A quotation from Herbert Spencer will help us to understand this partial stoppage: "As fast as the faculties are multiplied, so fast does it become possible for the several members of a species to have various kinds of superiorities over one another. While one saves its life by higher speed, another does the like by clearer vision, another by keener scent, another by quicker hearing, another by greater strength, another by unusual power of enduring cold or hunger, another by special sagacity, another by special timidity, another by special courage… Now … each of these attributes, giving its possessor an extra chance of life, is likely to be transmitted to posterity. But" it is not nearly so likely to be increased by natural selection. For "if those members of the species which have but ordinary" or even deficient shares of some valuable attribute "nevertheless survive by virtue of other superiorities which they severally possess, then it is not easy to see how this particular attribute can be" enhanced in subsequent generations by natural selection.²

These considerations apply especially to the human race with its multitudinous capacities, and I can better explain the case by a crude and imperfect illustration than by a detailed and elaborate statement. If an individual antelope falls below the average of the herd in speed, he is sure to become food for lions, and thus the high average of speed in the herd is maintained by natural selection. But if an individual man becomes a drunkard, though his capabilities be ever so much curtailed by this vice, yet the variety of human faculty furnishes so many hooks with which to keep one's hold upon life that he may sin long and flagrantly without perishing; and if the drunkard survives, the action of natural selection in weeding out drunkenness is checked. There is thus a wide interval between the highest and lowest degrees of completeness in living that are compatible with maintenance of life. Mankind has so many other qualities beside the bad ones, which enable it to subsist and achieve progress in spite of them, that natural selection – which always works through death – cannot come into play.

Now it is because of this interval between the highest and lowest degrees of completeness of living that are compatible with the mere maintenance of life, that men can be distinguished as morally bad or morally good. In inferior animals, where there is no such interval, there is no developed morality or conscience, though in a few of the higher ones there are the germs of these things. Morality comes upon the scene when there is an alternative offered of leading better lives or worse lives. And just as up to this point the actions of the forefathers of mankind have been determined by the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, so now they begin to be practically determined by the pursuit of goodness and avoidance of evil. This rise from a bestial to a moral plane of existence involves the acquirement of the knowledge of good and evil. Conscience is generated to play a part analogous to that played by the sense of pain in the lower stages of life, and to keep us from wrong doing. To the mere love of life, which is the conservative force that keeps the whole animal world in existence, there now comes gradually to be superadded the feeling of religious aspiration, which is nothing more nor less than the yearning after the highest possible completeness of spiritual life. In the lower stages of human development this religious aspiration has as yet but an embryonic existence, and moral obligations are still but imperfectly recognized. It is only after long ages of social discipline, fraught with cruel afflictions and grinding misery, that the moral law becomes dominant and religious aspiration intense and abiding in the soul. When such a stage is reached, we have at last in man a creature different in kind from his predecessors, and fit for an everlasting life of progress, for a closer and closer communion with God in beatitude that shall endure.

X
The Relativity of Evil

As we survey the course of this wonderful evolution, it begins to become manifest that moral evil is simply the characteristic of the lower state of living as looked at from the higher state. Its existence is purely relative, yet it is profoundly real, and in a process of perpetual spiritual evolution its presence in some hideous form throughout a long series of upward stages is indispensable. Its absence would mean stagnation, quiescence, unprogressiveness. For the moment we exercise conscious choice between one course of action and another, we recognize the difference between better and worse, we foreshadow the whole grand contrast between good and bad. In the process of spiritual evolution, therefore, evil must needs be present. But the nature of evolution also requires that it should be evanescent. In the higher stages that which is worse than the best need no longer be positively bad. After the nature of that which the upward-striving soul abhors has been forever impressed upon it, amid the long vicissitudes of its pilgrimage through the dark realms of sin and expiation, it is at length equipped for its final sojourn

 
"In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love."
 

From the general analogies furnished in the process of evolution, we are entitled to hope that, as it approaches its goal and man comes nearer to God, the fact of evil will lapse into a mere memory, in which the shadowed past shall serve as a background for the realized glory of the present.

Thus we have arrived at the goal of my argument. We can at least begin to realize distinctly that unless our eyes had been opened at some time, so that we might come to know the good and the evil, we should never have become fashioned in God's image. We should have been the denizens of a world of puppets, where neither morality nor religion could have found place or meaning. The mystery of evil remains a mystery still, but it is no longer a harsh dissonance such as greeted the poet's ear when the doors of hell were thrown open; for we see that this mystery belongs among the profound harmonies in God's creation. This reflection may have in it something that is consoling as we look forth upon the ills of the world. Many are the pains of life, and the struggle with wickedness is hard; its course is marked with sorrow and tears. But assuredly its deep impress upon the human soul is the indispensable background against which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of heaven!

THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE AND SELF-SACRIFICE

 
O abbondante grazia, ond' io presunsi
Ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna
Tanto, che la veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna,
Legato con amore in un volume,
Ciò che per l' universo si squaderna.
 

Dante, Paradiso, xxxiii. 82.

I
The Summer Field, and what it tells us

There are few sights in Nature more restful to the soul than a daisied field in June. Whether it be at the dewy hour of sunrise, with blithe matin songs still echoing among the treetops, or while the luxuriant splendour of noontide fills the delicate tints of the early foliage with a pure glory of light, or in that more pensive time when long shadows are thrown eastward and the fresh breath of the sea is felt, or even under the solemn mantle of darkness, when all forms have faded from sight and the night air is musical with the murmurs of innumerable insects, amid all the varying moods through which the daily cycle runs, the abiding sense is of unalloyed happiness, the profound tranquillity of mind and heart that nothing ever brings save the contemplation of perfect beauty. One's thought is carried back for the moment to that morning of the world when God looked upon his work and saw that it was good. If in the infinite and eternal Creative Energy one might imagine some inherent impulse perpetually urging toward fresh creation, what could it be more likely to be than the divine contentment in giving objective existence to the boundless and subtle harmonies whereof our world is made? That it is a world of perfect harmony and unsullied beauty, who can doubt as he strolls through this summer field? As our thought plays lightly with its sights and sounds, there is nothing but gladness in the laugh of the bobolink; the thrush's tender note tells only of the sweet domestic companionship of the nest; creeping and winged things emerging from their grubs fill us with the sense of abounding life; and the myriad buttercups, hallowed with vague memories of June days in childhood, lose none of their charm in reminding us of the profound sympathy and mutual dependence in which the worlds of flowers and insects have grown up. The blades of waving grass, the fluttering leaves upon the lilac bush, appeal to us with rare fascination; for the green stuff that fills their cellular tissues, and the tissues of all green things that grow, is the world's great inimitable worker of wonders; its marvellous alchemy takes dead matter and breathes into it the breath of life. But for that magician chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, such things as animal life and conscious intelligence would be impossible; there would be no problems of creation, nor philosopher to speculate upon them. Thus the delight that sense impression gives, as we wander among buttercups and daisies, becomes deepened into gratitude and veneration, till we quite understand how the rejuvenescence of Nature should in all ages have aroused men to acts of worship, and should call forth from modern masters of music, the most religious of the arts of expression, outbursts of sublimest song.

And yet we need but come a little closer to the facts to find them apparently telling us a very different story. The moment we penetrate below the superficial aspect of things the scene is changed. In the folklore of Ireland there is a widespread belief in a fairyland of eternal hope and brightness and youth situated a little way below the roots of the grass. From that land of Tir nan Og, as the peasants call it, the secret springs of life shoot forth their scions in this visible world, and thither a few favoured mortals have now and then found their way. It is into no blest country of Tir nan Og that our stern science leads us, but into a scene of ugliness and hatred, strife and massacre. Macaulay tells of the battlefield of Neerwinden, that the next summer after that frightful slaughter the whole countryside was densely covered with scarlet poppies, which people beheld with awe as a token of wrath in heaven over the deeds wrought on earth by human passions. Any summer field, though mantled in softest green, is the scene of butchery as wholesale as that of Neerwinden and far more ruthless. The life of its countless tiny denizens is one of unceasing toil, of crowding and jostling, where the weaker fall unpitied by the way, of starvation from hunger and cold, of robbery utterly shameless and murder utterly cruel. That green sward in taking possession of its territory has exterminated scores of flowering plants of the sort that human economics and æsthetics stigmatize as weeds; nor do the blades of the victorious army dwell side by side in amity, but in their eagerness to dally with the sunbeams thrust aside and supplant one another without the smallest compunction. Of the crawling insects and those that hum through the air, with the quaint snail, the burrowing worm, the bloated toad, scarce one in a hundred but succumbs to the buffets of adverse fortune before it has achieved maturity and left offspring to replace it. The early bird, who went forth in quest of the worm, was lucky if at the close of a day as full of strife and peril as ever knight-errant encountered, he did not himself serve as a meal for some giant foe in the gloaming. When we think of the hawk's talons buried in the breast of the wren, while the relentless beak tears the little wings from the quivering, bleeding body, our mood toward Nature is changed, and we feel like recoiling from a world in which such black injustice, such savage disregard for others, is part of the general scheme.

II
Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process

But as we look still further into the matter, our mood is changed once more. We find that this hideous hatred and strife, this wholesale famine and death, furnish the indispensable conditions for the evolution of higher and higher types of life. Nay more, but for the pitiless destruction of all individuals that fall short of a certain degree of fitness to the circumstances of life into which they are born, the type would inevitably degenerate, the life would become lower and meaner in kind. Increase in richness, variety, complexity of life is gained only by the selection of variations above or beyond a certain mean, and the prompt execution of a death sentence upon all the rest. The principle of natural selection is in one respect intensely Calvinistic; it elects the one and damns the ninety and nine. In these processes of Nature there is nothing that savours of communistic equality; but "to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Through this selection of a favoured few, a higher type of life – or at all events a type in which there is more life – is attained in many cases, but not always. Evolution and progress are not synonymous terms. The survival of the fittest is not always a survival of the best or of the most highly organized. The environment is sometimes such that increase of fitness means degeneration of type, and the animal and vegetable worlds show many instances of degeneration. One brilliant instance is that which has preserved the clue to the remote ancestry of the vertebrate type. The molluscoid ascidian, rooted polyp-like on the sea beach in shallow water, has an embryonic history which shows that its ancestors had once seen better days, when they darted to and fro, fishlike, through the waves, with the prophecy of a vertebrate skeleton within them. This is a case of marked degeneration. More often survival of the fittest simply preserves the type unchanged through long periods of time. But now and then under favourable circumstances it raises the type. At all events, whenever the type is raised, it is through survival of the fittest, implying destruction of all save the fittest.

This last statement is probably true of all plants and of all animals except that as applied to the human race it needs some transcendently important qualifications which students of evolution are very apt to neglect. I shall by and by point out these qualifications. At present we may note that the development of civilization, on its political side, has been a stupendous struggle for life, wherein the possession of certain physical and mental attributes has enabled some tribes or nations to prevail over others, and to subject or exterminate them. On its industrial side the struggle has been no less fierce; the evolution of higher efficiency through merciless competition is a matter of common knowledge. Alike in the occupations of war and in those of peace, superior capacity has thriven upon victories in which small heed has been paid to the wishes or the welfare of the vanquished. In human history perhaps no relation has been more persistently repeated than that of the hawk and the wren. The aggression has usually been defended as in the interests of higher civilization, and in the majority of cases the defence has been sustained by the facts. It has indeed very commonly been true that the survival of the strongest is the survival of the fittest.

Such considerations affect our mood toward Nature in a way that is somewhat bewildering. On the one hand, as we recognize in the universal strife and slaughter a stern discipline through which the standard of animate existence is raised and the life of creatures variously enriched, we become to some extent reconciled to the facts. Assuming, as we all do, that the attainment of higher life is in itself desirable, our minds cannot remain utterly inhospitable towards things, however odious in themselves, that help toward the desirable end. Since we cannot rid the world of them, we acquiesce in their existence as part of the machinery of God's providence, the intricacies of which our finite minds cannot hope to unravel. On the other hand, a thought is likely to arise which in days gone by we should have striven to suppress as too impious for utterance; but it is wiser to let such thoughts find full expression, for only thus can we be sure of understanding the kind of problem we are trying to solve. Is not, then, this method of Nature, which achieves progress only through misery and death, an exceedingly brutal and clumsy method? Life, one would think, must be dear to the everlasting Giver of life, yet how cheap it seems to be held in the general scheme of things! In order that some race of moths may attain a certain fantastic contour and marking of their wings, untold thousands of moths are doomed to perish prematurely. Instead of making the desirable object once for all, the method of Nature is to make something else and reject it, and so on through countless ages, till by slow approximations the creative thought is realized. Nature is often called thrifty, yet could anything be more prodigal or more cynical than the waste of individual lives? Does it not remind one of Charles Lamb's famous story of the Chinaman whose house accidentally burned down and roasted a pig, whereupon the dainty meat was tasted and its fame spread abroad until epicures all over China were to be seen carrying home pigs and forthwith setting fire to their houses? We need but add that the custom thus established lasted for centuries, during which every dinner of pig involved the sacrifice of a homestead, and we seem to have a close parody upon the wastefulness of Nature, or of what is otherwise called in these days the Cosmic Process. Upon such a view as this the Cosmic Process appears in a high degree unintelligent, not to say immoral.

III
Caliban's Philosophy

Polytheism easily found a place for such views as these, inasmuch as it could explain the unseemly aspects of Nature offhand by a reference to malevolent deities. With Browning's Caliban, in his meditations upon Setebos, that god whom he conceived in his own image, the recklessness of Nature is mockery engendered half in spite, half in mere wantonness. Setebos, he says,

 
"is strong and Lord,
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: So He."
 

Such is the kind of philosophy that commends itself to the beastly Caliban, as he sprawls in the mire with small eft things creeping down his back. His half-fledged mind can conceive no higher principle of action – nothing more artistic, nothing more masterful – than wanton mockery, and naturally he attributes it to his God; it is for him a sufficient explanation of that little fragment of the Cosmic Process with which he comes into contact.