Introductory material

EVOLUTION

I. OPTIMISM

Innumerable writers at the end of the nineteenth century have reviewed the changes which in the last fifty years have come over the civilised world. The record indeed is admitted on all hands to be marvellous. Steam, electricity, machinery, and all the practical inventions of applied science have added enormously to the material wealth, comfort, and luxury of mankind. Intellectually, the bounds of pure science have been vastly enlarged; and the blessings of education have been extended to the poorest members of the community. Philanthropic and religious activity manifests itself in a thousand different organisations. We are never tired of repeating, that changes which in the first half of the century would have been pronounced impossible and incredible, at the end of the century are accomplished facts.

But amongst all these changes one is almost universally overlooked, and that the most characteristic, the most remarkable, and the most important: the face of civilisation has come to be illumined by hope. Great as is the progress of the last fifty years, we count it as nothing compared with that which is in store for us. To the discoveries of science it is felt that no bounds can be set; what a day may bring forth in the way of the extension of man's control over the forces of Nature, what secrets of Nature the chemist in his laboratory may light upon at any moment, no man can surmise, but everyone is confident that things will be discovered as marvellous to us now as the telegraph and telephone to our predecessors of the pre-scientific age. In the treatment of political and social questions the same deep-seated conviction prevails that progress can and will be made: the conditions and causes of poverty can be ascertained by patient study, and when ascertained can be dealt with. The laws of physical health and cleanliness have not refused to reveal themselves, nor are moral health and cleanliness without their laws. In fine, if the best energy of the age is everywhere devoted to the increase of knowledge, the advancement of morality, and the diffusion of comfort, it is because everywhere there is hope. In the social as in the individual organism hope raises the tide of life, increases vitality, and stimulates the system. Hence this general discharge throughout the nervous system of society, manifesting itself in the vigour and energy with which all schemes for improvement are taken up and carried out. That discoveries will be made and progress effected is as certain as that gold is to be found in a goldfield; the only practical question is, By whom? Who is to be the lucky man?

To us who have witnessed the advance which has given rise to this universal hope, the hope itself seems so reasonable and so justifiable that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is without parallel in the history of mankind. Never, of course, has any generation of men imagined its own lot perfect; all have had their ideals, and all have believed their ideals to be true. But whereas we place the realisation of our ideals in the future, all previous generations have placed it in the past: the Golden Age till now has always been regarded as the starting-point of man's history, not its goal. All races have looked back with pride upon a heroic past; all mythologies tell of the better and brighter lot that was in the beginning man's; all poets sing of the brave days of old; all fairy tales begin with "once upon a time." The historians of Greece and Rome discovered no progress in the history of their countries, but only degeneration from the patriotism and simplicity of earlier times, or at best a series of changes making its round like the circle of the year's seasons. The philosophers of Greece are mainly occupied, when they deal with sociological questions, with the causes of corruption and decay of constitutions; and, if they frame ideal constitutions, they intend them to be final; they do not imagine them to have any possibility of growth. In modern times the same tendency has been equally manifest. Political revolutions have always aimed, not at introducing a new, but at restoring an old state of things: the actors in the French Revolution even dressed and posed as ancient Greeks and Romans. In philosophy, civilisation, as being artificial, has been regarded as a degeneration from a "natural" state of man which was at once primitive and perfect.

In the individual, optimism may be dismissed as a mere mood, or as a tendency to cheerfulness not based on any rational estimate either of the future or of the past. But when a whole generation of men, when, indeed, the whole civilised world, looks to the future, not with careless levity, but with the calm assurance of confidence in the progress that is and is to be, we cannot dismiss its optimism offhand. Astonishing as it is, that the world as it grows older should grow more hopeful, there are good reasons for the fact.

The child's estimates of distance, magnitude, and importance differ from those of the adult. The estimates, however, persist in memory, and we have all discovered, on revisiting familiar scenes of childhood, how exaggerated our childish estimates were when compared with the actual facts. It is this exaggeration of memory, this illusion of the mind's eye, that psychologically is the foundation of the tendency to idealise the past. To us as children the exploits of our elders were marvellous in our eyes; and they remain as marvels in the memory, as marvels, however, which, as all marvels do, belong to the past. The past becomes the wonderland in which were performed the great deeds, not only of our fathers' time, but of the old times before them. The past becomes the poet's treasury, from which he produces things new and old—the abiding-place of all things good and great and beautiful which are not, but ought to be, and therefore once were.

To measure progress, as indeed to measure any movement and determine its rate and direction, some fixed points are necessary. As long, therefore, as there is no contemporaneous record of events, fixed in writing, there is no possibility of checking the laudator temporis acti and of reducing the unconscious exaggerations of his memory to their due proportions. But even if there were, in the lowest stages of culture the rate of progress is too slow to be perceptible at the time. In the beginning man is at the mercy of his environment: it is only when he has learnt to modify it to his needs that progress begins to move. And by the time that man has passed from savagery to barbarism, and has emerged from barbarism to civilisation, the conviction that the present and the actual are things of naught as compared with the ideal past, is too intimately inwrought with his religion, his mythology, his philosophy, and the accepted history of his race and its heroic origin to allow him to see facts as they are, or to divine the true trend of human affairs. Further, there is a very practical reason for his looking with suspicion and not with confidence on social changes. It is only as the result of a long course of slow evolution that society has attained to a condition of fairly stable equilibrium. In the beginning society may be compared to a man hanging on for bare life, with a precarious foothold, to the face of a sheer cliff: when the least movement may prove fatal, all movement is dreaded. Thus the characteristic of all early societies is that they are impeded by "the cake of custom" and rigid with the immobility of conservatism.

To those who hold that experience mechanically impresses itself upon the mind and so automatically expresses itself as truth, it must appear somewhat strange that mankind should have advanced for thousands of years without knowing that they had progressed; and still more strange that it was not as an induction from experience, but on a priori grounds that they arrived at the conclusion. Yet so it was. The mere contemplation of the rise and fall of empires no more suggested the presence and persistence of a constant tendency to progress than the mountainous wave which threatens to engulf the ship suggests that the sea-level is a scientific truth. But when Darwin established his theory that man was descended from the brute, all was clear: it became certain a priori that the long history and "pre-history" of man must have been one of progress and advance. When the descent of man was established, his ascent came to be studied, and human evolution was seen to be synonymous with progress. Savages were seen to be the nearest existing representatives of primitive man, and there was an end to the idea that the primitive state was perfection. The comparative method, once applied to the study of mankind, was able to set side by side examples of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, which illustrated every step in the process of the evolution of society, and showed that, though the forms of society may fluctuate as do the waves of the sea, society itself is steady in its advance and progressive in its evolution. This conclusion, which at first was a deduction drawn from the animal descent of man, has now the independent support of an enormous amount of evidence. The existence of a Stone Age, palæolithic and neolithic, of a Bronze Age and an Iron Age, and the succession of those ages in the order named, are established facts of science. That the culture of nomad peoples is lower than that of pastoral tribes; that pastoral tribes advance in culture when they become agricultural; that agriculture, implying settled habits and fixed homes, leads to the foundation of cities and the formation of civic life; that the city-states of the ancient world give way to the nation-states of modern times: are all accepted facts, bridging the apparent chasm between civilisation and savagery, and demonstrating the action of the law of continuity in the evolution of society.

But, it will be observed, all these facts and arguments taken together only prove what has been—not what will be. They show that from a level little higher than the brute man has attained to what he is; but is this enough to guarantee his continuous rise? In other words, have we reached the real source of that universal hope which, as we have said, is characteristic of this stage of man's evolution? The bark of man's destiny hitherto has been wafted by a favouring and a steady gale, and it is natural enough for the unreflecting to take it for granted that the wind will always set from the same happy quarter. But the question will obtrude itself whether we are justified in the presumption.

If man shaped his own course, we might at least say that there was no reason why he should not continue to steer in the same direction as hitherto. But the most remarkable lesson that sociology has to teach us is that the course which he has followed so continuously has not been of his own steering. As we have already seen, man until this present generation has uniformly kept his eyes fixed on the quarter from which, not to which, he has imagined himself to be travelling, and, like a reluctant emigrant, has lamented the increasing distance between him and the happy shore from which he sailed. Or, to change the metaphor, society is an organism. Like all organisms, it starts as a relatively structureless mass; then, in accordance with the principle of the division of labour, different functions come to be performed by different parts; thus special organs are developed for the performance of special functions; division of labour further implies co-operation of the various organs and the development of the necessary means of communication and connection. All this is necessary for that evolution of society which we call progress; and of all these changes in the structure of society but few were ever intentionally planned by man. Mr. Herbert Spencer has familiarised this generation with the idea that the foreseen consequences of any intended change are insignificant as compared with the consequences unforeseen and unintended. Hence the general rule that the structural developments on which the evolution of society depends are but rarely the result of the coercive and conscious changes effected by government: in practically all cases they are the unintended consequences of the spontaneous actions of individuals aiming at something else and unconsciously promoting the evolution of society. So, too, the animal organism is made up of living units, each of which unconsciously performs the part necessary to be played by it, if the organism is to live; and each unit, unconsciously again, even modifies the part it plays, in order to promote the changes which constitute the evolution and the progress of the organism.

We must therefore dismiss the idea that the progress of mankind and the evolution of society have been planned by man or are due to his design; and we must recognise the presence in human affairs of some unseen, impelling power which is continually guiding them to good issues and shaping them to ends not even rough-hewn by men. This power, it is evident, must be one not limited in its action to the social organism, but manifesting itself in animal organisms also, since there also it produces similar results. That power, we need hardly say, is to be sought in "the struggle for existence": wherever organisms are in excess of the means for supporting them, competition for food, for life, must ensue; and in this case the battle is to the strong, the race to the fleet. But of course strength is a relative term: what in some circumstances is a source of strength, in others may be a cause of weakness; and, generally, the very qualities which in some cases are of the highest value may in others be useless to their possessor. It is therefore the creature which possesses the particular kind of superiority required by the circumstances in which it finds itself, which is the creature that is likely to fare best, and is most likely to survive in the struggle for existence. But, further, the circumstances tend to produce the very superiority which they require: they ruthlessly reject and condemn to destruction every organism which fails to satisfy their requirements, thus leaving the field in possession of those organisms which have the required superiority. The next generation, therefore, is bred not from chance parents, but from parents which have been selected, by natural causes and the force of circumstances, as carefully as by the breeder who wishes to produce a prize animal. Every successive generation thus must be superior to that which preceded it. Advance is the very breath of every organism's being, the condition without which existence is impossible. To the talents which it has, every being must add other talents, or be cast out into the darkness of non-existence; whereas to the good and faithful servant who exercises all the powers entrusted to him even wider rule is given. Neither this world nor the next is for the idle or for the stupid. The intelligence must be alert to detect the slightest element of possible superiority, and the will resolute to work it to the utmost of its worth. Man must be wise in his generation; and the wise man makes friends even with the mammon of unrighteousness, and that quickly.

If, then, it is by the perpetual and strenuous exercise of all its powers that an organism achieves the degree of superiority which is its contribution to the universal work of progress, it follows that "the performance of every function is, in a sense, a moral obligation," and that "the moral man is one whose functions are all discharged in degrees duly adjusted to the conditions of existence." Here, as elsewhere, the individual, to exist, must comply with the conditions of existence; and progress consists in more perfect compliance with the conditions. There is, however, a difference between the highly evolved organism, man, and the less complex organisms; between animal and human evolution; between biological and moral progress. In the case of the lower and simpler organisms, the creature is prompted simply and safely by its emotions to the performance of those functions on which its existence and the evolution of its species depend. But the evolution of man has been so rapid in its later stages, the social environment which he has himself created is so different from the circumstances in which he originally found himself, that his adjustment to his environment has become, so to speak, much looser, and consequently it is now no longer the case that actions in themselves pleasant are also necessarily beneficial in their consequences to the individual and to society. Moral progress, therefore, will manifest itself in the readjustment of man to his altered conditions. The consequence of that adjustment, when complete, will be that actions which are right—that is, are beneficial to the individual and to society—will always be pleasurable, not only in their consequences, but also immediately and in themselves. To this ideal, when all men will delight always in the thing that is right, and when all have attained to a height of morality now reached only by the few, man is being slowly but surely urged by the force which is the motive power of all evolution, the struggle for existence, regulated by the law which directs all progress, that of the survival of the fittest.

Here, then, we have the reason of the hope that is characteristic of our generation; here the foundation of the calm confidence with which we count on the continuance of progress as a thing assured us. It is not merely that progress has been made in the past, that the gale hitherto has steadily blown us on a favourable course. We have learnt that it must of necessity always blow from the same quarter. Man's course is not dependent on man's fitful will: the wind and waves obey not him, but the Power which directs all evolution, and "our strength in ages past" is shown by science to be "our hope in years to come."

II. ILLUSION

It seems, then, according to the optimistic view set forth in the previous chapter, that Evolution is necessarily Progress, and progress is movement in the line of our moral aspirations produced ad infinitum. The changes that are and always have been taking place are and always have been changes for the better; the forms of existence which incessantly succeed one another necessarily develop from lower to higher, from good to better. And this conclusion is not a matter of religious faith, but of scientific necessity. The only forces and causes that it presupposes are those which we see and feel at work every day around us. For the reconstruction of the past history of the earth's surface, geology only requires to assume the operation during infinite past time of those agencies which at this moment may be seen to be slowly changing the face of the earth. The cooling of the earth's surface follows the same laws, and can be calculated with the same certainty as the cooling of a red-hot poker. The law of gravitation, which determines the movements of the heavenly bodies, is equally exemplified in the fall of an apple to the ground. In fine, the universe consists of bodies of matter in motion; the movements which occur within the range of human observation are sufficient to enable us from them to calculate the paths which they follow when they pass beyond our ken, and the correctness of our calculations is demonstrated when they reappear at the time and place predicted. The chemist recovers on one side of his equation every atom which the other side requires him to account for. The stars in their courses confirm the calculations of the astronomer. Matter is in perpetual course of redistribution, and the same everlasting laws which determine the forms into which it is incessantly being redistributed necessarily determine that those forms shall perpetually improve.

This optimistic view of evolution has met with general welcome, but on very different grounds in different cases. Believers in Divine Providence have eagerly greeted it as a startling and irresistible demonstration that their belief in a Providence over-ruling all things for good was true. No suspicion here was possible that the argument had been sophisticated by those with whom the wish was father to the thought. By science the testimony of science could hardly be impeached; and here was science on independent reasonings of its own, starting from purely materialistic ground, compelled by the force of its own arguments to bear witness to the truth which religion had so long proclaimed on the strength of faith alone. To this generation a sign had indeed been given.

On the other hand, the optimistic interpretation of evolution was welcomed with equal ardour by those for whom it removed the last difficulty they had in believing that there was no God. Hitherto the deeply rooted desire to believe that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, good must triumph ultimately, and right-doing never be confounded, had seemed to necessitate belief in a righteous God. But now the necessity for any such assumption was done away with: the perpetual triumph of the good was a necessary aspect or expression of the mechanical action of particles of matter upon one another, as much as the law of gravitation itself, and based on exactly the same kind of evidence. From this it followed that religious belief was but a passing phase in the process of evolution, useful enough as long as the real evidence for our faith in the good was unknown, but destined to dwindle to a mere rudiment and survival as fast as men become capable of seeing the truth of the matter, and of realising that religion is superfluous because it can offer nothing that is not independently assured by science. At the same time and in the same way the hope of future blessedness is brought down from the unsubstantial clouds of an imaginary heaven to the solid ground of a materialistic science, which never travels beyond the evidence of the senses.

Since, then, minds, which differ otherwise so much, are agreed that the optimistic interpretation of evolution is the true one, it seems not unreasonable to ask each how far they are prepared to push their optimism. We will ask the one side whether the reason why they believe in the goodness of God really is that, as a matter of fact, they see that good is incessantly triumphant around them, and triumphant as a matter of absolute necessity. Surely whether we consider what we daily see of life, or whether we consider the struggle with evil in our own souls, it is a mockery to say that good invariably triumphs here and now; and there must be illusion in the argument that would prove that it does. Could an argument that is based on the assumption that matter and motion are the only realities issue in anything but illusion when extended to spiritual experience?

To the other side we may put the question somewhat differently. It is agreed that all the many changes which are incessantly taking place in the universe, and which, added together, constitute what is called the cosmic process, are incessantly and inevitably working for good, and themselves are always rising from good to better. But what of the Force, or Power, or Cause, or Reality which underlies them and of which they are the manifestation? May we infer that because they are good, it is good? That if the fruits are good, the tree must be good also? To this the reply will be that it is the manifestations which we know; they alone are known to us; they alone can be known to us. That which underlies them is not manifest; and that which is not manifested to us obviously cannot be known to us: it is the Unknowable. Obviously, therefore, it is impossible for us to say whether it is good or not. To affirm and to deny that it is good would both equally be to profess knowledge of the unknowable. Religion may profess—and, indeed, all religions have professed—to possess this inconceivable and impossible knowledge. But religion is not science.

On this view, then, there are limits to the optimism of evolution: to apply the term "good" to that which manifests itself as the cosmic process in evolution is mere illusion. But this raises a further question: If it is unmeaning to call the Unknowable Reality good, what precisely is the meaning and value of the term "good" when applied to those forms in which the Unknowable manifests itself to us?

To begin with, it is clear that if everything has been evolved, then our moral aspirations also are the products of evolution. It is they, indeed, that distinguish man from the brute; but even of them the law of continuity holds good: we can see not only how in man the virtues have been developed by civilisation, but we can trace the germs of conscience in that civilised animal the dog, as we can certainly see maternal affection, devotion, and self-sacrifice in the fiercest of undomesticated animals. In other words, the struggle for existence is waged better in co-operation than by individual effort; co-operation implies the subordination of individual impulse to the interests of the species or society; and such subordination, taking different forms in different stages of social development, is what we call virtue.

In the next place, the theory of evolution is built upon the ancient truth that nothing abideth long in one stay. Matter and motion are in perpetual course of redistribution, entering into countless combinations, and assuming innumerable forms, which succeed each other like the waves of the sea, and like them are no sooner formed than they are gone. It follows, then, on this showing, that our moral aspirations are as transitory as other products of evolution. Indeed, as we look back over the pages of history we can see them always changing before our eyes—what is approved by savages is disapproved later; the virtues of the military stage of social development give way to those fostered, by the industrial organisation of society. In a word, our moral aspirations, being the outcome of evolution, have neither the permanence of matter and motion which are everlasting and indestructible, nor the reality which is the attribute of the Unknowable alone.

If any confirmation of this conclusion were required, it would be found in the fact that only a living, conscious being can entertain moral aspirations, or desire the good, or hunger and thirst after righteousness. And life and consciousness are but transitory phases of evolution. The earth's crust, the geologic record, testifies to the former existence of fauna now extinct. The science of heat makes it certain that the earth must cease to be habitable for any form of life; and with the extinction of consciousness, good and the desire for good, right and the striving after right, will be no more: matter and motion, brute matter and blind forces, knowing nothing of good or evil, will resume their ancient, desolate domain.

If, pursuing the same train of thought, we ask what meaning the optimistic evolutionist puts upon the word "good," we shall see that, according to him, the distinction between good and bad is one that applies, and can only apply, to certain moments in the process of evolution, but not to the process as a whole, just as we have already seen that according to the optimistic evolutionist the distinction does not apply to the Unknowable Reality of which the process of evolution is a manifestation. The law of life is laid down to be the struggle for existence, with the consequent survival of the fittest. In the struggle, that is good which is struggled for, viz. existence; and that conduct, in man or brute, is good which conduces to success in the struggle and enables the organism to maintain its existence. This can only be done by the adaptation of the organism to its environment, of the constitution to the conditions. It follows, therefore, that "good" is a purely relative term: it is only applicable with reference to organisms, and even in their case only to success and whatever contributes to success in the struggle for existence. But to the cosmos before the struggle for life begins, and after life and its struggles have relapsed into the insentience of unconscious matter, the term cannot be applied. Matter and motion, which exist before and after life's appearance, are everlasting and indestructible. Their existence is assured, and implies no struggle. They are eternal, organic life compared with them is momentary. The portion, then, of the cosmic process which can be spoken of as good is infinitesimal compared with the whole. Save for the brief moment during which organic life exists, it is as illusory to speak of the cosmic process as good as it is to apply the term to the Unknowable.

But if so much of our optimistic interpretation of evolution has proved to be an illusion which consists in the simple fallacy of using the word "good" in connections in which it has no meaning, can we hope to rescue the very small fragment that remains? Perhaps we may argue, that since that is good which conduces to human existence, the whole of the cosmic process up to now, having paved the way and prepared the earth for man, must be good. Thus at one stroke we seem to regain half at least of the territory we have lost. But it is only seeming, once more illusion, for the cosmic process which has prepared the earth for man's existence has also prepared it for his destruction: his good, his existence, and his destruction are equally indifferent to it. This conclusion is confirmed by the reflection that to regard the cosmic process as giving any consideration to man would be to ascribe purpose, consciousness, a knowledge of good and evil, and a preference for good, to the Unknowable of which the cosmic process is the continuous manifestation.

It is therefore mere illusion to imagine that evolution necessarily tends to good: it is absolutely indifferent to it. And as we must judge of the parts by the whole, we must conclude that human evolution follows the same laws as evolution in general. The steps in human evolution, like those in evolution at large, are not progress, are not changes working to a good end, but merely changes. Evolution is not progress, but mere change, as far as good and evil are concerned, a mere marking of time, or at most a series of movements in which advance and retreat cancel each other in the long-run.

At the same time, the evolution theory enables us to see plainly a cause at work which would inevitably produce in human minds the illusion that existence is good. Just as any species of animals which found a pleasure in actions ultimately entailing the destruction of the species would be condemned to extinction, so too only those varieties of the genus homo could survive in whom the conviction of the goodness and desirability of existence was strong enough to call forth the activities on which existence was dependent.

The optimistic interpretation of evolution is based on the "struggle for life" theory that "existence" sums up the good for which man struggles; and we have sought to show that the optimism which is based on this assumption must result in the conclusion that progress is an illusion. Some readers, however, may hold that mere existence is not the only good that man is capable of struggling for.

III. PESSIMISM

"The prospect of attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there have been many of them."[1]

The theory which sees in evolution nothing but the redistribution of matter and motion leads to an optimistic view of things which on examination proves to be a misleading illusion. From illusion to pessimism is but a step.

The facts on which the theory of organic evolution is based are two. The first is that no two individuals of any species are born exactly alike; and that of two different individuals one must be superior to the other, i.e. better fitted to survive under the conditions then and there prevailing. The next is that parents transmit their qualities to offspring; and the superiority of superior parents is thus transmitted and accumulated from generation to generation. Organic evolution, therefore, consists in more and more perfect adaptation of the organism to the environment. And this adaptation is effected by the physical destruction of those creatures which are weakly and not adapted to cope with the environment.

According to the theory that evolution is progress, the progress or evolution of humanity obeys the same laws, is impelled by the same forces, and follows the same line as the evolution of organisms in general; and consists accordingly in increasing adaptation to the environment. Imperfect adaptation manifests itself whenever a man's impulses or desires move him to perform acts which are immediately or eventually prejudicial to his own or to society's existence. Adaptation will be perfect when all acts which are necessary for the existence of the individual and of the society are pleasant in themselves—when not only going to the dentist's will be a duty, but the extraction will be a pleasure desired for its own sake.

Though Mr. Huxley maintained that it was a misleading illusion to lead people to expect any such state of untroubled happiness, he was far from denying that progress has been made in the past by man, or from despairing of further progress in the future. But progress does not, according to him, consist in adaptation to environment; it is not effected by means of the struggle for existence; it neither obeys the same laws, nor is impelled by the same forces, nor follows the same lines as organic evolution in general. Nor does it consist in the substitution of personal pleasure for a sense of duty as the motive of action: on the contrary, it consists in a fuller and fuller recognition of the claims of others.

The idea that evolution means progress, and by its very nature necessarily results in perfection, owes much of its popularity to the fallacious interpretation given to the phrase "survival of the fittest." In any scientific use of the phrase, "fittest" simply means "fittest to survive." But in popular usage it is supposed to mean "ideally or ethically best." But the fittest to survive are not necessarily the ideally best: they are, scientifically speaking, simply those best adapted to the circumstances and conditions under which they live. And the circumstances and conditions, the environment, may or may not be favourable to the survival of the ethically or æsthetically best: they may be favourable to the growth of weeds and to the destruction of beautiful flowers, in which case the cosmic process will wipe out the beautiful flowers, and the movement of evolution will be æsthetically retrogressive, not progressive.

Adaptation to environment, therefore, is no indication or test of progress, or of what is good or right or true or beautiful. Everything that exists is shown, by the mere fact of its existence, to be adapted to its environment. If, therefore, such adaptation is evidence that the thing is ideally satisfactory, it will follow that whatever is, is right. At the same time, our conception of right and good will be emptied of all meaning: a "right" or "good" thing will simply mean a thing which exists. The epithets will simply predicate existence, not a quality; and consequently we shall have to call the successful villain and the prosperous traitor good, and their methods right. They have adapted themselves to their conditions, and have flourished in consequence.

Adaptation to environment could only mean progress provided that the environment was uniformly such as to favour the survival of those alone who were ideally fit to survive. But it is not: instances are not uncommon in which organisms, having attained to a certain degree of complexity and heterogeneity of structure, subsequently, as a consequence of adapting themselves to their environment, lose it and revert to an earlier stage of development, relatively simple, homogeneous, and structureless. Such reversion or regressive metamorphosis is as much a part of the organism's evolution as its previous progressive metamorphosis; and progress and regress both are equally the result of adaptation to environment. Further, though reversion and regress may now be only occasional, it is certain that as the earth cools down they must become universal: the altered conditions of temperature, etc., will allow only the lower forms of life to survive, and will eventually extinguish even them.

As regards organic evolution in general, then, the struggle for existence and the action of the environment do not necessarily tend to result in progress. As regards the evolution of man in particular, Mr. Huxley went further and maintained that they were absolutely inimical to human progress, which has been effected, not because, but in spite of them, and is the result not of obeying the cosmic process, but of defying it.

The qualities which brought success in the struggle for existence to man as an animal were rapacity, greed, selfishness, and an absolute and cruel indifference to the wants and sufferings of others. On the gratification, at all cost to others, of his animal desires, his animal existence depended: it was the "ape and tiger" within him that made him victor in the struggle for existence; it was the environment that imposed this as the condition of success.

The qualities which make man a human being are tenderness, pity, mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, and love. It is in their growth—the "ethical process"—that human progress consists, and not in the ruthlessness by which the cosmic process effects the evolution of other organisms. These qualities—human and humane—do not make for success in the struggle for existence. They are not adapted to the environment provided by Nature. Their owners were not the fittest to survive, and consequently paid the penalty—physical destruction—as far as the cosmic process could exact it. If the struggle for existence and the action of the environment have not succeeded in keeping man down to the level of the brute, it is because man has deliberately set himself to oppose the cosmic process and the blind forces, knowing nothing of right and wrong, pity or love, by which it effects the evolution of the brute. The struggle for existence is fatal to the development of the qualities which are peculiarly characteristic of humanity, and man accordingly has suspended the struggle for existence. In place of warring with his fellow-man, he has begun to co-operate with him. He has learnt to some extent to postpone the gratification of his own wants to the satisfaction of those of others. He no longer destroys the weakly, the sick, the helpless, the useless, or even the criminal; and, if the environment threaten their destruction, he sets to work to alter the environment. Man no longer seeks to conquer Nature by obeying her: he studies her forces in order to command them to his will. Adaptation to environment is the implement by which she shapes human evolution to ends that are not his ends; he wrests the weapon from her hands, and by adaptation of the environment undoes her work, fosters the growth of those qualities which tend towards his ideal, and does away with the conditions which harbour ignorance and error, selfishness and sin.

Human progress, then, consists in perpetual approximation to the ideals of charity, love, and self-sacrifice. Life is exhibited as a struggle against evil, against the ape and tiger within us which we inherit from our ancestor—the brute. The evil is real, the struggle is hard but worthy, and not the less worthy because it is not directed to our personal happiness and gratification. "The practice of self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be something much better."[2]

Thus far this criticism of life, though stern, is not pessimistic. On the contrary, in it man seems to have recovered the freedom of action and the power of independent judgment which, as the mere product of the cosmic process, he could not enjoy according to the optimistic theory. If life is a struggle, at any rate man can fight the good fight, if he will; and he can judge for himself which is the higher, the adaptation to environment which puts man on a level with the ape and tiger, or the adaptation of environment which, for the sake of his ideals, sets him in conflict with the cosmic process.

It is when we proceed to conjecture the issue of the struggle, as thus stated, that pessimism begins to invade us. However valiantly man may fight, whatever temporary victories he may gain here or there, his defeat in the end is inevitable: the same cosmic forces which, working through him, have won him his trifling victories have preordained his ultimate destruction. As far as it is possible for science to forecast the future, it is certain that in the end man will fall a victim to his environment, and join the other extinct fauna of the earth. With him the ethical process ceases; with him perish the hopes, the aspirations, and the ideals for which he strove as being of greater worth than aught that evolution, the redistribution of matter and motion, could offer or produce.

If this were all, the picture would be sufficiently gloomy: man alone in the universe, surrounded by forces which act without regard to good or evil, without sympathy or heed for right or wrong, indeed, with the effect of impartially extinguishing both in the end. But it is not all. As the conditions grow more and more unfavourable to man's existence upon earth, as the margin of the means of subsistence contracts, and the presence of universal want increases, the ape and tiger in man will begin to assert themselves once more. In the face of starvation, the instinct of self-preservation will become imperious. Once more, as in the earliest days, man will live by rapacity, cruelty, and selfishness alone. Before man yields possession of the earth to the brutes, he will himself revert to brutishness. The puny barriers behind which man has for a moment sheltered himself from the action of the cosmic process, and nursed the feeble flame of those aspirations after higher things which distinguish him from the brute, must inevitably be swept away by the restless and relentless tide of insentient matter, perpetually redistributed by aimless motion, which constitutes the cosmic process.

The pity of it is that the process of evolution should require not merely man's physical destruction, but his moral destruction also; that the ruin of his body should be preceded by the ruin of his soul; that in his regressive metamorphosis he should be compelled, by the struggle for existence and the instinct of self-preservation, to play the traitor to one after another of his ideals of tenderness, of pity, and of love. The fittest to survive will be those who are most completely adapted to the altered environment, who are resolved to succeed in a struggle for existence in which success can be obtained by brutishness alone. The least fitted to the new conditions, and the first to perish therefore, will be those with whom self does not come first. With their destruction the competition between their less scrupulous survivors will become fiercer and still more cruel. And this process will be repeated again and again, each generation transmitting cunning and cruelty intensified to the next. Our great cities already breed men degraded below the level of the lowest savages known to us, but even they can give us but little idea of what the struggle for existence will yet produce from the ruins of civilisation in the course of the Evolution of Inhumanity.

While proclaiming that "the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle," and that at the best the ethical process can maintain itself only for a relatively short time, "until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet," Mr. Huxley held that our duty lay "not in imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it."[3] "Cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature," and though we know that the enemy's triumph must be complete, that the defeat of the good cause is preordained, that we and ours must be annihilated, we must remain at our posts, fighting to the end without hope.

It seems, then, that man possesses two kinds of knowledge: he knows to some extent what is, and to some extent he knows what ought to be. And both kinds of knowledge are equally valid. He judges that a thing is, and he judges also that a thing ought to be. Both judgments are equally true, but apparently both are not equally final, for if man judges that what is, ought not to be, he is impelled to alter what is, so that in the end the thing that ought to be is also the thing that is. The judgment of what ought to be, the ideal, is thus proved, or rather made, to be the finally correct one. On the other hand, if man is defeated in his attempts to adjust the things that are to his judgment of what they ought to be, he does not acquiesce in his defeat; he refuses to accept the result as final; the end of the matter is not there; things are not what he strove to make them, but they ought to be. What is has nothing to do with what ought to be. But what ought to be may make a good deal of difference to what is.

The ethical process, in its conflict with the cosmic process, may not in the end prove victorious; but that makes no difference to the fact that it ought to be victorious. It is this deep-seated conviction which made Mr. Huxley say that we must declare war to the last against cosmic nature, the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The victory of the enemy may be certain, but it will none the less be wrong; it may be permanent, but as long as it lasts it will be wrong. If matter and motion are eternal and indestructible, morality is equally everlasting and immutable. Unless this is so, unless the triumph of the cosmic process is wrong, once and always, why are we called upon to endure sorrow and pain and suffering rather than submit to it? Our judgment that it is wrong is as independent of time as is our judgment that particles of matter gravitate towards one another. We have no reason for believing that the latter will continue to be true for a longer time than the former. Indeed, if matter and motion, having achieved their victory over the ethical process, were then and there to be annihilated, their victory would continue to be wrong, though they had ceased to be. Right may triumph or wrong may triumph, but right is right and wrong is wrong for evermore. It is vain to tell us in the same breath that we must stake our all upon our moral judgments and that our moral judgments are not to be relied on. Every impeachment of their validity is an invitation to us to give up the struggle against the enemy of ethical nature. And if we are really resolved to fight the good fight and quit ourselves like men, we thereby affirm that our moral judgments are at least as valid as our judgments on matters of fact, and that, if our knowledge of what is is true objectively, our knowledge of what ought to be has in it at least an equal element of objective truth.

If, then, the cosmic process is real and objective, in so far as it is a perpetual manifestation of the Unknown Reality which underlies all things, then the ethical process, having the same reality and objectivity, is also a manifestation of the Unknowable. The perpetual redistribution of matter and motion is not the only way in which the Unknowable manifests itself to men: it also gives a shape to itself in the form of the highest and purest aspirations of which man is conscious within himself. It might seem, therefore, at first sight as though a mere dispassionate consideration of the actual facts of life, quite apart from any religious presuppositions or presumptions, forced us at last into the presence of a God, the source and author of all goodness. But, in the first place, those who hold to the dogma of Agnosticism, that what underlies things as they are known to us is the Unknowable, cannot admit that we know or can find out whether the Unknowable is good or bad. Induction, the logical method to which science owes so many of its discoveries, and by which we proceed from the known to the unknown, does not avail us here. No logical method could discover what is not merely unknown, but absolutely unknowable.

In the next place it is reasonable enough that those who begin by believing in a Divine Providence should also believe that right will triumph in the end, if not in the world as it is manifested to us now and here, in space and time, then in that real world, that kingdom of heaven, of which this world is but an imperfect manifestation, or to which it is but a distant and slowly moving approximation. For those, however, who refuse to assume the reality of a Divine Providence the case is different. They base themselves on facts of experience: they observe that to some small extent what ought to be tends to substitute itself for what is, thanks to the action of man exclusively, and not to any inherent tendency to good in cosmic nature, but rather in spite of the resistance to good caused by the necessary action of the mechanical laws of nature. From their observation of the conditions under which man has succeeded in modifying what is into what ought to be, they forecast the extent to which that process may be carried in the future; and their conclusion is that the process is doomed to eventual failure, is doomed not merely to cease, but to give way to a process in the opposite direction, by which what ought to be will be displaced by what ought not, by which ethical nature will succumb to cosmic nature.

Now, if there be no God, or if being Unknowable He must be eliminated from our words, thoughts, and deeds as a negligible and useless quantity for rational purposes, it is a natural enough conclusion that right must eventually succumb to wrong. It is but a reassertion of the familiar thesis that without religion morality cannot permanently be maintained. On this occasion, however, the thesis is advanced not as a piece of religious prejudice or theological insolence, but as the teaching of science and the inevitable outcome of evolution.

FOOTNOTES:

IV. IDEALISM

The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly, what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be real. But whereas those losses are but personal, and possibly our regrets selfish, this loss is more than personal, and the regret not merely selfish. It is not merely that we personally have held a mistaken opinion, or that any self-sacrifice—miserably small and unworthy in the retrospect—that we have made has been made for a losing cause. It is that apart from our personal share in the matter, which rated at its true value is as naught, the thing is wrong; it ought not to be. Of that we are just as certain as that our past life has not been what it ought to have been, what it might have been. The past is past beyond recall, but for the future hitherto there has been hope and faith, faith that what ought to be may be, even for us, hope that it will be so. But now, in place of hope and faith, we have the scientific certainty that the future of humanity is devoted to the triumph of the thing that ought not to be. The only consolation left to us is the inextinguishable, the unconquerable conviction that right is right even though it should not prevail. To this conviction we must hold, though the heavens should fall. To it we must hold, though it bring, as bring it must, according to Mr. Huxley, sorrow and pain and the renunciation of our own happiness.

These are hard sayings. But there is a yet harder to be added to them. Even though it should involve the renunciation of our intellectual superiority to other people, we must hold to our conviction. If we are in earnest about our moral convictions, we shall reject any suggestion that they are not after all really true, even if that suggestion seems to afford the only way of escaping from the conclusion that faith in religion has the same basis in reason as faith in science.

In proclaiming our conviction that right is right, we affirm and intend to affirm that it is so not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. In the same way, an established scientific truth is not one of those matters about which reasonable persons, who are competent to judge, may reasonably hold different opinions: it is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact. Indeed, both kinds of truth, moral truths and scientific truths, are quite independent of individual and personal opinion. There are people in whose opinion the earth is flat; but the earth is not flat, nor can their opinion alter the fact. There was a time when all the laws of nature were unknown to man or misconceived by him; but they operated as usual, quite unaffected by his ideas. So there are people who consider successful roguery ideal, and who would make a fortune by promoting fraudulent companies, if they could; but honesty remains a duty, in spite of their ideas. Right is right, even though there be brutes in human form; and right was right, even when the ape and tiger ruled in man, and even though they were fine fellows, in their own opinion. Cruelty and selfishness never were right at any time, and never will be. The laws of morality, like the laws of science, are objectively true: they do not vary with the opinions men entertain about them; the earth, for instance, did not move or cease to move round the sun according as men imagined Galileo to be right or wrong, nor has right ceased to be right even when the world has been most depraved.

A moral judgment, then, like a scientific judgment, is objective, not subjective; it is not the expression of a mere opinion, but the statement of a fact which has an existence independent of man. If now we ask what sort of an existence it has, it is clear that what is and what ought to be have not in all cases the same kind of existence: the thing which is may sometimes also be the thing that ought to be, but often it is not. Now, when the latter is the case, when a thing is felt to be a crying evil, a foul injustice that calls for remedy, in what sense does the justice exist on which we call to drive out the injustice? The thing which ought not to be exists, and is in possession. The thing which ought to be delays its coming. Shall we say, then, that, while that is so, it exists indeed, but exists as an ideal, as something which we know ought to be and are resolved shall be? That it must present itself to some mind or other as an object of desire, and as a possibility capable of fulfilment, is certain. That it does so present itself to man is what we mean when we attribute to him the power of moral judgment and moral action. But when we speak of man's moral judgments as being objectively true, we imply that they exist not merely in his mind, but also elsewhere. But ideals can only exist in a mind; judgments can be pronounced only by a judge. When, therefore, we affirm that in objectivity and validity our moral judgments are on a par with our scientific judgments, and that our knowledge of what ought to be is as real and true as our knowledge of what is, that the existence of ethical nature, with its demands upon our reason, is a fact as indisputable as the existence of cosmic nature, we are implicitly affirming also the existence of a mind, other than human, from whose moral judgments the laws of morality derive their validity; and as those laws are eternal and immutable, as right is right always and from eternity to eternity, so must be the mind in which they are and from which they proceed.

To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. When the desire to amend our life is strong upon us, when we are most conscious of the heavy difference between actual amendment and amendment in idea alone, then we are most certain of the reality of the moral ideal as a fact, both of immediate consciousness at the moment and of permanent significance for us and for all men. To say that our moral convictions correspond to no real facts is simply to deny to them any validity at all. To say that the facts to which they correspond are real, but are purely subjective, being but moods, and often passing moods, of the individual, is merely to say that our moral convictions are illusions and right-doing only fancy. Nor do we mend matters if we add that all men are more or less subject to these moods, that right and wrong are purely human institutions; for if their value in the individual is naught, their existence in the multitude does but add to ciphers ciphers. On the other hand, if the moral ideal is no figment of man's imagination, if its existence does not come and go with his fitful moral struggles, then its permanent abode, the centre from which it manifests itself, must be in some permanent intelligence at the centre of things.

The Pessimistic interpretation of evolution suggests another way of reaching the same conclusion. That form of Pessimism represents cosmic nature as indifferent, if not hostile, to ethical nature; the former by its law of the struggle for existence favours the survival of the strongest and the most selfish; the latter with its moral laws strives to suspend the struggle for existence, and to defeat the selfishness which the former seeks to perpetuate and extend. Human evolution is in its essence the struggle of man as a moral being against nature as non-moral or anti-moral; and the curve traced by human evolution is the resultant of the opposition of the two forces—the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, nature. During the first part of its course the line of human evolution rises, but during the latter part it is doomed to fall; and the curve will be completed when man, having traversed every stage of moral degradation, is merged once more in the brute matter to which originally he owed his being. Against this victory of cosmic nature man, as a moral being, protests and fights. He protests that it is wrong—wrong, not because it brings him more pain than pleasure, for right-doing also may have that result, but wrong without regard to his feelings, so that any impartial spectator who witnessed the struggle would condemn and regret the issue. If this is not so, if the condemnation is the expression merely of human prejudice, then there is nothing in the defeat of ethical nature or in the victory of its enemy, cosmic nature, really to regret; the difference between right and wrong is not an absolute or real distinction, corresponding to real facts, and the victory of cosmic nature, even if it runs counter to man's prejudices, is not thereby shown to be really wrong, though man naturally is under the illusion that it is.

The coarse and immoral piece of vulgarity which condones an act of wrong-doing on the ground that "it will be all the same a hundred years hence," is, with an extension of time, as applicable to the race generally as to the individual in particular. In a million, or a billion, years hence it will, according to the pessimistic interpretation of evolution, be all the same: matter and motion will alone exist, completely indifferent to right and wrong. What does it matter, then, whether we do right or wrong? Ultimately, it will make no difference: the distinction between right and wrong is not one of permanent value, or based on any lasting difference in things. Nor is it strange that a cause which is based on an illusion should be doomed to defeat. What is strange is that anyone should invite us to renounce happiness for such an unmeaning struggle.

The only reply to such loose talk is that it does matter, here and now, always and to all time, that right should triumph over wrong. It will not do to say that it matters now, but will not matter hereafter, for, if it is of no importance then, neither is it of any importance now. But if right-doing is the most important thing in the world, more important than happiness, more important to all time even than the perpetual redistribution of matter and motion, to whom is it important? Not exclusively, nor even primarily, to ourselves; for the essence of right-doing is the attempt to put self away and forget it, the yearning to be lifted above personal considerations and thought of self, the conviction that whilst it matters all the world to me, to do the right, the matter does not end with me. The matter is not of merely personal importance to me, nor important simply because I choose to think it so. Its value and significance are apprehended—alas! too rarely—by me, they are not created by me. Its significance and importance are real, not fictitious; that reality is not created by man, it is not a human prejudice, but exists independent of man and what he thinks. To matter and motion, those perpetual manifestations of the Power or Reality which underlies them, nothing can have any meaning or importance: it is only to a mind that things can be significant or important. If, then, the importance of right-doing is real, it is because it really matters to the Power, which underlies all things, that we should do right; and that Power must be of the nature of an intelligence, for it is only a mind which can either apprehend values or assign them. If the microcosm, man, can pass a valid sentence of condemnation upon the macrocosm, nature, it is only because and so far as his moral nature places him in direct communication with the heart of things and gives him knowledge of the will of that Power on which microcosm and macrocosm alike depend for their existence. If the distinction between right and wrong is one by which man can correctly judge between himself and the cosmos, the distinction and the judgment must proceed from a source superior to both. If it is not, then the Pessimistic interpretation of evolution falls to the ground, because it is based on the assumption that its condemnation of cosmic nature is a correct judgment. Not only does Pessimism fall, but the element of truth and reality which Pessimism contains must also be abandoned; if the distinction between right and wrong is not sufficient for the task put upon it by Pessimism, neither is it sufficient for us to build our lives on. In fine, either the ultimate defeat of the ethical process matters, or it does not. If it does not, why suffer sorrow and pain in the vain endeavour to stave it off? If it does, then to whom? No longer to man, for he will have joined the extinct fauna. Therefore to some moral intelligence to whom the triumph of right is a matter of importance.

From this dilemma the only escape seems to be frankly to admit that a billion years hence it will be "all the same," but to deny that, because it will be all the same then, it is a matter of indifference now. This argument, then, maintains that it will be all the same ultimately, and that it is an illusion to imagine that when man is extinct it can possibly matter. Here and now, however, and indeed as long as mankind continues to exist, right-doing is of the highest conceivable importance to man, more important even than happiness. But it is only as long as mankind continues to exist that it can continue to be important: its importance only exists in man's mind, and perishes with it. To say, therefore, that the ultimate defeat of the ethical process will, when established, be regrettable, is only to say that if we, or any other moral judge, were there to see it, we should feel regret about it; but we cannot possibly maintain that, because a moral judge would regret it, if he were there, therefore there will be one there to regret it. Of course, it is possible that the Unknowable may be a moral intelligence of this kind, because everything is possible with regard to the Unknowable. But we can neither affirm nor deny that or anything else about the Unknowable, for then the Unknowable would cease so far to be unknowable.

The contention of this argument, then, is that for us men, and (as far as we have any positive knowledge) for us men alone, the laws of morality are real, intensely real; but their reality begins with man and ends with man. To this contention the reply is that as regards their reality the laws of morality are on exactly the same footing as the laws of science. Take the theory of evolution for instance: from scientific observations of what is going on now it infers what has been and what will be, it reconstructs the past and forecasts the future; it frames pictures of the globe as it was before man was evolved; it forms conceptions of the earth as it will be long after man is extinct. These conceptions and pictures, however, exist only in the mind of man, for the future does not yet exist and the past has ceased to be. That is to say, evolution is an inference, or rather a mass of inferences, which like all inferences exist in the mind, could not have existed before the mind, and cannot exist when the mind has ceased to be. Science, being the work of the mind (for we cannot say that it requires no intelligence), is just man's notion of what has been, is, and will be, in the same way that morality is man's conception of what ought to be. If we say that what ought to be will cease and become meaningless when man is extinct, then we must say the same of what has been, is, and will be. If the good, the noble, the right, are merely human ideas of what ought to be, matter and motion are merely human conceptions of what is. If the reality of the former is only to be found in the human mind, so is the reality of the latter. If the reality of the one is to cease with human existence, so must the reality of the other. On the other hand, if either is to exist when mankind is no more, it is only in some mind that it can exist. It is only for a person that anything can be right or good. It is only a person that can see the past summed up or the future contained in the present. If it is legitimate and logical to infer that what is will continue to be after man's disappearance from the earth, so it is to draw the same inference with regard to what ought to be. If science is true really, and does not merely appear so to man, it must be true for some mind other than human: by an intelligence alone can truth be apprehended, or the right approved. But if truth is limited to the human mind, and ceases with it, then evolution must cease to be true when men cease to exist. Nay, in that case it cannot claim to be true at all, or rather does not claim to be true, but only seeming. On the other hand, if the law of gravity, for instance, was true before man's appearance, its truth must have dwelt in some mind. If it was not true then, we have no better reason for believing it to be true now. In fine, truth and right, what is and what ought to be, must either be dismissed as mere human imaginings, or be accepted as everlasting facts of an Eternal Moral Consciousness.

Shall we, then, say that the description which science gives of the constitution and working of the universe is indeed consistent and coherent enough with itself, and is a logical deduction from its premises, but to assert that it expresses or even corresponds to any reality beyond itself is a statement which we have no right to make? To take up this position is simply to maintain that science is consistent and logical, but that we have no reason or right to believe that it is true. If our accounts are based on imaginary figures, they may be kept as strictly as you please, but they will never show us our true position. Indeed, if our premises are incorrect to start with, the more logical our inferences are, the more certain our conclusions are to be wrong.

Shall we, then, say that the account which science gives of the cosmic process is not only consistent and logical, but expresses or corresponds to a reality? Then in that case the cosmic process, so far as it is truly expressed by science, is a logical process. But it is only a mind which can be logical or can go through a logical process. Once more, therefore, the facts of science as much as the facts of morality imply that the real is an Intelligence. In fine, the truth of science and the truth of morality are bound up together and have the same basis. If the one is valid for facts beyond the range of human observation, so is the other. If the one implies a consciousness other than human, equally so does the other.

It may be said that to regard the ruling principle of the cosmos as a moral agent is to commit the anthropomorphic fallacy. What, then, shall we say of science, which is engaged in demonstrating that the cosmic process is always logical? That science simply describes the facts as they are, and that if they are logical, it is not her fault? Then the presence of an intelligence other than human is revealed to science in the facts; and it is false to say that science merely imports her own intelligence into them. In the same way, the presence of a moral personality other than our own is revealed to us in the facts of conscience, and not imported into them by us. The presence of the Comforter is one of the facts apprehended by the religious consciousness; it is not merely the religious man's way of interpreting some other fact. From this conclusion the only way of escape is to say that anthropomorphism is a fallacy, and that it is a fallacy to which the human mind, by its very constitution, is always and inevitably subject. This argument gets rid at one blow of all indications of any intelligence or morality other than human. But how? Simply by begging the question, by tacitly taking it for granted that there is no other personality than human personality. In that case it is obvious, indeed, that man's perpetual discovery of personal power in the forces of nature, of more than human wisdom in nature's laws, and of more than human goodness in the human heart, is and must be fallacious. But only on the assumption that there is no wisdom in the world but man's, no love in all the universe but his, can we say that man reads into the facts a wisdom and a love which are not there. Are we, then, prepared to say that, in giving us a logical account of the cosmic process, science has—naturally and necessarily indeed, but none the less completely—been mistaken? If the scientific account corresponds to the facts, then the facts behave logically. If it is the anthropomorphic fallacy to imagine that things can behave logically, then science's description of the facts must be fallacious.

Perhaps it will be sought to save science by saying that science is anthropomorphic, but not fallacious. This, however, gives away the whole case: it is an admission that, in interpreting the cosmic process as a logical process, science is simply recognising, and rightly recognising, the logical character of the facts—the anthropomorphic interpretation happens to be right. But we must note that it is not right because it is anthropomorphic, but anthropomorphic because it faithfully describes the facts. Science aims at describing and formulating facts as they are: if the laws of science are rational, it is because she found reason already in the facts, and not because she put it there. She does not make the laws of nature, neither does she dictate the behaviour of facts, nor is their behaviour merely her way of interpreting facts. Man discovers in nature wisdom, which is an attribute of personality, not because he cannot help being anthropomorphic in his views, but because nature is a manifestation of the power and wisdom of a personality other and greater than man's. So far, then, is this discovery from creating a presumption that man makes nature after his own image, that it constitutes a proof that man is made in the image of that personal will and wisdom which is expressed in nature as well as manifested in man. In discovering personality we discover what is fundamentally real in nature, and for us what is fundamentally real is also our highest ideal.

We have already remarked that paradoxical though it sounds to say that the ideal is real, the seeming paradox does express a fact—the fact at once of our consciousness of the difference between what is and what ought to be, and of our conviction that what ought to be is no mere illusion. Truth and goodness, wisdom and love, are all at the same time ideal and real. The truth to which it is the ideal of science to approximate is no mere chimera. So far as it is truth, it is not merely man's way of looking at the facts or an interpretation which he puts upon them: it is a statement of the facts, as accurate and precise as science can make it. The ideal, being an ideal, will never be fully attained; but that the truth is there to be found out is proved every time science reaches a new truth, that is to say, a truth which before its discovery was indeed not apprehended by man, but certainly was not therefore either untrue or non-existent. The truth was in the facts; for what man knows of nature he has learnt from nature, and what he finds there is not the projection of human wisdom but the revelation of a more than human wisdom. Man's knowledge is real in proportion as it approaches the ideal. The ideal is not man's surmise, or vague conception, or anticipation of what he may hereafter come to know, for such surmises are always proved to be more or less erroneous. Neither is it man's conviction that the truth exists, if only he could find it out. It is actual truth and knowledge which now exist, and, being truth and knowledge, must exist in some mind, and certainly do not exist in man's mind. Science, so far as it has approached the ideal, has done so not by being anthropomorphic, but by ceasing to be anthropomorphic—that is to say, by casting aside presumptions of what according to man's notions ought to be or a priori must be, and substituting for such preconceptions a patient, reverent study of the facts as they are.

To regard the knowledge thus gained as being at once purely human and the only reality is to say that the evolution of the universe exists only in the speculation of human thinkers, and consequently that the world as it was before man existed was created by the speculation of minds which were not in existence then and which were only subsequently evolved. How can man have been evolved out of his own speculations? How can his speculations have existed before he did? Man owes his origin to the same Power whose wisdom is revealed in nature to science, and manifested to all in all around us. Of the existence of a Power, not ourselves, we have evidence in everything that affects us. It is a fact of consciousness, but it is a fact which from its very nature does not exist solely in our consciousness. Therein it resembles ideal wisdom or goodness, which exists in us, so far as our wisdom or goodness is real, but is far from being exhausted by its partial presence in us.

The ideal in morality, again, is not the mere desire to do good or to be good, just as the ideal in knowledge is not the mere desire to know the truth. And if goodness is the object of moral desire, as truth is the object of intellectual desire, in neither case is the object of desire purely imaginary, a mere idea or conception of something which might be, but as a matter of fact is not. We do not desire imaginary pleasures or imaginary goodness, we want the reality; and to tell us that that reality exists only in idea, only in our own imagination, is a misleading half-truth. True, we must have some idea of it, or else we could not desire it. But neither could we desire it if it were presented to us as purely imaginary. In other words, the object of moral desire is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as both actual and possible, as existing simultaneously for us and beyond us. The case is the same with ideal truth: we could not desire it, unless we had some conception of it, unless it were to some degree or in some way present to our consciousness; yet, at the same time, the knowledge which we desire to have but do not yet possess is certainly, so far as we do not possess it, beyond our consciousness. It is because we have not got it that we want it. And the object of desire, what we want, is not imaginary truth, but real truth; just as in our better moments we want to do not what we imagine to be right, but what is really right. The Real, therefore—real truth, real goodness—is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, and desired, at the moment of desire, as existing both for us and beyond us.

The proviso, "at the moment of apprehension, at the moment of desire," is important, because it strikes at the root of all forms of subjective idealism. They all assume that the only thing directly apprehended is what exists for us; that consequently the supposed existence of any real thing or person beyond us is a mere inference, and an inference the truth of which we have no means of checking, because it is a statement about things of which we have no direct apprehension or knowledge. On this assumption, therefore, the only things man directly apprehends are his own states of consciousness, his own sensations, etc. Are we to call them real or not? If they are not real, his whole life is a dream, his speculations fancies, and his desires illusions. If they are the only reality of which he can be certain, then the only truth is that which man knows, the only good is that which man does, the only world is that which man thinks, the only God is that which man makes, the magnified, non-natural shadow of man projected on to the mists of the Unknowable.

It is important, therefore, to insist that the Real—the reality of existence, of knowledge, of goodness—is not an inference, but a matter of direct apprehension. It is certain that goodness or knowledge to be an object of desire must be presented to us in idea; but it is equally certain that the mere idea is not what we desire. The object of desire is directly apprehended as in our consciousness and beyond it. The natural world around us is also directly apprehended as at once in our consciousness and beyond it: it is presented to our minds, but it is presented as real.

It is important also to note that the real does not forfeit its reality to our apprehension when and because it takes up its abode in us: goodness does not cease to be good because we do it, nor truth cease to be truth because we know it. It does not follow that because the ideal cannot be fully realised, it cannot be realised at all. On the contrary, the conviction that it cannot be completely attained is itself the guarantee that it can be attained partially. Yet it has been assumed that if a thing is apprehended by us it cannot be real, that real knowledge begins just where our knowledge ends, that the further we push our knowledge forward the further real knowledge recedes from our view. On this assumption is built the theory of the Unknowable, the theory that whatever is known to man is a state of man's consciousness; that states of consciousness are subjective, are merely the appearances of things, not the things themselves; that the real things, the things themselves, are unknowable; their appearances alone can be known to man; therefore the real is for ever unknowable. "The reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown."[4] Consequently, inferences about the Real are valueless and futile. By way of compensation, however, our knowledge of the unreal is, on this theory, varied and extensive: it includes, for instance, the theory of evolution and the whole of science.

But the assumption which leads to this strange conclusion is opposed to the facts. The fact, as we have contended, is that the real in consciousness is continuous with the real beyond consciousness, and is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as being thus continuous, and is not reached by any process of inference. The real is not a matter of inference, but of apprehension. Its existence cannot be deduced from anything else; it is that from which all conclusions must be deduced. I cannot prove that a thing is real any more than I can prove that I have toothache. There is no need.

FOOTNOTES:

V. THE REAL

We began, at the beginning of this book, by accepting Evolution as a fact, as all ordinarily educated persons in the present state of scientific knowledge are practically bound to do. Accepting it as a fact, we proceeded to inquire what, if anything, it had to tell us about the moral government of the world; and we found that very different interpretations were put upon the theory of Evolution by different authorities. According to one interpretation the process of Evolution was a continual progress from good to better: good could only give way to higher good. According to another interpretation goodness was a transient, evanescent phase in the process of evolution, of no permanent value: the ethical process was doomed to be defeated by its enemy, the cosmic process. According to a third interpretation the notion of good was a pure illusion, necessary indeed, inasmuch as without it there would be no survival for man in the struggle for existence, but none the less an illusion.

Much as these interpretations differ from one another as to the moral significance of the process of evolution, or indeed as to whether evolution has any moral significance at all, they are agreed upon one point. They are agreed that it is impossible to draw any inference from the facts of evolution as to the moral government of the universe. To affirm its moral government would be to claim knowledge of the Unknowable, which is an obvious absurdity. It would be to attribute power, consciousness, wisdom, and goodness to the Real; and the Real is and must ever be unknown.

This identification of the Real with the Unknowable leads us into the following ridiculous impasse: the vast majority of men look, and must always look, for guidance and information to science and theology; and theology is knowledge of the unknowable; science, knowledge of the unreal. Those who are content with this blind alley may remain in it. We propose to try to find our way out of it.

If we analyse our perception of any material object, that is to say, of any object which we perceive by means of the senses, we shall find that our perception of the object consists of the sensations which we have of it. To perceive an orange is to see that it is yellow, to feel that it is round, to smell it, taste it, and so on. These various sensations together constitute our perception of the orange. Now, the subjective idealist says that the perception is the orange, and that the orange is the perception. To the beginner in philosophy that sounds absurd: he knows that his perception is not the orange, and that the orange is something more than his perception of it. But when he is asked, "What more? If the orange is not the perception, what is it?" he does not generally produce any satisfactory reply; and then he is told that his notion, that there is anything in the orange except his own perception or sensations, is obviously not a fact of sensation or a thing directly observed, but merely a belief or inference of his. On the other hand, he generally puts a very natural question to his instructor: "If the orange is merely my perception, what becomes of the orange when I do not perceive it? Granted that it exists whenever I look at it, what becomes of it in the intervals when I am not looking at it? Does it exist then, or does it not?"

To this Bishop Berkeley replies that it does; that it exists then in exactly the same way as it does now, that is to say, it exists in idea (i.e. perception or sensation); but as it does not exist in my perception, when I am not looking at it, it must exist in the perception of some other mind, to which all things at all times are present.

With the fact which forms Berkeley's conclusion I have no quarrel. What I should like to show is that it does not follow from these premises.

Berkeley's argument is: All men believe, and rightly believe, that the things they see are permanent. The things they see are ideas (perceptions, sensations) of a mind. Therefore the permanent world is the idea of a permanent mind.[5]

But "the things they see" is an ambiguous expression. If by "the things that I see" is meant "my sensations of sight," then they are not permanent, for they only last as long as I look at the object, and consequently any argument based on their supposed permanence falls to the ground. On the other hand, if "the things that I see" are permanent, then they are not merely my sensations of sight—in which case subjective idealism is wrong, and my perception of a thing is not the whole account of the thing and does not exhaust its reality. The things which I perceive are not my sensations: they are things of which I have sensations. In fine, they are apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as being both within and without consciousness.

To the question whether a thing exists when I am not looking at it, John Stuart Mill replies, in effect, that as often as I look at it I shall see it; that if I were looking I should see it. This is true enough; but it is no answer to the question. When further pressed, Mill further replies that, if things do not exist when we do not look, we should nevertheless necessarily be deluded by the association of ideas into imagining that they do exist when not looked at. Here, again, it is perfectly true that, if things are not real, it is a delusion to imagine they are. But that is no answer to the question. It is, in fact, a question which the subjective idealist cannot answer. To say "No! Things out of consciousness are non-existent," is to say that effects of which the causes are unobserved are effects produced by non-existent causes. To say "Yes" is to admit that things can exist out of consciousness as well as in, which is what subjective idealism is there to deny.

We submit, then, that the analysis of experience which subjective idealism makes is not an exhaustive analysis; and that, when the man of common sense says that in looking at anything he is aware both of his sensations of sight and of something more, he is stating the actual facts as they are given in experience to all of us.

We apprehend a thing as being both our sensations and something more. When the idealist says that the latter half of this apprehension is a misapprehension, he rejects an observed fact of experience, not because he does not find it in his experience, but because it seems to him impossible that it should be there. He argues that to say we can be conscious of what is not in our consciousness is to say that we can be conscious of something of which we are unconscious—a patent nonsense. He might admit, for the sake of argument, that possibly a thing could exist both in consciousness and out, and even that we might know that it so existed. But he cannot admit that a man is conscious of what he is not conscious of.

He is not required to admit it. He is required to admit that our perceptions are not the only things of which we are conscious; or, to put it in other words, that our states of consciousness are not the only things of which we are conscious. And he is required to admit it simply and solely on the ground that it is a fact of common observation and everyday experience. Thus, for instance, we perform actions, and (usually) we are conscious of performing them. But the action is something more and other than our consciousness of it. Or is someone going to maintain that doing and knowing are the same thing? Is anyone prepared to push the illusion-argument so far as to say that the idea that we do things is a mere delusion? If it is not a delusion, if it is, on the contrary, a fact, then our actions are not states of consciousness, but things of which we are conscious. We apprehend them, in the very act of apprehension, as realities distinct from the consciousness which we have of them. And we have the very same guarantee for their reality as we have for the reality of our perception or sensations of them, viz. the fact that we are conscious of them.

In the same way, when we push a solid object or feel the impact of a moving body, we are as conscious of that body as of our muscular sensations: our sensations make up our perception of the object, but are not the object. They constitute the state of consciousness, but that state is not the only thing we are conscious of. The object is apprehended as being in consciousness and not as merely being our consciousness of it.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, at least, is quite clear that our states of consciousness are not the only things of which we are conscious; he holds even that we are vaguely conscious of that which transcends our consciousness. Thus, our personality is not a state of consciousness, yet we are conscious of it, and "its existence is to each a fact above all others the most certain."[6] And, as for the real, "our firm belief in objective reality, a belief which metaphysical criticism cannot shake," is not merely "a positive though vague consciousness of that which transcends consciousness," but "has the highest validity of any"[7] of our beliefs.

But though Mr. Spencer admits, or rather insists, that we know that the Real is, he denies that we know what it is. In other words, he accepts the validity of one half of every act of experience and denies the validity of the other half. Our analysis of experience has shown us that we apprehend the real, in the very act of apprehension, as being both a state of our consciousness and something more than that state. To say that one half of the apprehension is a misapprehension is to say that both are invalid. If what is present in consciousness is merely appearance and not the real thing, then our states are the only things of which we are conscious, and the existence of anything more is not a fact of experience and observation—still less can it have the highest validity of any of our beliefs.