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This recognition of limitations will content those who seek not
"after a
sign". For others, that search will continue to have encouragement
not
only from the theologian, but from the pseudo-scientific who
have
travelled some distance with the Pioneers of Evolution, but who
refuse
to follow them further. In each of these there is present
the
"theological bias" whose varied forms are skilfully analyzed by
Mr.
Spencer in his chapter under that heading in the Study of
Sociology.
This explains the attitude of various groups which are
severally
represented by Mr. St. George Mivart, and the late Dr. W. B.
Carpenter;
by Professor Sir Geo. G. Stokes, and Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace.
The
first-named is a Roman Catholic; the second was a Unitarian; the
third
is an orthodox Churchman, and the fourth, as already seen, is
a
Spiritualist. In his Genesis of Species, Mr. Mivart contends that
"man's
body was evolved from pre-existing material (symbolised by the
term
'dust of the earth'), and was therefore only derivatively created,
i.
e., by the operation of secondary laws," but that "his soul, on the
other
hand, was created in quite a different way ... by the direct
action of the
Almighty (symbolised by the term breathing)," p. 325. In
his Mental
Physiology, Dr. Carpenter postulates an Ego or Will which
presides over,
without sharing in, the causally determined action of the
other mental
functions and their correlated bodily processes; "an entity
which does not
depend for its existence on any play of physical or vital
forces, but which
makes these forces subservient to its determinations"
(p. 27). Professor
Mivart actually cites St. Augustine and Cardinal
Newman as authorities in
support of his theory of the special creation
of the soul. He might with
equal effect subpoena Dr. Joseph Parker or
General Booth as authorities. Dr.
Carpenter argued as became a good
Unitarian. In his Gifford Lectures on
Natural Theology, Professor Stokes
asserts, drawing "on sources of
information which lie beyond man's
natural powers," in other words, appealing
to the Bible, that God made
man immortal and upright, and endowed him with
freedom of the will. As,
without the exercise of this, man would have been as
a mere automaton,
he was exposed to the temptation of the devil, and fell.
Thereby he
became "subject to death like the lower animals," and by the
"natural
effect of heredity," transmitted the taint of sin to his offspring.
The
eternal life thus forfeited was restored by the voluntary sacrifice
of
Christ, but can be secured only to those who have faith in him.
This
doctrine, which is no novel one, is known as "conditional
immortality."
Professor Stokes attaches "no value to the belief in a future
life by
metaphysical arguments founded on the supposed nature of the
soul
itself," and he admits that the purely psychic theory which
would
discard the body altogether in regard to the process of thought is
beset
by very great difficulties. So he once more has recourse to "sources
of
information which lie beyond man's natural powers." Following up
certain
distinctions between "soul" and "spirit" drawn by the Apostle Paul
in
his tripartite division of man, Professor Stokes, somewhat in
keeping
with Dr. Carpenter, assumes an "Ego, which, on the one hand, is
not
to be identified with thought, which may exist while thought is
in
abeyance, and which may, with the future body of which the
Christian
religion speaks, be the medium of continuity of thought....
What
the nature of this body might be we do not know; but we are
pretty
distinctly informed that it would be something very different from
that
of our present body, very different in its properties and functions,
and
yet no less our own than our present body." "Words, words, words,"
as
Hamlet says.
Reference has been made in some fulness to Mr.
Wallace's limitations of
the theory of natural selection in the case of man's
mental faculties.
We must now pursue this somewhat in detail, reminding the
reader of Mr.
Wallace's admission that, "provisionally, the laws of variation
and
natural selection ... may have brought about, first, that perfection
of
bodily structure in which man is so far above all other animals, and,
in
co-ordination with it, the larger and more developed brain by means
of
which he has been able to subject the whole animal and
vegetable
kingdoms to his service." But, although Mr. Wallace rejects the
theory
of man's special creation as "being entirely unsupported by facts,
as
well as in the highest degree improbable," he contends that it does
not
necessarily follow that "his mental nature, even though developed
_pari
passu_ with his physical structure, has been developed by the
same
agencies." Then, by the introduction of a physical analogy which is
no
analogy at all, he suggests that the agent by which man was
upraised
into a kingdom apart bears like relation to natural selection as
the
glacial epoch bears to the ordinary agents of denudation and
other
changes in producing new effects which, though continuous with
preceding
effects, were not due to the same causes.
Applying this
"argument" (drawn from natural causes), as Mr. Wallace
names it, "to the case
of man's intellectual and moral nature," he
contends that such special
faculties as the mathematical, musical, and
artistic (is this faculty to be
denied the nest-decorating bower bird?),
and the high moral qualities which
have given the martyr his constancy,
the patriot his devotion, and the
philanthropist his unselfishness, are
due to a "spiritual essence or nature,
superadded to the animal nature
of man." We are not told at what stage in
man's development this was
inserted; whether, once and for all, in
"primitive" man, with
potentiality of transmission through Palæolithic folk
to all succeeding
generations; or whether there is special infusion of a
"spiritual
essence" into every human being at birth.
Any perplexity
that might arise at the line thus taken by Mr. Wallace
vanishes before the
fact, already enlarged upon, that the author of the
Malay Archipelago and
Island Life has written a book on Miracles and
Modern Spiritualism in defence
of both. The explanation lies in that
duality of mind which, in one
compartment, ranks Mr. Wallace foremost
among naturalists, and, in the other
compartment, places him among the
most credulous of
Spiritualists.
Despite this, Mr. Wallace has claims to a respectful
hearing and to
serious reply. Fortunately, he would appear to furnish the
refutation to
his own argument in the following paragraph from his
delightful
Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection:
"From the
time when the social and sympathetic feelings came into
operation and the
intellectual and moral faculties became fairly
developed, man would cease to
be influenced by natural selection in
his physical form and structure. As an
animal he would remain almost
stationary, the changes in the surrounding
universe ceasing to produce
in him that powerful modifying effect which they
exercise on other
parts of the organic world. But, from the moment that the
form of his
body became stationary, his mind would become subject to those
very
influences from which his body had escaped; every slight variation
in
his mental and moral nature which should enable him better to
guard
against adverse circumstances and combine for mutual comfort
and
protection would be preserved and accumulated; the better and
higher
specimens of our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower
and
more brutal would give way and successively die out, and that
rapid
advancement of mental organisation would occur which has raised the
very
lowest races of man so far above the brutes (although differing
so
little from some of them in physical structure), and, in
conjunction
with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has developed
the
wonderful intellect of the European races" (pp. 316, 317,
Second
Edition, 1871).
This argument has suggestive illustration in
the fifth chapter of the
Origin of Species. Mr. Darwin there refers to a
remark to the following
effect made by Mr. Waterhouse: "_A part developed in
any species in an
extraordinary degree or manner in comparison with the same
part in
allied species tends to be highly variable._" This applies only
where
there is unusual development. "Thus, the wing of a bat is a
most
abnormal structure in the class of mammals; but the rule would not
apply
here, because the whole group of bats possesses wings; it would
apply
only if some one species had wings developed in a remarkable manner
in
comparison with the other species of the same genus." And when
this
exceptional development of any part or organ occurs, we may
conclude
that the modification has arisen since the period when the
several
species branched off from the common progenitor of the genus; and
this
period will seldom be very remote, as species rarely endure for
more
than one geological period.
How completely this applies to man,
the latest product of organic
evolution. The brain is that part or organ in
him which has been
developed "in an extraordinary degree, in comparison with
the same part"
in other Primates, and which has become _highly variable_.
Whatever may
have been the favouring causes which secured his immediate
progenitors
such modification of brain as advanced him in intelligence over
"allied
species," the fact abides that in this lies the explanation of
their
after-history; the arrest of the one, the unlimited progress of
the
other. Increasing intelligence at work through vast periods of
time
originated and developed those social conditions which alone
made
possible that progress which, in its most advanced degree, but a
small
proportion of the race has reached. For in this question of
mental
differences the contrast is not between man and ape, but between
man
savage and civilized; between the incapacity of the one to count
beyond
his fingers, and the capacity of the other to calculate an eclipse
of
the sun or a transit of Venus. It would therefore seem that Mr.
Wallace
should introduce his "spiritual essence, or nature," in the
intermediate, and
not in the initial stage.
As answer to Mr. Wallace's argument that in
their large and
well-developed brains, savages "possess an organ quite
disproportioned
to their requirements," Huxley cites Wallace's own remarks in
his paper
on Instinct in Man and Animals as to the considerable demands made
by
the needs of the lower races on their observing faculties which
call
into play no mean exercise of brain function.
"Add to this,"
Huxley says, "the knowledge which a savage is obliged to
gain of the
properties of plants, of the characters and habits of
animals, and of the
minute indications by which their course is
discoverable; consider that even
an Australian can make excellent
baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and
beautifully balanced spears;
that he learns to use these so as to be able to
transfix a quartern loaf
at sixty yards; and that very often, as in the case
of the American
Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which
a
well-trained European finds it difficult to master; consider that
every
time a savage tracks his game, he employs a minuteness of
observation,
and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which,
applied to
other matters, would assure some reputation, and I think one need
ask no
further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains."... But
Mr.
Wallace's objection "applies quite as strongly to the lower
animals.
Surely a wolf must have too much brain, or else how is it that a
dog,
with only the same quantity and form of brain, is able to develop
such
singular intelligence? The wolf stands to the dog in the same
relation
as the savage to the man; and therefore, if Mr. Wallace's doctrine
holds
good, a higher power must have superintended the breeding up of
wolves
from some inferior stock, in order to prepare them to become
dogs"
(Critiques and Addresses, p. 293).
After all is said, perhaps
the effective refutation of the belief in a
spiritual entity superadded in
man is found in the explanation of the
origin of that belief which
anthropology supplies.
The theory of the origin and growth of the belief
in souls and spiritual
beings generally, and in a future life, which has been
put into coherent
form by Spencer and Tylor, is based upon an enormous mass
of evidence
gathered by travellers among existing barbaric peoples;
evidence
agreeing in character with that which results from investigations
into
beliefs of past races in varying stages of culture. Only brief
reference
to it here is necessary, but the merest outline suffices to
show
from what obvious phenomena the conception of a soul was derived,
a
conception of which all subsequent forms are but elaborated copies.
As
in other matters, crude analogies have guided the barbaric mind in
its
ideas about spirits and their behaviour. A man falls asleep and
dreams
certain things; on waking, he believes that these things
actually
happened; and he therefore concludes that the dead who came to him
or to
whom he went in his dreams, are alive; that the friend or foe whom
he
knows to be far away, but with whom he feasted or fought in
dreamland,
came to him. He sees another man fall into a swoon or trance that
may
lay him seemingly lifeless for hours or even days; he himself may
be
attacked by deranging fevers and see visions stranger than those
which
a healthy person sees; shadows of himself and of objects, both
living
and not living, follow or precede him and lengthen or shorten in
the
withdrawing or advancing light; the still water throws back images
of
himself; the hillsides resound with mocking echoes of his words and
of
sounds around him; and it is these and allied phenomena which have
given
rise to the notion of "another self," to use Mr. Spencer's
convenient
term, or of a number of selves that are sometimes outside the man
and
sometimes inside him, as to which the barbaric mind is never
sure.
Outside him, however, when the man is sleeping, so that he must not
be
awakened, lest this "other self" be hindered from returning; or when
he
is sick, or in the toils of the medicine-man, who may hold the
"other
self" in his power, as in the curious soul-trap of the
Polynesians--a
series of cocoa-nut rings--in which the sorcerer makes believe
to catch
and detain the soul of an offender or sick person. When Dr. Catat
and
his companions, MM. Maistre and Foucart were exploring the
"Bara"
country on the west coast of Madagascar the people suddenly
became
hostile. On the previous day the travellers, not without
difficulty,
had photographed the royal family, and now found themselves
accused of
taking the souls of the natives with the object of selling them
when
they returned to France. Denial was of no avail; following the custom
of
the Malagasays, they were compelled to catch the souls, which were
then
put into a casket, and ordered by Dr. Catat to return to
their
respective owners (Times, 24th March, 1891).
Although the
difference presented by such phenomena and by death is
that it is abiding,
while they are temporary, to the barbaric mind the
difference is in degree,
and not in kind. True, the "other self" has
left the body, and will never
return to it; but it exists, for it
appears in dreams and hallucinations, and
therefore is believed to
revisit its ancient haunts, as well as to tarry
often near the exposed
or buried body. The nebulous theories which identified
the soul with
breath, and shadow, and reflection, slowly condensed into
theories of
semi-substantiality still charged with ethereal conceptions,
resulting
in the curious amalgam which, in the minds of cultivated
persons,
whenever they strive to envisage the idea, represents the
disembodied
soul.
Therefore, in vain may we seek for points of
difference in our
comparison of primitive ideas of the origin and nature of
the soul with
the later ideas. The copious literature to which these have
given birth
is represented in the bibliography appended to Mr. Alger's work
on
Theories of a Future Life, by 4977 books, exclusive of many
published
since his list was compiled. Save in refinement of detail such as
a
higher culture secures, what is there to choose between the four
souls
of the Hidatsa Indians, the two souls of the Gold Coast natives, and
the
tripartite division of man by Rabbis, Platonists, and Paulinists,
which
are but the savage other-self "writ large"? Their common source is
in
man's general animistic interpretation of Nature, which is a
_vera
causa_, superseding the need for the assumptions of which Mr.
Wallace's
is a type. As an excellent illustration of what is meant by
animism, we
may cite what Mr. Everard im Thurn has to say about the Indians
of
Guiana, who are, presumably, a good many steps removed from
so-called
"primitive" man. "The Indian does not see any sharp line of
distinction
such as we see between man and other animals, between one kind of
animal
and another, or between animals--man included--and inanimate objects.
On
the contrary, to the Indian all objects, animate and inanimate,
seem
exactly of the same nature, except that they differ in the accident
of
bodily form. Every object in the whole world is a being, consisting
of
a body and spirit, and differs from every other object in no
respect
except that of bodily form, and in the greater or lesser degree of
brute
power and brute cunning consequent on the difference of bodily form
and
bodily habits. Our next step, therefore, is to note that animals,
other
than men, and even inanimate objects, have spirits which differ not
at
all in kind from those of men."
The importance of the evidence
gathered by anthropology in support of
man's inclusion in the general theory
of evolution is ever becoming
more manifest. For it has brought witness to
continuity in organic
development at the point where a break has been
assumed, and driven home
the fact that if Evolution operates anywhere, it
operates everywhere.
And operates, too, in such a way that every part
co-operates in the
discharge of a universal process. Hence it meets the
divisions which
mark opposition to it by the transcendent power of
unity.
Until the past half-century, man excepted himself, save in crude
and
superficial fashion, from that investigation which, for long
periods,
he has made into the earth beneath him and the heavens above him.
This
tardy inquiry into the history of his own kind, and its place in
the
order and succession of life, as well as its relation to the
lower
animals, between whom and itself, as has been shown, the barbaric
mind
sees much in common, is due, so far as Christendom is concerned
(and
the like cause applies, _mutatis mutandis_, in non-Christian
civilized
communities), to the subjection of the intellect to
pre-conceived
theories based on the authority accorded to ancient legends
about man.
These legends, invested with the sanctity with which time endows
the
past, finally became integral parts of sacred literatures, to
question
which was as superfluous as it was impious. Thus it has come to
pass
that the only being competent to inquire into his own antecedents
has
looked at his history through the distorting prism of a mythopoeic
past!
Perhaps, in the long run, the gain has exceeded the loss. For, in
the
precedence of study of other sciences more remote from man's
"business
and bosom," there has been rendered possible a more
dispassionate
treatment of matters charged with profounder issues. Since the
Church,
however she may conveniently ignore the fact as concession
after
concession is wrung from her, has never slackened in jealousy of
the
advance of secular knowledge, it was well for human progress that
those
subjects of inquiry which affected orthodox views only indirectly
were
first prosecuted. The brilliant discoveries in astronomy, to which
the
Copernican theory gave impetus, although they displaced the earth
from
its assumed supremacy among the bodies in space, did not
apparently
affect the doctrine of the supremacy of man as the centre of
Divine
intervention, as the creature for whom the great scheme of
redemption
had been formulated "in the counsels of the Trinity," and the
tragedy of
the self-sacrifice of God the Son enacted on earth. The surrender
or
negation of any fundamental dogma of Christian theology was not
involved
in the abandonment of the statement in the Bible as to the
dominant
position of the earth in relation to the sun and other
self-luminous
stars. To our own time the increase of knowledge concerning the
myriads
of sidereal systems which revolve through space is not held to
be
destructive of those dogmas, but held, rather, to supply material
for
speculation as to the probable extension of Divine paternal
government
throughout the universe. And, although, as coming nearer home,
with
consequent greater chance of intrusion of elements of friction, the
like
applies to the discoveries of geology. Apart from intellectual
apathy,
which explains much, the impact of these discoveries on
traditional
beliefs was softened by the buffers which a moderating spirit
of
criticism interposed in the shape of superficial
"reconciliations"
emptying the old cosmogony of all its poetry, and therefore
of its value
as a key to primitive ideas, and converting it into bastard
science.
Thus a temporary, because artificial, unity, was set up. But with
the
evidence supplied by study of the ancient life whose remains
are
imbedded in the fossil-yielding strata, that unity is shivered. In
a
Scripture that "cannot be broken" there was read the story of
conflict
and death æons before man appeared. Between this record, and that
which
spoke of pain and death as the consequences of man's disobedience to
the
frivolous prohibition of an anthropomorphic God, there is no
possible
reconciliation.
To the evidence from fossiliferous beds was
added evidence from old
river-gravels and limestone caverns. The relics
extracted from the
stalagmitic deposits in Kent's Hole, near Torquay, had
lain unheeded
for some years save as "curios," when M. Boucher des Perthes
saw in the
worked flints of a somewhat rougher type which he found mingled
with the
bones of rhinoceroses, cave-bears, mammoths, or woolly-haired
elephants,
and other mammals in the "drift" or gravel-pits of Abbeville,
in
Picardy, the proofs of man's primitive savagery, so far as
Western
Europe was concerned. The presence of these rudely-chipped flints
had
been noticed by M. de Perthes in 1839, but he could not persuade
savants
to admit that human hands had shaped them, until these doubting
Thomases
saw for themselves like implements _in situ_ at a depth of
seventeen
feet from the original surface of the ground. That was in 1858: a
year
before the publication of the Origin of Species. Similar materials
have
been unearthed from every part of the globe habitable once or
inhabited
now. They confirm the speculations of Lucretius as to a
universal
makeshift with stone, bone, horn, and such-like accessible or
pliable
substances during the ages that preceded the discovery of
metals.
Therefore, the existence of a Stone Age at one period or another
where
now an Age of Iron (following an Age of Bronze) prevails, is
an
established canon of archæological science. From this follows
the
inference that man's primitive condition was that which corresponds
to
the lowest type extant, the Australian and Papuan; that the further
back
inquiry is pushed such culture as exists is found to have been
preceded
by barbarism; and that the savage races of to-day represent not
a
degradation to which man, as the result of a fall from primeval
purity
and Eden-like ease, has sunk, but a condition out of which all
races
above the savage have emerged.
While Prehistoric Archæology,
with its enormous mass of _material_
remains gathered from "dens and caves of
the earth," from primitive
work-shops, from rude tombs and temples, thus adds
its testimony to the
"great cloud of witnesses"; _immaterial_ remains, potent
as embodying
the thought of man, are brought by the twin sciences of
Comparative
Mythology and Folklore, and Comparative Theology--remains of
paramount
value, because existing to this day in hitherto unsuspected form,
as
survivals in beliefs and rites and customs. Readers of Tylor's
Primitive
Culture, with its wealth of facts and their significance; and of
Lyall's
Asiatic Studies, wherein is described the making of myths to this day
in
the heart of India; need not be told how the slow zigzag advance of
man
in material things has its parallel in the stages of his
intellectual
and spiritual advance all the world over; from the lower animism
to
the higher conception of deity; from bewildering guesses to
assuring
certainties. To this mode of progress no civilized people has been
the
exception, as notably in the case of the Hebrews, was once
thought--"the
correspondence between the old Israelitic and other archaic
forms of
theology extending to details."
While, therefore, the
discoveries of astronomers and geologists have
been disintegrating agencies
upon old beliefs, the discoveries classed
under the general term
Anthropological are acting as more powerful
solvents on every opinion of the
past. Showing on what mythical
foundation the story of the fall of man rests,
Anthropology has utterly
demolished the _raison d'etre_ of the doctrine of
his redemption--the
keystone of the fabric. It has penetrated the mists of
antiquity, and
traced the myth of a forfeited Paradise, of the Creation, the
Deluge,
and other legends, to their birthplaces in the valley of the
Euphrates
or the uplands of Persia; legends whose earliest inscribed records
are
on Accadian tablets, or in the scriptures of Zarathustra. It has in
the
spirit of the commended Bereans, "searched" those and other
scriptures,
finding therein legends of founders of ancient faiths cognate to
those
which in the course of the centuries gathered round Jesus of
Nazareth;
it has collated the rites and ceremonies of many a barbaric
theology
with those of old-world religions--Brahmanic, Buddhistic,
Christian--and
found only such differences between them as are referable to
the higher
or the lower culture. For the history of superstitions is included
in
the history of beliefs; the superstitions being the germ-plasm of
which
all beliefs above the lowest are the modified products. Belief
incarnates
itself in word or act. In the one we have the charm, the
invocation, and the
dogma; in the other the ritual and ceremony. "A
ritual system," Professor
Robertson Smith remarks, "must always remain
materialistic, even if its
materialism is disguised under the cloak of
mysticism." And it is with the
incarnated ideas, uninfluenced by
the particular creed in connection with
which it finds them, that
anthropology deals. Its method is that of biology.
Without bias, without
assumptions of relative truth or falsity, the
anthropologist searches
into origins, traces variations, compares and
classifies, and relates
the several families to one ordinal group. He must be
what was said of
Dante, "a theologian to whom no dogma is foreign."
Unfortunately, this
method, whose application to the physical sciences is
unchallenged, is,
when applied to beliefs, regarded as one of attack, instead
of being one
of explanation. But this should not deter; and if in analyzing a
belief
we kill a superstition, this does but show what mortality lay at
its
core. For error cannot survive dissection. Moreover, as John Morley
puts
it, "to tamper with veracity is to tamper with the vital force of
human
progress." Therefore, delivering impartial judgment, the verdict
of
anthropology upon the whole matter is that the claims of
Christian
theologians to a special and divine origin of their religion are
refuted
by the accordant evidence of the latest utterances of a science
whose
main concern is with the origin, nature, and destiny of man.
The
extension of the comparative method to the various products of
man's
intellectual and spiritual nature is the logical sequence to the
adoption of
that method throughout every department of the universe. Of
course it starts
with the assumption of differences in things, else it
would be superfluous.
But it equally starts with the assumption of
resemblances, and in every case
it has brought out the fact that the
differences are superficial, and that
the resemblances are fundamental.
All this bears closely on Huxley's
work. The impulse thereto has come
largely from the evidence focussed in
Man's Place in Nature, evidence of
which the material of the writings of his
later years is the expansion.
The cultivation of intellect and character had
always been a favourite
theme with him, and the interest was widened when the
passing of Mr.
Forster's Elementary Education Act in 1870 brought the problem
of
popular culture to the front. The wave of enthusiasm carried a group
of
distinguished liberal candidates to the polls, and Huxley was elected
a
member of the School Board for London. Then, although in not so acute
a
form as now, the religious difficulty was the sole cause of any
serious
division, and Huxley's attitude therein puzzled a good many
people
because he advocated the retention of the Bible in the schools.
Those
who should have known him better thought that he was (to quote from
one
of his letters to the writer) "a hypocrite, or simply a fool." "But,"
he
adds, "my meaning was that the mass of the people should not be
deprived
of the one great literature which is open to them, nor shut out
from
the perception of its place in the whole past history of
civilised
mankind." He lamented, as every thoughtful person must lament,
the
decay of Bible reading in this generation, while, at the same time,
he
advocated the more strenuously its detachment from the glosses
and
theological inferences which do irreparable injury to a literature
whose
value cannot be overrated.
For Huxley was well read in history,
and therefore he would not trust
the clergy as interpreters of the Bible.
After repeating in the Prologue
to his Essays on Controverted Questions what
he had said about the book
in his article on the School Boards in Critiques
and Addresses, he adds,
"I laid stress on the necessity of placing such
instruction in lay
hands; in the hope and belief that it would thus gradually
accommodate
itself to the coming changes of opinion; that the theology and
the
legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the
perennially
interesting historical, literary, and ethical contents would come
more
and more into view."
Subsequent events have justified neither the
hope nor the belief. Had
Huxley lived to see that all the sectaries, while
quarrelling as to the
particular dogmas which may be deduced from the Bible,
agree in refusing
to use it other than as an instrument for the teaching of
dogma, he
would probably have come to see that the only solution in the
interests
of the young, is its exclusion from the schools. Never has
any
collection of writings, whose miscellaneous, unequal, and
often
disconnected character is obscured by the common title "Bible"
which
covers them, had such need for deliverance from the
so-called
"believers" in it. Its value is only to be realized in the degree
that
theories of its inspiration are abandoned. Then only is it possible
to
treat it like any other literature of the kind; to discriminate
between
the coarse and barbaric features which evidence the humanness of
its
origin, and the loftier features of its later portions which
also
evidence how it falls into line with other witnesses of man's
gradual
ethical and spiritual development.
Huxley's breadth of view,
his sympathy with every branch of culture, his
advocacy of literary in unison
with scientific training, fitted him
supremely for the work of the School
Board, but its demands were too
severe on a man never physically strong, and
he was forced to resign.
However, he was thereby set free for other work,
which could be only
effectively done by exchanging the arena for the study.
The earliest
important outcome of that relief was the monograph on Hume,
published in
1879, and the latest was the Romanes lecture on Evolution and
Ethics,
which was delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford on the 18th
of
May, 1893. Between the two lie a valuable series of papers dealing
with
the Evolution of Theology and cognate subjects. In all these we have
the
application of the theory of Evolution to the explanation of the
origin
of beliefs and of the basis of morals. To quote the saying attributed
to
Leibnitz, both Spencer and Huxley, and all who follow them, care
for
"science only because it enables them to speak with authority
in
philosophy and religion." In a letter to the writer, wherein
Huxley
refers to his retirement from official life, he says:--
I was
so ill that I thought with Hamlet, "the rest is silence." But
my wiry
constitution has unexpectedly weathered the storm, and I
have every reason
to believe that with renunciation of the devil and
all his works (i. e.,
public speaking, dining, and being dined,
etc.) my faculties may be
unimpaired for a good spell yet. And
whether my lease is long or short, I
mean to devote them to the work
I began in the paper on the Evolution of
Theology.
That essay was first published in two sections in the
Nineteenth
Century, 1886, and was the sequel to the eighth chapter of his
Hume. The
Romanes Lecture supplemented the last chapter of that book. All
these
are accessible enough to render superfluous any abstract of
their
contents. But the tribute due to David Hume, who may well-nigh
claim
place among the few but fit company of Pioneers, warrants
reference
to his anticipation of accepted theories of the origin of belief
in
spiritual beings in his Natural History of Religion, published in
1757.
He says: "There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive
all
beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those
qualities
with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they
are
intimately conscious.... The _unknown causes_ which continually
employ
their thought, appearing always in the same aspect, are all
apprehended
to be of the same kind or species. Nor is it long before we
ascribe to
them thought, and reason, and passion, and sometimes even the
limbs and
figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance
with
ourselves." In his address to the Sorbonne on The Successive Advances
of
the Human Mind, delivered in 1750, Turgot expresses the same
idea,
touching, as John Morley says in his essay on that statesman, "the
root
of most of the wrong thinking that has been as a manacle to
science."
The foregoing, and passages of a like order, are made by Huxley
the text
of his elaborations of the several stages of theological evolution,
the
one note of all of which is the continuity of belief in
supernatural
intervention. But more important than the decay of that belief
which is
the prelude to decay of belief in deity itself as commonly defined,
is
the resulting transfer of the foundation of morals, in other words,
of
motives to conduct, from a theological to a social base. Theology is
not
morality; indeed, it is, too often, immorality. It is concerned
with
man's relations to the gods in whom he believes; while morals
are
concerned with man's relations to his fellows. The one looks
heavenward,
wondering what dues shall be paid the gods to win their smiles or
ward
off their frowns. In old Rome _sanctitas_ or holiness, was, according
to
Cicero, "the knowledge of the rites which had to be performed."
These
done, the gods were expected to do their part. So in new Rome, when
the
Catholic has attended mass, his share in the contract is ended.
Worship
and sacrifice, as mere acts toward supernatural beings, may
be
consonant with any number of lapses in conduct. Morality, on the
other
hand, looks earthward, and is prompted to action solely by what
is
due from a man to his fellow-men, or from his fellow-men to him.
Its
foundation therefore is not in supernatural beliefs, but in
social
instincts. All sin is thus resolved into an anti-social act: a
wrong
done by man to man.
This is not merely readjustment; it is
revolution. For it is the
rejection of theology with its appeals to human
obligation to deity, and
to man's hopes of future reward or fears of future
punishment; and it is
the acceptance of wholly secular motives as incentives
to right action.
Those motives, having their foundation in the physical,
mental, and
moral results of our deeds, rest on a stable basis. No longer
interlaced
with the unstable theological, they neither abide nor perish with
it.
And one redeeming feature of our time is that the churches are
beginning
to see this, and to be effected by it. John Morley caustically
remarks
that "the efforts of the heterodox have taught them to be
better
Christians than they were a hundred years ago." Certain
extremists
excepted, they are keeping dogma in the background, and are
laying
stress on the socialism which it is contended was at the heart of
the
teaching of Jesus. Wisely, if not very consistently, they are
seeking
alliance with the liberal movements whose aim is the "abolition
of
privilege." The liberal theologians, in the face of the varying
ethical
standards which mark the Old Testament and the New, no longer insist
on
the absoluteness of moral codes, and so fall into line with
the
evolutionist in his theory of their relativeness. For society in
its
advance from lower to higher conceptions of duty, completely
reverses
its ethics, looking back with horror on that which was once
permitted
and unquestioned.
It is with this checking of "the ape and
tiger," and this fostering of
the "angel" in man, that Huxley dealt in his
Romanes Lecture. There was
much unintelligent, and some wilful,
misunderstanding of his argument,
else a prominent Catholic biologist would
hardly have welcomed it as a
possible prelude to Huxley's submission to the
Church. Yet the reasoning
was clear enough, and in no wise contravened the
application of
Evolution to morals. Huxley showed that Evolution is both
_cosmical_ and
_ethical_. _Cosmic Evolution_ has resulted in the universe
with its
non-living and living contents, and since, dealing with the
conditions
which obtain on our planet, there is not sufficient elbow-room or
food
for all the offspring of living things, the result is a
furious
struggle in which the strong win and transmit their advantages to
their
descendants. Nature is wholly selfish; the race is to the swift, and
the
battle to the strong.
But there are limits set to that struggle by
man in the substitution,
also within limits, of social progress for cosmic
progress. In this
_Ethical Evolution_ selfishness is so far checked as to
permit groups
of human beings to live together in amity, recognising certain
common
rights, which restrain the self-regarding impulses. For, in the words
of
Marcus Aurelius, "that which is not good for the swarm is not good
for
the bee" (Med., vi, 54). Huxley aptly likens this counter-process to
the
action of a gardener in dealing with a piece of waste ground. He
stamps
out the weeds, and plants fragrant flowers and useful fruits. But
he
must not relax his efforts, otherwise the weeds will return, and
the
untended plants will be choked and perish. So in conduct. For the
common
weal, in which the unit shares, thus blending the selfish and
the
unselfish motives, men check their natural impulses. The emotions
and
affections which they share with the lower social animals, only
in
higher degree, are co-operative, and largely help the development
of
family, tribal, and national life. But once we let these be
weakened,
and society becomes a bear-garden. Force being the dominant factor
in
life, the struggle for existence revives in all its primitive
violence,
and atavism asserts its power. Therefore, although he do the best
that
in him lies, man can only set limits to that struggle, for the
ethical
process is an integral part of the cosmic powers, "just as
the
'governor' in a steam-engine is part of the mechanism of the
engine."
As with society, so with its units: there is no truce in the
contest.
Dr. Plimmer, an eminent bacteriologist, describes to the writer
the
action of a kind of yeast upon a species of Daphnia, or
water-flea.
Metschnikoff observed that these yeast-cells, which enter with
the
animal's food, penetrate the intestines, and get into the tissues.
They
are there seized upon by the leukocytes, which gather round the
invaders
in larger fashion, as if seemingly endowed with consciousness,
so
marvellous is the strategy. If they win, the Daphnia recovers; if
they
lose, it dies. "In a similar manner in ourselves certain
leukocytes
(phagocytes) accumulate at any point of invasion, and pick up the
living
bacteria," and in the success or failure of their attack lies the
fate
of man. Which things are fact as well as allegory; and time is on
the
side of the bacteria. For as our life is but a temporary arrest of
the
universal movement toward dissolution, so naught in our actions
can
arrest the destiny of our kind. Huxley thus puts it in the
concluding
sentences of his Preface--written in July, 1894, one year before
his
death--to the reissue of Evolution and Ethics:
"That man, as a
'political animal,' is susceptible of a vast amount of
improvement, by
education, by instruction, and by the application of his
intelligence to the
adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher
needs, I entertain not the
slightest doubt. But, so long as he remains
liable to error, intellectual or
moral; so long as he is compelled to
be perpetually on guard against the
cosmic forces, whose ends are not
his ends, without and within himself; so
long as he is haunted by
inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so
long as the
recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him to
acknowledge
his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; 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. That which lies before the human race is
a
constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State
of
Nature, the State of Art of an organised polity; in which, and by
which,
man may develop a worthy civilisation, capable of maintaining
and
constantly improving itself, 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."
But only those of low ideals would seek in
this impermanence of things
excuse for inaction; or worse, for
self-indulgence. The world will last
a very long time yet, and afford scope
for battle against the wrongs
done by man to man. Even were it and ourselves
to perish to-morrow, our
duty is clear while the chance of doing it may be
ours. Clifford,--dead
before his prime, before the rich promise of his genius
had its full
fruitage,--speaking of the inevitable end of the earth "and all
the
consciousness of men" reminds us, in his essay on The First and
Last
Catastrophe, that we are helped in facing the fact "by the words
of
Spinoza: 'The free man thinks of nothing so little as of death, and
his
wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.'" "Our
interest,"
Clifford adds, "lies with so much of the past as may serve to
guide our
actions in the present, and to intensify our pious allegiance to
the
fathers who have gone before us and the brethren who are with us;
and
our interest lies with so much of the future as we may hope will
be
appreciably affected by our good actions now. Do I seem to say, 'Let
us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?' Far from it; on the contrary
I
say, 'Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive
together.'"
Evolution and Ethics was Huxley's last important deliverance,
since the
completion of his reply to Mr. Balfour's "quaintly entitled"
Foundations
of Belief was arrested by his death on the 30th of June,
1895.
In looking through the Collected Essays, which represent
his
non-technical contributions to knowledge, there may be regret
that
throughout his life circumstances were against his doing any piece
of
long-sustained work, such as that which, for example, the affluence
and
patience of Darwin permitted him to do. But until Huxley's later
years,
and, indeed, through broken health to the end, his work
outside
official demands had to be done fitfully and piecemeal, or not at
all.
Notwithstanding this, it has the unity which is inspired by a
central
idea. The application of the theory of evolution all round imparts
a
quality of relation to subjects seemingly diverse. And this comes
out
clearly and strongly in the more orderly arrangement of the material
in
the new issue of Collected Essays.
These show what an omnivorous
reader he was; how well equipped in
classics, theology, and general
literature, in addition to subjects
distinctly his own. He sympathized with
every branch of culture. As
contrasted with physical science, he said,
"Nothing would grieve me more
than to see literary training other than a very
prominent branch of
education." One corner of his library was filled with a
strange company
of antiquated books of orthodox type; this he called "the
condemned
cell." When looking at the "strange bedfellows" that slept on
the
shelves, the writer asked Huxley what author had most influenced a
style
whose clearness and vigour, nevertheless, seems unborrowed; and he
at
once named the masculine and pellucid Leviathan of Hobbes. He had
the
happy faculty of rapidly assimilating what he read; of clearly
grasping
an opponent's standpoint; and what is a man's salvation
nowadays,
freedom from that curse of specialism which kills all sense
of
proportion, and reduces its slave to the level of the machine-hand
that
spends his life in making the heads of screws. He believed in
"scepticism as
the highest duty, and in blind faith as the one
unpardonable sin." "And," he
adds, "it cannot be otherwise, for every
great advance in natural knowledge
has involved the absolute rejection
of authority, the cherishing of the
keenest scepticism, the annihilation
of the spirit of blind faith; and the
most ardent votary of science
holds his firmest convictions, not because the
men he most venerates
holds them; not because their verity is testified by
portents and
wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he
chooses
to bring these convictions into contact with their primary
source,
Nature--whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to
experiment
and to observation--Nature will confirm them. The man of science
has
learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by
verification."
Therefore he nursed no illusions; would not say that he knew
when he did
not or could not know, and bidding us follow the evidence
whithersoever
it leads us, remains the surest-footed guide of our time.
Such
leadership is his, since he has gone on "from strength to strength."
The
changes in the attitude of man toward momentous questions which
new
evidence and the _zeit-geist_ have effected, have been approaches to
the
position taken by Huxley since he first caught the public ear. His
deep
religious feeling kept him in sympathetic touch with his fellows.
Ever
present to him was "that consciousness of the limitation of man,
that
sense of an open secret which he cannot penetrate, in which lies
the
essence of all religion." In one of his replies to a prominent
exponent
of the Comtian philosophy, that "incongruous mixture of bad science
with
eviscerated papistry," as he calls it, Huxley protests against the
idea
that the teaching of science is wholly negative.
I venture, he
says, to count it an improbable suggestion that any
one who has graduated
in all the faculties of human relationships;
who has taken his share in all
the deep joys and deeper anxieties
which cling about them, who has felt the
burden of young lives
entrusted to his care, and has stood alone with his
dead before the
abyss of the Eternal--has never had a thought beyond
negative
criticism.
That is the Agnostic position as he defined it;
an attitude, not a
creed; and if he refused to affirm, he equally refused to
deny.
* * * * *
Thus have
the Pioneers of Evolution, clear-sighted and sure-footed, led
us by ways
undreamed-of at the start to a goal undreamed-of by the
earliest among them.
To have halted on the route when the graver
difficulties of the road began
would have made the journey futile, and
have left their followers in the
wilds. Evolution, applied to everything
up to man, but stopping at the stage
when he appears, would have
remained a fascinating study, but would not have
become a guiding
philosophy of life. It is in the extension of its processes
as
explanation of all that appertains to mankind that its abiding
value
consists. That extension was inevitable. The old theologies of
civilized
races, useful in their day, because answering, however imperfectly,
to
permanent needs of human nature, no longer suffice. Their dogmas
are
traced as the lineal descendants of barbaric conceptions; their
ritual
is becoming an archæological curiosity. They have no answer to
the
questions propounded by the growing intelligence of our time;
neither
can they satisfy the emotions which they but feebly discipline.
Their
place is being slowly, but surely, and more effectively, filled by
a
theory which, interpreting the "mighty sum of things," substitutes
clear
conceptions of unbroken order and relation between phenomena, in
place
of hazy conceptions of intermittent interferences; a theory which
gives
more than it takes away. For if men are deprived of belief in
the
pseudo-mysteries coined in a pre-scientific age, their wonder is fed, and
their inquiry is stimulated, by the consciousness of the impenetrable mysteries
of the Universe. |
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