The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality Part 13

CONCLUSION.

If now, having reached our goal, we look back upon the way which we have traversed, we find a justification of the regret expressed at the beginning, that a scientific treatment of religion and morality is compelled to take a position in regard to theories which are not yet established. We found the most different problems--scientific, naturo-philosophical, metaphysical, religious and ethical--inextricably mixed, and were obliged, as one of our first tasks, to make an attempt at finding the clew and at examining and testing each single problem, together with attempts at its solution, separately, although keeping constantly in mind its connection with all other problems and their attempts at solution.

We found ourselves led into the presence of a series of the most interesting problems, but not a single solution finished. That very attempt at solution which brought up this whole question, and which was repeatedly announced as the infallible key to the solution of all scientific problems--the selection theory--we found a decided failure, at least in the direction of the extension and importance which was given to this theory.

And yet in spite of the hypothetical nature of all attempts at solution, we see investigators in all the realms of natural science strongly attracted by the very promising character of these problems and busily engaged in making attempts at solution; {400} and we see even philosophy strongly attracted by its interest in these works. Such a diligent work can certainly not be without gain; but wherein will this gain consist? Will it, as its antagonists prophecy, be like that which in former times alchemy brought to science, which, indeed, enriched chemistry by an entire series of new discoveries, but did not find what it sought, the one fundamental element from which all the rest are derived, which only confirmed, with a power acknowledged even to-day, the old doctrine of the elementary difference of the elements? Will the Darwinian investigations thus also make all possible discoveries _by the way_, but in place of that which they look for, in place of a common pedigree or of a few pedigrees for all organisms, finally only give additional strength to the permanence of species and the unapproachableness of the secret of their origin? Or can we derive from the reasons which the investigators urge in favor of the idea of an origin of species through descent and evolution, the hope that that mysterious darkness of prehistoric times upon which the works of our century have shed so much light, will still be illuminated even to the sources from which organic species came, and from which mankind also originated? We must leave the decision of these questions to the future and to scientists.

But we have to note _one_ gain, which is so great that on its account, we willingly cease our regret in regard to the unfinished condition of these theories; for we owe the full enjoyment of this gain to that very unfinished condition. It is the gain which _religion and morality_ get from these investigations, and which consists in the new and comprehensive confirmation of the conviction, {401} which, indeed, was established before, that religion and morality--Christian religion and Christian morality--rest on foundations which can no longer be shaken by any result of exact investigation.

The triumph with which the Darwinian theories were greeted by many as the new sun before whose rising all that mankind had thus far called light and sun turns pale, and the antipathy with which, on that very account, many to whom their religious and ethical acquisitions are a sacred sanctuary, turn away from these theories, urged us to investigate their position in reference to religion and morality. Now, if these theories had produced a certain undoubted result, we should unquestionably have been satisfied with the examination of the position of religion and morality in reference to this certain result. But since not a single result of those investigations is really established, we have found ourselves obliged to give our investigation a much greater extension and to discuss even all imaginable _possibilities_. The beneficial result of this comparison was, that religion and morality not only remain at peace with all imaginable possibilities of _scientific_ theories, but can also, in the realm of the _philosophy of the doctrines of nature_, be pa.s.sive spectators of all investigations and attempts, even of all possible excursions into the realm of fancy, without being obliged to interfere. It is in the realm of _mere metaphysics_ that we first perceive an antagonist whose victory would indeed be fatal to the religious and ethical acquisitions of mankind: this antagonist is called elimination from nature of the idea of design.

Fortunately, this metaphysical idea is in such striking opposition not only to the whole world of facts but also to all logical {402} reasoning, it has everywhere, where man perceives organization and a difference between lower and higher, especially in the contemplation of the world, of this _cosmos_ of wonderful order and beauty, so decidedly all philosophical as well as all exact sciences as its adversaries, it lays its hands so rudely and so destructively not only upon the religious and ethical acquisitions but also upon all ideal remaining acquisitions of mankind, that religion and morality know, when fighting this adversary, they are in firm accord with all the spiritual interests of mankind.

This, in its most essential features, is the pleasing result of our critical examination; and such a demonstration of the immovably solid foundation, secure from all the change of opinions and all the progress of discoveries on which morality and religion rest, has still an entire series of further pleasing consequences in its train.

In the first place, it is a living and actual proof of the fact that religion and morality give to all sciences _the full freedom of investigation_. The religious and ethical interest itself not only gives, but even _requires_, this freedom of investigation. It requires it in consequence of that _impulse of truth_ which religion has in common with every impulse of knowledge, and which in itself is an ethical impulse. In consequence of this impulse, religion must found its possession on nothing else than subjective and objective truth, and can look upon all the paths which lead through even the remotest realm of knowledge to the establishment of truth, only with sympathetic interest. Precisely those who see in religion more than a mere expression of emotion, and all those who require that their religious life and the object of {403} their religious faith shall possess truth, subjective and objective, cannot commit any greater folly than treating search for truth in any other realm with suspicion, or even ignoring it. They only injure that which they meant to defend, by rendering the purity of their own religious interest suspected, and by establis.h.i.+ng more firmly the breach between religious life and faith and the other acquisitions of culture and interests of their time, of which neither religion nor science, but only a misguided tendency of their minds and hearts, is guilty. How much unfriendly and unjust judgment has already found utterance by means of the pen and voice, in reference to honest and meritorious workers, on the part of religious zealots who fail to recognize that close relations.h.i.+p of the religious with the scientific impulse of truth! How often and how much does such a judgment gain great consideration from a public of which but a few are able to form an independent opinion of the men and works which are thus abused before their eyes and ears, and how much of the aversion to the form in which the religious life of the present offers itself, on the part of those men who are thus suspected, is in the last instance to be attributed neither to be irreligiousness of these men nor to the deficiency of the present form of our religious life, but to the repelling effect of that unjust treatment!

Another gain of our discussion, correlated to that just mentioned, consists in the proof _that religion and morality have their autonomous principle and realm_ which is not at all obliged to borrow the proof of its truth from the present condition and degree of our knowledge, but carries it in itself, although it stands in {404} fruitful reciprocal action with all the other realms of knowledge and life. Just as decidedly as we had to caution the advocates of religion against keeping themselves indifferent, suspicious, or even hostile, regarding the advances into the realm of secular knowledge, so decidedly do we like to see the workers in the realm of the knowledge of nature cautioned against confusing points of view, in thinking that they can through their scientific knowledge purify and reform the religious and ethical realms. They may purify and reform as much as they please, but only in their own realm. The only thing they are able to reform is our knowledge of nature, and in our religious and ethical life and perception only that which belongs to this natural part; but this is only the outer part of religious and ethical life: the source of our religion and morality springs from quite another ground than that which they cultivate.

A third gain from our discussion is the actual proof of _the harmony between faith and knowledge, between the religious and the scientific views of the world_. In our investigation we had no occasion for psychological or theoretical investigations as to faith and knowledge and their mutual relation; but if our discussion is not an entire failure, perhaps the actual exposition of a standpoint on which faith and knowledge may live at peace with one another, which is not bought by a sacrifice on either side, and which does not consist in a compromise of the two, but which has its reason in the deepest and most active interest of the one, in the full and unconstrained freedom of the other, a stronger proof for the intimate relations.h.i.+p of these brothers, between whom the present generation wishes too often to sow discord, than if we {405} had undertaken long religio-philosophical and theoretical investigations.

Finally, the results of our a.n.a.lysis have given us still another gain: they have led us beyond Lessing's "Nathan" and his parable of the "Three Rings."

We call this a gain, without the least intention of discrediting by it the motives of tolerance and the points of view for the judgment of the character and religiousness of human individuals, which lay in that parable, or suspecting the motives of so many of our contemporaries whose religio-philosophical judgment is entirely expressed in that parable. We saw ourselves compelled to make a choice either of accepting or of rejecting ends in the world, and found that the world resolves itself into a senseless game at dice, and that the phenomena become more unintelligible the more important they are, if we ignore or even reject teleology. The acknowledgment of the latter prevented us from seeing in the world and its events merely the eternal stream of planless coming and going; it prevented us from accepting such an endless stream of appearance and disappearance, and therefore also an endless stream of the appearance and disappearance of new forms of religion in that creature for whose appearance we see all other creatures are only a preparation, and are even obliged to look upon them as a preparation in accordance with no other theory more than that of evolution. It also urged us to inquire as to the ends and designs of mankind, and we found this end in the disposition of man for a communion with G.o.d, for the state of bearing his image and of being his child. Now we have fully to acknowledge that Christianity, like all religions which claim truth and universal acceptance, {406} is to be a.n.a.lyzed with the very same means of science as all phenomena in the world of facts, and that therefore it is especially subject to all investigations of religio-philosophical, religio-historical, and historical criticism, to its fullest extent. But precisely such an a.n.a.lysis of Christianity leads us to a result which elevates Christian religion high above all other forms. It also confirms by means of science what, indeed, is established to a Christian mind as certainty from his own direct experience, that the quintessence of that which Christianity offers us, is truth and gives full satisfaction to soul and mind. For that a.n.a.lysis establishes, in the first place, that Christianity shows us the idea of G.o.d and the nature and destiny of man in a purity such as no other religion does, and in such a life-creating power that it is able to satisfy most completely all the n.o.bler desires and impulses of soul and mind, and to overcome most successfully all ign.o.ble ones. Furthermore, it shows us that these gifts of Christianity offered themselves, and still offer themselves, not only in philosophemes and doctrines, in parables and myths, in postulates and prophecies, but what, indeed, is not the case in any other religion, in an arranged course of deeds and facts which, in everything that is necessary and essential for the acquisition of that idea of G.o.d and for the realization of that ideal of mankind, legitimate themselves to criticism as historical facts, and which legitimate themselves as actions of divine manifestation by the fact, that they and their consequences also are really able to fulfill what they promise, and to bring mankind nearer to the accomplishment of that goal which they set up for it. Finally, it shows us, when it reviews and compares the development of {407} culture among all mankind, that the Christian nations have really borne the richest blossom and fruit which has appeared hitherto on the tree of mankind, and that Christianity, for the life of nations, has not only, like other religions, powers of preservation, but also powers of renovation and renewal which other religions are wanting. Even all the errors of superst.i.tion and immorality, of intolerance and l.u.s.t of power, of so many of its advocates and confessors, at which the adversaries of the Christian view of the world so willingly point, are but a confirmation of its value. For they show us how divine and heavenly the gift must be, if even such errors were not able to smother its fruits. If we do not wish to suppose that mankind has foundations and ends which up to the present it is not yet allowed to know, we certainly must look for these foundations and ends where we find the best which has so far been given to mankind and which has been accomplished by it.

This acknowledgment of Christianity as the only true and only really universal religion leads us beyond another sentiment of Lessing, which has found an equally strong or perhaps still stronger echo in the mind. We mean the expression that, if he had to choose, he would prefer the continual search for truth to the possession of truth itself. We emphatically acknowledge the holy right and the high n.o.bility of this impulse of investigation and activity, but we need not buy its acknowledgment and satisfaction at the price of being obliged to renounce a consciousness or the hope of a consciousness which is equally indispensable to our inner happiness as that impulse of investigation, and which first gives to this impulse its overwhelming power--namely, the {408} consciousness and the hope of really possessing the truth. For, in fact, we are not required to make this choice. There is a possession of truth which does not exclude, but requires, the search for truth: that is the possession of truth in the answer to the questions as to the starting point and the goal of our life, the possession of truth in the fundamentals of our religious view of the world. It is the certainty about the starting-point and goal of our life, which lastingly and effectively invites us also to look for and perceive all the ways which, in theory as well as in practice, lead from a firm starting-point to a certain end, and only the possession of truth in the fundamentals of our religious view of the world gives value and satisfaction to investigation in a world which, without this possession, contains for us only transitory and fleeting, and therefore only unsatisfactory, things, but which stands before us as the work and the theatre of revelation of a G.o.d and Father, and therefore gives to investigation inexhaustible joy and satisfaction when we look upon it from those stand-points.

In like manner as, at the outset of our investigation, we perceived in organic species creations of G.o.d, and in spite of this, or rather on account of it, looked upon the attempts at exploring their origin with so much deeper interest, we also see ourselves, in the still more direct religious realm, not at all condemned to stagnation when we acknowledge Christianity as absolute religion. This very acknowledgment alone makes a real progress possible for us. For every progress, in order to be a real progress, needs a firm starting-point and a certain goal; hence that which is shown and offered to mankind in Christianity. From this {409} starting-point and toward this end there are tasks enough for religious progress. The ever more definite investigation of the facts and doctrines of Christianity, the improvement and ever more complete reproduction of the scientific image in which these facts and doctrines are reflected in the mind of man the progressing adaptation of ecclesiastical life in divine service, and organization to the substance and the need of Christian religiousness, the harmonizing of our possession of faith with all other elements of culture of each period, the working up of that which is given to us in Christianity into the spiritual and ethical acquisition of a single personality and its ever more complete representation and realization in the individual and the common life, the progressing penetration of generations by the transfiguring light of religion and morality, and the progressive overcoming of the likewise progressingly developing kingdom of evil--in short, all that which the language of religion calls the growth of the kingdom of G.o.d, is work and progress enough, but certainly work and progress on the ground of a certain basis as the starting-point given to us by G.o.d, and work and progress toward a certain goal set for us by G.o.d.

It is only from this basis of a possession of truth as it is offered to us by Christian theism, and by the facts of redemption and of a reconciliation of man with G.o.d, that the breach between faith and knowledge, between religion and the life of culture, which at present takes place in so many a heart and mind, can be healed; and, far from seeking to cripple or hinder those who stand on this basis, it alone gives to their theoretical and practical activity its joyous strength and certain end, to {410} their sphere of knowledge its universal breadth. The Apostle Paul, at the end of 1 Corinthians, XV, when he takes a comprehensive view from the highest points of Christian hope to which he found himself led from those fundamentals, knows of no fitter words to conclude with and to give it a practical application than these: "Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not vain in the Lord."

Notes

[1] "The International Scientific Series." No. XIII.

[2] "Evolution of Man."

[3] It was only when the ma.n.u.script of this work was nearly finished and the first part of it had gone to the press, that the author received the second part of K. E. von Baer's "_Studien aus dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften_" (Studies in the Realm of Natural Sciences). It contains another essay on teleology, "_Ueber Zielstrebigkeit in den organischen Korpern insbesondere_," and a treatise on Darwin's doctrine, "_Ueber Darwin's Lehre_," which Baer had promised long ago and which the public had anxiously awaited. It is no little satisfaction to find that I, from my modest premises, reached results regarding the naturo-philosophical problems and their weight in the religious realm which so fully harmonize with the views of this first authority in the realm of the history of development. I shall still have occasion here and there to avail myself of a study of this latest and most important publication upon the question of Darwinism, and shall confine myself here to the remark that von Baer, although he rejects the selection theory and the superficial treatment of the principle of evolution on the part of materialists, is by no means disinclined to the idea of the origin of species through descent, whether in gradual development or in leaps; and that in this respect he could no longer be counted among the advocates of the group above referred to, but among those which we mention farther on, had he not repeatedly and forcibly confessed, with a modesty worthy of acknowledgment, his total ignorance concerning the manner in which certain forms of life, especially the higher ones, originated. The origin of higher species without the supposition of a descent is to him unexplainable, because the individuals of these species are, in their first development of life, so dependent on the mother.

Furthermore, he points out the fact that in early periods of the earth the organic forming power which ruled, must have been a higher one than it is at the present time; in like manner as the first period in the embryonic development of individuals is to-day the most productive. This higher power of organization, he says, could consist in a higher power of changing organisms into new species, as well as in a higher power of producing new species through primitive generation; or it could consist in both. In general, there is no reason to suppose that primitive generations which took place at the first origination of life on earth, could not have been repeated later and oftener. The nearer a generation was to these individuals originated through primitive generation, the greater was undoubtedly its flexibility and changeableness; the farther, the greater the fixity of type.

[4] After the completion this ma.n.u.script, the author found that K. E. von Baer, in his treatise upon Darwin's doctrine, pays especial attention to the change of generation and also to the metamorphosis of plants and animals in exactly the same sense and reaches the same conclusion.

[5] Compare Max Muller, "Lectures on the Science of Language," 6th ed., London, 1871, vol. I, p. 403.

[6] Compare v. Baer, "Studies, etc.," p. 294 ff.

[7] Darwin says, on page 146, Eng. Ed., of his "Descent of Man": "In the earlier editions of my 'Origin of Species', I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.... I did not formerly sufficiently consider the existence of structures which, as far as we can at present judge, are neither beneficial nor injurious; and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work.... An unexplained residuum of change, perhaps a large one, must be left to the a.s.sumed uniform action of those unknown agencies, which occasionally induce strongly-marked and abrupt deviations of structure in our domestic productions."

[8] This word, which is of recent coinage in Germany, has been found so incapable of being rendered by an exact English equivalent, that it has been thought best to retain it and to give the author's own explanation of the meaning which he desired it to express. He says, in a note to the translator: "I was led to this idea [of _Auslosung_] in a small essay of Robert von Mayer ("Ueber Auslosung," 1876). Afterwards Mayer personally stated to me that he heartily approved the emphasis I had given to this idea, and said that he had only thought of the fact that psychical processes, like the action of the will, _losen aus_ (release) physiological processes, like the action of the muscles, and that I had carried the idea farther, in saying that psychical processes are _ausgelost_ (released) by physiological processes, and that this is a very important step farther on the way of investigation. Mayer himself thought it would be necessary to call the attention to this, when he further developed the ideas he had given in the before-mentioned essay; his intention to do so was prevented by his death.

"_Auslosung_ is a word originated by modern mechanical science, and means: (1.) Slight mechanical operations of detaching and the like, by which another and more important action, whose forces were heretofore restrained, can be set into activity: _e.g._, the pressure which sets in motion a machine, previously at rest, is _Auslosung_; the pressure on the trigger of a gun is _Auslosung_; the friction of a match which is the beginning of a great fire is _Auslosung_. (2.) This idea may now be applied to chemical processes: _e.g._, a gla.s.s of sugar-water will remain sweet unless some foreign element is introduced into it, but the moment it receives a fermenting substance either by chance, from the air, or with intention, then the sugar water is brought into a process of chemical decomposition, and from this there results _Auslosung;_ but the introduction of the fermenting agent into the sugar-water is _Auslosung_. (3.) Von Mayer applies this idea to psycho-physical relations of life, and says: when the will acting through the agency of the motor nerves sets in motion the muscles, this is _Auslosung_."--[TRANS.]

[9] For the use of readers who do not understand Greek, we may state that the word _teleology_ is derived from the Greek word _telos_, Gen. _teleos_: end, purpose, aim; and means the "doctrine of design or a conformity to the end in view," or, as K. E. von Baer prefers and wishes to have introduced into scientific language, "the doctrine of the striving toward an end"

(_Zielstrebigkeit_). It seems to be quite a superficial treatment of an idea on whose reception or rejection no less a thing than an entire view of the world with all its most important and deepest questions depends, when Dr. G. Seidlitz, in an essay on the success of Darwinism ("Ausland," 1874, No. 37), states incidentally that teleology is derived from the Greek [Greek: teleos] _perfect_. It is true that the Greek adjective for perfect is also derived from that noun, [Greek: telos], which has the same root as the German word _Ziel_, and there is even an Ionic form for that adjective which is [Greek: teleos], but the Attic form is [Greek: teleios]; and since modern languages, when a choice is allowed, do not derive their Greek foreign words from the Ionic, but from the Attic dialect, that word--were it really derived from that adjective and did it express "doctrine of perfection"--would have to be teleiology, or, in Latinized form, teliology.

As far as we know, the word, since it was introduced into scientific language, has never been derived from any other root than from [Greek: telos], Gen. [Greek: teleos], _end_, and has never been used in any other sense than to express the doctrine of a purpose and end in the world.

[10] Compare "History, Essays, and Orations of the 6th General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance," New York, Harper Bros., 1874, p. 264-271.

[11] Compare D. F. Strauss, the most celebrated moral philosopher of Monism, in -- 74 of his "The Old Faith and the New."