Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley Part 10

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 pa.s.su_ with his physical structure, has been developed by the same agencies." Then, by the introduction of a physical a.n.a.logy which is no a.n.a.logy 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 Palaeolithic 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 circ.u.mstances and combine for mutual comfort and protection would be preserved and acc.u.mulated; 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sure 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 quant.i.ty 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 ent.i.ty 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 ma.s.s 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 a.n.a.logies 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 tripart.i.te 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 a.s.sumptions of which Mr. Wallace's is a type. As an excellent ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sumed, 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 sanct.i.ty 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 pa.s.s 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 dispa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sumed supremacy among the bodies in s.p.a.ce, 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 s.h.i.+vered. In a Scripture that "cannot be broken" there was read the story of conflict and death aeons 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 G.o.d, 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 archaeological 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 Archaeology, with its enormous ma.s.s 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 a.s.suring 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 cla.s.sed 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 superst.i.tions is included in the history of beliefs; the superst.i.tions 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 a.s.sumptions of relative truth or falsity, the anthropologist searches into origins, traces variations, compares and cla.s.sifies, 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 a.n.a.lyzing a belief we kill a superst.i.tion, 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 a.s.sumption of differences in things, else it would be superfluous. But it equally starts with the a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.sing 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 att.i.tude 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 ma.s.s 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 t.i.tle "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 coa.r.s.e 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 const.i.tution 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds to win their smiles or ward off their frowns. In old Rome _sanct.i.tas_ or holiness, was, according to Cicero, "the knowledge of the rites which had to be performed." These done, the G.o.ds were expected to do their part. So in new Rome, when the Catholic has attended ma.s.s, his share in the contract is ended. Wors.h.i.+p 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 subst.i.tution, 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 a.s.serts 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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) acc.u.mulate 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 t.i.tle 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 ent.i.tled" 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.sics, 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 a.s.similating 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 cheris.h.i.+ng 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 leaders.h.i.+p is his, since he has gone on "from strength to strength." The changes in the att.i.tude 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 relations.h.i.+ps; 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 att.i.tude, not a creed; and if he refused to affirm, he equally refused to deny.