Evolution

XII Progress

The artificial nature of the abstraction which distinguishes the scientific from the moral and the religious consciousness, as well as the impossibility of simultaneously exercising faith and repressing it, is plainly exhibited in the optimistic interpretation of evolution. The premises from which it starts are faith in the uniformity of Nature and belief in the reality of material things. The conclusions which it reaches constitute a non sequitur if they are supposed to follow from the avowed premises, and only command assent when we tacitly assume certain moral and religious presuppositions which, if not avowed in the optimist’s argument, are instinctively supplied by the moral and religious consciousness of the optimist’s disciples. That the process of evolution on the whole has been and will be a process of progress follows logically enough from the optimist’s avowed premises, if by progress we mean the survival of those best fitted to survive—that is, if we empty the notion of progress of all moral meaning. But as the conclusion that evolution is progress is the conclusion which is necessary for the justification of the common faith of mankind, the illogical nature of the optimist’s process of inference is apt to be overlooked in consideration of the satisfactory termination of his argument.

It is, however, necessary, in the interests of clearness of thought as well as of the moral and religious consciousness, that the conception of progress thus thoughtlessly emptied of meaning by the optimist should have its context restored. This service—a service essential as a preliminary to every theory of evolution—was rendered by one in whom the moral consciousness spoke with force—Professor Huxley. To him is due the demonstration that adaptation to environment, so far from being the cause of progress, counteracts it; so far from being man’s ideal, it is that which resists the realisation of his ideals. Progress is effected, according to Professor Huxley, not by adaptation to but adaptation of the environment, and consists in approximating to the ideals of art and morality—which ideals are not accounted for, as ideals, by the fact that they are the outcome of evolution, because evil has been evolved as well as good. Why approximation to the ideal of religion—love of God as well as of one’s neighbour—should not contribute to progress does not appear. If, however, we add it, and also add the ideal of science, viz. truth, then progress will be the continuous approximation to the ideals of truth, beauty, goodness, and holiness; and human evolution, so far as evolution is progress, will be the progressive revelation of the ideal in and to man.

Two things are implied in this conception of evolution: the first is that evolution may or may not in any given case be progress; the next that we have a means of judging, a canon whereby to determine, whether evolution is progress. Both points are illustrated by the argument of Professor Huxley, who uses the moral ideals as a test whereby to judge the process of evolution, and decides that evolution has been progressive in the past and will be regressive in the future. Strange to say, the reason why Professor Huxley maintains that evolution will be regressive is exactly the same reason that leads Mr. Herbert Spencer to maintain that it will be progressive. It is that the law of evolution is Necessity, that evolution is the outcome of mechanical causes. But in effect both arguments lead logically to the same conclusion, for the progress which is the outcome of Mr. Spencer’s argument is not progress in the moral or any other sense of the word. In fine, progress is eventually impossible if evolution is due to mechanical causes; progress is conceivable only if we interpret the process of evolution teleologically and as expressing the operation of a final cause. Science, as such, declines to inquire whether there is any purpose in evolution, and leaves it an open question. The moral consciousness affirms only that the process of evolution ought to make for good. The religious consciousness alone is in a position to say that its spiritual experience requires us to affirm that evolution, in accordance with the uniformity of the Divine nature, will be, in years to come as in ages past, a continuous movement towards the realisation of all that in its best moments the human heart holds most dear.

The argument that evolution must be progress commits logical suicide, for in the very act of proving its conclusion it proves that progress is not progress. We are therefore left to face the fact that progress is only a possibility; and that amounts to saying that regress also is possible. What is implied therein will become clear if we return to the question of the nature of progress.

Progress is not the survival of the fittest to survive, but of the æsthetically or ethically fittest; not adaptation to the environment, but approximation to the ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness. Those ideals are manifested in man, but not equally in all men; and the words and works of those men on whom they are most clearly impressed and by whom they are most faithfully expressed become the canon whereby we judge whether any tendency in art or morality is progressive or retrogressive. We cannot all make beautiful things or do heroic deeds, but we can all appreciate them when made or done. To appreciate them, however, is to judge that they do come nearer to the ideal than anything else of the kind which we have yet known. Thus the ultimate court of appeal for each one of us is not the ideal as manifested by man, but the ideal as revealed to each of us. True it is that, until we saw that particular work of art or that particular instance of love, we had no idea what beauty or love could be. But that makes no difference to the fact that we feel for ourselves how much nearer it comes to the ideal than anything we had any idea of before. It may henceforth be the standard by which we shall measure other things, but in adopting it we measure it ourselves, and measure it not by itself, but in relation to the ideal. And what shall we say of the artist himself? By what does he measure the work of his predecessors and judge that it is not the best that can yet be done, if he does not measure it by the ideal which is revealed more perfectly to him than to them?

But the perfect work of art or love, when done, becomes not merely the canon by which to test progress; it becomes itself the cause of progress, both because of its more perfect revelation of the ideal and because of the emulation which it arouses in others to go and do likewise. They likewise strive after the ideal and labour for its sake: it is the final cause of their endeavours, the purpose of their attempts; and were there no such final cause there would be no progress. The ideal is a principle both of thought and action, the test of knowledge and the source of progress. Truth is the ideal of science: approximation to truth is that for which the man of science labours and that in which he conceives that scientific progress lies. The gravitation formula not only expresses a wide-reaching truth, but has acted as an incentive to many attempts to extend it to the domain of chemistry, and serves as an ideal yet to be rivalled in other branches of science. But science and progress in science are alike impossible, if consciousness and experience be discredited, or if the ideal of science be not real, i.e. if the laws of science have not the permanence, the independence, and the self-identity which are the attributes of the real, but are as transient as the minds that discovered them, exist only when thought of by man, and are not really the same at different times. But if these ideals, whether of truth, beauty, or goodness, are thus real, then they are “our” ideals only in the sense that we are aware of them and adopt them, not in the sense that we make them; they are ours because they are present in the common consciousness of mankind, but not in the sense that they are created by that consciousness. They are revealed to man before they are manifested by man.

Professor Huxley’s definition of progress cuts at the root of two misconceptions as to its nature, which, though mutually inconsistent, are both widely spread. One is that the latest products of time, simply because they are the latest, are superior to all that has preceded. The other is that to know the origins of a thing will best enable us to assign its value. The tendency of the one is to result in the idea that because a thing has been evolved it must be superior; of the other to lead to the conclusion that because a thing has been evolved out of certain elements it cannot be superior to them. The truth is that the mere fact that a thing has been evolved—be it an institution, a mode of life, or a disease—does not in itself prove either that the thing is or is not an advance on that out of which it was evolved. Regressive metamorphosis, degeneration, pathological developments—physiological, mental, moral, and religious—are all processes of evolution, but are not progress. A society in its decay, or an art in its decline, is evolved out of a previous healthier state or more flourishing period, but is not because later therefore better. Nor, on the other hand, does it follow, because the earliest manifestations of a tendency are the lowest, and can be shown by the theory of evolution to be so, that no progress has been made in the process of evolution. The artistic impulse in its earliest manifestations, in children and in savages, is rude enough; but it would be absurd to say, therefore, that art in its perfection has no more value than in its origins, that the Hermes of Praxiteles is on a level with a misshapen idol from the South Sea islands.

If the continuity of evolution does not warrant us in assigning the same value, æsthetic or moral, to all the links, highest and lowest, in the chain, still less does it authorise or require us to deny all value to the lowest. On the contrary, we should rather see in the lowest what it has of the highest, than look in the highest for the lowest we can find. We should beware lest in reducing everything to its lowest terms we prove to have been seeking simply to bring it to our own level, when at the cost of a little more generosity we might have raised ourselves somewhat nearer to the ideal prefigured even in the lowest stage of the evolution of love, of beauty, of piety or of goodness. Indeed, as a mere matter of logic, it is impossible to state the nature of a cause accurately, quite apart from any question of estimating its value, until or unless we know the effect which it produces. It is not only that we may underrate or entirely overlook the importance of a thing, so long as we are ignorant that it is a factor largely influencing some result in which we are interested; but, until we know what effects it is capable of producing, we do not know what the thing is. We could not be said to have knowledge of a drug if we did not know what its effects were. Nor is that knowledge to be acquired by analysing the causes which produce the drug. It is not from the mechanical causes which give rise to a thing that we can learn what a thing is: no amount of knowledge of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen would enable us to predict a priori the nature of the compound which is formed when electricity is passed through two molecules of the former and one of the latter; nor is the least light thrown upon the properties of water by our knowledge of its constituent elements: on the other hand, our knowledge of them is materially and serviceably increased when we learn what they are capable of producing in combination. We learn most truly what a thing is from observing what it becomes, what use it subserves, what end it answers, what purpose it fulfils—in a word, when we know not its mechanical but its final cause. In biology, knowledge of an organ means knowledge of its function—that is, of its purpose; and evolutional biology also teaches that function is the cause of the organ.

It is by observing what a thing becomes that we learn the part it may hereafter play in the general scheme of things, and come to know its real nature, and estimate it at its real value. Thus our estimate of the value of such an institution as “taboo” goes up, and our knowledge of it is increased, when we recognise in it one of the early manifestations of the sense of moral obligation on its negative side. Again, in tracing the evolution of religion it is impossible to know which of the various rites and ceremonies, practised by a savage tribe in its dealings with the supernatural, are religious and which non-religious, without taking into consideration the question, What do such customs tend to develop into? Until we know that, and until we can say whether what is evolved out of them is religious or non-religious—a question which we cannot answer unless we know what religion is—we cannot be said to understand the nature of the savage rites that we are studying. But it is not from the origins of art, religion, or morality that we shall gain the answer to the question what art, morality, or religion is; for the question must be answered before we can recognise the origins when we see them, and can only be answered by reference to the ideal, which is the test and final cause not only of progress, but of the real.

The ideal is a principle both of thought and of action. As a principle of thought it is the test by which we determine whether any given movement is progressive or regressive, and whether any given thing is what it appears or is alleged to be. As a principle of action it is that for which we strive, the purpose with which we act, the cause of any progress that we make. If we are not prepared to maintain that everything which takes place is an advance upon what preceded, we require some test whereby to distinguish what is progress from what is not, and we admit that progress is a possibility which may or may not be realised, and it becomes of interest to inquire on what conditions its realisation depends.

If, as Professor Huxley maintains, the test of progress is approximation to the ideal, then one condition of progress is that man shall be conscious, to whatever extent is necessary for the purpose, of the ideal, shall feel that the ideal of love, tenderness, compassion, justice, truth, beauty, etc., is a thing for him to strive for, an end for him to attain. To the chosen few—the great artists, the moral or religious reformer—a sense of the ideal is dealt in a larger measure than to the rest of men. By the chosen few it is manifested to the many. But it does not become the cause of progress, unless it leavens the mass, unless they too are inspired by it to do better and be better. In a word, when, or if, ever the ideal has been manifested in its fulness, it is not a fresh revelation which is necessary for progress, but fresh conviction in us and renewed determination. Indeed, so long as we do not act up to the light that we have, even an imperfect revelation of the ideal may serve for imperfect beings.

So far, then, as the genius in art or science, or the reformer in religion or morals, is the cause of the progress that is made by his school, his disciples, and them that follow after, it is clear that he is the cause and not the product of evolution. It is his works or words which inspire his followers with a fresh sense of the reality of the ideal and a fresh resolve to devote their lives to the pursuit of art or the service of science. But it is only because his perfect work is felt by them, judging for themselves, to realise the ideal that it has this effect on them; and they could not judge it to approach the ideal more closely than anything known to them before, unless they had some surmise, however vague, of the ideal, with which to compare this work, perfect as it seems to them. It is not necessary to suppose that this vague surmise existed, or if it existed that it was attended to, previously: it may have been first called into existence or into notice by the contemplation of the master’s work, but its presence, however evoked, is attested by the judgment that his work does come nearest to the ideal. The manifestation of the masterpiece may be the occasion of this fresh revelation of the ideal, but the revelation must be made if the work is to be judged highest and is to inspire the disciple.

It is, however, one thing to have an ideal, and another to live up to it. “To scorn delights and live laborious days” in the search for truth or in single-minded devotion to the cause of art requires some will. Granted that the ideal has been revealed, either to the disciple on the occasion of another’s teaching or directly as to the master, for progress there is further required will. It requires an act of will to prefer the ideal, with its laborious days, and to scorn delights; and it requires many acts of will to make any progress. Yet the will to believe and the will to act are the same will. We may, if we choose, define belief as the readiness to act, and take action as the test of belief: if a man in a hurry makes a short cut, i.e. goes straight from one point to another rather than round a corner, his action is proof that he believes that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. From this point of view we may regard the many acts of will which are necessary to progress, i.e. movement in the direction of the ideal, as so many reaffirmations of the original act of will by which we affirmed our belief that the ideal was the goal of progress; and if our object is to show that the behaviour of man, so far as he pursues the ideal, can be exhibited as a logical and rational behaviour, we are justified in thus demonstrating that our renewed resolutions to realise the ideal are but the logical consequences of our original will to believe in the ideal as the proper goal of action. Our belief in the ideal is thus shown to be the principle from which our subsequent acts of will can be logically deduced, just as Nature’s uniformity can be shown to be the principle from which the conclusions of science logically flow.

But it may be doubted whether this logical order of ideas is the chronological order of events. As a matter of fact, we go through a number of struggles and temptations long before we reflect, if ever we do reflect, upon them in such a way as to see what is the general principle logically implied by our repeated if intermittent resistance to temptation, just as a child acts in a way that for its logical justification would require a formal recognition of the uniformity of Nature, though the infant of two years, or less, does not formulate that principle as a condition precedent of crying for its food or its nurse. Chronologically, then, the will to act seems to precede the will to believe in the uniformity of Nature, and in the case of most human beings is never followed by any fully conscious formulation of the principle on which we act as an abstract principle in which to believe. That fact, however, does not in the least detract from the value which the formulation of the abstract principle has: when formulated it becomes in the hands of science as Ithuriel’s spear for the detection of lingering superstitions and confusions of thought—

  “for no falsehood can endure
Touch of celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness.”

At touch of the question, “Does it contradict the uniformity of Nature?” error is seen for what it is, and is exploded sooner thus than in any other way.

The ideal of truth, then, with its “celestial temper,” is logically implicit in the earliest acts of will, but chronologically is developed in consciousness later, if indeed and when it reaches that later stage of its evolution from the potential to the actual. The ideals of morality and religion, again, though equally implicit in the acts of will which form their earliest manifestation, are, as a rule, both in the individual and the race, more slowly evolved from the particulars in which they are immersed. The period of their gestation is longer, and results in the birth of a higher organism.

Thus, when we reach the age of reflection, whenever it may come, we wake up to find that we have been acting as though we had beliefs, when, as in our infancy, we could have had no beliefs, and as though we willed our actions, at a time when we can scarcely be said to have had any will in the matter. For years we have been acting as we should have done supposing that we had believed certain things and had willed our action accordingly. When we wake up to this state of things the question is, Are we bound to go on in this way? are we bound now to believe as well as to act as though we believed in God, morality, and Nature’s uniformity? Does the fact that our physiological and psychological mechanism has been started—perhaps by Nature’s cosmic forces, perhaps by the social environment, certainly not by us—to run in certain grooves, prove either that we ought or that we must continue to run the particular organism we are in charge of on the same lines? The agnostic and the atheist exercise their freedom of will to say No. They claim the right and exercise the power of free choice. The agnostic, further, is fully aware that in choosing to believe the uniformity of Nature his choice is not determined by evidence—it is “a great act of faith,” no amount of evidence could justify it, the only evidence anyone can bring to justify his belief in the general abstract principle is the fact that he does believe it in every concrete, particular instance. In a word, he believes it because he chooses to believe it—and that is exactly what is meant by the dictum, which he finds it so hard to understand, that his will is self-determining.

When it comes to the question of morality and religion, the agnostic again exercises his freedom of choice: he wills to believe in the former and not in the latter—the evidence for and against either being equally nil. It is not, therefore, the evidence which determines his choice; and he shows that it is not his previous history, not the momentum which his psychological mechanism gained during the period when he had no conscious or no self-conscious control over it, which determines his choice, for in the first place he denies that it ought or must influence him, and next he shows that it does not, by willing differently in the case of the two principles. In both cases his will is equally self-determining, though his will is to believe in the moral principle or ideal and not to believe in the religious.

If we wish either to define progress or to make it, we must choose, arbitrarily or otherwise, some particular goal and say, definitely and decidedly, any movement which being continued in the same straight line leads to that goal is progress, every other movement is regress, being necessarily away from the goal. If we choose, by a great act of faith or otherwise, to say the ideal is the goal, then we have therein a principle both of belief and action: we have a standard by which to test everything offered for judgment, a general principle to apply to every particular case; and we have an object to aim at, a principle to carry out in every act of our lives, an ideal to strive for. But whether we choose the ideal as the goal or something else, our choice is the free act of a self-determining will. Progress, on the human side, is—as indeed is regress—the expression of the free will of human beings, whose choice, though free, is limited to the alternatives offered to them. Those alternatives reduce themselves ultimately to aiming at the ideal or at something else.

What, then, of the environment, of the cosmos, in which man finds himself, in which he has to act and may act so as to advance or not to advance towards the ideal? To begin with, we may distinguish between those forces in the cosmos which man can to some extent control, and those over which he has no control. The former, from this point of view, the point of view of action, are means whereby man secures his ends: his regulation of them effects that adaptation of the environment which, according to Professor Huxley, is essential to ethical progress. Now, as a matter of observed fact, no one doubts that the advance which civilised man has made in controlling the forces of Nature is due to science and to civilised man’s devotion to the scientific ideal of truth. Even the savage made what little progress he did make in this direction by acting fitfully and unconsciously, or at the most semi-consciously, on the principle of the uniformity of Nature: the savage was faithful in little things to the scientific ideal—which was revealed to him but dimly—the savant is fully conscious of the principle on which he acts, walks in its light, and strives by example and precept to save his fellow-men from relapsing into the darkness of error and superstition. It is not merely because of the material advantages, the comforts and luxuries, which science indirectly secures to mankind, that the man of science devotes himself to the scientific ideal and seeks to make it universal: it is for the sacred cause of truth. In a word, what at first sight presents itself merely as a principle of the scientific reason, proves, in the conception of those who have spent their lives in endeavouring to seek the scientific ideal and to ensue it, to be a manifestation of the moral reason, to be not merely in harmony with the moral ideal, but to have been its harbinger, making the way straight for it. Belief which implies a violation of the uniformity of Nature is denounced not because it violates a scientific principle, but because it is immoral, a pretence, and a lie. The final cause of science is thus made out to be to subserve the moral ideal, to secure that adaptation of the environment without which ethical progress is impossible. The labour of adapting his environment would have for man as a rational being no sufficient reason if it did not tend to realise his moral ideal. Man may use his science and the power of adapting his environment for other than moral ends; but such use is not, according to this view, progress. In other words, it is not science or the scientific ideal alone which enables us to lay down the line of progress, but science and morality together: one point cannot give us our direction, but the line which connects two points may.

Thus far, then, by taking the environment into consideration, we seem to have introduced no new factor into our conception of progress. It seems that when I wake up from childhood’s slumber I find myself surrounded by men who believe that they can do certain things—make rain, send telegraphic messages, etc.; and I am told that if certain assumptions—that there is a God, that Nature is uniform, etc.—be true, then it will be well for me to behave in a certain way. But what if the assumptions be not true? My elders tell me that experience—in the individual, in the race, enlarged by science and the theory of evolution—shows it is quite safe to assume that they are true, at any rate as a provisional hypothesis. Of course, if the future is going to resemble the past, then experience of the past is a good guide to the future: but that is just the question, is the future going to resemble the past? In other words, what attitude am I to assume towards my environment, the cosmos? Am I to assume that it will work, and for countless ages has worked, in such a way as to make it possible for me, with some co-operation on my part, to do things which my elders tell me are desirable and which I feel for myself I should rather like to do?

If I assume that the cosmic power does work thus, in such a way that I can know the truth and do the right, and love the Power that gives me the chance and makes it possible, even for me, so to do, I am only exercising the will to believe in that principle which is logically implied by every act of the scientific or moral life.

It is the common faith of mankind that experience may be trusted; and it is the common experience of mankind that progress is approximation to the ideals of truth, of goodness, and of love. It is not the common experience of mankind that all men or all peoples approximate equally to those ideals. The measure of progress is to be found in the clearness and consistency with which men have carried out in science the principle of the uniformity of Nature, in their dealings with their fellow-men the principles of morality, in their dealings with the supernatural the principle of love.

Science, and especially the theory of evolution, has enormously extended our inferential experience, but it has done so only by accepting the common faith that experience may be trusted, that is to say, that the environment, the cosmos, is trustworthy within our experience of it. When, then, the optimist alleges that the process of evolution has been, on the whole, a course of progress, he is but showing that the common faith in the trustworthiness of the reality in which we move and have our being justifies itself. But he does not show us, nor does science show us, why the real, the cosmos, is trustworthy: he ends by showing that it is trustworthy because he began, like all of us, by trusting it. He is quite right: it is the only way in which to demonstrate that either science, or morality, or religion is trustworthy—by giving our faith, to start with. Only when we are satisfied as to the fact can we profitably inquire the reason; and the reason is to be found only in the nature of the real, as revealed to us in the sum total of our experience, scientific, moral, and religious. But the will to believe that experience and to trust the real which it reveals, is free: if a man will not accept it as trustworthy, there is for him no reason why.

The case is different with the man who does accept the testimony of consciousness as evidence of the reality to which it testifies. For him the one reality is Will, and the ideals of science, morality, and religion are the expressions of that Will. In accepting them as the principles of thought and action he does not learn what is the purpose of evolution, the final cause of the cosmos: he chooses to believe that, by so accepting them and by striving to realise the ideal, he is fulfilling the Divine Will and contributing his share to the realisation of the rational purpose to which, he assumes, the process of evolution is tending.

But in so doing he does not renounce his freedom: his resolution to believe is an exercise of his free will, an act, “a great act,” of faith. If carried into effect in his daily life, his resolution, daily renewed and ever free, may in the end become a daily act of love, and then he will understand the reason why the cosmos, or the cosmic power, is trustworthy. Only love of man could have given man, as his ideals, to know the truth and do the right. Only if man’s ideals are so given is the cosmos trustworthy—if it is trustworthy. If it is not, then there is no truth to know, no right to do, no inference can be drawn from the past to the future, for the past, even of a minute ago, may be a delusion.

But though the will to believe that the cosmos is untrustworthy cannot in practice be carried out in all its logical (or illogical) conclusions, it can be and is acted on intermittently, and such action is regress. So far as it is carried out, it is the negation of progress; if it could be carried out completely and by all men, there would be an end of progress; science, morality, and religion would be extinguished; evil would triumph over good. The history of evolution shows that, as a matter of fact, such unfaith in the reality of our ideals has been only intermittent; for the course of evolution has been, on the whole, progress. Individual experience shows that there comes a point, soon or late, at which the will, acting freely, refuses to go further with its rejection of morality: there are some things which even a bad man will not do—however oddly they may seem chosen. In theory, in philosophy, there is a point at which the will refuses to go further with its rejection of the common reason, in which all men share: there are some things which even the sceptic refuses to disbelieve, e.g. those which are necessary to his conviction that nothing can be believed.

These considerations may serve to confirm us in the belief that progress has been the law of evolution in the past and will increasingly be in the future. They should so confirm us, for they do but carry out, as far as history, individual experience, and imagination can take us, our fundamental faith in the reality of those ideals that are revealed in consciousness to all of us. Belief in the possibility of progress at all carries with it, as its logical postulate, faith in the wisdom and goodness of God. But if wisdom and goodness are the source of all reality, and if the final purpose of evolution is the realisation of the ideal—viz. love of truth, of our fellow-beings, and of God—what are we to say of evil? Is it not real? It is real, in the same sense that our pleasures and pains are real, but not in the same sense that the ideal is real. The real things which our sense-experience reveals to us are real in the sense that they are permanent, independent of us, and self-identical. The same characteristics attach to the realities revealed to us in our moral and spiritual experience. The laws of morality and the goodness of God do not come and go with our fleeting recognitions of them; they are permanent, independent of us, and are ever the same: God’s goodness faileth never. The uniformity of Nature is but one expression of the uniformity of the Divine love for man: it is that which makes it possible for man to know the truth and survive in the struggle for existence. But evil is not independent of us men: it exists only so far as we will it to exist. It is not permanent: it comes and goes with our passing acts of will. It is not self-identical, but tends to self-destruction. It is the will to believe nothing, and therefore, as action involves belief, the will to do nothing—that is, to revert to the condition of mere inert matter, as matter is conceived by the materialist to exist.

But though evil be illusive, though it is the fool who says in his own heart, “There is no God,” or “Tush! He will not see it,” the illusion is voluntary. It is we who deceive or sophisticate ourselves, when we will to believe that this act is not really wrong, or that our peculiar circumstances constitute a special, a highly special exception, on this occasion only, to the rules for ordinary occasions and ordinary men. And though the illusion is subjective, i.e. is not generally shared by the onlookers, and is consciously subjective (for we avoid onlookers, because they would spoil the illusion), nevertheless, subjective though it be, it is a fact in your particular subjective history, and a damning fact. If the evil that you will is confined in its range to your will, and if its existence can only be recreated by a fresh act of will in you or another, that is an argument to show that there is mercy in the scheme of things, but it does not prove that you incur no responsibility in offering yourself or another the example and the opportunity of doing wrong. We are not, and, if the will be free, we cannot be responsible for what others do; but we are responsible for what we do—for evil, if it be evil; for good, if we——but there is no pressing need to consider that contingency.

The question underlying the previous paragraph is that of our social environment and its effects. We are apt to forget that we are the social environment. If we bear the fact in mind, we shall perhaps be less inclined to seek the origin of all our misdeeds outside ourselves: we cannot shift the burden of our own wrong-doing on to the shoulders of society by any process which does not bring back at least an equivalent burden. The fact is that neither can we cause others, nor can others cause us to do evil. What we can do is to supply them with an opportunity, which, but for our action, would not indeed have existed, but which also, so far from necessitating evil action on their part, may by their free will be made the occasion for a victory over wrong. The fact, however, that they alone are responsible for their evil-doing prevents us from taking any credit for their good deeds. It is for our own acts of will that we are responsible, and it is by willing evil that we become evil. We create evil, consciously, by every wrong act of will that we perform, and then we talk of the origin of evil as a mystery, so thoroughly do we sophisticate ourselves! Why should there be evil? Why, indeed? There is no reason, no rational answer can be given, because evil is irrational—it is the will to reject the common reason or common sense or faith of mankind, in this detail or that. It is the arbitrary element, self-will, and if it could be eliminated we should have a uniformity of human nature and of human love corresponding to the uniformity of the Divine. Progress is the process of its elimination.

If we turn from the human to the pre-human period of evolution, the first immediate fact which strikes us is that there has been throughout the animal kingdom an evolution of mind, which has resulted in providing man with the psychological apparatus necessary for conceiving, and, to some extent, realising the ideal. When we reached the age of reflection, we woke up to find that our psychological mechanism had been running for some years in certain grooves. We now find that its direction can be traced back by evolution to the beginnings of animal consciousness. If, however, we believe that the evolution of mind, animal and human, has been a process of progress, we do so not on the ground that mind has been evolved, but that its evolution has been in the direction of those ideals, approximation to which is believed by us to be progress. Similarly, if the pre-animal period of the earth’s evolution is shown by science to have resulted in fitting the earth to be the home of animal life, we judge that evolution to have been progress, not because it prepared the world eventually for man, but because it is seen to have been part of the process by which the ideal is in course of realisation, by which the Divine purpose is in the course of being fulfilled.

The only value that we can assign to the pre-human period of evolution is that which attaches to it as a means to an end; but though we believe that by striving after the ideals revealed to us we are labouring towards that end, and though everything that makes for the ideal contributes to the end, yet we do not know the Divine purpose, and we cannot say in what manifold other ways the pre-human period may have subserved that purpose. It is sufficient if we can trace the steps by which this one portion, the only portion known to us, of the whole design has been carried forward. This reflection is one which it is necessary to bear in mind when considering the alleged wastefulness of the process of evolution and the price at which progress has been purchased.

The theory of evolution, as a purely scientific theory, i.e. as an objective statement of what actually has taken place on the earth in the past, shows that the various species of animals which have survived were—so long as they did survive—the only species which could survive under the conditions which then prevailed; given the conditions, their survival was necessary and inevitable. There the scientific explanation of the matter ends: having shown the causes which produced the effect in question, science has explained everything that it undertook to explain. Had the conditions been different, the present state of the world, doubtless, would have been different; but being what they were they produced that which is, and there is an end of the matter—as far as it is a matter for scientific investigation.

What we are to think of the survivors—whether we are to admire them; whether we are to consider their survival an advance and an improvement; whether anything has been gained by their survival, and, if so, from what point of view the gain is a gain—are questions which science excludes, because, however answered, they do not affect the scientific fact that these species did survive, and, under the conditions, alone could survive.

But we all take it for granted and as self-evident that man is not only better adapted, under existing conditions, to survive and flourish at the cost and to the extinction of other species, but that he is better than the brute, that his survival is an advance, that his is a higher type, and that his existence realises a higher ideal than that of the brutes. We believe this not merely because we are men, and as such rate our own comforts, our own interests, our own skins as the most important things known to us, for there are things for which men sacrifice their own interests and for which they have laid down their lives. It is precisely because there are things more important than our own material and animal existence, and because they are or may be realised by man and not by the animals, by the ideal man and not by the brute man, that we consider him to be worth more than many sparrows—though they too have their value in His eyes—and man’s existence to be of a higher type than theirs.

Thus, then, when science—which, if it is truly scientific, makes no distinction of value, moral or spiritual, between man and the sparrow—has explained that a given species which did survive was the only species that could have survived under the conditions, there still remains the problem, for those to whom it is a problem, Why should the species which was bound to survive also happen to be a species of a higher type? Why have the survivors always happened to be both better adapted to survive and better adapted to further the ideal which the course of evolution reveals with increasing clearness?

In fine, science explains only a part, not the whole of the effect of evolution. It concentrates its attention on one part or aspect of the effect, on the survival of the fittest, and explains very simply and satisfactorily that the environment kills off the creatures which are not fit to cope with it, while the fittest to contend with it survive. The fact that the survivors not only are best adapted to the environment, but are also best adapted to bring the whole creation one step nearer to those distant ideals in expectation of which it groaneth and travaileth, is that part of the effect which science, for scientific purposes, rightly ignores. Science does not undertake to estimate the value of the effect produced, or even to consider whether when produced it has any value.

But when the question is raised as to the cost at which the process of evolution is carried on, it becomes necessary to bring into the account the value of the result attained or to be attained. Possibly, creation that groaned in her travail may rejoice that a man-child has been born. But so much depends on what her child grows into. And he has free will. We have the power now and here to dash her expectations to the ground.

The value of a thing to me is exactly what I am prepared to give or do for it. I have no other way of estimating the value of the ideals for which creation has laboured in the past, than by asking myself how far I am prepared to go for the love of truth, of fellow-beings, and of God. If I am prepared to give everything, and then count myself the gainer, then indeed I may know that the cost of evolution has not been greater than the value of the ideal: I know the highest price, and I know the feelings of those who pay it. And they are the only persons who can judge the value of the article, for they are the only people who get it. The fact, however, that they do get it, that they get it in full, and every man according to the measure with which he metes it, contains the answer to our question. What is true now was true of earlier generations and earlier men: the value of the ideal to every man was exactly what he gave for it. It is the realisation of the ideal by me that is my reward, though my object may be its realisation by others. But it is absurd to say that their gain is my loss, or that their progress has been made at my expense.

These considerations apply only of course to those men who have sacrificed themselves for the sake of progress and the love of their fellow-man. Most men, however, do not sacrifice themselves much; and therefore they can hardly be brought out as martyrs to the cause of progress, as the millions who have perished by the wayside in the march of evolution.

It is not until we introduce the element of material progress that it becomes possible to maintain with any plausibility that there is a divergency of interests between the contributors to it, or that they who sowed have been sacrificed to us who reap. It is when we compare the shivering savage with our sheltered civilisation, primitive man’s struggle for existence with civilised man’s enjoyment of existence, that we begin to be anxious about the cost of evolution—that is to say, that our little faith in the value of the ideal begins to torment us. In our unreadiness to sacrifice ourselves we forget that it is possible for civilised man also to make sacrifices—perhaps the greater because he has the more to forego—and that the savage has his tribal traditions, embodying his ideal of a good man, to live up to; his tribal customs, which he may violate with self-reproach, or fulfil with satisfaction; his conceptions of the truth about man’s relations to the past, the world, and the supernatural. The savage also has his ideal, which he sets above his pleasure, and for which he faces pain in many a cruel rite. Shall we say that its realisation is no reward to him? or that in realising it he does not as faithfully contribute his mite to the fulfilment of the Divine purpose as we? We make too much of our superiority. We make, also, too little of the savage’s enjoyment of existence. Take the lowest savages known to us, the native tribes of Central Australia, and turn to the most recent and the best accounts of their manner of life; and it is certain that their existence is enjoyed by them. Is ours without exception enjoyed by us?

If it is easy to be led by sentimentalism into mistakes about what our fellow-man thinks of the question whether life is worth living, it is still easier to be misled with regard to our fellow-creatures lower in the scale. Here all is conjecture, and it is on this uncertain ground that rests the charge brought against Nature of waste and cruelty. There is the cruelty with which, in order to secure the survival of the few and fittest, the environment kills off the many who are unfit—an argument of great force, if the survivors were immortal. There is the waste of bringing into life thousands of creatures unfit, and therefore doomed to a speedy extinction. But death is the common lot; and as for waste and failure, if the short-lived creatures fulfil their purpose, they are not failures; and if their purpose is by competition to force the development of the potentially fit, then they fulfil their purpose. A man may be entered for a race for no other purpose than to force the pace. As for happiness, wild animals, to judge by their usual fit condition and by the evidence of sportsmen, do enjoy existence. But they, at any rate, have no ideals—whatever the savage may have. Yet it is conceivable that the bird that builds its nest finds some satisfaction in doing so, and that the animal that lays down her life to save her young ones has some sense of love. What is revealed as the ideal in man may be inchoately manifested as instinct in the undeveloped consciousness of the animal. If so, then the animal’s life has independent value and is not merely valuable as a means to a distant future end.

To sum up: science declines to take the teleological view of Nature, or to admit final causes or ends. To speak, therefore, of survival in the struggle for existence as an end, may be excellent sense, but it is unscientific: it implies an assumption of a kind about which science is agnostic. If we do, however, make this one deviation from agnosticism, we have then no difficulty in showing that evolution is a failure, for its end is survival, and we all die; and there is no compensation, or, if there is, posterity gets it, not we—an aggravation of the original injustice.

If survival in the struggle for existence is the only end that we personally recognise in the conduct of our own lives, we are quite consistent in judging it to be the only end of other lives, and in condemning the Universe, for then there is neither goodness nor any wisdom in it.

On the other hand, our faith in that wisdom and goodness is not genuine so long as we are prepared to stake only our arguments on it, and not our lives.