XIII Evolution as Purpose
Evolution, as a scientific theory, is a description of the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is. The method employed is that of science, and proceeds upon the assumption of the uniformity of Nature and the universality of the law of causation. The existence of a thing is proof that the conditions necessary to produce it preceded it. Thus from what is we infer with certainty what has been: the occurrence of Z is proof that Y preceded, and so from Y we can infer X, and so on, to the beginning of the alphabet. Eventually, that is, we are carried back, in theory at least, to an initial arrangement of things which not only gave birth to the actual order of evolution, but was such that no other order of events could have followed from it. Were it possible, in fact, to get back to this original collocation of causes and to formulate it, the formula would explain the universe as it is and has been, the totality of things.
Unfortunately the formula, though it would explain everything else, would not explain itself, and would therefore, so far, fail to explain anything. Or, to put it in other words, though certain causes, collocated in the proper way, would, on this view of evolution, explain everything which ensued from that collocation, we should still want to know why the causes were collocated in that particular way rather than in any other. To say that that collocation was not the outcome of a previous collocation is really to say that there was originally no antecedent necessity why this or any other order of evolution should take place at all; that Z hangs on Y, Y on X... and A on nothing at all; that the formula which is to render all things intelligible is itself unmeaning. Or, if we say that things had no beginning—matter and force being indestructible—then there is no initial collocation, that is to say, no formula, even in theory, to explain all things: we cannot even imagine the process of evolution to be intelligible.
The latter seems to be preferred by science as the final result of scientific knowledge: the object of science is to demonstrate, not why, but that things happen in a certain way; and it is admitted, or rather insisted upon, e.g. by J. S. Mill, that if scientific knowledge were carried to its utmost conceivable or inconceivable perfection, the question why anything should happen or does happen would remain as great a mystery as ever, and must remain so, for the simple reason that it is a question which science does not even put, much less attempt to answer. Nevertheless, it is said, science does prove what she undertakes to show, viz. that things do happen in certain ways, which ways when formulated appear as laws of science. That, however, is not strictly the case if science, in order to prove her conclusions, has to postulate that each and every state of things is the outcome of some antecedent necessity. Ultimately the postulate proves untrue; for there can have been no necessity antecedent to the initial arrangement of things. And if the postulate be untrue, the conclusions based on it cannot be accepted as certain. If we cannot tell whether it be true or not, neither can we tell whether science be true or not. If it is unintelligible, no wonder that things, as explained by it, are mysterious.
But let us waive these theoretical objections. Does Science, as a matter of fact, prove that things do happen in the ways she describes? In justice to her, let us remember that she does not undertake to do even that. Her laws only state the way in which things tend to happen, not the way in which they actually do happen; only what would happen if there were no counteracting causes and if certain conditions, which do not prevail, did prevail—not what does really happen in the world as we know it. Herein the scientific reason behaves in exactly the same way as the moral or religious reason. Science no more alleges that all bodies in motion do move for ever in the same straight line, at the same rate, than the moral reason alleges that all men always do what is right or that they always do God’s will. The allegation is that the tendency exists and can be discerned by those qualified to form an opinion on the matter. That there is friction retarding the movement, and that there are obstacles diverting it, is admitted; and, though the admission does not affect the truth (in one way) of the laws of science, it does allow that they convey no exact or faithful picture of what actually happens in the world as it is.
But if the laws of science do not explain what happens—even in the limited sense of scientific explanation—they are the indispensable preliminary to that explanation. If they do not represent the world as it is, they supply the means by which we may hereafter produce the picture. They are ideals not in the sense that science hopes to show eventually that feathers only appear to float leisurely to the ground, and are really all the time falling sixteen feet in a second, but in the sense that starting from the gravitation formula we could show that every feather’s fall is as rationally comprehensible as the gravitation formula itself. They are not the ultimate truth, the final reality, or Science’s supreme ideal. They are shadows cast by the scientific ideal before its coming; they are the principles by which science must proceed, if she is to make the world of things intelligible. So, too, the reality of the moral ideal does not imply that, in refusing to make sacrifices for others, I only appear to be selfish, and shall be found in the end really to have been actuated all the time by some high moral principle. What is implied is that only by the acceptance of the moral ideal can the world of men be moralised. From the same point of view it seems hopeless to try to make out that atheism, though not in appearance, will be found in reality to have been a manifestation of religion. It is by accepting, not by denying the religious ideal or doubting its existence, that the ideal of religion is achieved.
Now, in the theory of evolution we have the attempt made to effect this transition from the abstractions of science to the concrete facts, to show that the world as presented to sense is as intelligible and rationally comprehensible as the laws of science themselves, and that the hypothetical statements of science were but preliminary, though necessary preliminaries, to a categorical statement of actual facts. In evolution, as indeed in all the historical sciences, we abandon the elasticity and the uncertainty of conditional conceptions for the rigidity and certainty of accomplished fact. We no longer deal with what may happen if given conditions are realised, but with what has been, and therefore is subject to no “ifs.” We start from the certainty of what is, and thus we argue back positively to what must have been.
There is, however, one precaution which must be observed, and without which the whole of the system just described is as uncertain and conditional as the rest of science. Before we can argue from what is to what has been, we must first know for certain what is. Before we can conclude that a patient has been healed by faith or cured miraculously of an incurable complaint, we must first have medical evidence to show that he had the disease. Or, to take a better and closer illustration from medicine, it is premature to assign a cause for a patient’s condition before his condition has been diagnosed; and physicians who differ in their diagnosis will naturally differ as to the causes in the patient’s past history which are responsible for his state.
If, then, the evolutionist is to attain accuracy in his description of the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is, he must first know what it is. Before we can trace the evolution of morality, for instance, we must make up our minds as to what it is. If we regard it as an illusion, we shall hold that it is subject to the same laws as other illusions, and we shall have no difficulty in showing that its evolution was a necessary consequence of those laws. Or, again, if we hold that religion is mere foolery or hysteria, we shall naturally infer a very different process for its evolution than if we feel it to be a permanent manifestation of the common consciousness in the same sense that morality is. A distinguished German mythologist, starting from the former diagnosis, has no difficulty in evolving primitive religion out of primitive drunkenness.
In fine, if we regard “what is” as giving the data by which we are to determine what has been, it is clear that to understand what has been we must properly appreciate what is. This is in accordance with the conclusion which we have reached previously that it is only by studying its effects that we can properly understand a cause. To judge a thing properly we must know the effects it is capable of producing: to know what a thing is we must observe what it becomes or what it is capable of becoming at its best. We cannot judge the value of the moral character or the moral ideal fairly if we take a low specimen to go by; nor if we knew nothing more of morality than what we could observe of its rudiments in the higher animals, should we know much about it. It is by its highest manifestations that we most correctly judge either morality or art, and it is only through them that we can be properly said even to understand what either art or morality is. So, too, taking the religious ideal as love of God and man, we must judge religion not by its imperfect manifestations in imperfect beings, but by its perfect revelation and realisation in Christ.
The case is not otherwise with science or evolution itself. From primitive times man has always used his knowledge (however imperfect) of what is as the basis of speculations as to what has been. It would, however, be absurd to take the puerile and barbarous cosmogonies of the savage as adequate expressions of the scientific ideal, or to imagine that it is from them that we can judge what science is. It is no less unreasonable to judge the theory of evolution by its present, passing phase. In the first place, there are facts in its history which show that it naturally started with a partial and one-sided view of the facts. In the next place, we must judge it not by what it may be at its worst, but by what it is capable of becoming at its best; and it is by the latter that we must decide what evolution truly is, not by the former.
At its worst the theory of evolution may require us to believe that the whole process of evolution is essentially irrational—being the outcome of unintelligent forces operating on reasonless matter—and that the theory of evolution, accordingly, if faithful to the facts, is as irrational as they; or, if rational, is a misleading account of the real universe in which we live and move and have our being.
On the other hand, the theory at its best may require us to believe that it reveals a universe run on rational principles, a real world perfectly intelligible to perfect reason, and partially intelligible even to beings who share but partially in the Divine reason that animates the whole.
Both theories, however, base themselves upon what is, and profess that their conclusions follow logically from it. If, then, they differ in their conclusions it is because they differ in their diagnosis of what is. Both admit the existence of faith; but one regards faith as a fact in the pathology of human reason, the other regards it as the normal mode of our common reason’s operation. The latter, therefore, requires to postulate causes which will account for the correctness of the common faith of mankind; the latter, causes which have resulted in the common illusion of mankind.
It seems, then, that even in evolution we do not escape after all from the indeterminate and conditional knowledge, which science offers, to the absolute certainty of accomplished fact. Every theory of the past history of the world is just as conditional, just as much dependent on an “if,” as the hypothetical laws of science, for any such theory is dependent on the view it takes of what is, and is correct only if that view is correct.
The theories of evolution which we have called the Optimistic and the Pessimistic interpretations of evolution are avowedly based on the assumption that a large part of the common faith of mankind is a mental or moral disease. According to Mr. Herbert Spencer the faith that we can know what is real is an illusion: the Real is the Unknowable. According to Professor Huxley the common faith in the freedom of the will is an illusion: necessity is the law of the uniformity both of Nature and of human nature. In thus declining to accept the testimony of the moral and religious consciousness as evidence of what is, both philosophers were influenced by the belief that it is science alone which is capable of ascertaining and demonstrating what is and what actually does happen. This belief, however, we have ventured to suggest, overlooks two facts. One is that the abstract sciences do not even profess to state what actually does happen: they simply affirm that, if the conditions stated in their various laws are the only conditions operative, the only result will be that stated by the particular law in question. Thus science does not concern itself with what is or does happen, but solely with what would be or would happen under certain (usually impossible) conditions. The other point overlooked is that the historical or comparative sciences are also only hypothetically true. All that their laws undertake to demonstrate is that, if certain consequences constitute the whole of an observed effect, then the only conditions antecedently operative were those stated in the law. Here too, then, science does not even claim to prove what is or demonstrate what does happen, but assumes that we know it or find it out, in some way with which science does not concern itself. If we do know and can know what is, science can tell us what were the conditions that produced it.
The question, then, that we have to put to any theory of evolution—that is, to any theory which professes to state the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is—is, “Does it account for that totality? do the causes which it assumes to have been at work account for all that is?” Now, a priori it was not to be expected that evolution would in its infancy, and it is still young, succeed in accounting for all things; and there were special reasons in the circumstances under which it first took its modern scientific shape which necessarily limited its earliest attempts to grasp the totality of things. It would, however, be absurd to judge the principle by the first attempt to apply it, and to condemn it because it has not done in a moment what with time it assuredly will succeed in effecting. At the same time, it can only effect that wider success by refusing to stereotype its first errors and by declining to bind itself to the dogma that what it has succeeded in explaining is all that there is to explain, or that that alone is or happens which its present assumptions or laws are capable of accounting for. There lies the danger which threatens to check the further development of the theory of evolution—in the dogmatism which pretends to set aside common sense and the common reason, and arrogates to itself the sole right of saying what is; and succeeds in doing so by the simple but circular argument that that alone is or happens which can be accounted for by the laws that regulate the movements of things in space or that follow from the struggle for animal existence.
Historically, the theory of evolution in its first manifestation was an extension to the historical sciences generally of a purely biological conception, that of the origin of species as a consequence of the struggle for existence. It was found that much else in the manifold of what is, many other differences between related things, besides the differences which mark off one species of animals from another, might be accounted for, historically, by the theory that those differences were but the sum and the accumulation of an infinite number of small modifications which had given the thing an advantage over its rivals in the struggle for existence. Strictly speaking, all that this remarkable and wide-reaching discovery implied as a matter of logic was that between animals and things not animal there existed an analogy or resemblance, in virtue of which it was logical to argue from things animal to things not animal just so far as the resemblance between them went, but not further. Very naturally, however, it happened that with this originally biological conception all its biological implications were taken over, and it was (and is) argued not merely that there are great and fruitful resemblances between, say, society and an animal organism, but that societies are animal organisms. In fine, sociology was treated as a department of biology. The fallacy that science demonstrates what is, and that what science does not account for has no real existence, thus made its appearance simultaneously with the birth of the evolution theory. The resemblances between the evolution of the social organism and of animal organisms could be accounted for by the biological theory of the struggle for existence; the differences, therefore, must be denied or laboriously explained away. With the growth of sociology, however, it is becoming apparent that the evolution of society has laws, some of which do indeed coincide with those of animal evolution, but others of which are peculiar to sociology in the same sense as the laws of chemistry are distinct from those of physics. Sociology is accordingly revolting from its bondage to biology: the plain fact that society is not an animal is beginning to make itself felt. The resemblances between the organisation of society and that of an animal are freely admitted, but the differences are beginning to claim consideration also; and the sound doctrine is beginning to assert itself that by experience alone, experience of what is, and not by any a priori dogmatism as to what in the name of science must be, can we tell how far the resemblances extend as a matter of fact and where the differences begin. That the evolution theory must be the gainer by thus admitting the facts instead of denying their existence is clear; if sociology is not a branch of biology, and yet the two sciences have certain laws in common, a great step is at once taken towards demonstrating the existence of certain general principles of evolution which are higher than the laws of either, or perhaps than of any, particular science.
The tendency of the scientific theories prevailing for the moment to deny the existence of what they cannot, for the moment, account for, is exemplified in another way by the theory of the survival of the fittest. It was shown by Darwin that, granted the tendency to variation in animals, the struggle for existence was enough in its results—as he had the genius to discern them—to account for the origin of species. The struggle for existence is a fact, and thus animal evolution was based on what is, on positive fact. To apply the same process of argument to human and social evolution was perfectly scientific and legitimate. What is neither scientific nor legitimate is to maintain, explicitly or implicitly, that the totality of human activity is engaged and exhausted in the struggle for existence. Self-preservation is undoubtedly a powerful instinct, but it is not the only instinct even of animals, and is not always the most powerful in man—or in the brute. That there are resemblances between man and his fellow-creatures, the brutes, and that so far as those resemblances extend, man and the animals have been, and are, subject to the same laws of evolutions, are facts which may be heartily admitted, but which neither authorise us to deny the existence of specifically human peculiarities, nor warrant us in trying to deduce the differences from a law which applies only to the resemblances. If the evolution theory is to state the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is, it must begin by facing the whole of the facts—in this case by admitting that not only have the fittest to survive survived, as is natural in a struggle for existence, but that progress, æsthetic, ethical, and religious, has been made.
The denial of this fact may either be open and avowed, as, for instance, when the reality of the religious ideal is formally denounced; or it may be tacit and implied, as, for instance, when moral progress is defined as adaptation to environment, i.e. as not progress at all, or when the freedom of the will is denied, i.e. when approximation to the ethical ideal is maintained to be a thing not under our control. Tacit or avowed, this denial proceeds upon the fallacy that the laws of science, as understood and formulated at any particular moment, are the sole test and constitute our only knowledge of what is. But the interests both of the common sense of mankind and that specially organised form of common sense which we know as science require a protest against that fallacy: it is opposed to the principle on which scientific knowledge rests, and it would be fatal, if acted upon, to all further development of that knowledge.
The principle upon which science rests is that its laws are capable of verification, and that they are verified when and if they are confirmed by experience. The final appeal of science is to the evidence of consciousness, the only evidence of what is that we possess: the only evidence of the truth and accuracy with which an eclipse has been calculated is the evidence of our senses that the eclipse does take place and is visible in the place and at the time predicted. If a hypothesis predicts results which as a matter of observation do not take place, the hypothesis is judged so far inaccurate or inadequate: what is over-rides our preconceived opinions, even if they be the hypotheses of science, as to what ought to be or will be. It is the ever-open appeal to the final court of fact, of what is, that condemns false assumptions, guarantees the truth of science, and safeguards the freedom of scientific inquiry. To allow any group of men, however eminent, or any body of science, however sound, to deprive us of this right of appeal and bid us disbelieve in the evidence of our own senses, if it contradicts their theories, would be to submit to the tyranny of dogmatism, and to be faithless to the cause of truth.
Fortunately, though the unconscious and therefore ill-considered metaphysics of some men of science have tended in the direction of scientific dogmatism, the practice of science has been in the opposite direction. In practice science has owed much of her progress to the study of “residual phenomena.” Phenomena which the laws of science for the moment could not account for have not been denounced as illusions, or ruled out of court as non-existent or beneath the notice of science: they have been accepted as facts, as part of the totality of things which it is the ambition of science to account for; and, accepted as such, they have led, it may be, to the discovery of a new planet or a new element, but always to the discovery of fresh truths, which never would have enriched the page of science had science refused to take cognisance of facts the laws of which it had not at the time discovered.
In demanding, then, that any theory which professes to account for the totality of things should recognise the fact of ethical and æsthetic progress, and that all progress is willed and purposed, we are seeking not to cramp science but to enlarge its bounds, not to introduce a new scientific method, but to extend the application of existing methods, and to carry out the principle on which the truth of science and the freedom of scientific inquiry are based. The laws which enable the physicist to explain the mechanical action and reaction of things do not suffice to explain the reactions studied by the chemist. The laws of chemistry are inadequate for the purposes of the biologist. It is but an extension of the same principle when the student of the anthropological sciences finds it necessary to assume, or rather discovers, that the laws of animal existence do not wholly account for everything that man does; and it is to these sciences that we must look for the next important and fruitful modification of the general theory of evolution. It is to them, dealing as they do with the highest product of evolution, that we must look for the truest interpretation of evolution. On the principle that to understand what a thing is we must not reduce it to its lowest terms, but look at it in its highest manifestation, we must judge the evolution process by its highest phase, by all that it is capable of, and not by the least we can, by scientific abstraction, leave in it. And the sciences which, merely to maintain their scientific existence, have a vital interest in insisting on the reality of will and purpose as causes which have influenced the direction of the evolution process are the sciences which deal with man.
Those who find it easy to believe that a society is an animal, like those who proclaim that the real is unknowable, but that our knowledge of it is just as good as if it were not unknowable, will have little difficulty in believing that men’s actions are not influenced by their purposes; and both will probably subscribe to the doctrine that, first, approximation to the ideal is an unintended result of the brute struggle for mere animal existence; and, next, the purpose which appears to mark the evolution process and to be the cause of progress is semblance only, a mere illusion. Against the first article of this doctrine the final and decisive appeal is and always must be to experience. It makes a general statement with regard to particular facts of experience: like every other statement made in the form of a scientific law, it affirms that a certain proposition will be found, when tested by experience, to be true of every one of a certain class of facts in our experience. It is therefore competent for every man, who chooses to consult his experience, to decide for himself whether the statement is true. In the present case, it is for every man, who has struggled with temptation and has achieved any progress, to say whether he gained the victory without an effort of will, without any desire for better things, without any purpose or resolution to try once more, without any intention not to yield the next time. Are “secret commissions” in trade refused, when refused, unintentionally? or is their refusal due solely to the blind instinct of self-preservation in the struggle for commercial existence? If reform is effected, will it be effected by those who declare that the severity of the struggle for existence makes reform impossible? or by those in whom the ideal of honesty has some operative force and who purpose approximation to that ideal? When the conviction is expressed that public opinion alone will be able to check this form of dishonesty, what is that but an appeal to the common sense and common faith that there are other things which man can will and purpose besides success in the struggle for existence?
The doctrine that the universe presents the mere semblance of purpose, that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is shared by materialistic systems in common with all those which consider that the only explanation that can be rendered of any given state of things is the assumption that it is the issue of some antecedent necessity which produced it. As we have already argued, the assumption of necessity as the ultimate explanation of things breaks down when we come to consider the beginning of the universe. If we assume an absolute beginning, then there can have been no necessity antecedent to that, and the beginning of things is left without explanation. On the other hand, to say that there never was any beginning is to admit that there never was any original necessity why things should follow the course of evolution which they have pursued—the initial collocation of causes was due to chance, was a purely fortuitous concurrence of atoms. When it is remarked that this is a strange assumption, that really, if the whole evolution process had been designed to reach the stage in which we know it and to attain the ideal which we surmise it to be capable of, the primeval atoms could not have been arranged better for the purpose, the reply is that the appearance of purpose is a delusion: true, as a matter of chance, the chances are millions to one against a fortuitous concurrence of atoms producing the evolution process that has taken place, but then the chances were just as great, neither more nor less, against any other of the millions of evolution processes that might have been evolved. We know the one that has taken place, and it is marvellous in our eyes that precisely this and no other should have occurred; but the wonder vanishes when we reflect that, had any other occurred, we should have been equally convinced, and equally erroneously convinced, that it could not have been produced by chance. The initial arrangement of things was, as it happened, such as to produce our evolution process: things might have chanced differently at the beginning; if they had, a different evolution process would have taken place, that is all. But it would still have looked like purpose, and would still have been due to chance.
But would it? The whole question is whether the initial collocation was due to chance or to purpose. To say that there might have been many other collocations proves nothing: an Almighty Power could collocate things in any of an infinite number of ways. To argue that every possible collocation, and therefore the one that produced our evolution process, must be due to chance, is simply to beg the question: the very thing we want to know is whether this or any other process could be due to chance. The argument that any and every other process would equally testify to purpose and equally imply design, seems rather to indicate that no conceivable evolution process could conceivably be due to chance.
Next, the necessitarian argument lays it down that the marvel of evolution vanishes when we reflect that if things had been different at the beginning, the results would have been different. But they were not. And the fact that they were not is just the marvel which the necessitarian does not even explain away: in order to diminish the probability of purpose, he postulates countless possible alternatives to the original arrangement of atoms, and then he is embarrassed with the difficulty of getting rid of them. Why was this particular collocation determined on rather than one of the countless alternatives? To say it was chance may be true; but we want to know what reason there is for believing it to be true. If there is none, then neither is there any reason for believing the purpose that makes the evolution process to be an illusion.
But let us grant it was chance: chance, as everyone knows, is merely a name for our ignorance as to the real cause; so that to say it was due to chance is to say that, for anything we know to the contrary, the original concurrence of atoms may have been due to purpose. In a word, there is, on the theory of chance, no reason to believe that purpose either is or is not an illusion.
It may, however, be said that not only do we not know, but that we cannot know, whether it is an illusion or not. In reply we may either admit that all our knowledge—scientific, moral, and religious—is based not on knowledge, but on faith; or we may ask on what grounds this alleged impossibility is based. If we put that question, we shall find that the grounds are not altogether cogent. It is alleged to be equally impossible for the human mind to conceive either the existence or the non-existence of a necessity antecedent to the absolute beginning of things: therefore, in face of this inherent incapacity of the human mind, the truth about the beginning of things is unknowable and inconceivable. But, we venture to suggest, this alleged incapacity of the human mind rests on a false antithesis: it rests on the assumption that whatever phase of the evolution process we regard as the initial arrangement must either have been determined by some prior phase (in which case it was not initial) or not determined at all. But as a mere matter of logic, there remains the possibility that it may have been self-determined; and, as regards the evidence of experience, we are familiar with a cause which operates every day and which is self-determined, viz. the free will. There is, therefore, no such inherent incapacity in the human mind as is alleged; and the only inconceivability is that which is inherent in the theory of antecedent necessity, and not in the facts themselves. It is simply incorrect to say that if things cannot be explained by the theory of antecedent necessity, they are not capable of being explained at all. If the evolution process had been designed to follow the course it has followed, the initial arrangement of things could not have been better adapted to produce the result; and, as adaptation of means to end is the mark of intelligence, it is neither inconceivable nor irrational to suppose that purpose was immanent in things from the beginning.
But as it is scientific to argue from the known to the unknown, or from the better known to the less known; and as to know fully what a thing is we must know what it is capable of becoming or producing, let us pass from the pre-animal to the animal stage of evolution. It is the more necessary to do this because it was Darwin’s theory of the origin of species which impressed upon the modern mind the idea that Nature mimics purpose, having none. Man, with the purpose of breeding a certain type of animal, selects those animals to breed from which possess, in the most marked degree, the characteristics which he wishes to develop in the offspring. But, as Darwin demonstrated, Nature, or the environment, by killing off those creatures which did not possess (or least possessed) the qualities necessary to ensure survival, “selects” animals of a certain type to breed from. Thus “natural selection” produces its results in the same way as human selection does; and presents every appearance of purpose, though the environment which produced the results could have had no intentions or purpose at all. But just as man does not create the animals which he first selects to breed from, so the environment does not create those sports or varieties which it selects to breed from: if they did not exist, neither man nor Nature could breed from them—no results, purposed or unpurposed, could be got from them.
If now we inquire about these sports, we are told science is content with the fact that they undeniably occur: wherever there are animals there are varieties in their offspring. That those which are adapted to survive will survive, and those which are not will not, is a self-evident, indeed an identical, proposition. It is; and it gives away the whole case against purpose, for it admits that some varieties are originally adapted to survive, that without them neither man nor the environment would have anything to begin on or work on, and that though man and Nature may develop, they do not create the original adaptation. They do but promote, by conscious or unconscious action, the purpose immanent in the sport. Of all the numerous, successive, imperceptible increments by which what was originally a sport is raised to a distinct species, not one is created by man or by the environment: all are the “gratuitous offerings” of the organism, manifestations of the organism’s spontaneity, revelations of its latent capacities, fulfilments of the purpose immanent in it from the beginning.
If it be said that the survival of any or every given species was a matter of chance, because other sports would have developed into other species, if the environment had been different, the reply again is, But it was not; and, on the theory of necessity, could not be. The fact that both conditions—the organism’s spontaneity and the environment’s selective agency—were requisite to the production of the new species, and that both conditions were forthcoming, tells rather in favour of purpose than against it. The fact that this particular combination of conditions was effected, rather than any other, is on exactly the same footing as the initial concurrence of atoms: if the latter cannot be ascribed to any necessity antecedent to it, neither can the former; the reason of the combination is to be sought in the self-determining cause immanent in the conditions. The fact, if it be a fact, that countless other combinations were possible, and this alone was chosen, shows that the will immanent in the evolution process is free will.
In fine, Darwin has shown that the action of the environment is exactly what it would have been had it been designed for the purpose of selecting certain sports for development. All that is further necessary in order to show that this apparent purpose is an illusion, is to prove that the environment was not designed to act as it does. Pending the production of that proof, the argument remains incomplete.
The larger part of the process of evolution is known to us only from the outside: we observe its effects in the animal world and in inorganic nature, but its inner workings we have to reach by inference. One part of the evolution process, however, we know from the inside—that part which is carried on through us. We are some of the innumerable channels through which the motive force of the process is transmitted; and the knowledge which its transmission through us gives us is more intimate and direct than that which we get from observing the external effects it produces elsewhere. The evolution of society, for instance, is a part of the general process of evolution, and is a process which is carried on through us and expresses the resultant of the totality of our sentiments and actions towards one another. What light, then, if any, is thrown by sociology on the general question of purpose?
Mr. Herbert Spencer has familiarised us with the lesson that in politics and social experiments it is the unforeseen and unintended results of legislation which are far the most important, and that the industrial organisation of the country, or we may now say of the world, is not the fulfilment of any design preconceived by any governmental agency, but the unintended result of innumerable actions on the part of men who never dreamed that their action would have any such outcome. The reason of this is to be sought in the fact that society is an organism and that its growth follows the same laws as those which regulate the structural development of an am[oe]ba or a rhizopod. Thus, both society and the animal organism must be fed. To be fed, both must appropriate nutriment from the environment. That nutriment must be taken up and must be distributed to all parts of the organism, social or animal, if all parts are to be fed—and all must be fed, because all are mutually dependent, and to neglect one would disorganise the whole. Channels of communication must be established between all parts, in order that food may be conveyed from the organ which took it from the environment to the organs which require it for support. What marks the process of evolution in both cases is the increasing division of labour and the increasing interdependence of the parts on one another. The animal organism, like the social organism, is made up of a multitude of living units, each one of which is continually adjusting itself to the requirements of all the rest. The increasing complexity in the structure of an animal organism is possible only because the living units of one part take upon themselves new functions, or devote themselves exclusively to one function, in order to benefit the units of a distant part. If they purposed or were purposed to produce that result, they could not behave differently or better. But this appearance of purpose is mere semblance: the minute cells of an animal organism have no intention of producing even a rhizopod or an am[oe]ba. The explanation of this mimicry of purpose lies in the fact of the mutual interdependence of the parts: no change can take place in one organ of society or of the animal without being transmitted through the whole, just as you cannot remove one of the undermost of a cartload of bricks without more or less disturbing all the rest. But what is true of the bricks or of the units of the animal organism is true of the units of the social organism: what we discover in their action and reaction on one another is the operation, not of voluntary purpose, but of invariable laws of cause and effect.
According to this argument, then, the living units of the animal organism resemble in their action those of the social organism sufficiently to warrant us in arguing from the one to the other, and in concluding that there is purpose in the action of neither. But it is obvious that, if the resemblance is great enough to justify us in arguing from the animal to the social organism, it also opens the way for the argument to travel the return journey, from the social organism to the animal, and to reach the conclusion that there is purpose in both. Let us therefore consider what each of these two opposite conclusions requires us to believe.
On the one hand, before accepting the argument that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism because there is none in that of the animal, we must prove that there is none in that of the animal. But that, as we have already urged, is exactly what has not been proved: the utmost that science claims to prove is that the units of the animal organism do behave in a certain way. That way is exactly the way in which they would behave if they were designed to do so; and science leaves it, so far, a perfectly open question whether they were or were not so designed. The argument, therefore, that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism, because none in the animal, breaks down at the threshold. Yet it is on the unproved and unprovable assertion that the appearance of purpose in the animal organism cannot possibly be due to design, and must therefore be a delusion, that we are expected to deny the evidence of our own experience and consciousness and to believe that we, the units of the social organism, have no purpose in the daily acts by which we extend trade or discharge our social functions.
Thus the surmise that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is a conjecture which, so far as it is applied to the pre-human stages of the evolution process, simply plays upon our ignorance; and which, when applied to that part of the evolution process which is carried on through us, we know to be absurd. On the other hand, if there is such similarity between the laws of the one part of the process and the laws of the other part, it must be as allowable to argue from the part and the laws which we do know to the part and the laws that we do not know, as it is to explain the known by what is confessedly unknown. In other words, if the evolution of the social organism is known to be due to purpose, then it is a reasonable inference that animal evolution, which, we are told, follows the same line and laws, is due also to purpose—and if not to any purpose entertained by the cells of the animal organism, then to that of a Will of which their action is the expression.
It is, however, maintained that the continuous social changes which constitute the evolution of society, so far from being the result of the purpose of any individual or of any government, are frequently the very opposite of what was intended by the authors of the changes, and always are notoriously beyond our power to forecast. But the fact that my plans are modified or diverted by my successors or by my coadjutors does not prove that there was no purpose in my plans, or that there was none in the modifications introduced by my successors. And the total result of our united action and purposes may be something different from what any of us individually intended and yet express a common purpose, which is shown by the result to have been more or less present to all of us. A cathedral begun in the Norman style may have taken generations to build and may end in Gothic; and it will express the ideas common to the several builders, in much the same way that a composite photograph reproduces most distinctly the features in which all the persons photographed coincide, and other features more or less distinctly according to the extent to which they are shared in common by the different subjects. Or, to express the effect of the successive actions of succeeding generations, we may borrow an illustration from the game of chess. It is possible for five players to play, taking it in turns to move, so that every player makes one move out of five, and plays alternately for White and Black. The result, with good players, is a brilliant and well-developed game, which is not the game as purposed or intended by any one of the five players, but as continually modified and improved by each every time that he took it up. When, then, we reflect how many players in the game of life there are even in a small society, we can well understand that, though each has his own way of serving the common purpose, none can forecast the result.
Perhaps it will be said that the chess-players have a common purpose, and the players in life’s game have none. The reply is that science assumes they have; science assumes that they play to win in the struggle for existence; and only on the assumption that men have common purposes is it possible to frame any scientific account of their actions. The science of Political Economy assumes that it is a common purpose of men to acquire wealth, and that their actions are determined by that purpose. It then goes on to show that if that is their purpose, then the conditions under which it can be and is effected are of a certain kind, e.g. men must buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. It is not necessary to assume, nor does Political Economy assume, that man can only purpose to acquire wealth, or that he must under all circumstances do so. In the same way it is wholly unscientific in sociology to assume that success in the struggle for existence is either a thing that man must aim at, or the only thing that he can aim at: the soldier dies for his country, the martyr for his faith. The institutions of a nation—legal, political, social, and religious—express the predominant purposes for which successive generations of the community have laboured; and the evolution of mankind is the history of the various degrees of success with which men have realised the ideals which they have purposed to attain. The successive reforms by which progress has been effected have all been purposed, and have all been purposed by men who believed, rightly or wrongly, that in so doing they were serving God and their fellow-men, and that the ideals of truth, justice, equality, fraternity, love, compassion, and mercy express God’s will and the Divine purpose.
If, then, the outcome of the pre-human period of evolution has been, as a matter of fact, and amongst other things, such as to prepare the earth for man’s habitation and to provide him with a mechanism, physiological and psychological, such that he can use it, if he will, to promote what he considers to be progress and advance, it is not unreasonable for him to regard past phases of evolution as so many steps leading to the realisation of the ideals which he cherishes, in his best moments, as his highest purposes. The continuity of evolution and the unity of its process authorise or even compel him to use that part of the process which is carried on through him as a means to interpret the rest. As, in the game of chess played by five players, each player inherits from his predecessor the game as it stands, and carries on, with improvements or modifications, the scheme which he inherits, so in life each player in turn becomes conscious of the ideals which he too may, or may not, as he wills, carry one step nearer to their goal. It is in the continuity with which these ideals are transmitted through one consciousness after another that the continuity of human evolution consists. We are, or may be if we choose, particles in the medium by which a purpose not our own (save inasmuch as we choose to make it so) is carried onwards to its destination. The medium through which progress has travelled in the past is Nature; the medium through which it is now travelling is human nature. By us the ideal, as it is transmitted through our consciousness, is recognised as implying the presence in us of a purpose higher than our own. Whether in the medium of Nature there is any dim consciousness of the progress towards which the changes in Nature conspire, we know not. But the uniformity of Nature and human nature requires us to see in those natural changes the operation of the same power travelling in the same direction as it does through us. In its passage through us it is made known to us as the object of our highest aspirations; the ideal of purity, of holiness, and love; the God for whom the human heart, mistakenly or not, has always sought, and never sought in vain.