Through Nature to God

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Title: Through Nature to God
Author: Fiske, John, 1842-1901
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Through Nature to God" ***

THROUGH NATURE
TO GOD

JOHN FISKE

_Soyez comme l'oiseau posé pour un instant
Sur des rameaux trop frêles,
Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant,
Sachant qu'il a des ailes!_

VICTOR HUGO

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1900

TO THE BELOVED AND REVERED MEMORY
OF MY FRIEND

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

THIS BOOK IS CONSECRATED

[Illustration]

PREFACE

A single purpose runs throughout this little book, though different
aspects of it are treated in the three several parts. The first part,
"The Mystery of Evil," written soon after "The Idea of God," was
designed to supply some considerations which for the sake of conciseness
had been omitted from that book. Its close kinship with the second part,
"The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice," will be at once apparent
to the reader.

That second part is, with a few slight changes, the Phi Beta Kappa
oration delivered by me at Harvard University, in June, 1895. Its
original title was "Ethics in the Cosmic Process," and its form of
statement was partly determined by the fact that it was intended as a
reply to Huxley's famous Romanes lecture delivered at the University of
Oxford in 1893. Readers of "The Destiny of Man" will observe that I have
here repeated a portion of the argument of that book. The detection of
the part played by the lengthening of infancy in the genesis of the
human race is my own especial contribution to the Doctrine of Evolution,
so that I naturally feel somewhat uncertain as to how far that subject
is generally understood, and how far a brief allusion to it will
suffice. It therefore seemed best to recapitulate the argument while
indicating its bearing upon the ethics of the Cosmic Process.

I can never cease to regret that Huxley should have passed away without
seeing my argument and giving me the benefit of his comments. The
subject is one of a kind which we loved to discuss on quiet Sunday
evenings at his fireside in London, many years ago. I have observed on
Huxley's part, not only in the Romanes lecture, but also in the charming
"Prolegomena," written in 1894, a tendency to use the phrase "cosmic
process" in a restricted sense as equivalent to "natural selection;" and
doubtless if due allowance were made for that circumstance, the
appearance of antagonism between us would be greatly diminished. In our
many talks, however, I always felt that, along with abundant general
sympathy, there was a discernible difference in mental attitude. Upon
the proposition that "the foundation of morality is to ... give up
pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence," we were
heartily agreed. But I often found myself more strongly inclined than my
dear friend to ask the Tennysonian question:--

"Who forged that other influence,
That heat of inward evidence,
By which he doubts against the sense?"

In the third part of the present little book, "The Everlasting Reality
of Religion," my aim is to show that "that other influence," that inward
conviction, the craving for a final cause, the theistic assumption, is
itself one of the master facts of the universe, and as much entitled to
respect as any fact in physical nature can possibly be. The argument
flashed upon me about ten years ago, while reading Herbert Spencer's
controversy with Frederic Harrison concerning the nature and reality of
religion. Because Spencer derived historically the greater part of the
modern belief in an Unseen World from the savage's primeval world of
dreams and ghosts, some of his critics maintained that logical
consistency required him to dismiss the modern belief as utterly false;
otherwise he would be guilty of seeking to evolve truth from false-hood.
By no means, replied Spencer: "Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the
religious consciousness is the final development of a consciousness
which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous
errors." This suggestion has borne fruit in the third part of the
present volume, where I have introduced a wholly new line of argument to
show that the Doctrine of Evolution, properly understood, does not
leave the scales equally balanced between Materialism and Theism, but
irredeemably discredits the former, while it places the latter upon a
firmer foundation than it has ever before occupied.

My reference to the French materialism of the eighteenth century, in its
contrast with the theism of Voltaire, is intended to point the stronger
contrast between the feeble survivals of that materialism in our time
and the unshakable theism which is in harmony with the Doctrine of
Evolution. When some naturalist like Haeckel assures us that as
evolutionists we are bound to believe that death ends all, it is a great
mistake to hold the Doctrine of Evolution responsible for such a
statement. Haeckel's opinion was never reached through a scientific
study of evolution; it is nothing but an echo from the French
speculation of the eighteenth century. Such a writer as La Mettrie
proceeded upon the assumption that no belief concerning anything in the
heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth, is
worthy of serious consideration unless it can be demonstrated by the
methods employed in physical science. Such a mental attitude was natural
enough at a time when the mediæval theory of the world was falling into
discredit, while astronomy and physics were winning brilliant victories
through the use of new methods. It was an attitude likely to endure so
long as the old-fashioned fragmentary and piecemeal habits of studying
nature were persisted in; and the change did not come until the latter
half of the nineteenth century.

The encyclopædic attainments of Alexander von Humboldt, for example,
left him, to all intents and purposes, a materialist of the eighteenth
century. But shortly before the death of that great German scholar,
there appeared the English book which heralded a complete reversal of
the attitude of science. The "Principles of Psychology," published in
1855 by Herbert Spencer, was the first application of the theory of
evolution on a grand scale. Taken in connection with the discoveries of
natural selection, of spectrum analysis, and of the mechanical
equivalence between molar and molecular motions, it led the way to that
sublime conception of the Unity of Nature by which the minds of
scientific thinkers are now coming to be dominated. The attitude of mind
which expressed itself in a great encyclopædic book without any
pervading principle of unity, like Humboldt's "Kosmos," is now become
what the Germans call _ein ueberwundener Standpunkt_, or something that
we have passed by and left behind.

When we have once thoroughly grasped the monotheistic conception of the
universe as an organic whole, animated by the omnipresent spirit of God,
we have forever taken leave of that materialism to which the universe
was merely an endless multitude of phenomena. We begin to catch glimpses
of the meaning and dramatic purpose of things; at all events we rest
assured that there really is such a meaning. Though the history of our
lives, and of all life upon our planet, as written down by the
unswerving finger of Nature, may exhibit all events and their final
purpose in unmistakable sequence, yet to our limited vision the several
fragments of the record, like the leaves of the Cumæan sibyl, caught by
the fitful breezes of circumstance and whirled wantonly hither and
thither, lie in such intricate confusion that no ingenuity can enable us
wholly to decipher the legend. But could we attain to a knowledge
commensurate with the reality--could we penetrate the hidden depths
where, according to Dante (_Paradiso_, xxxiii. 85), the story of Nature,
no longer scattered in truant leaves, is bound with divine love in a
mystic volume, we should find therein no traces of hazard or
incongruity. From man's origin we gather hints of his destiny, and the
study of evolution leads our thoughts through Nature to God.

CAMBRIDGE, March 2, 1899.

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

THE MYSTERY OF EVIL

I. _The Serpent's Promise to the Woman_ 3

II. _The Pilgrim's Burden_ 8

III. _Manichæism and Calvinism_ 14

IV. _The Dramatic Unity of Nature_ 22

V. _What Conscious Life is made of_ 27

VI. _Without the Element of Antagonism there
could be no Consciousness, and therefore
no World_ 34

VII. _A Word of Caution_ 40

VIII. _The Hermit and the Angel_ 43

IX. _Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brutehood_ 48

X. _The Relativity of Evil_ 54

THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE AND SELF-SACRIFICE

I. _The Summer Field, and what it tells us_ 59

II. _Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process_ 65

III. _Caliban's Philosophy_ 72

IV. _Can it be that the Cosmic Process has no
Relation to Moral Ends?_ 74

V. _First Stages in the Genesis of Man_ 80

VI. _The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man_ 86

VII. _The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened Infancy_ 88

VIII. _Some of its Effects_ 96

IX. _Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments_ 102

X. _The Cosmic Process exists purely for the
Sake of Moral Ends_ 109

XI. _Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism_ 117

XII. _The Omnipresent Ethical Trend_ 127

THE EVERLASTING REALITY OF RELIGION

I. "_Deo erexit Voltaire_" 133

II. _The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of
God_ 147

III. _Weakness of Materialism_ 152

IV. _Religion's First Postulate: the Quasi-Human
God_ 163

V. _Religion's Second Postulate: the undying
Human Soul_ 168

VI. _Religion's Third Postulate: the Ethical Significance
of the Unseen World_ 171

VII. _Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or
an Eternal Reality?_ 174

VIII. _The Fundamental Aspect of Life_ 177

IX. _How the Evolution of Senses expands the
World_ 182

X. _Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting
Reality of Religion_ 186

THE MYSTERY OF EVIL

I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create
darkness; I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these
things.--ISAIAH, xiv. 6, 7.

Did not our God bring all this evil upon us?--NEHEMIAH, xiii. 18.

Οὐκ ἔοικε δ’ ἡ φύσις ἐπεισοδιώδης οὖσα ἐκ τῶν φαινομένων, ὥσπερ
μοχθηρὰ τραγῳδία.--ARISTOTLE, _Metaphysica_, xiii. 3.

[Illustration]

_The Serpent's Promise to the Woman_

"Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing
good and evil." _Genesis_ iii. 5.

The legend in which the serpent is represented as giving this counsel to
the mother of mankind occurs at the beginning of the Pentateuch in the
form which that collection of writings assumed after the return of the
Jews from the captivity at Babylon, and there is good reason for
believing that it was first placed there at that time. Allusions to Eden
in the Old Testament literature are extremely scarce,[1] and the story
of Eve's temptation first assumes prominence in the writings of St.
Paul. The marks of Zoroastrian thought in it have often been pointed
out. This garden of Eden is a true Persian paradise, situated somewhere
in that remote wonderland of Aryana Vaëjo to which all Iranian tradition
is so fond of pointing back. The wily serpent is a genuine Parsee
serpent, and the spirit which animates him is that of the malicious and
tricksome Ahriman, who takes delight in going about after the good
creator Ormuzd and spoiling his handiwork. He is not yet identified with
the terrible Satan, the accusing angel who finds out men's evil thoughts
and deeds. He is simply a mischief-maker, and the punishment meted out
to him for his mischief reminds one of many a curious passage in the
beast epos of primitive peoples. As in the stories which tell why the
mole is blind or why the fox has a bushy tail, the serpent's conduct is
made to account for some of his peculiar attributes. As a punishment he
is made to crawl upon his belly, and be forever an object of especial
dread and loathing to all the children of Eve.

What, then, is the crime for which the serpent Ahriman thus makes bitter
expiation? In what way has he spoiled Ormuzd's last and most wonderful
creation? He has introduced the sense of sin: the man and the woman are
afraid, and hide themselves from their Lord whom they have offended. Yet
he has been not altogether a deceiving serpent. In one respect he had
spoken profound truth. The man and the woman have become as gods. In the
Hebrew story Jehovah says, "Behold the man is become as one of us;" that
is to say, one of the Elohim or heavenly host, who know the good and the
evil. Man has apparently become a creature against whom precautions need
to be taken. It is hinted that by eating of the other tree and acquiring
immortal life he would achieve some result not in accordance with
Jehovah's will, yet which it would then be too late to prevent.
Accordingly, any such proceedings are forestalled by driving the man and
woman from the garden, and placing sentinels there with a fiery sword
which turns hither and thither to warn off all who would tread the path
that leads to the tree of life. The anthropomorphism of the story is as
vivid as in those Homeric scenes in which gods and men contend with one
another in battle. It is plainly indicated that Jehovah's wrath is
kindled at man's presumption in meddling with what belongs only to the
Elohim; man is punished for his arrogance in the same spirit as when,
later on, he gives his daughters in marriage to the sons of the Elohim
and brings on a deluge, or when he strives to build a tower that will
reach to heaven and is visited with a confusion of tongues. So here in
Eden he has come to know too much, and Ahriman's heinous crime has
consisted in helping him to this interdicted knowledge.

The serpent's promise to the woman was worthy of the wisest and most
astute of animals. But with yet greater subtlety he might have declared,
Except ye acquire the knowledge of good and evil, ye cannot come to be
as gods; divine life can never be yours. Throughout the Christian world
this legend of the lost paradise has figured as the story of the Fall of
Man; and naturally, because of the theological use of it made by St.
Paul, who first lifted the story into prominence in illustrating his
theory of Christ as the second Adam: since by man came death into the
world, by man came also the resurrection from death and from sin. That
there is truth of the most vital sort in the Pauline theory is
undeniable; but there are many things that will bear looking at from
opposite points of view, for aspects of truth are often to be found on
both sides of the shield, and there is a sense in which we may regard
the loss of paradise as in itself the beginning of the Rise of Man. For
this, indeed, we have already found some justification in the legend
itself. It is in no spirit of paradox that I make this suggestion. The
more patiently one scrutinizes the processes whereby things have come to
be what they are, the more deeply is one impressed with its profound
significance.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Isaiah li. 3; Joel ii. 3; Ezekiel xxviii. 13, xxxi. 8, 9.

[Illustration]

_The Pilgrim's Burden_

But before I can properly elucidate this view, and make clear what is
meant by connecting the loss of innocence with the beginning of the Rise
of Man, it is necessary to bestow a few words upon a well-worn theme,
and recall to mind the helpless and hopeless bewilderment into which all
theologies and all philosophies have been thrown by the problem of the
existence of evil. From the ancient Greek and Hebrew thinkers who were
saddened by the spectacle of wickedness insolent and unpunished, down to
the aged Voltaire and the youthful Goethe who felt their theories of
God's justice quite baffled by the Lisbon earthquake, or down to the
atheistic pessimist of our own time who asserts that the Power which
sustains the world is but a blind and terrible force without concern
for man's welfare of body or of soul,--from first to last the history of
philosophy teems with the mournful instances of this discouragement. In
that tale of War and Peace wherein the fervid genius of Tolstoi has
depicted scenes and characters of modern life with truthful grandeur
like that of the ancient epic poems, when our friend, the genial and
thoughtful hero of the story, stands in the public square at Moscow,
uncertain of his fate, while the kindly bright-faced peasant and the
eager pale young mechanic are shot dead by his side, and all for a silly
suspicion on the part of Napoleon's soldiery; as he stands and sees the
bodies, still warm and quivering, tossed into a trench and loose earth
hastily shovelled over them, his manly heart surges in rebellion against
a world in which such things can be, and a voice within him cries
out,--not in the mood in which the fool crieth, but with the anguish of
a tender soul wrung by the sight of stupendous iniquity,--"There is no
God!" It is but the utterance of an old-world feeling, natural enough to
hard-pressed and sorely tried humanity in those moments that have come
to it only too often, when triumphant wrong is dreadfully real and close
at hand, while anything like compensation seems shadowy and doubtful and
far away.

It is this feeling that has created the belief in a devil, an adversary
to the good God, an adversary hard to conquer or baffle. The feeling
underlies every theological creed, and in every system of philosophy we
find it lurking somewhere. In these dark regions of thought, which
science has such scanty means for exploring, the statements which make
up a creed are apt to be the outgrowth of such an all-pervading
sentiment, while their form will be found to vary with the knowledge of
nature--meagre enough at all times, and even in our boasted time--which
happens to characterize the age in which they are made. Hence,
well-nigh universally has philosophy proceeded upon the assumption,
whether tacit or avowed, that pain and wrong are things hard to be
reconciled with the theory that the world is created and ruled by a
Being at once all-powerful and all-benevolent. Why does such a Being
permit the misery that we behold encompassing us on every side? When we
would fain believe that God is love indeed, and love creation's final
law, how comes it that nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine,
shrieks against our creed? If this question could be fairly answered,
does it not seem as if the burden of life, which so often seems
intolerable, would forthwith slip from our shoulders, and leave us, like
Bunyan's pilgrim, free and bold and light-hearted to contend against all
the ills of the world?

Ever since human intelligence became enlightened enough to grope for a
meaning and purpose in human life, this problem of the existence of evil
has been the burden of man. In the effort to throw it off, leaders of
thought have had recourse to almost every imaginable device. It has
usually been found necessary to represent the Creator as finite either
in power or in goodness, although the limitation is seldom avowed,
except by writers who have a leaning toward atheism and take a grim
pleasure in pointing out flaws in the constitution of things. Among
modern writers the most conspicuous instance of this temper is afforded
by that much too positive philosopher Auguste Comte, who would fain have
tipped the earth's axis at a different angle and altered the
arrangements of nature in many fanciful ways. He was like Alphonso, the
learned king of Castile, who regretted that he had not been present when
the world was created,--he could have given such excellent advice!

In a very different mood the great Leibnitz, in his famous theory of
optimism, argued that a perfect world is in the nature of things
impossible, but that the world in which we live is the best of possible
worlds. The limitation of the Creator's power is made somewhat more
explicitly by Plato, who regarded the world as the imperfect realization
of a Divine Idea that in itself is perfect. It is owing to the
intractableness and vileness of matter that the Divine Idea finds itself
so imperfectly realized. Thus the Creator's power is limited by the
nature of the material out of which he makes the world. In other words,
the world in which we live is the best the Creator could make out of the
wretched material at his disposal. This Platonic view is closely akin to
that of Leibnitz, but is expressed in such wise as to lend itself more
readily to myth-making. Matter is not only considered as what Dr.
Martineau would call a "datum objective to God," but it is endowed with
a diabolical character of its own.

[Illustration]

III

_Manichæism and Calvinism_

It is but a step from this to the complicated personifications of
Gnosticism, with its Demiurgus, or inferior spirit that created the
world. By some of the Gnostics the Creator was held to be merely an
inferior emanation from God, a notion which had a powerful indirect
effect upon the shaping of Christian doctrine in the second and third
centuries of our era. A similar thought appears in the mournful question
asked by Tennyson's Arthur:--

"O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world
And had not force to shape it as he would?"

But some Gnostics went so far as to hold that the world was originally
created by the Devil, and is to be gradually purified and redeemed by
the beneficent power of God as manifested through Jesus Christ. This
notion is just the opposite to that of the Vendidad, which represents
the world as coming into existence pure and perfect, only to be
forthwith defiled by the trail of the serpent Ahriman. In both these
opposing theories the divine power is distinctly and avowedly curtailed
by the introduction of a rival power that is diabolical; upon this point
Parsee and Gnostic are agreed. Distinct sources are postulated for the
evil and the good. The one may be regarded as infinite in goodness, the
other as infinite in badness, and the world in which we live is a
product of the everlasting conflict between the two. This has been the
fundamental idea in all Manichæan systems, and it is needless to say
that it has always exerted a mighty influence upon Christian theology.
The Christian conception of the Devil, as regards its deeper ethical
aspect, has owed much to the Parsee conception of Ahriman. It can hardly
be said, however, that there has been any coherent, closely reasoned,
and generally accepted Christian theory of the subject. The notions just
mentioned are in themselves too shadowy and vague, they bear too plainly
the marks of their mythologic pedigree, to admit of being worked into
such a coherent and closely reasoned theory. Christian thought has
simply played fast and loose with these conceptions, speaking in one
breath of divine omnipotence, and in the next alluding to the conflict
between good and evil in language fraught with Manichæism.

In recent times Mr. John Stuart Mill has shown a marked preference for
the Manichæan view, and has stated it with clearness and consistency,
because he is not hampered by the feeling that he ought to reach one
conclusion rather than another. Mr. Mill does not urge his view upon the
reader, nor even defend it as his own view, but simply suggests it as
perhaps the view which is for the theist most free from difficulties and
contradictions. Mr. Mill does not, like the Manichæans, imagine a
personified principle of evil; nor does he, like Plato, entertain a
horror of what is sometimes, with amusing vehemence, stigmatized as
"brute matter." He does not undertake to suggest how or why the divine
power is limited; but he distinctly prefers the alternative which
sacrifices the attribute of omnipotence in order to preserve in our
conception of Deity the attribute of goodness. According to Mr. Mill, we
may regard the all-wise and holy Deity as a creative energy that is
perpetually at work in eliminating evil from the universe. His wisdom is
perfect, his goodness is infinite, but his power is limited by some
inexplicable viciousness in the original constitution of things which it
must require a long succession of ages to overcome. In such a view Mr.
Mill sees much that is ennobling. The humblest human being who resists
an impulse to sin, or helps in the slightest degree to leave the world
better than he found it, may actually be regarded as a participator in
the creative work of God; and thus each act of human life acquires a
solemn significance that is almost overwhelming to contemplate.

These suggestions of Mr. Mill are extremely interesting, because he was
the last great modern thinker whose early training was not influenced by
that prodigious expansion of scientific knowledge which, since the
middle of the nineteenth century, has taken shape in the doctrine of
evolution. This movement began early enough to determine the
intellectual careers of eminent thinkers born between 1820 and 1830,
such as Spencer and Huxley. Mr. Mill was a dozen years too old for this.
He was born at nearly the same time as Mr. Darwin, but his mental habits
were formed too soon for him to profit fully by the new movement of
thought; and although his attitude toward the new ideas was hospitable,
they never fructified in his mind. While his thinking has been of great
value to the world, much of it belongs to an era which we have now left
far behind. This is illustrated in the degree to which he was influenced
by the speculations of Auguste Comte. Probably no two leaders of
thought, whose dates of birth were scarcely a quarter of a century
apart, were ever separated by such a stupendous gulf as that which
intervenes between Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, and this fact may
serve as an index to the rapidity of movement which has characterized
the nineteenth century. Another illustration of the old-fashioned
character of Mill's philosophy is to be seen in his use of Paley's
argument from design in support of the belief in a beneficent Creator.
Mill adopted this argument, and, as a professed free-thinker, carried it
to the logical conclusion from which Paley, as a churchman, could not
but shrink. This was the conclusion which I have already mentioned, that
God's creative power has been limited by some inexplicable viciousness
in the original constitution of things.

I feel as if one could not be too grateful to Mr. Mill for having so
neatly and sharply stated, in modern language and with modern
illustrations, this old conclusion, which after all is substantially
that of Plato and the Gnostics. For the shock which such a clear, bold
statement gives to our religious feelings is no greater than the shock
with which it strikes counter to our modern scientific philosophy.
Suppose we could bring back to earth a Calvinist of the seventeenth
century and question him. He might well say that the God which Mr. Mill
offers us, shorn of the attribute of omnipotence, is no God at all. He
would say with the Hebrew prophet, that God has created the evil along
with the good, and that he has done so for a purpose which human reason,
could it once comprehend all the conditions of the case, would most
surely approve as infinitely wise and holy. Our Calvinist would ask who
is responsible for the original constitution of things if not the
Creator himself, and in supposing anything essentially vicious in that
constitution, have not Plato and the Gnostics and the Manichæans and
Mr. Mill simply taken counsel of their ignorance? Nay, more, the
Calvinist would declare that if we really understood the universe of
which humanity is a part, we should find scientific justification for
that supreme and victorious faith which cries, "Though he slay me, yet
will I trust in him!" The man who has acquired such faith as this is the
true freeman of the universe, clad in stoutest coat of mail against
disaster and sophistry,--the man whom nothing can enslave, and whose
guerdon is the serene happiness that can never be taken away.

[Illustration]

_The Dramatic Unity of Nature_

Now in these strong assertions it seems to me that the Calvinist is much
more nearly in accord with our modern knowledge than are Plato and Mill.
It is not wise to hazard statements as to what the future may bring
forth, but I do not see how the dualism implied in all these attempts to
refer good and evil to different creative sources can ever be seriously
maintained again. The advance of modern science carries us irresistibly
to what some German philosophers call monism, but I prefer to call it
monotheism. In getting rid of the Devil and regarding the universe as
the multiform manifestation of a single all-pervading Deity, we become
for the first time pure and uncompromising monotheists,--believers in
the ever-living, unchangeable, and all-wise Heavenly Father, in whom we
may declare our trust without the faintest trace of mental reservation.

If we can truly take such a position, and hold it rationally, it is the
modern science so apt to be decried by the bats and owls of orthodoxy
that justifies us in doing so. For what is the philosophic purport of
these beautiful and sublime discoveries with which the keen insight and
patient diligence of modern students of science are beginning to be
rewarded? What is the lesson that is taught alike by the correlation of
forces, by spectrum analysis, by the revelations of chemistry as to the
subtle behaviour of molecules inaccessible to the eye of sense, by the
astronomy that is beginning to sketch the physical history of countless
suns in the firmament, by the palæontology which is slowly unravelling
the wonders of past life upon the earth through millions of ages? What
is the grand lesson that is taught by all this? It is the lesson of the
unity of nature. To learn it rightly is to learn that all the things
that we can see and know, in the course of our life in this world, are
so intimately woven together that nothing could be left out without
reducing the whole marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else may be
true, the conviction is brought home to us that in all this endless
multifariousness there is one single principle at work, that all is
tending toward an end that was involved from the very beginning, if one
can speak of beginnings and ends where the process is eternal. The whole
universe is animated by a single principle of life, and whatever we see
in it, whether to our half-trained understanding and narrow experience
it may seem to be good or bad, is an indispensable part of the
stupendous scheme. As Aristotle said, so long ago, in one of those
characteristic flashes of insight into the heart of things in which no
one has ever excelled him, in nature there is nothing that is out of
place or interpolated, as in an ill-constructed drama.

To-day we can begin to realize how much was implied in this prophetic
hint of Aristotle's, for we are forced to admit that whatever may be the
function of evil in this world, it is unquestionably an indispensable
function, and not something interpolated from without. Whatever exists
is part of the dramatic whole, and this can quickly be proved. The
goodness in the world--all that we love and praise and emulate--we are
ready enough to admit into our scheme of things, and to rest upon it our
belief in God. The misery, the pain, the wickedness, we would fain leave
out. But if there were no such thing as evil, how could there be such a
thing as goodness? Or to put it somewhat differently, if we had never
known anything but goodness, how could we ever distinguish it from evil?
How could we recognize it as good? How would its quality of goodness in
any wise interest or concern us? This question goes down to the bottom
of things, for it appeals to the fundamental conditions according to
which conscious intelligence exists at all. Its answer will therefore
be likely to help us. It will not enable us to solve the problem of
evil, enshrouded as it is in a mystery impenetrable by finite
intelligence, but it will help us to state the problem correctly; and
surely this is no small help. In the mere work of purifying our
intellectual vision there is that which heals and soothes us. To learn
to see things without distortion is to prepare one's self for taking the
world in the right mood, and in this we find strength and consolation.

[Illustration]

_What Conscious Life is made of_

To return to our question, how could we have good without evil, we must
pause for a moment and inquire into the constitution of the human mind.
What we call the soul, the mind, the conscious self, is something
strange and wonderful. In our ordinary efforts to conceive it, invisible
and impalpable as it is, we are apt to try so strenuously to divorce it
from the notion of substance that it seems ethereal, unreal, ghostlike.
Yet of all realities the soul is the most solid, sound, and undeniable.
Thoughts and feelings are the fundamental facts from which there is no
escaping. Our whole universe, from the sands on the seashore to the
flaming suns that throng the Milky Way, is built up of sights and
sounds, of tastes and odours, of pleasures and pains, of sensations of
motion and resistance either felt directly or inferred. This is no
ghostly universe, but all intensely real as it exists in that intensest
of realities, the human soul! Consciousness, the soul's fundamental
fact, is the most fundamental of facts. But a truly marvellous affair is
consciousness! The most general truth that we can assert with regard to
it is this, that it exists only by virtue of incessant change. A state
of consciousness that should continue through an appreciable interval of
time without undergoing change would not be a state of consciousness. It
would be unconsciousness.

This perpetual change, then, is what makes conscious life. It is only by
virtue of this endless procession of fleeting phases of consciousness
that the human soul exists at all. It is thus that we are made. Why we
should have been made thus is a question aiming so far beyond our ken
that it is idle to ask it. We might as well inquire whether Infinite
Power could have made twice two equal five. We must rest content with
knowing that it is thus we were created; it is thus that the human soul
exists. Just as dynamic astronomy rests upon the law of gravitation,
just as physics is based upon the properties of waves, so the modern
science of mind has been built upon the fundamental truth that
consciousness exists only by virtue of unceasing change. Our conscious
life is a stream of varying psychical states which quickly follow one
another in a perpetual shimmer, with never an instant of rest. The
elementary psychical states, indeed, lie below consciousness, or, as we
say, they are sub-conscious. We may call these primitive pulsations the
psychical molecules out of which are compounded the feelings and
thoughts that well up into the full stream of consciousness. Just as in
chemistry we explain the qualitative differences among things as due to
diversities of arrangement among compounded molecules and atoms, so in
psychology we have come to see that thoughts and feelings in all their
endless variety are diversely compounded of sub-conscious psychical
molecules.

Musical sounds furnish us with a simple and familiar illustration of
this. When the sounds of taps or blows impinge upon the ear slowly, at
the rate of not more than sixteen in a second, they are cognized as
separate and non-musical noises. When they pass beyond that rate of
speed, they are cognized as a continuous musical tone of very low pitch;
a state of consciousness which seems simple, but which we now see is
really compound. As the speed of the blows increases, further
qualitative differences arise; the musical tone rises in pitch until it
becomes too acute for the ear to cognize, and thus vanishes from
consciousness. But this is far from being the whole story; for the
series of blows or pulsations make not only a single vivid fundamental
tone, but also a multifarious companion group of fainter overtones, and
the diverse blending of these faint harmonics constitutes the whole
difference in tone quality between the piano and the flute, the violin
and the trumpet, or any other instruments. If you take up a violin and
sound the F one octave above the treble staff, there are produced, in
the course of a single second, several thousand psychical states which
together make up the sensation of pitch, fifty-five times as many
psychical states which together make up the sensation of tone quality,
and an immense number of other psychical states which together make up
the sensation of intensity. These psychical states are not, in any
strict sense of the term, states of consciousness; for if they were to
rise individually into consciousness, the result would be an immense
multitude of sensations, and not a single apparently homogeneous
sensation. There is no alternative but to conclude that in this case a
seemingly simple state of consciousness is in reality compounded of an
immense multitude of sub-conscious psychical changes.

Now, what is thus true in the case of musical sounds is equally true of
all states of consciousness whatever, both those that we call
intellectual and those that we call emotional. All are highly compounded
aggregates of innumerable minute sub-conscious psychical pulsations, if
we may so call them. In every stream of human consciousness that we call
a soul each second of time witnesses thousands of infinitely small
changes, in which one fleeting group of pulsations in the primordial
mind-stuff gives place to another and a different but equally fleeting
group. Each group is unlike its immediate predecessor. The absence of
difference would be continuance, and continuance means stagnation,
blankness, negation, death. That ceaseless flutter, in which the
quintescence of conscious life consists, is kept up by the perpetual
introduction of the relations of likeness and unlikeness. Each one of
the infinitesimal changes is a little act of discrimination, a
recognition of a unit of feeling as either like or unlike some other
unit of feeling. So in these depths of the soul's life the arrangements
and re-arrangements of units go on, while on the surface the results
appear from moment to moment in sensations keen or dull, in perceptions
clear or vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in memories gay or sad, in
sordid or lofty trains of thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love.
The whole fabric of human thought and human emotion is built up out of
minute sub-conscious discriminations of likenesses and unlikenesses,
just as much as the material world in all its beauty is built up out of
undulations among invisible molecules.

[Illustration]

_Without the Element of Antagonism there could be no Consciousness, and
therefore no World_

We may now come up out of these depths, accessible only to the plummet
of psychologic analysis, and move with somewhat freer gait in the region
of common and familiar experiences. It is an undeniable fact that we
cannot know anything whatever except as contrasted with something else.
The contrast may be bold and sharp, or it may dwindle into a slight
discrimination, but it must be there. If the figures on your canvas are
indistinguishable from the background, there is surely no picture to be
seen. Some element of unlikeness, some germ of antagonism, some chance
for discrimination, is essential to every act of knowing. I might have
illustrated this point concretely without all the foregoing explanation,
but I have aimed at paying it the respect due to its vast importance. I
have wished to show how the fact that we cannot know anything whatever
except as contrasted with something else is a fact that is deeply rooted
in the innermost structure of the human mind. It is not a superficial
but a fundamental truth, that if there were no colour but red it would
be exactly the same thing as if there were no colour at all. In a world
of unqualified redness, our state of mind with regard to colour would be
precisely like our state of mind in the present world with regard to the
pressure of the atmosphere if we were always to stay in one place. We
are always bearing up against the burden of this deep aerial ocean,
nearly fifteen pounds upon every square inch of our bodies; but until we
can get a chance to discriminate, as by climbing a mountain, we are
quite unconscious of this heavy pressure. In the same way, if we knew
but one colour we should know no colour. If our ears were to be filled
with one monotonous roar of Niagara, unbroken by alien sounds, the
effect upon consciousness would be absolute silence. If our palates had
never come in contact with any tasteful thing save sugar, we should know
no more of sweetness than of bitterness. If we had never felt physical
pain, we could not recognize physical pleasure. For want of the
contrasted background its pleasurableness would be non-existent. And in
just the same way it follows that without knowing that which is morally
evil we could not possibly recognize that which is morally good. Of
these antagonist correlatives, the one is unthinkable in the absence of
the other. In a sinless and painless world, human conduct might possess
more outward marks of perfection than any saint ever dreamed of; but the
moral element would be lacking; the goodness would have no more
significance in our conscious life than that load of atmosphere which we
are always carrying about with us.

We are thus brought to a striking conclusion, the essential soundness of
which cannot be gainsaid. In a happy world there must be sorrow and
pain, and in a moral world the knowledge of evil is indispensable. The
stern necessity for this has been proved to inhere in the innermost
constitution of the human soul. It is part and parcel of the universe.
To him who is disposed to cavil at the world which God has in such wise
created, we may fairly put the question whether the prospect of escape
from its ills would ever induce him to put off this human consciousness,
and accept in exchange some form of existence unknown and inconceivable!
The alternative is clear: on the one hand a world with sin and
suffering, on the other hand an unthinkable world in which conscious
life does not involve contrast.

The profound truth of Aristotle's remark is thus more forcibly than ever
brought home to us. We do not find that evil has been interpolated into
the universe from without; we find that, on the contrary, it is an
indispensable part of the dramatic whole. God is the creator of evil,
and from the eternal scheme of things diabolism is forever excluded.
Ormuzd and Ahriman have had their day and perished, along with the
doctrine of special creations and other fancies of the untutored human
mind. From our present standpoint we may fairly ask, What would have
been the worth of that primitive innocence portrayed in the myth of the
garden of Eden, had it ever been realized in the life of men? What would
have been the moral value or significance of a race of human beings
ignorant of sin, and doing beneficent acts with no more consciousness or
volition than the deftly contrived machine that picks up raw material at
one end, and turns out some finished product at the other? Clearly, for
strong and resolute men and women an Eden would be but a fool's
paradise. How could anything fit to be called _character_ have ever been
produced there? But for tasting the forbidden fruit, in what respect
could man have become a being of higher order than the beasts of the
field? An interesting question is this, for it leads us to consider the
genesis of the idea of moral evil in man.

[Illustration]

VII

_A Word of Caution_

Before we enter upon this topic a word of caution may be needed. I do
not wish the purpose of the foregoing questions to be misunderstood. The
serial nature of human thinking and speaking makes it impossible to
express one's thought on any great subject in a solid block; one must
needs give it forth in consecutive fragments, so that parts of it run
the risk of being lost upon the reader or hearer, while other parts are
made to assume undue proportions. Moreover, there are many minds that
habitually catch at the fragments of a thought, and never seize it in
the block; and in such manner do strange misconceptions arise. I never
could have dreamed, until taught by droll experience, that the foregoing
allusions to the garden of Eden could be understood as a glorification
of sin, and an invitation to my fellow-men to come forth with me and be
wicked! But even so it was, on one occasion when I was trying, somewhat
more scantily than here, to state the present case. In the midst of my
endeavour to justify the grand spirit of faith which our fathers showed
when from abysmal depths of affliction they never failed to cry that God
doeth all things well, I was suddenly interrupted with queries as to
just what percentage of sin and crime I regarded as needful for the
moral equilibrium of the universe; how much did I propose to commit
myself, how much would I advise people in general to commit, and just
where would I have them stop! Others deemed it necessary to remind me
that there is already too much suffering in the world, and we ought not
to seek to increase it; that the difference between right and wrong is
of great practical importance; and that if we try to treat evil as good
we shall make good no better than evil.

When one has sufficiently recovered one's gravity, it is permissible to
reply to such criticisms that the sharp antithesis between good and evil
is essential to every step of my argument, which would entirely collapse
if the antagonism were for one moment disregarded. The quantity of
suffering in the world is unquestionably so great as to prompt us to do
all in our power to diminish it; such we shall presently see must be the
case in a world that proceeds through stages of evolution. When one
reverently assumes that it was through some all-wise and holy purpose
that sin was permitted to come into the world, it ought to be quite
superfluous to add that the fulfilment of any such purpose demands that
sin be not cherished, but suppressed. If one seeks, as a philosopher, to
explain and justify God's wholesale use of death in the general economy
of the universe, is one forsooth to be charged with praising murder as a
fine art and with seeking to found a society of Thugs?

[Illustration]

VIII

_The Hermit and the Angel_

The simple-hearted monks of the Middle Ages understood, in their own
quaint way, that God's methods of governing this universe are not always
fit to be imitated by his finite creatures. In one of the old stories
that furnished entertainment and instruction for the cloister it is said
that a hermit and an angel once journeyed together. The angel was in
human form and garb, but had told his companion the secret of his
exalted rank and nature. Coming at nightfall to a humble house by the
wayside, the two travellers craved shelter for the love of God. A dainty
supper and a soft, warm bed were given them, and in the middle of the
night the angel arose and strangled the kind host's infant son, who was
quietly sleeping in his cradle. The good hermit was paralyzed with
amazement and horror, but dared not speak a word. The next night the two
comrades were entertained at a fine mansion in the city, where the angel
stole the superb golden cup from which his host had quaffed wine at
dinner. Next day, while crossing the bridge over a deep and rapid
stream, a pilgrim met the travellers. "Canst thou show us, good father,"
said the angel, "the way to the next town?" As the pilgrim turned to
point it out, this terrible being caught him by the shoulder and flung
him into the river to drown. "Verily," thought the poor hermit, "it is a
devil that I have here with me, and all his works are evil;" but fear
held his tongue, and the twain fared on their way till the sun had set
and snow began to fall, and the howling of wolves was heard in the
forest hard by. Presently the bright light coming from a cheerful window
gave hope of a welcome refuge; but the surly master of the house turned
the travellers away from his door with curses and foul gibes. "Yonder
is my pig-sty for dirty vagrants like you." So they passed that night
among the swine; and in the morning the angel went to the house and
thanked the master for his hospitality, and gave him for a keepsake
(thrifty angel!) the stolen goblet. Then did the hermit's wrath and
disgust overcome his fears, and he loudly upbraided his companion. "Get
thee gone, wretched spirit!" he cried. "I will have no more of thee.
Thou pretendest to be a messenger from heaven, yet thou requitest good
with evil, and evil with good!" Then did the angel look upon him with
infinite compassion in his eyes. "Listen," said he, "short-sighted
mortal. The birth of that infant son had made the father covetous,
breaking God's commandments in order to heap up treasures which the boy,
if he had lived, would have wasted in idle debauchery. By my act, which
seemed so cruel, I saved both parent and child. The owner of the goblet
had once been abstemious, but was fast becoming a sot; the loss of his
cup has set him to thinking, and he will mend his ways. The poor
pilgrim, unknown to himself, was about to commit a mortal sin, when I
interfered and sent his unsullied soul to heaven. As for the wretch who
drove God's children from his door, he is, indeed, pleased for the
moment with the bauble I left in his hands; but hereafter he will burn
in hell." So spoke the angel; and when he had heard these words the
hermit bowed his venerable head and murmured, "Forgive me, Lord, that in
my ignorance I misjudged thee."

I suspect that, with all our boasted science, there is still much wisdom
for us in the humble childlike piety of the Gesta Romanorum. To say that
the ways of Providence are inscrutable is still something more than an
idle platitude, and there still is room for the belief that, could we
raise the veil that enshrouds eternal truth, we should see that behind
nature's cruelest works there are secret springs of divinest tenderness
and love. In this trustful mood we may now return to the question as to
the genesis of the idea of moral evil, and its close connection with
man's rise from a state of primeval innocence.

[Illustration]

_Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brutehood_

We have first to note that in various ways the action of natural
selection has been profoundly modified in the course of the development
of mankind from a race of inferior creatures. One of the chief factors
in the production of man was the change that occurred in the direction
of the working of natural selection, whereby in the line of man's direct
ancestry the variations in intelligence came to be seized upon,
cherished, and enhanced, to the comparative neglect of variations in
bodily structure. The physical differences between man and ape are less
important than the physical differences between African and South
American apes. The latter belong to different zoölogical families, but
the former do not. Zoölogically, man is simply one genus in the
old-world family of apes. Psychologically, he has travelled so far from
apes that the distance is scarcely measurable. This transcendent
contrast is primarily due to the change in the direction of the working
of natural selection. The consequences of this change were numerous and
far-reaching. One consequence was that gradual lengthening of the
plastic period of infancy which enabled man to became a progressive
creature, and organized the primeval semi-human horde into definite
family groups. I have elsewhere expounded this point, and it is known as
my own especial contribution to the theory of evolution.

Another associated consequence, which here more closely concerns us, was
the partial stoppage of the process of natural selection in remedying
unfitness. A quotation from Herbert Spencer will help us to understand
this partial stoppage: "As fast as the faculties are multiplied, so fast
does it become possible for the several members of a species to have
various kinds of superiorities over one another. While one saves its
life by higher speed, another does the like by clearer vision, another
by keener scent, another by quicker hearing, another by greater
strength, another by unusual power of enduring cold or hunger, another
by special sagacity, another by special timidity, another by special
courage.... Now ... each of these attributes, giving its possessor an
extra chance of life, is likely to be transmitted to posterity. But" it
is not nearly so likely to be increased by natural selection. For "if
those members of the species which have but ordinary" or even deficient
shares of some valuable attribute "nevertheless survive by virtue of
other superiorities which they severally possess, then it is not easy to
see how this particular attribute can be" enhanced in subsequent
generations by natural selection.[2]

These considerations apply especially to the human race with its
multitudinous capacities, and I can better explain the case by a crude
and imperfect illustration than by a detailed and elaborate statement.
If an individual antelope falls below the average of the herd in speed,
he is sure to become food for lions, and thus the high average of speed
in the herd is maintained by natural selection. But if an individual man
becomes a drunkard, though his capabilities be ever so much curtailed by
this vice, yet the variety of human faculty furnishes so many hooks with
which to keep one's hold upon life that he may sin long and flagrantly
without perishing; and if the drunkard survives, the action of natural
selection in weeding out drunkenness is checked. There is thus a wide
interval between the highest and lowest degrees of completeness in
living that are compatible with maintenance of life. Mankind has so many
other qualities beside the bad ones, which enable it to subsist and
achieve progress in spite of them, that natural selection--which always
works through death--cannot come into play.

Now it is because of this _interval_ between the highest and lowest
degrees of completeness of living that are compatible with the mere
maintenance of life, that men can be distinguished as morally bad or
morally good. In inferior animals, where there is no such interval,
there is no developed morality or conscience, though in a few of the
higher ones there are the germs of these things. Morality comes upon the
scene when there is an alternative offered of leading better lives or
worse lives. And just as up to this point the actions of the forefathers
of mankind have been determined by the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance
of pain, so now they begin to be practically determined by the pursuit
of goodness and avoidance of evil. This rise from a bestial to a moral
plane of existence involves the acquirement of the knowledge of good and
evil. Conscience is generated to play a part analogous to that played by
the sense of pain in the lower stages of life, and to keep us from wrong
doing. To the mere love of life, which is the conservative force that
keeps the whole animal world in existence, there now comes gradually to
be superadded the feeling of religious aspiration, which is nothing more
nor less than the yearning after the highest possible completeness of
spiritual life. In the lower stages of human development this religious
aspiration has as yet but an embryonic existence, and moral obligations
are still but imperfectly recognized. It is only after long ages of
social discipline, fraught with cruel afflictions and grinding misery,
that the moral law becomes dominant and religious aspiration intense and
abiding in the soul. When such a stage is reached, we have at last in
man a creature different in kind from his predecessors, and fit for an
everlasting life of progress, for a closer and closer communion with God
in beatitude that shall endure.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Biology, i. 454.

[Illustration]

_The Relativity of Evil_

As we survey the course of this wonderful evolution, it begins to become
manifest that moral evil is simply the characteristic of the lower state
of living as looked at from the higher state. Its existence is purely
relative, yet it is profoundly real, and in a process of perpetual
spiritual evolution its presence in some hideous form throughout a long
series of upward stages is indispensable. Its absence would mean
stagnation, quiescence, unprogressiveness. For the moment we exercise
conscious choice between one course of action and another, we recognize
the difference between better and worse, we foreshadow the whole grand
contrast between good and bad. In the process of spiritual evolution,
therefore, evil must needs be present. But the nature of evolution also
requires that it should be evanescent. In the higher stages that which
is worse than the best need no longer be positively bad. After the
nature of that which the upward-striving soul abhors has been forever
impressed upon it, amid the long vicissitudes of its pilgrimage through
the dark realms of sin and expiation, it is at length equipped for its
final sojourn

"In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love."

From the general analogies furnished in the process of evolution, we are
entitled to hope that, as it approaches its goal and man comes nearer to
God, the fact of evil will lapse into a mere memory, in which the
shadowed past shall serve as a background for the realized glory of the
present.

Thus we have arrived at the goal of my argument. We can at least begin
to realize distinctly that unless our eyes had been opened at some time,
so that we might come to know the good and the evil, we should never
have become fashioned in God's image. We should have been the denizens
of a world of puppets, where neither morality nor religion could have
found place or meaning. The mystery of evil remains a mystery still, but
it is no longer a harsh dissonance such as greeted the poet's ear when
the doors of hell were thrown open; for we see that this mystery belongs
among the profound harmonies in God's creation. This reflection may have
in it something that is consoling as we look forth upon the ills of the
world. Many are the pains of life, and the struggle with wickedness is
hard; its course is marked with sorrow and tears. But assuredly its deep
impress upon the human soul is the indispensable background against
which shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of heaven!

THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE AND SELF-SACRIFICE

O abbondante grazia, ond' io presunsi
Ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna
Tanto, che la veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna,
Legato con amore in un volume,
Ciò che per l' universo si squaderna.

DANTE, _Paradiso_, xxxiii. 82.

[Illustration]

_The Summer Field, and what it tells us_

There are few sights in Nature more restful to the soul than a daisied
field in June. Whether it be at the dewy hour of sunrise, with blithe
matin songs still echoing among the treetops, or while the luxuriant
splendour of noontide fills the delicate tints of the early foliage with
a pure glory of light, or in that more pensive time when long shadows
are thrown eastward and the fresh breath of the sea is felt, or even
under the solemn mantle of darkness, when all forms have faded from
sight and the night air is musical with the murmurs of innumerable
insects, amid all the varying moods through which the daily cycle runs,
the abiding sense is of unalloyed happiness, the profound tranquillity
of mind and heart that nothing ever brings save the contemplation of
perfect beauty. One's thought is carried back for the moment to that
morning of the world when God looked upon his work and saw that it was
good. If in the infinite and eternal Creative Energy one might imagine
some inherent impulse perpetually urging toward fresh creation, what
could it be more likely to be than the divine contentment in giving
objective existence to the boundless and subtle harmonies whereof our
world is made? That it is a world of perfect harmony and unsullied
beauty, who can doubt as he strolls through this summer field? As our
thought plays lightly with its sights and sounds, there is nothing but
gladness in the laugh of the bobolink; the thrush's tender note tells
only of the sweet domestic companionship of the nest; creeping and
winged things emerging from their grubs fill us with the sense of
abounding life; and the myriad buttercups, hallowed with vague memories
of June days in childhood, lose none of their charm in reminding us of
the profound sympathy and mutual dependence in which the worlds of
flowers and insects have grown up. The blades of waving grass, the
fluttering leaves upon the lilac bush, appeal to us with rare
fascination; for the green stuff that fills their cellular tissues, and
the tissues of all green things that grow, is the world's great
inimitable worker of wonders; its marvellous alchemy takes dead matter
and breathes into it the breath of life. But for that magician
chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, such things as animal life and
conscious intelligence would be impossible; there would be no problems
of creation, nor philosopher to speculate upon them. Thus the delight
that sense impression gives, as we wander among buttercups and daisies,
becomes deepened into gratitude and veneration, till we quite understand
how the rejuvenescence of Nature should in all ages have aroused men to
acts of worship, and should call forth from modern masters of music, the
most religious of the arts of expression, outbursts of sublimest song.

And yet we need but come a little closer to the facts to find them
apparently telling us a very different story. The moment we penetrate
below the superficial aspect of things the scene is changed. In the
folklore of Ireland there is a widespread belief in a fairyland of
eternal hope and brightness and youth situated a little way below the
roots of the grass. From that land of Tir nan Og, as the peasants call
it, the secret springs of life shoot forth their scions in this visible
world, and thither a few favoured mortals have now and then found their
way. It is into no blest country of Tir nan Og that our stern science
leads us, but into a scene of ugliness and hatred, strife and massacre.
Macaulay tells of the battlefield of Neerwinden, that the next summer
after that frightful slaughter the whole countryside was densely covered
with scarlet poppies, which people beheld with awe as a token of wrath
in heaven over the deeds wrought on earth by human passions. Any summer
field, though mantled in softest green, is the scene of butchery as
wholesale as that of Neerwinden and far more ruthless. The life of its
countless tiny denizens is one of unceasing toil, of crowding and
jostling, where the weaker fall unpitied by the way, of starvation from
hunger and cold, of robbery utterly shameless and murder utterly cruel.
That green sward in taking possession of its territory has exterminated
scores of flowering plants of the sort that human economics and
æsthetics stigmatize as weeds; nor do the blades of the victorious army
dwell side by side in amity, but in their eagerness to dally with the
sunbeams thrust aside and supplant one another without the smallest
compunction. Of the crawling insects and those that hum through the air,
with the quaint snail, the burrowing worm, the bloated toad, scarce one
in a hundred but succumbs to the buffets of adverse fortune before it
has achieved maturity and left offspring to replace it. The early bird,
who went forth in quest of the worm, was lucky if at the close of a day
as full of strife and peril as ever knight-errant encountered, he did
not himself serve as a meal for some giant foe in the gloaming. When we
think of the hawk's talons buried in the breast of the wren, while the
relentless beak tears the little wings from the quivering, bleeding
body, our mood toward Nature is changed, and we feel like recoiling from
a world in which such black injustice, such savage disregard for others,
is part of the general scheme.

[Illustration]

_Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process_

But as we look still further into the matter, our mood is changed once
more. We find that this hideous hatred and strife, this wholesale famine
and death, furnish the indispensable conditions for the evolution of
higher and higher types of life. Nay more, but for the pitiless
destruction of all individuals that fall short of a certain degree of
fitness to the circumstances of life into which they are born, the type
would inevitably degenerate, the life would become lower and meaner in
kind. Increase in richness, variety, complexity of life is gained only
by the selection of variations above or beyond a certain mean, and the
prompt execution of a death sentence upon all the rest. The principle of
natural selection is in one respect intensely Calvinistic; it elects
the one and damns the ninety and nine. In these processes of Nature
there is nothing that savours of communistic equality; but "to him that
hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even
that which he hath." Through this selection of a favoured few, a higher
type of life--or at all events a type in which there is more life--is
attained in many cases, but not always. Evolution and progress are not
synonymous terms. The survival of the fittest is not always a survival
of the best or of the most highly organized. The environment is
sometimes such that increase of fitness means degeneration of type, and
the animal and vegetable worlds show many instances of degeneration. One
brilliant instance is that which has preserved the clue to the remote
ancestry of the vertebrate type. The molluscoid ascidian, rooted
polyp-like on the sea beach in shallow water, has an embryonic history
which shows that its ancestors had once seen better days, when they
darted to and fro, fishlike, through the waves, with the prophecy of a
vertebrate skeleton within them. This is a case of marked degeneration.
More often survival of the fittest simply preserves the type unchanged
through long periods of time. But now and then under favourable
circumstances it raises the type. At all events, whenever the type is
raised, it is through survival of the fittest, implying destruction of
all save the fittest.

This last statement is probably true of all plants and of all animals
except that as applied to the human race it needs some transcendently
important qualifications which students of evolution are very apt to
neglect. I shall by and by point out these qualifications. At present we
may note that the development of civilization, on its political side,
has been a stupendous struggle for life, wherein the possession of
certain physical and mental attributes has enabled some tribes or
nations to prevail over others, and to subject or exterminate them. On
its industrial side the struggle has been no less fierce; the evolution
of higher efficiency through merciless competition is a matter of common
knowledge. Alike in the occupations of war and in those of peace,
superior capacity has thriven upon victories in which small heed has
been paid to the wishes or the welfare of the vanquished. In human
history perhaps no relation has been more persistently repeated than
that of the hawk and the wren. The aggression has usually been defended
as in the interests of higher civilization, and in the majority of cases
the defence has been sustained by the facts. It has indeed very commonly
been true that the survival of the strongest is the survival of the
fittest.

Such considerations affect our mood toward Nature in a way that is
somewhat bewildering. On the one hand, as we recognize in the universal
strife and slaughter a stern discipline through which the standard of
animate existence is raised and the life of creatures variously
enriched, we become to some extent reconciled to the facts. Assuming,
as we all do, that the attainment of higher life is in itself desirable,
our minds cannot remain utterly inhospitable towards things, however
odious in themselves, that help toward the desirable end. Since we
cannot rid the world of them, we acquiesce in their existence as part of
the machinery of God's providence, the intricacies of which our finite
minds cannot hope to unravel. On the other hand, a thought is likely to
arise which in days gone by we should have striven to suppress as too
impious for utterance; but it is wiser to let such thoughts find full
expression, for only thus can we be sure of understanding the kind of
problem we are trying to solve. Is not, then, this method of Nature,
which achieves progress only through misery and death, an exceedingly
brutal and clumsy method? Life, one would think, must be dear to the
everlasting Giver of life, yet how cheap it seems to be held in the
general scheme of things! In order that some race of moths may attain a
certain fantastic contour and marking of their wings, untold thousands
of moths are doomed to perish prematurely. Instead of making the
desirable object once for all, the method of Nature is to make something
else and reject it, and so on through countless ages, till by slow
approximations the creative thought is realized. Nature is often called
thrifty, yet could anything be more prodigal or more cynical than the
waste of individual lives? Does it not remind one of Charles Lamb's
famous story of the Chinaman whose house accidentally burned down and
roasted a pig, whereupon the dainty meat was tasted and its fame spread
abroad until epicures all over China were to be seen carrying home pigs
and forthwith setting fire to their houses? We need but add that the
custom thus established lasted for centuries, during which every dinner
of pig involved the sacrifice of a homestead, and we seem to have a
close parody upon the wastefulness of Nature, or of what is otherwise
called in these days the Cosmic Process. Upon such a view as this the
Cosmic Process appears in a high degree unintelligent, not to say
immoral.

[Illustration]

III

_Caliban's Philosophy_

Polytheism easily found a place for such views as these, inasmuch as it
could explain the unseemly aspects of Nature offhand by a reference to
malevolent deities. With Browning's Caliban, in his meditations upon
Setebos, that god whom he conceived in his own image, the recklessness
of Nature is mockery engendered half in spite, half in mere wantonness.
Setebos, he says,

"is strong and Lord,
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: So He."

Such is the kind of philosophy that commends itself to the beastly
Caliban, as he sprawls in the mire with small eft things creeping down
his back. His half-fledged mind can conceive no higher principle of
action--nothing more artistic, nothing more masterful--than wanton
mockery, and naturally he attributes it to his God; it is for him a
sufficient explanation of that little fragment of the Cosmic Process
with which he comes into contact.

[Illustration]

_Can it be that the Cosmic Process has no Relation to Moral Ends?_

But as long as we confine our attention to the universal struggle for
life and the survival of the fittest, without certain qualifications
presently to be mentioned, it is difficult for the most profound
intelligence to arrive at conclusions much more satisfactory than
Caliban's. If the spirit shown in Nature's works as thus contemplated is
not one of wanton mockery, it seems at any rate to be a spirit of stolid
indifference. It indicates a Blind Force rather than a Beneficent Wisdom
at the source of things. It is in some such mood as this that Huxley
tells us, in his famous address delivered at Oxford, in 1893, that there
is no sanction for morality in the Cosmic Process. "Men in society," he
says, "are undoubtedly subject to the cosmic process. As among other
animals, multiplication goes on without cessation and involves severe
competition for the means of support. The struggle for existence tends
to eliminate those less fitted to adapt themselves to the circumstances
of their existence. The strongest, the most self-assertive, tend to
tread down the weaker.... Social progress means a checking of the cosmic
process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may
be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of
those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the
conditions which exist, but of those who are ethically the best." Again,
says Huxley, "let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress
of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in
running away from it, but in combating it." And again he tells us that
while the moral sentiments have undoubtedly been evolved, yet since
"the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is so far as
much natural sanction for the one as for the other." And yet again, "the
cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends."

When these statements were first made they were received with surprise,
and they have since called forth much comment, for they sound like a
retreat from the position which an evolutionist is expected to hold.
They distinctly assert a breach of continuity between evolution in
general and the evolution of Man in particular; and thus they have
carried joy to the hearts of sundry theologians, of the sort that like
to regard Man as an infringer upon Nature. If there is no natural
sanction for morality, then the sanction must be supernatural, and
forthwith such theologians greet Huxley as an ally!

They are mistaken, however. Huxley does not really mean to assert any
such breach of continuity as is here suggested. In a footnote to his
printed address he makes a qualification which really cancels the group
of statements I have quoted. "Of course," says Huxley, "strictly
speaking, social life and the ethical process, in virtue of which it
advances toward perfection, are part and parcel of the general process
of evolution." Of course they are; and of course the general process of
evolution is the cosmic process, it is Nature's way of doing things. But
when my dear Huxley a moment ago was saying that the "cosmic process has
no sort of relation to moral ends," he was using the phrase in a more
restricted sense; he was using it as equivalent to what Darwin called
"natural selection," what Spencer called "survival of the fittest,"
which is only one part of the cosmic process. Now most assuredly
survival of the fittest, as such, has no sort of relation to moral ends.
Beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, are all alike to it. Side by side
with the exquisite rose flourishes the hideous tarantula, and in too
many cases the villain's chances of livelihood are better than the
saints. As I said a while ago, if we confine our attention to the
survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, we are not likely
to arrive at conclusions much more satisfactory than Caliban's

"As it likes me each time, I do: So He."

In such a universe we may look in vain for any sanction for morality,
any justification for love and self-sacrifice; we find no hope in it, no
consolation; there is not even dignity in it, nothing whatever but
resistless all-producing and all-consuming energy.

Such a universe, however, is not the one in which we live. In the cosmic
process of evolution, whereof our individual lives are part and parcel,
there are other agencies at work besides natural selection, and the
story of the struggle for existence is far from being the whole story. I
have thus far been merely stating difficulties; it is now time to point
out the direction in which we are to look for a solution of them. I
think it can be shown that the principles of morality have their roots
in the deepest foundations of the universe, that the cosmic process is
ethical in the profoundest sense, that in that far-off morning of the
world, when the stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy,
the beauty of self-sacrifice and disinterested love formed the chief
burden of the mighty theme.

[Illustration]

_First Stages in the Genesis of Man_

Let us begin by drawing a correct though slight outline sketch of what
the cosmic process of evolution has been. It is not strange that when
biologists speak of evolution they should often or usually have in mind
simply the modifications wrought in plants and animals by means of
natural selection. For it was by calling attention to such modifications
that Darwin discovered a true cause of the origin of species by
physiological descent from allied species. Thus was demonstrated the
fact of evolution in its most important province; men of science were
convinced that the higher forms of life are derived from lower forms,
and the old notion of special creations was exploded once and forever.
This was a great scientific achievement, one of the greatest known to
history, and it is therefore not strange that language should often be
employed as if Evolutionism and Darwinism were synonymous. Yet not only
are there extensive regions in the doctrine of evolution about which
Darwin knew very little, but even as regards the genesis of species his
theory was never developed in his own hands so far as to account
satisfactorily for the genesis of man.

It must be borne in mind that while the natural selection of physical
variations will go far toward explaining the characteristics of all the
plants and all the beasts in the world, it remains powerless to account
for the existence of man. Natural selection of physical variations might
go on for a dozen eternities without any other visible result than new
forms of plant and beast in endless and meaningless succession. The
physical variations by which man is distinguished from apes are not
great. His physical relationship with the ape is closer than that
between cat and dog, which belong to different families of the same
order; it is more like that between cat and leopard, or between dog and
fox, different genera in the same family. But the moment we consider the
minds of man and ape, the gap between the two is immeasurable. Mr.
Mivart has truly said that, with regard to their total value in nature,
the difference between man and ape transcends the difference between ape
and blade of grass. I should be disposed to go further and say, that
while for zoölogical man you can hardly erect a distinct family from
that of the chimpanzee and orang, on the other hand, for psychological
man you must erect a distinct kingdom; nay, you must even dichotomize
the universe, putting Man on one side and all things else on the other.
How can this overwhelming contrast between psychical and physical
difference be accounted for? The clue was furnished by Alfred Russel
Wallace, the illustrious co-discoverer of natural selection. Wallace
saw that along with the general development of mammalian intelligence a
point must have been reached in the history of one of the primates, when
variations of intelligence were more profitable to him than variations
in body. From that time forth that primate's intelligence went on by
slow increments acquiring new capacity, while his body changed but
little. When once he could strike fire, and chip a flint, and use a
club, and strip off the bear's hide to cover himself, there was clearly
no further use in thickening his own hide, or lengthening and sharpening
his claws. Natural selection is the keenest capitalist in the universe;
she never loses an instant in seizing the most profitable place for
investment, and her judgment is never at fault. Forthwith, for a million
years or more she invested all her capital in the psychical variations
of this favoured primate, making little change in his body except so far
as to aid in the general result, until by and by something like human
intelligence of a low grade, like that of the Australian or the Andaman
islander, was achieved. The genesis of humanity was by no means yet
completed, but an enormous gulf had been crossed.

After throwing out this luminous suggestion Mr. Wallace never followed
it up as it admitted and deserved. It is too much to expect one man to
do everything, and his splendid studies in the geographical distribution
of organisms may well have left him little time for work in this
direction. Who can fail to see that the selection of psychical
variations, to the comparative neglect of physical variations, was the
opening of a new and greater act in the drama of creation? Since that
new departure the Creator's highest work has consisted not in bringing
forth new types of body, but in expanding and perfecting the psychical
attributes of the one creature in whose life those attributes have begun
to acquire predominance. Along this human line of ascent there is no
occasion for any further genesis of species, all future progress must
continue to be not zoölogical, but psychological, organic evolution
gives place to civilization. Thus in the long series of organic beings
Man is the last; the cosmic process, having once evolved this
masterpiece, could thenceforth do nothing better than to perfect him.

[Illustration]

_The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man_

This conclusion, which follows irresistibly from Wallace's theorem, that
in the genesis of Humanity natural selection began to follow a new path,
already throws a light of promise over our whole subject, like the rosy
dawn of a June morning. But the explanation of the genesis of Humanity
is still far from complete. If we compare man with any of the higher
mammals, such as dogs and horses and apes, we are struck with several
points of difference: _first_, the greater progressiveness of man, the
widening of the interval by which one generation may vary from its
predecessor; _secondly_, the definite grouping in societies based on
more or less permanent family relationships, instead of the indefinite
grouping in miscellaneous herds or packs; _thirdly_, the possession of
articulate speech; _fourthly_, the enormous increase in the duration of
infancy, or the period when parental care is needed. Twenty-four years
ago, in a course of lectures given yonder in Holden Chapel, I showed
that the circumstance last named is the fundamental one, and the others
are derivative. It is the prolonged infancy that has caused the
progressiveness and the grouping into definite societies, while the
development of language was a consequence of the increasing intelligence
and sociality thus caused. In the genesis of Humanity the central fact
has been the increased duration of infancy. Now, can we assign for that
increased duration an adequate cause? I think we can. The increase of
intelligence is itself such a cause. A glance at the animal kingdom
shows us no such thing as infancy among the lower orders. It is with
warm-blooded birds and mammals that the phenomena of infancy and the
correlative parental care really begin.

[Illustration]

VII

_The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened Infancy_

The reason for this is that any creature's ability to perceive and to
act depends upon the registration of experiences in his nerve-centres.
It is either individual or ancestral experience that is thus registered;
or, strictly speaking, it is both. It is of the first importance that
this point should be clearly understood, and therefore a few words of
elementary explanation will not be superfluous.

When you learn to play the piano, you gradually establish innumerable
associations between printed groups of notes and the corresponding keys
on the key-board, and you also train the fingers to execute a vast
number of rapid and complicated motions. The process is full of
difficulty, and involves endless repetition. After some years perhaps
you can play at sight and with almost automatic ease a polonaise of
Liszt or a ballad of Chopin. Now this result is possible only because of
a bodily change which has taken place in you. Countless molecular
alterations have been wrought in the structure of sundry nerves and
muscles, especially in the gray matter of sundry ganglia, or
nerve-centres. Every ganglion concerned in the needful adjustments of
eyes and fingers and wrists, or in the perception of musical sounds, has
undergone a change more or less profound. The nature of the change is
largely a matter of speculation; but that point need not in any way
concern us. It is enough for us to know that there is such a change, and
that it is a registration of experiences. The pianist has registered in
the intimate structure of his nervous system a world of experiences
entirely foreign to persons unfamiliar with the piano; and upon this
registration his capacity depends.

Now the same explanation applies to all bodily movements whatever,
whether complicated or simple. In writing, in walking, in talking, we
are making use of nervous registrations that have been brought about by
an accumulation of experiences. To pick up a pencil from the table may
seem a very simple act, yet a baby cannot do it. It has been made
possible only by the education of the eyes, of the muscles that move the
eyes, of the arm and hand, and of the nerve-centres that coordinate one
group of movements with another. All this multiform education has
consisted in a gradual registration of experiences. In like manner all
the actions of man upon the world about him are made up of movements,
and every such movement becomes possible only when a registration is
effected in sundry nerve-centres.

But this is not the whole story. The case is undoubtedly the same with
those visceral movements, involuntary and in great part unconscious,
which sustain life; the beating of the heart, the expansion and
contraction of the lungs, the slight changes of calibre in the
blood-vessels, even the movements of secretion that take place in
glands. All these actions are governed by nerves, and these nerves have
had to be educated to their work. This education has been a registration
of experiences chiefly ancestral, throughout an enormous past,
practically since the beginnings of vertebrate life.

With the earlier and simpler forms of animal existence these visceral
movements are the only ones, or almost the only ones, that have to be
made. Presently the movements of limbs and sense organs come to be
added, and as we rise in the animal scale, these movements come to be
endlessly various and complex, and by and by implicate the nervous
system more and more deeply in complex acts of perception, memory,
reasoning, and volition. Obviously, therefore, in the development of the
individual organism the demands of the nervous system upon the vital
energies concerned in growth must come to be of paramount importance,
and in providing for them the entire embryonic life must be most
profoundly and variously affected. Though we may be unable to follow the
processes in detail, the truth of this general statement is plain and
undeniable.

I say, then, that when a creature's intelligence is low, and its
experience very meagre, consisting of a few simple perceptions and acts
that occur throughout life with monotonous regularity, all the
registration of this experience gets effected in the nerve-centres of
its offspring before birth, and they come into the world fully equipped
for the battle of life, like the snapping turtle, which snaps with
decisive vigour as soon as it emerges from the egg. Nothing is left
plastic to be finished after birth, and so the life of each generation
is almost an exact repetition of its predecessor. But when a creature's
intelligence is high, and its experience varied and complicated, the
registration of all this experience in the nerve-centres of its
offspring does not get accomplished before birth. There is not time
enough. The most important registrations, such as those needed for
breathing and swallowing and other indispensable acts, are fully
effected; others, such as those needed for handling and walking, are but
partially effected; others, such as those involved in the recognition of
creatures not important as enemies or prey, are left still further from
completion. Much is left to be done by individual experience after
birth. The animal, when first born, is a baby dependent upon its
mother's care. At the same time its intelligence is far more plastic,
and it remains far more teachable, than the lower animal that has no
babyhood. Dogs and horses, lions and elephants, often increase in
sagacity until late in life; and so do apes, which, along with a higher
intelligence than any other dumb animals, have a much longer babyhood.

We are now prepared to appreciate the marvellous beauty of Nature's
work in bringing Man upon the scene. Nowhere is there any breach of
continuity in the cosmic process. First we have natural selection at
work throughout the organic world, bringing forth millions of species of
plant and animal, seizing upon every advantage, physical or mental, that
enables any species to survive in the universal struggle. So far as any
outward observer, back in the Cretaceous or early Eocene periods, could
surmise, this sort of confusion might go on forever. But all at once,
perhaps somewhere in the upper Eocene or lower Miocene, it appears that
among the primates, a newly developing family already distinguished for
prehensile capabilities, one genus is beginning to sustain itself more
by mental craft and shiftiness than by any physical characteristic.
Forthwith does natural selection seize upon any and every advantageous
variation in this craft and shiftiness, until this favoured genus of
primates, this _Homo Alalus_, or speechless man, as we may call him,
becomes preëminent for sagacity, as the mammoth is preëminent for bulk,
or the giraffe for length of neck.

[Illustration]

VIII

_Some of its Effects_

In doing this, natural selection has unlocked a door and let in a new
set of causal agencies. As Homo Alalus grows in intelligence and variety
of experience, his helpless babyhood becomes gradually prolonged, and
passes not into sudden maturity, but into a more or less plastic
intermediate period of youth. Individual experience, as contrasted with
ancestral experience, counts for much more than ever before in shaping
his actions, and thus he begins to become progressive. He can learn many
more new ways of doing things in a hundred thousand years than any other
creature could have done in a much longer time. Thus the rate of
progress is enhanced, the increasing intelligence of Homo Alalus further
lengthens his plastic period of life, and this in turn further
increases his intelligence and emphasizes his individuality. The
evidence is abundant that Homo Alalus, like his simian cousins, was a
gregarious creature, and it is not difficult to see how, with increasing
intelligence, the gestures and grunts used in the horde for signalling
must come to be clothed with added associations of meaning, must
gradually become generalized as signs of conceptions. This invention of
spoken language, the first invention of nascent humanity, remains to
this day its most fruitful invention. Henceforth ancestral experience
could not simply be transmitted through its inheritable impress upon the
nervous system, but its facts and lessons could become external
materials and instruments of education. Then the children of Homo
Alalus, no longer speechless, began to accumulate a fund of tradition,
which in the fulness of time was to bloom forth in history and poetry,
in science and theology. From the outset the acquisition of speech must
greatly have increased the rate of progress, and enhanced the
rudimentary sociality.

With the lengthening of infancy the period of maternal help and
watchfulness must have lengthened in correspondence. Natural selection
must keep those two things nicely balanced, or the species would soon
become extinct. But Homo Alalus had not only a mother, but brethren and
sisters; and when the period of infancy became sufficiently long, there
were a series of Homunculi Alali, the eldest of whom still needed more
or less care while the third and the fourth were arriving upon the
scene. In this way the sentiment of maternity became abiding. The cow
has strong feelings of maternal affection for periods of a few weeks at
a time, but lapses into indifference and probably cannot distinguish her
grown-up calves as sustaining any nearer relation to herself than other
members of the herd. But Femina Alala, with her vastly enlarged
intelligence, is called upon for the exercise of maternal affection
until it becomes a permanent part of her nature. In the same group of
circumstances begins the permanency of the marital relation. The
warrior-hunter grows accustomed to defending the same wife and children
and to helping them in securing food. Cases of what we may term wedlock,
arising in this way, occur sporadically among apes; its thorough
establishment, however, was not achieved until after the genesis of
Humanity had been completed in most other respects. The elaborate
researches of Westermarck have proved that permanent marriage exists
even among savages; it did not prevail, however, until the advanced
stage of culture represented by the Aztecs in aboriginal America and the
Neolithic peoples of ancient Europe. As for strict monogamy, it is a
comparatively late achievement of civilization. What the increased and
multiplied duration of infancy at first accomplished was the
transformation of miscellaneous hordes of Homines Alali into organized
clans recognizing kinship through the mother, as exemplified among
nearly all American Indians when observed by Europeans.

Thus by gradual stages we have passed from four-footed existence into
Human Society, and once more I would emphasize the fact that nowhere do
we find any breach of continuity, but one factor sets another in
operation, which in turn reacts upon the first, and so on in a
marvellously harmonious consensus. Surely if there is anywhere in the
universe a story matchless for its romantic interest, it is the story of
the genesis of Man, now that we are at length beginning to be able to
decipher it. We see that there is a good deal more in it than mere
natural selection. At bottom, indeed, it is all a process of survival of
the fittest, but the secondary agencies we have been considering have
brought us to a point where our conception of the Struggle for Life must
be enlarged. Out of the manifold compounding and recompounding of
primordial clans have come the nations of mankind in various degrees of
civilization, but already in the clan we find the ethical process at
work. The clan has a code of morals well adapted to the conditions amid
which it exists. There is an ethical sentiment in the clan; its members
have duties toward it; it punishes sundry acts even with death, and
rewards or extols sundry other acts. We are, in short, in an ethical
atmosphere, crude and stifling, doubtless, as compared with that of a
modern Christian homestead, but still unquestionably ethical.

[Illustration]

_Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments_

Now, here at last, in encountering the ethical process at work, have we
detected a breach of continuity? Has the moral sentiment been flung in
from outside, or is it a natural result of the cosmic process we have
been sketching? Clearly it is the latter. There has been no breach of
continuity. When the prolongation of infancy produced the clan, there
naturally arose reciprocal necessities of behaviour among the members of
the clan, its mothers and children, its hunters and warriors. If such
reciprocal necessities were to be disregarded the clan would dissolve,
and dissolution would be general destruction. For, bear in mind, the
clan, when once evolved, becomes the unit whose preservation is
henceforth the permanent necessity. It is infancy that has made it so.
A miscellaneous horde, with brief infancies for its younger members, may
survive a very extensive slaughter; but in a clan, where the proportion
of helpless children is much greater, and a considerable division of
labour between nurses and warriors has become established, the case is
different. An amount or degree of calamity sufficient to break up its
organization will usually mean total ruin. Hence, when Nature's travail
has at length brought forth the clan, its requirements forthwith become
paramount, and each member's conduct from babyhood must conform to them.
Natural selection henceforth invests her chief capital in the enterprise
of preserving the clan. In that primitive social unit lie all the
potentiality and promise of Human Society through untold future ages. So
for age after age those clans in which the conduct of the individuals is
best subordinated to the general welfare are sure to prevail over clans
in which the subordination is less perfect. As the maternal instinct
had been cultivated for thousands of generations before clanship came
into existence, so for many succeeding ages of turbulence the patriotic
instinct, which prompts to the defence of home, was cultivated under
penalty of death. Clans defended by weakly loyal or cowardly warriors
were sure to perish. Unflinching bravery and devoted patriotism were
virtues necessary to the survival of the community, and were thus
preserved until at the dawn of historic times, in the most grandly
militant of clan societies, we find the word _virtus_ connoting just
these qualities, and no sooner does the fateful gulf yawn open in the
forum than a Curtius joyfully leaps into it, that the commonwealth may
be preserved from harm.

Now the moment a man's voluntary actions are determined by conscious or
unconscious reference to a standard outside of himself and his selfish
motives, he has entered the world of ethics, he has begun to live in a
moral atmosphere. Egoism has ceased to be all in all, and altruism--it
is an ugly-sounding word, but seems to be the only one
available--altruism has begun to assert its claim to sovereignty. In the
earlier and purely animal stages of existence it was right enough for
each individual to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; it did not endanger
the welfare of the species, but on the contrary it favoured that
welfare; in its origin avoidance of pain was the surest safeguard for
the perpetuation of life, and with due qualifications that is still the
case. But as soon as sociality became established, and Nature's supreme
end became the maintenance of the clan organization, the standard for
the individual's conduct became shifted, permanently and forever
shifted. Limits were interposed at which pleasure must be resigned and
pain endured, even certain death encountered, for the sake of the clan;
perhaps the individual did not always understand it in that way, but at
all events it was for the sake of some rule recognized in the clan,
some rule which, as his mother and all his kin had from his earliest
childhood inculcated upon him, _ought_ to be obeyed. This conception of
ought, of obligation, of duty, of debt to something outside of self,
resulted from the shifting of the standard of conduct outside of the
individual's self. Once thus externalized, objectivized, the ethical
standard demanded homage from the individual. It furnished the rule for
a higher life than one dictated by mere selfishness. Speaking after the
manner of naturalists, I here use the phrase "higher life" advisedly. It
was the kind of life that was conducive to the preservation and further
development of the highest form of animate existence that had been
attained. It appears to me that we begin to find for ethics the most
tremendous kind of sanction in the nature of the cosmic process.

A word of caution may be needed. It is not for a moment to be supposed
that when primitive men began crudely shaping their conduct with
reference to a standard outside of self, they did so as the result of
meditation, or with any realizing sense of what they were doing. That
has never been the method of evolution. Its results steal upon the world
noiselessly and unobserved, and only after they have long been with us
does reason employ itself upon them. The wolf does not eat the lamb
because he regards a flesh diet as necessary to his health and activity,
but because he is hungry, and, like Mr. Harold Skimpole, he likes lamb.
It was no intellectual perception of needs and consequences that
lengthened the maternal instinct with primeval mothers as the period of
infancy lengthened. Nor was it any such intellectual perception that
began to enthrone "I ought" in the place of "I wish." If in the world's
recurrent crises Nature had waited to be served by the flickering lamp
of reason, the story would not have been what it is. Her method has
been, with the advent of a new situation, to modify the existing group
of instincts; and this work she will not let be slighted; in her train
follows the lictor with the symbols of death, and there is neither pity
nor relenting. In the primeval warfare between clans, those in which the
instincts were not so modified as to shift the standard of conduct
outside of the individual's self must inevitably have succumbed and
perished under the pressure of those in which the instincts had begun to
experience such modification. The moral law grew up in the world not
because anybody asked for it, but because it was needed for the world's
work. If it is not a product of the cosmic process, it would be hard to
find anything that could be so called.

[Illustration]

_The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake of Moral Ends_

I have not undertaken to make my outline sketch of the genesis of
Humanity approach to completeness, but only to present enough salient
points to make a closely connected argument in showing how morality is
evolved in the cosmic process and sanctioned by it. In a more complete
sketch it would be necessary to say something about the genesis of
Religion. One of the most interesting, and in my opinion one of the most
profoundly significant, facts in the whole process of evolution is the
first appearance of religious sentiment at very nearly the same stage at
which the moral law began to grow up. To the differential attributes of
Humanity already considered there needs to be added the possession of
religious sentiment and religious ideas. We may safely say that this is
the most important of all the distinctions between Man and other
animals; for to say so is simply to epitomize the whole of human
experience as recorded in history, art, and literature. Along with the
rise from gregariousness to incipient sociality, along with the first
stammerings of articulate speech, along with the dawning discrimination
between right and wrong, came the earliest feeble groping toward a world
beyond that which greets the senses, the first dim recognition of the
Spiritual Power that is revealed in and through the visible and palpable
realm of nature. And universally since that time the notion of Ethics
has been inseparably associated with the notion of Religion, and the
sanction for Ethics has been held to be closely related with the world
beyond phenomena. There are philosophers who maintain that with the
further progress of enlightenment this close relation will cease to be
asserted, that Ethics will be divorced from Religion, and that the
groping of the Human Soul after its God will be condemned as a mere
survival from the errors of primitive savagery, a vain and idle reaching
out toward a world of mere phantoms. I mention this opinion merely to
express unqualified and total dissent from it. I believe it can be shown
that one of the strongest implications of the doctrine of evolution is
the Everlasting Reality of Religion.

But we have not time at present for entering upon so vast a subject. Let
this reference suffice to show that it has not been passed over or
forgotten in my theory of the genesis of Humanity. In an account of the
evolution of the religious sentiment, its first appearance as coeval, or
nearly so, with the beginnings of the ethical process would assume great
importance. We have here been concerned purely with the ethical process
itself, which we have found to be--as Huxley truly says in his
footnote--part and parcel of the general process of evolution. Our
historical survey of the genesis of Humanity seems to show very forcibly
that a society of Human Souls living in conformity to a perfect Moral
Law is the end toward which, ever since the time when our solar system
was a patch of nebulous vapour, the cosmic process has been aiming.
After our cooling planet had become the seat of organic life, the
process of natural selection went on for long ages seemingly, but not
really at random; for our retrospect shows that its ultimate tendency
was towards singling out one creature and exalting his intelligence.

Now we have seen that this increase of intelligence itself, by entailing
upon Man the helplessness of infancy, led directly to the production of
those social conditions that called the ethical process into play and
set it actively to work. Thus we may see the absurdity of trying to
separate the moral nature of Man from the rest of his nature, and to
assign for it a separate and independent history. The essential
solidarity in the cosmic process will admit of no such fanciful
detachment of one part from another. All parts are involved one in
another. Again, the ethical process is not only part and parcel of the
cosmic process, but it is its crown and consummation. Toward the
spiritual perfection of Humanity the stupendous momentum of the cosmic
process has all along been tending. That spiritual perfection is the
true goal of evolution, the divine end that was involved in the
beginning. When Huxley asks us to believe that "the cosmic process has
no sort of relation to moral ends," I feel like replying with the
question, "Does not the cosmic process exist purely for the sake of
moral ends?" Subtract from the universe its ethical meaning, and nothing
remains but an unreal phantom, the figment of false metaphysics.

We have now arrived at a position from which a glimmer of light is
thrown upon some of the dark problems connected with the moral
government of the world. We can begin to see why misery and wrongdoing
are permitted to exist, and why the creative energy advances by such
slow and tortuous methods toward the fulfilment of its divine purpose.
In order to understand these things, we must ask, What is the ultimate
goal of the ethical process? According to the utilitarian philosophy
that goal is the completion of human happiness. But this interpretation
soon refutes itself. A world of completed happiness might well be a
world of quiescence, of stagnation, of automatism, of blankness; the
dynamics of evolution would have no place in it. But suppose we say that
the ultimate goal of the ethical process is the perfecting of human
character? This form of statement contains far more than the other.
Consummation of happiness is a natural outcome of the perfecting of
character, but that perfecting can be achieved only through struggle,
through discipline, through resistance. It is for him that _overcometh_
that the crown of life is reserved. The consummate product of a world
of evolution is the character that _creates_ happiness, that is replete
with dynamic possibilities of fresh life and activity in directions
forever new. Such a character is the reflected image of God, and in it
are contained the promise and potency of life everlasting.

No such character could be produced by any act of special creation in a
garden of Eden. It must be the consummate efflorescence of long ages of
evolution, and a world of evolution is necessarily characterized by slow
processes, many of which to a looker-on seem like tentative experiments,
with an enormous sacrifice of ephemeral forms of life. Thus while the
Earth Spirit goes on, unhasting, yet unresting, weaving in the loom of
Time the visible garment of God, we begin to see that even what look
like failures and blemishes have been from the outset involved in the
accomplishment of the all-wise and all-holy purpose, the perfecting of
the spiritual Man in the likeness of his Heavenly Father.

These points will receive further indirect illustration as we complete
our outline sketch of the cosmic process in the past. It is self-evident
that in the production of an ethical character, altruistic feelings and
impulses must coöperate. Let us look, then, for some of the beginnings
of altruism in the course of the evolution of life.

[Illustration]

_Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism_

From an early period of the life-history of our planet, the preservation
of the species had obviously become quite as imperative an end as the
preservation of individuals; one is at first inclined to say more
imperative, but if we pause long enough to remember that total failure
to preserve individuals would be equivalent to immediate extinction of
the species, we see that the one requirement is as indispensable as the
other. Individuals must be preserved, and the struggle for life is
between them; species must be preserved, and in the rivalry those have
the best chance in which the offspring are either most redundant in
numbers or are best cared for. In plants and animals of all but the
higher types, the offspring are spores or seeds, larvæ or spawn, or
self-maturing eggs. In the absence of parental care the persistence of
the species is ensured by the enormous number of such offspring. A
single codfish, in a single season, will lay six million eggs, nearly
all of which perish, of course, or else in a few years the ocean could
not hold all the codfishes. But the princess in the Arabian tale, who
fought with the malignant Jinni, could not for her life pick up all the
scattered seeds of the pomegranate; and in like manner of the codfish
eggs, one in a million or so escapes and the species is maintained. But
in the highest types of animal life in birds and mammals--with their
four-chambered hearts, completely arterialized blood, and enhanced
consciousness--parental care becomes effective in protecting the
offspring, and the excessive production diminishes. With birds, the
necessity of maintaining a high temperature for the eggs leads to the
building of nests, to a division of labour in the securing of food, to
the development of a temporary maternal instinct, and to conjugal
alliances which in some birds last for a lifetime. As the eggs become
effectively guarded the number diminishes, till instead of millions
there are half a dozen. When it comes to her more valuable products,
Nature is not such a reckless squanderer after all. So with mammals, for
the most part the young are in litters of half a dozen or so; but in
Man, with his prolonged and costly infancy parental care reaches its
highest development and concentration in rearing children one by one.

From the dawn of life, I need hardly say, all the instincts that have
contributed to the preservation of offspring must have been favoured and
cultivated by natural selection, and in many cases even in types of life
very remote from Humanity, such instincts have prompted to very
different actions from such as would flow from the mere instinct of
self-preservation. If you thrust your walking-stick into an ant-heap,
and watch the wild hurry and confusion that ensues when part of the
interior is laid bare, you will see that all the workers are busy in
moving the larvæ into places of safety. It is not exactly a maternal
instinct, for the workers are not mothers, but it is an altruistic
instinct involving acts of self-devotion. So in the case of fish that
ascend rivers or bays at spawning time, the actions of the whole shoal
are determined by a temporarily predominant instinct that tends towards
an altruistic result. In these and lower grades of life there is already
something at work besides the mere struggle for life between
individuals; there is something more than mere contention and slaughter;
there is the effort towards cherishing another life than one's own. In
these regions of animate existence we catch glimpses of the cosmic roots
of love and self-sacrifice. For the simplest and rudest productions of
Nature mere egoism might suffice, but to the achievement of any higher
aim some adumbration of altruism was indispensable.

Before such divine things as love and self-sacrifice could spring up
from their cosmic roots and put forth their efflorescence, it was
necessary that conscious personal relations should become established
between mother and infant. We have already observed the critical
importance of these relations in the earliest stages of the evolution of
human society. We may now add that the relation between mother and child
must have furnished the first occasion for the sustained and regular
development of the altruistic feelings. The capacity for unselfish
devotion called forth in that relation could afterward be utilized in
the conduct of individuals not thus related to one another.

Of all kinds of altruism the mother's was no doubt the earliest; it was
the derivative source from which all other kinds were by slow degrees
developed. In the evolution of these altruistic feelings,
therefore,--feelings which are an absolutely indispensable constituent
in the process of ethical development,--the first appearance of real
maternity was an epoch of most profound interest and importance in the
history of life upon the earth.

Now maternity, in the true and full sense of the word, is something
which was not realized until a comparatively recent stage of the earth's
history. God's highest work is never perfected save in the fulness of
time. For countless ages there were parents and offspring before the
slow but never aimless or wanton cosmic process had brought into
existence the conscious personal relationship between mother and child.
Protection of eggs and larvæ scarcely suffices for the evolution of true
maternity; the relation of moth to caterpillar is certainly very far
from being a prototype of it. What spectacle could be more dreary than
that of the Jurassic period, with its lords of creation, the oviparous
dinosaurs, crawling or bounding over the land, splashing amid the mighty
waters, whizzing bat-like through the air, horrible brutes innumerable,
with bulky bodies and tiny brains, clumsy, coarse in fibre, and
cold-blooded.

"Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime."

The remnants of that far-off dismal age have been left behind in great
abundance, and from them we can easily reconstruct the loathsome picture
of a world of dominating egoism, whose redemption through the evolution
of true maternity had not yet effectively begun. For such a world might
Caliban's theology indeed seem fitted. Nearly nine tenths of our
planet's past life-history, measured in duration, had passed away
without achieving any higher result than this,--a fact which for
impatient reformers may have in it some crumbs of consolation.

For, though the mills of God grind slowly, the cosmic process was aiming
at something better than egoism and dinosaurs, and at some time during
the long period of the Chalk deposits there began the tremendous
world-wide rivalry between these dragons and the rising class of
warm-blooded viviparous mammals which had hitherto played an
insignificant part in the world. The very name of this class of animals
is taken from the function of motherhood. The offspring of these
"mammas" come into the world as recognizable personalities, so far
developed that the relation between mother and child begins as a
relation of personal affection. The new-born mammal is not an egg nor a
caterpillar, but a baby, and the baby's dawning consciousness opens up a
narrow horizon of sympathy and tenderness, a horizon of which the
expansion shall in due course of ages reveal a new heaven and a new
earth. At first the nascent altruism was crude enough, but it must have
sufficed to make mutual understanding and cooperation more possible than
before; it thus contributed to the advancement of mammalian
intelligence, and prepared the way for gregariousness, by and by to
culminate in sociality, as already described. In the history of creation
the mammals were moderns, equipped with more effective means of
ensuring survival than their oviparous antagonists. The development of
complete mammality was no sudden thing. Some of the dinosaurs may have
been ovoviviparous, like some modern serpents. The Australian duck-bill,
a relic of the most ancient incipient mammality, is still oviparous; the
opossum and kangaroo preserve the record of a stage when viviparousness
was but partially achieved; but with the advent of the placental mammals
the break with the old order of things was complete.

The results of the struggle are registered in the Eocene rocks. The
ancient world had found its Waterloo. Gone were the dragons who so long
had lorded it over both hemispheres,--brontosaurs, iguanodons,
plesiosaurs, lælaps, pterodactyls,--all gone; their uncouth brood quite
vanished from the earth, and nothing left alive as a reminder, save a
few degenerate collateral kin, such as snakes and crocodiles, objects
of dread and loathing to higher creatures. Never in the history of our
planet has there been a more sweeping victory than that of the mammals,
nor has Nature had any further occasion for victories of that sort. The
mammal remains the highest type of animal existence, and subsequent
progress has been shown in the perfecting of that type where most
perfectible.

[Illustration]

XII

_The Omnipresent Ethical Trend_

With the evolution of true maternity Nature was ready to proceed to her
highest grades of work. Intelligence was next to be lifted to higher
levels, and the order of mammals with greatest prehensile capacities,
the primates with their incipient hands, were the most favourable
subjects in which to carry on this process. The later stages of the
marvellous story we have already passed in review. We have seen the
accumulating intelligence lengthen the period of infancy, and thus
prolong the relations of loving sympathy between mother and child; we
have seen the human family and human society thus brought into
existence; and along therewith we have recognized the necessity laid
upon each individual for conforming his conduct to a standard external
to himself. At this point, without encountering any breach of continuity
in the cosmic process, we crossed the threshold of the ethical world,
and entered a region where civilization, or the gradual perfecting of
the spiritual qualities, is henceforth Nature's paramount aim. To
penetrate further into this region would be to follow the progress of
civilization, while the primitive canoe develops into the Cunard
steamship, the hieroglyphic battle-sketch into epics and dramas,
sun-catcher myths into the Newtonian astronomy, wandering tribes into
mighty nations, the ethics of the clan into the moral law for all men.
The story shows us Man becoming more and more clearly the image of God,
exercising creative attributes, transforming his physical environment,
incarnating his thoughts in visible and tangible shapes all over the
world, and extorting from the abysses of space the secrets of vanished
ages. From lowly beginnings, without breach of continuity, and through
the cumulative action of minute and inconspicuous causes, the
resistless momentum of cosmic events has tended toward such kind of
consummation; and part and parcel of the whole process, inseparably
wrapped up with every other part, has been the evolution of the
sentiments which tend to subordinate mere egoism to unselfish and moral
ends.

A narrow or partial survey might fail to make clear the solidarity of
the cosmic process. But the history of creation, when broadly and
patiently considered, brings home to us with fresh emphasis the profound
truth of what Emerson once said, that "the lesson of life ... is to
believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to
resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic
sense." When we have learned this lesson, our misgivings vanish, and we
breathe a clear atmosphere of faith. Though in many ways God's work is
above our comprehension, yet those parts of the world's story that we
can decipher well warrant the belief that while in Nature there may be
divine irony, there can be no such thing as wanton mockery, for
profoundly underlying the surface entanglement of her actions we may
discern the omnipresent ethical trend. The moral sentiments, the moral
law, devotion to unselfish ends, disinterested love, nobility of
soul,--these are Nature's most highly wrought products, latest in coming
to maturity; they are the consummation, toward which all earlier
prophecy has pointed. We are right, then, in greeting the rejuvenescent
summer with devout faith and hope. Below the surface din and clashing of
the struggle for life we hear the undertone of the deep ethical purpose,
as it rolls in solemn music through the ages, its volume swelled by
every victory, great or small, of right over wrong, till in the fulness
of time, in God's own time, it shall burst forth in the triumphant
chorus of Humanity purified and redeemed.

THE EVERLASTING REALITY OF RELIGION

Here sits he shaping wings to fly;
His heart forebodes a mystery:
He names the name Eternity.

That type of Perfect in his mind
In Nature can he nowhere find,
He sows himself on every wind.

He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend,
And through thick veils to apprehend
A labour working to an end.

TENNYSON, _The Two Voices_.

[Illustration]

"_Deo erexit Voltaire_"

The visitor to Geneva whose studies have made him duly acquainted with
the most interesting human personality of all that are associated with
that historic city will never leave the place without making a
pilgrimage to the chateau of Ferney. In that refined and quiet rural
homestead things still remain very much as on the day when the aged
Voltaire left it for the last visit to Paris, where his long life was
worthily ended amid words and deeds of affectionate homage. One may sit
down at the table where was written the most perfect prose, perhaps,
that ever flowed from pen, and look about the little room with its
evidences of plain living and high thinking, until one seems to recall
the eccentric figure of the vanished Master, with his flashes of shrewd
wisdom and caustic wit, his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his
consuming hatred of bigotry and oppression, his merciless contempt for
shams, his boundless enthusiasm of humanity. As we stroll in the park,
that quaint presence goes along with us till all at once in a shady walk
we come upon something highly significant and characteristic, the little
parish church with its Latin inscription over the portal, _Deo erexit
Voltaire_, i. e. "Voltaire built it for God," and as we muse upon it,
the piercing eyes and sardonic but not unkindly smile seem still to
follow us. What meant this eccentric inscription?

When Voltaire became possessor of the manor of Ferney, the church was
badly out of repair, and stood where it obstructed the view from certain
windows of the chateau. So he had it cleared away, and built in a better
spot the new church that is still there. It was duly consecrated, and
the Pope further hallowed it with some relics of ancient saints, and
there for many a year the tenants and dependents of the manor assembled
for divine service. Nowhere in France had Voltaire ever seen a church
dedicated simply to God; it was always to Our Lady of This or Saint
So-and-so of That; always there was some intermediary between the devout
soul and the God of its worship. Not thus should it be with Voltaire's
church, built upon his own estate to minister to the spiritual needs of
his people. It should be dedicated simply and without further
qualification to the worship and service of God. Furthermore, it was
built and dedicated, not by any ecclesiastical or corporate body, but by
the lord of that manor, the individual layman, Voltaire.

This, I say, was highly characteristic and significant. It gave terse
and pointed expression to Voltaire's way of looking at such things.
Church and theology were ignored, and the individual soul was left alone
with its God. The Protestant reformers and other freethinkers had
stopped far short of this. In place of an infallible Church they had
left an infallible Book; if they rejected transubstantiation, they
retained as obligatory such doctrines as those of the incarnation and
atonement; if they laughed at the miracles of mediæval saints, they
would allow no discredit to be thrown upon those of the apostolic age;
in short, they left standing a large part, if not the larger part, of
the supernatural edifice within which the religious mind of Europe had
so long been sheltered. But Voltaire regarded that whole supernatural
edifice as so much rubbish which was impeding the free development of
the human mind, and ought as quickly as possible to be torn to pieces
and cleared away. His emotions as well as his reason were concerned in
this conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it then existed in France,
was responsible for much atrocious injustice, and in neighbouring lands
the Inquisition still existed. Ecclesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of
ignorance, whatever tended to hold people in darkness and restrain them
from the free and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire hated with
all the intensity of which he was capable. He summed it all up in one
abstract term and personified it as "The Infamous," and the watchword of
that life of tireless vigilance was "Crush the Infamous!" Supernatural
theology had been too often pressed into the service of "The Infamous,"
and for supernatural theology Voltaire could find no place in his scheme
of things. He lost no chance of assailing it with mockery and sarcasm
made terrible by the earnestness of his purpose, until he came in many
quarters to be regarded as the most inveterate antagonist the Church had
ever known.

Yet among the great men of letters in France contemporary with Voltaire,
the most part went immeasurably farther than he, and went in a different
direction withal, for they denied the reality of Religion. Few of them,
indeed, believed in the existence of God, or would have had anything to
do with building a house of worship. It is related of David Hume that
when dining once in a party of eighteen at the house of Baron d'Holbach,
he expressed a doubt as to whether any person could anywhere be found to
avow himself dogmatically an atheist. "Indeed, my dear sir," quoth the
host, "you are this moment sitting at table with seventeen such
persons." Among that group of philosophers were men of great
intelligence and lofty purpose, such as D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvétius,
Condorcet, Buffon, men with more of the real spirit of Christianity in
their natures than could be found in half the churches of Christendom.
The roots of their atheism were emotional rather than philosophical. It
was part of the generous but rash and superficial impatience with which
they disowned all connection whatever with a Church that had become
subservient to so much that was bad. Their atheism was one of the fruits
of the vicious policy which had suppressed Huguenotism in France; it was
an early instance of what has since been often observed, that
materialism and atheism are much more apt to flourish in Romanist than
in Protestant countries. The form of religion which is already to some
extent purified and rationalized awakens no such violent revulsion in
free-thinking minds as the form that is more heavily encumbered with
remnants of obsolete primitive thought. Moreover, the rationalizing
religion of Protestant countries is commonly found in alliance with
political freedom. In France under the Old Régime, the Catholic religion
was stigmatized as an ally of despotism, as well as a congeries of
absurd doctrines and ceremonies. The best minds felt their common sense
shocked by it no less than their reason. No very deep thinking was done
on the subject; their treatment of it was in general extremely shallow.

The forms which religious sentiment had assumed in the Middle Ages had
become unintelligible; the most highly endowed minds were dead to the
sublimity of Gothic architecture, and saw nothing but grotesque folly
in Dante's poetry. They seriously believed that religious doctrines and
ecclesiastical government were originally elaborate systems of fraud,
devised by sagacious and crafty tyrants for the sole purpose of
enslaving the multitude of mankind. No discrimination was shown. They
were as ready to throw away belief in God as in the miracles of St.
Columba, and to scout at the notion of a future life in the same terms
as those in which they denounced the forged donation of Constantine. The
flippant ease with which they disposed of the greatest questions, in
crass ignorance of the very nature of the problem to be solved, was well
illustrated in the remark of the astronomer Lalande, that he had swept
the entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. A similar
instance of missing the point was furnished about fifty years ago by the
eminent physiologist Moleschott, when he exclaimed, "No thought without
phosphorus," and congratulated himself that he had forever disposed of
the human soul. I am inclined to think that those are the two remarks
most colossal in their silliness that ever appeared in print.

Very different in spirit was the acute reply of Laplace when reminded by
Napoleon that his great treatise on the dynamics of the solar system
contained no allusion to God. "Sire," said Laplace, "I had no need of
that hypothesis." This remark was profound in its truth, for it meant
that in order to give a specific explanation of any single group of
phenomena, it will not do to appeal to divine action, which is equally
the source of all phenomena. Science can deal only with secondary
causes. In the eighteenth century men of science were learning that such
is the case; men like Diderot and D'Alembert had come to realize it, and
they believed that the logical result was atheism. This was because the
only idea of God which they had ever been taught to entertain was the
Latin idea of a God remote from the world and manifested only through
occasional interferences with the order of nature. When they dismissed
this idea they declared themselves atheists. If they had been familiar
with the Greek idea of God as immanent in the world and manifested at
every moment through the orderly sequence of its phenomena, their
conclusions would doubtless have been very different.

To these philosophers Voltaire's unshaken theism seemed a mere bit of
eccentric conservatism. But along with that queer and intensely
independent personality there went a stronger intellectual grasp and a
more calm intellectual vision than belonged to any other Frenchman of
the eighteenth century. In the facts of Nature, despite the lifeless
piecemeal fashion in which they were then studied, Voltaire saw a
rational principle at work which atheism could in nowise account for. To
him the universe seemed full of evidences of beneficent purpose, and
more than once he set forth with eloquence and power the famous
argument from design, which is as old as Xenophon's Memorabilia, and
which received its fullest development at the hands of Paley and the
authors of the Bridgewater Treatises. There is thus yet another
significance added to the little church at Ferney. Not only was it the
sole church in France dedicated simply to God, and not only was its
builder a layman hostile to ecclesiastical doctrines and methods, but he
was almost alone among the eminent freethinkers of his age and country
in believing in God and asserting the everlasting reality of religion.

It is therefore that I have cited Voltaire as a kind of text for the
present discourse; for it is my purpose to show that, apart from all
questions of revelation, the light of nature affords us sufficient
ground for maintaining that religion is fundamentally true and must
endure forever. It appears to me, moreover, that the materialism of the
present day is merely a tradition handed down from the French writers
whom Voltaire combated. When Moleschott made his silly remark about
phosphorus, it was simply an inheritance of silliness from Lalande. When
Haeckel tells us that the doctrine of evolution forbids us to believe in
a future life, it is not because he has rationally deduced such a
conclusion from the doctrine, but because he takes his opinions on such
matters ready-made from Ludwig Büchner, who is simply an echo of the
eighteenth century atheist La Mettrie. We shall see that the doctrine of
evolution has implications very different from what Haeckel supposes.

But first let me observe in passing that in the English-speaking world
there has never been any such divorce between rationalism and religion
as in France, and among the glories of English literature are such
deeply reverent and profoundly philosophical writings as those of Hooker
and Chillingworth, of Bishop Butler and Jonathan Edwards, and in our own
time of Dr. Martineau. Nowhere in history, perhaps, have faith and
reason been more harmoniously wedded together than in the history of
English Protestantism. But the disturbance that affected France in the
age of Voltaire now affects the whole Christian world, and every
question connected with religion has been probed to depths of which the
existence was scarcely suspected a century ago. One seldom, indeed,
hears the frivolous mockery in which the old French writers dealt so
freely; that was an ebullition of temper called forth by a tyranny that
had come to be a social nuisance. The scepticism of our day is rather
sad than frivolous; it drags people from long cherished notions in spite
of themselves; it spares but few that are active-minded; it invades the
church, and does not stop in the pews to listen but ascends the pulpit
and preaches. There is no refuge anywhere from this doubting and testing
spirit Of the age. In the attitude of civilized men towards the world in
which we live, the change of front has been stupendous; the old
cosmology has been overthrown in headlong ruin, attacks upon doctrines
have multiplied, and rituals, creeds, and Scriptures are overhauled and
criticised, until a young generation grows up knowing nothing of the
sturdy faith of its grandfathers save by hearsay; for it sees everything
in heaven and earth called upon to show its credentials.

[Illustration]

_The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God_

The general effect of this intellectual movement has been to discredit
more than ever before the Latin idea of God as a power outside of the
course of nature and occasionally interfering with it. In all directions
the process of evolution has been discovered, working after similar
methods, and this has forced upon us the belief in the Unity of Nature.
We are thus driven to the Greek conception of God as the power working
in and through nature, without interference or infraction of law. The
element of chance, which some atheists formerly admitted into their
scheme of things, is expelled. Nobody would now waste his time in
theorizing about a fortuitous concourse of atoms. We have so far spelled
out the history of creation as to see that all has been done in strict
accordance with law. The method has been the method of evolution, and
the more we study it the more do we discern in it intelligible
coherence. One part of the story never gives the lie to another part.

So beautiful is all this orderly coherence, so satisfying to some of our
intellectual needs, that many minds are inclined to doubt if anything
more can be said of the universe than that it is a Reign of Law, an
endless aggregate of coexistences and sequences. When we say that one
star attracts another star, we do not really know that there is any
pulling in the case; all we know is that a piece of cosmical matter in
the presence of another piece of matter alters its space-relations in a
certain specified way. Among the coexistences and sequences there is an
order which we can detect, and a few thinkers are inclined to maintain
that this is the whole story. Such a state of mind, which rests
satisfied with the mere content of observed facts, without seeking to
trace their ultimate implications, is the characteristic of what Auguste
Comte called Positivism. It is a more refined phase of atheism than that
of the guests at Baron d'Holbach's, but its adherents are few; for the
impetus of modern scientific thought tends with overwhelming force
towards the conception of a single First Cause, or Prime Mover,
perpetually manifested from moment to moment in all the Protean changes
that make up the universe. As I have elsewhere sought to show, this is
practically identical with the Athanasian conception of the immanent
Deity.[3] Modern men of science often call this view of things Monism,
but if questioned narrowly concerning the immanent First Cause, they
reply with a general disclaimer of knowledge, and thus entitle
themselves to be called by Huxley's term "Agnostics." Thirty-five years
ago Spencer, taking a hint from Sir William Hamilton, used the phrase
"The Unknowable" as an equivalent for the immanent Deity considered _per
se_; but I always avoid that phrase, for in practice it invariably leads
to wrong conceptions, and naturally, since it only expresses one side of
the truth. If on the one hand it is impossible for the finite Mind to
fathom the Infinite, on the other hand it is practically misleading to
apply the term Unknowable to the Deity that is revealed in every
pulsation of the wondrously rich and beautiful life of the Universe. For
most persons no amount of explanation will prevent the use of the word
Unknowable from seeming to remove Deity to an unapproachable distance,
whereas the Deity revealed in the process of evolution is the
ever-present God without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and
whose voice is heard in each whisper of conscience, even while his
splendour dwells in the white ray from yonder star that began its
earthward flight while Abraham's shepherds watched their flocks. It is
clear that many persons have derived from Spencer's use of the word
Unknowable an impression that he intends by means of metaphysics to
refine God away into nothing; whereas he no more cherishes any such
intention than did St. Paul, when he asked, "Who hath known the mind of
the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor?"--no more than Isaiah did
when he declared that even as the heavens are higher than the earth, so
are Jehovah's ways higher than our ways and his thoughts than our
thoughts.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge_, Boston, 1885.

[Illustration]

III

_Weakness of Materialism_

Just here comes along the materialist and asks us some questions, tries
to serve on us a kind of metaphysical writ of _quo warranto_. If modern
physics leads us inevitably to the conception of a single infinite Power
manifested in all the phenomena of the knowable Universe, by what
authority do we identify that Power with the indwelling Deity as
conceived by St. Athanasius? The Athanasian Deity is to some extent
fashioned in Man's image; he is, to say the least, like the psychical
part of ourselves. After making all possible allowances for the gulf
which separates that which is Infinite and Absolute from that which is
Finite and Relative, an essential kinship is asserted between God and
the Human Soul. By what authority, our materialist will ask, do we
assert any such kinship between the Human Soul and the Power which
modern physics reveals as active throughout the universe? Is it not
going far beyond our knowledge to assert any such kinship? And would it
not be more modest and becoming in us to simply designate this ever
active universal Power by some purely scientific term, such as Force?

This argument is to-day a very familiar one, and it wears a plausible
aspect; it is couched in a spirit of scientific reserve, which wins for
it respectful consideration. The modest and cautious spirit of science
has done so much for us, that it is always wise to give due heed to its
warnings. Let us beware of going beyond our knowledge, says the
materialist. We know nothing but phenomena as manifestations of an
indwelling force; nor have we any ground for supposing that there is
anything psychical, or even quasi-psychical, in the universe outside of
the individual minds of men and other animals. Moreover, continues the
materialist, the psychical phenomena of which we are conscious--reason,
memory, emotion, volition--are but peculiarly conditioned manifestations
of the same indwelling force which under other conditions appears as
light or heat or electricity. All such manifestations are fleeting, and
beyond this world of fleeting phenomena we have no warrant, either in
science or in common sense, for supposing that anything whatever exists.
This world that is cognizable through the senses is all that there is,
and the story of it that we can decipher by the aid of terrestrial
experience is the whole story; the Unseen World is a mere figment
inherited from the untutored fancy of primeval man. Such is the general
view of things which Materialism urges upon us with the plea of
scientific sobriety and caution; and to many minds, as already observed,
it wears a plausible aspect.

Nevertheless, when subjected to criticism, this theory of things soon
loses its sober and plausible appearance and is seen to be eminently
rash and shallow. In the first place, there is no such correlation or
equivalence as is alleged between physical forces and the phenomena of
consciousness. The correlations between different modes of motion have
been proved by actual quantitative measurement, and never could have
been proved in any other way. We know, for example, that heat is a mode
of motion; the heat that will raise the temperature of a pound of water
by one degree of Fahrenheit is exactly equivalent to the motion of 772
pounds falling through a distance of one foot. In similar wise we know
that light, electricity, and magnetism are modes of motion, transferable
one into another; and, although precise measurements have not been
accomplished, there is no reason for doubting that the changes in brain
tissue, which accompany each thought and feeling, are also modes of
motion, transferable into the other physical modes. But thought and
feeling themselves, which can neither be weighed nor measured, do not
admit of being resolved into modes of motion. They do not enter into the
closed circuit of physical transformations, but stand forever outside of
it, and concentric with that segment of the circuit which passes through
the brain. It may be that thought and feeling could not continue to
exist if that physical segment of the circuit were taken away. It may be
that they could. To assume that they could not is surely the height of
rash presumption. The correlation of forces exhibits Mind as in nowise a
product of Matter, but as something in its growth and manifestations
outside and parallel. It is incompatible with the theory that the
relation of the human soul to the body is like that of music to the
harp; but it is quite compatible with the time-honoured theory of the
human soul as indwelling in the body and escaping from it at death.

In the second place, when we come to the denial of all kinship between
the human soul and the Infinite Power that is revealed in all
phenomena, the materialistic theory raises difficulties as great as
those which it seeks to avoid. The difficulties which it wishes to avoid
are those which inevitably encumber the attempt to conceive of Deity as
Personality exerting volition and cherishing intelligent purpose. Such
difficulties are undeniably great; nay, they are insuperable. When we
speak of Intelligence and Will and Personality, we must use these words
with the meanings in which experience has clothed them, or we shall soon
find ourselves talking nonsense. The only intelligence we know is
strictly serial in its nature, and is limited by the existence of
independent objects of cognition. What flight of analogy can bear us
across the gulf that divides such finite intelligence from that
unlimited Knowledge to which all things past and future are ever
present? Volition, as we know it, implies alternative courses of action,
antecedent motives, and resulting effort. Like intelligence, its
operations are serial. What, then, do we really mean, if we speak of
omnipresent Volition achieving at one and the same moment an infinite
variety of ends? So, too, with Personality: when we speak of personality
that is not circumscribed by limits, are we not using language from
which all the meaning has evaporated?

Such difficulties are insurmountable. Words which have gained their
meanings from finite experience of finite objects of thought must
inevitably falter and fail when we seek to apply them to that which is
Infinite. But we do not mend matters by emptying terms taken from the
inorganic world rather than from human personality. To designate the
universal Power by some scientific term, such as Force, does not help us
in the least. All our experience of force is an experience of finite
forces antagonized by other forces. We can frame no conception whatever
of Infinite Force comprising within itself all the myriad antagonistic
attractions and repulsions in which the dynamic universe consists. We
go beyond our knowledge when we speak of Infinite Force quite as much as
we do when we speak of Infinite Personality. Indeed, no word or phrase
which we seek to apply to Deity can be other than an extremely
inadequate and unsatisfactory symbol. From the very nature of the case
it must always be so, and if we once understand the reason why, it need
not vex or puzzle us.

It is not only when we try to speculate about Deity that we find
ourselves encompassed with difficulties and are made to realize how very
short is our mental tether in some directions. This world, in its
commonest aspects, presents many baffling problems, of which it is
sometimes wholesome that we should be reminded. If you look at a piece
of iron, it seems solid; it looks as if its particles must be everywhere
in contact with one another. And yet, by hammering, or by great
pressure, or by intense cold, the piece of iron may be compressed, so
that it will occupy less space than before. Evidently, then, its
particles are not in contact, but are separated from one another by
unoccupied tracts of enveloping space. In point of fact, these particles
are atoms arranged after a complicated fashion in clusters known as
molecules. The word _atom_ means something that cannot be cut. Now, are
these iron atoms divisible or indivisible? If they are divisible, then
what of the parts into which each one can be divided; are they also
divisible? and so on forever. But if these iron atoms are indivisible,
how can we conceive such a thing? Can we imagine two sides so close
together that no plane of cleavage could pass between them? Can we
imagine cohesive tenacity too great to be overcome by any assignable
disruptive force, and therefore infinite? Suppose, now, we heat this
piece of iron to a white heat. Scientific inquiry has revealed the fact
that its atom-clusters are floating in an ocean of ether, in which are
also floating the atom-clusters of other bodies and of the air about
us. The heating is the increase of wave motion in this ether, until
presently a secondary series of intensely rapid waves appear as white
light. Now this ether would seem to be of infinite rarity, since it does
not affect the weight of bodies, and yet its wave-motions imply an
elasticity far greater than that of coiled steel. How can we imagine
such powerful resilience combined with such extreme tenuity?

These are a few of the difficulties of conception in which the study of
physical science abounds, and I cite them because it is wholesome for us
to bear in mind that such difficulties are not confined to theological
subjects. They serve to show how our powers of conceiving ideas are
strictly limited by the nature of our experience. The illustration just
cited from the luminiferous ether simply shows how during the past
century the study of radiant forces has introduced us to a mode of
material existence quite different from anything that had formerly been
known or suspected. In this mode of matter we find attributes united
which all previous experience had taught us to regard as contradictory
and incompatible. Yet the facts cannot be denied; hard as we may find it
to frame the conception, this light-bearing substance is at the same
time almost infinitely rare and almost infinitely resilient. If such
difficulties confront us upon the occasion of a fresh extension of our
knowledge of the physical world, what must we expect when we come to
speculate upon the nature and modes of existence of God? Bearing this in
mind, let us proceed to consider the assumption that the Infinite Power
which is manifested in the universe is essentially psychical in its
nature; in other words, that between God and the Human Soul there is
real kinship, although we may be unable to render any scientific account
of it. Let us consider this assumption historically, and in the light of
our general knowledge of Evolution.

[Illustration]

_Religion's First Postulate: the Quasi-Human God_

It is with purpose that I use the word _assumption_. As a matter of
history, the existence of a quasi-human God has always been an
assumption or postulate. It is something which men have all along taken
for granted. It probably never occurred to anybody to try to prove the
existence of such a God until it was doubted, and doubts on that subject
are very modern. Omitting from the account a few score of ingenious
philosophers, it may be said that all mankind, the wisest and the
simplest, have taken for granted the existence of a Deity, or deities,
of a psychical nature more or less similar to that of Humanity. Such a
postulate has formed a part of all human thinking from primitive ages
down to the present time. The forms in which it has appeared have been
myriad in number, but all have been included in this same fundamental
assumption. The earliest forms were those which we call fetishism and
animism. In fetishism the wind that blows a tree down is endowed with
personality and supposed to exert conscious effort; in animism some
ghost of a dead man is animating that gust of wind. In either case a
conscious volition similar to our own, but outside of us, is supposed to
be at work. There has been some discussion as to whether fetishism or
animism is the more primitive, and some writers would regard fetishism
as a special case of animism; but it is not necessary to my present
purpose that such questions should be settled. The main point is this,
that in the earliest phases of theism each operation of Nature was
supposed to have some quasi-human personality behind it. Such phases we
find among contemporary savages, and there is abundant evidence of
their former existence among peoples now civilized. In the course of
ages there was a good deal of generalizing done. Poseidon could shake
the land and preside over the sea, angry Apollo could shoot arrows
tipped with pestilence, mischievous Hermes could play pranks in the
summer breezes, while as lord over all, though with somewhat fitful
sway, stood Zeus on the summit of Olympus, gathering the rain-clouds and
wielding the thunderbolt. Nothing but increasing knowledge of nature was
needed to convert such Polytheism into Monotheism, even into the strict
Monotheism of our own time, in which the whole universe is the multiform
manifestation of a single Deity that is still regarded as in some real
and true sense quasi-human. As the notion of Deity has thus been
gradually generalized, from a thousand local gods to one omnipresent
God, it has been gradually stripped of its grosser anthropomorphic
vestments. The tutelar Deity of a savage clan is supposed to share with
his devout worshippers in the cannibal banquet; the Gods of Olympus
made war and love, and were moved to fits of inextinguishable laughter.
From our modern Monotheism such accidents of humanity are eliminated,
but the notion of a kinship between God and man remains, and is rightly
felt to be essential to theism. Take away from our notion of God the
human element, and the theism instantly vanishes; it ceases to be a
notion of God. We may retain an abstract symbol to which we apply some
such epithet as Force, or Energy, or Power, but there is nothing
theistic in this. Some ingenious philosopher may try to persuade us to
the contrary, but the Human Soul knows better; it knows at least what it
wants; it has asked for Theology, not for Dynamics, and it resents all
such attempts to palm off upon it stones for bread.

Our philosopher will here perhaps lift up his hands in dismay and cry,
"Hold! what matters it what the Human Soul wants? Are cravings,
forsooth, to be made to do duty as reasons?" It is proper to reply that
we are trying to deal with this whole subject after the manner of the
naturalist, which is to describe things as they exist and account for
them as best we may. I say, then, that mankind have framed, and for long
ages maintained, a notion of God into which there enters a human
element. Now if it should ever be possible to abolish that human
element, it would not be possible to cheat mankind into accepting the
non-human remnant of the notion as an equivalent of the full notion of
which they had been deprived. Take away from our symbolic conception of
God the human element, and that aspect of theism which has from the
outset chiefly interested mankind is gone.

[Illustration]

_Religions Second Postulate: the undying Human Soul_

That supremely interesting aspect of theism belongs to it as part and
parcel of the general belief in an Unseen World, in which human beings
have an interest. The belief in the personal continuance of the
individual human soul after death is a very ancient one. The savage
custom of burying utensils and trinkets for the use of the deceased
enables us to trace it back into the Glacial Period. We may safely say
that for much more than a hundred thousand years mankind have regarded
themselves as personally interested in two worlds, the physical world
which daily greets our waking senses, and another world, comparatively
dim and vaguely outlined, with which the psychical side of humanity is
more closely connected. The belief in the Unseen World seems to be
coextensive with theism; the animism of the lowest savages includes
both. No race or tribe of men has ever been found destitute of the
belief in a ghost-world. Now, a ghost-world implies the personal
continuance of human beings after death, and it also implies identity of
nature between the ghosts of man and the indwelling spirits of sun,
wind, and flood. It is chiefly because these ideas are so closely
interwoven in savage thought that it is often so difficult to
discriminate between fetishism and animism. These savage ideas are of
course extremely crude in their symbolism. With the gradual civilization
of human thinking, the refinement in the conception of the Deity is
paralleled by the refinement in the conception of the Other World. From
Valhalla to Dante's Paradise, what an immeasurable distance the human
mind has travelled! In our modern Monotheism the assumption of kinship
between God and the Human Soul is the assumption that there is in Man a
psychical element identical in nature with that which is eternal. Belief
in a quasi-human God and belief in the Soul's immortality thus appear in
their origin and development, as in their ultimate significance, to be
inseparably connected. They are part and parcel of one and the same
efflorescence of the human mind. Mankind has always entertained them in
common, and so entertains them now; and were it possible (which it is
not) for science to disprove the Soul's immortality, a theism deprived
of this element would surely never be accepted as an equivalent for the
theism entertained before. The Positivist argument that the only worthy
immortality is survival in the grateful remembrance of one's fellow
creatures would hardly be regarded as anything but a travesty and trick.
If the world's long cherished beliefs are to fall, in God's name let
them fall, but save us from the intellectual hypocrisy that goes about
pretending we are none the poorer!

[Illustration]

_Religions Third Postulate: the Ethical Significance of the Unseen
World_

Our account of the rise and progress of the general belief in an Unseen
World is, however, not yet complete. No mention has been made of an
element which apparently has always been present in the belief. I mean
the ethical element. The savage's primeval ghost-world is always mixed
up with his childlike notions of what he ought to do and what he ought
not to do. The native of Tierra del Fuego, who foreboded a snowstorm
because one of Mr. Darwin's party killed some birds for specimens,
furnishes an excellent illustration. In a tribe living always on the
brink of starvation, any wanton sacrifice of meat must awaken the wrath
of the tutelar ancestral ghost-deities who control the weather. Notions
of a similar sort are connected with the direful host of omens that dog
the savage's footsteps through the world. Whatever conduct the
necessities of clan or tribe have prohibited soon comes to wear the
aspect of sacrilege.

Thus inextricably intertwined from the moment of their first dim dawning
upon the consciousness of nascent Humanity, have been the notion of
Deity, the notion of an Unseen World, and the notions of Right and
Wrong. In their beginnings theology and ethics were inseparable; in all
the vast historic development of religion they have remained
inseparable. The grotesque conceptions of primitive men have given place
to conceptions framed after wider and deeper experience, but the union
of ethics with theology remains undisturbed even in that most refined
religious philosophy which ventures no opinion concerning the happiness
or misery of a future life, except that the seed sown here will
naturally determine the fruit to be gathered hereafter. All the
analogies that modern knowledge can bring to bear upon the theory of a
future life point to the opinion that the breach of physical continuity
is not accompanied by any breach of ethical continuity. Such an opinion
relating to matters beyond experience cannot of course be called
scientific, but whether it be justifiable or not, my point is that
neither in the crude fancies of primitive men nor in the most refined
modern philosophy can theology divorce itself from ethics. Take away the
ethical significance from our conceptions of the Unseen World and the
quasi-human God, and no element of significance remains. All that was
vital in theism is gone.

[Illustration]

VII

_Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or an Eternal Reality?_

We are now prepared to see what is involved in the Reality of Religion.
Speaking historically, it may be said that Religion has always had two
sides: on the one side it has consisted of a theory, more or less
elaborate, and on the other side it has consisted of a group of
sentiments conformable to the theory. Now in all ages and in every form
of Religion, the theory has comprised three essential elements: first,
belief in Deity, as quasi-human; secondly, belief in an Unseen World in
which human beings continue to exist after death; thirdly, recognition
of the ethical aspects of human life as related in a special and
intimate sense to this Unseen World. These three elements are alike
indispensable. If any one of the three be taken away, the remnant cannot
properly be called Religion. Is then the subject-matter of Religion
something real and substantial, or is it a mere figment of the
imagination? Has Religion through all these weary centuries been dealing
with an eternal verity, or has it been blindly groping after a phantom?
Can that history of the universe which we call the Doctrine of Evolution
be made to furnish any lesson that will prove helpful in answering this
question? We shall find, I think, that it does furnish such a lesson.

But first let us remember that along with the three indispensable
elements here specified, every historic Religion has also contained a
quantity of cosmological speculations, metaphysical doctrines, priestly
rites and ceremonies and injunctions, and a very considerable part of
this structure has been demolished by modern criticism. The destruction
of beliefs has been so great that we can hardly think it strange if
some critics have taken it into their heads that nothing can be
rescued. But let us see what the doctrine of evolution has to say. Our
inquiry may seem to take us very far afield, but that we need not mind
if we find the answer by and by directing us homeward.

[Illustration]

VIII

_The Fundamental Aspect of Life_

I often think, when working over my plants, of what Linnæus once said of
the unfolding of a blossom: "I saw God in His glory passing near me, and
bowed my head in worship," The scientific aspect of the same thought has
been put into words by Tennyson:--

"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower,--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

No deeper thought was ever uttered by poet. For in this world of plants,
which with its magician chlorophyll conjuring with sunbeams is
ceaselessly at work bringing life out of death,--in this quiet vegetable
world we may find the elementary principles of all life in almost
visible operation. It is one of these elementary principles--a very
simple and broad one--that here concerns us.

One of the greatest contributions ever made to scientific knowledge is
Herbert Spencer's profound and luminous exposition of Life as the
continuous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations. The extreme
simplicity of the subject in its earliest illustrations is such that the
student at first hardly suspects the wealth of knowledge toward which it
is pointing the way. The most fundamental characteristic of living
things is their response to external stimuli. If you come upon a dog
lying by the roadside and are in doubt whether he is alive or dead, you
poke him with a stick; if you get no response you presently conclude
that it is a dead dog. So if the tree fails to put forth leaves in
response to the rising vernal temperature, it is an indication of death.
Pour water on a drooping plant, and it shows its life by rearing its
head. The growth of a plant is in its ultimate analysis a group of
motions put forth in adjustment to a group of physical and chemical
conditions in the soil and atmosphere. A fine illustration is the spiral
distribution of leaves about the stem, at different angular intervals in
different kinds of plants, but always so arranged as to ensure the most
complete exposure of the chlorophyll to the sunbeams. Every feature of
the plant is explicable on similar principles. It is the result of a
continuous adjustment of relations within the plant to relations
existing outside of it. It is important that we should form a clear
conception of this, and a contrasted instance will help us. Take one of
those storm-glasses in which the approach of atmospheric disturbance
sets up a feathery crystallization that changes in shape and
distribution as the state of the air outside changes. Here is something
that simulates vegetable life, but there is a profound difference. In
every one of these changes the liquid in the storm-glass is passive; it
is changed and waits until it is changed again. But in the case of a
tree, when the increased supply of solar radiance in spring causes those
internal motions which result in the putting forth of leaves, it is
quite another affair. Here the external change sets up an internal
change which leads to a second internal change that anticipates a second
external change. It is this active response that is the mark of life.

All life upon the globe, whether physical or psychical, represents the
continuous adjustment of inner to outer relations. The degree of life is
low or high, according as the correspondence between internal and
external relations is simple or complex, limited or extensive, partial
or complete, perfect or imperfect. The relations established within a
plant answer only to the presence or absence of a certain quantity of
light and heat, and to sundry chemical and physical relations in
atmosphere and soil. In a polyp, besides general relations similar to
these, certain more special relations are established in correspondence
with the eternal existence of mechanical irritants; as when its
tentacles contract on being touched. The increase of extension acquired
by the correspondences as we ascend the animal scale may be seen by
contrasting the polyp, which can simply distinguish between soluble and
insoluble matter, or between opacity and translucence in its
environment, with the keen-scented bloodhound and the far-sighted
vulture. And the increase of complexity may be appreciated by comparing
the motions respectively gone through by the polyp on the one hand, and
by the dog and vulture on the other, while securing and disposing of
their prey. The more specific and accurate, the more complex and
extensive, is the response to environing relations, the higher and
richer, we say, is the life.

[Illustration]

_How the Evolution of Senses expands the World_

The whole progression of life upon the globe, in so far as it has been
achieved through natural selection, has consisted in the preservation
and the propagation of those living creatures in whom the adjustment of
inner relations to outer relations is most successful. This is only a
more detailed and descriptive way of saying that natural selection is
equivalent to survival of the fittest. The shapes of animals, as well as
their capacities, have been evolved through almost infinitely slow
increments of adjustment upon adjustment. In this way, for instance, has
been evolved the vertebrate skeleton, through a process of which
Spencer's wonderful analysis is as thrilling as a poem. Or consider the
development of the special organs of sense. Among the most startling
disclosures of embryology are those which relate to this subject. The
most perfect organs of touch are the _vibrissæ_ whiskers of the cat,
which act as long levers in communicating impulses to the nerve-fibres
that terminate in clusters about the dermal sacs in which they are
inserted. These cat-whiskers are merely specialized forms of such hairs
as those which cover the bodies of most mammals, and which remain in
evanescent shape upon the human skin imbedded in minute sacs. Now in
their origin the eye and ear are identical with _vibrissæ_. In the early
stages of vertebrate life, while the differentiations of dermal tissue
went mostly to the production of hairs or feathers or scales, sundry
special differentiations went to the production of ears and eyes.
Embryology shows that in mammals the bulb of the eye and the auditory
chamber are extremely metamorphosed hair-sacs, the crystalline lens is a
differentiated hair, and the aqueous and vitreous humours are liquefied
dermal tissue! The implication of these wonderful facts is that sight
and hearing were slowly differentiated from the sense of touch. One can
seem to discern how in the history of the eye there was at first a
concentration of pigment grains in a particular dermal sac, making that
spot exceptionally sensitive to light; then came by slow degrees the
heightened translucence, the convexity of surface, the refracting
humours, and the multiplication of nerve-vesicles arranging themselves
as retinal rods. And what was the result of all this for the creature in
whom organs of vision were thus developed? There was an immense
extension of the range, complexity, and definiteness of the adjustment
of inner relations to outer relations; in other words, there was an
immense increase of life. There came into existence, moreover, for those
with eyes to see it, a mighty visible world that for sightless creatures
had been virtually non-existent.

With the further progress of organic life, the high development of the
senses was attended or followed by increase of brain development and the
correlative intelligence, immeasurably enlarging the scope of the
correspondences between the living creature and the outer world. In the
case of Man, the adjustments by which we meet the exigencies of life
from day to day are largely psychical, achieved by the aid of ideal
representations of environing circumstances. Our actions are guided by
our theory of the situation, and it needs no illustration to show us
that a true theory is an adjustment of one's ideas to the external
facts, and that such adjustments are helps to successful living. The
whole worth of education is directed toward cultivating the capacity of
framing associations of ideas that conform to objective facts. It is
thus that life is guided.

[Illustration]

_Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting Reality of Religion_

So as we look back over the marvellous life-history of our planet, even
from the dull time when there was no life more exalted than that of
conferva scum on the surface of a pool, through ages innumerable until
the present time when Man is learning how to decipher Nature's secrets,
we look back over an infinitely slow series of minute adjustments,
gradually and laboriously increasing the points of contact between the
inner Life and the World environing. Step by step in the upward advance
toward Humanity the environment has enlarged. The world of the
fresh-water alga was its tiny pool during its brief term of existence;
the world of civilized man comprehends the stellar universe during
countless æons of time. Every stage of enlargement has had reference to
actual existences outside. The eye was developed in response to the
outward existence of radiant light, the ear in response to the outward
existence of acoustic vibrations, the mother's love came in response to
the infant's needs, fidelity and honour were slowly developed as the
nascent social life required them; everywhere the internal adjustment
has been brought about so as to harmonize with some actually existing
external fact. Such has been Nature's method, such is the deepest law of
life that science has been able to detect.

Now there was a critical moment in the history of our planet, when love
was beginning to play a part hitherto unknown, when notions of right and
wrong were germinating in the nascent Human Soul, when the family was
coming into existence, when social ties were beginning to be knit, when
winged words first took their flight through the air. It was the moment
when the process of evolution was being shifted to a higher plane, when
civilization was to be superadded to organic evolution, when the last
and highest of creatures was coming upon the scene, when the dramatic
purpose of creation was approaching fulfilment. At that critical moment
we see the nascent Human Soul vaguely reaching forth toward something
akin to itself not in the realm of fleeting phenomena but in the Eternal
Presence beyond. An internal adjustment of ideas was achieved in
correspondence with an Unseen World. That the ideas were very crude and
childlike, that they were put together with all manner of grotesqueness,
is what might be expected. The cardinal fact is that the crude childlike
mind was groping to put itself into relation with an ethical world not
visible to the senses. And one aspect of this fact, not to be lightly
passed over, is the fact that Religion, thus ushered upon the scene
coeval with the birth of Humanity, has played such a dominant part in
the subsequent evolution of human society that what history would be
without it is quite beyond imagination. As to the dimensions of this
cardinal fact there can thus be no question. None can deny that it is
the largest and most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence of
mankind upon the earth.

Now if the relation thus established in the morning twilight of Man's
existence between the Human Soul and a world invisible and immaterial is
a relation of which only the subjective term is real and the objective
term is non-existent, then, I say, it is something utterly without
precedent in the whole history of creation. All the analogies of
Evolution, so far as we have yet been able to decipher it, are
overwhelming against any such supposition. To suppose that during
countless ages, from the seaweed up to Man, the progress of life was
achieved through adjustments to external realities, but that then the
method was all at once changed and throughout a vast province of
evolution the end was secured through adjustments to external
non-realities, is to do sheer violence to logic and to common sense. Or,
to vary the form of statement, since every adjustment whereby any
creature sustains life may be called a true step, and every
maladjustment whereby life is wrecked may be called a false step; if we
are asked to believe that Nature, after having throughout the whole
round of her inferior products achieved results through the accumulation
of all true steps and pitiless rejection of all false steps, suddenly
changed her method and in the case of her highest product began
achieving results through the accumulation of false steps; I say we are
entitled to resent such a suggestion as an insult to our understandings.
All the analogies of Nature fairly shout against the assumption of such
a breach of continuity between the evolution of Man and all previous
evolution. So far as our knowledge of Nature goes the whole momentum of
it carries us onward to the conclusion that the Unseen World, as the
objective term in a relation of fundamental importance that has
coexisted with the whole career of Mankind, has a real existence; and it
is but following out the analogy to regard that Unseen World as the
theatre where the ethical process is destined to reach its full
consummation. The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary
ages the Human Soul has not been cherishing in Religion a delusive
phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless groping and stumbling it has
been rising to the recognition of its essential kinship with the
ever-living God. Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolution
with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be that
which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion.

So far as I am aware, the foregoing argument is here advanced for the
first time. It does not pretend to meet the requirements of scientific
demonstration. One must not look for scientific demonstration in
problems that contain so many factors transcending our direct
experience. But as an appeal to our common sense, the argument here
brought forward surely has tremendous weight. It seems to me far more
convincing than any chain of subtle metaphysical reasoning can ever be;
for such chains, however, invincible in appearance, are no stronger than
the weakest of their links, and in metaphysics one is always uneasily
suspecting some undetected flaw. My argument represents the impression
that is irresistibly forced upon one by a broad general familiarity with
Nature's processes and methods; it therefore belongs to the class of
arguments that survive.

Observe, too, that it is far from being a modified repetition of the old
argument that beliefs universally accepted must be true. Upon the view
here presented, every specific opinion ever entertained by man
respecting religious things may be wrong, and in all probability is
exceedingly crude, and yet the Everlasting Reality of Religion, in its
three indispensable elements as here set forth, remains unassailable.
Our common-sense argument puts the scientific presumption entirely and
decisively on the side of religion and against all atheistic and
materialistic explanations of the universe. It establishes harmony
between our highest knowledge and our highest aspirations by showing
that the latter no less than the former are a normal result of the
universal cosmic process. It has nothing to fear from the advance of
scientific discovery, for as these things come to be better understood,
it is going to be realized that the days of the antagonism between
Science and Religion must by and by come to an end. That antagonism has
been chiefly due to the fact that religious ideas were until lately
allied with the doctrine of special creations. They have therefore
needed to be remodelled and considered from new points of view. But we
have at length reached a stage where it is becoming daily more and more
apparent that with the deeper study of Nature the old strife between
faith and knowledge is drawing to a close; and disentangled at last from
that ancient slough of despond the Human Mind will breathe a freer air
and enjoy a vastly extended horizon.

[Illustration]

L'ENVOI

Yesterday, when weary with writing, and my mind quite dusty with
considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and a salad I had asked
for was set before me. "It seems, then," said I aloud, "that if pewter
dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of vinegar and oil, and
slices of eggs, had been floating about in the air from all eternity, it
might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad." "Yes,"
says my wife, "but not so nice and well dressed as this of mine
is!"--KEPLER, _apud_ Tait and Stewart, _Paradoxical Philosophy_.

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

THE WRITINGS OF JOHN FISKE

[Illustration]

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

_With some Account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest.
With a steel portrait of Mr. Fiske, many maps, facsimiles, etc.
2 vols. crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00._

Those who care for geography and for primitive culture will doubtless
find this "Discovery of America," as we have found it, one of the most
agreeable and instructive books on both those topics that have appeared
in a good many years.... The book brings together a great deal of
information hitherto accessible only in special treatises, and
elucidates with care and judgment some of the most perplexing problems
in the history of discovery.--_The Speaker_ (London).

OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS

_2 vols. crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00._

Mr. Fiske's "Old Virginia and Her Neighbours" adds another to those
valuable and delightful studies of our early history which are fast
approaching the completeness and adequacy of a comprehensive history of
the beginnings of the American people. History has rarely been invested
with such interest and charm as in these volumes.--_The Outlook_ (New
York).

THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND

_Or, the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and
Religious Liberty. Crown 8vo, $2.00._ Illustrated Edition.
_Containing Portraits, Maps, Facsimiles, Contemporary Views,
Prints, and other Historic Materials. 2 vols. 8vo, gilt top,
$4.00._

Having in the first chapters strikingly and convincingly shown that New
England's history was the birth of centuries of travail, and having
prepared his readers to estimate at their true importance the events of
our early colonial life, Mr. Fiske is ready to take up his task as the
historian of the New England of the Puritans.... The last chapters give
a broad and fair account of the history of the time, but it is easy to
see that in his choice of facts, the author has exercised a large power
of selection,--a selection which we may note is wonderful in its
unfailing accuracy of estimate. As he is busy with the progress towards
civil and religious liberty which culminated in the Revolution, his
facts are chosen to illustrate that progress.--_Boston Daily
Advertiser._

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

_With Plans of Battles, and a Steel Portrait of Washington. 2
vols. crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00._ Illustrated Edition.
_Containing about 300 Illustrations. 2 vols. 8vo, gilt top,
$8.00._

The reader may turn to these volumes with full assurance of faith for a
fresh rehearsal of the old facts, which no time can stale, and for new
views of those old facts, according to the larger framework of ideas in
which they can now be set by the master of a captivating style and an
expert in historical philosophy.--_New York Evening Post._

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

_In Riverside Library for Young People. With Maps. 16mo, 75
cents._

John Fiske's "War of Independence" is a miracle.... A book brilliant and
effective beyond measure.... It is a statement that every child can
comprehend, but that only a man of consummate genius could have
written.--MRS. CAROLINE H. DALL, in the _Springfield Republican_.

THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF AMERICAN HISTORY, 1783-1789

_With Map, Notes, etc. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00._ Illustrated
Edition. _Containing about 170 Illustrations. 8vo, gilt top,
$4.00._

The author combines in an unusual degree the impartiality of the trained
scholar with the fervor of the interested narrator.... The volume should
be in every library in the land.--_The Congregationalist_ (Boston).

An admirable book.... Mr. Fiske has a great talent for making history
interesting to the general reader.--_New York Times._

A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES FOR SCHOOLS

_With Topical Analysis, Suggestive Questions, and Directions for
Teachers, by F. A. Hill, and Illustrations and Maps. Crown 8vo,
$1.00, net._

It is doubtful if Mr. Fiske has done anything better for his generation
than the preparation of this text-book, which combines in a rare degree
accuracy, intelligent condensation, historical discrimination, and an
attractive style.--_The Outlook_ (New York).

CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

_Considered with some Reference to its Origins. With Questions
on the Text by Frank A. Hill, and Bibliographical Notes by Mr.
Fiske. Crown 8vo, $1.00, net._

It is most admirable, alike in plan and execution, and will do a vast
amount of good in teaching our people the principles and forms of our
civil institutions.--MOSES COIT TYLER, _Professor of American
Constitutional History and Law, Cornell University_.

OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY

_Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on the
Positive Philosophy. In two volumes, 8vo, $6.00._

You must allow me to thank you for the very great interest with which I
have at last slowly read the whole of your work.... I never in my life
read so lucid an expositor (and therefore thinker) as you are; and I
think that I understand nearly the whole, though perhaps less clearly
about cosmic theism and causation than other parts.--CHARLES DARWIN.

This work of Mr. Fiske's may be not unfairly designated the most
important contribution yet made by America to philosophical
literature.--_The Academy_ (London).

DARWINISM, AND OTHER ESSAYS

_Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00._

If ever there was a spirit thoroughly invigorated by the "joy of right
understanding," it is that of the author of these pieces.... No less
confident and serene than his acceptance of the utmost logical results
of recent scientific discovery is Mr. Fiske's assurance that the
foundations of spiritual truths, so called, cannot possibly be shaken
thereby.--_The Atlantic Monthly_ (Boston).

THE UNSEEN WORLD

_And Other Essays. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00._

To each study the writer seems to have brought, besides an excellent
quality of discriminating judgment, full and fresh special knowledge,
that enables him to supply much information on the subject, whatever it
may be, that is not to be found in the volume he is noticing.--_Boston
Advertiser._

EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST

_Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00._

Among our thoughtful essayists there are none more brilliant than Mr.
John Fiske. His pure style suits his clear thought. He does not write
unless he has something to say; and when he does write, he shows not
only that he has thoroughly acquainted himself with the subject, but
that he has to a rare degree the art of so massing his matter as to
bring out the true value of the leading points in artistic relief....
The same qualities appear to good advantage in his new volume, which
contains his later essays on his favorite subject of evolution.--_The
Nation_ (New York).

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS

_Old Tales and Superstitions interpreted by Comparative
Mythology. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00._

Mr. Fiske has given us a book which is at once sensible and attractive,
on a subject about which much is written that is crotchety or
tedious.--W. R. S. RALSTON, in _The Athenæum_ (London).

THE DESTINY OF MAN

_Viewed in the Light of His Origin. 16mo, gilt top, $1.00._

One is charmed by the directness and clearness of his style, his simple
and pure English, and his evident knowledge of his subject.... Of one
thing we may be sure: that none are leading us more surely or rapidly to
the full truth than men like the author of this little book, who
reverently study the works of God for the lessons which He would teach
his children.--_Christian Union_ (New York).

THE IDEA OF GOD

_As Affected by Modern Knowledge. 16mo, gilt top, $1.00._

The vigor, the earnestness, the honesty, and the freedom from cant and
subtlety in his writings are exceedingly refreshing. He is a scholar, a
critic, and a thinker of the first order.--_Christian Register_
(Boston).

THROUGH NATURE TO GOD

_16mo, gilt top, $1.00._

CONTENTS: _The Mystery of Evil_; _The Cosmic Roots of Love and
Self-Sacrifice_; _The Everlasting Reality of Religion_.

This book discusses, in Mr. Fiske's large and luminous way, the
important subjects indicated in the contents. It falls in the same group
with his "Idea of God" and "Destiny of Man," which have been an
inspiration and a source of strength and light to a multitude of
readers.

* * * * *

[asterism] _For sale by all Booksellers. Sent by mail, postpaid, on
receipt of price by the Publishers_,

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

_4 Park Street, Boston; 11 East 17th Street, New York._

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