Title: Essays of a Biologist
Author: Huxley, Julian
Language: English
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ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST


      *      *      *      *      *      *

DUCTLESS AND OTHER GLANDS

_Fred E. Wynne, M. B._


A brief description of the results of recent research into the
physiology and functions of the ductless glands and the application of
this knowledge to the prevention and cure of disease.

      *      *      *      *      *      *


ESSAYS of a BIOLOGIST

by

JULIAN HUXLEY


[Illustration: Logo]



New York
Alfred · A · Knopf
1923

Copyright, 1923, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Published October, 1923

Set up, electrotyped, printed and bound by the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc.,
Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York.

Manufactured in the United States of America



TO MY COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS
AT THE RICE INSTITUTE
HOUSTON, TEXAS



PREFACE


A preface should be long, like one of Mr. Shaw’s, or short. I propose
the latter.

The essays here collected were written on very various occasions. This
must excuse the considerable overlap that will be found among them. I
have not thought it worth while to attempt to get rid of this, since,
though facts may be repeated, the point of view and general context are
on each occasion different.

Contrary to all custom, I have put the meat courses at the two ends
of my menu. If an author may presume to advise his readers, I would
suggest that, after finishing the first essay, they should (if they
retain a stomach for more) proceed at once to the last. This done, they
will find the others all in a sense lesser variations (if I may change
my metaphor) upon the same themes.

In spite, however, of the diversity of their occasions, there is a
common thread running through them, a common background of ideas. I
do not know whether I am justified in calling those ideas especially
biological, but they are certainly ideas which must present themselves
to any biologist who does not deliberately confine himself to the
technicalities of his science.

The biologist cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that his science
to-day is, roughly and broadly speaking, in the position which
Chemistry and Physics occupied a century ago. It is beginning to reach
down from observation to experimental analysis, and from experimental
analysis to grasp of principle. Furthermore, as the grasp of principles
in physico-chemical science led speedily to an immense new extension
both of knowledge and of control, so it is not to be doubted that
like effects will spring from like causes in biology. But whereas the
extension of control in physics and chemistry led to a multiplication
of the number of things which man could do and experience, the
extension of control in biology will _inter alia_ mean an alteration
of the modes of man’s experience itself. The one, that is to say,
remained in essence a quantitative change so far as concerns the real
life of man; the other can be a qualitative change. Applied physics and
chemistry bring more grist to the mill; applied biology will also be
capable of changing the mill itself.

The possibilities of physiological improvement, of the better
combination of existing psychical faculties, of the education of
old faculties to new heights, and of the discovery of new faculties
altogether--all this is no utopian silliness, but is bound to come
about if science continues her current progress.

Take but one example. In the first half of last century, hypnotism, or
mesmerism as it was then called, was in complete scientific disrepute.
To-day, all the main claims of its founders have been verified, and
many new facts unearthed. Every text-book on the subject will tell
you that men may be made insensible to pain by hypnosis alone without
any drug, many women even being delivered of children under its
influence without suffering. Temperature can be changed, blisters
raised, and many other processes not normally under the control of the
will can similarly be affected. The mind can be raised to an abnormal
sensitiveness, in which differences between objects that are completely
unrecognizable in ordinary waking existence, such as those between the
backs of two cards in a pack, may be easily distinguished.

If such possibilities are open to the empiricism of the hypnotist,
what may we not await from any truly scientific knowledge of mind,
comparable even in low degree to our knowledge of, say, electricity?

But these in a sense are all details, relevant in a way, and yet only
details. There is something still more fundamental in the biologist’s
attitude. He has to study evolution, and in that study there is brought
home to him, more vividly than to any one to whom the facts are not so
familiar, that in spite of all appearances to the contrary there has
been, throughout the whole of evolution, and most markedly in the rise
of man from his pre-human forbears, a real advance, a progress.

He sees further that the most remarkable single feature in that
progress has been the evolution of self-consciousness in the
development of man. That has made possible not only innumerable single
changes, but a change in the very method of change itself; for it
substituted the possibility of conscious control of evolution for the
previous mechanism of the blind chances of variation aided by the
equally blind sifting process of natural selection, a mechanism in
which consciousness had no part.

Most of mankind, now as in the past, close their eyes to this
possibility. They seek to put off their responsibility on to
the shoulders of various abstractions which they think can bear
their burden well enough if only they are spelt with a capital
letter:--Fate--God--Nature--Law--Eternal Justice--and such like. Men
are educated to be self-reliant and enterprising in the details of
life, but dependent, unreflective, _laissez-faire_ about life itself.
The idea that the basis of living could be really and radically altered
is outside most people’s orbit; and if it is forced upon their notice,
they as often as not find it in some way immoral.

Closely connected with this, in a sense its corollary, we have the fact
that ninety-nine people out of a hundred are concerned with getting a
living rather than with living, and that if for any reason they are
liberated from this necessity, they generally have not the remotest
idea how to employ their time with either pleasure or profit to
themselves or to others.

There are two ways of living: a man may be casual and simply exist,
or constructive and deliberately try to do something with his life.
The constructive idea implies constructiveness not only about one’s
own life, but about that of society, and the future possibilities of
humanity.

In pre-human evolution, the blind chances of variation and the blind
sifting of natural selection have directed the course of evolution
and of progress. It is on survival and the production of offspring
that the process has hinged; the machinery is in reality blind, but
these emerge as its apparent ends or purposes. The realization of ever
higher potentialities of living substance has happened, but only as a
secondary result and slow by-product of the main process.

In human evolution up till the present, the apparent ends and aims
have for the most part and in the bulk of men remained the same; it is
only the methods of pursuing them that have changed. True or conscious
purpose comes in and aids the unconscious biological forces already at
work.

However, to most men at some time, and to some men at most times,
these purely biological ends and purposes of life become altogether
inadequate. They perceive the door opened to a thousand possibilities
higher than this, all demanding to be satisfied. The realization of
what for want of a better term we can call spiritual values becomes
the true end of life, superposed on and dominating the previous
biological values.

When civilizations and societies are organized so that their prime
purpose is the pursuit of spiritual values, then life will have
passed another critical point in its evolution; as always, what has
gone before is necessary as foundation for what is coming, and the
biological conditions must be fulfilled before the new and higher
edifice can be built; but, as when the mammals superseded the reptiles,
so this change of aim will mean the rise of a new type to be the
dominant and highest form of life.

This can only come about so far as man consciously attempts to make
it come about. His evolution up to the present can be summed up in
one sentence--that through his coming to possess reason, life in his
person has become self-conscious, and evolution is handed over to him
as trustee and director. “Nature” will no longer do the work unaided.
Nature--if by that we mean blind and non-conscious forces--has,
marvellously, produced man and consciousness; they must carry on the
task to new results which she alone can never reach.

Mr. Trotter, in his delightful book on the Herd-instinct, draws
a distinction between the stable-minded or resistive and the
unstable-minded or adaptive, and points out how the destinies of
society have usually been entrusted to the former--whence spring our
persecutions of prophets and our neglect of innovating genius. This
will continue so long as the accepted belief of the majority is that
there exists a Providence who has assigned every one his proper place,
or even (oddest whim!) ordained the present type of society; so long
as they rely more on authority than experience, look to the past more
than to the future, to revelation instead of reason, to an arbitrary
Governor instead of to a discoverable order.

The general conceptions of the universe which a man or a civilization
entertains come in large part to determine his or its actions. There
are only two general and embracing conceptions of the sort (though any
number which are not general, and fail because they leave out whole
tracts of reality): in the fewest possible words, one is scientific,
the other unscientific; one tries to use to its fullest extent the
intellect with which we have been evolved, the other does not. The
thread running through most of these essays is the attempt to discover
and apply in certain fields as much as possible of this scientific
conception to several different fields of reality.

Of these essays, “Progress” has already appeared in the _Hibbert
Journal_, “Biology and Sociology” in the _Monist_, “Ils n’ont que de
l’âme” and “Philosophic Ants” in the _Cornbill Magazine_, “Rationalism
and the Idea of God” in the _Rationalist Press Annual_, and “Religion
and Science” in _Science and Civilization_, this year’s representative
of the annual “Unity” series edited by Mr. F. S. Marvin and published
by the Oxford University Press. They have all, however, been
considerably revised and enlarged before appearing in the present
volume. I have to thank the proprietors and publishers for kindly
permitting me to reprint these.

OXFORD,
_April 1923_.



CONTENTS

  I PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER                     3

 II BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY                             69

III ILS N’ONT QUE DE L’ÂME: AN ESSAY ON BIRD-MIND    107

 IV SEX BIOLOGY AND SEX PSYCHOLOGY                   133

  V PHILOSOPHIC ANTS: A BIOLOGIC FANTASY             177

 VI RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD                  207

VII RELIGION AND SCIENCE: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES    235



I

PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER


           EVOLUTION: AT THE MIND’S CINEMA

     I turn the handle and the story starts:
       Reel after reel is all astronomy,
       Till life, enkindled in a niche of sky,
     Leaps on the stage to play a million parts.

     Life leaves the slime and through all ocean darts;
       She conquers earth, and raises wings to fly;
       Then spirit blooms, and learns how not to die,--
     Nesting beyond the grave in others’ hearts.

     --I turn the handle: other men like me
     Have made the film: and now I sit and look
     In quiet, privileged like Divinity
     To read the roaring world as in a book.
       If this thy past, where shall thy future climb,
     O Spirit, built of Elements and Time!

     MUNICH, _Jan. 1923_.



PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER


     “Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
     Paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientes.”
                                 --LUCRETIUS.


     “As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each
     being, all corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress
     towards perfection.”
                                                     --CHARLES DARWIN.


     “Social progress means the checking of the cosmic process at every
     step and the substitution for it of another which may be called
     the ethical process.”
                                                    --T. H. HUXLEY.


     “It is probable that what hindered Kant from broaching his
     theory of progress with as much confidence as Condorcet was his
     perception that nothing could be decisively affirmed about the
     course of civilization until the laws of its movement had been
     discovered. He saw that this was a matter for future scientific
     investigation.”
                                                     --J. B. BURY.


What is the most fundamental need of man? It would be interesting to
conduct a plebiscite of such a question, a plebiscite of the same sort
that was conducted by one of the French newspapers some years ago,
to discover the opinions of its readers as to who was the greatest
Frenchman of the century.

When I say the most fundamental need of man, I do not mean those basic
needs for food and drink and shelter which he shares with the animals:
I mean the most fundamental to him _as man_, as an organism differing
from all other organisms in the power of thought, in reflection and
self-consciousness. What variety of answers would be given, I dare not
guess; but I hazard the belief that the majority, if the suggestion
were put before them, would agree that his deepest need was to discover
something, some being or power, some force or tendency, which was
moulding the destinies of the world--something not himself, greater
than himself, with which he yet felt that he could harmonize his
nature, in which he could repose his doubts, through faith in which he
could achieve confidence and hope.

That need has been felt by all those to whom life has been more
than a problem of the unreflective satisfaction of instincts and
desires--however pure those instincts, or beautiful those desires;
it has been felt by all in whom the problem of existence has been
apprehended by intellect and disinterested imagination.

I say all. There may be rare creatures who, secure in strength of body
and mind and in unhampered unfolding of their faculties, possess a
confidence by which this need is never felt. They are like those whom
Wordsworth drew for us in the “Ode to Duty”:--


     “There are who ask not if thine eye
     Be on them; who, in love and truth,
     Where no misgiving is, rely
     Upon the genial sense of youth:
     Glad hearts! without reproach or blot;
     Who do thy work and know it not.”


But such are rare; or should we say that their type of mind, though
not uncommon in the earlier years of life, only by the rarest chance
achieves its course without a descent into that vale where the finite
human intellect grapples unequally with infinite problems?

The need has been felt in all ages and in all countries; and the
answers, the partial satisfactions of the needs which have been found
by the mind of men, are correspondingly diverse.

Savages have endowed the objects around them, living and inanimate,
with supernatural qualities. At a higher grade of development they
have created gods made with hands, visible images of their fears or
their desires, by whose worship and service they assuaged the urgent
need within their breast. Still later, turning from such crudity, they
became servants and worshippers of unseen gods, conceived under the
form of persons, but persons transcending human personality, beings in
whom was vested the control of man and of the world.

Up to this point there had been an increase of spirituality in the
constructions by which human thought satisfied its need; none the less,
the ideas underlying the mode of these constructions had not materially
altered. As Voltaire so pungently put it, man had created God in his
own image.

What remains? there remains to search in the external world, to find
there if possible a foundation of fact for the belief drawn from the
inner world of mind, to test the conceptions of a supreme being or
supereminent power against ever more and more touchstones of reality,
until the most sceptical shall acknowledge that the final construction
represents, with whatever degree of incompleteness, yet not a mere
fragment educed to fill a void, however inevitable, to satisfy a
longing, however natural, but the summary and essence of a body of
verifiable fact, having an existence independent of the wishes or
ideals of mankind.

It was the striving after some such certainty that led Matthew Arnold
to his famous definition of God as “something, not ourselves, which
makes for righteousness.” Dissatisfaction with the assertion that
belief in a very special and undemonstrable form of Divinity was
necessary as an act of faith has, in a large measure, helped the
widespread revulsion against orthodox Christianity. It was the need for
some external, ascertainable basis for belief which led such different
minds as William James and H. G. Wells to approach religion, and in
such diverse ways as in the “Varieties of Religious Experience” and in
“God the Invisible King.” It is this same need which is leading the
representatives of Christianity to lay ever greater stress upon the
reality and pragmatic value of the religious experience, less and less
upon dogmas and creeds.

It will be my attempt in this brief paper to show how the facts of
evolutionary biology provide us, in the shape of a verifiable doctrine
of progress, with one of the elements most essential to any such
externally-grounded conception of God, to any construction which shall
be able to serve as permanent satisfaction of that deepest need whereof
we have spoken.

Any such construction must take account of many separate parts of
reality. In the first place, it must consider those realities inherent
in the mind of man: his desire for goodness; the sense of value which
all agree is attached to certain experiences of mystics and to certain
religious emotions; his ideals and their importance for the conduct of
life. But in the second place it must consider those realities which
are independent of man and of his mind--the ascertainable body of hard
fact, those things which existed before ever he existed, which would
exist were he to disappear, with which he must struggle as best he may.
Lastly, there is the need for intermediation between the one and the
other reality, between the inner _felt_ and the outer _known_.

Mr. Wells,[1] if you remember, erected a new trinitarianism, which in
broad outlines corresponded with this division. With his particular
construction, I do not in many respects agree. But that some form
of trinitarianism is a reasonably natural method of symbolizing the
inevitable tripleness of inner experience, outer fact, and their
interrelation is obvious enough. In the particular trinitarianism
of Christianity, the reality apprehended to exist behind the forces
of Nature is called the Father, the upspringing force within the
mind of man, especially when it seems to transcend individuality and
to overflow into what we designate as the mystical, is called the
Holy Ghost, and the activity, personal or vicarious, which mediates
between the individual and the rest of the universe, reconciling
his incompleteness and his failures with its apparent sternness and
inexorableness, is called the Son.

Some men lay more weight on one of these aspects than on the others.
I know a clergyman of the Church of England who, on being reproached
during a theological argument with failure to pay sufficient respect
to the doctrine of God the Father, replied: “I am not interested in
God the Father”; and I know intellectually-minded men who wish to
reject the validity of all religious experience because their minds
are so made that they pay more attention to external fact and because
their reason refuses to let them agree with the interpretations of
fact propounded by most religious bodies. But, for a properly balanced
construction, for the finding of something which shall serve not as the
basis of a creed for this or that sect, but of a creed for humanity, of
something which instead of dividing shall unite, we need all aspects.

The idea of Progress constitutes, as I hope to show, the most important
element in the first part of our construction--that which attempts to
synthesize the facts of Nature; and besides, no inconsiderable portion
of the third, the interrelation of inner and outer.

Readers of Bury’s interesting book on the Idea of Progress[2] will
perhaps, with me, have been surprised at the modernity of that
conception. He shows how, in antiquity, the idea was never a dominant
one, and further that the adumbrations made of it all lacked some
element without which it cannot be styled progress in the sense in
which that word is used to-day.

Not indeed till the late Renaissance can we say that the idea of
Progress became in any real sense incorporated with the common thought
of Western civilization. From then to the present it has suffered
many vicissitudes. Starting in the XVIIth century as little more than
a consciousness of the superiority of the present over the past, in
the XVIIIth it changed to a dogma, its adherents claiming that there
existed a “Law of Progress” leading inevitably to the perfectioning
of humanity. In the XIXth century the dogma was questioned, and
thinkers began to put it to the test--the test of comparing theory with
historical fact. A new lease of life, however, was given to the idea of
a law of progress by the evolution theory; but finally, of late years,
there has been a marked reaction, leading not only to a denial of any
such inevitable law, but often to a questioning of the very existence
of Progress in any shape or form.

It is the business of the philosopher and of the biologist to see
whether this scepticism be justified, and to find out by a more
scientific approach how much of the doctrine of Progress is valid.
To the layman it would seem inevitable, once the validity of the
evolution theory was granted, to concede the fact of Progress in some
form or another. If we accept the doctrine of evolution, we are bound
to believe that man has arisen from mammals, terrestrial from aquatic
forms, vertebrates from invertebrates, multicellular from unicellular,
and in general the larger and the more complex from the smaller and
simpler. To the average man it will appear indisputable that a man is
_higher_ than a worm or a polyp, an insect _higher_ than a protozoan,
even if he cannot exactly define in what resides this highness or
lowness of organic types.

It is, curiously enough, among the professional biologists that
objectors to the notion of biological progress and to its corollary,
the distinction of higher and lower forms of life, have chiefly been
found. I say curiously enough, and yet to a dispassionate observer it
is perhaps not so curious, but only one further instance of that common
human failing, the inability to see woods because of the trees that
compose them.

That is as it may be. Our best course will be to start by examining
some of the chief objections to the idea of biological progress, in
order to see if they involve errors of thought which we may then avoid.

The most widespread of all the objections raised may, I think, be
fairly put as follows: “The fundamental attribute of living beings
is adaptation to environment. A man is not better adapted to his
environment than the flea which lives upon him as a parasite, or than
the bacillus which kills him, nor is a bird better adapted to air than
a jelly-fish to water; therefore we have no right to speak of one as
higher than the other, or to regard the transition from one type to
another as involving progress.”

A second class of objector is prepared to admit that there has been
an increase of complexity, an increase in the degree of organization
during evolution, but refuses to allow that increase of complexity
has any value in itself, whether biological or philosophical, and
accordingly refuses to dignify this trend towards greater complexity by
the name of progress.

Yet a third difficulty is raised by those who ask us to fix our
attention on forms of life like Lingula, the lamp-shell, which, though
millions of years elapse, do not evolve. If there exists a Law of
Progress, they say, how is it that such creatures are exempt from its
operations?

Finally, a somewhat similar attitude is adopted by those who refuse
to grant that evolution can involve progress when it has, as we know,
brought about well-nigh innumerable degenerations. Granted, for
instance, they would say, that the average Crustacean is in many ways
an improvement upon the simple form of life from which we must suppose
that it arose, yet we know that within the group of Crustacea there are
several lines of descent which have led to the production of parasitic
forms--animals in which the activity and complex organization of the
ancestral type has been sacrificed, and as end-product we are presented
with a hateful being, an almost shapeless mass consisting of little
else but over-developed reproductive organs and mechanisms for sucking
nutriment from its unfortunate host. Such a result is revealed to us
in the Crustacean form Sacculina, and is paralleled by countless other
examples in almost every class of animals. The degradation of parasites
and sedentary types is equally a product of the evolutionary process
with the genesis of the ant, the bird or the human being; how then can
we call the evolutionary process progressive?

These are important objections. Can they be met? In the broadest way
they can and must be met by the only possible method, the method of
Science, which consists in examining facts objectively, and by drawing
conclusions not a priori, but a posteriori. A law of Nature is not (and
I wonder how often this fallacy has been exploded, only to reappear
next day)--a law of Nature is not something revealed, not something
absolute, not something imposed on phenomena from without or from
above; it is no more and no less than a summing-up, in generalized
form, of our own observations of phenomena; it is an epitome of fact
from which we can draw several conclusions. By beginning in this way
from the very beginning, by examining the basis of our mode of thinking
in natural science, only thus are we enabled to see at one and the same
moment how to investigate the question of progress on the constructive
side, and how to neutralize the force of the objections to the idea.

Questions of fact are simple to deal with. It is indubitable that some
forms of life remain stationary and unevolving for secular periods; it
is equally indubitable that degeneration is widespread in evolution.
These are facts. But we are not therefore called upon to deny the
possibility of progress. To do so would be to fall into the error
of reasoning which we have already condemned. It remains for us to
take these facts into account when examining the totality of facts
concerning organic life, and to see whether, in spite of them, we
cannot discover a series of other facts, a movement in phenomena, which
may still legitimately be called progress. To deny progress because of
degeneration is really no more legitimate than to assert that, because
each wave runs back after it has broken, therefore the tide can never
rise.

Similarly with the first two objections. If the degree of adaptation
has not increased during evolution, then it is clear that progress
does not consist in increase in adaptation. But it does not follow
that progress does not exist; it may quite well consist in an increase
of other qualities. So with complexity. Complexity has increased, but
increase in complexity is not progress, say the objectors. Granted:
but may there not be something else which has increased besides mere
complexity?

No; the remedy for all our difficulties, and indeed the only way in
which we can arrive at the _possibility_ of saying whether biological
progress exists or no, is to adopt the positive method.

Let us then begin our survey of biological evolution in the endeavour
to find whether or no progress is visible there. To start with, we must
be clear what are the sources of our knowledge on the subject.

Direct observation of progressive evolution has, of course, not yet
been possible in the period--biologically negligible--in which man has
directed his attention to the problem; and historical record is also
absent. The best available evidence is that of paleontology: here the
relative positions of the layers of the earth’s crust enable us to
deduce their temporal sequence--and naturally, that of the organisms
whose fossil remains they embalm--with a great deal of accuracy.[3]

We can scarcely ever observe the direct transition from the forms of
life in an older to those in a younger stratum, nor can we absolutely
prove their genetic relationship. But in a vast number of cases it is
abundantly clear that the later type of organization is descended from
the former--that a group of forms in the younger stratum had its origin
in one or more species of the group to which the forms in the older
stratum belong. Sometimes, however, as in many groups of mammals, the
gaps are few and small, the seriation almost complete. In any event we
have here evidence which, so far as it goes, is perfectly admissible
for the main lines and for many of the smaller branches of evolutionary
descent.

Unfortunately, it does not go very far--or, we had better say, it is
of restricted application. By the time we find well-preserved fossils
in the rocks, the main groups of the animal kingdom and their chief
subdivisions had been already differentiated, with the one important
exception of the vertebrates; while time, heat, and pressure have
so modified the earlier strata as to destroy the fossil forefathers
of insects, molluscs, crustacea, and the rest, which they must have
contained.

Within the vertebrate stock, then, we can learn a great deal from
the semi-direct methods of paleontology: but for the history of the
other groups and for their origin and interrelations, we are driven
back upon comparative anatomy and embryology, into another field of
more circumstantial evidence. When, for instance, we find that the
fore-limbs of bat, bird, whale, horse, and man, although so different
in function and in detail of structure, are yet built upon the same
general plan, and upon a plan wholly different from that of the
limbs, say, of a spider or an insect, we must either deny reason and
say that this similarity means nothing; or assume that its cause
is supernatural, outside the province of science, that it is the
expression of some eternal Idea, or some plan of a personal creator
(in which case, be it noted, the idea or the plan often appears to
our intellect as unreasonable and indeed stupid); or finally that it
implies community of origin with later divergence of development. When
we are dealing with the smaller sub-divisions of some larger group,
this method too gives us information of the same order of accuracy as
does paleontology: but when we try to understand the relationships
of these larger groups, then we are forced to renounce any claim to
detailed knowledge. In broad outline, however, a great deal still
remains, and this broad outline we can employ for our valuation of the
whole sweep of biological progress, just as we can use the greater
accuracy of vertebrate paleontology and comparative morphology to fill
in the detail within a restricted field of its operation. From these
various evidences, direct and indirect, we can paint for ourselves a
picture of the evolution of life which, in spite of inevitable gaps and
errors, is in its main features adequate and true.

Let us not be misled by the fact that disputes can and justifiably do
arise over details: as Professor Bateson put it recently[4]:--

“If the broad lines do not hold, then we must sink into irrationality
or turn to flagrant supernaturalism.”

Let us then remind ourselves of some of these broad lines.

We know that there was a time when the earth, hot and fiery, could
not have been the abode of life. Of the first origins of life we know
nothing and guess little. What we can justifiably surmise is that
the protoplasm of the original organisms was not yet differentiated
into cytoplasm and nucleus, and that sexuality had not yet arisen.
The bacteria, however specialized in other ways, are still in this
primitive condition.

Later, we can with great probability infer that the independent
units into which the stuff of life was subdivided reached a size
which, though still minute, was at least not beyond or even close to
the limits of microscopic vision; they were further provided with a
nucleus, and occasionally underwent sexual fusion. In other words, they
showed an organization which we call cellular; they were free-living
cells. Such unicellular creatures must have been at one epoch sole
inhabitants of the earth, and diverged into the most manifold types of
structure and modes of life. Such of them as led an animal as opposed
to a plant type of existence would be classified under the Protozoa or
unicellular animals.[5]

The colonial habit gives advantages of increased size and greater
rapidity of motion, of which many Protozoa have availed themselves. A
colonial existence once attained, division of labour, at first between
the germinal and the somatic, later between different types of somatic
units, will be a further advantage. Such organisms, of which we cannot
say definitely whether they are compound aggregates or single wholes,
would represent the most natural link between the unicellular Protozoan
and the rest of the animal kingdom, the multicellular forms or Metazoa.
And indeed such organisms exist at the present day--organisms such as
Volvox, Zoothamnium, Proterospongia, and Myxidium--as adjuvant and
confirmatory of our reasonable faith.

The multicellular organisms appear to have originated twice over, by
divergent routes. There are the true Metazoa, to which belong all the
higher types, and the Parazoa or sponges, which have never passed
beyond a very primitive type of structure. Both start as simple sacs,
whose walls are formed from two primary sheets or layers of cells.
Leaving sponges out of account, the Hydroid polyps are the simplest
representative of this grade of structure, while some of the Jelly-fish
and Siphonophores have attained the utmost limit of its inherent
possibilities.

The next great step was the intercalation of a third primary layer
between the other two. The result of this, the so-called triploblastic
type of organization, gives the ground-plan for all subsequent
organizations; and later evolution consists mainly in the evolution of
this ground-plan.

In other words, we can now pass from the consideration of the general
plan of life’s architecture to that of its details. During the next
great tract of time, that which was novel in life (for we must not
be guilty of a _petitio principii_ in yet speaking of “advance” or
“progress”) was brought about in two main ways--by an increase in
the size of organisms, and by an increase in the efficiency of their
working.

The simplest Metazoa, such as the polyps, as well as the simplest
three-layered forms, such as the free-living flat-worms, are all small,
composed of an amount of material comparable with that contained in a
single one of our hairs. In every group of Metazoa, increase of size is
one of the main features that accompanies specialization, and the more
specialized groups possess a higher average size than the less.

A jelly-fish against a polyp; a cuttle-fish against a primitive
mollusc; a vertebrate against its chordate ancestor; the giant reptiles
of the late secondary period against their forbears; a horse against
Phenacodus; man against the earliest primates--over and over again does
size increase with the march of time.

Not only this, but when there occurs aggregation of individuals to
form units of a higher order, as in bees and ants and termites, and in
man himself, there too increase of size in the new units thus produced
is one of the most notable features. Is not human history in large
measure the history of the increase in size of social units?

But size alone is not enough; there is also a definite improvement of
the details of life’s mechanism--partly revealed as improvement in the
efficiency of the parts themselves, partly in the adjustment of the
parts to each other, and their subordination to the needs of the whole.

It is scarcely necessary to detail the improvements in efficiency of
different organs during evolution: such are universally familiar. But
a few examples will point my moral. The lowest three-layered forms
have no circulatory system; this, rendered necessary later by increase
of size, shows a gradual differentiation of parts in evolution. The
exquisite machinery of our heart is directly descended from a minute
pulsating ventral vessel such as that seen in Amphioxus. Protection and
support are better cared for in insect than in worm, in mammal than in
lamprey. But the most spectacular improvement of function, the most
important of all the directional movements in evolution has been that
affecting the nervous system and the sense-organs associated with it.
Few people who have not gone carefully into the subject realize how
imprisoned and windowless are the existences led by lower forms of life.

Even such physically well-organized creatures as Crustacea stand at
an amazingly low mental level. The other day I was reading a careful
account of experiments on the behaviour of crabs. The method by which
the sexes recognize each other is so crude that I am not sure whether
it deserves the term recognition at all. Before mating, which takes
place immediately after a moult, the female is carried about for some
time in the claws of the male. The mature males will attempt to lift
up and carry off any members of the same species, male or female: but
the only ones which will permit themselves to be thus carried about are
females just before moulting. Hence by a general instinct to lift any
members of the same species on the part of the males, and on the part
of the females an instinct to allow themselves to be lifted when in
the physiological condition which precedes moulting, the required end
is brought about. But of any mental operation such as is involved in
sex-recognition in man or any other mammal, there is no evidence.

Fish, to take another example, possess associative memory; they can
learn. But they learn very slowly, and learn only the simplest things.
The jump from their powers of memory to those of a dog, who can be
trained comparatively quickly to carry out complicated tricks, is as
great as the further jump from the powers of a dog to those of a man
capable of learning a page of print by heart in two or three readings.

The first organs connected with mind to become elaborated are the
organs of sense: but such _receptor_ organs are useless to their
possessor, however elaborate, unless put into relation with proper
_effector_ organs--organs for action, whether locomotor or secretory.
So that the first steps are the elaboration of sense-organs, the
increase of efficiency of muscles and glands, and, equally essential,
the construction of an improved “_adjustor system_,” whereby the
stimulus falling on the sense-organ may be translated into action and
into the right kind of action. This adjustor mechanism is the central
nervous system. Most of the further history of organisms may be summed
up in one phrase--the evolution of adjustor mechanisms.

At first, it is chiefly of importance to be brought into relation with
more and more of the happenings of the outer world, to be able to see
and hear and feel and smell more and more delicately; and to react upon
the outer world more and more efficiently and powerfully, to be able
to move and to handle matter more quickly and with finer and finer
adjustment.

But unless the adjustor mechanism be improved, this process soon tends
to a limit. I may illustrate my meaning by a simple supposition.
Suppose an organism capable of very little beyond reflexes and
instincts and with but a scanty dose of associative power: of what
conceivable use to it would be a telescope or a telephone? Man obtains
a biological advantage from such accessory sense-organs in that, when
thus apprised of events at a distance, he is enabled to plan out
courses of action to meet the events which he imagines are going to
overtake him: but both planning and imagination are entirely functions
of an adjustor mechanism, and without such a mechanism, great
enlargement of sensory power would only result in an organism reacting
too often and unnecessarily to events in its environment.

There is, in fact, an obvious limit to the perfection which can be
attained by receptor and effector organs. Striated muscles, the
modelling of the skeleton and joints for speed in a horse or greyhound,
the eye and ear of higher vertebrates, the mammalian sense of smell--no
doubt it would be possible for life to have produced more perfect and
more efficient mechanisms--but not, apparently, mechanisms _much_
more perfect or _much_ more efficient. They stand near the limit of
biological efficiency.

There thus comes a time when it is impossible or extremely difficult
to give an organism advantage in the struggle by improving its
sense-organs or its locomotor system, or indeed any of its general
physical construction, whereas it is still possible to confer the most
important advantages upon it by means of improvements in the adjustor
mechanism, improvements which involve and imply improvements of mind.

This stage was reached by mammals and birds quite early in the Tertiary
period; and one of the most striking spectacles of biology, revealed
in the fossils of successive strata, is to see Mind coming into its
own after this epoch. Over and over again a group of animals is seen
to appear and spread, only to be extinguished and replaced by another
type which to all outward appearance is similar, no better adapted
to the conditions of life. But the two types differ in one point: the
later possessed a larger brain, and so, from all analogy, a better
mind. Or, to take another example, man differs from the lower animals
in no notable _physical_ specialization except the upright posture.

After this critical point in the evolution of organisms was reached,
further development has consisted chiefly in the development of mind:
and this has meant, from the objective, purely biological standpoint,
the possibility of summing-up ever more and more power and fine
adjustment of response in the present, in the single act.[6]

The first main function of the improved adjustor mechanism was to make
ever more complicated actions possible; but this again tended speedily
to a limit. The next step was to make it possible for the past to
act in the present. Through associative memory, present behaviour is
modified by past experience. What this has meant to organisms can be
realized if we reflect that certain terms which can justly be applied
to a mammal or a bird have no real meaning if applied to lower forms.
If we speak of a cunning wolf or a wary crow, we imply that their life
has taught them new qualities; but it is nonsense to talk of a cunning
crab, and, though we might properly ascribe wariness to a trout, I
would not like to speak of a wary Amoeba. In the same way we can
justifiably say that one dog is affectionate, another intelligent:
but to speak of an affectionate earthworm or an intelligent snail has
no more proper significance than it would be to say that a dog was
intellectual or religious.

Quickness of learning then became of importance; but so long as the
faculty of generalizing is absent, associative memory, although
liberating organisms from the prison of a fixed and inherited
mental constitution, still pins them down to the accidental and the
particular; an organism can only learn to react to those particular
experiences which chance has decreed that it should have had.

The next and last salient step in evolution was a double one. Which
of its two parts came first is hard to say; probably they acted
reciprocally throughout. This step was, on the one hand, the attainment
of the power of generalization--of reason, concept-formation, or what
you will--and on the other the origin of tradition, which in its turn
was made possible by the acquisition of speech and of a gregarious mode
of life. By these means, the human species and its evolving ancestors
were gradually enabled, first, to free experience ever more and more
from the accidental and to store what was essential; and, secondly, to
bring gradually more and more of the experience of the whole race to
bear upon the present problem, and to plan further and further ahead,
and on a larger and larger scale.

This has meant, among other things, that for the first time in
biological history there has been an aggregation (in the technical
biological sense) of minds. Over and over again in evolution does
the process of aggregation appear.[7] It is an advantage, for at one
jump it lands life on a new level of size, with new possibilities of
division of labour and specialization. It appears in the aggregation
of Protozoa to form the colonial ancestor of all higher, many-celled
forms. It appears again on this new level in the aggregation of hydroid
polyps, of polyzoa, of ascidians, and especially in the beautiful
floating Siphonophora, in which the polyp-like units (themselves
historically aggregates of cells) have become so subordinate in
relation to the whole that they can often scarcely be recognized as
individuals, and the individuality of the aggregate is much more marked
than that of its components. It appears in a new way in the Termites
and in the social Hymenoptera--ants, bees, and wasps. Here the bonds
uniting the members of the aggregate are not physical but mental,
their sense-impressions and instincts; but the principle is identical
throughout. Finally in man we have not merely aggregation of physical
individuals held together by mental bonds, but aggregation of minds as
well as of physical individuals.

In many mammals and birds, each generation can extend its influence
on to the next, and the experience of the parents is in part made
available to the offspring. But never until the origin of speech was
it possible for a whole series of generations to be linked together
by experience, never could experience be cumulative, never could one
mind know what another mind, remote in time, had been thinking or
feeling. Biologically, evolution since the time of origin of this new
process has consisted essentially in the enlargement and specialization
of aggregations of minds, and the improvement of the tradition which
constitutes the mode of inheritance for these aggregations--that
tradition which, like Hugo’s “Nef magique et suprême” of human destiny,
will eventually have “fait entrer dans l’homme tant d’azur qu’elle a
supprimé les patries.”

It will, I hope, have been clear, even from the few examples which
I have given, that there has been a main direction in evolution. At
the close of the paper I shall try to point out that since motion in
this direction has led to the production of an increasing intensity
of qualities which we are unanimous in calling valuable, since in
other words the application of our scale of values tends in the same
direction as has the march of evolutionary history, that therefore
we are justified in calling this direction progressive, and indeed
logically compelled to give to motion in this direction a name which,
like progress, implies the idea of value.

I shall therefore, from now on, use the term _biological progress_ to
denote movement in the direction which we have sketched in outline,
and shall shortly proceed to define more accurately. In so doing, I
perhaps beg the question, to be proved I hope later, as to whether the
observed direction is progressive: but I no longer beg the question of
whether evolution is a directional process. However we may argue on
the facts, the facts remain: and the facts are that there has been an
increase in certain qualities of organisms, both physical and mental,
during geological time.

Meanwhile, let it be remembered, the simplest forms have survived side
by side with the more complex, the less specialized with the more
specialized. Even when we can trace a causal relation between the rise
of one group and the decay of another, as with the mammals and birds on
the one hand, and the reptiles on the other, even then numbers of the
defeated group continue to exist. Thus, in broad terms, evolution is
not a transformation, be it progressive or no, of the whole of living
matter, but of a part of it.

I will endeavour to sum up, in brief, what seem to me the salient
points of that process, a sketch of which, inevitably hasty and
inadequate, I have just tried to give.

During the time of life’s existence on this planet, there has been
an increase, both in the average and far more in the upper level, of
certain attributes of living things.

In the first place there has been an increase in their size, brought
about by two methods, first by the increase of size of the units of
life themselves (cells, metazoan individuals, communities), secondly
by their aggregation; and this has been accompanied by a (very roughly)
parallel increase in the duration of life.

Next, there has been an increase in their complexity; and this in its
turn depends upon the fact that a division of labour has been brought
about between the parts of organisms, each part becoming specialized
for greater efficiency in the performance of some particular function.
In the fewest words, the separate bits of machinery of which organisms
are composed have become more efficient.

In the third place, there has been an increase in the harmony of these
parts, and consequently in the unity of the whole. Delicate mechanisms
for co-ordination have been developed, and arrangements whereby one
portion becomes dominant over the rest, and so a material basis for
unification is given.

In the fourth place, there has been an increase of self-regulation.
The outer environment changes from month to month, from hour to hour.
The more complex products of evolution are in high degree exempt from
the consequences of these changes, through being the possessors of a
constant internal environment which, beyond the narrowest limits, it is
most difficult to alter.

Fifthly, there has been an increase in the possibility of bringing
past experience to bear on present problems. At the base is the power
of modifying normal reactions with repetition; then come some simple
degrees of memory; then associative memory, as in birds and mammals,
for whom most reactions are not given in the inherited constitution,
but must be learnt; then rational memory, in which the power of
generalization liberates life from blind dependence upon the local and
the accidental; and finally tradition, whereby the amount of experience
available to the developing race is not constituted merely by the
isolated and limited experiences of its members, but by their sum. More
and more of the past becomes directly operative in the present; further
and further into the future can the aim of the present extend.

Finally we can conclude with a high degree of certainty that the
psychical faculties--of knowing, feeling, and willing--have increased
in intensity, and also in their relative importance for the life of the
individual organism.

We have condensed our summary into these six general statements; if
we wish to reach a still more general form, the most general form
possible, we can redistil it thus: During the course of evolution in
time, there has been an increase in the control exerted by organisms
over their environment, and in their independence with regard to it;
there has been an increase in the harmony of the parts of organisms;
and there has been an increase in the psychical powers of organisms, an
increase of willing, of feeling, and of knowing.

This increase has not been universal; many organisms have remained
stationary or have even regressed; many have shown increase in
one particular but not in others. But the _upper level_ of these
properties of living matter has been continually raised, their average
has continually increased. It is to this increase, continuous during
evolutionary time, in the average and especially in the upper level of
these properties that, I venture to think, the term biological progress
can be properly applied.

Used thus it is no more an a priori or an undefined concept. It is a
name for a complicated set of actual phenomena, and if, with progress
thus defined, we were to speak of a law of progress in evolution, we
should be using the term law in a perfectly legitimate way, as denoting
a generalization based on observed facts, and not as pre-supposing any
vitalistic principle of perfectibility, any necessary and mysterious
tendency of organisms to advance independently of circumstances.

The gas laws state that the pressure of a gas kept at constant volume
increases in a particular way with increase of temperature. Now the
pressure of a confined gas depends on the rate at which its particles
bombard the walls in which they are contained, and the speed at which
they are travelling. In a gas whose temperature is raised, many
particles will, at any given moment, be travelling more slowly than the
average rate when it was cooler, many even which had been travelling
fast may now be travelling slowly. None the less, the average speed of
all the particles is greater; and this and nothing else is what with
perfect justification we sum up as our _law_.

In biological evolution, some organisms degenerate, some remain
stationary, but the average of certain properties, and more especially
their upper level, increases; and this tendency for certain properties
to become more marked, this and nothing else, is what we sum up and
generalize, again with perfect justification, as the law of biological
progress.

The mechanism of biological progress demands a word: for it is
noticeable that a mere fact, however well attested, makes a very
different kind of impression from a fact explained and brought into
relation with the rest of our knowledge. The impression is either less
powerful; or else, an explanation being sought for, an erroneous one is
found. It was Darwin’s great merit that, not content with the piling up
of evidence in favour of the reality of Evolution, he at the same time
advanced a theory which made it at least possible to understand how
Evolution could have come to pass as a natural process. The effect was
multiplicative on men’s minds, not merely additive, for facts are too
bulky to be lugged about conveniently except on wheels of theory.

The fact of biological progress has struck many observers. Some have
been content to believe that the single magic formula of “Natural
Selection” would explain it adequately and without further trouble,
forgetting that there must be at least some points of difference
between a natural selection producing a degenerate type and natural
selection leading to progress. Some biologists have lumped it,
together with all other evolutionary processes which seem to show
us a development along predetermined lines, under the head of
_orthogenesis_--the (hypothetical!) tendency of organisms to unfold
just one type of hidden potentiality. Bergson has been particularly
struck with it: refuses to allow that it can have anything to do with
Natural Selection or any determinist process, and ascribes it to his
_élan vital_.

Here, as so often elsewhere, Bergson reveals himself as a good poet but
a bad scientist. His intellectual vision of evolution as a fact, as
something happening, something whole, to be apprehended in a unitary
way--that is unsurpassed. He seems to see it as vividly as you or I
might see a hundred yards race, holding its different incidents and
movements all in his mind together to form one picture. But he then
goes on to give a symbolic description of what he sees--and then
thinks that his symbols will serve in place of analytic explanations.
There _is_ an “urge of life”; and it is, as a matter of fact, urging
life up the steps of progress. But to say that biological progress is
explained by the _élan vital_ is to say that the movement of a train
is “explained” by an _élan locomotif_ of the engine: it is to fall
into the error, so often condemned in scientists by philosophers, and
ridiculed in both by satirists, of hanging or at least disposing of a
difficulty by giving it a long name.

Let us think of the condition of life on earth at any given moment of
her evolution. Certain possibilities have been realized by her--others
have not. To take a trenchant example, before the Carboniferous or
thereabouts, the vertebrates had not realized their possibilities of
terrestrial existence--nearly half the globe’s surface lay waiting to
be colonized by backboned animals. The earth’s surface was conquered
then--but the air remained unsubdued before the mid-Secondary. In every
period, there must be not only actual gaps unfilled in the economy of
nature--such and such an animal is without parasites, such and such
a hot spring or salt lake is without tenants; but also improvements
can be made in existing types of organization--a tapeworm could be
more firmly attached, a salt-lake shrimp could tolerate an even higher
concentration of brine.

These two sorts of possibilities really overlap. For instance, an
increased efficiency of vision must be an improvement in pre-existing
structures and creatures; it also involves the conquest of new regions
of environment, and so in a real sense the occupation of a new
biological niche.

In any case, the changes which would confer advantage in the struggle
for existence may take place in any direction--with, or against, or at
right angles to the stream of progress. By means of those which march
with that stream, the upper level of life’s attainment is raised.
But the struggle still goes on: and again, starting from this new
condition, there will be variations in every direction which will have
survival value, and some of these will be progressive; and so the
upper level will be once more raised.

The process will take time, for, whatever theory of variation we may
hold[8]--the old idea of small continuous variations; or that of large
mutations big enough to produce new species at one jump; or the most
probable theory of numerous small mutations--they one and all must
grant that the largest variation occurring at one time in a living
species is infinitesimal in comparison with the secular changes of
evolution.

There will further be a premium upon progressive changes, since a
progressive change will generally land its possessor in virgin soil,
so to speak; if not in an actually new physical environment, then in a
biologically new situation. The placental mammal occupies the same dry
land as did the wonderful reptilian types of the Secondary epoch. But
constant temperature and embryonic nutrition within its mother provide
delicately adjusted conditions in the early phases of development which
in their turn enabled a more elaborate and more delicately responding
brain machinery to be constructed in development, and so advanced their
possessors on to new shores of control and independence.

There will thus be a constant biological pressure (to use a term
which, though still symbolic, a mere analogy, is less misleading and
question-begging than _élan vital_) tending to push some of life on
to new levels of attainment, new steps in progress, _because_ any
variations in that direction will have selection value, a selection
value above the ordinary. And the process will be a gradual one,
because variations are not very large; so that life no more realizes
all potentialities of progress at once than did the United States or
any other new country receive a uniform population over all its extent
as soon as it was discovered, but had its people move in from the
coasts in a regular and orderly advance.

There are plenty of parallels from human affairs. Indeed, the
evolutionist can often gain valuable light on his subject, on what
one may call the economics of the process, by turning to study the
development of human inventions and machines. There, although the
ways in which variations arise, and the way they are transmitted, are
different from those of organic evolution, yet the type of “pressure,”
the perpetual struggle, and the advantage of certain kinds of variation
therein--these are in essence really similar.

What could be more striking than the parallel between the rise of the
mammals to dominance over the reptiles, and the rise of the motor
vehicle to dominance over that drawn by horses?

In both cases, a comparatively long period in which the new type is in
a precarious and experimental stage, only just managing to exist, of
small size and rare occurrence, and in no real sense a serious rival to
its old-established competitors. Then, suddenly, a change. It reaches
a level at which it can effectively compete with them. What happens?
In the case both of man-made machine and evolving vertebrate group,
there is first a sudden increase in numbers of the new, a corresponding
decrease in numbers of the old type. The upper level of size of the
new type also begins to increase, and it begins to split up into a
great number of differentiated sub-types. Some of these sub-types
become extinct, others, on the other hand, are gradually improved,
while still others undergo such rapid change as to merit the style of
new sub-types. The upper level of size, complexity, and efficiency
increase, both in animal and machine.

It is as well to remember that survival-value means only what it says.
A variation with survival-value helps its possessors to survive: it
is not the best possible variation of the kind. In the developing
motor-car, the substitution of four for one or two cylinders was a
great improvement. It had “survival-value”; and not until the majority
of cars came to be four-cylindered was the additional advantage of
six or eight cylinders large enough to bring them into existence as
dominant types.

To the interrelated evolution of carnivore and herbivore, again,
leading to increase of size and speed in both, of wariness in one, of
tooth and claw in the other, we have again a close parallel in the
interrelated evolution of armour-plating and of projectiles. Here
again the process is gradual. We can further see that the sudden
“development” of full modern armour on the first iron-clad would
have been actually disadvantageous, since it would have reduced
its speed relatively to other less heavily protected ships, without
conferring any corresponding benefit in the way of defence against the
comparatively inefficient projectiles of the day. Only when the range
and piercing power of the projectiles increased did increase of armour
become imperative.

To resume our pressure analogy, the natural increase of all organisms
leads to a “biological pressure.” So long as a species remains
unchanged, so long must it stay subjected to the full force of this
pressure. But if it changes in such a way that it can occupy a new
niche in environment, it is expanding into a vacuum or a region of
lower pressure. Natural increase soon fills this up to the same level
of pressure, and conditions thus become favourable for expansion into
new low-pressure areas previously out of reach of the normal range
of variation. Variation towards such “low-pressure” regions may be
progressive, retrogressive, or neutral: but it is obvious that at
each stage of evolution there will always be a low-pressure fringe,
representing a considerable fraction of the “low-pressure” area within
the range of variability, the occupation of which would be biologically
progressive.

Thus from the well-established biological premisses of (1) the tendency
to geometrical increase with consequent struggle for existence,
(2) some form of inherited variability, we can deduce as necessary
consequence, not only the familiar but none the less fundamental
fact of Natural Selection, but also the almost neglected fact that
a _certain fraction_ of the guiding force of Natural Selection will
inevitably be pushing organisms into changes that are progressive.

This will of course be true only so far as the general conditions of
the environment remain within certain limits: it is probable that too
great reductions of temperature or moisture on the surface of the
earth would lead to a gradual reversal of progress before the final
extinction of life. Up to the present, however, it is clear that such
conditions have not occurred, or, possibly, have occurred only for
short periods. The general state has been one in which steady, slow
progress has been achieved. Progress, like adaptation, is in pre-human
evolution almost entirely the resultant of blind chance and blind
necessity.

What corollaries and conclusions may be drawn from the establishment
of the fact of biological progress? In the first place, it permits us
to treat human progress as a special case of a more general process.
Biologically speaking, the human species is young--not perhaps still
in infancy, but certainly not yet attained to any stable maturity.
The conception, common enough in much traditional thought, that man
as a species is old, far removed from all pristine vigour and power,
is demonstrably untrue. The genus Homo has not yet adapted itself
to the new conditions and the new possibilities arising out of the
acquisition of reason and tradition. Its history so far is a record of
experiment after experiment. From a period so short and so empirical
it is impossible to deduce any general law of progress. In certain
respects, as we shall see more in detail later, there has been advance;
in others, the species has been stationary. But whether humanity in
this or that particular has progressed is for the moment comparatively
immaterial. Humanity is part of life, a product of life’s movement; and
in life as a whole there is progress.[9]

What is more, there was progress before man ever appeared on the earth,
and its reality would have been in no way impaired even if he had never
come into being. His rise only continued, modified, and accelerated a
process that had been in operation since the dawn of life.

Here we find, in the intellectual sphere at least, that assurance which
men have been seeking from the first. We see revealed, in the fact of
evolutionary progress, that the forces of nature conspire together to
produce results which have value in our eyes, that man has no right
to feel helpless or without support in a cold and meaningless cosmos,
to believe that he must face and fight forces which are definitively
hostile. Although he must attack the problems of existence in a new
way, yet his face is set in the same direction as the main tide of
evolving life, and his highest destiny, the end towards which he has so
long perceived that he must strive, is to extend to new possibilities
the process with which, for all these millions of years, nature has
already been busy, to introduce less and less wasteful methods, to
accelerate by means of his consciousness what in the past has been the
work of blind unconscious forces. “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.”

For this is one of the most remarkable facts of evolution--that
consciousness, until a very late period, has played in it a negligible
part. Indeed the rise of consciousness to become a factor of importance
in evolution has been one of the most notable single items of progress.
Darwin gave the deathblow to teleology by showing that apparently
purposive structures could arise by means of a non-purposive mechanism.
“Purpose” is a term invented to denote a particular operation of the
human mind, and should only be used where a psychological basis may
reasonably be postulated. On the other hand, a result can be attained
by conscious purpose without the waste of time and of living material
needed by the indirect method of natural selection; and thus the
substitution of purposed for unpurposed progress is itself a step in
progress.

As another corollary of our concept of progress, it follows that we
can and should consider, not only the direction of any evolutionary
process, but also its rate.

An evolutionary process, if it is to be considered progressive, must
have a component in one particular direction--a direction which we have
already defined. But this is not all; for even if it be moving in the
right direction, and yet be moving extremely slowly, it may, if it have
any interaction with a much more rapid progressive movement, actually
exert a drag on this; its relative motion--relative to the main current
of progress--will be backwards, and we may have to class it as the
reverse of progressive. For example, the interaction of carnivore and
herbivore, pursuer and pursued, led during the development of the
vertebrates to the evolution of much that was good--speed, strength,
alertness, and acuity of sense--and of many noble types of living
things. But with the advent of man, different methods have been
introduced, new modes of competition and advance; and the tiger and
the wolf not only cease to be agents of progress in its new form,
but definitely stand in its way and must be stamped out, or at least
reduced to a condition in which they can no longer interfere as active
agents in evolution.

Some such considerations as these will help perhaps to resolve various
difficulties of ethics--how, for instance, that which seems good to me
may seem evil to another. Even the good, if it be a drag on the better,
is evil. Expressed thus, the proposition is a paradox; but expressed in
terms of direction and relative speed, it is at once intelligible.

But the test of any such general biological theory as I have outlined
will be its application to human problems. And here too, I venture to
say, the value of biological method is apparent. What we ask, and
rightly ask, is whether in the laws of biological progress we can find
any principle which we can apply directly to guide us in devising
methods for human progress.

I do not propose to follow the example of many rather hasty
philosophers and biologists, who have thought that, whenever the
study of lower organisms permitted the promulgation of a biological
law, such law can be lifted bodily from its context and be applied
without modification to human affairs. Man is an organism--but a very
exceptional and peculiar organism. Any biological law which epitomizes
only facts about the lower creatures is not a general biological law,
for general biological laws must take account not only of plants and
animals, but of man as well. In practice, however, the simplest method
is to frame our biological laws without considering man, and then to
see in what way they must be modified if they are to be applied to him.

Man differs biologically from other organisms in the following main
ways. First, he has the power of thinking in concepts; in other words,
his power of learning by experience is not always conditioned directly
by the accidents of his own life, as is the case with animals endowed
only with associative memory, but he can, by reaching the general from
the special, attain to the possibility of dealing with many more, and
more complicated, eventualities. Next, by means of speech, writing,
and printing, he has developed a new mode of inheritance.[10] Each
community, and indeed humanity as a whole, transmits its peculiarities
to later ages by means of tradition, using that word in its largest
sense. Physical inheritance of the same type as in all higher animals
and plants is the necessary basis, but the distinctive characters
of any civilization are based on this new tradition-inheritance.
Thirdly, the type of mind which has been evolved in man is much more
plastic--a much more elastic and flexible mechanism than any tool
previously evolved by life for handling the problems of existence. As
a consequence of this we have the substitution of general educability
for specific instincts. For the power of performing comparatively
few actions smoothly and without trouble, there is exchanged the
possibility of a vastly increased range of action, but one which
has to be learnt. As another consequence, man has come by the
power--impossible to any other organism--of leading what is to all
intents and purposes a multiple existence. It is for this very reason
difficult to fit man into many of the ordinary biological categories.
The physical and mental structure and the mode of life of even the
highest of the animals are for all practical purposes a fixed quantity.
An ant, for all its delicacy of adjustment, is little less than a
sentient cog shaped to fit in just one way into the machinery of the
community; a dog, for all his power of learning, is tied down and
imprisoned within a rigidity and narrowness of bodily and mental
organization difficult for us to imagine.

Man passes freely from one aggregation to another. He can
change his nation or his city; he can belong to a dozen
organizations--biologically speaking, can be aggregated in a dozen
different ways--and play a different part as unit in each. He can
follow one profession in the morning, another at night, and be a
hobby-horse rider in between.

This plastic mind has endowed him with a new biological possibility.
He can do what no other organism can--he can be both specialized and
generalized at one and the same time.

In biology, the aggregation of units to form units of higher grade has
been always followed by division of labour among the units; and this
division of labour has, in all infrahuman history, been made possible
only by an irreversible specialization.[11] A soldier-ant is a soldier,
and there its possibilities end. It cannot do what the worker or
the queen can do. A muscle-cell, because it has gained the power to
contract, is cut off from other possibilities; it cannot secrete, or
digest, or carry messages. The aggregate of nerve-cells which makes the
physical basis of mind is held fixed to its post, incapable of turning
to other functions.

It follows that the units of all such aggregates are subordinate to
the whole--they have lost their independence, and can often no longer
be considered as individuals at all, except historically. But in man,
none of these things hold. A man can for half his day be the merest
cog, subordinate in every detail of his action to the needs of the
community, but for the other half be himself, a full and complete
individuality, making the community serve his own ends and needs. For
him, aggregation does not mean complete and irreversible subordination;
his specialization is reversible, and indeed his potentialities as an
individual actually increase with the increased individuality of the
aggregate to which he belongs.

Bearing these differences in mind, we may turn to consider how our
doctrine of progress helps us in studying humanity.

At the outset we must guard ourselves against the idea that human
society has reached any high level of biological individuation. I may
perhaps quote from what I have written elsewhere: “If we were to draw a
parallel between primitive types of society and some primitive mammal
such as a duck-billed platypus, and to compare the course which we
hope society will in time accomplish with what has been accomplished
in the progress of the mammalian type from a creature resembling the
platypus up to man, with what creature should we have to compare the
existing state of human communities? I venture to say that we should be
flattering ourselves if we were to fix upon the dog.”

Then we must remember that Natural Selection in man has fallen chiefly
upon groups, not upon individuals, and differences in the nature and
organization of human groups are determined chiefly by what we can
best sum up as differences of tradition in the widest sense of the
term. The later history of mankind, from a period long antedating
written records, has been one of the rapid rise and equally rapid
extinction, not only of one group-unit after another, but of one type
of group-unit after another. It is further obvious at first glance that
the group-units, the types of society which are at present dominant,
are far from perfect and far from stable, and indeed that they are
evolving, with speed of change hitherto unsurpassed, towards new and
unknown forms.

When the mammalian type first became dominant on the globe--at the
transition between the Secondary and Tertiary periods--a somewhat
similar history was passed through. The new type of organization gave
its possessors marked advantages over other animal types: but the full
potentialities of the mammal (excluding man) were not realized until
well over half of the Tertiary period had elapsed, and man was being
prepared in the womb of circumstance. The Pliocene sees the triumph
of the perfected types of mammal: the preceding Miocene, broadly
speaking, sees the first rise of these new types, while the Eocene and
Oligocene show us a rapid rise and as rapid extinction of variation
upon variation on the original theme.[12] With man, however, only the
beginnings of a similar process have as yet come to pass.

Further, we must distinguish clearly between the different ways in
which progress may be operative in man. In the first place it can
appear, as we have just pointed out, in the organization of the
communities to which he belongs and on which natural selection seems
mainly to act. Secondly, it can appear as a raising of the _average_ of
certain qualities among the individuals composing those communities.
And thirdly, it can appear as a raising of the _upper level_ of
attainment in those qualities, in the appearance of individuals
biologically higher than any that have previously existed.

This last point may be first dealt with. It has often been urged as
an argument against the doctrine of progress that we can trace no
advance in the capabilities of the individual man throughout history,
and it has even been asserted that no such advance has occurred during
pre-history. To this latter criticism there is the obvious reply that
at some period there was an origin of human from non-human organisms,
and that during the period of transition at least (and probably for a
considerable time afterward) there naturally must have been a raising
of the upper level of attainments, and still more of possibility. The
main point at issue, however, is not to be gainsaid. It appears[13]
that comparatively early in the evolution of man, there appeared, in
some branches of the stock, a type of mental organization which has
not yet been improved upon. An individual possessing it is capable,
when developing in proper environment (the most important single
elements of which are the organization and tradition of the community
to which he belongs) of attaining to possibilities which, measured in
terms of the potentialities of any previous organism, are wellnigh
boundless. He can survey the whole of mankind, penetrate the future
with prophecy, bring the gamut of experience within a work of art,
discover the laws by which the universe operates. Judged thus, Goethe
is no greater and no less great than Leonardo, Shakespeare than Dante
or Æschylus, Darwin than Pasteur, Kant than Plato.

The best type of human mind operating to the best advantage, is
introduced to possibilities so vast in comparison with its paltry span
of existence that it can never realize more than a fraction of them.
Furthermore, since the incidence of natural selection has fallen, from
long before historical time, upon the community and its traditions far
more than upon the individual, and since the conditions under which
the possibilities of the individual can be even qualitatively realized
have been rarely forthcoming, it is not surprising that the level of
possibility itself has not been raised. Indeed, only too often there
has been reversed selection, and the exceptional man has suffered from
his exceptional endowments.

There is no theoretical objection whatever to the idea that new
types of mind, new modes of thought, new levels of attainment, could
be reached by life: the mental difference between low types of men
and men of genius is almost as great as that between man and ape.
The difference in practical intelligence between a hen, a dog, a
chimpanzee, and a man is largely a difference in the complexity of the
situations which can be grasped as a whole so that the right way out
is adopted as the result of this unitary comprehension.[14] There is
no reason to doubt that other types of mental mechanism are possible
which would make our grasp of complex situations appear pitiful and
hen-like in its limitations, which would enable their possessors to
_see_ and solve in a flash where we can only grope and guess or at best
calculate laboriously and step by step. But this will not take place,
first until the community-environment is made as favourable as possible
for such development, and secondly until there is begun a deliberate
biological encouragement of new possibilities of intuition, say, or of
communication between mind and mind.

As regards the second point, the raising of the average as opposed to
the upper level of attainment, not much need be said. That part of
our civilization which can be thought of as progressive is largely
concerned with this very thing--with making it possible for men to
realize in larger measure their inherent possibilities. Further, in
so far as there exists selection within the community, it largely,
under present conditions, encourages qualities such as intelligence
and initiative, which are biologically progressive. And finally, when
Eugenics shall become practical politics, its action, so far as we can
see, will be at first entirely devoted to this raising of the average,
by altering the proportion of good and bad stock, and if possible
eliminating the lowest strata, in a genetically mixed population.[15]

Since, however, the main stress in human evolution has been upon the
community and upon tradition, it is here that we shall expect to find
most definite evidences of progress, and it is here that we do in fact
find them.

We have in the first place the increase of the size of units, familiar
to us already in lower forms. This, however, is tending to a limit,
which will be attained when the present competition of sovereign states
has been replaced (as, if we can read the future from the past, it
inevitably will be) by some form of federation covering the globe.
We find an immense increase of control over environment--a theme so
hackneyed as to need no labouring. We find an almost equally striking,
if less spectacular, increase in independence. Man becomes less and
less at the mercy of the forces of nature and of other organisms,
attains much more to self-regulation. This has depended upon increased
efficiency of “organs”--here the extra-organismal organs we call
tools and machines; and upon increased rapidity and certainty of
communication both within and between units. There has been an almost
overwhelming increase (displaying too not a uniform but an accelerated
motion) of knowledge, of the possibilities of acquiring new knowledge,
and of what may be called the “group-memory”--the power of storing
and rendering knowledge available, and this in its turn brings about
a huge increase in the size of the environment with which man either
physically or mentally comes into contact.

As regards increase of harmony or co-ordination, human communities
have advanced but little, although in the increase of powers of
communication there has been laid the foundation for such possibility.

That this lack of progress is partly due to the extreme rapidity of
change in type of unit and of the units’ increase in size, is not
doubtful; a further ground for it, however, is to be found in the fact
that human societies present a new biological problem, in so much as
it is impossible, man being what he is, to solve the relationship of
individual and community, of smaller and larger unit, in the simple
way in which it has always been solved before--by specialization and
subordination of the individuals.[16] The early development of codes of
law, codes of ritual, and codes of morals represents the first attempt
at a solution of the problem: the modern rise of arbitration as a
method of settling disputes between whole units and large groups within
units is another important step in the same direction. Nevertheless, it
is here that the most drastic change of method will have to be brought
into being if man’s development is to continue progressive.

There is, however, a weighty criticism of the validity of human
progress. Granted that human science and invention have made enormous
strides, that knowledge has increased and convenience multiplied--is
_man_, the living, feeling, personal human being, any the better in
essentials for all of this--has it not merely made life more complex at
the expense of its depth, more rapid at the expense of its tranquillity
and suavity? This is especially obvious in the field of art. It is
impossible to maintain that any one of a certain number--a hundred, or
perhaps a thousand--of great poets, painters, sculptors, or musicians
is greater or has achieved finer things than any other of the number.
What is more, in most arts--notably sculpture, painting, and poetry,
the possibilities of expression and achievement do not increase, and
once a certain pitch of skill is reached, tend to extinguish themselves
in technique and virtuosity. When this happens, new ideas generally
come upon the scene and work up again from a relatively primitive to a
complicated technique along a more or less different path--and so on
and so forth _ad infinitum_.

This is not so true of architecture, and still less so of music. In
intellectual matters it is clearly not true of mathematics, where
each advance provides the foundation for the solution of more complex
problems, nor, similarly, of much of science. But even in this
intellectual domain, where the accumulation of knowledge is so evident,
where the increasing difficulty and complexity of the problems soluble
and solved is so remarkable--even here the individual achievement can
scarcely be properly said to increase, certainly not the individual
merit or the individual satisfaction. Newton’s achievement was no less
splendid because to-day any fourth-rate mathematician can use the
calculus, nor Euclid’s for that his discoveries can be explained to
every schoolboy; while for Harvey to discover the circulation of the
blood or for Dalton to demonstrate the particulate nature of matter
was certainly no slighter task than that needed to show the reality of
internal secretion or to discover the infra-atomic world of electrons.
The task occupied all their powers, its accomplishment satisfied them;
and the powers themselves have not increased--only the ways in which
men have learned to use them.

This criticism has been partly dealt with before. We have seen that
the present organization of human mind introduces its possessor to
a practical infinitude of possibility. We have also seen that there
is no theoretical obstacle to be seen at present to an increase of
human powers, be it in range of comprehension, intensity of feeling,
or brilliance of intuition. More to our present purpose is the reply
that, whereas in all these ways the inherent capabilities have not
increased, yet the opportunities of realizing these capabilities have
for the bulk of the population increased--in particular, for instance,
of gratifying the more complex and the more intellectual emotions,
with the multiplication of theatres, of books, of pictures, of
concerts. Here, for once, the average has advanced more than the upper
level. Whatever overstress and maladjustment the complexity of modern
civilization has brought with it, it has certainly made it easier for
more men and women to realize more of their potentialities now than a
thousand years ago, and far more than a hundred thousand years ago.

There are, then, these facts to set on the credit side of Progress’
balance-sheet. It is easy enough to see items on the debit side, and
indeed to be so horrifiedly fascinated by it as not to have eyes
for anything else. Human history is in one view but a long record
of suffering, oppression, and folly. Slavery, torture, religious
persecution, war, pestilence and famine, the greed of those who
possess power, the dirt and sloth and ignorance of those who do
not--the elements of the picture keep on recurring, if not in the old
forms, then in new ones. Pain, disease, disappointment, and death are
inevitable. Even when a civilization seems to be progressing, there
always comes a time when it passes its zenith and topples through
decay or defect to ruin. How is it possible to speak of progress
when at this present moment there are vast poverty-stricken and slum
populations with all the great nations, and when these same great
nations have just been engaged in the most appalling war in history?

It is a formidable indictment: but I venture to assert that it can be
met by the same argument with which, in the realm of biology, was met
the argument from degeneration.

Such facts show at once that any idea of inevitable or of universal
progress is untenable, the product of an irrational idealism which
prefers its own desires to reality. They show further that, up to
the present, suffering and pain on the one hand, and on the other
degeneration in a certain number of individuals, are as universal and
apparently inevitable in human as in animal evolution. But they do not
show that some sort of progress may not have occurred--not necessarily
the kind of progress that some of us would like, not necessarily as
rapid as could be desired, but yet indubitably and solidly Progress. We
have seen that in the hundreds of thousands of species which constitute
life, that which has been increased most obviously is the upper level
of certain qualities--primitive forms have persisted, degenerate forms
have arisen side by side with and in spite of the steady improvement in
the highest types. This has happened in man also.

The upper level of control and of independence in human group-units,
and in a certain number of fortunate individuals, has obviously
increased; but there are the slums, there are the drab lives of
thousands in great cities, there are poverty, degeneracy, and crime.
All that we can say is that to many at least it seems theoretically
possible that man should be able to reduce the amount of degeneration,
waste, and pain, to increase the changes to be summed up as progressive.

The future Golden Age of Millenniarism is as impossible a notion
as the past Golden Age of Mythology, and more demoralizing. Bury,
with pardonable sarcasm, speaks of the result hoped for in it as “a
menagerie of happy men ... in which the dynamic character of history
disappears.” But once we have accepted (as the great majority accept)
life as somehow worth living, the belief in progress asserts only
(though there is much in that “only”) that life may be made more worth
living to a larger proportion of people, although effort and failure
always will and always must be conditions of its operation. As Goethe
said, “Let humanity last as long as it will, there will always be
hindrances in its way, and all kinds of distress, to make it develop
its powers.”

It is important to remember, what we have already noted, that the
history of mankind is largely the history of competition between
group-units or communities. When rare communities have been able to
escape from this race of competition and have deliberately devoted the
energy and resources thus set free to better community-regulation and
an improvement in the lives of the individuals composing them, then,
like Denmark, they have moved rapidly along a path of real progress.
Once an efficient federation of communities has come into being,
Progress can knock at the door with some chance of being admitted. In
general, it is enough for our present purpose to have shown that some
modicum of progress has occurred within the species Man; and that some
of the characteristics which most saliently mark him off from other
organisms--his powers of generalization and his self-consciousness--are
in themselves germs, potentialities of great progress in the future,
because through them blind biological progress can become economical,
foreseeing, and conscious of herself.

There remains for me only one task--to investigate more closely the
relation of that fact of evolutionary direction which we have called
biological progress, to our ideas of value. What we have found is that
there exists a certain general direction of movement in the evolution
of living things; towards the increase of certain of their properties.
But when we make a further analysis, we find that movement in this
direction is movement towards a realization of the things judged by the
human mind to have value. It is movement towards an increase of power,
of knowledge, of purpose, of emotion, of harmony, of independence.
Increases in these faculties combine, once a certain stage in mental
development is reached, to mean the embracing of ever larger syntheses
by the organism possessing them--practical syntheses, as in business,
or exploration, or administration; intellectual, as in philosophy or in
the establishment of scientific laws; emotional, as in love or in the
passion for nature; artistic, as in a symphony or great drama. These
capabilities are greater in man than in the higher animals, in the
higher animals than in the lower, more and more windows being closed
and powers pruned away as we descend the scale.

It is immaterial whether the human mind comes to have these values
_because_ they make for progress in evolution, or whether things which
make for evolutionary progress become significant _because_ they happen
to be considered as valuable by human mind, for both are in their
degree true. There is an interrelation which cannot be disentangled,
for it is based on the fundamental uniformity and unity of the cosmos.
What is important is that the human idea of _value_ finds its external
counterpart in an actual historical _direction_ in phenomena, and that
each becomes more important because of the relationship.

Much of what I have written will appear obvious. But if it has been
obvious, it will be because I have here attempted to focus attention on
some of the corollaries of a single fundamental truth--so obvious that
it often escapes notice, but so fundamental that its results cannot but
fail to obtrude themselves upon us. I mean the unity of phenomena--not
merely the unity of life, put on a firm footing for all time by Darwin,
though that is for my purpose the most important, but the unity of
living and non-living, demanding a monistic conception of the universe.
For the present, the stellar host (possibly, as recent astronomy
seems to assert, assembled not in one system but in a multiplicity of
universes, floating through space like a shoal of jelly-fishes in a
Mediterranean bay)--the stars seem alien from our life, alien or at
best neutral. All that links us to them is that we are built of the
same stuff, the same elements.

But the last half-century has at least enlarged our view so that we
can perceive that we, as living things, are not alien to the rest of
life--that we march in the same direction, and that our hostility to
and struggles with other organisms are in part but the continuation
of the old struggle, in part the expression of the fact that we have
acquired new methods for dealing with the problems of existence.

The origin of life itself, and its movement in time--both these are
found to face in the same direction as ourselves. St. Paul wrote that
all things work together for good. That is an exaggeration: but they
work together so that the average level of the good is raised, the
potentialities of life are bettered. In every time and every country,
men have obscurely felt that, although so much of the world, taken
singly, was evil, yet the clash of thing with thing, process with
process, the working of the whole, somehow led to good.

This feeling is what I believe is clarified and put on a firm
intellectual footing by biology. The problems of evil, of pain, of
strife, of death, of insufficiency and imperfection--all these and
a host of others remain to perplex and burden us. But the fact of
progress emerging from pain and battle and imperfection--this is an
intellectual prop which can support the distressed and questioning
mind, and be incorporated into the common theology of the future.

Dean Inge, in his Romanes Lectures,[17] quotes Disraeli’s caustic
words, “The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few
scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken
comfort for civilization,” and quotes them with approval. He bitterly
criticizes what we may sum up as Millenarianism (although this after
all is but a crude and popular aspiration after what the Christian
would call the Kingdom of God on earth). And, after exalting Hope as a
virtue, closes with the somewhat satirical statement, “It is safe to
predict that we shall go on hoping.”

He has been so concerned to attack the dogma of inherent and
inevitable progress in human affairs that he has denied the fact
of progress--whether inevitable we know not, but indubitable and
actual--in biological evolution: and in so doing he has cut off
himself and his adherents from one of the ways in which that greatest
need of man which we spoke of at the outset can be satisfied, from by
far the greatest manifestation in external things of “something, not
ourselves, that makes for righteousness.”

One word more, and I have done. There remains in some ways the hardest
problem of all. The greatest experiences of human life, those in which
the mind appears to touch the Absolute and the Infinite--what of
their relation to this notion of progress? They are realized in many
forms--in love, in intellectual discovery, in art, in religion; but the
salient fact about all is that they are felt as of intensest value,
and that they seem to leave no more to be desired. Doubtless when we
say that at such moment we touch the Infinite or the Absolute we mean
only that we touch what is infinite and absolute in comparison with our
ordinary selves. None the less, the sense of finality and utter reality
attendant on them is difficult to bring into line with our idea of
progress.


     “I saw Eternity the other night
     Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
     All calm, as it was bright.”


The Dean too has felt this so strongly that he has made it the keystone
of his argument. As he says, “Spiritual progress must be within the
sphere of a reality which is not itself progressing, or for which in
Milton’s grand words ‘progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle
of its own perfection, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in
over-measure for ever.’”

I would only suggest that for many to attain to such experiences,
which in truth seem to constitute the highest satisfaction at present
conceivable for men on earth, it is necessary to organize the community
and to plan out life in such a way that human beings, released from the
unnecessary burdens of hunger, poverty, and strife, are not only free
but helped and urged to attain to such Delectable Mountains. Spiritual
progress is our one ultimate aim; it may be towards the dateless and
irrevoluble; but it is inevitably dependent upon progress intellectual,
moral, and physical--progress in this changing, revolving world of
dated events.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

(It was felt that the citation of a few works bearing upon the
subject-matter of the essays might help those desirous of pursuing the
subject further; but to more than this the lists make no claim.)

     Babcock and Clausen, ’18. “Genetics in Relation to Agriculture.”
     New York, 1918.

     Bateson, ’22. “Science.” (N.S.) 1922.

     Bergson, H., ’11. “Creative Evolution.” London, 1911.

     Bury, J. B., ’20. “The Idea of Progress.” London, 1920.

     Carr-Saunders, A. M., ’22. “The Population Problem.” Oxford, 1922.

     Castle, _et al_, ’12. “Genetics and Eugenics.” Chicago, 1912.

     Conklin, E. G. “Heredity and Environment in the Development of
     Man.” London, 1922.

     Darwin, C. “The Origin of Species.”

     ---- ---- “The Descent of Man.”

     Dendy, ’14. “Outlines of Evolutionary Biology.” London, 1914.

     Hobhouse, L. T., ’19. “Development and Purpose.” London, 1919.

     Huxley, J. S., ’12. “The Individual in the Animal Kingdom.”
     Cambridge, 1912.

     ---- T. H. “Evolution and Ethics.” Collected Essays, vol. ix.
     London, 1906.

     Inge, W. R., ’20. “The Idea of Progress.” Romanes Lectures.
     Oxford, 1920.

     James, W., ’02. “Varieties of Religious Experience.” London, 1902.

     Köhler, W., ’21. “Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen.” Berlin,
     1921.

     Lloyd Morgan, C, ’20. “Animal Behaviour.” London, 1920.

     Loeb, J., ’18. “Forced Movements, Tropisms, and Animal Conduct.”
     Philadelphia, 1918.

     Lull, ’17. “Organic Evolution.” New York, 1917.

     M’Dougall, W., ’11. “Body and Mind.” London, 1911.

     Osborn, H. F., ’10. “The Age of Mammals.” New York, 1910.

     Shipley and MacBride, ’20. “Zoology.” Cambridge, 1920.

     Washburn, M. F., ’13. “The Animal Mind.” New York, 1913.

     Weismann, A., ’04. “The Evolution Theory.” 2 vols. London, 1904.

     Whetham, W. C. D., ’12. “Heredity and Society.” London, 1912.

     Woodward, A. S., ’98. “Outlines of Vertebrate Paleontology.”
     Cambridge, 1898.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Wells, ’17.

[2] Bury, ’20.

[3] This holds good, naturally, for any given spot on the earth’s
crust: once the contained fossils have been carefully examined from a
number of series of strata, they enable us to correlate the ages of the
members of the different series.

[4] Bateson, ’22.

[5] There is a certain school of biologists who object to describing
Protozoa as cells. This to others appears pedantic. But, whether or no
they are right in the matter of terminology, the fact which I am here
emphasizing remains, viz., that Protozoa had to be aggregated before
the Metazoa, or many-celled animals, could arise.

[6] See Lloyd Morgan, ’20; Washburn, ’13; Köhler, ’21.

[7] Huxley, ’12.

[8] See Babcock and Clausen, ’19.

[9] See Conklin, ’22.

[10] See Carr-Saunders, ’22.

[11] See Huxley, ’12.

[12] See Woodward, ’98; Osborn, ’10.

[13] See Carr-Saunders, ’22.

[14] See Köhler, ’21.

[15] See Whetham, ’21; Castle, ’12.

[16] See the second essay of this volume for fuller discussion of this
point.

[17] Inge, ’20.



II

BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY


                        PROGRESS

     The Crab to Cancer junior gave advice:
       “Know what you want, my son, and then proceed
       Directly sideways. God has thus decreed--
     Progress is lateral; let that suffice.”

     Darwinian Tapeworms on the other hand
       Agree that Progress is a loss of brain,
       And all that makes it hard for worms to attain
     The true Nirvana--peptic, pure, and grand.

     Man too enjoys to omphaloscopize.
       Himself as Navel of the Universe
       Oft rivets him--until he asks his Nurse,
     Old Nature, for the truth; and she replies:
     “Look back, and find support; you march with Life’s main stream.
     Look on--be proud; her future lies within your dream.”

     LONDON, _Feb. 1923_.



BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

     “Come out into the light of things;
     Let Nature be your teacher.”
                      --W. WORDSWORTH.


     “In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the
     suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin. He is
     too anxious to feel certain to have time to know. So that we see
     of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy,
     then physics, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology,
     then sociology--but always the new field was grudged to the new
     method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name of
     science.”--W. TROTTER, _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_.


There are many facile comparisons to be drawn between the facts of
biology and of sociology. The most obvious is that between a whole
civilized community and one of the higher animals. Shakespeare
employed an age-old fable in Menenius Agrippa’s Tale of the Belly
and the Members in _Coriolanus_. With Darwin, and the establishment
of evolutionary biology on a sound footing, matters took a new turn.
Man was now seen to be connected with the rest of life not merely by
analogies of his own mind’s weaving, but by the living bonds of genetic
descent; and it was at once perceived that a more rigid force than had
hitherto been suspected might inhere in the comparisons between State
and Organism. For, as Spencer argued, was not the State in a true sense
an organism--a single biological unit composed of individual human
beings just as a metazoan animal was a single biological unit composed,
in the first instance, of individual cells? Further, the investigation
of the evolutionary process seemed to reveal certain general laws of
its march: beings of the same original constitution, exposed to the
environmental forces of the same planet, had reacted in similar ways,
developing along parallel lines, and arriving at similar types of
organization as end-result. Thus it might reasonably be supposed that
we should find the same general organization and mode of development in
one type of organism as in another, in human society as in a vertebrate.

On these bases, Spencer and his followers drew elaborate comparisons
of the two, and apparently believed that they were reaching the
same degree of accuracy as that found in comparative anatomy when
they compared the circulatory system of a mammal with the transport
facilities of a State, or drew parallels between the brain and the
cabinet.

It was speedily seen, however, that such generalizations were so broad
and vague as not to be of much service: that the resemblances were in
fact often no more than symbolical or metaphorical, instead of being
based upon detailed similarity of constitution or of evolutionary
development. With this, evolutionary theorizing on sociological
matters fell somewhat into disrepute. The earlier jubilant certainty
gave place to later doubt; and the half-century whose beginnings had
roused Haeckel and Herbert Spencer to their imaginative flights closed
suitably enough with that remarkable document, T. H. Huxley’s Romanes
Lecture, in which the greatest protagonist of Darwinism confesses
to seeing between man and the rest of the cosmic process, in spite
of man’s genesis from that same cosmic process, an insuperable and
essential opposition, a difference of aim or direction which had turned
the original bridge into a barrier.[18]

As a result, not only did the particular comparison between society
and an organism fall into disrepute, but also all attempts to draw
far-reaching conclusions from biology to human affairs.

But the original contention still remains, and is logically
unassailable. Man is an organism descended from lower organisms; his
communities are composed of units bound together for mutual good in
a division of labour in the same way as are the cells of a metazoan:
he can no more escape the effects of his terrestrial environment than
can other organisms. There _is_ therefore reason to suppose that the
processes of evolution in man and man’s societies on the one hand, and
in lower organisms on the other, must have something important and
indeed fundamental in common, something which if we could but unravel
would help us in the study of both.

The correlation of biology with sociology is important not only in
itself, but also as part of a more general correlation of all the
sciences. The correlation of the sciences is of particular importance
to-day for a double set of reasons. The rise of evolutionary biology
and of modern psychology have not only changed our outlook on specially
human problems, but have altered the whole balance, if I may so put
it, of science. There was a time when the basic studies of physics
and chemistry seemed not only basic but somehow more essentially
scientific than the sciences dealing with life. Distinctions were
drawn between the experimental and the observational sciences--often
half-consciously implying a distinction between accurate, scientific,
self-respecting sciences and blundering, hit-or-miss, tolerated bodies
of knowledge. Biological phenomena are now, however, seen to be every
whit as susceptible of accurate and experimental analysis; and indeed
to present so many problems to the physicist and chemist that in fifty
years or so, I venture to prophesy, the wise virgins in those basic
sciences will be those who have laid in a store of biological oil.

But the main point is this--the study of evolution, of animal behaviour
and of human psychology makes it clear that in the higher forms of
animals at least we are dealing with a category not touched on at all
by the physicist and chemist--the category of mind and mental process.
Sir Charles Sherrington, with admirable lucidity, drew for us, in his
recent address to the British Association, the problem of the relation
between mind and matter as it presents itself to the biologist.

The great change that has come over science in the last half century,
or so it seems to me, is the recognition that mind is not to be
explained away as a mere epiphenomenon, but is to be studied as a
phenomenon. From this point of view, biology will always be the
connecting link between physico-chemical science on the one hand, and
psychology on the other. There is every reason to suppose and no reason
to doubt that life, which we know to be composed of the same material
elements and to work by the same energy as non-living matter, actually
arose from it during the evolution of this planet. There is, in the
behaviour of the lower organisms, nothing which by itself would make us
postulate mind: but in the higher insects, molluscs, and vertebrates,
the last in particular, mental process is not only clearly present, but
clearly of great biological importance; and finally the mind of man,
according to innumerable converging lines of evidence, has evolved from
the mind of some non-human mammal.

The principle of continuity makes us postulate that this new category
of phenomena has not sprung up during the course of evolution
absolutely _de novo_, but that it is in some sense universally present
in all phenomena. It is merely that we have not yet found a method
for the direct detection of mental processes as we have, say, for
electrical processes; but something of the same general nature, the
same category as mind must, if we wish to preserve our scientific
sanity, our belief in the orderliness of the world, be present in lower
organisms and in the lifeless matter from which they originally sprang.

In the present state of our knowledge, the study of physics and
chemistry can be pursued without any reference to mental processes. But
the study of biology cannot: and that is one reason why the centre of
gravity of science as a whole is shifting--it is shifting for exactly
the same reason that the centre of gravity of a house shifts during its
construction--because the foundations have to be built first.

Our second reason is as follows. Biology is once more the link between
root and flower, between physics and chemistry and human affairs, in
regard to evolution. I say evolution: it would be better to broaden the
idea by saying the directional processes to be seen in the universe. So
far as a main direction is to be observed in physics and chemistry, it
is, as all authorities are agreed, towards the degradation of energy
and a final state in which not only life but all activity whatsoever
will be reduced to nothing, all the waters of energy run down into
a single dead level of moveless ocean. Biology, on the other hand,
presents us with the spectacle of an evolution in which the main
direction is the raising of the maximum level of certain qualities
of living beings, such as efficiency of organs, co-ordination, size,
accuracy and range of senses, capacity for knowledge, memory and
educability, emotional intensity,--qualities which in one way or
another lead to a more efficient control by the organism over the
external world, and to its greater independence.

A direction towards more mind is visible; and this development of
greater mental powers has been in all the later stages the chief
instrument of acquiring control and independence. More and more
of matter is embodied in living organisms, more and more becomes
subservient to life.

Thus, while in physics and chemistry we see a tendency towards the
extinction of life and activity, in biology we see a tendency towards
more life and more activity; and this latter tendency is accompanied
and largely made possible by the evolution of greater intensity of
mental process--of something, that is to say, of which we cannot as yet
take account in physics and chemistry.

The biologist may well ask himself the question--“Is it not possible
that this evolving mind, of whose achievements on its new level in
man we are only seeing the beginning, may continue to find more and
more ways of subordinating the inorganic to itself, and that it may
eventually retard or even prevent the attainment of this complete
degradation of energy prophesied by physico-chemical science? Is it
not possible that this great generalization only applies to phenomena
in their purely material aspect, and that when we learn to detect and
measure the mental aspects of phenomena we may find reason to modify
the universal applicability of this law of degradation?” We do not know
the answer to that question: but it is clearly a legitimate and useful
question to ask. In any event, we constatate two chief directions in
the universe; that seen in biology is in many ways opposed to that seen
in physics and chemistry; and both must be taken into account.

I have spent, I fear, a great deal of time on what will appear to many
as very irrelevant prolegomena. But the complete breakdown of the
older views about nature and man, of the philosophies and theologies
based not on observation but on an authority which is no authority, on
unverifiable speculation, on superstition, and on what we would like to
be so rather than on what happens to be so--the breakdown of all the
commonly accepted basis for man’s view of himself and the universe, has
made it necessary to go back to fundamentals if we are to see where
we stand. Secondly, the progress of the biological and psychological
sciences, as I have already pointed out, has considerably altered the
outlook of those who pin their faith to the newer or scientific view
of nature, the view which attempts constantly to refer speculations
to reality, and to build on foundations which have been tested by
experiment.

The orthodox evolutionary view was that phenomena received in some
degree an explanation if their origin from simpler phenomena could be
demonstrated. As a matter of fact, reflection makes it clear that such
an explanation is never complete. It is a very incomplete explanation
of the properties of water to discover that it is composed of oxygen
and hydrogen; or of those of humanity to discover that it is derived
from lower forms of life. A precisely similar mistake is made by most
psycho-analysts, who consider that an “explanation” of adult psychology
is given by tracing in it effects of the events of childhood. In all
such cases it is true that analysis is helped, but we are by no means
exempted from further study of the later (and more complex) phenomena
in and for themselves. Just as adult psychology is qualitatively
different in various respects from childish psychology, so is man
qualitatively different from lower organisms. Very few attempts have
been made to carry over conceptions derived from sociology into
biology.[19] But the converse, as we have seen, has often been true,
and numerous writers--largely because purely biological are simpler
than human phenomena--have been obsessed with the idea that the study
of biology as such will teach us principles which can be applied
directly and wholesale to human problems.

What we have just been saying shows us the correct path. Through
psychology and biology, sociology can become attached to the general
body of science; and in so doing it can both receive and give. Since
man is but a single species of organism, and, biologically speaking,
a very young one; since moreover he presents a peculiar type of
organization, it is clear that the broad principles underlying
physiology and evolution can best be studied on other organisms and
later applied to man. On the other hand, man is the highest existing
organism; thus a study of the causes to which he owes his pre-eminence
will be important as adding to and crowning the principles derived
from non-human biology. Furthermore, not only are man’s mental powers
on a different level from those of other animals, but psychology can
at present make by far its greatest contributions by a study of human
mind, so that the psychological side of biology will for the present
derive its chief information from man.

Our first affair, therefore, is to see in what important respects
man is qualitatively unlike the rest of the organic world; then to
investigate what general rules or principles apply equally to him and
to the others; and finally to see what corrections, so to speak, must
be made before these principles can be applied to the one or to the
other.

The qualitative difference between man and other organisms is a
cardinal fact with orthodox biology has tended to slur over or to
neglect, whereas philosophy has too often tried to magnify it unduly
so as to make man frankly incommensurable with his lower relatives, a
creature not only unique but disparate.

Man is obviously and undoubtedly an organism of the same general nature
as other organisms. He possesses the same general system of organs,
working in the same way as a dog, a horse, a bird, a crocodile, or
a frog; he passes through the same type of developmental cycle; he
is built on the same detailed plan as other mammals; and numerous
indications betray his descent from a particular branch of the
mammalian stock.

But in his mode of life and type of social organization he is unique.
All detailed comparisons between the communities of man and those of
bees and ants are as unprofitable in the working-out as they are easy
in the making. It is futile to direct the sluggard or any other human
being to the ant, since the whole physical and psychical construction
of ants is different from that of man, the whole organization of their
communities from that of his.

His mode of life is unique because his psycho-neural mechanism is built
on a new plan, new modes of connection between parts of the brain being
associated with new possibilities of mind. Let us briefly run over the
biologically most important points in which he differs from the lower
organisms.

In the first place, he is capable of speech, and possesses a true
language--not a mere repertory of sounds or signs associated with
different states of mind, as in some higher organisms, but a language
comprising special symbols for particular external objects, and
thus making it possible to have a much more detailed knowledge and
classification of the outer world. In the second place, he can frame
abstract ideas or concepts, and is thus enabled to extract the general
kernel from the husk of innumerable separate and different particulars.
As a result of these two faculties, he possesses what we may call a
new, accessory form of inheritance. True biological inheritance takes
place by means of the reproductive cells. In some birds and mammals,
the behaviour of the young is modified by what they learn from their
parents, so that they profit by the experience of their elders;
however, this profiting by experience is not cumulative, but must be
repeated afresh in each generation. In man, on the other hand, speech
and writing make it possible to construct a continuous tradition, by
means of which experience may be actually accumulated from generation
to generation. There are thus two forms of inheritance in man, two
hereditary streams--biological inheritance, by means of germ-cells or
detached portions of the organism, in which favourable mutations may
be accumulated by selection, and “experience-inheritance,” by means
of tradition, in which useful experience may be accumulated by the
activity of mind. By means of tradition-inheritance, man is virtually
enabled to “inherit acquired characters”; thus the environment in
which the latter stages of his development are passed through, and
consequently his adult self, the end-product of that development, can
be altered far more rapidly than in any other organism. Finally, it
is possible, as is being increasingly realized, thus to accumulate
experience relating to the alteration of biological inheritance, and so
eventually to substitute conscious purpose for blind natural selection
in man’s future evolution.

Next point: by means of speech, tradition, and invention, man has
been enabled to extend his biological environment--in other words,
that part of the cosmos with which he stands in relation--till it has
reached an enormously greater size than that of any other organism.
He is learning ever more facts about the celestial bodies, studying
stars that are at an inconceivable distance from him. He is able to
travel at will to all parts of the globe. He can penetrate by means of
tradition to remote periods of the past: as Mr. Wells has forcibly put
it, a modern Englishman can know more of the world in the Classical
Epoch than could the most learned Greek or Roman. And even when he can
no more get into contact with ideas, he can still unravel facts: flint
implements help him to the history of man, fossils to that of life,
rocks to that of the globe, stars to that of the solar system. In time,
as well as in space, his environment enlarges to a size that is for
practical purposes infinite, whereas no other organism can penetrate
beyond its own memories, or, at most, do more than profit by those
of the generation immediately before it. Professor Keyser,[20] in a
suggestive article, has characterized this unique attribute of man by
calling him “the time-binder.”

Speech and reasoning, with all their consequences, have only been
rendered possible through another important qualitative change in the
human brain, which in its turn has led to other new potentialities of
life being realized in man and in man alone--its flexibility.

In some of the lowest forms of life, such as Paramecium, there are but
one or two possible modes of reaction--reactions which it attempts in
response to any one of the myriad changes that may occur in the outer
world. As we ascend the scale, we find two chief types of alterations:
in the first place an increase in the number of hereditarily-given
modes of reaction, and in the second an increased power of “learning,”
of altering behaviour in adjustment to experience. In the insects, the
first is chiefly in evidence. Although many insects undoubtedly can
profit by experience to a limited degree, yet most of their behaviour
is instinctive, in the sense that it unrolls itself automatically and
efficiently in the absence of previous experience or of any possible
instruction. In the vertebrates, on the other hand, we see as we pass
from the lower to the higher groups a definite, steady increase in the
power of learning by experience, from the fish that takes weeks to
associate a given colour with a given event such as feeding-time, to
the dog or monkey capable of learning elaborate tricks after a couple
of trials. But even in the most “intelligent” of birds or mammals, the
power of image-formation is very probably absent,[21] and the power
of concept-formation, of generalizing, certainly so. This fact (quite
apart from the absence of tradition, although this too operates in the
same direction) means that the associations of animals can only be
arbitrary and individual: a rook in one country (to choose a somewhat
far-fetched example) may happen to associate danger with fire-arms, one
in another with bows and arrows. Life, for the animals, is a cinema,
different for each individual, in which one event may be associated
with another in the most diverse and haphazard ways. With the advent
of the human type of brain, however, experience can be sorted out and
properly docketed; the mere cinematographic record is converted into a
drama full of significance, the diary into a card-index. By this means,
and by tradition, it is possible for man to obtain a much more accurate
and more complete grasp of the relationships of the objects that
compose the outer world than is possible for any other animal. Through
knowledge, as ever, comes power: and as a result, man has been enabled
to invent tools and machinery, and so to enlarge enormously his control
over his environment. Just as his “range,” in the zoogeographical
sense, is extended to an unprecedented degree both in space and time,
so tools represent, biologically speaking, an extension of himself
as an operator. While man is using a tool, he and the tool together
constitute but a single unit in the struggle for existence. As various
writers have put it, tools and machines are temporary organs of man,
which have the additional merit of being replaceable if lost or damaged.

But this is not all: the great power of association possessed by man,
together with his faculty of generalization and of speech, makes it
possible for him to _learn_ his rôle in the community, instead of being
born with it as are the bee and the ant. Great educability instead of
differentiated instinct, infinite possibility, at the expense of the
pains of learning, instead of an effortless but limited stock of inborn
modes of behaviour--in this again man represents a qualitatively new
organic type.

By this means he can escape what has always been a necessity with lower
forms: by means of education and machinery he can play a specialized
part in the community life, and so build up a community with a high
degree of division of labour, without being born specialized. He could
not thus learn his rôle if he were not educable, nor if he could not
manufacture tools. An ant or a duck or a dog possesses admirable tools
for its particular job: but they are living parts of the organism’s
own body. A worker ant cannot lay down its serviceable carpentering
mandibles and become a soldier by picking up a large and warlike
pair:--once a worker, always a worker; once a soldier, always a
soldier--that is the rule for ants, but not for men.

The efficiency and biological success of communities depends on the
degree and accuracy of the division of labour and co-ordination between
the units of which they are built up. This is true of cell-communities
and the second-grade individuals or metazoa or multicellular animals
and plants to which they give rise,[22] and also of the communities
of metazoa and the third-grade individuals to which they give rise,
whether the members of such communities of higher grade are physically
bound together, as in a Hydroid or a Portuguese Man-o’-War, or
united only by mental bonds, as are the communities of ants and bees
and termites. As we have seen, the individuals are differentiated
structurally for the different functions which they have to perform.

This is not so in human species: a man is not born cross-legged to
be a tailor, or broad-thumbed to be a miller, or big-armed to be a
blacksmith. Even in the hereditary castes of India, the trade or
profession is determined by tradition, and not by inborn structural
adaptations.

Still another consequence flows from this educability, this flexible
and elastic mental organization. A man can pass from one occupation
to another. He can be specialized for several, or combine a high
degree of professional skill in one with the generalized knowledge of
an amateur in another. It is this obvious but fundamental fact which
is at the bottom of many of the failures to apply biological ideas to
sociology.

Another human distinction is the increase of the part played by
environment in man as opposed to animals (in determining his
biologically effective nature). Environment plays not merely a large
part, but a preponderating one, in his development after the first
year or so of his life. Tradition provides a special environment,
made by man for man’s own development; and men brought up in markedly
different traditions arrive at different end-results just as surely and
obviously as do men of markedly different hereditary tendencies arrive
at different end-results even though exposed to similar traditions.
Traditions are infinitely complex things: there are world traditions,
national traditions broad and narrow, class traditions and traditions
of profession and trade, traditions of predilection, of art, of
religion: and men may be exposed in their development to the combined
influence of a number of these. But the net result of the diversity of
tradition is an extraordinary diversity of end-result. “_Nihil humanum
alienum a me puto_”--Terence could only say this with truth in the
sense that there are certain fundamental emotions and instincts found
in all men, and also certain aspects of environment shared by all
humanity--the sun and moon, earth, water, and fire, space and time,
parents and society, and so on and so forth.

I make no apologies for the length of this preliminary analysis,
since it is precisely by the neglect of preliminary analysis that
most attempts to correlate biology and sociology have failed. The
salient fact emerges that with man there has been a radical change in
evolutionary method.

As space is limited, I am here only proposing to consider three of the
chief contributions which biology can make to sociology--on the idea of
progress, on the relation between individual and community, and on the
applicability of the doctrine of the struggle for existence to man.

As regards the idea of progress, biology can make a clear and
unequivocal contribution: whereas man is biologically so young, his
evolution is yet so chaotic and divergently directed, that it is very
hard to arrive at definite conclusions from the study of his history
alone. It has been a source of constant surprise to me that more use
has not been made of biological data in the controversy over this
question. In the little book recently edited by Mr. Marvin on various
aspects of the concept of Progress, there was no article dealing with
biological progress; and even in Professor Bury’s notable book, _The
Idea of Progress_, biology was as little and as unsatisfactorily drawn
upon as in Dean Inge’s writings on the subject.

We have already seen that a certain direction obtains in organic
evolution. Into the details of this process I have not here the time
to go; we must be content with the brief enumeration which has already
been given of the qualities of organisms whose maximum level, and to a
lesser degree whose average, have increased during evolution.

So far so good. But a process may be going in a definite direction and
yet not be satisfactory.

This road leads to London; this other to Puddlington Parva. We all know
people who are obviously headed for success, while it is on record that
Mr. Mantalini’s direction was towards “the demnition bow-wows.”

But we know that we ourselves consciously find _value_ in things, in
objects and aims, in directions and processes. In this we are unique
among organisms, and as a matter of fact a large part of our life is
determined by the relative values we set on objects. On the whole,
however, there is a reasonable amount of agreement among different
individuals, at any rate in one country at one epoch, as to what they
call good and what they call bad. There are very few western Europeans
who find dirt or untruthfulness good, knowledge or bravery bad.

When we look into the trend of biological evolution, we find as a
matter of fact that it has operated to produce on the whole what we
find good, to bring into being more and more things on which we can set
positive value. This is not to say that progress is an inevitable “law
of nature,” but that it has actually occurred, and that its occurrence
provides an external sanction for many of our subjective human hopes
and ideals.

True that we are ourselves a product of the evolutionary process and
might therefore be thought biased. None the less, it is clear that if a
degenerate animal like a tapeworm, or one inevitably specialized like
a hermit-crab, could possess and enunciate values, they would be of a
very different nature from our own. But we should further find that
the direction of the evolutionary process which led to the former was
directly opposed to the main trend, that of the latter more or less
at right angles to it. The general coincidence of the main observable
trend and of our own concepts of value warrants us in calling the one
progressive, and in feeling that the other is no mere isolated flicker
in an alien or hostile world, but finds a sanction and a resting-place
in being part of something vastly bigger than itself. The remarkable
and important fact for man is to find, in spite of all the apparently
fundamental differences between his organization and his evolutionary
methods and those of lower organisms, in spite of the widespread
degeneration and “blind-alleyism” to be seen in evolution, that the
direction in which he desires to go coincides with the resultant, the
main direction of organic evolution. There are no ideals, there is no
purpose, in fish or ant or tree: but man’s ideals and purposes are the
outcome of the blind interplay of forces in which fish and ant and
tree play their unwitting rôles. True again that further analysis shows
that the methods of evolutionary progress are often crude, wasteful,
and slow: that some of our values are unreal or artificial: but this
does not destroy the main fact, and only means that each side can here
learn something from the other.

The main fact abides--that progress is an evolutionary reality, and
that an analysis of the modes of biological progress may often help us
in our quest for human progress.

The next great problem on which biology has something to say to
sociology is that eternal one of the relation between individual
and community. As it is sometimes put, Does the individual exist
for the State, or the State for the individual? In all non-human
biological aggregates--cell-colonies, second-grade aggregates or
metazoan organisms, third-grade aggregates like Siphonophora and
insect communities--the very existence of the aggregate as a unit, its
biological efficiency and success, depend upon a permanent division of
labour between its members, upon their thoroughgoing specialization.
This always and inevitably involves a sacrifice of certain of their
potentialities to greater efficiency in one of a few actual functions,
and in evolution a progressive subordination of the smaller unit to the
aggregate.

At first sight, biological principles seem to contradict themselves
on this subject. On the one hand, the human individual is, or, we had
better say, has the potentiality of being the highest type of organism
in existence--far higher, biologically speaking, not only than any
human community now in existence, but than any which we could possibly
imagine as coming into existence in the future. When we remember the
general agreement of biological progress with our human values, it is
clear that to degrade the individual for the benefit of the community
is wrong--a biological crime.

On the other hand, human progress depends and will always depend to an
extent scarcely to be overrated upon the proper organization of the
community. So long as present competition continues, the very survival
of a nation may easily depend upon the efficiency of its organization
as a community. Biological as well as human experience makes it
perfectly plain that such success, in a unit which is itself an
aggregate of smaller units, depends upon the degree of specialization
of these constituent units and the division of labour and co-operation
between them.

Biology here then lays down that human individuals should become
more and more specialized if progress is to continue; but since
specialization implies the sacrifice of many potentialities for the
good of the whole, this apparently contradicts what we have just
inculcated above.

This is where our human flexibility comes in. Man should neither live
whole-heartedly for himself, nor throw his individuality, ant-like,
beneath the wheels of the community Juggernaut. He can escape from the
dilemma by passing from one state to the other. For part of his time,
he can apply his energies as a specialized unit--for the rest, he can
be a complete individual, realizing the various potentialities of his
many-sided nature, with the community contributing to his development,
not he to the community’s. And not only can he, but he should act thus.

Be it noted, to avoid misapprehension, that I have here been using the
community to denote the single aggregate unit which from the beginning
has played such an important part biologically in human evolution, not
merely as denoting the sum of individuals considered separately.

Thus biology gives a definite answer to this question too. Pure
individualism is condemned, and so is what we may call ant-and-bee
socialism. Some form of the “dual day,” to use a current phrase, or at
least of the “dual life,” is the method which seems to be in accord
with the enduring principles of biology, although the precise details
are not and cannot be the biologist’s concern, and particular lives,
such as that of the creative artist, who moves on a different plane of
reality, escape his analysis.

I have reserved to the close that biological principle which has been
most often and most seriously misapplied in sociology and politics--the
struggle for existence. Never was the proverb about the Devil’s quoting
Scripture better exemplified than in this matter. This fundamental
idea of Darwin’s has been used as justification for three totally
different and indeed incompatible political doctrines. In England, it
has served chiefly to bolster up _laissez-faire_ individualism and
free competition. In Germany in the years immediately succeeding the
publication of the _Origin of Species_, it was seized upon by the
Socialists as implying equal opportunity for all as against feudalism
or hereditary aristocracy. Later in the same country (and to a certain
extent elsewhere) it was abundantly employed as a theoretical support
for militarism.

As a matter of fact, the use of it as sole principle governing the
interrelation of biological units is wholly unjustified. As has been
shown by a number of writers, among whom may especially be mentioned
Darwin himself, Ritchie in his _Darwinism and Politics_, and Kropotkin
in his _Mutual Aid_, the struggle for existence is only _one_ of two
possibilities in this relationship: the other is that of co-operation,
of mutual aid, which is especially well marked in the building up of
higher-grade units from a multiplicity of smaller lower-grade ones. Two
of the most important steps in the whole evolutionary process have been
based on the co-operation of units--the origin of multicellular from
unicellular organisms, and the development of true man, with his social
life, from his pre-human ancestor. It is also prominent in the lives
of many species of the highest groups--insects, mammals, and birds:
witness the ants and bees, the rook, the wild dog, the elephant, the
baboon. In fact, once the bodily specialization of units has reached
a certain pitch, progress, as we have seen, is only possible through
mental development, and this in the great majority of cases brings
about aggregation into some sort of community, held together by mental
bonds.

Besides aggregation of similar units, there has frequently been
co-operation between units of unlike character and origin--witness
symbiosis, as in lichens; the relation between many insects and
flowers; the formation of flocks consisting of two or more species, as
with jackdaws and rooks, and many other cases.

Competition and co-operation both occur throughout the whole of
evolution: but co-operation comes to play an ever more considerable
part in higher forms. In lower organisms enormous overproduction is
of no great consequence; their organization is simple, and, given
favourable conditions, they can turn inorganic matter into their own
specific substance at a great rate. But higher forms are more complex,
more delicately balanced, and longer lived. Accordingly, waste of life
is of greater consequence to them, and methods by which a struggle on
the grand scale can be minimized tend to be more and more adopted. We
find regularly, for instance, a reduction of the number of offspring in
higher groups together with greater parental care.

Thus co-operation, for still fresh reasons, is biologically important
for the higher groups. The problem is becoming increasingly pressing
for the human race, since the time is in sight when the whole habitable
area of the globe will be colonized, up to a certain level of density
and efficiency, by members of the more advanced races. Biologically
speaking, it is perfectly clear that some co-operative system,
involving federation in one form or another, is the proper system to
adopt; and that the “world-state”--not necessarily organized after
the plan of our present highly specialized nationalist-industrialist
states, which appear happily to represent only a temporary phase
of evolution, but none the less an organic reality, a co-operative
unit--that the “world-state” is not merely a figment of unpractical
dreamers, but an obviously desirable aim for humanity. Kant, a century
and a half ago even, had seen clearly enough that some universal
society was a necessity for the unfolding of human possibility; and had
gone further and pointed out that there were indications of a movement
of civilization in that direction. In our time, this movement has been
retarded by the extraordinary and mushroom growth of Nationalism, in
which to the average man his “Country” (really _Nation_) has become
his most real God. In the last hundred years, Nationalism has usurped
the place of Religion as the most important super-individual interest
of individuals--has indeed in some sense become a religion. It is
leading the world into an impasse, as do all incomplete and partial
conceptions; but, in the Hague Court and the League of Nations, has
already generated the seeds of what will in time devour it.[23]

To sum up, we may say that the crude application to human affairs of
the doctrine of the struggle for existence, torn from its biological
context, isolated and over-emphasized, is wholly unwarranted. On the
other hand, a struggle does continue, both of the direct and indirect
type defined by Darwin: and there is no prospect of it ceasing to play
an important part in human biology. Co-operation is not, any more than
competition, to be taken as the sole desirable principle. Panaceas of
this sort do not exist, except to make bubble reputations and quack
fortunes. Even within such a highly organized co-operative unit as
the mammalian body a struggle continues--the different tissues are
in competition with each other for food, and if the available supply
diminishes below the necessary level, some tissues will be drawn upon
by other more successful competitors, and the struggle will lead to an
end-result in which the proportion of the various kinds of cells comes
to be very different from what they were in the normal well-nourished
body.[24] That is a purely biological example. In man, since the
unification of the community is of a low order, it is inevitable that
individuals and sections will continue in some form of competition with
each other: not only this, however, but the additional fact that man’s
mental organization reacts strongly to the stimulus of competition make
it probable that a “struggle” of some sort will not only be inevitable
but up to a point beneficial in any form of society. What is more, once
co-operation exists, competition between the co-operative units is
necessary to bring out the full efficiency of their combination.

All that the biologist can do is to point out that neither the
one-sided application of the principle of struggle nor of that of
co-operation is biologically sound. But, as everywhere else in human
conduct, after the broad principles have been grasped, success lies
always in a delicate, continuous adjustment of conflicting claims, in
what one may call a personal conscious effort. Struggle is universal:
but by itself it can only lead to a certain stage of evolutionary
progress.

The half-baked moralist may lay down the law about right and wrong
with the most positive assurance; but, by not paying attention to the
necessity for sweet reasonableness, give-and-take, unselfishness, for
thought about the thousand and one details of daily conduct, he may be
making himself and his wife thoroughly unhappy, ruining his family’s
chances, and, as a matter of fact, be thoroughly immoral without once
suspecting it.

It is in a very similar way that the militarist, for instance,
fortifying himself in the doctrine of the struggle for existence with
what he regards as an impregnable sanction for his theories, is in
reality acting immorally because not attempting to envisage the whole
problem.

There is one very interesting evolutionary point which well illustrates
the difference between pure biology and pure sociology, and yet
emphasizes the natural connection between the two. Once again it has
a connection with the greater flexibility of human mind. As we have
seen, in the lowest animals behaviour is for the most part unvarying,
hereditarily determined: the organism is capable of a number of
definite reactions, and if these do not suffice to extricate it from
difficulties, it perishes. The first step towards gaining is the
power of learning. “Once bitten, twice shy” is applicable to all
higher vertebrates; and it is not only the burnt child who dreads the
fire (although a study of moths and candles will convince us that
“Lepidopteran” cannot be substituted as subject of the proverb).

When, as in the higher mammals, the power of learning by experience is
rapid, the individual organism is better able to adjust itself to the
dangers of life, and once more there is less sacrifice of individuals
in the struggle. The same organism persists: but of two possible types
of behaviour, the unmodified innate type is eliminated, the type
modified by experience survives. If we like to put it in a way which
is perhaps not wholly justifiable, there comes into being, besides the
struggle for existence between individuals, a struggle for existence
between different possible modes of reaction of one and the same
organism.

With the advent of man upon the scene, still new possibilities arise.
First of all, he is capable of ideas, which, biologically speaking, are
to be regarded as potentialities of behaviour. There is no evidence at
present that even the highest animals possess ideas or even images.[25]
Secondly, these ideas are transmissible by speech and writing, and
accordingly tradition has come into being, so that modification of
behaviour by experience can be operative not only within the individual
life, not only from one generation to the next immediately succeeding,
as in many mammals, but for an indefinite period. The experience of
Moses, Archimedes, or Charlemagne, of Jesus, Newton, or James Watt is
modifying our behaviour to-day.

The result, both for individuals and communities, is that a selection
of ideas instead of a selection of organic units can to an ever greater
extent take place; and thus the actual extinction of living matter
be increasingly avoided. For instance, we find the substitution of
judicial procedure, in which the ideas of two disputants about the
matter in dispute are weighed and a selection made in favour of one,
for various forms of violence and combat in which one or other of the
actual disputants was often eliminated. Or again, in struggles between
communities, even though warfare is still resorted to, yet it does
not operate in the same way as in earlier stages of human evolution. A
salient example of this is afforded by the result of the recent war to
Germany; although an equally good instance can be seen, for example,
in the Boer War. In primitive wars, the defeated tribe was wherever
possible exterminated or enslaved: it ceased to exist as an independent
unit, and the great majority of its male members were killed. This is
impossible under present conditions: and all those who preserve, or
have ever possessed, any political sanity aim, for instance, neither at
the physical nor the economic destruction or subordination of Germany,
but--to use one of those attractive catchwords that sounded so well in
war-time--at her “change of heart”--in other words, the extermination,
not of a nation, but of a national tradition.

To what extent this substitution of mental for physical will continue
it is hard to say; already, to take another field, the multiplication
of cheap books has led to an ever increasing number of men and women
finding most of their adventure and romance in books instead of in the
life that we are accustomed to call real. But that would lead us away
from our main point--enough to have indicated another great difference
between processes above and below the human level.

There are numerous important questions concerning our right to apply
biological ideas of heredity directly to human beings which I would
have liked to touch upon. But for one thing I have not the time, and
for another, Mr. Carr-Saunders in his recent book on the Population
Problem has dealt so fully with the relation between biological
inheritance and what may be called tradition-inheritance, that I omit
them with a good conscience.

In this brief treatment I have had to ask you to take conclusions on
trust, without presenting the evidence on which they are based; this,
however, is inevitable when transferring ideas from one science to
another. I have attempted to show, first, that biology can profit by
incorporating certain conclusions of sociology and so rounding off and
completing certain of its own principles: on the other hand, I have put
before you my belief that there are certain basic biological principles
which must be taken into account by the sociologist--principles which
hold good in sociology because man too is an organism.

By now, however, we can see more clearly the way in which the various
sciences with which we are concerned, of whose relations we had
something to say at the beginning of this essay, properly interlock.

They interlock thus. The physico-chemical sciences are basic to
biology. Organisms are made of the same substances as are non-living
compounds; their processes are therefore conformable to certain
physico-chemical laws, such as the indestructibility of matter, the
conservation of energy, and so forth; and in so far as we analyse the
material aspect of life, physico-chemical concepts are _adequate_.
On the other hand, physico-chemical concepts--or at least our
present ones--are not _all-sufficient_. In the first place, the very
complicated arrangement of matter which is found in living substance
has not been yet sufficiently analysed by physics and chemistry:
accordingly we find many processes occurring in biology--such as the
directional changes in evolution of which we have spoken--which could
not have been foretold on our present physico-chemical knowledge,
but must be investigated separately as adding to our store of facts
and principles, in the confident hope that a synthesis will one
day be possible. Secondly, a whole new category of phenomena, the
psychological, is first met with in biology, and to this we cannot as
yet apply physical or chemical ideas at all.

For a combination of these two reasons, biology deals with certain
concepts which are not implicit in current physico-chemical ideas.
Physics and chemistry are basic for biology, but they are not
exhaustive.

In a very similar way, biology is basic for sociology, but again not
exhaustive. Certain limits are set to human life through man’s organic
nature. Certain of his activities can be completely analysed in terms
of biology. But other of his activities, especially those concerned
with his new type of mental organization, find no counterpart in
the rest of the biological kingdoms, and must be studied in and for
themselves.

Bergson would have us believe that evolution is creative. It is better
to say, with Lloyd Morgan, that it is emergent. With new degrees of
complexity, new qualitative differences emerge. Thus the sciences are
a hierarchy, the subject-matter of one constituting the foundation for
the next in the series. All that biology can do for sociology is to
help her to build her foundations solidly and correctly: but we all
know that without good foundations no building is safe.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

     Bury, J. B., ’20. “The Idea of Progress.” London, 1920.

     Carr-Saunders, A. M., ’22. “The Population Problem.” Oxford, 1922.

     Hobhouse, L. T., ’01. “Mind in Evolution.” London, 1901.

     Huxley, J. S., ’12. “The Individual in the Animal Kingdom.”
     Cambridge, 1912.

     Keyser, ’21. “Science” (N.S.) New York, 1921.

     Kropotkin, Prince, ’08. “Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution.”
     London, 1908.

     Lloyd Morgan, C., ’23. “Emergent Evolution.” London, 1923.

     Marvin, F. S. “Progress and History” (5th Imp.). Oxford, 1921.

     Radl, E., ’09. “Geschichte der biologischen Theorien,” vol. ii.
     Leipzig, 1909.

     Ritchie, ’01. “Darwinism in Politics” (4th Ed.). London, 1901.

     Roberts, Morley, ’20. “Warfare in the Human Body.” London, 1920.

     Roux, W., ’81. “Der Kampf der Teile im Organismics.” 1881.

     Sherrington, ’22. “The Advancement of Science, 1922.” London, 1922.

     Spencer, Herbert. “First Principles,” “Principles of Biology,”
     “Principles of Sociology.”

     Thorndike, E. L., ’11. “Animal Intelligence.” New York, 1911.

     Trotter, W., ’19. “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War” (2nd
     Ed.). London, 1919.

     Wells, H. G., ’21. “The Outline of History.” London, 1921.


FOOTNOTES:

[18] For a remarkable critical history of biological thought during
this period, see Radl, ’09.

[19] Morley Roberts is a recent exception. See his interesting book,
_Warfare in the Human Body_.

[20] _Science_, September 1921.

[21] See Thorndike, ’11.

[22] See J. S. Huxley, ’12, for a discussion of the grades of
biological individuality.

[23] See, e.g., Wells, ’21, pp. 558, 666.

[24] See Roux, ’81, for a discussion of this important extension of
Darwinism.

[25] See Thorndike, _op. cit._; Washburn, _The Animal Mind_. New York,
1913.



III

ILS N’ONT QUE DE L’ÂME: AN ESSAY ON BIRD-MIND


                       THE BIRDS

     To most of us, a bird’s a feathered song
       Which for our pleasure gives a voice to spring.
       We make a symbol of its airy wing
     Bright with the liberty for which we long.

     Or we discover them with love more strong
       As each a separate, individual thing
       Which only learns to act, or move, or sing
     In ways that wholly to itself belong.

     But some with deeper and more inward sight
       See them a part of that one Life which streams
     Slow on, towards more mind--a part more light
      Then we; unburdened with regrets, or dreams,
     Or thought. A winged emotion of the sky,
     The birds through an eternal Present fly.

OXFORD, _April 1923_.



ILS N’ONT QUE DE L’ÂME: AN ESSAY ON BIRD-MIND


     “O Nightingale, thou surely art
     A creature of a fiery heart.”
                        --W. WORDSWORTH.


     “The inferior animals, when the conditions of life are favourable,
     are subject to periodical fits of gladness, affecting them
     powerfully and standing out in vivid contrast to their ordinary
     temper.... Birds are more subject to this universal joyous
     instinct than mammals, and ... as they are much freer than
     mammals, more buoyant and graceful in action, more loquacious,
     and have voices so much finer, their gladness shows itself in a
     greater variety of ways, with more regular and beautiful motions,
     and with melody.”--W. H. HUDSON.


     “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
     Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
                                                       --BLAKE.


“_Ils n’ont pas de cerveau--ils n’ont que de l’âme._” A dog was
being described, with all his emotion, his apparent passion to make
himself understood, his failure to reach comprehension; and that was
how the French man of letters summed up the brute creation--“_pas de
cerveau--que de l’âme_.”

Nor is it a paradox: it is a half-truth that is more than half
true--more true at least than its converse, which many hold.

There is a large school to-day who assert that animals are “mere
machines.” Machines they may be: it is the qualification which does
not fit. I suppose that by saying “mere” machines it is meant to imply
that they have the soulless, steely quality of a machine which goes
when it is set going, stops when another lever is turned, acts only in
obedience to outer stimuli, and is in fact unemotional--a bundle of
operations without any quality meriting the name of a self.

It is true that the further we push our analysis of animal behaviour,
the more we find it composed of a series of automatisms, the more we
see it rigorously determined by combination of inner constitution
and outer circumstance, the more we have cause to deny to animals
the possession of anything deserving the name of reason, ideals, or
abstract thought. The more, in fact, do they appear to us as mechanisms
(which is a much better word than machines, since this latter carries
with it definite connotations of metal or wood, electricity or steam).
They are mechanisms, because their mode of operation is regular; but
they differ from any other type of mechanism known to us in that their
working is--to put it in the most non-committal way--accompanied by
emotion. It is, to be sure, a combination of emotion with reason that
we attribute to a soul; but none the less, in popular parlance at
least, the emotional side is predominant, and pure reason is set over
against the emotional content which gives soul its essence. And this
emotional content we most definitely find running through the lives of
higher animals.

The objection is easily and often raised that we have no direct
knowledge of emotion in an animal, no direct proof of the existence of
any purely mental process in its life. But this is as easily laid as
raised. We have no direct knowledge of emotion or any other conscious
process in the life of any human being save our individual selves;
and yet we feel no hesitation in deducing it from others’ behaviour.
Although it is an arguable point whether biological science may not for
the moment be better served by confining the subject-matter and terms
of analysis to behaviour alone, it is a very foolhardy “behaviorist”
indeed who denies the _existence_ of emotion and conscious process!

But the practical value of this method of thinking is, as I say, an
arguable point; it is indeed clear that a great immediate advance,
especially in non-human biology, has been and may still be made
by translating the uncertain and often risky terms of subjective
psychology into those based upon the objective description of directly
observable behaviour. However, it is equally easy to maintain, and I
for one maintain it, that to omit a whole category of phenomena from
consideration is unscientific, and must in the long run lead to an
unreal, because limited, view of things; and that, when great detail of
analysis is not required, but only broad lines and general comparison,
the psychological terminology, of memory, fear, anger, curiosity,
affection, is the simpler and more direct tool, and should be used
to supplement and make more real the cumbersome and less complete
behavioristic terminology, of modification of behaviour, fright,
aggression, and the rest.

It is at least abundantly clear that, if we are to believe in the
principle of uniformity at all, we must ascribe emotion to animals as
well as to men: the similarity of behaviour is so great that to assert
the absence of a whole class of phenomena in one case, its presence in
the other, is to make scientific reasoning a farce.

“_Pas de cerveau--que de l’âme._” Those especially who have studied
birds will subscribe to this. The variety of their emotions is greater,
their intensity more striking, than in four-footed beasts, while their
power of modifying behaviour by experience is less, the subjection
to instinct more complete. Those who are interested in the details
can see from experiments, such as those recorded by Mr. Eliot Howard
in his _Territory in Bird Life_, how limited is a bird’s power of
adjustment; but I will content myself with a single example, one of
nature’s experiments, recorded by Mr. Chance last year by the aid of
the cinematograph--the behaviour of small birds when the routine of
their life is upset by the presence of a young Cuckoo in the nest.

When, after prodigious exertions, the unfledged Cuckoo has ejected its
foster-brothers and sisters from their home, it sometimes happens that
one of them is caught on or close to the rim of the nest. One such
case was recorded by Mr. Chance’s camera. The unfortunate fledgling
scrambled about on the branches below the nest; the parent Pipit flew
back with food; the cries and open mouth of the ejected bird attracted
attention, and it was fed; and the mother then settled down upon the
nest as if all was in normal order. Meanwhile, the movements of the
fledgling in the foreground grew feebler, and one could imagine its
voice quavering off, fainter and fainter, as its vital warmth departed.
At the next return of the parent with food the young one was dead.

It was the utter stupidity of the mother that was so impressive--its
simple response to stimulus--of feeding to the stimulus of the young’s
cry and open mouth, of brooding to that of the nest with something warm
and feathery contained in it--its neglect of any steps whatsoever to
restore the fallen nestling to safety. It was almost as pitiable an
exhibition of unreason as the well-attested case of the wasp attendant
on a wasp-grub, who, on being kept without food for some time, grew
more and more restless, and eventually bit off the hind end of the grub
and offered it to what was left!

Birds in general are stupid, in the sense of being little able to
meet unforeseen emergencies; but their lives are often emotional, and
their emotions are richly and finely expressed. I have for years been
interested in observing the courtship and the relations of the sexes
in birds, and have in my head a number of pictures of their notable and
dramatic moments. These seem to me to illustrate so well the emotional
furnishing of birds, and to provide such a number of windows into that
strange thing we call a bird’s mind, that I shall simply set some of
them down as they come to me.

First, then, the coastal plain of Louisiana; a pond, made and kept as
a sanctuary by that public-spirited bird-lover Mr. E. A. McIlhenny,
filled with noisy crowds of Egrets and little egret-like Herons.
These, in great flocks, fly back across the “Mexique Bay” in the
spring months from their winter quarters in South America. Arrived in
Louisiana, they feed and roost in flocks for a time, but gradually
split up into pairs. Each pair, detaching themselves from the flocks,
choose a nesting-site (by joint deliberation) among the willows and
maples of the breeding pond. And then follows a curious phenomenon.
Instead of proceeding at once to biological business in the shape of
nest-building and egg-laying, they indulge in what can only be styled
a honeymoon. For three or four days both members of the pair are
always on the chosen spot, save for the necessary visits which they
alternately pay to the distant feeding grounds. When both are there,
they will spend hours at a time sitting quite still, just touching
one another. Generally the hen sits on a lower branch, resting her
head against the cock bird’s flanks; they look for all the world like
one of those inarticulate but happy couples upon a bench in the park
in spring. Now and again, however, this passivity of sentiment gives
place to wild excitement. Upon some unascertainable cause the two birds
raise their necks and wings, and, with loud cries, intertwine their
necks. This is so remarkable a sight that the first time I witnessed
it I did not fully credit it, and only after it had happened before my
eyes on three or four separate occasions was I forced to admit it as
a regular occurrence in their lives. The long necks are so flexible
that they can and do make a complete single turn round each other--a
real true-lover’s-knot! This once accomplished, each bird then--most
wonderful of all--runs its beak quickly and amorously through the just
raised aigrettes of the other, again and again, nibbling and clappering
them from base to tip. Of this I can only say that it seemed to bring
such a pitch of emotion that I could have wished to be a Heron that
I might experience it. This over, they would untwist their necks and
subside once more into their usual quieter sentimentality.

This, alas! I never saw with the less common little White Egrets, but
with the Louisiana Heron (which should, strictly speaking, be called an
egret too); but since every other action of the two species is (in all
save a few minor details) the same, I assume that the flashing white,
as well as the slate and vinous and grey birds, behave thus.

The greeting ceremony when one bird of the pair, after having been
away at the feeding grounds, rejoins its mate is also beautiful. Some
little time before the human watcher notes the other’s approach, the
waiting bird rises on its branch, arches and spreads its wings, lifts
its aigrettes into a fan and its head-plumes into a crown, bristles up
the feathers of its neck, and emits again and again a hoarse cry. The
other approaches, settles in the branches near by, puts itself into
a similar position, and advances towards its mate; and after a short
excited space they settle down close together. This type of greeting is
repeated every day until the young leave the nest; for after the eggs
are laid both sexes brood, and there is a nest-relief four times in
every twenty-four hours. Each time the same attitudes, the same cries,
the same excitement; only now at the end of it all, one steps off the
nest, the other on. One might suppose that this closed the performance.
But no: the bird that has been relieved is still apparently animated
by stores of unexpended emotion; it searches about for a twig, breaks
it off or picks it up, and returns with it in beak to present to the
other. During the presentation the greeting ceremony is again gone
through; after each relief the whole business of presentation and
greeting may be repeated two, or four, or up even to ten or eleven
times before the free bird flies away.

When there are numerous repetitions of the ceremony, it is extremely
interesting to watch the progressive extinction of excitement. During
the last one or two presentations the twig-bringing bird may scarcely
raise his wings or plumes, and will often betray an absent air, turning
his head in the direction in which he is proposing to fly off.

No one who has seen a pair of Egrets thus change places on the nest,
bodies bowed forward, plumes a cloudy fan of lace, absolute whiteness
of plumage relieved by gold of eye and lore and black of bill, and the
whole scene animated by the repeated, excited cry, can ever forget it.
But such unforgettable scenes are not confined to other countries. Here
in England you can see as good; I have seen them on the reservoirs of
Tring, and within full view of the road by Frensham Pond--the courtship
forms and dances of the Crested Grebe.

The Crested Grebe is happily becoming more familiar to bird-lovers
in England. Its brilliant white belly, protective grey-brown back,
rippleless and effortless diving, long neck, and splendid ruff and
ear-tufts of black, chestnut, and white, conspire to make it a marked
bird. In the winter the crest is small, and even when fully grown
in spring it is usually held close down against the head, so as to
be not at all conspicuous. When it is spread, it is almost, without
exception, in the service of courtship or love-making. Ten years ago I
spent my spring holiday watching these birds on the Tring reservoirs.
I soon found out that their courtship, like the Herons’, was mutual,
not one-sidedly masculine as in Peacocks or fowls. It consisted most
commonly in a little ceremony of head-shaking. The birds of a pair
come close, face one another, raise their necks, and half-spread
their ruffs. Then, with a little barking note, they shake their heads
rapidly, following this by a slow swinging of them from side to
side. This alternate shaking and swinging continues perhaps a dozen
or twenty times; and the birds then lower their standards, become
normal everyday creatures, and betake themselves to their fishing or
resting or preening again. This is the commonest bit of love-making;
but now and then the excitement evident even in these somewhat casual
ceremonies is raised to greater heights and seems to reinforce itself.
The little bouts of shaking are repeated again and again. I have seen
over eighty succeed each other uninterruptedly. And at the close the
birds do not relapse into ordinary life. Instead, they raise their
ruffs still further, making them almost Elizabethan in shape. Then one
bird dives; then the other: the seconds pass. At last, after perhaps
half or three-quarters of a minute (half a minute is a long time when
one is thus waiting for a bird’s reappearance!) one after the other
they emerge. Both hold masses of dark brownish-green weed, torn from
the bottom of the pond, in their beaks, and carry their heads down
and back on their shoulders, so that either can scarcely see anything
of the other confronting it save the concentric colours of the raised
ruff. In this position they swim together. It is interesting to see
the eager looks of the first-emerged, and its immediate start towards
the second when it too reappears. They approach, rapidly, until the
watcher wonders what will be done to avert a collision. The answer
is simple: there is no averting of a collision! But the collision is
executed in a remarkable way: the two birds, when close to each other,
leap up from the water and meet breast to breast, almost vertical,
suddenly revealing the whole flashing white under-surface. They keep
themselves in this position by violent splashings of the feet, rocking
a little from side to side as if dancing, and very gradually sinking
down (always touching with their breasts) towards the horizontal.

Meanwhile, they exchange some of the weed they are carrying; or at
least nibbling and quick movements of the head are going on. And so
they settle down on to the water, shake their heads a few times more,
and separate, changing back from these performers of an amazing age-old
rite--age-old but ever fresh--into the feeding- and sleeping-machines
of every day, but leaving a vision of strong emotion, canalized into
the particular forms of this dive and dance. The whole performance
impresses the watcher not only with its strength, but as being
apparently of very little direct (though possibly much indirect)
biological advantage, the action being self-exhausting, not stimulating
to further sexual relations, and carried out, it would seem, for its
own sake.

Further acquaintance with the Grebe only deepened the interest and made
clearer the emotional tinge underlying all the relations of the sexes.
This bird, too, has its “greeting ceremony”; but since, unlike the
colonial Herons and Egrets, it makes every effort to conceal its nest,
this cannot take place at its most natural moment, that of nest-relief,
but must be made to happen out on the open water where there are no
secrets to betray. If the sitting bird wishes to leave the nest, and
the other does not return, it flies off, after covering the eggs with
weed, in search of its mate; it is common in the breeding season to see
a Grebe in the “search-attitude,” with neck stretched up and slightly
forward and ear-tufts erected, emitting a special and far-carrying
call. When this call is recognized and answered, the two birds do
nothing so simple as to fly or swim to each other, but a special and
obviously exciting ceremony is gone through. The bird that has been
searched for and found puts itself into a very beautiful attitude, with
wings half-spread and set at right angles to the body, ruff erected
circularly, and head drawn back upon the shoulders, so that nothing
is visible but the brilliant rosette of the spread ruff in the centre
of the screen of wings, each wing showing a broad bar of brilliant
white on its dusk-grey surface. In this position it swings restlessly
back and forth in small arcs, facing towards its mate. The discoverer
meanwhile has dived; but, swimming immediately below the surface of the
water, its progress can be traced by the arrowy ripple it raises. Now
and again it lifts its head and neck above the water, periscope-wise,
to assure itself of its direction, and resumes its subaqueous course.
Nor does it rise just in front of the other bird; but swims under and
just beyond, and, as its mate swings round to the new orientation,
emerges in a really extraordinary attitude. At the last it must have
dived a little deeper; for now it appears perpendicularly from the
water, with a slowish motion, slightly spiral, the beak and head
pressed down along the front of the neck. I compared it in my notes
of ten years ago with “the ghost of a Penguin,” and that comparison
is still the best I can think of to give some idea of the strange
unreality of its appearance. It then settles down upon the water and
the pair indulge in one of their never-failing bouts of head-shaking.

Two mated birds rejoin each other after a few hours’ separation. Simple
enough in itself--but what elaboration of detail, what piling on of
little excitements, what purveying of thrills!

Other emotions too can be well studied in this bird, notably jealousy.
Several times I have seen little scenes like the following enacted.
A pair is floating idly side by side, necks drawn right down so that
the head rests on the centre of the back. One--generally, I must
admit, it has been the cock, but I think the hen may do so too on
occasion--rouses himself from the pleasant lethargy, swims up to
his mate, places himself in front of her, and gives a definite, if
repressed, shake of the head. It is an obvious sign of his desire to
“have a bit of fun”--to go through with one of those bouts of display
and head-shaking in which pleasurable emotion clearly reaches its
highest level in the birds’ lives, as any one who has watched their
habits with any thoroughness would agree. It also acts, by a simple
extension of function, as an informative symbol. The other bird knows
what is meant; it raises its head from beneath its wing, gives a
sleepy, barely discernible shake--and replaces the head. In so doing
it puts back the possibility of the ceremony and the thrill into its
slumbers; for it takes two to make love, for Grebe as for human. The
cock swims off; but he has a restless air, and in a minute or so is
back again, and the same series of events is run through. This may be
repeated three or four times.

If now another hen bird, unaccompanied by a mate, reveals herself to
the eye of the restless and disappointed cock, he will make for her and
try the same insinuating informative head-shake on her; and, in the
cases that I have seen, she has responded, and a bout of shaking has
begun. Flirtation--illicit love, if you will; for the Grebe, during
each breeding season at least, is strictly monogamous, and the whole
economics of its family life, if I may use the expression, are based on
the co-operation of male and female in incubation and the feeding and
care of the young. On the other hand, how natural and how human! and
how harmless--for there is no evidence that the pretty thrills of the
head-shaking display ever lead on to anything more serious.

But now observe. Every time that I have seen such a flirtation start,
it has always been interrupted. The mate, so sleepy before, yet must
have had one eye open all the time. She is at once aroused to action:
she dives, and attacks the strange hen after the fashion of Grebes,
from below, with an underwater thrust of the sharp beak in the belly.
Whether the thrust ever goes home I do not know. Generally, I think,
the offending bird becomes aware of the danger just in time, and,
squawking, hastily flaps off. The rightful mate emerges. What does she
do now? Peck the erring husband? Leave him in chilly disgrace? Not a
bit of it! She approaches with an eager note, and in a moment the two
are hard at it, shaking their heads; and, indeed, on such occasions you
may see more vigour and excitement thrown into the ceremony than at any
other time.

Again we exclaim, how human! And again we see to what a pitch of
complexity the bird’s emotional life is tuned.

It will have been observed that in the Grebe, whose chief skill lies
in its wonderful powers of diving, these powers have been utilized as
the raw material of several of the courtship ceremonies. This pressing
of the everyday faculties of the bird into the service of emotion, the
elevation and conversion of its useful powers of diving and underwater
swimming into ceremonials of passion, is from an evolutionary point
of view natural enough, and has its counterparts elsewhere. So in
the Divers, not too distant relatives of the Grebes, swimming and
diving have their rôle in courtship. Here too the thrilling, vertical
emergence close to the mate takes place; and there is a strange
ceremony in which two or three birds plough their way through the water
with body set obliquely--hinder parts submerged, breast raised, and
neck stretched forward and head downward with that strange look of
rigidity or tension often seen in the courtship actions of birds.

Or, again, I once saw (strangely enough from the windows of the
Headmaster’s house at Radley!) the aerial powers of the Kestrel
converted to the uses of courtship. The hen bird was sitting in a large
bush beyond the lawn. A strong wind was blowing, and the cock again
and again beat his way up against it, to turn when nearly at the house
and bear down upon the bush in an extremity of speed. Just when it
seemed inevitable that he would knock his mate off her perch and dash
himself and her into the branches, he changed the angle of his wings
to shoot vertically up the face of the bush; then turned and repeated
the play. Sometimes he came so near to her that she would start back,
flapping her wings, as if really fearing a collision. The wind was so
strong--and blowing away from me--that I could not hear what cries may
have accompanied the display.

A friend of mine who knows the Welsh mountains and is a watcher of
birds as well, tells me that he has there seen the Peregrine Falcons
do the same thing: the same thing--except that the speed was perhaps
twice as great, and the background a savage rock precipice instead of a
Berkshire garden.

Not only the activities of everyday life, but also those of
nest-building, are taken and used to build up the ceremonies of
courtship; but whereas in the former case the actions are simply those
which are most natural to and best performed by the bird, in the latter
there is, no doubt, actual association between the cerebral centres
concerned with nest-building and with sexual emotion in general. Thus
we almost invariably find the seizing of nest-material in the beak as
a part of courtship, and this is often extended to a presentation of
the material to the mate. This we see in the Grebes, with the dank
weeds of which their sodden nest is built; the Divers use moss in the
construction of theirs, and the mated birds repair to moss banks,
where they nervously pluck the moss, only to drop it again or throw it
over their shoulder. Among the Warblers, the males pluck or pick up a
leaf or twig, and with this in their beak hop and display before the
hens; and the Peewit plucks frenziedly at grass and straws. The Adelie
Penguins, so well described by Dr. Levick, make their nests of stones,
and use stones in their courtship.

A curious, unnatural transference of object may sometimes be seen in
these Penguins. The normal course of things is for this brave but comic
creature, having picked up a stone in its beak, to come up before
another of opposite sex, and, with stiff bow and absurdly outstretched
flippers, to deposit it at the other’s feet. When, however, there are
men near the rookery, the birds will sometimes in all solemnity come
up to them with their stone offering and lay it at the feet of the
embarrassed or amused human being.

The Adelies do not nest by their natural element the sea, but some way
away from it on stony slopes and rock patches; thus they cannot employ
their brilliant dives and feats of swimming in courtship, but content
themselves, apart from this presentation of household material, with
what Dr. Levick describes as “going into ecstasy”--spreading their
flippers sideways, raising their head quite straight upwards, and
emitting a low humming sound. This a bird may do when alone, or the two
birds of a pair may make a duet of it. In any case, the term applied
to it by its observer well indicates the state of emotion which it
suggests and no doubt expresses.

The depositing of courtship offerings before men by the Penguins shows
us that there must be a certain freedom of mental connection in birds.
Here an act, properly belonging to courtship, is performed as the
outlet, as it were, of another and unusual emotion. The same is seen
in many song-birds, who, like the Sedge Warbler, sing loudly for anger
when disturbed near their nest; or in the Divers, who, when an enemy is
close to the nest, express the violence of their emotion by short sharp
dives which flip a fountain of spray into the air--a type of dive also
used as a sign of general excitement in courtship.

Or, again, the actions may be performed for their own sake, as we may
say: because their performance, when the bird is full of energy and
outer conditions are favourable, gives pleasure. The best-known example
is the song of song-birds. This, as Eliot Howard has abundantly shown,
is in its origin and essential function a symbol of possession, of a
nesting territory occupied by a male--to other males a notice that
“trespassers will be prosecuted,” to females an invitation to settle,
pair, and nest. But in all song-birds, practically without exception,
the song is by no means confined to the short period during which it
actually performs these functions, but is continued until the young are
hatched, often to be taken up again when they have flown, or after the
moult, or even, as in the Song Thrush, on almost any sunny or warm day
the year round.

And finally this leads on to what is perhaps the most interesting
category of birds’ actions--those which are not merely sometimes
performed for their own sake, although they possess other and
utilitarian function, but actually have no other origin or _raison
d’être_ than to be performed for their own sake. They represent, in
fact, true play or sport among ourselves; and seem better developed
among birds than among mammals, or at least than among mammals below
the monkey. True that the cat plays with the mouse, and many young
mammals, like kittens, lambs, and kids, are full of play; but the
playing with the mouse is more like the singing of birds outside the
mating season, a transference of a normal activity to the plane of
play; and the play of young animals, as Groos successfully exerted
himself to show, is of undoubted use. To be sure, the impulse to play
must be _felt_ by the young creature as an exuberance of emotion and
spirits demanding expression; but a similar impulse must be felt for
all instinctive actions. Psychologically and individually, if you like,
the action is performed for its own sake; but from the standpoint
of evolution and of the race it has been originated, or at least
perfected, as a practice ground for immature limbs and a training and
keeping ready of faculties that in the future will be needed in earnest.

We shall best see the difference between mammals’ and birds’ behaviour
by giving some examples. A very strange one I saw in a pond near the
Egret rookery in Louisiana. Here, among other interesting birds,
were the Darters or Water Turkeys, curious-looking relatives of the
Cormorants, with long, thin, flexible neck, tiny head, and sharp beak,
who often swim with all the body submerged, showing nothing but the
snake-like neck above water. One of these was sitting on a branch of
swamp-cedar, solitary and apparently tranquil. But this tranquillity
must have been the cloak of boredom. For suddenly the bird, looking
restlessly about her (it was a hen), began to pluck at the little green
twigs near by. She pulled one off in her beak, and then, tossing her
head up, threw it into the air, and with dexterous twist caught it
again in her beak as it descended. After five or six successful catches
she missed the twig. A comic sideways and downward glance at the twig,
falling and fallen, in meditative immobility; and then another twig
was broken off, and the same game repeated. She was very clever at
catching; the only bird that I have seen come up to her was a Toucan in
the Zoo which could catch grapes thrown at apparently any speed. But
then the Toucan had been specially trained--and had the advantage of a
huge capacity of bill!

Here again it might, of course, be said that the catching of twigs is
a practice for beak and eye, and helps keep the bird in training for
the serious business of catching fish. This is no doubt true; but, as
regards the evolution of the habit, I incline strongly to the belief
that it must be quite secondary--that the bird, desirous of occupying
its restless self in a satisfying way, fell back upon a modification of
its everyday activities, just as these are drawn upon in other birds
to provide much of the raw material of courtship. There is no evidence
that young Darters play at catching twigs as preparation for their
fishing, and until there is evidence of this it is simpler to think
that the play habit here, instead of being rooted by the utilitarian
dictates of natural selection in the behaviour of the species, as with
kids or kittens, is a secondary outcome of leisure and restlessness
combining to operate with natural aptitude--in other words, true sport,
of however simple a kind.

The commonest form of play in birds is flying play. Any one who has
kept his eyes open at the seaside will have seen the Herring Gulls
congregate in soaring intersecting spirals where the cliff sends the
wind upwards. But such flights are nothing compared with those of other
birds. Even the staid black-coated Raven may sometimes be seen to go
through a curious performance. One I remember, all alone, flying along
the side of a mountain near Oban; but instead of progressing in the
conventional way, he flew diagonally upwards for a short distance, then
giving a special croak with something of gusto in it, turned almost
completely over on to his back, and descended a corresponding diagonal
in this position. Then with a strong flap of the wings he righted
himself, and so continued until he disappeared round the shoulder of
the hill half a mile on. It reminded me of a child who has learnt some
new little trick of step or dance-rhythm, and tries it out happily all
the way home along the road. Mr. Harold Massingham has seen the Ravens’
games too, and set them down more vividly than I can.[26] He also is
clear that they play for the love of playing, and even believes that
their love of sport has helped their downfall to rarity by rendering
them too easy targets for the gunner.

Or again, at the Egret rookery in Louisiana, at evening when the birds
returned in great numbers, they came back with steady wing-beats along
an aerial stratum about two hundred feet up. Arrived over their nesting
pond, they simply let themselves drop. Their plumes flew up behind like
a comet’s tail; they screamed aloud with excitement; and, not far
above the level of the trees, spread the wings so that they caught the
air again, and as result skidded and side-slipped in the wildest and
most exciting-looking curves before recovering themselves with a brief
upward glide and settling carefully on the branches. This certainly had
no significance for courtship; and I never saw it done save over the
pond at the birds’ return. It seemed to be simply an entertaining bit
of sport grafted on to the dull necessity of descending a couple of
hundred feet.

Examples could be multiplied: Rooks and Crows, our solemn English
Heron, Curlew, Swifts, Snipe--these and many others have their own
peculiar flying sports. What is clear to the watcher is the emotional
basis of these sports--a joy in controlled performance, and excitement
in rapidity of motion, in all essentials like the pleasure to us of a
well-hit ball at golf, or the thrill of a rapid descent on sledge skis.

For any one to whom the evolution theory is one of the master-keys
to animate nature, there must be an unusual interest in tracing out
the development of lines of life that, like the birds’, have diverged
comparatively early from the line which eventually and through many
vicissitudes led to Man.

In the birds as in the mammals, and quite separately in the two groups,
we see the evolution not only of certain structural characters such as
division of heart, compactness of skeleton, increase of brain-size,
not only of physiological characters like warm-bloodedness or
efficiency of circulation, but also of various psychical characters.
The power of profiting by experience becomes greater, as does that of
distinguishing between objects; and there is most markedly an increase
in the intensity of emotion. It has somehow been of advantage, direct
or indirect, to birds to acquire a greater capacity for affection, for
jealousy, for joy, for fear, for curiosity. In birds the advance on the
intellectual side has been less, on the emotional side greater: so that
we can study in them a part of the single stream of life where emotion,
untrammelled by much reason, has the upper hand.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

     Chance, E., ’22. “The Cuckoo’s Secret.” London, 1922.

     Darwin, C., ’71. “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to
     Sex.” London, 1871.

     Groos, K., ’98. “The Play of Animals.” New York, 1898.

     Howard, E., ’20. “Territory in Bird Life.” London, 1920.

     Hudson, W. H., ’12. “The Naturalist in La Plata” (5th Ed.).
     London, 1912.

     Huxley, J. S., ’14 and ’23. (Courtship in Birds) Proc. Zool. Soc.,
     1914, and Proc. Linn. Soc., 1923.

     Kirkman, F. B. (ed.), ’10. “British Bird Book.” London, 1910.

     Levick, G. M., ’14. “Antarctic Penguins.” London, 1914.

     Massingham, H. J., ’23. “The Ravens.” _Nation and Athenæum._
     London, 21st April, 1923.

     Selous, E., ’01. “Bird Watching.” London, 1901.

     Selous, E., ’05. “Bird Life Glimpses.” London, 1905.


FOOTNOTE:

[26] Massingham, ’23.



IV

SEX BIOLOGY AND SEX PSYCHOLOGY


                  SEX: THREE WAYS

     That body has for soul an air-balloon
       Which drifts with every spiritual blast,
       Doomed, swollen thing! to leak or burst at last
     Though overmuch aspiring toward the moon.

     This other soul, below the animal,
       Bloating and coating body’s baser parts
       With the manure of its desires and arts,
     Helps flesh to grow still more corporeal.

     I pray that I may still inhabit earth,
       Where grass invites the foot, and roses smell;
       Yet shall I lead my body on to dwell
     In the eternal land of second birth,
     If, nought contemned, each part of being’s whole
     Is taken up in my transmuting soul.



SEX BIOLOGY AND SEX PSYCHOLOGY[27]


     “And now I see with eye serene
     The very pulse of the machine.”
                         --W. WORDSWORTH.


     “There is reason to believe that the processes which underlie
     all great work in art, literature, or science take place
     unconsciously, or at least unwittingly. It is an interesting
     question to ask whence comes the energy of which this work is the
     expression. There are two chief possibilities: one, that it is
     derived from the instinctive tendencies which, through the action
     of controlling forces, fail to find their natural outlet; the
     other, that the energy so arising is increased in amount through
     the conflict between controlled and controlling forces.”--W. H.
     RIVERS.


The biology of sex is a vast subject. Not only are there questions of
sex-determination, but the whole sexual selection problem has to be
considered, together with the evolutionary function of sex, and its
first origin. I can only attempt, in the short space at my disposal, to
deal with one or two of the chief points, and only in so far as they
bear on questions of human sex psychology.

In the first place, then, we have to consider the evolutionary history
of sex. Of its origin we can say only that it is veiled in complete
obscurity. Once present, however, it appears to have a definite
function by making possible, through sexual reproduction, all the
various combinations of any heritable variations that may arise
in different individuals of a species, and so conferring greater
evolutionary plasticity on the species as a whole.[28]

Primarily, sex implies only the fusion of nuclei from two separate
individuals; there is no need for sex differences to exist at all. Sex
differences, however, are almost universal in sexually-reproducing
organisms, and represent a division of labour between the active male
cell and the passive female cell, the former taking over the task of
uniting the two, the latter storing up nutriment for the new individual
that will result from that union.

The subsequent history of sex is, roughly speaking, the history of its
invasion of more and more of the organization of its possessors. First
the male as a whole, and not merely its reproductive cells, tends to
become organized for finding the female. The female’s whole type of
metabolism is altered to produce the most efficient storage of reserve
material in her ova, and later she almost invariably protects and
nourishes the young during the first part of their development, either
within or without her own body. Appropriate instincts are of course
developed in both male and female.

At the outset there is enormous waste incurred in the liberation of
sperms and ova into the water, there to unite as best they may.
Congress of the sexes eliminates the major part of this waste, and is
universal above a certain level. This is in itself the basis for other
changes. As the mind, or shall we say the psycho-neural organization,
becomes more complex, the sexual instinct becomes more interwoven with
the general emotional state; and a large number of animals appear not
to mate unless their emotional state has been raised to a certain
level. The result of this is that special actions, associated generally
with bright colours or striking structures, with song or with scent,
come into being.

The exact mechanism of the appearance of these courtship-displays is a
much-vexed point; but it is undoubted that they only occur in animals
with congress of the sexes and with minds above a certain level of
complexity, and that they are employed in ceremonies between the two
sexes at mating-time. There can subsist no reasonable doubt that there
exists some causal connection between the associated facts.

An important point, which has been commonly overlooked, is that such
characters and actions may be either developed in one sex only, or in
both. In a large number of birds, such as egrets, grebes, cranes, and
many others, the courtship-displays are mutual, and the characters used
in them developed to a similar extent in both sexes. Such characters
are therefore often not secondary sexual differences, and we had best
use Poulton’s term _epigamic_ for them, whether they are developed in
one or in both sexes.[29]

The human species, in accordance with its complexity and flexibility
of brain, has epigamic characters of both kinds. Some, like voice and
moustache, are different in the two sexes, others, such as colour of
eyes and lips, the hairlessness of the body and grace of limbs and
carriage, are common to both.

In the vertebrate stock, two main lines of evolution as regards
sexual relationships may be traced. The first is predominant in
mammals: here, in most species, the female will not receive the male
except at fixed times, which are determined by a purely physiological
mechanism, the internal secretion of the gonad (reproductive organ).
Here we consequently find that the rule is for the males to fight for
the possession of the females, not to display before them. In the
monkeys, presumably as a result of a lessened dependence of mental
upon physiological processes, bright colours and special adornments of
various parts of the body are frequently developed.[30]

In the birds, on the other hand, although here too the internal
secretion of the gonad delimits a period in which alone congress of
the sexes can occur, it does not act for such a sharply-limited time
as in the mammal, nor is it so intense as completely to override
other components of the mind. As a result, general emotional stimulus
may play an important part in inducing readiness to pair, and we
accordingly find display of some sort, either by the male alone or by
both sexes, present in the great majority of species. It is at least
partly in correlation with this that beauty of voice and brilliant
appearance is far commoner in birds than in mammals.

The monkeys represent in some way a transitional stage towards that
seen in man, in whom the conditions have come to resemble those found
in birds, with consequent great development of epigamic characters and
actions of one sort and another, both physical and mental. Thus we see
that sex, after invading and altering the conformation of the body,
finally invades and alters the conformation of the mind.

As regards the other great biological question, of the determination of
sex, a very few words will suffice. In the first place I have no time
to consider plants or lower animals. In almost all higher animals that
have been investigated, however, there has been found some hereditary
mechanism for ensuring a rough constancy of sex-ratio. This mechanism
resides in the so-called _chromosomes_ of the nucleus. These exist
for the most part in similar pairs in both sexes: but one pair is
dissimilar in one sex. In mammals and man this sex is the male. Man
possesses one chromosome less than woman. He possesses only one member
of this pair of special sex-chromosomes, whereas she possesses two. All
her ova are alike in possessing one, whereas half his sperms possess
one, half possess none. Therefore, when the former kind of sperms
fertilize an ovum, two sex-chromosomes are present in the fertilized
egg and a female results; when the latter, only one, and the offspring
is male.[31]

Putting the matter in the broadest terms, we can say that there is a
different balance of hereditary factors in male and female, and that
this difference of balance dates from the moment of fertilization, and
normally determines sex.

Various agencies may alter the balance. The chromosomes themselves may
vary in what we must vaguely call their potency; or external agencies
may affect it. As a result, we sometimes obtain strange abnormal
individuals, in which the balance has been upset; in them development
results sometimes in organisms permanently intermediate between male
and female, sometimes in a change of sex at some period of development.

In insects the chromosomes appear to be predominant throughout life.
In vertebrates, however, they seem to play their chief rôle in early
development, ending by building up either a male or a female gonad in
the early embryo. This, once produced, takes over what remains of the
task of sex-determination. It secretes a specific internal secretion
which in a male acts so as to encourage the growth of male organs and
instincts, to suppress those of females; and vice versa in a female.

As a result of this difference we find that castration in insects, even
followed by engrafting of a gonad of opposite sex, produces no effect
upon other sexual characters; whereas it exerts a profound effect upon
mammals or birds.

As a second result, we find that in vertebrates the gonads form part
of what has been called the chemical directorate of the body--the
interlocking system of endocrine glands, each of which is exerting an
effect upon the rest. The importance of this is seen in the experiments
of Steinach, Sand, Voronoff, and others, who have been able to obtain
a rejuvenating effect in senile mammals by increasing, by various
methods, the amount of secreting reproductive organ in the body.[32]

To what then has our rapid survey led us? The actual origin of sex
is lost to us in the mists of a time inconceivably remote. Its
preservation once in existence, and its present all-but-universal
distribution seem to be definitely associated with the biological
advantage of the plasticity which it confers. Later, the primary
difference between male and female--their power of producing different
sorts of reproductive cells--leads on to secondary differences.
These differences may be biologically speaking non-significant, mere
accidents of the primary difference. Or they may be in the nature
of a division of labour between the sexes, this division of labour
usually concerning the protection of the embryo or the care of the
young, or more rarely the preservation of the individual itself. Or,
finally, they may concern the more efficient union of the gametes;
such differences may merely affect the ducts and apertures of the
reproductive system, and be more or less mechanical; or they may
concern the use of these systems, in the form of still mechanical
instincts, or they may be concerned in some way or other with the
emotional side of the animals, and consist in characters and actions
which stimulate the emotions of the other sex, characters which we have
termed epigamic.

It is only in higher groups that these emotion-stimulating sexual
characters arise, for only in them has mind reached a sufficient degree
of perfection. But even though detailed study reveals in a bird or a
mammal a mental life of a complexity far more considerable than the
average man would imagine, yet on the whole it is straightforward and
its currents run fairly direct from stimulus to fulfilment.

When we reach man, however, the whole aspect of the matter changes.
The change is most marked, naturally, in his mental organization.
Through his powers of rapid and unlimited association, any one part of
his experience can be combined with any other; through his powers of
generalizing and of giving names to things, his experience is far more
highly organized than that of any animal; through speech and writing he
is inheritor of a continuous tradition which enormously enlarges his
range of experience. Again, he can frame a purpose and thus put the
objective of his actions far further into the future than can lower
organisms.

There are, however, also changes of considerable biological importance
on the physical side. Man brings with him from his animal ancestors
the endocrine secretory mechanism of the reproductive organs: but his
life is not subordinated to it in such an iron-bound way. To start with
he has gradually lost all semblance of a breeding-season. Traces of
it survive in some primitive races, but in civilized communities all
one can say is that the number of births may show a slight seasonal
variation; and the reproductive organs are capable of function in all
twelve months of the year--a state of affairs known, I believe, in no
other vertebrate, or at least in no wild species.[33]

In the second place, there has been in the female a further
emancipation of the sexual life. In all other mammals the female will
only receive the male at certain well-defined periods, which in their
turn depend on cyclical changes in the ovaries. In man this restriction
has been overcome, and, in spite of the survival of a certain degree
of cyclical change in feeling, neither sex is restricted any longer
to certain physically-determined periods for the consummation of its
sexual life. This is, we may say, a triumph of mind over matter in the
human organism, of the mental elements of the sexual life over the
purely physical elements.

This is not to deny that the sexual life of man is dependent upon
the reproductive hormones. It is apparently necessary for proper
activation of the sexual centres in the brain that there should occur
a continuous liberation of secretion from the reproductive organs
into the blood. Again, the mental activities of man are so much more
important than those of other forms that even the cessation of activity
of the reproductive organs, for instance in the female at the change of
life, or even their total removal, need not prevent the continuation,
albeit in a modified form, of the sexual life in its varied indirect
manifestations.

Before attempting to probe the intricacies of the mental side of the
subject, we had better see what we can learn of the physical. Let
us first remind ourselves of one or two facts gained from animal
experimentation. In the first place, in mammals the activation of the
sexual instincts of one or the other sex appears to be completely
or almost completely under the control of the internal secretions
of the reproductive organs. Steinach and others have taken new-born
male guinea-pigs and have removed their testes and grafted ovaries
in their place. The result has been an animal almost completely
feminized both as regards body and mind. In some of the animals milk
was secreted, and when this occurred they would act as foster-mothers
to new-born guinea-pigs of other parents. The reverse operation, the
masculinization of females, was equally successful, the animals growing
large and showing all the instincts of a normal male and none of those
of a normal female.

A similar dependence of behaviour on gonad is seen in fowls. Here
nature makes a number of experiments, which have recently been studied
by Dr. Crew of Edinburgh. When the ovaries of a hen are affected by a
certain type of tumour, the bird stops laying, her comb and wattles
enlarge to the size of a cock’s, her spurs grow, she begins to crow,
her plumage changes at the moult and becomes cock-like, and finally
she becomes indistinguishable from a male. Indistinguishable, even in
behaviour: her years of feminine routine in laying and brooding are
forgotten: the secretion of the altered ovary now apparently resembles
that of a testis and stimulates centres of the brain which would
otherwise have remained permanently dormant. She struts and crows,
fights and mates, and the memory of the previous part of her life is
for all practical purposes lost, since the centres for female activity
are no longer stimulated at all.

Various workers have even experimentally produced a state of
hermaphroditism in mammals by simultaneous grafting of portions of
testes and ovary: the behaviour here oscillates between male and
female.[34]

It is quite clear from these and other facts that in higher vertebrates
there are present in every individual of either sex the nervous
connections which give the possibility of either male or female
behaviour; but that normally only one of these two possibilities is
realized, since for the potentiality of action given by the nervous
connections to become actual as behaviour it is necessary for the
nervous system to be activated by the secretion of one or other of
the reproductive organs. Castrated animals fail to realize either
possibility of normal sex-behaviour, although their nervous machinery
is untouched.

There are, further, some facts of observation which, even if they have
not yet been fully analysed by experiment, still throw light on the
matter. Although many of the most familiar birds--fowls, pheasant,
peacock, duck, finches, and so forth--have bright-coloured males and
drab females, with marked difference of behaviour between the sexes,
there are, as we have seen, many others, such as herons, divers, swans,
grebes, moorhens, and auks, in which the sexes are alike in plumage
and furthermore show what may be called a “mutual” courtship in which
both male and female play similar rôles. In this latter class it seems
clear that the secretions of the male and female reproductive organs
must be more alike than in the markedly dimorphic species: and this
is borne out by some strange facts regarding not merely the courtship
but the actions concerned with pairing itself. In the crested grebe
and the little grebe, for example, close observation has shown that
either member of the pair may assume the passive “female” attitude or
the active “male” attitude in pairing: and in the moorhen we meet with
the still more extraordinary phenomenon of double pairing, in which an
act of pairing with male and female in normal position is immediately
followed by a second act in which the normal position is reversed.[35]
It would appear in such cases that the similarity of male and female
internal secretion is so great that quite slight changes in nervous or
metabolic activity can cause the nervous centres for the opposite sex’s
mode of behaviour to become activated.

In human beings we are confronted with various grades of sexual
organization and behaviour besides the typically feminine and the
typically masculine. In the first place it is matter of common
knowledge that many women, who so far as their physical reproductive
capacity goes are perfectly normal, show various mental traits which
are more characteristic of men, and vice versa. What is more, the
“masculinoid” woman (to use the current jargon) tends physically
also to be less feminine, to have the feminine secondary sexual
characteristics in stature, form of skeleton, distribution of fat,
breasts, etc.--less strongly developed than normal, while the
“feminoid” man shows the reverse tendency.[36]

In trying to analyse these facts further, we are brought up against new
depths of complication. It is becoming ever clearer that the gonads do
not operate as independent organs, but in conjunction with the whole
of the rest of the endocrine system--thyroid, pituitary, adrenal, and
the rest. In the first place, it seems to be established that the
reproductive organs must be in some way activated by other ductless
glands before they become normal, just as they in their turn must
activate the sexual centres in the brain. This phase of the matter is
being investigated by many workers to-day; provisionally we may say
that pituitary and adrenal cortex are especially concerned. In the
second place the gonads, once activated and in normal working order,
react upon the other ductless glands. It thus comes about that the
relative proportion or relative activity of the parts of the whole
ductless gland system is different in male and female. Blair Bell is
the protagonist of this view. A woman is a woman, he says, not merely
because of her ovaries, but because of all her internal secretions, of
her endocrine balance as a whole.

It cannot be said that we have any certainty on the details of this
subject. It is clear, however, that some such fundamental difference
does exist, and it is therefore further probable that if a woman has a
thyroid, say, or an adrenal which for some reason (and there are many
possible reasons) is producing an amount of secretion abnormal for a
woman but more like that which is produced by a man, she will, in spite
of her ovaries, be more masculine in tendency.

I will content myself with one example. The cortex of the adrenal
gland, if active beyond a certain measure, assists the development
of male, prevents the development of female, characters. Women with
adrenal tumours frequently develop moustache and beard and other
appanages of the male. One presumes that a slight preponderance of the
adrenal cortex in the normal endocrine make-up will lead to a less
feminine type of woman than normal. I repeat that we are but on the
verge of the matter and that premature speculation is certainly risky
and probably fallacious. But all the same, there is very little doubt
that we are on the right track, and that we shall have to search for
the finer shades of temperamental difference between man and woman
not so much in differences in the quality of the secretion of testis
or ovary as in differences of balance in what the Americans call the
“endocrine make-up.”[37]

There is, however, also the possibility of difference in the quality
of gonad secretion, and of recent years Steinach and his followers
have been claiming that this may be at the bottom of many cases of
so-called “perversion of sexual instinct.” The latest claim of this
school is that homosexual men may be rendered heterosexual in instinct
by removal of their testes and implantation of a testis from a sexually
normal person--from a man, for example, who is being operated on for
cryptorchidism. It is frankly impossible as yet to say whether their
conclusions are well founded: a very much larger series of cases
will be necessary, and the possibility of suggestion’s action must
be eliminated. It is well to remember, however, that there is no
theoretical objection to the possibility. We know that in various
lower animals, such as moths and flies, the balance between the
male- and female-determining factors in the chromosomes may be altered
in certain crosses, and that this altered balance in the constitution
is reflected in some cases in a state permanently intermediate
between male and female, in others by a reversal of sex at some point
during development. For various reasons we should not usually expect
reversal in mammals; but if such abnormal balance should exist in the
constitution, as it well might, we should expect a gonad secreting an
abnormal, intermediate secretion. This we might also expect as the
result of certain accidents of embryonic life, as actually happens in
the abnormal female cattle known to farmers as free-martins. These
animals are always born co-twin to a male, and their abnormality is due
to the blood-systems of the embryonic membranes of the twins having
fused, so that the secretion of the developing male’s gonad acts upon
the developing female.

Further light on abnormally-directed sex-instinct is thrown by recent
analysis of abnormal domestic animals by Crew.[38] In both goats and
swine he finds that by far the commonest form of sexual abnormality is
one in which the external appearance, at least in youth, is so nearly
female as to raise no question in the mind of the casual observer;
about the time of maturity, however, male secondary sex characters
begin to develop, including male instincts; and dissection reveals
the presence of a double set of ducts--the female uterus and vagina,
the male epididymis and vas deferens, but only a single uniform
reproductive organ, and that always a testis. The simplest explanation
(although it is admittedly tentative) appears to be that the testis
has not been activated during embryonic and juvenile life, and that
therefore until puberty the animal, though really male, has been
physiologically in a neutral state, which permits the growth of the
internal apparatus proper to both sexes. Externally, the “neutral”
condition approximates more closely to the female type, and the animal
is thus first classed as a female. Some other gland is then responsible
for the second activation at puberty, and this occurs in a normal
manner.

This is of considerable interest, since it appears that in man too the
largest class of sexually abnormal individuals are those whose external
appearance is almost or quite feminine, but who possess male instincts.
It is at least probable that examination will show that they, too, or
many of them, will be of the type described above--males with delayed
activation of testis, a consequent classification as female at birth,
and a girl’s upbringing, with male instincts arising in the unhappy
creature at puberty.

It is the fashion nowadays to write down abnormal sexual psychology
wholly to the account of the mind, to an abnormal development with
causes entirely psychological. It is clear, however, that if some
abnormal individuals can be cured by implantation, and others are
abnormal owing to an early failure of activation, this conception falls
to the ground, and the Freudian is robbed of some of his most cherished
examples.

In any case, the work on animals definitely shows that, unless the
mechanism of activation of instinct by gonad secretion has altered
between animal and man more than we have any right to postulate a
priori, the quality of gonad secretion and the balance of all the
endocrines has to be taken into account far more than is done by the
average psycho-analyst.

This, however, is not to say that the genesis of our attitude towards
sex, our sexual behaviour, and our general mental organization in so
far as modified by sex, is not normally determined for the most part
by purely psychological causes. If there is a physical abnormality,
this will react upon the mental; but in the vast majority of cases
the physical variation will not take the individual beyond the limits
of normality, and when the normal physical limits are not exceeded,
the wide range of mental variation still observable is to be ascribed
to psychological causes. In other words, abnormal sexual behaviour
and instinct may be due either to physiological or psychological
abnormality, and the latter is probably the commoner cause.

I am not competent to attempt to treat of the vast and complex
psychological aspect of the sex-problem which the analytical
psychologists have opened up to such an extent within the last few
years; I can only deal with it in the broadest way, and content myself
rather with stating than with solving problems.

As regards the place of sex in our mental organization, there are two
contradictory extremes possible. Either all ideas connected with the
physical side of sex may be repressed with great vehemence, and the
sexual contribution to various emotions ignored or dismissed, while a
constant attempt is made at sublimation; or else there is little or no
repression beyond that necessitated by convention and custom, sexual
matters are taken at their physical face value, and sublimation is not
consciously attempted and exists only to a negligible amount.

There is no doubt that the first alternative represents one of the
commonest neuroses of modern life, and one in which an interpretation
on principles made familiar by psycho-analysis is the most
satisfactory. Repression, through whatever cause initiated (and
psychologists, I understand, are coming more and more to recognize
that chronic misuse of the mind as well as single violent shocks may
be effective), leads to a more or less complete dissociation of two
parts of the mind, of which one only is in the main connected with
the conscious personal life. As a result, curious phenomena are met
with. There is, it is true, a constant effort necessary to keep life
a-going with the aid of an incomplete mental organization; but when
satisfaction is attained, its very rarity brings with it a certain
glow, an irradiation of peculiarly pleasurable nature. Furthermore,
dissociation in most cases is not complete; now and again, and
especially when there is successful sublimation--in some people when in
love, in others with religious ecstasy, in others again with some form
of art--now and again re-association of the parts occurs, and there is
an extraordinary sense of the irruption of some vast beneficent force,
some great extra-personal flood of soul, into the meagre stream of
everyday life. The lives of a certain number of saints and ascetics,
mystics and poets, abound with phenomena of this sort; and apparently
the sense of value attaching to the occasional complete attainment of
such satisfactory states of the soul, combined with the conscious daily
quest for sublimation which is inevitable when the most important part
of the primitive emotions are repressed, is such a vivid experience
that it satisfies the mind and enables such persons to carry on, and to
do work sometimes of the highest value.

On the other hand, men and women with this type of mental development
naturally tend to be unstable; they cannot be sure of their capacity,
whether for routine work or creative thought or spiritual experience,
from day to day. Their mental life has a tendency to wear thin, their
sense of effort and struggle to increase and lead to breakdown. It
is in the long run an unsatisfactory way of organizing the psyche,
because the conscious mind has less than it ought to have upon which to
fall back.

The opposite extreme is equally unsatisfactory. If individuals of the
first type are trying to build high without adequate foundations, those
of the second are mistaking the foundations for a complete building.
A dissociation of a different type occurs in them--a dissociation due
to lack of use, to a mere failure to connect up that part of the mind
concerned with sexual emotion with a great many of the mind’s other
activities. Thus the sexual side has few and lower values associated
with it than it might, and other possibilities of thought and feeling
and action remain as mere possibilities, never realized in actuality.
The result is a definitely incomplete personality of a more or less
arrested or rudimentary type.

Those are the extremes: of course there are all intermediates between
them. They may crop up with apparent spontaneity, determined more
by the hereditary constitution of the man or woman than by external
happenings: or they may be mainly or at least largely determined by the
accidents of the environment during the period before maturity. One
of the most potent factors in the environment will be the attitude of
the parents towards sexual matters. On the one hand they may adopt the
common, horror-stricken attitude towards sex, hushing it up, making
it clear to the sensitive mind of childhood that there is something
thoroughly bad about it, and so laying the best possible foundations
for future repression. Or, on the other hand, they may openly adopt
the psycho-analytic view as to the rôle of sex in the development of
mind, may further believe that the fullest analysis and self-knowledge
is always desirable, and may accordingly be pointing out to the
child interpretations of its actions and sayings in terms of sex,
familiarizing it with sex from the outset, not merely not discouraging
but actually encouraging reference to sexual matters. This will tend,
_ceteris paribus_, to the development of a mind in which many of the
more complex mental operations will not usually persist because the
subject will be continually unbuilding them into their constituent
parts, of which sex will be the most unvarying and important.

Both these types are to my judgment obviously unsatisfactory. The ideal
organization of the mind must be one in which first there is a minimum
of waste of energy, secondly a maximum realization of potentiality.
The operations of mind may further be thought of from two different
angles--a subserving the biological needs of the organism, or as
ends in themselves. From the first point of view, thought is action
_in posse_: efficiency and full utilization of energy are here the
requirements, and it is obvious that any method which even partially
separates one part of the mental organization from the rest must be a
poor one, that a refusal to face any portion of reality, such as, in
our special case, the physical side of sex, must put the organism at a
disadvantage in a world in which that portion of reality plays, as it
obviously does, an important rôle.

The correct type of organization is one of the type which has been
developed over and over again in the course of evolution, for
different functions: it is the hierarchical one, in which some parts
are dominant, others subordinate, the dominant parts helpless without
the subordinate, the subordinate different, through the fact of their
subordination, from what they would otherwise have been, doing most of
the hard work, but under the guidance of the dominant. Only in this way
is a unitary organization arrived at in which there is the minimum of
waste, of antagonism between the parts.

The psycho-analysts have, by analysing the pathology of mind, shown
us how waste of energy may arise in particular cases, and so make it
easier for us to avoid it in general.

One may recognize the merits of Freud as an investigator without
accepting all or even the majority of his conclusions. As the late
W. H. Rivers pointed out, Freud will always be remembered in the
history of psychology because he introduced new ideas and new methods
into the science. Previous workers had discovered the realm of the
subconscious; but they had not discovered the real nature of its
relation to the rest of the mental organization. Freud pointed out
that there was often a biological value attached to the power of
forgetting as well as to that of remembering, and that in any case
in most of us a large amount of experience is rendered unconscious by
suppression, or an attempt made to force it into the unconscious by
repression. He and his followers and other schools of psychologists
have pointed out the importance of unresolved conflicts in determining
thought and behaviour, and have made it clear that in the ordinary
civilized community of to-day a large proportion of those conflicts
arise out of difficulties connected with the sex-instinct. And, even
if we reject the extreme claims made by many Freudians, we must admit
that psycho-analysis has shown that many cases of actual perversion
of instinct may be cured by analytic methods, and that sex occupies a
very much larger space in the mind than was previously supposed. It
had not been previously supposed, because of the fact that it tends to
appear in consciousness in disguised form--either sublimated and thus
intertwined with other emotions and instincts or with unusual objects,
or else rationalized as something else, or kept below the surface of
consciousness as an unfulfilled wish; and because there is a resistance
in most of us to recognizing its importance.

This revolution in our thought has proved very unpalatable to many. In
just the same way as a large proportion of Darwin’s opponents opposed
him because they believed that to accept man’s simian origin was a
repulsive degradation, so many of the opponents of psycho-analysis
oppose it because they believe that to ascribe this huge rôle to sex
in the genesis of our psyche is a repulsive degradation.

To my mind there are two very general questions which the student of
human sex psychology now has to face, if he takes not necessarily
the whole but the central theses of psycho-analysis, however much
pruned, as proven. The first is this: granted that sex does play such
a large part, especially in early years, in the genesis of our mental
organization, is it desirable that the average adult or adolescent
should, by analysis, be given full self-knowledge on the subject?

The second is this: granted that sex does penetrate into more corners
of mind in man than in lower organisms, is this really a regrettable
thing, or can we find any grounds for believing it to be desirable or
biologically progressive?

To answer this we shall have to go back a little to first principles,
and consider, however briefly, certain facts as to the march of
evolution.

Evolution is essentially progressive. It proceeds on the whole in
a certain direction, and that direction is on the whole towards a
realization of what seems to us to have positive value. The direction,
however, as a matter of fact, is most striking when we consider the
maximum level attained, much less so when we consider the average, not
at all when we look at the minimum.

The method or mechanism of progress may differ in different types,
and it does differ in man from that which is found in other mammals.
In most higher animals progress is brought about chiefly by natural
selection operating upon individuals, although in a few forms selection
operates chiefly upon groups of communities: in both cases the changes
in the inherited constitution of the species are the important
changes. In man, however, in all except the very early stages of
his development, changes in inherited constitution have been small
and unimportant, and the chief changes of evolutionary significance
have been those in tradition; selection among individuals has been
of relatively little importance, and selection has fallen mainly
upon groups and, to an ever-increasing extent, upon their ideas and
traditions.

In spite of differences in method as between different types of
organism, the tendency has been in the same direction--towards
a possibility of greater control, greater independence, greater
complexity, and greater regulation or harmony.

Looked at from the evolutionary point of view, the moving, dynamic
point of view, we have to think of human sex-psychology in yet another
way. So far we have been treating it as what it is; now we must think
of what it may become.

The general rule in evolution--the natural and obvious rule--is that
acquisitions are not thrown away when change occurs, but built upon,
utilized for some new function. The endostyle of the lowest chordates,
part of a very primitive type of feeding mechanism, was converted,
when they changed their mode of life, into the thyroid gland: the
parathyroids develop from the remains of the gill-apparatus when
gills are discarded for lungs: the secondary sexual differences which
originate as accidental consequence of the primary difference between
the sexes are, over and over again, elaborated into special characters
employed in courtship.

So the sex-instinct and its associated emotion, at first simply one
among a number of separate and scarcely-correlated instincts, has in
man become the basis for numerous new mental functions. It can enter
into the composition of various emotions, though its character is often
disguised and its presence often undetected. It contributes to some of
the most exalted states of mind which we can experience. The sexual
relationship, which in lower animals involves neither contact nor even
propinquity, but simply simultaneous discharge of reproductive cells,
and in most animals is a purely temporary affair, is very different
in man. Even in those birds and non-human mammals in which the sexes
remain associated for long periods or permanently, the different
departments of life are more in water-tight compartments, the psychical
activity is subordinate to the physiological: in man the physiological
side, though of course still basic and necessary, is more--and can
be much more--subordinate to the psychological, and all parts of the
mental life interpenetrate to a much greater extent; so that the
sex-instinct may become transformed by a psychological process roughly
analogous to the transformation of physical energy, and reappear in
altered guise in various other activities of mind.

If we look at the matter broadly, we see that man is in a period of
evolutionary transition as regards sex. We found previously that the
greatest change connected with sex which has been made in the evolution
of higher animals was the change by which there was evolved a brain
and mind with associated sense-organs in which accurate perception of
objects at a distance could occur, a mechanism which really dominated
the working of the organism as a whole, and in which memory and emotion
seemed to play an important part. Once this happened, the sex-instinct
could be linked up with general emotional reactions and connected with
external objects capable of inducing emotion.

What was the result? That in every group possessing such a type of
mind, epigamic characters of a beautiful or striking or bizarre
nature were evolved. This first linking-up of sex with mind produced,
eventually, a large proportion of the beauty of the organic world. It
coloured and adorned not only many a bird, but even newts and fish
and spiders; it helped elicit song and music from mere sounds and
noises; it moulded our own bodies, coloured our lips and eyes, and
everywhere helped in adding grace to mere serviceableness; it saw to it
that, as St. Paul puts it, “even our uncomely parts have an abundant
comeliness.” But, as we have just pointed out, its connection with the
mind’s higher centres was in all pre-human forms still temporary, under
the control of cyclical physiological changes, and the mind as a whole
was still constructed in compartments, so that different instincts
and different experiences did not necessarily or even usually come in
contact with each other.

The next great change is being made now; it concerns a further
development of mind and a consequent fresh mode of connection of sex
with mental life. As we have outlined above, this change in mind
consists in the tendency towards uniting the different parts of the
psyche, both those portions given by heredity and the modification due
to experience, into a single organic whole, and in making this whole
more dominant over the other aspects of the organism; the consequent
tendency as regards the relationship of sex to the organism is towards
taking it out of its single groove, its water-tight compartment, and
bringing it into more complete and more permanent union with the rest
of the mind. Furthermore, the main change and the consequent change as
regards sex are both of a biologically progressive nature.

We are now, I think, owing to our taking this broad biological view,
in a better position to make up our minds as to some at least of the
difficulties which beset us to-day in any attempt to deal squarely
with the relation of sex to human life. It is true that some of
these difficulties are permanent. The synthesis of a unitary and
comprehensive mental organization can never be an easy task. The
child is endowed with a number of instinctive tendencies which, as
in animals, each tend whenever aroused to occupy the whole mental
field to the exclusion of all others, producing divergence and lack
of co-ordination instead of unity and organization. Then again, the
experience of any one individual may be highly unusual. For the child
to co-ordinate his various tendencies with each other and with his
own experience and with the tradition and experience of the race must
always be difficult, and there will always be some failures.

There is another permanent difficulty, a biological disharmony, in the
fact that sexual maturity in man comes several years before general
maturity, and that again, at least in any state of civilization which
we can at present imagine as practicable, several years before the
economic possibility of marriage. There will always be crises of
adolescence; there will always be suffering and difficulty due to this
disharmony in time between the origin of the full sexual instinct and
the possibility of its proper satisfaction.

However, granted these permanent difficulties, there are others which
may be reduced or made to disappear. Granted that we have to organize
our minds into a whole, we can see the general plan on which we
should aim at organizing it. We must aim first at having no barriers
between different parts of the mind. Every attempt must be made in
the education of children to prevent there being a stigma attached
to one whole section of mental life, and so to avoid its partial or
total dissociation from the rest. On the other hand, the absence of
barriers does not imply the absence of any relation of subordination or
dominance of one part to another. One of the most important biological
generalizations is that progressive evolution is accompanied by the
rise of one part to dominance and, whenever there are many parts to be
considered, by the arrangement of the rest in some form of hierarchy,
each part being subordinate to one above, dominant to one below. It
is such a hierarchy which we must try to construct in our mental
organization.

It is obviously impossible here to go into the whole question of
values and ideals, but it is clear to any one who has given the
briefest reflection to the subject that there are certain values,
æsthetic, intellectual, and moral, which are ultimate for the mind of
man, certain ideals--of truth and honesty, intellectual satisfaction,
righteousness or at least freedom from the sense of sin or guilt,
completeness and self-realization, unselfishness and serviceableness
and so forth--which (though perhaps in varying proportions) are by
common consent accepted as the highest: and further that the greater
the attempt to deepen and broaden these, to increase their mental
intensity and to widen their range and association, the more they
tend to emerge into something increasingly unitary, in which it is
seen that honesty is also beautiful and useful, that intellectual
satisfaction is in the long run serviceable to the community, that
unselfishness to be effective requires thought and will besides mere
altruistic emotion, that one of the greatest aids to any genuine
righteousness is an æsthetic love of beautiful things that prevents our
doing ugly things, and so _ad infinitum_.

The proper way, then, to build the sex instinct into the mental system
is not to have its stimulation cause a merely physiological and
uninhibited desire for its gratification, nor to bring about a forcible
repression and an attempt to break connection between it and the other
parts of the mind.

The desirable method is to have free connection between it and the
dominant ideas, so that its stimulation brings about a stimulation of
them too. This leads, as a matter of experience, to the incorporation
of the sexual emotion in the dominant ideas, or we had better say an
interpenetration of one with the other, so that the sexual emotion is
no longer simply sexual emotion, but is become part of something very
much larger and very much better. Let the great writers say in their
few words what I should say much worse in many.

Wordsworth’s “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused”
opens a window on to the general process of sublimation: and Blake’s
description of the physical union of the sexes as “that ... on which
the soul expands her wing” is an epitome of a particular aspect of
our particular problem. Or again, when St. Paul says “Am I not free?”
or “All things are lawful unto me,” he means that by subordinating all
sides of himself to his highest ideals, he has reached that state in
which what he does is right to him because he only wants to do what
is right. (True that, as he himself confesses, he is not always able
to keep in that state: but when he is in it, he attains that complete
freedom which is the subordination of lower to higher desire.)

Physiologically speaking, the activation of the sex instinct, when the
connection is made in this way, arouses the higher centres, and these
react upon the centres connected with the sex instinct, modifying their
mode of action. The nett result is thus that both act simultaneously
to produce a single whole of a new type. Processes of this nature
are common in the nervous system, as has been shown for instance by
Hughlings Jackson, Head, and Rivers.[39]

Thus the higher, dominant parts of the mind are strengthened by their
connection with such lower parts as the simple sex instinct, and the
sex instinct is able to play a rôle in any operation of the mind,
however exalted, in which emotion is in any way concerned. Rivers
believes that the actual conflict between controlled and controlling
parts of the mind is a potent generator of mental “energy”; and adds,
“whatever be the source of the energy, however, we can be confident
that by the process of sublimation the lives upon which it is expended
take a special course, and in such case it is not easy to place any
limit to its activity. We do not know how high the goal that it may
reach.”[40]

The change is thus on the one side from the relative independence of
the sex instinct towards its subordination to a position in a hierarchy
of mental process, but on the other from a rigid limitation of its
scope towards a greater universality by establishing connections with
all other parts of the mind. Further, there is also a change towards
greater dominance and “self-determination” of the mental as against the
physical.

A great many of the difficulties which beset us, both as individuals
and as communities, come from the fact that both these changes are only
in process of being made, and are (even approximately) complete only in
a very small number of persons.

Lack of restraint is failure to construct a properly-working hierarchy.
That is a very simple example. Less easy to analyse but equally
vicious, are the innumerable cases in which some sort of equilibrium
is only attained not by a free interaction of dominant and subordinate
parts, but by repression. Conflicts arise, which persist, either in an
open form or in the subterranean regions of the unconscious. In either
case they tend to be projected by the subject into his ideas of other
people. This projection, or interpretation of external reality in terms
of one’s self, is a curious and almost universal attribute of the
human mind. The most familiar example is perhaps the anthropomorphism
which in religion after religion has invested the powers of the
universe with human form, human mental process, human personality--or
at least with form, mind, and personality similar to those of man;
while a very simple case is that in which certain neurotic types
project their depression so as to colour everything that comes into
their cognizance a gloomy black.

In the sphere of sex this process is, alas, most potently at work. The
man in whom the sexual instinct still lives a more or less independent,
uninhibited life of its own, tends--unless he has special evidence to
the contrary, and often even then--to interpret the behaviour and the
minds of others in the terms familiar to himself, and to suppose that
they too must be stopped by the fear of punishment or of loss of caste
if they are not to commit excesses.

On the other hand, those in whom there is a constant conflict with a
sexual origin project it here, there, and everywhere into the breasts
of those they know, and interpret others’ motives in terms of their own
repressed wishes.

Furthermore, most of our existing laws and customs are based on a
state of society in which the changes to which we have referred had
not progressed as far as they have to-day, and man’s psychology was a
little less removed from that of other mammals.

The result is that those who attempt the complete emancipation
possible to a properly-organized mind are confronted first by the lag
of our institutions and traditions, and secondly by the unconcealed
suspicion of all those--and they are as yet the large majority--in
which the conflicts arising out of sex are unresolved. It is from the
sum of those conflicts that the spirit prevalent with regard to sex
to-day derives its character--shocked and shamefaced as regards one’s
own sexual life, vindictive and grudging as regards the difficulties
of others. The bulk of men and women cannot treat sexual problems in a
scientific spirit, because of the store of bottled-up emotion in the
wrong place that they have laid up for themselves by their failure to
come to proper terms with their sexual instincts. The soul should grow
to deserve the words Crashaw wrote of St. Theresa--“O thou undaunted
daughter of desires!” But this the soul of such disharmonic beings can
never do.

This brings us to our other pressing question. Should the results
of psycho-analytic methods, the knowledge that the sex instinct is
fundamental and is interwoven into the roots of the highest spiritual
activities--should the inculcation and demonstration of this be part
of education? Some would say yes, and would argue that to know oneself
is essential to a proper realization of one’s capacities. Personally I
am extremely doubtful of the correctness of this answer. Knowledge of
the processes of digestion is not necessary to digest well--so long as
we go on digesting well: it is only necessary when we digest badly. In
that case the processes involved are automatic: but even in processes
which require a great deal of learning, we find a similar state of
affairs. A man can become expert at, say, a game requiring the most
delicate adjustments of hand and eye without analysing the processes
he employs, but by practising them as finished articles, so to speak;
and it is equally obvious that Shakespeare and Shelley and Blake and
other great writers produced their works without the least analytical
knowledge of the obscure and rather unpleasant processes which, if we
are to believe the critics who psycho-analyse dead authors in the pages
of Freudian journals, were “really” at work below the surface. Analysis
constitutes a serious surgical operation for the mind, and, as one of
the leading Austrian psycho-analysts has recently said, we do not want
to perform this operation on healthy people any more than we want to
open their abdomens merely for the sake of seeing that their viscera
are normal.

If matters concerning sex are treated properly during a child’s
development and education, the necessity for psycho-analysis and any
extension of analytic knowledge of the foundations of one’s own mind
that it may bring is done away with. If it can be ensured that there
is no obvious avoidance of the subject leading to repression in the
child’s mind, and on the other hand no undue prominence given to it so
that a morbid curiosity is aroused, a large proportion of the conflicts
that now arise could be avoided. The other necessity is that there
should be provision for sublimation--in art or music, in social service
or in one’s own work, in religion, or, in modified form, in sport or
romance.

It is perfectly possible, in such case, for mental development to
proceed naturally and comparatively smoothly towards a unified
organization of the type of which we have spoken. Psycho-analysis
would not help a boy or girl developing in such a way, any more than
would a study of all the characters we have inherited from our simian
forefathers help us to realize our specifically human possibilities. On
the other hand, when the intellectual desire to know things for their
own sake is aroused, as it is in most boys and girls between the ages
of about fourteen and twenty, then just as it is good, in order to
get a true picture of the universe, for them to know and be presented
with the evidence for man’s evolution from lower forms, so it is good
for the same reason to give them an account of their psychological
organization, including evidence for the rôle which sex plays in the
genesis of higher mental activities--without, however, any necessity
for psychological experiments in burrowing into their own foundations.
In this case such knowledge would have the additional value of putting
them on their guard against allowing themselves to be prejudiced by
their own incompletely-adjusted conflicts.

We are all of us too prone to think that a phenomenon is somehow
“explained,” or interpreted better, by analysing it into its component
parts or discovering its origin than by studying it in and for itself.

The new type of mental organization acquired by man permits of wholly
new types of mental process, of a complexity as far exceeding those
that we deduce in brutes as does the physical organism of a dog or an
ant that of a polyp or a protozoan: and it is part of our business to
realize those possibilities to the fullest extent.

To sum up, then, biological investigation in the first place shows
us how certain abnormalities of sexual psychology may be more easily
interpreted as caused by comparatively simple physical abnormalities
than by the more complex distortions of psychological origin dealt
with by psycho-analysis. In the second place, by giving us a broader
_aperçu_ than can otherwise be gained over the evolution of sex
and the direction visible in biological history, it clears up to a
certain extent some of the difficulties which the discoveries of the
psycho-analytic school have rendered acute.

If the changes in the relation of the sex instinct to the rest of the
mind, which I have spoken of above as being in operation at present,
should one day progress so far as to be more or less carried through
in a majority, or in a dominant section of the population, the whole
outlook of society towards the sex problem would be changed, and
the laws and institutions and customs connected with it completely
remodelled.

The most pressing task of those who are thinking over the problem of
sex in human life will often be the relief of suffering and the removal
of abuses: but the broader view should never be forgotten, and every
attempt should be made to think constructively with a view to realizing
the enormous possibilities that such a change would bring about.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

     Blair Bell, ’16. “The Sex Complex.” London, 1916.

     Carr-Saunders, ’22. “The Population Problem.” Oxford, 1922.

     Crew, ’23. Proc. Roy. Soc. (B.). London, 1923.

     Cunningham, J. T., ’00. “Sexual Dimorphism in the Animal Kingdom.”
     London, 1900.

     Doncaster, L., ’14. “The Determination of Sex.” Cambridge, 1914.

     East and Jones, ’19. “Inbreeding and Outbreeding.” Philadelphia,
     1919.

     Ellis, Havelock, ’10. “Studies in the Psychology of Sex.”
     Philadelphia, 1910.

     Freud. “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”

     Goldschmidt, R., ’23. “The Mechanism and Physiology of
     Sex-Determination.” London, 1923.

     Harrow, B., ’23. “Glands in Health and Disease.” London, 1923.

     Howard, E., ’20. “Territory in Bird Life.” London, 1920.

     Huxley, ’14. (Reversed Pairing, Grebe) Proc. Zool. Soc. London,
     1914.

     Huxley, ’23. (Courtship and Display) Proc. Linnean Soc. London,
     1923.

     Jung, ’20. “Analytical Psychology.” London, 1920.

     Lipschütz, ’19. “Die Pubertätsdrüse.” Bern, 1919.

     Marshall, ’23. “The Physiology of Reproduction.” (2nd Ed.).
     Cambridge, 1923.

     Meisenheimer, J., ’21. “Geschlecht und Geschlechter.” Jena, 1921.

     Morgan, ’19. “The Physical Basis of Heredity.” Philadelphia, 1919.

     Rivers, ’20. “Instinct and the Unconscious.” Cambridge, 1920.

     Selous, E., ’20. (Moorhen) _Zoologist_ [4] 6. London, 1902.

     Steinach J., ’20. Verjüngung, Leipzig, 1920.

     Stopes, Marie. “Married Love.”

     Tansley, ’20. “The New Psychology.” London, 1920.

     Vincent, Swale, ’21. “Internal Secretion and the Ductless Gland.”
     (2nd Ed.). London, 1921.

     Voronoff, S., ’23. “Greffes Testiculaires.” Paris, 1923.


FOOTNOTES:

[27] Read before the British Society for Sex Psychology, October 1922.

[28] See East and Jones, ’19.

[29] See Huxley, ’23.

[30] See Howard, ’20; Carr-Saunders, ’22.

[31] See Goldschmidt, ’23; Morgan, ’19; Doncaster, ’14.

[32] See Steinach, ’20; summary in Lipschütz, ’19; Voronoff, ’23.

[33] See Carr-Saunders, ’22, ch. v, and M. Stopes.

[34] See Lipschütz, ’19; Goldschmidt, ’23.

[35] See Selous, ’02; Huxley, 14.

[36] See Blair Bell, ’16.

[37] See Vincent, ’21; Harrow, ’23.

[38] Crew, ’23.

[39] See Rivers, ’20, chs. iv, xviii.

[40] Rivers, ’20, p. 158.



V

PHILOSOPHIC ANTS:

A BIOLOGIC FANTASY


              PHILOSOPHIC----ANTS?

     Amœba has her picture in the book,
       Proud Protozoon!--Yet beware of pride.
       All she can do is fatten and divide;
     She cannot even read, or sew, or cook....

     The Worm can crawl--but has no eyes to look:
       The Jelly-fish can swim--but lacks a bride:
       The Fly’s a very Ass personified:
     And speech is absent even from the Rook.

     The Ant herself cannot philosophize--
       While Man does that, and sees, and keeps a wife,
     And flies, and talks, and is extremely wise....
       Will our Philosophy to later Life
     Seem but a crudeness of the planet’s youth,
     Our Wisdom but a parasite of Truth?



PHILOSOPHIC ANTS:

A BIOLOGIC FANTASY[41]


     “Incomprehensibility; that’s what I say.”--LEWIS CARROLL
     (_amended_).


According to a recent study by Mr. Shapley (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.,
Philadelphia, vol. vi, p. 204), the normal rate of progression of
ants--or at least of the species of ant which he studied--is a function
of temperature. For each rise of ten degrees centigrade, the ants go
about double as fast. So complete is the dependence that the ants may
be employed as a thermometer, measurement of their rate of locomotion
giving the temperature to within one degree centigrade.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

The simple consequence--easy of apprehension by us, but infinite
puzzlement to ants--is that on a warm day an ant will get through a
task four or five times as heavy as she will on a cold one. She does
more, thinks more, lives more: more Bergsonian duration is hers.

There was a time, we learn in the myrmecine annals, when ants were
simple unsophisticated folk, barely emerged from entomological
barbarism. Some stayed at home to look after the young brood and tend
the houses, others went afield to forage. It was not long before they
discovered that the days differed in length. At one season of the year
they found the days insufferably long; they must rest five or six times
if they were, by continuing work while light lasted, to satisfy their
fabulous instinct for toil. At the opposite season, they needed no
rest at all, for they only carried through a fifth of the work. This
irregularity vexed them: and what is more, time varied from day to day,
and this hindered them in the accurate execution of any plans.

But as the foragers talked with the household servants, and with those
of their own number who through illness or accident were forced to stay
indoors, they discovered that the home-stayers noticed a much slighter
difference in time between the seasons.

It is easy for us to see this as due to the simple fact that the
temperature of the nest varies less, summer and winter, than does that
of the outer air: but it was a hard nut for them, and there was much
head-scratching. It was of course made extremely difficult by the fact
that they were not sensitive to gradual changes in temperature as such,
the change being as it were taken up in the altered rate of living.
But as their processes of thought kept pace in alteration with their
movements, they found it simplest and most natural to believe in the
fixity and uniformity of their own life and its processes, and to refer
all changes to the already obvious mutability of external nature.

The Wise Ants were summoned: they were ordered by the Queen to
investigate the matter; and so, after consultation, decided to apply
the test of experiment. Several of their numbers, at stated intervals
throughout the year, stayed in and went out on alternate days,
performing identical tasks on the two occasions. The task was the
repeated recitation of the most efficacious of the myrmecine sacred
formulæ.

The rough-and-ready calculations of the workers were speedily
corroborated. “Great is God, and we are the people of God” could be
recited out-of-doors some twenty thousand times a day in summer, less
than four thousand times in winter; while the corresponding indoor
figures were about fifteen thousand and six thousand.

There was the fact; now for the explanation. After many conclaves,
a most ingenious hypothesis was put forward, which found universal
credence. Let me give it in an elegant and logical form.


     (1) It was well-known--indeed self-evident--that the Ant race was
     the offspring and special care of the Power who made and ruled the
     universe.

     (1.1) Therefore a great deal of the virtue and essence of that
     Power inhered in the race of Ants. Ants, indeed, were made in the
     image of God.

     (1.2) It was, alas, common knowledge that this Power, although
     Omnipotent and Omniscient, was confronted by another power, the
     power of disorder, of irregularity, who prevented tasks, put
     temptations in the way of workers, and was in fact the genius of
     Evil.

     (2) Further, it was a received tradition among them that there had
     been a fall from the grace of a Golden Age, when there were no
     neuters, but all enjoyed married bliss; and the ant-cows gave milk
     and honey from their teats.

     (2.1) And that this was forfeited by a crime (unmentionable, I
     regret to say, in modern society) on the part of a certain Queen
     of Ants in the distant past. The Golden Age was gone; the poor
     neuters--obligate spinsters--were brought into being; work became
     the order of the day. Ant-lions with flaming jaws were set round
     that kingdom of Golden Age, from which all ants were thenceforth
     expelled.

     (2.2.1) This being so, it was natural to conclude that the fall
     from grace involved a certain loss of divine qualities.

     (2.2.2) The general conclusion to be drawn was that in the race
     of ants there still resided a certain quantity of these virtues
     that give regularity to things and events; although not sufficient
     wholly to counter-balance the machinations of the power of evil
     and disorder.

     (2.2.3) That where a number of ants had their home and were
     congregated together, there the virtue resided in larger bulk and
     with greater effect, but that abroad, where ants were scattered
     and away from hearth, home, and altar, the demon of irregularity
     exerted greater sway.


This doctrine held the field for centuries.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

But at last a philosopher arose. He was not satisfied with the current
explanation, although this had been held for so long that it had
acquired the odour and force of a religious dogma. He decided to put
the matter to the test. He took a pupa (_anglice_ “ant’s egg”) and on a
windless day suspended it from a twig outside the nest. There he had it
swung back and forth, counting its swings. He then (having previously
obtained permission from the Royal Sacerdotal College) suspended the
pupa by the same length of thread from the roof of the largest chamber
of the nest--a dome devoted to spiritual exercise--and repeated the
swinging and the counting. The living pendulum-bob achieved the same
daily number of oscillations inside the nest as outside, although it
was full summer, and the foragers found the day quite twice as long
as did the home-stayers. The trial was repeated with another pupa and
other lengths of thread; the result was always the same.

It was then that he laid the foundations of ant science by his bold
pronouncement that neither the combat of spiritual powers nor the
expansion or contraction of the store of divine grace had anything to
do with the strange alteration of diurnal length; but that the cause of
it lay in the Ants themselves, who varied with the varying of something
for which he invented the word _Temperature_, not in a contraction or
expansion of Time.

This he announced in public, thinking that a tested truth must be
well-received, and would of necessity some day prove useful to society.
But the consequence was a storm of protest, horror, and execration.

Did this impious creature think to overthrow the holy traditions with
impunity? Did he not realize that to impugn one sentence, one word,
one letter of the Sacred Books was to subvert the whole? Did he think
that a coarse, simple, verifiable experiment was to weigh against the
eternal verity of subtle and mysterious Revelation? No! and again a
thousand times No!!

He was brought before the Wise Ants, and cross-questioned by them. It
was finally decided that he was to abjure his heretical opinion and to
recant in public, reciting aloud to the four winds of heaven: “the Ant
is the norm of all”--


     Μὑρμηξ παντὁς νὁμος.


He said it. But Truth stirred within him, and under his breath he
muttered “Eppur si muove....” This was overheard, and he was condemned
(loneliness being much hated and dreaded by ants) to a solitary
banishment.

Later philosophers, however, by using this same pendulum method, were
enabled to find that the movements of sap in plants differed in rate
according to the length of day, and later discovered that the expansion
of water in hollow stems also followed these changes. By devising
machines for registering these movements, they were enabled to prophesy
with considerable success the amount of work to be got through on a
given day, and so to render great aid to the smooth working of the body
politic. Thus, gradually, the old ideas fell into desuetude among the
educated classes--which, however, did not prevent the common people
from remaining less than half-convinced and from regarding the men of
science with suspicion and disapproval.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

We happen to be warm-blooded--to have had the particular problem
faced by our philosophic ants solved for us during the passage of
evolutionary time, not by any taking of thought on our part or on
the part of our ancestors, but by the casual processes of variation
and natural selection. But a succession of similar problems presses
upon us. Relativity is in the air; it is so much in the air that it
becomes almost stifling at times; but even so, its sphere so far has
been the inorganic sciences, and biological relativity, though equally
important, has been little mentioned.

We have all heard the definition of life as “one damn thing after
another”; it would perhaps be more accurate to substitute some term
such as _relatedness_ for _thing_.

When I was a small boy, my mother wrote down in a little book a number
of my infant doings and childish sayings, the perusal of which I find
an admirable corrective to any excessive moral or intellectual conceit.
What, for instance, is to be thought of a scientist of whom the
following incident is recorded, even if the record refers to the age of
four years?

I (for convenience one must assign the same identity to oneself at
different ages, although again it is but a relative sameness that
persists)--I had made some particularly outrageous statement which was
easily proved false: to which proof, apparently without compunction, I
answered, “Oh, well, I always ex_agg_-erate when it’s a fine day....”

The converse of this I came across recently in a solemn treatise of
psychology: a small girl of five or six, in the course of an “essay” in
school, affirmed that the sun was shining and the day was fine; while
as a matter of fact it had been continuously overcast and gloomy: on
being pressed for a reason, she explained that she felt so happy that
particular morning that she had been sure it was a fine day.

If the weather can affect one’s statements of fact, and one’s emotions
can affect the apparent course of meteorological events, where is
the line to be drawn? What is real? The only things of which we have
immediate cognizance are, of course, happenings in our minds: and the
precise nature and quality of each of these happenings depends on two
things--on the constitution and state of our mind and its train on the
one hand; on the other hand upon events or relations between events
outside that system. That sounds very grand; but all it means after all
is that you need a cause to produce an effect, a machine to register as
well as a something to be registered.

As further consequence, since this particular machine (if I may be
permitted to use the odious word in a purely metaphorical sense),
this mind of ours, is never the same for two succeeding instants, but
continually varies both in the quantity of its activity and the quality
of its state, it follows that variations in mental happenings depend
very largely on variations in the machine that registers, not by any
means solely upon variations in what is to be registered.

Few (at least among Englishmen) would dispute the thesis that food,
properly cooked and served, and of course adapted to the hour, is
attractive four times in the day. But to a large proportion among
us, even sausages and marmalade at nine, or roast beef and potatoes
on a Sabbath noon, would prove not only not attractive but positively
repellent if offered us on a small steamer on a rough day. I will not
labour the point.

We all know how the size of sums of money appears to vary in a
remarkable way according as they are being paid in or paid out. We
all know to our cost the extraordinary superiority of the epochs when
our more elderly relatives were youthful. The fact remains that we
are always prone to regard the registering machine as a constant,
and to believe that all the variation comes from outside. It is easy
to discount the inner variation in ourselves when we are seasick, or
in others when they are old and reminiscent, but not only is this
discounting sometimes far more difficult, it is sometimes not even
attempted.

What, for instance, are we to say to those who profess to find a
harmony in the universe, those to whom poverty and discomfort and
hard work appear the merest accidents, to whom even disease, pain,
loss, death, and disaster are “somehow good”? You and I would probably
retort that we have a rooted dislike to discomfort, that we should most
strongly deny that the loss of a friend or even of a leg was anything
but bad, that a toothache was not damnably unpleasant. But I think that
if they were philosophically inclined (which they probably would not
be), they might justifiably retort that the difference between their
universe and ours was due to a difference in their mental machinery,
which they had succeeded in adjusting so that it registered in a
different and a better way.

It is at least clear that something of the sort can happen in the
intellectual sphere. To the uneducated, the totality of things, if ever
reflected upon, is a compound of fog and chaos: advance is painfully
slow, and interlarded with unpleasant falls into pits and holes of
illogicality and inconsequence; to those who have taken the trouble to
push on, however, an orderly system at last reveals itself.

The problem of the origin and relationship of species gave such mental
distress to those zoologists of the first half of the nineteenth
century who were conscientious enough to struggle with it, that
many of them ended by a mental suppression of the problem and a
refusal to discuss it further. The publication of Darwin’s _Origin
of Species_ was to them what psycho-analysis is (or may be) to a
patient with a repressed complex. Or again, no one can read accounts
of the physicists’ recent work on the structure of the atom without
experiencing an extraordinary feeling of satisfaction. Instead of
wallowing in unrelated facts, we fly on wings of principle; not only
can we better cut our way through the jungle of things, but we are
allowed a privilege that has universally been considered one of the
attributes of Gods--the calm and untroubled understanding of things and
processes.


     “The Gods are happy.
     They turn on all sides
     Their shining eyes,
     And see below them
     The earth and men.”


This being so, what is to prevent us from believing that, once certain
adjustments are made in the mental sausage-machine, we shall discover
that what we once found impossibly tough meat will pass smoothly
through and become done up into the most satisfactory of sausages?
In other words, that the values are there if we choose to make
them--an Euckenish doctrine which, for all that it arouses instinctive
suspicion, may none the less be true.

But even when we have made all possible discounts of this kind, evolved
the smoothest-running machinery, converted the raw and meaty material
of being into every conceivable kind of tidy sausage, the fact remains
that there are feats beyond the power of our machine--beyond its power
because of the very quality of its being.

We live at a certain rhythm in time, at a certain level of size and
space; beyond certain limits, events in the outer world are not
directly appreciable by the ordinary channels of sense, although a
symbolic picture of them may be presented to us by the intellect.

When we are listening to the organ, sometimes there come notes which
are on the border-line between sound and feeling: their separate
vibrations are distinguishable and pulse through us, and the more the
vibrations are separable, the more they are felt as mechanical shocks,
the less as sound. However, we know perfectly well that all sounds as
a matter of fact depend on vibratory disturbance, and that it is only
some peculiarity of the registering machinery, in ear or brain, which
enables us to hear a note as continuous.

Still more remarkable are the facts of vision. As I write I see
the tulips in my garden, red against the green grass: the red is a
continuous sensation; but the physicists appear to be justified in
telling us that the eye is being bombarded every second with a series
of waves, not the few hundred or thousand that give us sound, but the
half-billion or so which conspire to illuminate our vision.

With sound, we alter the frequency of the waves and we get a difference
of tone which seems to be merely a difference of more or less: but
alter the frequency of light-waves, and the whole quality of the
sensation changes, as when I look from the tulips to the sky. The
change of registering mechanism is here more profound than the change
in outer event.

Or again, to choose an example that depends more on size than rhythm,
how very difficult it is to remember that the pressure of air on our
bodies is not the uniform gentle embrace of some homogeneous substance,
but the bombardment of an infinity of particles. The particles are not
even all alike: some are of oxygen, others of nitrogen, of carbonic
acid gas, of water vapour. They are not all travelling at uniform
speeds; collisions are all the time occurring, and the molecules are
continuously changing their rate of travel as they clash and bump.

We have only to look down a microscope to convince ourselves of the
alteration in our experience that it would mean if we were to become
sufficiently diminished. The tiniest solid particles in fluids can
be seen to be in a continuous state of agitation--inexplicable until
it was pointed out that this mysterious “Brownian” movement was the
inevitable result of impacts by the faster-moving molecules of the
fluid. Many living things that we can still see are small enough to
live permanently in such agitation; the longest diameter of many
bacteria is but half a micron (a two-thousandth of a millimetre), and
there are many ultra-microscopic organisms which, owing to their closer
approximation to molecular dimensions, must pass their lives in erratic
excursions many times more violent than any visible Brownian motion.

If we could shrink, like Alice, at the persuasion of some magic
mushroom, the rain of particles on our skin, now as unfelt as midges
by a rhinoceros, would at last begin to be perceptible. We should
find ourselves surrounded by an infinity of motes; titillated by
a dance of sand-grains; bruised by a rain of marbles; pounded by
flights of fives-balls. What is more, the smaller we became, the
more individuality and apparent free-will should we detect in the
surrounding particles. As we got still smaller, we should, now and
again, find the nearly uniform bombardment replaced by a concerted
attack on one side or the other, and we should be hurled for perhaps
double our own length in one direction. If we could conceivably enter
into a single inorganic molecule, we should find ourselves one of a
moving host of similar objects: and we should further perceive that
these objects were themselves complex, some like double stars, others
star-clusters, others single suns, and all again built of lesser units
held in a definite plan, in an architecture reminding us (if we still
had memory) of a solar system _in petto_. If we were lucky enough
to be in a complicated fluid like seawater, we should be intrigued
by the relations of the different kinds of particles. They would be
continually coming up to other particles of different kinds, and would
then sometimes enter into intimate union with them. If we could manage
to follow their history, we should find that after a time they would
separate, and seek new partners, of the same or of different species.
Some kinds of the units, or people as we should be inclined to call
them, would spend most of their existence in the married state, others
would apparently prefer to remain single, or, if they married, would
within no long time obtain divorce.

We should be forcibly reminded of life in some cosmopolitan city like
London or New York. If there existed a registrar to note down the
events of these little beings’ existence, and we were privileged to
inspect the register, we should find that each had its own history,
different from that of every other in its course and its matrimonial
adventures.

If we were near the surface we should find that the outer beings always
arranged themselves in a special and coherent layer, apparently to
protect themselves against the machinations of the different beings
inhabiting the region beyond; for every now and again one would seem
to be pulled from the water and be lost among the more scattered
inhabitants of the air.

If we could now revert to our old size, we might remember, as we
listened to the scientist enunciating the simple formulæ of the
gas-laws, or giving numerical expression to vapour-pressures and
solubilities, that this simplicity and order which he enabled us to
find in inorganic nature was only simplicity when viewed on a large
enough scale, and that it was needful to deal in millions and billions
before chance aberrations faded into insignificance, needful to
experience molecules from the standpoint of a unit almost infinitely
bigger before individual behaviour could be neglected and merged in the
orderly average. And we might be tempted to wonder how the personal
idiosyncrasies of our human units might appear to a being as much
larger than we as we are larger than a molecule--whether kings and
beggars would not fare alike, and all the separate, striving, feeling,
conflicting personalities, with their individual histories, their
ancestors, successes, marriages, friendships, pains, and pleasures, be
merged in some homogeneous and simple effect, altering in response to
circumstances, with changes capable of expression in some formula as
simple as Boyle’s or Avogadro’s Law.

Almost more startling might be the effect of altering the rhythm at
which we live, or rather at which we experience events.

If only I were Mr. H. G. Wells, I could make a mint of money by a story
based on this idea of rhythm of living.[42] Let us see.... First there
would be Mercaptan the distinguished inventor, who would lead me (lay,
uninstructed, Watsonish me, after the fashion of narrators) into his
laboratory. There on the table would be the machine--all but complete:
handles, coils of wire, quartz terminals, gauges of rock-crystal in
which oscillated coloured fluids, platinum cogwheels ... dot ... dot
... dot ... dot.... He hardly dared to make the final connections, all
clear and calculable though they were. He had put so much of himself
into it: so many hopes ... fears ... dots....

Then there would be the farewell dinner-party--first the inventor’s
voice on the wireless telephone, summoning Wagrom the explorer, Glosh
of the _Evening Post_, Stewartson Ampill the novelist, and the rest
of our old friends: then the warm friendly light of the candles, the
excellent port, the absence of women, the reminiscences, the asterisks,
the....

Mercaptan refuses to allow the rest to come into the laboratory, in
case something should go wrong. He straps the machine on his shoulders,
makes a final connection; his life processes begin to work faster,
faster, ever faster. The first effect of course was a change of colour.
The blue oblong of the window became green--yellow--orange--red.
Meanwhile each wave-length of the ultra-violet became blue, and itself
ran down the gamut of colour. Then came the turn of the X-rays--by
their dim light he groped about, till they too became relatively too
slow for his retina. That ought to make him blind, of course--but no!
Mr. Wells had thought that all out; and he came into a state of nearly
maximum speed where he perceived a brilliant, phosphorescent light
given out by all objects, generated by disturbances of a wave-length
unimaginably, undiscoverably small. Meanwhile he had passed through an
amazing experience--he had heard the veritable music of the spheres!
That had happened when in his acceleration he had, so to speak, caught
up with the light-waves, until they were tuned to his ear’s organ of
Corti: and all that had been visible in his ordinary life was now to be
appreciated by hearing. Unfortunately, as his ears possessed no lens,
this universal music was to him of course merely a hideous babel of
sound.

At last, as the workings of his body approached the rapidity of light’s
own oscillations, he entered on a new phase--surrounded on every side
by an ocean of waves which lapped softly against his body--waves,
waves, and still more waves....

He was in that region not unlike that from which life has escaped when
it ceased to be infinitely little, a region in which none of the events
that make up our ordinary life, none of the bodies that are our normal
environment, have existence any more--all reduced to a chaos of billows
ceaselessly and meaninglessly buffeting his being.

“Mi ritrovai in una selva oscura.”

Life is a wood, dark and trackless enough to be sure; but Mercaptan
could not even see that it was a wood--for the trees.

Yet it was soothing: the very meaninglessness of the wave-rocking
released one of responsibility, and it was delicious to float upon this
strange etheric sea.

Then his scientific mind reasserted itself. He realized that he had
magnified his rate of life and was consuming his precious days at an
appalling speed. The lever was thrown into reverse, and he passed
gradually back to what he had been accustomed to think of as reality.

Back to it; and then beyond it, slowing his vital rhythm. This time
he was able by an ingenious arrangement to eliminate much of the
disturbing effect of his rhythm-change on his vision. It was an idea
of which he was very proud: every alternate light-wave was cut out when
he doubled the capacity of each process of life, and so on in automatic
correspondence. As a result he was enabled to get a picture of the
outer world very similar to that obtained in the ordinary accelerations
of slow processes that are made possible by running slow-taken cinema
records at high speed. He saw the snowdrops lift their matutinal heads
and drop them again at evening--an instant later; the spring was an
alarming burst of living energy, the trees’ budding and growth of
leaves became a portent, like the bristling of hairs on the backs of
vegetable cats. As his rate changed and he comprehended more and more
in each pulse, the flowers faded and fell before he could think of
plucking them, autumnal apples rotted in his grasp, day was a flash
and night a wink of the eye, the two blending at last in a continuous
half-light.

After a time ordinary objects ceased to be distinguishable; then the
seasons shared the fate of day and night. The lever was now nearly hard
over, and the machine was reaching its limits. He was covering nearly a
thousand of men’s years with each of his own seconds.

The cinema effect was almost useless to him now; and he discarded this
apparatus. Now followed what he had so eagerly awaited, something
deducible in general but unpredictable in all particulars. As the
repeated separate impacts of the ether waves had condensed, at his old
ordinary rate, to form the continuous sensation of light, so now the
events of nature coalesced to give new objects, new kinds of sensation.
Especially was this so with life: the repeated generations seemed to
act like separate repeated waves of light, blending to give a picture
of the species changing and evolving before his eyes.

Other experiences he could explain less well. He was conscious of
strange sensations that he thought were probably associated with
changes in energy-distribution, in entropy; others which he seemed to
perceive directly, by some form of telepathy, concerning the type of
mental process occurring around him. It was all strange: but of one
thing he was sure--that if only he could find a way of nourishing and
maintaining himself in this new state, he would be able, as a child
does in the first few years of life, to correlate his puzzling new
sensations, and that when he had done this he would obtain a different
and more direct view of reality than any he had ever obtained or
thought of obtaining before.

As the individual light-waves were summed to give light, as the
microcosm of gas-molecules cancelled out to give a uniformity of
pressure, so now the repetition of the years coalesced into what could
be described as visible time, a sensation of cosmic rate; the repeated
pullulations of living things fused into something perceived as organic
achievement: and the infinite variety of organisms, their conflicts
and interactions, resolved itself, through the mediation of his
sense-organs and brain at their new rhythm, into a direct perception of
life as a whole, an entity with a pressure on its environment, a single
slowly-evolving form, a motion and direction.

He put the lever to its limit: the rhythm of the cosmos altered again
in relation to his own. He had an extraordinary sense of being on the
verge of a revelation. The universe--that was the same; but what he
experienced of it was totally different. He had immediate experience
of the waxing and waning of suns, of the condensation of nebulæ, the
slowing down and speeding up of evolutionary processes.

The curious, apparently telepathic sense which he had had of the
mental side of existence was intensified. Through it, the world began
to be perceived as a single Being, with all its parts in interaction.
The shadowy lineaments of this being were half seen by his mental
vision--vast, colossal, slowly changing; but they appeared only to
disappear again, like a picture in the fire.

Strive as he might, he could not see its real likeness. Now it appeared
benign; at its next dim reappearance there would be a feeling of
capricious irresponsibility about it: at another instant it was cold,
remote; once or twice terrible, impending over and filling everything
with a black demoniacal power which brought only horror with it.

If he could but accelerate the machine! He wanted to _know_--to know
whether this phantom were a reality, to know above all if it were a
thing of evil or of good: and he could not know unless he could advance
that last final step necessary to fuse the rhythm of separate events
into the sensation of the single whole.

He sat straining all his faculties: the machine whirred and rocked: but
in vain. And at last, feeling desperately hungry, for he had forgotten
to take food with him, he gradually brought back the lever to its
neutral-point.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Of course, Mr. Wells would have done it much better than this.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

And then there would have to be an ending. I think the newspaper man
would take his opportunity to slink off into the laboratory and get on
the machine with the idea of making a scoop for his paper; ... and then
he would put the lever in too violently, and be thrown backwards. His
head hit the corner of a bench, and he remained stunned; but by evil
chance, the handles of the machine still made connection with his body
after the fall. The machine was making him adjust his rhythm to that of
light; so that he was living at an appalling rate. He had gone into the
laboratory late at night. Next morning they found him--dead: and dead
of senile decay--grey-haired, shrivelled, atrophic.

Then of course the machine is smashed up; and Mr. Wells begins to write
another book.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

I have spent so much time in frivolous discussion of rhythm and size
and commonplaces that I have not pointed out another fundamental fact
of biological relativity--to wit, that we are but parochial creatures
endowed only with sense-organs giving information about the agencies
normally found in our own little environment. Mind without the objects
of mind is the very Chimaera bombinating _in vacuo_.

Out of all the ether waves we are sensitive to an octave as light, and
some few others as heat. X-rays and ultra-violet destroy us, but we
know nothing about them until they begin to give us pain; while the low
swell of Hertzian waves passes by and through us harmless and unheeded.
Electrical sense again we have none.

Imagine what it would be for inhabitants of another planet where
changes in Hertzian waves were the central, pivotal changes in
environment, where accordingly life had become sensitive to “wireless”
and to nought else save perhaps touch--imagine such beings broadcast
upon the face of the Earth. With a little practice and ingenuity they
would no doubt be able to decipher the messages floating through
our atmosphere, would feel the rhythms of the Black Hamitic Band
transmitting Jazz to a million homes, and be able to follow, night by
night, the soporific but benevolent fairy-stories of Uncle Archibald.
I wonder what they would make of it all. They would at intervals,
of course, be bumping into things and people. But would touch and
radio-sense alone make our world intelligible? I wonder....

When we begin trying to quit our anthropocentry and discover what the
world might be like if only we had other organs of body and mind for
its assaying, we must flounder and bump in a not dissimilar fashion.

Even the few senses that we do possess are determined by our
environment. Sweet things are pleasant to us: sugar is sweet: so is
“sugar of lead”--lead acetate; sugar is nutritious, lead acetate a
poison. The biologist will conclude, and with perfect reason, that if
sugar was as rare as lead acetate in nature, lead acetate as common as
sugar, we should then abominate and reject sweet things as emphatically
as we now do filth or acids or over-hot liquids.

But I must pause, and find a moral for my tale; for all will agree that
a moral has been so long out of fashion that it is now fast becoming
fashionable again.

Every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say, knows William of Occam’s
Razor--that philosophical tool of admirable properties:--“Entia non
multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”

We want another razor--a Relativist Razor; and with that we will carry
out barbering operations worthy of another Shaving of Shagpat: we will
shave the Absolute.

The hoary Absolute, enormous and venerable, grey-bearded and
grey-locked--he sits enthroned, wielding tremendous power, filling
young minds with fear and awe.

Up, barbers, and at him! Heat the water of your enthusiasm: lather
those disguising appurtenances. See the tufts collapse into the white
foam--feel the hairy jungles melt away before your steel! And at the
end, when the last hair falls, you will wipe away the lather, and look
upon that face and see--ah, what indeed?

I will not be so banal as to attempt to describe that sight in
detail. You will have seen it already in your mind’s eye: “or else”
(to quote Mr. Belloc)--“or else you will not; I cannot be positive
which.” If not, you never will; if yes, what need to waste more of the
compositor’s time? But of him who forges that razor, who arms those
barbers, who gives them courage for their colossal task, of him shall a
new Lucretius sing.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

     Belloc, H. “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.”

     Bergson, H. “Time and Free-Will.”

     Carroll, L. “Alice in Wonderland.”

     ---- ---- “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

     Clerk Maxwell. “Collected Papers.”

     Einstein. See Kant.

     Hegel. See Einstein.

     Kant. See Hegel.

     Lear, E. “Nonsense Songs and Stories.”

     Lucretius. “De Rerum Natura.”

     Macaulay, Lord. “Essays.”

     Mee, A. “Children’s Encyclopædia.”

     Meredith, G. “The Shaving of Shagpat.”

     Occam, W. de. “Opera Omnia.”

     Shapley. Proc. Nat. Ac. Sci., 6, 204.

     Swift, J. “Gulliver’s Travels.”

     Wells, H. G. “The New Accelerator.”

     Wheeler, W. M. “Ants” (Columbia University Series).


FOOTNOTES:

[41] Read before the Heretics Club, Cambridge, May 1922.

[42] The reading of this paper brought a string of informants eager
to let me know that Mr. Wells had already written a story on this
theme. I was grateful to them for having caused me to read the _New
Accelerator_, which by some strange chance I had managed to miss: but
Mr. Wells’s treatment is so wholly different from that which I have
sketched that I feel no scruples in letting it stand: and, if amends
are needed, at least I make him a present of the germ of a new tale,
and so feel that honour should be satisfied.



VI

RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD


                         GODS

     Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know,
       I asked of men and books what God might be:--
       “An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”--
     “A King of kings, ruler of all below”--
     “Pure Love”--“A golden calf set up for show”--
       “A jealous chief and tribal sectary”--
       “Figment of fear and Man’s servility”--
     “The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ...

     I turned away; and found my God alone.
       God is the world--yet captive in our thought:
     Our thought--when it the head of the world is grown:
       Love--with what love we to ourselves have taught.
     The Soul must incarnate Divinity,
     And God in each anew must builded be.



RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD


     “Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.”
                                       --GOETHE.


     “Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion,
     are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for
     certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of
     instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value
     the capacity to foretell.”--W. TROTTER.


No one who has read Flaubert’s _Tentation de St. Antoine_ will be
likely to forget that amazing procession of Gods, hundreds upon
hundreds, in every diversity of form, defiling past the visionary
Saint to topple over into the abyss of nothingness and be for ever
destroyed--the doomed and outworn divinities of man’s childhood and
adolescence, put away as he came to maturity. “Man created God in his
own image,” wrote the irrepressible pen of Voltaire; and if it is not
always true that Gods have been in his own image, but also in the image
of animals and monsters, of embodied fears and hopes, it is indubitable
that man has created God after God, only to throw them on the scrapheap
as he outgrows them, like a child rejecting his old toys for new.

Indubitable--in a sense; indubitable that he has given each of them
their peculiar and characteristic form, endowed this and that God
with different qualities. But there is another part which he has not
created, which he can only perceive, mould, clothe. The raw material of
Divinity and its elemental attributes are given--man can but take it or
leave it; and, what is more, it is difficult for him to leave it. It is
given as the raw material and elemental attributes of life are given,
and the evolutionary process can but take them. Man moulds and forms;
but evolution has no more created living matter than he Divinity.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

I propose, then, to lay down as my main point that the idea of God is
an inevitable product of biological evolution, arising when the human
type of mind first came into being, and taking shape and form as a
definite God or Gods. That the Gods who thus arise, although of course
they play a rôle in the affairs of the human species only, have a
definite biological function. That the term God can still be properly
and profitably employed to denote a certain complex of phenomena, with
a certain function in human evolution.

What, then, do we mean by saying that the idea of God arises inevitably
with the appearance of man upon the evolutionary scene? How can the
appearance of man account for such a curious phenomenon?

With man, for the first time in the history of life upon the earth, an
organism appeared capable of generalizing, of framing concepts, and of
communicating them to his fellows. Through sense-organs and brain, an
organism reflects in its mind some of the events of the world outside,
creates some sort of a microcosm over against the macroscosm. But
the animal with no more than associative memory can at best create a
haphazard microcosm, a mere cinema record, and incomplete at that, of
the most elementary organization; while all one can say of its power
of profiting by experience is that a certain primitive plot is thus
provided for the series of adventures which make up the scenario.

With an organism like man, however, in which to the faculty of
associative memory there has been superadded the power of framing
concepts and of accumulating experience by tradition, the picture is
altogether changed. The microcosm becomes more highly organized; from
rough-and-tumble cinema it develops into an elaborate drama, whose plot
is knotted up in the same general way as that of the great macrocosmic
drama unrolling itself outside. Microcosm images macrocosm more nearly,
both in its form and in its scope. As result of this, life is for the
first time enabled in man’s person to frame some general ideas of the
outer world. Not only is it enabled, it cannot help but do so. The
outer world is there; it impinges through man’s sense-organs on his
mind, and his mind is so constructed that, if it thinks at all, it must
think in general terms.

For the first time, life becomes aware of something more than a set
of events; it becomes aware of a system of powers operating in
events. These powers (to use a general, and what is intended to be a
non-committal, term) are in constant action upon man’s life. There is
a power in the sun, a power in the storm, in the growth of crops, in
wild beasts, in strange tribes, in the unrealized recesses of man’s own
heart; and in the course of his life man is brought into contact with
these powers, which may act with him or against him. Man frames his own
idea of these powers; and once that idea is framed, it exerts an effect
upon the rest of his ideas, upon his emotions, upon his conduct. The
more strongly the idea is held, the greater the effect.

But the idea may obviously be held and organized in many different
ways. It is when the idea is organized in one particular way that
we call it religious. We call it religious when on the one hand it
involves some recognition of powers operating so as to underlie the
general operations of the world; and, on the other hand, when it
involves the emotions. It must involve the idea of the general powers
operating in the outer world; so that an emotional reaction entirely
limited to a single human being, or to beauty, or to a single event,
is not religious. And it must involve the emotional nature of man, so
that a purely intellectual investigation of the powers in operation, or
a purely practical response, a purely moral reaction to them, is again
not religious.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

In primitive societies, as the studies of a Frazer or a Rivers have
shown us, the whole of life is enmeshed with religion, and there is
scarcely an activity of man which is not spun round with religious
emotion and ritual. Very often the idea of God has not in this stage
been clearly formulated; there is simply a notion of _power_, of
mysterious influence, sometimes partly crystallized round a primitive
deity. Later, however, the power became frankly anthropomorphic, and
Gods came into being--many or one. Man had projected the idea of that
active agency he knew best--human personality--into his idea of cosmic
powers.

Into the God thus fashioned there are always projected, to greater or
less degree, the ideals of the community; and thus, at a certain stage
of development, we find definitely tribal Gods. Here the biological
function of Gods becomes extremely obvious. The God, by his inspired
prophets and priests, orders the destruction of his rivals--the false
Gods of neighbouring tribes--or of his enemies, the members of those
tribes.

The people of the tribe, however the result may have been brought
about, do as a matter of fact find themselves, all unconsciously,
caught up in the system which they and their forefathers have made.
They have fashioned their God so that their inmost life is joined
to him. When they sin, they fear him; when they look into their own
hearts to take stock of their ultimate ideals, they find that these are
attached, through the impalpable but infinitely resistant fibres of
tradition, of childish memory and of education, to him; he is on their
side against their enemies, so that their advantage is on the whole his.

Whatever, therefore, arouses the idea of God in their minds will send
messages into every corner of their being. And if they can be firmly
persuaded that God wishes something done, the call will pull at their
heart-strings and bring them to convinced and united action.

The most familiar example of this type of effect is to be found in the
history of the Jews in the Old Testament. But even to-day such tribal
ideas are not extinct: an educated and charming lady said to me during
the war--“I am convinced that if Jesus Christ were alive to-day He
would be fighting on the side of the Allies.” ...

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

In our further analysis we must carefully distinguish between the
outer and inner components of the idea of God. The outer components
are the powers acting upon man. Some of these are inorganic--storms,
winds, floods, the sun and moon; others are organic--wild beasts,
pestilence, crops, and fruits, domesticated animals; others again
are human--personal or national enemies, the community in which the
individual lives. And they may act upon man’s body or upon his mind.
The sun warms his body, but makes an impression on his mind as well.
The practice of astrology shows what power can be exerted on the mind
by quite imaginary properties of external reality. But, whatever we
may think of these outer components, there they are, and they do affect
us for better or for worse. Before such a heterogeneous assemblage
as is constituted by the outer components can operate as a single
idea, can deserve a single name such as God, they must be elaborately
organized.

The contribution to the idea of God from within, from the mind of man
himself, is its form; and this form is the outcome of a process of
mental organization every bit as real as the physical organization
occurring in the unborn embryo.

The essential thing about both is, as we have indicated, that unity
should arise in spite of diversity, and the resulting entity--organism
in the one case, organized idea in the other--should thus be able to
act as a single whole.

The system of ideas which man holds concerning external powers may be
thus organized by thinking of it in terms of magic, of “influence,”
manifesting itself in different ways in different operations of Nature;
or in terms of personality, the manifestations of power being supposed
to result from the activities of a being or beings more or less
similar to ourselves; or it may be organized, as we shall see, on more
scientific lines, by carefully pruning away all parts of it which are
either definitely the mere product of our own imaginations, or else are
not proven.

Thus what we have called the raw material of Divinity is given in the
outer forces of nature, which not only act upon man as they act upon
all organisms, but are by him perceived so to act in a way special and
peculiar to man alone.

But, being so perceived, they are inevitably taken up into his mental
life and made part of his mental organization. They are often perceived
emotionally--to take the simplest examples, pestilence with horror,
storm with fear, the growing of crops with gratitude. They are bound
to enter into relation with his emotions, with his ideals and hopes;
bound also to be in some degree generalized intellectually. When thus
emotionally and intellectually built up so as to form a coherent and
unitary idea, then only do they deserve the name of a God.

In parenthesis, let us make it quite clear that we are speaking of God
and Gods as they operate in human affairs, as they can be classified
by the anthropologist, analysed by the philosopher, experienced by the
mystic. These have always been constituted as we have described--as a
particular _idea_ of the powers of nature, the cosmic forces taking
shape through the moulding and organizing capacity of human thought,
or, if you prefer it, as an interpretation and unification of outer
and inner reality. The Absolute God, on the other hand, may be
one--may, in fact, operate as a unitary whole in the same sense as this
extraordinary product of the evolutionary process, this anthropological
God; but we can never know it as such in the same sense as we know a
person to be one.

This may be illustrated by a common fallacy--the ascription of
personality to God on the ground that a purpose exists in the universe.
Paley saw proof of this purpose in adaptations among organisms. Modern
theologians, driven from this position by Darwin, take refuge with
Bergson in the fact of biological progress. But this, too, can be shown
to be as natural and inevitable a product of the struggle for existence
as is adaptation, and to be no more mysterious than, for instance,
the increase in effectiveness both of armour-piercing projectile and
armour-plate during the last century. The time has gone by when a Paley
could advance his “carpenter” view of God; when a Fellow of the Royal
Society could be sure of general approval, as could D. Pront in his
Bridgewater Treatise, with a work entitled _Chemistry, Meteorology,
and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural
Theology_, or when a distinguished geologist like Buckland (almost
foreshadowing later writers of a certain type on labour questions)
could ascribe to a Beneficent Designer the existence of Carnivora, as
a means to the increase of the “Aggregate of Animal Enjoyment,” and
solemnly open a sentence such as “while each suffering individual is
soon relieved from pain, it contributes its enfeebled carcass to the
support of its carnivorous benefactors.”

No--purpose is a psychological term; and to ascribe purpose to a
process merely because its results are somewhat similar to those of
a true purposeful process, is completely unjustified, and a mere
projection of our own ideas into the economy of nature. Where we
experience only phenomena of one order we cannot hope to reach behind
them to phenomena of another order, or to the Absolute.

The ground is now cleared for our real investigation--our inquiry into
the task which Rationalism has before it in finding how best what we
have called the raw material of Divinity may be organized by the mind’s
activity, how best clothed with word or symbol to make it more the
common property of mankind as a whole.

The current Christian conception of God is of a person who is also
the creator and the ruler of the universe. This person has certain
attributes--is omnipotent, omniscient, and somehow, in spite of all
the unhappiness and squalor and cruelty in the world, all-loving. He
has personal qualities--he created the universe, and all that is in
it; he takes pleasure in being worshipped; is displeased when men
or women neglect him, or commit crimes or sins; takes pity on the
follies and sufferings of man; and was so moved by them (albeit after
a very considerable period had elapsed since man had first appeared
upon the scene) that he sent his son into the world as a redeemer.
(For simplicity’s sake, I omit all reference to the complexities of
Trinitarian doctrine, which, however important in distinguishing
Christianity from other religions envisaging an omnipotent personal
God, do not affect the essential point at issue.) Further, he grants
petitions, reveals himself to certain chosen persons, and is enthroned
in a somewhat elusive heaven, where he is (or will be after the Day of
Judgment--opinions seem to differ somewhat on the subject) surrounded
by the immortal souls of the elect.

Now this view, or any view of God as a personal being, is becoming
frankly untenable. The difficulty of understanding the functions
of a personal ruler in a universe which the march of knowledge is
showing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self-ordering in
every minutest detail is becoming more and more apparent. Either a
personal God is a ruler without power, or he _is_ the universe. In
the former case he becomes a mere fly on the wheel; in the latter we
revert to a frank pantheism, in which the idea of a personal Being
can no longer properly be upheld. A personal creation of the world,
in any reasonable sense of that term, is now meaningless except for
a hypothetical creation of the original substance of the cosmos in
the first instance. Creation of earth and stars, plants, animals, and
man--Darwin swept the last vestiges of that into the waste-paper basket
of outworn imaginations, already piled high with the debris of earlier
ages. After the psychological insight which the last half-century has
given us, miracles have ceased to be miracles, and have become either
delusions, or, more frequently, unusual phenomena for which a cause
has not yet been found. The immutability of the fundamental laws of
matter and motion, more particularly the grand generalization of the
conservation of energy and the substitution by science of an orderly
for a disorderly conception of nature, make it impossible to think of
occasional interference by God with this world’s affairs. Accordingly
the value of petitionary prayer falls to the ground. Revelation and
inspiration have resolved themselves into exceptional mental states,
and are no longer looked upon as a sort of telepathy between divine
and human minds. If we reflect, we see that all these intellectual
difficulties in modern theology arise from the advance of scientific
knowledge, which has shown that the older ideas of God were only
symbolic, and therefore false when the attempt was made to give real
value to them.

That being the quagmire in which traditional Christian theology
is floundering, it behoves us to discuss the opposite side of the
question, and to see whether the very advance of science which has
seemed to exert only a destructive influence may not have made it
possible to build up new and sounder conceptions of fundamental
religious ideas.

We have already seen that the conception of God always represents
man’s idea of the powers operating in the universe; that it has two
components--the outer consisting of these powers so far as they are
known to man, the inner consisting in the mode in which the conception
is organized and the way it is related to the rest of the personality.
It is obvious that both man’s knowledge of the cosmic powers as well
as his method of organizing them in his mind can grow and change; and
man’s Gods can--and do--grow and change accordingly.

The growth of science in the last few centuries has radically altered
our knowledge of the outer world. It has shown us, in the first place,
a fundamental unity of all phenomena, however apparently diverse. It
has shown us the inorganic part of the cosmos pursuing a direction--the
progressive degradation of energy--which, if it is carried to its
limit, will result in the extinction not only of life, but of all
activity. It has next shown us the organic part, sprung from the
inorganic but running a different course, ascending during evolutionary
time to increasing heights of complexity and to increasing control over
its inorganic environment.

Finally, we have the psychozoic or human portion--that minute fraction
of the cosmos which yet is of a preponderant importance, since it
definitely represents the highest level yet reached by evolutionary
progress. In this sphere mind is the dominant partner, biologically
speaking, in the mind-matter partnership; evolution can begin to
be conscious instead of fortuitous; and true _values_ arise which,
incorporated in ideals and purposes, exert an effect upon events.

As regards our own mental organization, psychological science has
recently shown us the enormous importance of what we may call the
extra-personal portion of our mind--all that which is normally
subconscious, or has not been during our mental growth incorporated
to form an integral part of our private personality. But this
extra-personal part of the mind may from time to time irrupt into the
personal, and does normally do so at some period of life. It is the
merit of psychology to have shown the true nature of this relationship
between personal and extra-personal, which was in the past a source of
an infinity of mistaken ideas--revelation, inspiration, possession,
direct communion with angels, saints, gods, or devils, and so forth.

Thus the powers operating in the cosmos are, though unitary, yet
subdivisible; and, though subdivisible, yet related. There are the vast
powers of inorganic nature, neutral or hostile to man. Yet they gave
birth to evolving life, whose development, though blind and fortuitous,
has tended in the same general direction as our own conscious desires
and ideals, and so gives us an external sanction for our directional
activities. This again gave birth to human mind, which, in the race, is
changing the course of evolution by acceleration, by the substitution
of new methods for old, and by introducing values which are ultimate
for the human species; and, in the individual, provides, in the
interplay of conscious and subconscious, unbounded possibilities of the
invasion of the ordinary and humdrum personality of every day by ideas
apparently infinite, emotions the most disinterested and overwhelming.

Still other light has of late years been thrown by psychology upon
the inner component of the idea of God. Recent work has shown, for
instance, that the mind, unless deliberately corrected and trained,
tends to think in terms of symbols instead of along the more arduous
paths of intellectual reasoning, tends to explain the unknown in terms
of the known, tends accordingly to project the familiar ideas of its
own personality as symbols for the explanation of the most varied
phenomena. The science of comparative religion has shown us an early
stage of religious belief in which but one idea held sway--the idea
of a magical influence residing in all things potent for good or ill:
the projection was so complete that no distinction whatever was made
between the personal and the impersonal. Later, the idea of particular
divine beings or Gods arose; and in early stages man still continued to
project not only his own passions, but even his own form, into these
divinities. The statement of Genesis that God made man in his own image
is in reality an admission of the converse process. Still later, the
divinity was purged of the grossness of human form and members, and,
gradually, of characteristically human passions; but God remained
personal, although the personality was now organized chiefly of ideals.

There is, however, no reason whatever to admit that personality is a
genuine characteristic of any knowable God; but every reason to suspect
that it is, as a matter of hard fact, merely another product of this
property of projection so strong in the human mind.

On the other hand, an analysis of religious experience as a phenomenon,
as something equally worthy of patient and scientific study as the
gas-laws or the methods of evolution, shows that the powers which
move in the universe, when organized by thought into a God, are
apprehended by the majority of the great mystics and those to whom
religious experience has been richly granted as in some way personal.
Although, if our line of argument is valid, this will be partly due to
a projection of the idea of personality into the idea of God, yet it is
clearly in part due to the idea of God being organized by our mental
activity to be of the same general type as is a normal personality--as
something into which concepts of power, of knowledge, and of feeling
and will all enter, with such interconnections between its parts that,
like a personality, all of its resources are capable of mobilization
at any one point. It will be one of the great constructive tasks of
psychology to ascertain just how such a conception is organized, and
how it operates to produce the experiences, often of overpowering
intensity and lasting value, which as a matter of record it often
does.[43]

Put broadly and roughly, there are, then, three main accounts possible,
or at any rate actually found in occidental civilization to-day, of
the phenomena generally known as religious. The first is that of the
out-and-out sceptic--that they are all illusions, imaginations of the
childhood of the race. This is an extreme view which I do not feel
called upon to discuss. The second is the view of almost every existing
religious denomination in Europe--that God is a personal being. And
the third is one, only just beginning to take shape, which I have
endeavoured, with every consciousness of inadequacy, to outline--the
account made possible by a radically scientific view of the universe.

Those who adopt the third attitude believe that the second is a purely
symbolic and not very accurate presentation of certain fundamental
facts, of which they are attempting to give what seems to them an
account which is closer to reality. Before the scientific work of the
last three or four centuries, it was impossible to attempt what we may
call a realistic account of this nature, so that symbols were perforce
adopted. In Christian theology man formulated a coherent scheme, which,
however, was purely symbolic, to account for the facts we have just
been considering. The chief feature in any such scheme must be the
conception of the powers with which man feels himself in relation; and
in this particular formulation his conception of these powers was that
of a God who was also a person.

Now, the danger of symbols and symbolic thinking comes when the
symbols are accepted for real, and taken as they stand for bases from
which conclusions shall be drawn. The Christian theologians did not
hesitate--why should they, in their position?--to use the personal
nature of the Deity as one premiss in a whole series of syllogisms, and
to accept at their full face value the conclusions which emerged from
these syllogisms.

If a personal God was ruler of the universe, then he must be
omnipotent; if truly divine, then omniscient; if worthy of worship,
then all-wise. He must be capable of interfering with the course
of events by “miracles,” of granting our prayers, of communicating
directly with us, of deciding our fate in afterlife. From these
conclusions yet further conclusions were drawn. If God revealed himself
in the Bible, then the Bible was “true” ... with all that this in its
turn involved as to our beliefs concerning natural causation, creation,
our relations with God, or personal immortality. The whole scheme was
self-consistent, and worked as well as many other human schemes. But
what if the whole premiss, of God as a personal being, ruler and father
and judge--what if this were not in fact tenable? Then, of course, the
whole edifice itself would come toppling down. That is what is actually
happening to-day. God, as personal ruler, is being slowly driven out
of the universe, but returning as this organized idea of which we have
spoken.

Another cardinal point in the older systems has always been its claim
to possess a revelation of Truth which is in some real ways complete
and absolute.

This leads us on immediately to a subject of especial interest to us
as rationalists--namely, the relation of religion to science and to
free inquiry. Religious beliefs, if they are really believed with any
conviction, will be to a greater or less extent dominant beliefs,
because by their nature they concern the general relationship between
man and his surroundings, which must bulk large in all our lives; and
it is matter of common experience with what obstinacy and fanaticism
they may be held. If therefore a system of religious belief includes
the belief that it is revealed, and therefore true with a more ultimate
and complete truth than the truths of observation or experiment, any
fact or idea which conflicts with any part of the system will be
inevitably treated not only as dangerous to the system, but as actually
evil: and this tendency is reinforced by the craving of the average man
for certainty, for intellectual satisfaction without undue intellectual
effort. The cynic who said that beliefs are generally held with an
intensity inversely proportional to the amount of evidence which can be
adduced in their support was not wholly or only cynical.

Since, however, the progress of modern science, in addition to the
discovery of many wholly new facts, has largely consisted in a proper
investigation and a revaluation of the facts subsumed without full
analysis into the symbolism of theology, the inevitable result has been
for the two to find each other in constant antagonism. But be it noted
that it is not science and religion which are in conflict, but science
and a particular brand of religion.

The essence of science is free inquiry combined with experimental
testing. The result is a body of knowledge, of fact, and
explanatory theory, which can properly be regarded as established.
By _established_, however, we do not mean that it is absolute or
immutable--we expect addition and modification. But we also expect
that, in the future as in the past, the additions and alterations will
not involve the scrapping and rebuilding of the whole edifice, but
that it will continue to be harmonious with itself, and to undergo a
gradual evolution. This has been so even with such marked changes as
the discovery of radioactivity, the new outlook in psychology, or the
rediscovery of Mendelism--the new, after apparent contradiction, has
been or is being harmoniously incorporated and organized with the old.

This in its turn implies that toleration should ever be encouraged by
the scientist. Humility cannot be genuine if combined with unsupported
dogmatic assertion: and the recognition that the ideas of revelation
and divine personality are such dogmatic assertions brings a whole new
outlook into being.

Putting matters in a nutshell, we can say that a system based on
revelation or on the pushing of unsupported premisses concerning
the nature of God to their complete logical conclusions is bound to
result in some degree of hostility to the pursuit of truth for its own
sake; whereas a religious system basing itself on scientific method,
while it must resign itself to being unable to produce a complete,
ready-made, and immutable scheme, however beloved of the multitude (and
indeed so beloved because it satisfies a lower and more primitive mode
of thinking only), on the other hand can be assured that its knowledge
and effectiveness will increase, and that contradictions will resolve
themselves, provided that free inquiry, free speech, and tolerance are
allowed and practised. Attempts to reconcile the old formulation with
the new facts and ideas, when not insincere, are doomed to failure
because the premisses of the two systems are different.

In conclusion, we may perhaps point out some of the bearings of such
a change. In the first place, the change in our conception of God
necessitates the stressing of religious experience, as such, as against
belief in particular dogma, or in the efficacy of special ritual.

Secondly, it emphasizes the need for tolerance and enlightenment. The
scientific view asserts not that its knowledge is absolute or complete,
but that, although relative and partial, it will indubitably continue
to grow harmoniously along the general lines already laid down.

Another change wrought by the inclusion of all phenomena under one head
and the banishment of the supernatural is the inestimable advantage
that we thereby find the possibility of constructing a single general
view of the universe for civilization. At present there are two that
matter--the orthodox religious and the scientific. The religious starts
from the top, the scientific from the bottom; but the scientific has
been creeping up, and now that it has begun to attack the problem
of mind it will be able to drown the other out. Since the current
religious formulation is only symbolic, it cannot become scientific;
but since the scientific is based on the closest possible analysis
of reality, it can become religious so far as it investigates the
realities of religious experience.

Once it has done this, we shall be able to construct a _Weltanschauung_
such as never before, with roots in the ordered reactions of inorganic
matter, trunk strong with the steady progress of evolving life, and
branches reaching up into the highest realities of the spirit. Union is
strength; and it is one of the prime duties of educated men and women
to see that the present duality and antagonism at the heart of what
should be the central unity of civilization--of its most fundamental
idea, its conception of the universe--should be terminated.

The new outlook will also interlock with the youthful science of
psychology to produce great results. Much of what now is interpreted,
by all save the few experts, in supernatural terms of the old theology
will become intelligible as a product of the natural workings of that
amazing thing, the human mind. We shall not have sects trying to
exploit the normal dissatisfactions and disharmonies of adolescence
in order to secure “conversions”; repressed tendencies will not be
thought to be the voice of a personal Devil, nor neglected ideals the
voice of a personal God. Irrational fear, to-day still the greatest
enemy of mankind and most potent annihilator of happiness, will, by
comprehension of its curious mechanism and its persistence, often
transformed, from childhood to adult life, become amenable to treatment
and be made more and more to disappear. Proper analysis of mental
processes such as repression, suppression, and sublimation will enable
us to make better use of our faculties, and deliberately to build up
treasures of spiritual experience now attainable only by the lucky few
in whom temperament and circumstances accidentally conspire.

On the moral side, the idea that a Divine command has, at some remote
period in the past, provided a fixed code, and the belief in the
immutable truth of certain dogmas--these will happily disappear.
Morals, like all else, not only have evolved, but should evolve. We
shall find, for instance, that no excuse will be left for the common
horrified (and horrible) views of sex, as of something inherently
hateful, of all its pleasures as involving sin; for it will be realized
that too much of the present attitude is due to the projection of our
own conflicts and complexes, our own pruriences and pruderies, into
what might be innocent and joyous. But this merits a fuller discussion
than we can here allot.

Again, if I had space at my disposal, I would write of the changes in
the position and constitution of religion brought about by changes
other than those in religious beliefs themselves. Most important, of
course, are the spread of education on the one hand, and the spread of
the facilities for the most varied spiritual enjoyment on the other.
If the people is educated to a point at which it can judge for itself,
it wants no special priests or clerical mediators; its mediators are
those who are specially fitted to unravel the intellectual, emotional,
and moral difficulties of its own day and for all time--poets,
philosophers, and men of science. The spread of facilities for reading,
for seeing plays and works of art, and hearing good music, means of
course that, whereas in ruder epochs the Church provided the principal
way of psychological sublimation, now sublimation and spiritual
refreshment can be achieved equally or more effectively (and every
whit as religiously) without ever frequenting a “place of worship”
or belonging to any denomination. This tendency towards fluidity and
plasticity, towards many possibilities of sublimation instead of one,
may by some be lamented. But, as a matter of fact, it is in full
accord with all we know of biological progress. Man has attained his
position of biological pre-eminence simply and solely by virtue of the
plasticity of his mind, which substitutes infinitude of potentiality
for the limited range of actuality given by the instinctive reactions
of lower forms. Humanity will always have some religion, and it will
always be of the utmost importance to man, both as individual and as
species. But the possibility of satisfying his religious tendencies
intellectually, emotionally, and morally, without rigid creed, limited
ritual, and iron-bound code of morals, will mean the liberation of all
that is best in religion from too narrow shackles, and the lifting it
on to a plane where it may be not only more free, but more rich.

It is the task of Rationalism to see that religion, this fundamental
and important activity of man, shall neither be allowed to continue in
false or inadequate forms, nor be stifled or starved, but made to help
humanity in a vigorous growth that is based on truth and in constant
contact with reality.


     (_For bibliography, see the end of the next essay._)


FOOTNOTE:

[43] See W. James, _Varieties of Religious Experience_; E. Underhill,
_Essentials of Mysticism_.



VII

RELIGION AND SCIENCE: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES


                     GOD AND MAN

     The world of things entered your infant mind
       To populate that crystal cabinet.
       Within its walls the strangest partners met,
     And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.

     For, once within, corporeal fact could find
       A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
       Built there your little microcosm--which yet
     Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.

     Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
      Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day:
     Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars--
      A million isolations burn away.
     The Universe can live and work and plan,
     At last made God within the mind of man.



RELIGION AND SCIENCE:

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES


     “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.”
                                    --DANTE.


     “Ye are the Gods if ye did but realize it.”--CARLYLE.


“The next great task of Science is to create a religion for humanity.”
So says Lord Morley in one of his essays. It is a striking saying,
coming as it does from one in whom thought and action have been so
intertwined, one to whom reason, not dogma, is the basis of morality,
achievement, not emotion, its justification.

Let those words be my encouragement; for they challenge at the outset,
and to my mind rightly, two of the most persistent difficulties that
confront one who tries to write of the relations between Science and
Religion. The man of science too often asks what science can have
to do with what he brands as utterly and wholly unscientific; the
religiously-minded man demands what gain can follow from contact with
the cold and inhuman attitude of pure reason. To those questions I hope
that this essay will provide a partial answer. Meanwhile I shall begin
with a perhaps less ultimate but more pressing question. That question
is asked by many men and women of to-day, who on the one hand feel as
it were instinctively that religion of some sort is necessary for
life, yet on the other are unable to do violence to their intellectual
selves by denying the facts that reason and scientific inquiry reveal,
or by closing their eyes to them.

The question, in briefest form, is this: “What room does science leave
for God?”

To the savage, all is spirit. The meanest objects are charged with
influence, the commonest actions fraught with spiritual possibilities,
the operations of nature one and all are brought about by spiritual
powers--but powers multifarious and conflicting. “Nature can have
little unity for savages. It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a
checkered play of light and shadow, a medley of impish and elfish,
friendly and inimical powers.”[44]

But with ordered civilization and dispassionate observation a network
of material cause and effect invaded this spiritual domain. The
mysterious influences, for example, believed to be inherent in springs
and running rivers became personified, and, anthropomorphized as nymphs
or gods, were removed into a seclusion more remote from practical
and everyday life than their unpersonified predecessors. Later, they
retreated still farther from actuality into a half-believed mythology,
and then passed away into the powerlessness of avowed fairy-story or
literary symbolism, while the rivers, perceived as the resultant of
natural forces, were more and more harnessed to man’s use. So with
the wind and the rain, the growth of crops, the storms of the sea. So,
in due time, with the thunder and the lightning, with earthquakes,
eruptions, comets, eclipses, pestilences.

This process of liberating matter from arbitrary and mysterious power,
of perceiving it as orderly and endowed with regularity of natural
law, of bringing it more and more beneath human control, was, on the
other hand, accompanied by what may be called a combined condensation
and sublimation of the spiritual forces accepted by human faith. They
are built up from spirit to spirits, spirits to gods, gods to God. But
now it seems as if this condensation had reached its limit, and the
sublimation could only go farther by resolving the one God into an
empty name or the vaguest unreality.

We look back and see the Gods of early man, and are complacently
prepared to believe that they were based in error, products of mental
immaturity, to be relegated to limbo without regret. But what about the
present? Why should we shrink from applying the same process to the God
of to-day?

Is it then to be so with every God? Is God only a personified symbol
of our residuum of ignorance? Is to hold the idea of God in any form
to be, as Salomon Reinach believes, in an infantile stage of human
development, and must we with him define religion as “a sum of beliefs
impeding the free use of human faculty”?

I think not; and I shall endeavour to justify my belief to you, and
to show that, albeit much alteration and a thorough revision of ideas
is needed, the term _God_ has an important scientific connotation, and
further that the present stagnation of religion can be remedied if, as
has happened again and again in biological evolution, the old forms
become extinct or subordinate, and a new dominant type is developed
along quite fresh lines.

In any case the man of science must obviously, if he face the problem
at all, take up a scientific attitude of mind towards it. He cannot
say that there is no such thing as religion; or try to whittle it away
by explaining that it is something else--a complicated fear, or a
sublimated sex-instinct, or a combination of credulity and duplicity.
A thing, if it is a thing at all, is never merely something else. Nor
can he submit to the pretensions of those who assert that it is too
sacred to be touched, or that its certainties are greater than those
of science. No--he must treat it for what it is--a fact, and a very
important fact at that, in human history: and he must see whether the
application of scientific method to its study--in other words, its
illumination by the faculty of pure intellect--will help not only our
comprehension of religion in the past, but its actual development in
the future.

He can study it in various ways. He can use the method of observation
and comparison, collecting and collating facts until he is able to give
a connected account of the manifestations of religion and of their
past history; he can study it physiologically, so to speak, to see what
part it plays in the body politic, and how that part may alter with
circumstances; or he may seek to investigate its essence, to discover
not only how it appears and what it does, but what it _is_.

Further, he must have some general principles to lean on in his search,
principles both positive and negative. He must be content to leave
certain possibilities out of account because as yet he cannot see how
they can be connected with his organized scheme of things; in other
words, he has to be content to build slowly and imperfectly in order
that he may be sure of building soundly. This is the principle which we
may call positive agnosticism.

This very fact has been in the past one of the great obstacles in
the way of successful treatment of religion by science. One of the
attributes of man is his desire for a complete explanation, or at
least a complete view, of his universe, and this has been at the
bottom of much doctrine and many creeds. But before Kepler and Newton,
no truly scientific account could be given of celestial phenomena;
before Darwin, none of Natural History; before the recent revival
in psychology, none of the mind and its workings. In the second
half of the nineteenth century, for instance, science could give an
adequate account of most inorganic phenomena, and, in broad outline,
of evolutionary geology and biology; but mind was still refractory.
Accordingly, the philosophy of science was mainly materialist. But the
common man felt that mind was not the empty epiphenomenon that orthodox
science would have it; and he desired a scheme of things in which mind
should be more adequately explained than it could be by science at its
then stage of development. _Hinc illae lacrimae._

To-day it is at least possible to link up, not only physics and
chemistry and geology and evolutionary biology, but also anthropology
and psychology, into a whole which, though far from complete, is at
least organized and coherent with itself. If the seventeenth century
cleared the ground for that dwelling-place of human mind which we
call the scientific view of things, if the eighteenth century laid
the foundations and the nineteenth built the walls, the twentieth is
already fitting up some of the rooms for actual habitation.

There are certain other domains of reality which have not yet been
properly investigated by science. Telepathy, for instance, and the
whole mass of phenomena included broadly under the term spiritualism,
are in about the some position with regard to organized scientific
thought to-day as was astronomy before astrology’s collapse, as was the
study of electricity in the eighteenth century, or that of hypnotism
in the middle of the nineteenth. What is more, the average man demands
that phenomena of this order shall be included in his scheme of things.
Science cannot yet do this for him; and accordingly the dwelling-place
that we are building must still be incomplete; it is for those who
come after to build the upper stories.

This cannot be helped. What we build, we must build firmly; on what is
yet to be built, science cannot pronounce, except to say that she knows
that it will be congruous with what has gone before.

What general principles, then, do we assume? We assume that the
universe is composed throughout of the same matter, whose essential
unity, in spite of the diversity of its so-called elements, the recent
researches of physicists are revealing to us; we assume that matter
behaves in the same way wherever it is found, showing the same mode
of sequence of change, of cause and effect. We assume, on fairly
good although indirect evidence, that there has been an evolution of
the forms assumed by matter; that, in this solar system of ours, for
instance, matter was once all in electronic form, that it then attained
to the atomic and the molecular; that later, colloidal organic matter
of a special type made its appearance, and later still, living matter
arose. That the forms of life, simple at first, attained progressively
to greater complexity; that mind, negligible in the lower forms, became
of greater and greater importance, until it reached its present level
in man.[45]

Unity, uniformity, and development are the three great principles that
emerge. We know of no instance where the properties of matter change,
though many where a new state of matter develops. The full properties
of a molecular compound such as water, for instance, cannot be deduced
at present from what we know about the properties of its constituent
atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The properties of the human mind cannot
be deduced from our present knowledge of the minds of animals. New
combinations and properties thus arise in time. Bergson miscalls
such evolution “creative.” We had better, with Lloyd Morgan, call it
“emergent.”

With mind, we find a gradual evolution from a state in which it is
impossible to distinguish mental response from physiological reaction,
up to the intensity and complexity of our own emotions and intellect.
Since all material developments in evolution can be traced back step by
step and shown to be specializations of one or more of the primitive
properties of living matter, it is not only an economy of hypothesis,
but also, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the proper
conclusion, that mental properties also are to be traced back to the
simplest and most original forms of life. What exact significance is
to be attached to the term “mental properties” in such organisms, it
is hard to say; we mean, however, that something of the same general
nature as mind in ourselves is inherent in all life, something standing
in the same relation to living matter in general as do our minds to the
particular living matter of our brains.

But there can be no reasonable doubt that living matter, in due
process of time, originated from non-living; and if that be so, we must
push our conclusion farther, and believe that not only living matter,
but all matter, is associated with something of the same general
description as mind in higher animals. We come, that is, to a monistic
conclusion, in that we believe that there is only one fundamental
substance, and that this possesses not only material properties, but
also properties for which the word _mental_ is the nearest approach. We
want a new word to denote this _X_, this world-stuff; _matter_ will not
do, for that is a word which the physicists and chemists have moulded
to suit themselves, and since they have not yet learned to detect or
measure mental phenomena, they restrict the word “material” to mean
“non-mental,” and “matter” to mean that which has such “material”
properties.

You will remember William of Occam’s razor; “Entia non multiplicanda
praeter necessitatem”; when we are monists in the sense I have just
outlined, we are using that weapon to shave away a very unrestrained
growth of hair which has long obscured the features of reality.

Holding to these principles, we must, until evidence to the contrary
is produced, reject any explanation which proceeds by cataclysms, or
by miracles; a miracle becomes (when not an illusion) simply an event
which is on the one hand uncommon, and for which, on the other, there
has been found no explanation. Revelation too goes by the board--save
a revelation which is simply a name for the progressive increase of
knowledge and insight.

Last, but not least, we do not pretend to know the Absolute. We
know phenomena, and our systems, in so far as scientific, are
interpretations of phenomena.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Religion has been defined in a hundred different ways. It has been
defined intellectually--as a creed; as myth; as a view of the universe;
it has been defined emotionally as consisting in awe; in fear; in love;
in mystical exaltation or communion. It has been defined from the
standpoint of action--as worship; as ritual; as sacrifice; as morality.
Matthew Arnold called it “morality tinged with emotion”; Salomon
Reinach “a sum of scruples impeding the free use of human faculties.”
Jevons makes the experiencing of God the central feature; and so on
and so forth. Is it possible to find any common measure for all these
statements? Would it not be better to unite with those who cut the
Gordian knot by writing down all religion simply as illusion? No. For
their point of view is meaningless. Even illusions are, in themselves,
facts to be investigated; and even illusions have a basis.

But it is not necessary to believe that it is an illusion; the knot may
be untied. Ritual, Creed, Morality, Mystical Experience--all these are
manifestations of religion, but not religion itself. Religion itself
is the reaction between man as a personality on the one side, and, on
the other, all of the universe with which he comes in contact. It is
not only ritual, for you may have obviously non-religious ritual, as
in a court ceremonial or a legal function: it is not merely morality,
for men may practise morality, the most austere or the most _terre à
terre_, uninspired by anything that could remotely be called religious:
it is not belief, for we may have beliefs of all kinds, even to the
most complex scientific beliefs concerning the universe, which have yet
no connection with religion: it is neither communion in itself, nor
ecstasy in itself, as many lovers and poets could tell you.

But because it is a reaction of the whole personality, it must involve
intellectual _and_ practical _and_ emotional processes: and because man
has the powers of abstraction and association, or rather because his
mind in most cases cannot help making associations and abstractions,
it follows that it will inevitably concern itself, consciously or
subconsciously, with all the phenomena that it encounters, will try to
bring them all into its scheme, and will try to unify them and frame
concepts to deal with them as a whole.

Some men will be more concerned on the emotional, others on the
intellectual, others again on the moral side: but it is impossible to
separate any one of the three aspects entirely from the others.

We will begin with and treat mainly of the intellectual aspect of
the problem, the credal side. For one thing, science has more direct
concern with it than with the others; for another, more continuous
and startling alterations have had to be made in it; and finally, the
actual problem is there felt most acutely at the present moment.

What, then, is the problem? In the terms of our definition of religion,
it is in its most general terms as follows: Man has to live his life
in a world in which he is confronted with forces and powers other than
his own. He is a mere animalcule in comparison with the totality of
these forces, his life a second in comparison with their centuries. By
his mental constitution, he of necessity attempts to formulate some
intelligible account of the constitution of the world and its relation
to himself--or should we rather say in so far as it is in relation to
himself?--and so we have a myth, a doctrine, or a creed.

At the present moment, as we have already seen, there appears to be
an irreconcilable conflict between orthodox Christianity and orthodox
Natural Science. The one asserts the existence of an omnipotent,
omniscient, personal God--creator, ruler, and refuge. The other, by
reducing ever more and more of natural phenomena to what we please to
call natural laws--in other words, to orderly processes proceeding
inevitably from the known constitution and properties of matter--has
robbed such a God of ever more and more of his realm and possible
power; until finally, with the rise of evolutionary biology and
psychology, there seems to be no place any more for a God in the
universe.

Stated thus, the opposition is complete. But let us return on our
footsteps, and trace for one thing some of the history of religious
beliefs, for another re-investigate, from a slightly unusual
standpoint, the actual knowledge of the Universe which science has
given us.

Man has developed: in early stages, his physical and mental capacities
developed; in later stages development has been mainly restricted to
his traditions, ideas, and achievements. As part of his development,
his religious ideas have altered too.

At the beginning, he appears to have no ideas of a God of Gods at
all--merely of influences and powers, obviously (he would say) inherent
in the forces of Nature, magically inherent in certain objects and
actions--fetishes and incantations. He seems scarcely to have been
conscious of himself as an individual, or of the full distinction
between self and the external world.

Later, perhaps as the idea of his own personality grew, he began to
ascribe a more personal existence to the forces with which he came
into contact, and so to turn them more and more into beings that can
properly be called Gods: polydaemonism arose and in its turn gave place
to polytheism.

But while rigid custom was at first the only morality, and each
external power and each human activity was regarded separately,
later the rise of civilization led to a modification of custom, to a
reference of action and belief to the standards of pure reason, and to
an attempt at unification. Once this occurred, and equally so whether
the attempt at unification had an intellectual or a moral basis,
polytheism was doomed. Its downfall has been often described; the
reasons for it are suggestively put by Jevons in his little book, “The
Idea of God.” It passes through a stage where one among the gods is
pre-eminent: but finally even that does not suffice, and in its place
arises a monotheistic creed.

Monotheism may start as a purely local or tribal affair--my one God
against yours. It may not only start, but long continue so. Readers of
Mr. Bang’s collection of startling German war-sayings will remember the
superbly national prayer of the Prussian pastor who addressed his God
(I quote from memory) as “Du, der hoch über Cherubinen, Seraphinen,
und Zeppelinen ewig trönst.” (J. P. Bang, _Hurrah and Hallelujah_.
London, 1916.) But this idea, too, is self-contradictory, and merges
into that of one God for all men. The primitive anthropomorphism
which had invested the first vague and mysterious spirits with human
parts and passions, human speech and thought, also fell into gradual
desuetude. It was kept up as a symbol, or because of the difficulty of
describing a God except in terms human individuality, but its literal
truth was deliberately denied. God became different from and more
than man--omnipotent, omniscient, with no parts, with no limitations:
but he retained personality--in other words, a mental or spiritual
organization of the same general kind as man’s, however superior in
degree. With time, the divine personality became compounded more and
more of man’s ideals instead of his everyday thoughts and attributes.
And thus and that God remains. He has created everything; he is in
some sense immanent in the world, in some sense apart from it as its
ruler--you take your choice according to your philosophic preferences.
Beyond that, organized religious thought has not gone; and now it finds
itself fronting science in an impasse.

That, very briefly and roughly, is how man’s idea of God has developed.
But how have man’s knowledge and ideas of the natural universe
developed? What has Science to say to the impasse?

Man has to deal with three great categories of phenomena--the
inorganic, the organic, and the psychic. In the inorganic, chemistry
first and then physics have given us a picture whose broad outlines
are now familiar. There is but one type and store of energy in Nature,
whether it drives a train, animates a man, radiates in heat or light,
inheres in a falling stone. There is but one substance. All bodies of
trees, of men, rivers and rocks, the clouds in the air and the air
itself, precious stones and common clay--all can be resolved into a
limited number of elements. And these elements in their turn can be
resolved into combinations, differing, it appears, only quantitatively
from each other, of electrical charges; so that at the last all matter
is one, and becomes perhaps indistinguishable, or at least inseparable,
from energy. There is no personal operator for particular happenings;
the lightning and the volcano are the inevitable outcome of the
material constitution of things, equally with the form and colour of a
pebble and with the fact that it will drop to the ground if it is let
fall. All is impersonal order and unity.

There is, however, one other great fact about the system of inorganic
matter. The energy contained in it tends to be degraded, as the
physicists say--in other words to become less readily available. There
is available energy in moving matter. There is potential energy in all
matter, dependent upon whether it can be set in motion. But if the sea
were to cover the whole surface of the globe, it would be impossible to
extract energy from running water as we do now, because no water would
be running. So too heat is energy; but it is only available when it
can flow, when there are hotter and colder bodies. The law under which
transformations of energy operate has now been investigated, and it has
been established that in every energy-transaction a certain modicum
goes to waste as unavailable heat, so that, unless some at present
unforeseen change occurs, the last state of the universe, considered
as a purely physico-chemical mechanism, will be one of death, of
inactivity, with all matter at a uniform low temperature and the whole
stock of energy locked up and unavailable in this sea of tranquillity.
True for one thing that an almost inconceivable number of millions
of years must elapse before this “death of matter” is realized; and
for another that we are unable to understand how such a progressive
degradation could have been in operation from all eternity. We must
not expect complete knowledge within a few years or a few centuries;
but even if the beginning is veiled--for there is no more evidence for
a “creation” than for (say) a rhythmic reversal of the direction of
energy-availability--and if it is always possible that some unforeseen
change in the process should occur before the whole runs down, yet
it is a fact (and we are resolved to be agnostic save about facts)
that, here and now, a direction is to be observed in the evolution of
inorganic matter, by which natural operations are tending to become
less active, and the amount of available energy is diminishing. If
it continues indefinitely, first life, and later on all activity and
change whatsoever will cease. There is a tendency towards death and
towards unchanging inactivity.

The next great category is that of the organic, of living matter. We
have to consider its origin and later history. So far as constitution
goes, living matter is merely a special and highly complicated form
of ordinary matter; and there can be no reasonable doubt that it has
originated naturally from non-living matter.

While the _main_ direction of the inorganic has been towards
degradation of energy, it has shown another subsidiary direction
towards the production of more and more complex forms of matter. If our
general ideas are correct, there must have been a time when matter in
our ordinary sense of the word did not exist--there can have been no
atoms, only free electrons. From this state, there evolved one in which
the various electron-systems that we call atoms first appeared; later
still, atoms could join with atoms to produce molecules. Leaping over
vast periods, we would come to the time when radiation had brought the
temperature of the earth surface below 100 degrees centigrade; water
then could form from steam and solution occur. Through solution, all
soluble elements, which would otherwise remain locked in the inactivity
of the solid state, are enabled to enter upon a new phase of mobility,
of chemical life, as we may say. Only in water could colloid carbon
compounds first be built up, and only from such substances could life
originate.

Living substance, or at least much of it, must be formed of molecules
containing thousands of atoms, each atom in its turn a system of
circling electrons. Here already is a vast increase of complexity: it
remains to be seen whether the same tendency is perpetuated later.

The evolutionary concept is to biology what the doctrine of the
conservation of energy has been in the physico-chemical sciences--an
indispensable preliminary to proper methods of attack. But while great
stress has been laid on the various _methods_ by which evolution
may be supposed to have taken place--natural selection, Lamarckism,
orthogenesis and the rest--biology has concerned herself comparatively
little with the _form_ of the process in itself. But it is here that
evolution becomes of value to us in our present search; for once more
we become aware of a direction. Partly from the direct evidence of
palaeontology, partly from indirect evidence, but along many converging
lines, we can form an idea of this direction which in broad outlines is
unassailable.

During life’s existence on earth--a period to be reckoned in hundreds
and probably in thousands of millions of years--there has been an
increase in various of its attributes. But just as in the inorganic
world electrons and atoms still exist as such side by side with
molecules, so also the earlier types of living matter continue to
exist side by side with the later. The increase is not therefore
seen uniformly in all forms at once, but is most easily observed by
studying the _maximum_ level attained. Size, for instance, is one of
these attributes; and whereas to-day all variations are to be found
between ultra-microscopic disease-germs and vast organisms like whales
and elephants, there has been a gradual steadying increase (tending to
a limit) in the size of the _largest_ organisms existing at any one
period.

If we confine ourselves for the moment to the material side, we find
that the directional change in organic evolution can be reduced to
this--to an increase of the control exercised by living matter over
the environment, and of its independence of the environment--two
reciprocal aspects of a single process. When we look more closely into
the means by which this has been achieved, we shall see an increase of
the maximum not only in size, but in complexity, in length of life,
in efficiency of particular organs, in co-ordination of parts and
general harmony, in improvement of sense-organs, and, continuing even
after other tendencies have reached their limits, in brain-size and
consequently in complexity of mode of reaction and behaviour.

If we turn to the psychological side, we find that there has been an
increase in the intensity of mental process. This is apparent in all
aspects of mind, on that of emotion equally with that of knowledge,
of volition equally with that of emotion. To be an amoeba or a worm
is to live a life almost without windows. Perfection of sense-organs
makes it possible for life to be aware of the different types of
outer events, whilst memory and, later, associative memory give the
possibility of understanding their history. In higher forms volition
can be maintained for longer and longer intervals, can attain greater
intensity, and can fix itself upon ever more and more distant objects.
With depth of feeling comes also differentiation, so that finally we
find in ourselves the possibility of organizing various blends of the
simple emotions into the compound emotional forms such as reverence
and admiration, called _sentiments_ by McDougall.

Biologically speaking, therefore, the direction observable in
mental evolution is again towards increased control and increased
independence; by mental and cerebral improvement there is introduced
a greater accuracy and a greater range of control, as well as better
adjustment between organisms and environment, than would be otherwise
possible to the same bodily organs.

The direction of life may therefore be roughly summed up in the two
words “more life”--more both in quantity (have not both land and air
been colonized during evolution?) and also in quality. More matter
has been stolen from the lifeless and embodied in the living; and the
living begins to be less helpless in face of the lifeless.

The direction of living matter is thus in many ways opposed to the
direction to be seen in inorganic matter; yet not only has the organic
arisen from the inorganic, but its direction continues one direction
already traceable before the appearance of life.[46]

Finally, we come to the psychological aspect of the universe. We have
already touched on it in connection with biology, and found that in
many ways at least the development of mind follows the same lines as
that of living matter, and helps forward the general trend of life.

But finally a kink occurs, a critical point similar to that seen at the
origin of living from non-living matter. There the attributes of living
matter which mark it off from inorganic matter become dominant--its
capacity for self-reproduction, its tendency to organization. The
colloid carbon compound had been the highest known independent unit;
from now on this place was taken by the organism.

In exactly the same way, in the final stages of evolution (as witnessed
abundantly by fossil mammals) complexity of purely bodily organization
had reached a limit, and survival, as is evidenced by increasing size
of brain, came to be determined more and more by mental qualities.
Finally the curve of mental development caught up with that of body,
and intersected it: mind became the dominant factor in the new type of
organism, and in the subsequent history of the evolutionary process.
The _organism_ ceased to be the highest unit, and gave place to the
_person_, or self-conscious individual with organized mind.

This new critical point was reached when man arose; many authors
recognize it for what it is, the beginning of a new era, by christening
the subsequent geological period the Psychozoic. That period,
geologically speaking, has not yet run but a tiny span; and we are
no more entitled to think that we have reached or even imagined the
possibilities of its future evolution than we should have been entitled
to regard the possibilities of purely biological evolution as having
been exhausted after the far longer period needed to give rise to a
coral polyp or a jelly-fish as highest existing types of organism. Even
man as a biological species is in his infancy, not to speak of other
psychozoic types that may be waiting in the womb of time.

But what are the characteristics of this new phase? In the first
place, mind has become self-conscious; thus the evolutionary methods
of psychozoic organisms may become conscious, and they come to direct
their own evolution instead of having their destinies shaped by the
blind forces of natural selection.

In most respects the same direction as before is pursued, but new
methods are introduced. The rate of change, of movement in that
direction, is accelerated; and the possibility is given of eliminating
a vast deal of waste. A watchmaker sends out very few defective
watches: why? because he makes his watches on a preconceived plan.
Even when an improvement in watch construction is introduced, he can
draw up his plan beforehand, and at the worst, waste only time and
paper, instead of metal and far more time. Ideas do not need to be
embodied before selection can act upon them; thus an increasing amount
of evolutionary change will take place through the natural selection
of ideas than through the older and far more wasteful process, natural
selection of individuals and species.

Finally, values appear upon the scene. If we could ask a wild animal
such as a fox what gave value to its life, and it could answer us, it
would doubtless say food, sleep, comfort, hunting, sexual pleasure, and
family companionship. But it cannot answer; nor can it know the value
of what it pursues, but only appreciate the result. Strictly speaking,
values do not exist for it. However, even if we allow ourselves to
speak of values in the life of pre-human organisms, we see immediately
that wholly new values are introduced after the critical point.

Putting it summarily, we can say that, with the rise of mind to
dominance, various activities of mind come to be pursued for their
own sake, to have value in themselves. Our life is worth living not
only for the sake of eating and drinking, sleeping, athletics, and
sexual pleasure. There is a value attached to knowledge for its own
sake, apart from the possible access of control that it may bring.
But this is new, a property of man alone; not even Athena’s owl will
exert itself through laborious years to understand celestial mechanics
or physiology. The highest anthropoids do not attempt to create works
of art, which for man come to have value in themselves. Natural
beauty comes to have its value too; a cow (so far as known!) does not
interrupt the business of its life to admire the sunset, whereas men
may and do. Behaviour also is implicated; with the entry upon the scene
of that practically unlimited number of possible reactions which give
us what we call free will and choice, there comes a conviction that
some modes of action are higher than others; and so a scale of moral
values comes into being.[47]

Nor is it merely that values, in the strict sense, are created; nor
that new values come into being. But with the enlargement of mind and
its more perfect organization, there arises a new method of appraising
values, and so a new type of value altogether. I mean of course the
so-called _absolute values_. Absolute values are never absolute in the
sense of absolute completeness; they are relative to two things--to
external reality and to our mental powers and organization.[48] They
are abstractions; we generalize the value in our minds, and at the same
time raise it to the highest pitch of intensity we can. An interesting
point arises from this way of thinking. Apart from the guarantee of
our own convictions, the observable direction of living nature is
our guarantee of right: or one had better say that it is at once the
guarantee and the touchstone of our convictions. But two things may be
moving in the same direction, and, if one be moving much slower than
the other, the slower may impede the faster; a pedestrian procession
making eastward along Fleet Street will hold up the life of the city
for a time, and cows walking along railways are treated as obstacles by
trains proceeding in the same direction. So it comes about that much
that was once progressive in organic evolution has become an obstacle
or a drag to psychozoic evolution; it is _relatively_ retrogressive,
and, from our present standpoint, bad. To take the simplest and most
fundamental example: evolution by blind natural selection was the
method of progress for organisms below man. Unceasing struggle and
courage was the chief factor in producing the grandeur and strength of
the lion, the swiftness and grace of deer, the brilliance and lightness
of the birds. But if the same end can be obtained both more quickly
and more bloodlessly by new methods, then the old stands condemned.
Here lies the key to the problem propounded by Huxley in his Romanes
Lecture--the problem of man’s relation to the rest of the cosmic
process, at once sprung from it by gradual generation and separated
from it by an absolute and unbridgeable chasm, at once one with it and
in deadly combat with it and all its ways.

Our mode of envisaging the problem illuminates it, and shows it as
inevitable and intelligible instead of insoluble and tormenting; and
illuminates too many other minor problems of good and evil. But all
this is a side-issue: _revenons à nos moutons_.

Unknown, or neutral, or hostile power: a movement similar in direction
to the direction in which history on the whole shows we are moving, and
to that which we desire with our highest aspirations, but operating
blindly; an acceleration of that movement by the coming of mind to
biological predominance, with certain consequent minor changes in
direction by major changes in speed and in methods. Three tendencies,
but all founded in one unity, and each arising out of the other--that
is the picture drawn for us by the present state of science. In this
sense, and in this only, can it be said that “all things work together
for righteousness.”

One word on an important side-issue--the problem of evil in man, of
stagnancy and degeneration in organic evolution. Degeneration often
does occur--a reversal, in other words, of the main tendency. But the
positive fact remains that the _maximum_ level is progressively raised,
and that we find that stagnation of development and even sometimes
degeneration have been factors indirectly helping on the main direction.

We must accept the positive main direction for what it is--an external
sanction of faith; confess that we do not understand the detailed
working of the whole, but see in the change of methods brought about
by the rise of mind a hope that we shall gradually learn at least to
dispense with much waste and evil and degeneration in the further
course of evolution.

This main direction gives us cause for optimism. The exceptions to it
temper that optimism. But the direction is there.

As we shall see later, we may either call the sum of the forces acting
in the cosmos the manifestations of God, who in this case must be the
Absolute God, and unknowable except through these manifestations. Or we
may confine the term God to its anthropological usage, as denoting the
objects of human religion, in which case we must admit that the term
God as understood by man is constituted by _man’s idea of_ the forces
acting in the cosmos, so that not only are these forces involved, not
only a possible Absolute God behind them, but also the organizing power
of human mind.

I wish you here to agree to my adopting the second alternative and
giving the name of God to the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos as
perceived and grasped by human mind. We can therefore now say that God
is one, but that though one, has several aspects. There is one aspect
of God which is neutral to us, in a way hostile, mere Power operating
in the vastness of the stellar universes, apprehended only as orderly,
tending in a direction which appears to be in the long run inimical.
It is to this aspect of God that Mr. Wells has given the name of the
Veiled Being--a somewhat primitive term for a true idea. There is
another aspect, which is the one seen operating in that sphere which
comprises the whole of life upon this earth--a sphere infinitesimal
in relation to the whole, yet still vast in relation to ourselves.
This aspect of God is our refuge and guarantee, for here we find
our assurance that our human life is a part of a whole that is not
antagonistic, but moves in the same general direction as do our history
and our aims. There does exist, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “a power,
not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” And this second aspect
is not wholly separate from the first, in spite of its difference of
direction; for the first is its parent, physically and temporally, and
the direction of biological progress is the continuation of a line of
development marked out, within the opposed inorganic direction, even
from the first.

Next, there is a more immediate and more often demanded assurance that
we, as individuals or as single communities in space or time, are at
one with humanity as a whole. Here it is that we look to the third
aspect of God, which enshrines the directive forces operating in man.
These directive forces are our instincts, our needs, our values, our
ideals. When those are harmonized with each other and with the outer
world by reason and experience, they form a power which we can see
has been directive, normative in the past, and will continue to be so
in the future. It alters with man’s development; but after a first
rudimentary phase, its main outlines, its type of organization remain
the same, for man’s instincts and ideals do not greatly change, and
their harmonization with each other and with experience will generally
proceed in the same broad way. Although in a sense this aspect is the
smallest, as comprising the smallest physical field, yet in another
it is the largest, since man’s ideals are in themselves unlimited,
non-finite; and the values involved, to our present type of mind,
appear ultimate. This third aspect of God is again historically the
offspring of the second, and through the second of the first.

Matter, life, mind--this is the simplest classification of phenomena.
By means of processes analogous to obtaining a resultant by the
parallelogram of forces, we can obtain a resultant of material
operations in general, vital operations in general, and mental
operations in general, numerous and varied in direction though they be.
Life is the link between the other two. Living matter is so definitely
one with non-living matter, not at all obviously one with mind; yet the
direction of living matter is obviously similar to that of mind, not at
all obviously one with that of non-living matter.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

It is a simple fact that the conception which man has of the universe
and its relation to himself exercises important effects upon his
life. A name therefore is needed for this anthropological phenomenon.
_God_ is the usual name applied, and we shall retain it in default
of another, premissing that the word, like many similar general
terms--“love,” or “life,” or “beauty,” say--can be defined and applied
in many ways, and that we apply it here in a particular and perhaps
somewhat novel sense.

God in this sense is the universe, not as such, but so far as grasped
as a whole by a mind, embodied in an idea,[49] and in consequence
capable of influencing that mind, and through it the whole course
of events. It is not grasped as a mere sum of details, but, however
vaguely and imperfectly, as a single idea, unitary in spite of its
complexity. Nor is it the universe in itself, but only so far as it
has been thus grasped by mind. There exists no other meaning of the
term which, on analysis, is found to convey anything, or at least
anything scientific or comprehensible, to us. We may reason that there
is an Absolute God behind the universe and our idea of it. But we have
no proof of this statement, and such an Absolute God is, as Spencer
pointed out, an Unknowable, and accordingly no concern of ours. That
part and these aspects of the universe which have been grasped by us
may prove to contain the key to many of our difficulties; meanwhile
we can only be humble and admit that our idea of God, even in this
restricted sense, is still extremely incomplete: and in this sense
there is a God far greater than our present idea and knowledge of God,
only waiting to be discovered.

That which it is essential to establish is our way of looking at the
problem. The universe does come into relation with our minds, and
there, owing to the way it and our minds are organized, generates an
idea which exerts an influence upon us.

The external basis of the idea of God is thus constituted by the forces
operating in the universe. The universe is a unitary whole, greater and
more powerful than ourselves, and its operations have resultants in
certain main directions--these are phenomena which we constatate like
any other phenomena. They, and that other phenomenon of our contact
with the Universe and our exposure to the play of its forces, give us
our objective knowledge of God. The rest of our idea of God, the inner
component, depends upon the mode of action of our minds.

So far, then, we have shown that recent advance in science,
particularly in our understanding of evolution, has enabled us to give
a more objective account than ever before of what is involved in the
concept _God_, and so to pave the way for a consensus of thought on the
question.

It will be observed that there is no idea of personality implicit in
this conception of God--God may or may not possess personality. It will
be for us later to investigate that particular aspect of the problem.

It now remains to deal with the inner reality. Man has a wholly new
type of mind. He is social and capable of speech. He generalizes, and
he has a very highly developed power of association. This combination
gives him a great many possibilities hitherto denied to life. In the
first place, he is able to order his experiences in a totally new way,
differing from the old very much as a classified card-index differs
from a rough diary-record of events. The organization of his mind is
elastic, capable of indefinite expansion and of specialization in any
direction.

That being so, there will be always parts of his mind wholly or at
least partially undeveloped; and in any case the capacities which he
must employ in his everyday life, the region of his mind illuminated by
the attention needed in the struggle for existence, constitute but a
fraction of his mental self and its potentialities.

This brings us on to one of the most important achievements of modern
psychology--the discovery and analysis of the subconscious. Impossible
here to go into detail; we must content ourselves with a few broad
statements. When we speak of the subconscious mind, we mean that in
man there exist processes which appear for many reasons to be of the
same nature as those of the normal mind (in that they are associated
with the same parts of the nervous system, fulfil the same general
biological functions, and probably operate through similar mechanisms),
with the single exception that we are not conscious of them as such.[50]

The conscious mind, that which we think of as the basis of our mental
individuality, as our personal being, is the result of a long process
of organization. We come into the world with a set of instinctive and
emotional reactions only waiting their proper stimuli to be fired
off, with a capacity for learning, for amassing experience, and a
capacity for modifying our instincts and our behaviour according to our
experience. We incorporate experience in ourselves, and in so doing
we alter the original basis of our reactions; a strongly emotional
experience colours all that is closely associated with it; and so after
birth we are continually making our mental microcosm not only larger
but qualitatively more complex, in exactly the same way as before birth
our body grew not only in size, but also in complexity of organization.

Parts of experience or of inherited tendencies may fail to become
organically connected with the main parts of our minds, simply because
attention has never been focussed on them, or has not attempted to
bring them into relation with the rest. They are, shall we say, like
bricks which might have been used in a building, but have been left
lying on the ground by the workmen.

Still more remarkable are the methods by which harmony is achieved
in the personal mind. It is obvious that a conflict of any sort
between parts of the mind will waste energy, will prevent a clear-cut
reaction being given in either direction, and so constitute a grave
biological disadvantage by making us fall between two stools. If a
child gets a serious fright in the dark, darkness will tend to arouse
fear. But darkness also comes with evening and with the time for
sleep. Two modes of reaction to darkness are therefore given, and they
are self-contradictory. One part of the mind comes down its pathway
towards action, and finds itself met by another which is coming along
the same path in the opposite direction. If neither moves, there is a
conflict; in our hypothetical case sleep is delayed; and if it comes,
is disturbed by nightmares--the echoes of the fright--and the childish
organism suffers.

Exactly similar conflicts in which fear plays a part may occur in adult
life, e.g., in so-called “shell-shock”; or the sex-instinct may come
into conflict with other parts of the personality.

These conflicts are resolved through one tendency or part of
experience being passed into the subconscious, where it no longer can
meet its opponent on the path to action. And this passage into the
subconscious can be apparently automatic, unwitting, when it is called
_suppression_, or performed only by voluntary effort, when it is called
_repression_. In the former case, it would appear that the conflict may
wholly or almost wholly cease; whereas in the second, the repressed
portion of mind is perpetually striving to come to the surface again,
and must thus perpetually be held down by force.

If we hold by our metaphor of the building, then in suppression,
bricks which would not go well with the rest are stacked quietly in
the cellars; while in repression, part of the workmen want to build a
different sort of building, and have to be forcibly held down by some
of the rest to prevent their doing so.

But in whatever way the subconscious may be organized it is always
with us, and there will always be a remainder of our soul, or of its
possibilities, which is not incorporated in our personal life at all,
as well as much which is not closely organized with the main everyday
personality, but is connected with it only by vague and loose bonds,
approachable only by narrow pathways instead of by broad roads.

There is another process at work in the human mind which is of the
utmost importance for our problem. I mean the process of sublimation.
If it is not easy to give a short and clear definition of sublimation,
at least the process is familiar to all. The commonest example is
“falling in love,” where the simple sex-instinct becomes intertwined
with other instincts and with past emotional experience, and projects
itself in wholly new guise upon its object. We may perhaps best say
that a sublimated instinct has more and higher values attached to its
satisfaction than one unsublimated. The mere satisfaction of the sexual
impulse need be little more than a physiological desirability; but the
satisfaction of passionate love involves every fibre of the mental
organism, hopes and ideals converging with memories and instincts on to
the highest pitch of being.

In such a case sublimation occurs with the normal object of the
instinct. But the elasticity of man’s mind permits of further
complication; the instinct may be not only sublimated but attached
to new objects. Through the cogs and spirals of the mind, the sexual
instinct may find an outlet at higher levels, and contribute to the
driving force of adventurous living, of art, or as we may see in many
mystics--St. Teresa for example--of religious ecstasy.

It is as if a swift stream were falling into underground channels below
the mill of our being, where it could churn and roar away to waste. But
some of it is led off at a higher level, and we can learn to lead off
still more; and we can make an installation of pipes whereby it can be
taken up to the original level, and made to fall through new machines
and do any work we may ask of it.

The mechanism of sublimation, however, deserves a few more words.
Recent work in biology has shown that in low forms of animals and in
early stages of high forms, the head-region is in a certain sense
dominant to the rest, in that it forms first and independently; but
that, once present, it exerts a formative influence upon the rest
of the body, keeping the various organs in some way under control,
making them different from what they would otherwise have been, and so
moulding them to the part of a single and higher whole.

An extremely similar process is at work in sublimation. Ideas and
ideals can be naturally dominant over others, or they can become
dominant through becoming associated with primarily dominant ideas, or
by receiving a larger share of attention. Attention, concentration,
what you will, is one of the most remarkable mental functions. Not
only can the metaphor of intense illumination of a particular field be
justly used of it, but we may say that it seems to accelerate the flow
of mental process through a particular channel, and so to draw into
that channel the contents of other channels in connection with it, just
as a rapid flow of water through a pipe sucks in water from connected
pipes.

As a result of this, sublimation involves not the suppression or
repression of instincts and emotional experiences, nor merely the
summation of them with another instinct, but their utilization as parts
of a new whole, of which the dominant instinct is like the controlling
head.

When the sex-instinct is repressed, the emotional and religious life is
meagre, though often violent. When the sex-instinct and the religious
feeling exist side by side, without conflict but without union, you
have “the natural man” of St. Paul; but when the religious ideals are
dominant, and can catch up the sex-instinct into themselves, and in
so doing give it a new form and a new direction, then you get one of
the highest types of emotional lives. Or fear may be sublimated to
reverence; or sex again to art or to philanthropy.

In every case, a new and more complicated mental activity or organ
is arrived at; and the same process that we saw at work in biological
evolution--the creation of ever more complex units--is thereby
continued.

Then we come to the fact that man displays disharmonies of mental
construction, together with an innate hankering after harmony. The
most obvious disharmony is that between the instincts that are
self-regarding and those that are other-regarding--between man’s
egotistic and his social tendencies.

It appears that man became gregarious quite late in evolutionary
history. Through natural selection, sufficient “herd-instinct” was
developed to ensure that men would on the whole stand by the tribe in
danger, that the tribe should become a real biological unit. But it
was impossible wholly to harmonize these new social instincts, even
in the simplest societies, with the old, deeper-rooted, individualist
tendencies; and as life became more complex and choice wider, conflict
grew more and more frequent.[51]

Another obvious disharmony in modern civilized communities is the
fact that sexual maturity occurs long before marriage is possible or
desirable.

In all this, there is inevitably a field for all the various
combinations of suppression, or repression, or sublimation.

Man’s gregariousness, together with his power of speech, learning,
and generalization, have led to the development of a new thing in the
world--persistent and cumulative tradition. I use tradition in the
broadest sense, as denoting all that owes its being to the mind of
man, and is handed down, by speech or imitation or in some permanent
record, from generation to generation. Language, general ideas of right
and wrong, convention, invention, national feeling--all this and much
more, constituting the more important part of the human individual’s
environment--is part of tradition; and tradition is pre-eminently and
inevitably social. However individualistic we may wish to be we cannot
escape modelling by this social environment.

The general effect of man’s gregarious instinct is that he desires
to find himself in harmony with some traditions, with the ideas that
modern jargon likes to call the herd to which he belongs. The herd
ideas, the traditions, may be those of a nation or of a stratum within
the nation; of a whole class or of a clique; of science or of art; of
a retired monasticism, or of an all-embracing world-civilization. But
they are always herd ideas, and through them man is always member of
some community, even though that community be tiny, or consist mainly
of writers dead and gone; and he always strives to put himself in
harmony with the traditions of that community.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

A long-winded introduction enough; now for the bearing of it. One of
the essentials of every religion is its treatment of the subconscious,
is its view and its practice as regards the relation between the
personally-organized part of the mind to the remaining non-personal
reservoirs. At first the non-personal part is regarded as being wholly
outside the organism, and its occasional flooding up into the narrower
ego is regarded as an operation of an external personality, a spirit, a
God. Comparatively late, it is recognized as part of the organism, but
the process by which connection is made is still regarded as divine,
and called inspiration. Such ideas belong to the adolescence of the
race, in precisely the same way as the discovery and acquisition of
great tracts of this subconscious territory will always necessarily
constitute part of the adolescence of the individual. But any developed
religion must always in some way help to make these great reserves of
power accessible, always teach the enlargements of the personal ego
which their conquest brings about. This is one of the ways in which, to
use current religious phraseology, self may be lost, and found again on
a different plane.

Religion must further always provide some internal harmony, in
counterpart to the harmony demanded in the unitary comprehension of
external reality. The various activities and experiences of life,
as they are originally given by heredity to the child, are either
independent, or else antagonistic and disharmonious. There must be some
means provided for bringing all of them into a true organization--in
other words into a whole which, though yet single, is composed of
co-operating parts. Here again the actual responses of actual religions
have been many and various; but they all operate by suppression,
repression, and sublimation, or by a combination of these.

It can at once be said that sublimation is the right and highest way,
and that two of the criteria of religious progress are to be found
in the stress laid upon sublimation, and in the enlargement and the
elevation of the dominant ideas at work in the sublimating process. It
is the right and highest way because through it no spiritual energy is
wasted, and the age-long path of progress towards ever higher levels
of complexity in organization is still continued. Among religious
teachers, both Jesus and Paul laid great stress on this--on the
freedom, the emancipation from the shackles of an external law made
possible by the apprehension of some highest harmonizing principle
and the subordination of all other ideas and desires to it. Once one
can see and learn to follow such a principle, whatever one does is in
a sense right, because one’s desires are all subordinate to a desire
for right, and to something which is right. Perhaps it would be better
to say that they appear right to oneself, that the haunting, terrible
sense of sin is laid to rest, and one’s life liberated into free
activity, one’s energy made all available for achievement.

The sense of sin, if not universal at one or other period of life,
is almost so, and comes from an apprehension of inner disharmony. As
one would expect, selfishness and sex are its most common roots; and
whenever it exists, then the necessary preliminary to any further
progress of one’s being is that it should be made to disappear. It
can disappear, as in St. Paul’s natural man, by a suppression of
part of the mind or of the connection between parts, or by a failure
to make certain connections, or it can be eradicated by a growth of
callousness; or--and I take it that this is the proper religious
solution--by discovering a clue which will harmonize the two apparently
opposed sections of experience, the two antagonistic tendencies, and so
resolve the problem with no loss of energy or of vital possibilities.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Finally, there remains to be considered the mode in which the mind may
best organize the ideas of external reality given to it by its pure
cognitive and intellectual faculties.

Even from the purely scientific point of view, generalization is
obviously of value. When we have found unity in the outer world’s
apparent diversity, direction in its apparent disorderliness, we
have obviously achieved a great gain. But religion appears to demand
something more. If for a moment we look at the matter pragmatically,
we shall find that a number of the great mystics (and a large majority
of those of our own occidental type and tradition) speak of their
experiences of “divine communion” as being communion with a _person_.

What does this mean? We have seen that a purely intellectual analysis
gives us no handle for finding personality in God. Can we suppose that
this direct intuition gives us that handle? To say so, to my mind,
would be simple obscurantism. Intuition, if it shows us reality, can
only show a reality capable in the long run of intellectual analysis;
to deny this is to deny all our premisses. No: their intuition shows
us that something akin to personality is perceived, but permits no
pronouncement as to whether its resemblance to personality is given in
its real nature, or introduced into it by their thought.

If we look into the history of religion, we find over and over again
that man has taken something from his own mind and projected it into
the external world. The magic power of fetishes, the tabus incurred by
contact with certain objects, the endowment of the idea of external
powers, of God, with human form, the ascription of miraculous influence
to places or things--in every case there has been this projection.
And there is no reason to doubt that here again there has been a
similar occurrence, that man has organized his idea of external power
after the pattern of a personality, and has then ascribed this type
of organization to the external power itself. This projection Blake
symbolized in a sentence: “Thus men forgot that All Deities reside in
the Human breast.”

The rival schools of psychology may disagree: but all are agreed that
some modes of thinking are more primitive than others, and even in the
most educated amongst us tend to persist, often in the subconscious,
side by side with more developed methods that have arisen later.

The use of concrete symbols or images is the most widespread of these
primitive modes of thought. It is natural that the more complex
should at the first be described in terms of the less complex, that
those experiences for which no proper terminology has been hammered
out should be given names out of man’s existing vocabulary. That is
inevitable: but there is an even more fundamental process at work. It
seems as if the human mind works, on its most primitive levels, by
means of image-formation, and that emotions and concepts for which
no simple image exist may call up symbolic images by association
and indeed often dress themselves in these new clothes before they
present themselves to consciousness. Some such process appears to take
place in dreams (including day-dreams!) and possibly in the ordinary
thought-processes of savages. More advanced modes of thought substitute
the currency of an arbitrary token such as a word or a formula for the
barter of images and concrete symbols; the freshness and vividness of
the image is lost, but more efficient and speedier working is attained.
However, in most of us the concrete image-using mode of thought is a
relief from the apparently less natural and more artificial (though
more efficient) operations of reason, and we relapse into it, wholly or
partially, more often than we realize.

This unconscious irrational tendency to symbolism, together with the
other tendency to project ideas properly attaching to the subjective
world into external objects and processes--these between them account
for much of the modes of expression so far found for religious belief;
and, since the majority of human beings have a profound distaste for
sustained or difficult thought, it is likely that they will continue to
account for much in the future.

These are facts of extreme importance. The professional sceptic is
at once tempted to exclaim that every such projection and illogical
symbolism is illusion through and through, and must be wholly swept
aside. He would be wrong. We each of us must know from our own
experience the “influence” (to use a general term) which may inhere
in certain things and places. True that the influence is of our own
mind’s making; but it is none the less real, not only as a momentary
existence, but, as the term implies, as exerting a definite and often
a great effect upon our lives. The lover who cherishes a ring or a
lock of hair; the man who is drawn back to the haunts of his childhood
or his youth; the mind refreshing itself with some loved poem or
picture;--what do we have in these and innumerable other instances but
a peculiarity of mind whereby it may take external objects into itself
and invest them with its own emotions and ideas, in such a way that
those same objects may later reflect their stored-up emotion back again
into the mind? It operates by a form of association; but the actual
working resembles the charging of a battery, which may subsequently
discharge back. We have in it, in fact, a special faculty which, if
rightly used, is of the greatest practical value. Further, the symbol,
if rightly used and rightly limited, is of service to most minds in
giving a more or less concrete cage for the winged, elusive, and
hardly-retained creatures of abstract thought.

So too, the organization of the idea of God into a form resembling a
personality appears definitely to have, at least with the majority of
people belonging to what we call “Western civilization,” a real value.

Biologically, the essence of real personality is first that it is
organized, and secondly that on each of its many faces it can, if I may
put it metaphorically, enter into action at a single point, but with
its whole content of energy available behind the point. In other words,
man as a personality can concentrate his mind on one particular problem
of one special aspect of reality; but he is able, if need be, to summon
up ever fresh reinforcements if he cannot carry the position--more
facts, other ways of thinking and feeling, memories, reserves of will.
In a properly organized personality, it is possible to bring the whole
to bear upon any single object.

Now when the idea which man makes for himself of outer reality is
organized after the same general pattern as a personality, it too will
be able to act in this same sort of way.

When man in perplexity interrogates the idea he has of external
reality, he is anxious to put his little individual self in harmonious
relation with the whole of reality that he knows. Therefore he should
organize that reality as a whole, and in such a way that it can all
be brought to bear through any single point. The relation between the
self and the idea of outer reality is, for any one problem, that of two
pyramids touching by their points only; but the points of contact can
shift as by miracle over their surfaces as the problem is changed.

But another power of personalities is their power of interpenetration.
The purely material cannot do this. One portion of matter cannot
occupy the same space as a second portion. It is another of the
great differences between the psychozoic and all previous stages of
evolution, between man and all else that we know in the universe,
that the discrete units reached at this level of organization, the
individual human beings, can achieve interpenetration by means of their
minds. When you expound a new idea to me, and I grasp it, our minds
have obviously interpenetrated. This is a simple case; but there may be
an intimate union of mind with mind which is the basis of the highest
spiritual achievement and the greatest happiness. If mind and matter
are two properties of the same world-substance, then the rise of mind
to dominance has enabled this basic substance to escape from some of
the imprisoning limitations which confined it at lower levels of its
development; do we not all know that despair at being boxed up, that
craving for communion? Using our previous line of argument, we see
that the interpenetration of personalities is right, implies a further
step in progress, must be part of the basis on which future advance in
evolution is to build.

But to apply this to our present point. By organizing our knowledge of
outer reality after the pattern of a personality, we make it possible
for it to interpenetrate our private personality. If, therefore, we
have, in any true sense of the word, “found religion,” it means that we
shall so have organized our minds that, for flashes at least, we attain
to a sense of interpenetration with the reality around us--that reality
which includes not only the celestial bodies, or the rocks and waters,
not only evolving life, but also other human beings, also ideas, also
ideals.

This, to my mind, is what actually happens when men speak of communion
with God. It is a setting, an organizing of our experiences of the
universe in relation with the driving forces of our soul or mental
being, so that the two are united and harmonized. There is a resolution
of conflicts, an attainment of a profound serenity, a conviction that
the experience is of the utmost value and importance.

Up till now, we have been defining and analysing: here we see religion
in operation. It is a relation of the personality as a unit to external
reality as a unit--and a relation of harmony. First, the inner
structure of the mind must be organized into a harmonious unit, then
our knowledge of outer reality organized similarly, and finally, in
religious experience, the two must be harmonized in interpenetrating
union.

Once this harmony has been achieved, it is for one thing so precious
in itself that it will be sought for again; the knowledge that we have
once reached the stage at which difficulties and doubts are resolved in
what the philosophers would perhaps call a higher unity, but which I
should prefer to call an organic harmony, is always there to fall back
upon in times of discouragement; and finally the harmony is actually
woven into the tissue of our mind, just as the amazing physical harmony
revealed by physiology has, in the course of evolution, been woven into
the structure and working of living bodies; and it can remain there
as the dominant idea to which the rest of our ideas, and consequently
our actions, are brought into subordinate relation. In other words,
it becomes the dominant sublimating principle. Once more, however,
the subordination is not forced, but free--we find that what we once
thought obstacles are aids, what once seemed sin is now the willing and
efficient handmaid of good. That is the fundamental fact in all genuine
and valuable religious experience as such--the resolution of conflict
and the losing, or enlarging as you will, of the private personality,
the mere “self.” You will find this set out more fully, though in
different terminology, in Miss Underhill’s books on mysticism, or in
William James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_, or in Thouless’s
_Psychology of Religion_.

One side-issue. Such experience, if not absolute in the philosophical
sense, is absolute for us. If I may be Irish, its absoluteness is
relative to our organization and to reality as we perceive it. We
cannot perceive anything fuller, more absolute--until perhaps one day,
with the growth of our minds, we come to have some still richer and
more complete experience. As William James was so fond of reminding the
world, we have no right to assume that our minds are, much less that
they must be, the highest type of mind realized in the universe--no
more right than our domestic animals have, although our minds to them
could only be measured by their own standards.

What is more, owing to our power of framing general concepts and
ideals, and of accumulating past and future in our present, we can
focus a vast deal to one point. In such experiences, whether they come
through religion, or love, or art, we may say that although we are but
a system of relations, we touch the Absolute--although we are mortal,
we mount to the Eternal for a moment. Only, to guard against error, we
must remember that it is obviously not in reality the Absolute or the
Eternal that we attain to, but only the nearest approximation to them
of which we are capable.

We can therefore sum up this second part of our investigation by
saying that religion, to be more than mere ritual, must involve the
possibility of harmonizing the parts of the soul, of wiping out the
sense of sin, of sublimating instinct, of rendering the subconscious
reservoirs of energy and being available for the personal self, and of
organizing the ideas of external reality into a single organized mental
whole--the idea of God--capable of reacting with the personal self by
interpenetration.

Although he was moving to quite other conclusions, it is worth
recalling James’s ideas. For instance, “The line of least resistance
... is to accept the notion ... that there is a God, but that he is
finite.... These, I need hardly tell you, are the terms in which common
men have usually carried on their active commerce with God; and the
Monistic” [sc. Absolutist] “perfections that make the notion of him so
paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote
professorial minds operating _in distans_ upon conceptual substitutes
for him alone.” (James,’09, p. 311.)

I may perhaps be rebuked for trying to analyse the unanalysable,
for neglecting the supreme and sufficing fact of experience of God
in favour of the unprofitable and impossible task of catching the
infinite in an intellectual net. There are two answers to this. One
is that unanalysed experience is selfish because less communicable:
with that we deal later. The other is even more important: it is this.
Humanity at large is _not_ content with emotional experience alone,
however complete and apparently satisfying: it has always demanded an
intellectual formulation of the reality with which it is in contact,
as well as emotional experience of it, and so far as we can judge it
will always continue to do so.

But it is further found, as matter again of general experience, that
such formulations do not remain innocuous in the vacuum of pure
intellect, but reverberate upon action and influence conduct. When
men believe that they are surrounded with magical powers, they spend
half their lives in ritual designed to affect the operations of these
(wholly hypothetical) influences. When they worship a God whom they
rationalize as man-like, they sacrifice a large proportion of their
produce on his altars, and may even kill their fellow-creatures to
placate his (again imaginary) passions. When they believe in a Divine
Revelation, they think that they possess complete enlightenment on
the great problems of life and death; and they will then cheerfully
burn those who differ from them, or embark upon the bloodiest wars in
defence of this imaginary certainty. When they worship God as absolute
and as a person, they cannot help making deductions that lead them
into absurdities of thought and of conduct: they deny or oppose ideas
derived from a study of nature, the only actual source of knowledge,
because they conflict with what they believe to be immutable truths,
but are in reality conclusions drawn from false premisses; they tend to
an acquiescent and obscurantist spirit in the belief that such moral
and intellectual laziness is “doing God’s will,” when that will is in
reality their own personification of cosmic direction.

Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct. Man can perhaps
get along with empirical methods and ideas which turn out on analysis
to be only symbols, provided that he does not attempt difficult
construction. He can have some sort of a religion, which will be some
sort of a help to him, even when its so-called certitudes are only
a collection of mixed metaphors, in the same way as he can practise
agriculture on a basis of mingled empiricism and superstition. But just
as he is finding that he is only able to raise agricultural efficiency
to its highest pitch by relying on the result of scientific method, as
when he uses synthetic nitrates instead of ploughing in a leguminous
crop, or just as a power-station would be very difficult to run if the
staff had only symbolic ideas on the nature of electricity no closer
to the real than is the symbolism of most religions, so if he does not
bring scientific analysis into the intellectual side of his religion,
he cannot realize religious possibilities. True that in a sense all
knowledge and intellectual presentation is symbolic: but there is the
world of difference between the merely analogical symbolism which takes
one idea or thing as symbolic of another because there is some degree
of similarity between the two and the first is more familiar, and the
scientific symbolism which strives to find a scientific counter, so
to speak, which shall represent particular phenomena as closely as
possible, and them alone.

Not only this, but religion unillumined by reason degenerates into an
evil thing. Religion seems to be a natural activity and need of the
average human mind. But when its more primitive components are allowed
to dominate, when the instinctive and emotional in it are unchecked by
reflection and rational thought, then, as history too clearly shows
us, it becomes a cruel and obstructive power. To the fine mind of
Lucretius, the religion that he knew was the greatest enemy:--


     “Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
     Horribili super aspecta mortalibus instans.”


And he replies to the charge of impiety by pointing to the foul deeds
perpetrated by religion:


               “--Quod contra saepius illa
     Religio peparit scelerosa atque impia facta.”


Many another thinker and reformer has felt the same.

There are those who, like Jung, believe that religion is an illusion
but also a necessity to the bulk of mankind, and therefore should be
encouraged. But the broader and truer view, I believe, is the one we
have adopted. We have seen that, in man, evolution has reached a new
plane, on which not only have new aims and values appeared, but the
possibility of new and better evolutionary methods has arisen. These
new methods are only possible, however, in so far as life, in man, uses
her new gifts. The progress of civilization is a constant conflict
between that part of man which he shares with the beasts and that part
which is his alone--between man as no more than a new kind of animal
and man as a rational and spiritual being. In so far as religion
is irrational, it is no more than a dog baying the moon, no higher
activity than the nocturnal concerts of Howler monkeys, no more and no
less moral than the nobility of birds or beasts to a strangely-marked
or unusually-built member of their species, or the sense of being
a trespasser so often shown by a bird that has ventured upon the
nesting-territory of another. Recall the “Natural Religion” of Robert
Browning’s _Caliban_; on which plane did that grow? But when we have
discovered its real bases, and subordinated its impulsive promptings
to the control of reason and of the new, higher values in which reason
must always share--then it becomes an instrument for helping in the
conquest of the new regions which lie open to man as individual and as
species. And in this it resembles every other human activity without
exception.

In religion the danger has always been that analogy and symbolism be
taken for more than they are--for scientific knowledge, or even for an
absolute certainty of some still higher order--and conclusions then
drawn from it. The conclusions follow with full syllogistic majesty:
but their feet are of clay--their premisses are false.

If we find that this is the case to-day, we not only may but we
must endeavour to make our formulation correspond more closely with
reality, must not be content to take one thing in place of another, the
familiar for the unfamiliar, must set about destroying the old false
formulation for fear of the further harm that it will do by its hold
upon man’s incurable habit of drawing conclusions.

Nor does this in any way interfere with or detract from the private and
unique experiences that in the long run _are_ religion. They remain;
but they are thus hindered from becoming draped with delusion, from
leading their possessor into false courses.

We may put it in another way. Too often in the past, religious
experience has been one-sided--one-or-other-sided instead of two-sided.
The intellectually-inclined, the theologians, frame more or less
adequate ideas of external reality, but fail in the majority of cases
to set their own house in order, to organize the inner reality to react
with the outer; they have theory without practice, are Dry-as-dusts.
On the other hand, the emotionally-minded who are gifted besides
with organizing and intuitive power, the mystics--they build up
their own souls into a desired and lovely edifice, in which too they
have constructed a spiritual machinery capable of viewing external
realities on a new plane, under a more highly synthesized aspect; but
they neglect the precise analysis of that outer reality, and so can
only speak in the barest symbols and metaphors, and cannot put their
hard-won knowledge into a form available for others. They have that
non-communicable skill which is that of the craftsman alone as opposed
to the craftsman who is also in some degree a scientist. We know good
mysticism from bad, as we know good art from bad--as definitely and
as personally. And we are sure that good mysticism, like good art, is
somehow of supreme, transcendent importance; but almost always it has
remained like a purely symbolic art, not having for others the value
which it should have or did have for the mystic himself, because not
properly enchained, as the French say, with stern and immutable fact.
And of the theologian we feel that he gives us the grammar, not the
spirit, that he does not help us toward the supremely important act of
experiencing, but only to understanding experience if we chance to have
had it.

One word on the problem of transcendence. The mystic will tell us that
transcendence is a hall-mark of religion at its highest. His mode of
experience transcends normal experience; things of everyday life become
surcharged with new, transcendent values; he has transcended from a
plane of disharmony to one of harmony. But the mystic is not alone in
this. Familiar examples are best examples: and the transcendence of
the lover’s experience is so familiar that all mankind is divided into
those who have it, those who long for it, and those who laugh at it.
But the great philosopher too must mediate between the transcendent and
mankind, and the true artist also, and the moralist worthy of the name.

What goes under this technical name of transcendence, therefore, is the
product of some special psychological mechanism which may be at work
in the most diverse spheres. It we wish to substitute one technical
phrase for another, we can say that it consists in the successful
attachment of what we have called absolute value to some human
activity, so as to make it for the time at least unitary, dominant, and
all-embracing. But psychologically speaking the genesis of “absolute
values” depends upon the generalizing of particular values; the raising
of them to the highest possible pitch; and the putting of them and
the rest of the mental organization into a relation in which they are
permanently or temporarily the dominating head and front, and are
connected with and gain strength and support from all the rest of the
mind.

The problem of transcendence, in other words, is not one of divine
inspiration, of wholly mysterious experience, but one special case of
the problem of sublimation; and as such it is to be investigated by
psychological science, to be understood, to be democratized, to be made
more available to all who wish for it.

The most ardent enemies of traditional religion have often professed
the most transcendental type of morality. Some men are pragmatic
and utilitarian in regard to Truth; by others she is worshipped as
fanatically as any goddess. So some men deliberately make _mariages
de convenance_; to others, the transcendence of their love is such
that they precipitate themselves into what can only be described as
_mariages d’inconvenance_.

I have dilated upon this at some length, because those whom we may
call the religious writers on religion so often lay such stress on this
question of transcendence and its special value and importance. But you
do not--in the long run at least--make a thing more important by giving
it an imposing title; you only give it a false exclusiveness.

Transcendence is the experimental side of what we have been describing
all along: it is the finding of unity in diversity, the synthesis
of discord in harmony and in especial the finding of something of
supreme value (and therefore dominant) which can be linked up with the
whole extent of our mental being. Transcendence in religion differs
from transcendence in art or love only in its objects. In love the
discrepancy between the object and the ideal values hung round it is
often so glaring as to provoke laughter from cynics, compassion from
the rest. In art, the operations by which an artist turns a collection
of mean and commonplace objects into a beautiful and single whole,
a poet invests failure and death with authentic tragedy, or drags
every-day to a seat in eternity, are just as transcendent as that by
which the mystic converts the relation between the warring passions
of his soul and the infinite catalogue of differences which he finds
around him into what he can only speak of as a divine communion,
all-satisfying in itself, all-important for the conduct of his life.
Science can here help religion by analysing and interpreting phenomena
such as transcendence, paring the false from the true, cutting down
false claims, substituting the hopefulness of natural causation for
the illogical vagaries of supernaturalism and incommunicability.

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

I may perhaps be allowed to close with a few more practical aspects of
the problem.

Many religious ideas and practices, as man’s thought clarified
itself, have proved to be unserviceable, and have been thrown on the
lumber-heap, or left only with the losers in the race. It is impossible
for any educated man nowadays to believe in the efficacy of magic,
or of animal sacrifice; to accept the first chapter of Genesis as
literally true; or to believe that God has human parts and passions.
But there was a time when all these could be, and were, believed.

The time is obviously coming when a great many other ideas must be cast
aside in favour of new ones. If you have followed me, you will agree
that it is impossible for me and those who think like me to believe in
God as a person, a ruler, to continue to speak of God as a spiritual
_Being_ in the ordinary way. Consequently, although the value of prayer
persists in so far as it is meditative and a self-purification of
the mind, yet its commonly accepted petitive value must fall to the
ground;[52] so must all idea of miracle and of direct inspiration;
so must all that is involved in the ordinary materialist ideas of
ritual, self-denial, and worship as merely propitiation or “acceptable
incense”; so must all the externally-projected parts of the ideas
concerning the ordaining of special priests; so must all notion of
our having a complete, peculiar, or absolute knowledge of God, or of
there being a divinely-appointed rule of conduct or a divinely-revealed
belief.

On such matters, most advanced thinkers have been long in general
agreement. But there is one very important point which, so far as I
know, has been very little touched upon--chiefly, I think, because such
radical thinkers have been for the most part destructive, and so have
not envisaged this particular side of the question.

I hope I have been able to convince you that the scientific manner of
thinking can lay the foundation for something constructive in religion:
this great problem, however, remains: what sort of form or organization
shall any such new-moulded religion take on itself?

We have just decided that fixed and rigid dogma is impossible, and that
completeness is out of the question. Yet humanity craves for certainty
and is not content to leave any factor out of the scheme of things.

To this we answer that it is here that real faith enters. We cannot
know the absolute, nor have we discovered a goal for our efforts. But
we have discovered a unity embracing all that we know, and a direction
starting at the first moment to which our reconstructive thought can
penetrate, continuing till to-day, and showing an acceleration of
speed on which we may raise our hopes for the future.

We do not know all. For instance, I have studiously avoided ever
mentioning the word _immortality_, since I believe that Science cannot
yet profitably discuss that question. But the discovery of unity in all
that has so far been studied gives us reasonable faith that its wings
will reach out to cover all that we shall still be enabled to learn,
while the unbroken continuity of evolutionary direction gives us the
same sort of right to believe that it will continue to-morrow and on
into time as we have to believe that apples will continue to fall to
the earth.

The study of evolution may give us a further help. We have seen how the
final steps of the highest forms of animals have been in the direction
of plasticity of organization: we see it in the rise of man from
mammals, in higher as against more primitive levels of human culture,
in great men as against ordinary men. There can be no doubt that its
acquisition constitutes a step in evolutionary progress. Plasticity is
needed in any new religion. And plasticity means tolerance, means the
reduction of fixity of ritual, of convention, of dogma, of clericalism.

It is clear that, as complexity increases, need will be felt for a
finer adjustment of satisfaction to mood, a more delicate adaptation of
religion to the individual. A few types of ceremony satisfied primitive
races: an elaborate system, fixed in essence, fluctuating in detail,
has grown up in modern Christianity. But the more complex the mind,
the less does it like to have to “wait till Sunday”--the less is it
satisfied with the solely biblical point of view, or the literary and
musical level of Hymns A. and M.

The less also is it satisfied with the mediation of a priest.
Priest (or Priest-King) is sole mediator in most savage tribes: his
mediation is enormously important in the Roman Catholic Church: less
so in Protestant Churches: until with the progressive raising of the
spiritual and cultural level, it is perhaps possible that he may become
an obstacle instead of a help. Mediators there must always be. They are
the great ones--prophets and poets, heroes, philosophers, musicians,
artists, and all who discover or interpret or display what for the
ordinary man is hidden or difficult or rare. They mediate between the
utmost attainable by man and man in the lump. As Hegel says of one
group of these mediators, the artists, it is the function of their
art to deliver to the domain of feeling and delight of vision all
that the mind may possess of essential and transcendent Being. But,
with the spread of invention and the change of civilization, their
mediations are becoming more and more readily accessible to all. I
can get, on the whole, more satisfactory mediation from three or four
feet of properly filled bookshelf than from a dozen priests. Milton
will give me doctrine if I want it, but stupendously: Wordsworth will
reveal nature: Shakespeare the hearts of men: Blake can put men into
a mystical, Shelley into an intellectual ecstasy, while Keats and a
dozen others can open universal doors of beauty. What is more, if I
have had the mediation of wise parents and good teachers, or to be so
fortunate as to be enthusiastic, I find that in many things I can be
my own mediator, in the same way as the Protestant found that he could
read his Bible and eat the holy bread and wine for himself as well or
better than the priest could do it for him.

Whatever we may say or like, it is an obvious fact that much of what
is essential in religious experience, which in a simpler society was
only attainable in prayer and sacrifice, communal ceremony or ritual
worship, is now attainable to an increasing degree through literature,
music, drama, art, and is, again, as a matter of fact, so attained by
an increasing number of people who do not profess a creed or belong
to a church. So that, as regards the personal, individual side of
religion, many of the functions of Churches will inevitably be better
performed through direct contact between the individual and the
mediator--philosopher, poet, artist, or whatever he be--who provides
the experience.

There remains public worship and community-religion. It is clear that
whereas a Church in the Middle Ages was not only Church but also Museum
of curiosities, Art-gallery and Theatre, and in large measure also took
the place of our press and public libraries, now it is none of these
things. There is now less reason for public worship, fewer functions
for it to perform. On the other hand a religion is essentially in one
aspect social, and not only does the unity of nature demand a unity of
religion, but such unity of religion would be of the highest importance
as a bond of civilization and a guarantee of the federalist as against
the solely nationalist ideal. Moreover, to many types of mind, and to
almost all men in certain circumstances, the partaking in a public
religious ceremony in common with others is of real importance. It is
safe to say, therefore, that these ceremonies will continue, however
much modified, and that for them a mediator or priest, even if but
temporarily acting as such, will be needed. The problem is largely
that of combining in public worship the religious effectiveness of the
simple, the hallowed, and the universally familiar--such as inheres in
many of the prayers, psalms, and hymns of the Church to-day--with the
spontaneity and immediacy which, for instance, are to be found at a
devotional meeting of the Society of Friends.

In any case, the new intellectual premisses once granted, the
limitations imposed on human mind once understood, the important thing
is to give a greater vigour and reality to religious experience itself,
whether personal and private or social and public. It is just here that
Science may help, where knowledge may be power. Atonement, conversion,
sense of grace, ecstasy, prayer, sacrifice--the meaning and value of
these and of other religious acts and experiences can be put on a
proper psychological basis, they can be shorn of excrescences, and
their practice take its place in normal spiritual development. That
is of the essence of any religion rooted in scientific ideas--that
comprehension should make practice easier and better worth while.

I am only too painfully aware of the omissions which such a cursory
treatment of the subject inevitably involves. I have given you, I know,
little but dry bones; but bones are the framework necessary before
impatient life can animate a new form. If Science can construct that
form, the emotions and hopes and energies of humanity will vivify and
clothe it. It is with the aid of such intellectual scaffolding that the
common mind of humanity in the future, inevitably rooted in scientific
conceptions as it will be, must try to raise that much-desired
building, a religion common to all.

In any case, I shall be more than content if I have been able to
persuade you first that the term God, just as much as the terms
Energy, say, or Justice, has a real meaning and scientifically-based
sense. Second, that the idea of God has and will continue to have an
important biological function in man as denoting an idea, organized
in a particular way, of the whole of the reality with which he is
in contact. Thirdly, that the physical and biological sciences, in
discovering the unity of matter and energy, and the direction operating
in cosmic evolution, have provided a real basis for what up till now
have been only theological speculations. Fourthly, that psychological
science, in revealing some of the mechanism of mind, is helping us to
appreciate the value of so-called mystical experience, is laying a
foundation for the proper spiritual training and development of human
mind, and shows us how the idea of God may be efficacious as a dominant
idea in the all-important process of sublimation. And finally that,
since the scientific mode of thought is of general and not merely local
or temporary validity, to build a religion on its basis is to make it
possible for that religion to acquire a stability, a universality, and
a practical value hitherto unattained.

We are yet at the very beginning of that task, but I cannot close
better than by reminding you of another biological fact of importance,
that from all analogy the human species is yet near the beginning of
its evolutionary career, and that man has before him vast tracts of
time to set against the vastness of his tasks.

A chapter in the history of Earth closed with the appearance of Man.
In man, the _Weltstoff_ had been made able to think and feel, to love
beauty and truth--the cosmos had generated soul. A new chapter then
began, a chapter in which we all are characters. Matter had flowered in
soul. Soul has now to mould matter.

That moulding of matter by spirit is, under one aspect, Science; under
another, Art; under still another, Religion. Let us be careful not to
allow the moulding forces to counteract each other when they might be
made to co-operate.


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FOOTNOTES:

[44] W. James, ’09, p. 21.

[45] See Danysz, ’21.

[46] See Danysz, ’21.

[47] See Haldane, ’21; Thouless, ’23.

[48] A confusion of thought easily arises here. It may be absolutely
true that 2 and 2 make 4; we may be absolutely right in certain cases
to tell a lie; or may find an expression of absolute beauty in some one
lovely thing. But we may grow to find that same thing aesthetically
unsatisfying; we can imagine a state of society in which it would never
be right to lie; while our correct knowledge of elementary arithmetic
is something very partial and incomplete considered in relation to
mathematical truth as a whole.

[49] It is interesting to note that a scientific treatment of the
problem may force an author almost unwittingly to similar conclusions.
For instance, in Jevons’ book (’10) the term “God” hardly occurs at
all, whereas the phrase “the idea of God” is to be found on nearly
every page. If, as we are urging, God as efficient agent in the world
and as reality in contact with human beings _is_ outer world organized
as idea, the reason for such periphrasis at once appears.

[50] See Prince, ’06 and ’16; Freud, ’22; Jung, ’19; Rivers, ’20;
Brown, ’22.

[51] See Trotter, ’19.

[52] See Turner, ’16.



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|Transcriber’s note:                              |
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|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.  |
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