II
After considering Darwin’s view of the practical working of his discovery, it is interesting to sum up, so far as is possible in such vague and indefinite matters, one’s own impression of the effect of the popular acceptance of that discovery. And here I must emphasize that I am not dealing with philosophical or scientific theories, least of all with any such theories of my own, but am simply trying to suggest what seem to me the indirect and secondary workings of scientific theory in the minds of vast masses of people, even of those conventionally connected with the churches of various denominations. It is hardly necessary to say that Darwin’s own teaching cannot be held directly responsible for those workings, and that many of them he would have completely rejected. Moreover, it must also be recognized that Darwin in large measure summarized and embodied the general scientific drift of the age. Especially we must not overlook the immense influence of practical as well as theoretical science in affecting contemporary life. An excellent editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature (May 8, 1926) emphasizes the importance of scientific invention and machinery on nineteenth- and twentieth-century living, and this importance, both direct and indirect, is almost incalculable. For example, printing has spread thought among the masses. The sewing-machine has changed the world of woman. The extraordinary development of transportation has enormously increased the superficial bustle and distraction of life, to the serious detriment of meditative and spiritual interests. Nevertheless, the evolutionary theory may be regarded as typifying and formulating all these complicated tendencies more fully and effectively than any other. How the theory has worked is well suggested in the pregnant words of Professor Osborn, though he is careful to insist that it is the misunderstanding, not the understanding, of evolutionary doctrine, that has caused the evil: ‘It may be said without scientific or religious prejudice that the world-wide loss of the older religious and Biblical foundation of morals has been one of the chief causes of human decadence in conduct, in literature, and in art. This, however, is partly due to a complete misunderstanding of creative evolution, which is a process of ascent, not of descent.’[178]
Let us attempt to follow the workings of evolution in various phases of life and thought. Take, first, politics. We cannot perhaps establish two strongly opposed points of view in regard to the phenomena of political life better than by contrasted quotations. President Coolidge, speaking on October 29, 1926, said: ‘I do not know any adequate support for our form of government except that which comes from religion.’[179] Professor Keller, writing of ‘Societal Evolution,’ says: ‘What moves men ... is not thought, but emotion. And what sets emotion going is interest.... What sets the revolutions in motion, with the result of drastic selection in the codes, is not the cerebration of any one over great issues, but the unendurable discomfort and awakened emotions of the masses. Their interests have been so outraged that anything seems likely to be better than the present.’[180]
The great democratic movement of the past hundred and fifty years naturally far antedated Darwinism. Its roots were laid in the eighteenth century, with the teachings of the French philosophers, chiefly Rousseau, and the practical action of the American and French Revolutions. But the views of evolutionary science fitted admirably with the intense individualism of democracy, its proclamation of the right of the individual man to assert himself against every and all others, high or low, rich or poor.
After democracy has made its way in the world, it is interesting to see the effort of theology to claim it and to urge that the value and importance of the individual is a gradual effect and an essential element of Christian doctrine. It is true that Christianity has always proclaimed the equality of all souls before God and their equal need of salvation. But it is equally true that the Church has always got along comfortably with every sort of tyranny and for centuries solemnly sponsored the divine right of kings, alleging at all times the unfailing text, ‘Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.’ And it is more deeply true that the natural Christian emphasis upon the importance of another world tends to create indifference to the political concerns of this, so that, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, revivalists like Moody could regard political movements and reforms as matters of minor consequence in face of the imminent cataclysm which would wipe out this world and its doings altogether. The most vigorous and energetic insistence on the rights of man as a mortal came from those who concerned themselves very little with his immortality.
And if indifference to the other world affected politics, it has had an even greater effect in the more general regions of sociology. So long as the poor and wretched were taught—by the rich—that their sojourn here was infinitesimally insignificant compared with the bliss that awaited them hereafter, they could endure with comparative patience. Lazarus could let the dogs lick his sores with fair content, while he was comforted with the reflection that an equally bad day was coming for Dives, and a great deal more of it. But when he became convinced that this world was all, Lazarus bestirred himself, and invented Socialism and Anarchism and Bolshevism and many other isms with capital letters, which might enable him to attend to the matter of Dives right here and to see to it that, if he himself could not share all the blessings of the rich, at least the rich might be made as miserable as he. We have become so gradually accustomed to an adjustment to the standpoint of this world that we hardly realize how completely and vastly it has entered into the views and opinions of even those who do not explicitly admit it.
Take again the influence of science in the realm of art. From the close of the eighteenth century external nature began to play a rôle in the arts that it had never played before and the prominence of landscape in painting was as notable as natural description in literature. But during the first half of the nineteenth century this natural influence was romantic, imaginative, emotional. With the middle years the scientific tendency made itself felt, and art became more closely and intensely realistic. This is perhaps most generally obvious in the literary world, and the great novelists of France from Balzac on embody the scientific movement of which Darwin is so eminently representative. Most significant of all in this regard is the great epic of Zola, the history of the Rougon-Macquart family, in twenty solid volumes. I am not for a moment vouching for the solidity of Zola’s science, which may be quite as fantastic in its way as the romance of Dumas. The point is that Zola believed himself to be typifying and illustrating scientific tendencies, and that the popularly accepted notion of the struggle for existence, with all its blind and bitter cruelty, its pitiful tragedy of the warfare and merciless destruction of the animal world, was transferred to humanity in the endless pages, as gloomy as they are powerful, of the great French imaginative drama. And it is interesting, as we come right down to the present day, to find a thoughtful critic attributing the ugly and realistic tendencies of current American fiction not to any passing upheaval caused by the World-War, but to just this gradual influence of scientific thought making itself felt everywhere: ‘What we are looking at is not the product of a decade or an episode, even so supreme an episode as battle, but the fructifying of scientific doctrines that for several decades have been seeping into society. What we are witnessing is the yielding of the romantic view of life to the scientific.’[181]
Thus scientific conceptions, working in the popular mind, have fixed it upon the affairs of this world, and have reduced the various phases of the other, formerly so immensely important, to a shadowy inconsistency. Science, for example, has disposed of hell with ludicrous completeness. The old material hell, as Dante and the Middle Ages viewed it, a repository definitely under ground, with devils busily engaged over boiling cauldrons, has surely vanished, never to return. In the scientifically arranged physical universe there is no place for it. Even my friend Moody, whose ideas of heaven were so specific, does not attempt any such physical location of hell. And it is true that the orthodox still take refuge in moral torments, prolonged if not eternal horrors, which the erring spirit in wilful perversity inflicts upon itself. But it is doubtful if even the orthodox continue to take even these very seriously. There cannot be many persons who still suffer from the brooding gloom with which the concrete vision of hell genuinely oppressed thousands of sensitive souls in ages past. And in some respects this may be set down as a gain, since the misery to the sensitive souls was very real, while how far the fear of hell acted as a deterrent to souls of another order is always open to question. But, gain or loss, it will hardly be disputed that the boiling depths of hell have largely boiled away.
Unfortunately hell, in departing, has shown a marked tendency to drag heaven with it. The same material difficulty of course obtains here also. Moody used to proclaim that heaven was tangible, mapable, a city like New York, only with more agreeable streets and doubtless better traffic arrangements. But it is hard for the most devout believer to-day to take so concrete a view. And it is not only that the pearly gates and golden pavements have gone. Their disappearance has given a rude jar to the belief in any kind of future life whatever. I am merely speaking of the average American man in the street, and perhaps of even the woman also. The negative views in such matters announced shortly before his death by so good, so upright, so in the largest sense Christian a man as Luther Burbank, are beyond a doubt the views more or less definitely formulated of millions of men in America to-day. The best they can say is, that it is their business to live the life here in the most energetic, straightforward, profitable way they can, to see that after their deaths their wives and children are provided for, and to leave any other lives to take care of themselves.
And then there is the question of God, and it seems that He has a tendency to vanish also, with the disappearance of His celestial habitation, so that I feel a pathetic touch of tenderness for departed grandeur in capitalizing the pronoun. The scientific sequence of cause and effect has permeated so thoroughly the minds of even those who do not think of it in formal terms that the old feeling of the intervention of Divine Providence in daily affairs and the old intimate relation with a personal Father have been greatly weakened where they have not been altogether forgotten. As Mrs. Darwin suggests, God grows further and further away. It is sometimes urged that this remoteness is connected with a deeper and more serious reverence, that our relation to the immanent Deity has become more worthily and profoundly spiritual; but there is great danger of revering Him out of existence. In the Middle Ages men treated God as familiarly as if He were a friend round the corner, but they felt Him.
Worship, at any rate Protestant worship, tends to lose its devotional character and the overpowering sense of the Divine presence, and to become a mere polite fraternizing for social purposes. You hear many people say that they worship God better alone in the fields than in the churches. As to some of the churches the feeling is natural enough, but I wonder how many think of Him on the golf-links, except in the form of profanity, or in the hurry and swirl of traffic-crowded highways, or even in the fields, if anybody ever gets there any more. And prayer? I have spoken in connection with Darwin of my old friend who prayed, though he had nothing to pray to. It may be that more keep up the habit than we suppose. But with how many is it still a passionate intercession for divine help in their daily needs or a means of self-forgetful communion with the comforting, supporting, everlasting Arms? How many boys still pray to have fence-rails lifted off them or to win in their games of baseball and football? Can we possibly conceive such a state of things as is indicated in Finney’s description of a revival a hundred years ago? ‘Indeed the town was full of prayer. Go where you would, you heard the voice of prayer. Pass along the street and if two or three Christians happened to be together, they were praying. Wherever they met, they prayed.’[182]
The most striking of all the dislocations effected by the intrusion of the scientific attitude is in the banishment of sin. Not only original sin has been swept away with the disappearance of the older theology and the establishment of evolutionary doctrines, but the uneasy, haunting torment of conscience and remorse appears to have been greatly diminished. No doubt it still, as always, chiefly harasses those who have least need of it. No doubt some persons still vex themselves to agony for imaginary sins. But vast numbers, especially of the younger generation, are like the heroine of Lemâitre’s play, ‘a little woman who without any very definite idea of the meaning of positivism, Darwinism, struggle for life, etc., lives in a moral atmosphere impregnated with all these things.’[183] And as a consequence, her moral attitude undergoes the great transformation of the modern world, by which an old-fashioned sin becomes simply a new-fashioned mistake. In other words, expediency, the belief that it does not pay to do wrong, takes the place of the old divine sanction, divine command, divine reward and punishment.
There are many who take a very sanguine view of all this. To them it seems that the old, instinctive sense of sin was stupid and caused far more misery than it cured. Expediency, or enlightened self-interest, working with the larger interest of the community, is expected more and more effectively and satisfactorily to take the place of the older categorical imperative. But to others it seems that expediency is but a chill and slender reed to lean upon when the stress of passion and temptation comes. ‘Oaths,’ says Shakespeare, ‘are straw to the fire i’ the blood.’ The dread of hell was often a mild deterrent enough, but it is doubtful whether remote considerations of expediency will suffice to deter even so effectively as hell-fire.
To these old-fashioned and conservative persons it seems likely that the decay of a divine origin will weaken and break down the springs of moral action and that in an enlightened self-interest the enlightenment is hardly powerful enough to abolish the selfishness. Some of these persons have even been disposed to see in the World War something at least of the culmination of evolutionary doctrines about the struggle for life and survival of the fittest, and it is certainly in the protest against these doctrines that the Fundamentalists find their best justification for attempting to set back and repress the movement of human thought, if there were any justification whatever for the unwisdom of an effort to dam the Mississippi with a sheet of paper.