In a race of inferior animals, any maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection. But in man there is a wide interval between the highest and lowest degree of completeness which are compatible with maintenance of life; in all grades of civilization above the lowest, there are so many kinds of superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstanding accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot, by itself, rectify any particular unfitness. Hence, the action of natural selection upon man has long since been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions. Therefore the wicked flourish. Vice is but slowly eliminated, because mankind has so many other qualities, besides the bad ones, which enable it, in spite of them, to subsist and achieve progress.
The fundamental difference between civilized man and the savage lies in the representative power, the imagination, by which men comprehend pleasure and pain in others. Use and disuse, in place of natural selection, have come to be paramount with man; and though the ethical emotions are still too feeble, they will be more and more strengthened by use, while the manifestation of selfish and hateful feelings will be more and more weakened by disuse. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state, in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state, in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The "original sin" of theology is the brute inheritance, which is being gradually eliminated; and the message of Christianity: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" will be realized in the state of universal peace towards which mankind is tending. Strife and Sorrow shall disappear. Peace and Love shall reign supreme. The goal of evolution is the perfecting of man, whereby we see, more than ever, that he is the chief object of divine care, the fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe.
We know soul only in connection with body. Yet nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; the molecular movements of the brain and the phenomena of thought and feeling are merely concomitants related in some unknown way. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. He who regards man as the consummate fruition of creative energy and the chief object of divine care, is almost irresistibly driven to the belief that the soul's career is not completed with the life upon the earth. Difficulties to this theory he will meet; yet the alternative view contains difficulties at least as great; nor is there any problem in the simplest and most exact departments of science which does not speedily lead us to a transcendental problem that we can neither solve nor elude. A broad common sense argument has often to be called in, where keen-edged metaphysical analysis has confessed itself baffled. The doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of man; the Darwinian theory, properly understood, replaces as much teleology as it destroys. In the Titanic events of the development of worlds from the nebular mist and their after-destruction, we may find no signs of purpose, or even of a dramatic tendency; but on the earth we do find distinct indications of a dramatic tendency; though doubtless not of purpose in the limited human sense. Are we to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks just for the pleasure of knocking them down again? On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. "I can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the evolution of humanity this divine spark [the soul] may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material forms and endure forever. Such a crowning wonder seems to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has been ineffably beautiful and marvellous in all its myriad stages."
Fiske gives some further definition of social evolution in man, in his "Cosmic Philosophy" (1874). He there denies the incompatibility of free-will with causation, saying that "it is the doctrine of lawlessness, and not the causationist doctrine, which is incompatible with liberty and destructive of responsibility."[54]
He further postulates heterogeneity of the environment as "the chief proximate determining cause of social progress," and defines such evolution as "a continuous establishment of psychical relations within the community, in conformity to physical and psychical relations arising in the environment, during which both the community and the environment pass from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the constituent units of the community become ever more distinctly individual."[55] "The progress of a community, as of an organism, is a process of adaptation—the continuous establishment of inner relations in conformity to outer relations. If we contemplate material civilization under its widest aspect, we discover its legitimate aim to be the attainment and maintenance of an equilibrium between the wants of men and the outward means of satisfying them. And while approaching this goal, society is ever acquiring in its economic structure both greater heterogeneity and greater specialization. It is not only that agriculture, manufactures, commerce, legislation, the acts of the ruler, the judge, and the physician, have, since ancient times, grown immeasurably multiform, both in their processes and in their appliances; but it is also that this specialization has resulted in the greatly increased ability of society to adapt itself to the emergencies by which it is now beset."[56] Religion, too, is adjustment; form after form has been outgrown and perished, yet the life of Christianity, incorporated in ever higher forms, is continually renewed. The omission of the moral feeling, as a factor, from Comte's interpretation of the progress of society, is a fatal defect, since moral and social progress depend more on feelings than on ideas. As Wallace shows, tribes which combined for mutual help and protection, restrained appetite by foresight, and felt sympathy, would have an advantage in the struggle for existence.
"As surely as the astronomer can predict the future state of the heavens, the sociologist can foresee that the process of adaptation must go on until, in a remote future, it comes to an end in proximate equilibrium. The increasing interdependence of human interests must eventually go far to realize the dream of the philosophic poet, of a Parliament of Man, a Federation of the World.
"'When the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,' and when the desires of each individual shall be in proximate equilibrium with the means of satisfying them and with the simultaneous desires of all surrounding individuals."[57]
FOOTNOTES:
[54] Vol. II. p. 189.
[55] Ibid. p. 223, 224.