I was so ill that I thought with Hamlet, “the rest is silence.” But my wiry constitution has unexpectedly weathered the storm, and I have every reason to believe that with renunciation of the devil and all his works (i. e., public speaking, dining, and being dined, etc.) my faculties may be unimpaired for a good spell yet. And whether my lease is long or short, I mean to devote them to the work I began in the paper on the Evolution of Theology.
That essay was first published in two sections in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, and was the sequel to the eighth chapter of his Hume. The Romanes Lecture supplemented the last chapter of that book. All these are accessible enough to render superfluous any abstract of their contents. But the tribute due to David Hume, who may well-nigh claim place among the few but fit company of Pioneers, warrants reference to his anticipation of accepted theories of the origin of belief in spiritual beings in his Natural History of Religion, published in 1757. He says: “There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.... The unknown causes which continually employ their thought, appearing always in the same aspect, are all apprehended to be of the same kind or species. Nor is it long before we ascribe to them thought, and reason, and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves.” In his address to the Sorbonne on The Successive Advances of the Human Mind, delivered in 1750, Turgot expresses the same idea, touching, as John Morley says in his essay on that statesman, “the root of most of the wrong thinking that has been as a manacle to science.”
The foregoing, and passages of a like order, are made by Huxley the text of his elaborations of the several stages of theological evolution, the one note of all of which is the continuity of belief in supernatural intervention. But more important than the decay of that belief which is the prelude to decay of belief in deity itself as commonly defined, is the resulting transfer of the foundation of morals, in other words, of motives to conduct, from a theological to a social base. Theology is not morality; indeed, it is, too often, immorality. It is concerned with man’s relations to the gods in whom he believes; while morals are concerned with man’s relations to his fellows. The one looks heavenward, wondering what dues shall be paid the gods to win their smiles or ward off their frowns. In old Rome sanctitas or holiness, was, according to Cicero, “the knowledge of the rites which had to be performed.” These done, the gods were expected to do their part. So in new Rome, when the Catholic has attended mass, his share in the contract is ended. Worship and sacrifice, as mere acts toward supernatural beings, may be consonant with any number of lapses in conduct. Morality, on the other hand, looks earthward, and is prompted to action solely by what is due from a man to his fellow-men, or from his fellow-men to him. Its foundation therefore is not in supernatural beliefs, but in social instincts. All sin is thus resolved into an anti-social act: a wrong done by man to man.
This is not merely readjustment; it is revolution. For it is the rejection of theology with its appeals to human obligation to deity, and to man’s hopes of future reward or fears of future punishment; and it is the acceptance of wholly secular motives as incentives to right action. Those motives, having their foundation in the physical, mental, and moral results of our deeds, rest on a stable basis. No longer interlaced with the unstable theological, they neither abide nor perish with it. And one redeeming feature of our time is that the churches are beginning to see this, and to be effected by it. John Morley caustically remarks that “the efforts of the heterodox have taught them to be better Christians than they were a hundred years ago.” Certain extremists excepted, they are keeping dogma in the background, and are laying stress on the socialism which it is contended was at the heart of the teaching of Jesus. Wisely, if not very consistently, they are seeking alliance with the liberal movements whose aim is the “abolition of privilege.” The liberal theologians, in the face of the varying ethical standards which mark the Old Testament and the New, no longer insist on the absoluteness of moral codes, and so fall into line with the evolutionist in his theory of their relativeness. For society in its advance from lower to higher conceptions of duty, completely reverses its ethics, looking back with horror on that which was once permitted and unquestioned.
It is with this checking of “the ape and tiger,” and this fostering of the “angel” in man, that Huxley dealt in his Romanes Lecture. There was much unintelligent, and some wilful, misunderstanding of his argument, else a prominent Catholic biologist would hardly have welcomed it as a possible prelude to Huxley’s submission to the Church. Yet the reasoning was clear enough, and in no wise contravened the application of Evolution to morals. Huxley showed that Evolution is both cosmical and ethical. Cosmic Evolution has resulted in the universe with its non-living and living contents, and since, dealing with the conditions which obtain on our planet, there is not sufficient elbow-room or food for all the offspring of living things, the result is a furious struggle in which the strong win and transmit their advantages to their descendants. Nature is wholly selfish; the race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong.
But there are limits set to that struggle by man in the substitution, also within limits, of social progress for cosmic progress. In this Ethical Evolution selfishness is so far checked as to permit groups of human beings to live together in amity, recognising certain common rights, which restrain the self-regarding impulses. For, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, “that which is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee” (Med., vi, 54). Huxley aptly likens this counter-process to the action of a gardener in dealing with a piece of waste ground. He stamps out the weeds, and plants fragrant flowers and useful fruits. But he must not relax his efforts, otherwise the weeds will return, and the untended plants will be choked and perish. So in conduct. For the common weal, in which the unit shares, thus blending the selfish and the unselfish motives, men check their natural impulses. The emotions and affections which they share with the lower social animals, only in higher degree, are co-operative, and largely help the development of family, tribal, and national life. But once we let these be weakened, and society becomes a bear-garden. Force being the dominant factor in life, the struggle for existence revives in all its primitive violence, and atavism asserts its power. Therefore, although he do the best that in him lies, man can only set limits to that struggle, for the ethical process is an integral part of the cosmic powers, “just as the ‘governor’ in a steam-engine is part of the mechanism of the engine.” As with society, so with its units: there is no truce in the contest. Dr. Plimmer, an eminent bacteriologist, describes to the writer the action of a kind of yeast upon a species of Daphnia, or water-flea. Metschnikoff observed that these yeast-cells, which enter with the animal’s food, penetrate the intestines, and get into the tissues. They are there seized upon by the leukocytes, which gather round the invaders in larger fashion, as if seemingly endowed with consciousness, so marvellous is the strategy. If they win, the Daphnia recovers; if they lose, it dies. “In a similar manner in ourselves certain leukocytes (phagocytes) accumulate at any point of invasion, and pick up the living bacteria,” and in the success or failure of their attack lies the fate of man. Which things are fact as well as allegory; and time is on the side of the bacteria. For as our life is but a temporary arrest of the universal movement toward dissolution, so naught in our actions can arrest the destiny of our kind. Huxley thus puts it in the concluding sentences of his Preface—written in July, 1894, one year before his death—to the reissue of Evolution and Ethics:
“That man, as a ‘political animal,’ is susceptible of a vast amount of improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of his intelligence to the adaptation of the conditions of life to his higher needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt. But, so long as he remains liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as he is compelled to be perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his ends, without and within himself; so long as he is haunted by inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him to acknowledge his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; the prospect of attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there have been many of them. That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organised polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilisation, capable of maintaining and constantly improving itself, until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.”
But only those of low ideals would seek in this impermanence of things excuse for inaction; or worse, for self-indulgence. The world will last a very long time yet, and afford scope for battle against the wrongs done by man to man. Even were it and ourselves to perish to-morrow, our duty is clear while the chance of doing it may be ours. Clifford,—dead before his prime, before the rich promise of his genius had its full fruitage,—speaking of the inevitable end of the earth “and all the consciousness of men” reminds us, in his essay on The First and Last Catastrophe, that we are helped in facing the fact “by the words of Spinoza: ‘The free man thinks of nothing so little as of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.’” “Our interest,” Clifford adds, “lies with so much of the past as may serve to guide our actions in the present, and to intensify our pious allegiance to the fathers who have gone before us and the brethren who are with us; and our interest lies with so much of the future as we may hope will be appreciably affected by our good actions now. Do I seem to say, ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?’ Far from it; on the contrary I say, ‘Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together.’”
Evolution and Ethics was Huxley’s last important deliverance, since the completion of his reply to Mr. Balfour’s “quaintly entitled” Foundations of Belief was arrested by his death on the 30th of June, 1895.
In looking through the Collected Essays, which represent his non-technical contributions to knowledge, there may be regret that throughout his life circumstances were against his doing any piece of long-sustained work, such as that which, for example, the affluence and patience of Darwin permitted him to do. But until Huxley’s later years, and, indeed, through broken health to the end, his work outside official demands had to be done fitfully and piecemeal, or not at all. Notwithstanding this, it has the unity which is inspired by a central idea. The application of the theory of evolution all round imparts a quality of relation to subjects seemingly diverse. And this comes out clearly and strongly in the more orderly arrangement of the material in the new issue of Collected Essays.