Changes of life—Aim of life—Progress of life—Historic aims—Historic waves—Value of life in classes and races of men—Psychology of uncivilized races—Savages—Barbarians—Civilized nations—Educated nations—Three stages of development (lower, middle, and higher) in each of the four classes—Individual and social value of civilized life in the five sections of nutrition, reproduction, movement, sensation, and mental life—Estimate of human life.
The value of human life is seen by us to-day, now that evolution is established, in quite a different light from fifty years ago. We are now accustomed to regard man as a natural being, the most highly developed natural being that we know. The same "eternal iron laws" that rule the evolution of the whole cosmos control our own life. Monism teaches that the universe really deserves its name, and is an all-embracing unified whole—whether we call it God or Nature. Monistic anthropology has now established the fact that man is but a tiny part of this vast whole, a placental mammal, developed from a branch of the order of primates in the later Tertiary Period. Hence, before we seek to estimate the value of man's life, we will cast a glance at the significance of organic life generally.
An impartial survey of the history of organic life on our planet teaches, first of all, that it is a process of constant change. Millions of animals and plants die every second, while other millions replace them; every individual has his definite period of life, whether it lives only a few hours, like the one-day fly or the infusorium, or, like the Wellingtonia, the dragon-tree of Orotava, and many other giant trees, lives for thousands of years. Even the species, the collection of like individuals, is just as transitory, and so are the orders and classes that embrace numbers of species of animals and plants. Most species are confined to a single period of the organic history of the earth; few species or genera pass unchanged through several periods, and not a single one has lived in all the periods. Phylogeny, taking its stand on the facts of paleontology, teaches unequivocally that every specific living form has only existed a longer or shorter period in the course of the many (more than a hundred) million years which make up the history of organic life.
Every living being is an end to itself. On this point all unprejudiced thinkers are agreed, whether, like the teleologist, they believe in an entelechy or dominant as regulator of the vital mechanism, or whether they explain the origin of each special living form mechanically by selection and epigenesis. The older anthropistic idea, that animals and plants were created for man's use, and that the relations of organisms to each other were generally regulated by creative design, is no longer accepted in scientific circles. But it is just as true of the species as of the individual that it lives for itself, and looks above all to self-maintenance. Its existence and "end" are transitory. The progressive development of classes and stems leads slowly but surely to the formation of new species. Every special form of life—the individual as well as the species—is therefore merely a biological episode, a passing phenomenal form in the constant change of life. Man is no exception. "Nothing is constant but change," said the old maxim.
The historical succession of species and classes is, both in the animal and the plant kingdom, accompanied by a slow and steady progress in organization. This is directly and positively taught by paleontology; its creation-medals, the fossils, are unequivocal and irrefutable witnesses to this phylogenetic advance. I have dealt with the subject in my History of Creation, and at the same time shown that both the progressive improvement and the increasing variety of the species can be explained mechanically as necessary consequences of selection. There was no need of a conscious Creator or a transcendental purposiveness to effect this. Scientific and thorough proof of this will be found in the three volumes of my Systematic Phylogeny (1894). I need only refer briefly to the two conspicuous examples we have in the stem-history of the tissue-plants and that of the vertebrates. Of the metaphyta the ferns are the chief groups in the Paleozoic, the gymnosperms in the Mesozoic, and the angiosperms in the Cenozoic age. Of the vertebrates only fishes are found in the Silurian age, dipneusta only begin in the Devonian, and the first mammals are in the Triassic.
A number of false teleological conclusions have been drawn from these facts of progressive modification of forms, as they are given in paleontology. The latest and most developed form of each stem was taken to be the preconceived aim of the series, and its imperfect predecessors were conceived as preparatory stages to the attainment of this aim. It was like the conduct of many historians, who, when a particular race or state has reached a high rank in civilization as a result of its natural endowments and favorable conditions of development, hail it as a "chosen people," and regard its imperfect earlier condition as a deliberately conceived preparatory stage. In point of fact, these evolutionary stages were bound to proceed according as the internal structure (given by heredity) and the outer conditions (provoking adaptation) determined. We cannot admit any conscious direction to a certain end, either in the form of theistic predestination or pantheistic finality. For this we must substitute a simple mechanical causality in the sense of psycho-mechanical monism or hylozoism.
Although the stem-history of plants and animals, like the history of humanity, shows a progressive advance taken as a whole, we find a good deal of vacillation in detail. These historical waves are wholly irregular; in periods of decay the hollows of the waves often persist for a long time, and are then succeeded by a fresh rise to the crest of another wave. New and rapidly advancing groups come to take the place of the old decaying groups, bringing with them a higher stage of organization. Thus, for instance, the ferns of to-day are only a feeble survival of the huge and varied pteridophyta that formed the most conspicuous part of the paleozoic forests in the Devonian and Carboniferous periods; they were ousted in the Secondary Period by their gymnosperm descendants (cycadea and conifers), and these, again, in the Tertiary Period by the angiosperm flowering plants. So among the terrestrial reptiles the modern tortoises, serpents, crocodiles, and lizards are only a feeble remnant of the enormous reptile-fauna that dominated the Secondary Period, the colossal dinosauri, pterosauri, ichtyosauri, and plesiosauri. They were replaced in the Tertiary Period by the smaller but more powerful mammals. In the history of civilization the Middle Ages form a deep valley between the crests of the waves of classical antiquity and modern culture.
These few examples suffice to show that the various classes and orders of living things have a very different value when compared with each other. In regard to their intrinsic aim, self-maintenance, it is true that all organisms are on a level, but in their relations to other living things and to nature as a whole they are of very unequal value. Not only may larger animals and plants retain domination for a long time in virtue of their special use or superior force and mass, but small ones may prevail owing to their power of inflicting injury (bacteria, fungi, parasites, etc.). In the same way the value of the various races and nations is very unequal in human history. A small country like Greece has almost dominated the mental life of Europe for more than two thousand years in virtue of its superior culture. On the other hand, the various tribes of American Indians have, it is true, developed a partial civilization in some parts (Peru and Central America); but, on the whole, they have proved incapable of advancing.
Though the great differences in the mental life and the civilization of the higher and lower races are generally known, they are, as a rule, undervalued, and so the value of life at the different levels is falsely estimated. It is civilization and the fuller development of the mind that makes civilization possible, that raise man so much above the other animals, even his nearest animal relatives, the mammals. But this is, as a rule, peculiar to the higher races, and is found only in a very imperfect form or not at all among the lower. These lower races (such as the Veddahs or Australian negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes or dogs) than to civilized Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives. The views on the subject of European nations which have large colonies in the tropics, and have been in touch with the natives for centuries, are very realistic, and quite different from the ideas that prevail in Germany. Our idealistic notions, strictly regulated by our academic wisdom and forced by our metaphysicians into the system of their abstract ideal-man, do not at all tally with the facts. Hence we can explain many of the errors of the idealistic philosophy and many of the practical mistakes that have been made in the recently acquired German colonies; these would have been avoided if we had had a better knowledge of the low psychic life of the natives (cf. the writings of Gobineau and Lubbock).
The grave errors that have been maintained in psychology for centuries are mostly due to a neglect of the comparative and genetic methods and the narrow employment of self-observation, or the introspective method; they are also partly due to the fact that metaphysicians generally make their own highly developed mind—a scientifically trained reason—the starting-point of their inquiry, and regard this as representative of the human mind in general, and thus build up their ideal scheme. The gulf between this thoughtful mind of civilized man and the thoughtless animal soul of the savage is enormous—greater than the gulf that separates the latter from the soul of the dog. Kant would have avoided many of the defects of his critical philosophy, and would not have formulated some of his powerful dogmas (such as the immortality of the soul, or the categorical imperative) if he had made a thorough and comparative study of the lower soul of the savage, and phylogenetically deduced the soul of civilized man therefrom.