Evolution

by F. B. Jevons

The pity of it is that the process of evolution should require not merely man's physical destruction, but his moral destruction also; that the ruin of his body should be preceded by the ruin of his soul; that in his regressive metamorphosis he should be compelled, by the struggle for existence and the instinct of self-preservation, to play the traitor to one after another of his ideals of tenderness, of pity, and of love. The fittest to survive will be those who are most completely adapted to the altered environment, who are resolved to succeed in a struggle for existence in which success can be obtained by brutishness alone. The least fitted to the new conditions, and the first to perish therefore, will be those with whom self does not come first. With their destruction the competition between their less scrupulous survivors will become fiercer and still more cruel. And this process will be repeated again and again, each generation transmitting cunning and cruelty intensified to the next. Our great cities already breed men degraded below the level of the lowest savages known to us, but even they can give us but little idea of what the struggle for existence will yet produce from the ruins of civilisation in the course of the Evolution of Inhumanity.

While proclaiming that "the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle," and that at the best the ethical process can maintain itself only for a relatively short time, "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," Mr. Huxley held that our duty lay "not in imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it."[3] "Cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature," and though we know that the enemy's triumph must be complete, that the defeat of the good cause is preordained, that we and ours must be annihilated, we must remain at our posts, fighting to the end without hope.

It seems, then, that man possesses two kinds of knowledge: he knows to some extent what is, and to some extent he knows what ought to be. And both kinds of knowledge are equally valid. He judges that a thing is, and he judges also that a thing ought to be. Both judgments are equally true, but apparently both are not equally final, for if man judges that what is, ought not to be, he is impelled to alter what is, so that in the end the thing that ought to be is also the thing that is. The judgment of what ought to be, the ideal, is thus proved, or rather made, to be the finally correct one. On the other hand, if man is defeated in his attempts to adjust the things that are to his judgment of what they ought to be, he does not acquiesce in his defeat; he refuses to accept the result as final; the end of the matter is not there; things are not what he strove to make them, but they ought to be. What is has nothing to do with what ought to be. But what ought to be may make a good deal of difference to what is.

The ethical process, in its conflict with the cosmic process, may not in the end prove victorious; but that makes no difference to the fact that it ought to be victorious. It is this deep-seated conviction which made Mr. Huxley say that we must declare war to the last against cosmic nature, the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The victory of the enemy may be certain, but it will none the less be wrong; it may be permanent, but as long as it lasts it will be wrong. If matter and motion are eternal and indestructible, morality is equally everlasting and immutable. Unless this is so, unless the triumph of the cosmic process is wrong, once and always, why are we called upon to endure sorrow and pain and suffering rather than submit to it? Our judgment that it is wrong is as independent of time as is our judgment that particles of matter gravitate towards one another. We have no reason for believing that the latter will continue to be true for a longer time than the former. Indeed, if matter and motion, having achieved their victory over the ethical process, were then and there to be annihilated, their victory would continue to be wrong, though they had ceased to be. Right may triumph or wrong may triumph, but right is right and wrong is wrong for evermore. It is vain to tell us in the same breath that we must stake our all upon our moral judgments and that our moral judgments are not to be relied on. Every impeachment of their validity is an invitation to us to give up the struggle against the enemy of ethical nature. And if we are really resolved to fight the good fight and quit ourselves like men, we thereby affirm that our moral judgments are at least as valid as our judgments on matters of fact, and that, if our knowledge of what is is true objectively, our knowledge of what ought to be has in it at least an equal element of objective truth.

If, then, the cosmic process is real and objective, in so far as it is a perpetual manifestation of the Unknown Reality which underlies all things, then the ethical process, having the same reality and objectivity, is also a manifestation of the Unknowable. The perpetual redistribution of matter and motion is not the only way in which the Unknowable manifests itself to men: it also gives a shape to itself in the form of the highest and purest aspirations of which man is conscious within himself. It might seem, therefore, at first sight as though a mere dispassionate consideration of the actual facts of life, quite apart from any religious presuppositions or presumptions, forced us at last into the presence of a God, the source and author of all goodness. But, in the first place, those who hold to the dogma of Agnosticism, that what underlies things as they are known to us is the Unknowable, cannot admit that we know or can find out whether the Unknowable is good or bad. Induction, the logical method to which science owes so many of its discoveries, and by which we proceed from the known to the unknown, does not avail us here. No logical method could discover what is not merely unknown, but absolutely unknowable.

In the next place it is reasonable enough that those who begin by believing in a Divine Providence should also believe that right will triumph in the end, if not in the world as it is manifested to us now and here, in space and time, then in that real world, that kingdom of heaven, of which this world is but an imperfect manifestation, or to which it is but a distant and slowly moving approximation. For those, however, who refuse to assume the reality of a Divine Providence the case is different. They base themselves on facts of experience: they observe that to some small extent what ought to be tends to substitute itself for what is, thanks to the action of man exclusively, and not to any inherent tendency to good in cosmic nature, but rather in spite of the resistance to good caused by the necessary action of the mechanical laws of nature. From their observation of the conditions under which man has succeeded in modifying what is into what ought to be, they forecast the extent to which that process may be carried in the future; and their conclusion is that the process is doomed to eventual failure, is doomed not merely to cease, but to give way to a process in the opposite direction, by which what ought to be will be displaced by what ought not, by which ethical nature will succumb to cosmic nature.

Now, if there be no God, or if being Unknowable He must be eliminated from our words, thoughts, and deeds as a negligible and useless quantity for rational purposes, it is a natural enough conclusion that right must eventually succumb to wrong. It is but a reassertion of the familiar thesis that without religion morality cannot permanently be maintained. On this occasion, however, the thesis is advanced not as a piece of religious prejudice or theological insolence, but as the teaching of science and the inevitable outcome of evolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 44.

[2] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 44.