VI.
EVOLUTION AS THE REDISTRIBUTION OF MATTER AND MOTION
Assuming the process of evolution to be a fact, we have inquired what is the value of that fact, what significance it has for man as a moral being, anxious to direct his life in accordance with the best lights he can obtain. In our attempts to draw any inference from the facts of evolution as to the moral government of the universe, we have always found ourselves ultimately confronted by the notice—The Real is Unknowable. Obviously, if "the ultimate of ultimates," the Real Power or Force, of which all things and beings are manifestations, is unknowable, we cannot know whether it cares or does not care for what is true or good. But if the Real is Unknowable, then the knowledge which we do possess is not knowledge of the real, and consequently all our science is unreal knowledge; the theory of evolution is a system of delusive inferences from unreal facts. That, however, is a thing which we could not believe. Doubtless our knowledge is small compared with our ignorance. Doubtless there is much which the human mind could not understand without becoming more than human. Doubtless, also, every addition to our knowledge involves a readjustment and correction of our previous inferences; and a considerable addition, such as the theory of evolution was, causes a considerable change in our conception of the universe and its laws. But all these admissions cannot compel us to admit that science is wholly unreal knowledge, or that evolution is an entirely unreal process. We sought, accordingly, to show that we have some, if only partial, knowledge of the real, that that knowledge is not wholly inferential, but that so far as it is inferred it is inferred from real facts, the reality of which is directly apprehended in the common experience of mankind.
As a matter of fact, those writers who proclaim the unknowability of the Real, when they are writing as philosophers, abandon it when they are engaged in science. When they are working out the theory of evolution, they take it for granted that the process of evolution is a reality, that the common experience of mankind is trustworthy to some extent, and that to that extent the Real is knowable and known. They assure us that, though the knowledge we have is not knowledge of the Real, it is just the same for us as if it were—if the Real could enter into our consciousness, we really should not know the difference. "Thus then we may resume, with entire confidence, those realistic conceptions which philosophy at first sight seems to dissipate."[8]
On examination, however, it turns out that the entire confidence which is thus restored to the reality of material things is not extended to the reality of those ideals of the good, the beautiful, and the holy which play their part in the lives of men and in the evolution of mankind—or not to all of those ideals.
Now, it is scarcely to be hoped that a theory which begins by ignoring certain facts in the common experience of mankind, or by denying their reality, can end in a satisfactory explanation of them. Either it will be consistent and proclaim them to be illusions, or it will be inconsistent and quietly include them from time to time as it goes on—in which case the explanation it gives of them will be no explanation. Thus, for instance, as we have already argued, the Optimistic interpretation of evolution, professing to exhibit the Ideal of morality as one of the ultimate consequences of the redistribution of matter and motion, ends by denying any difference between what is and what ought to be, and thus reduces the moral ideal to a mere illusion. The Pessimist, on the other hand, insisting on the reality, and to some extent the supremacy of the moral ideal, confesses his inability to explain its validity as being due to evolution: the fact that it has been evolved does not account for its validity, because the tendency to evil has been also evolved, but is not, therefore, to be yielded to.
The object of this chapter is to examine the hypothesis that the process of evolution is nothing but a perpetual redistribution of matter and motion, and to show that the hypothesis cannot explain, and as a matter of fact does not explain, all the facts which it is framed to account for.
The theory of evolution is an attempt—one of many attempts that men have made—to explain the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is. It differs from most other attempts in that it endeavours to give a scientific explanation of the process, and that consequently it does not profess to go back to the beginning or to discover the origin of the process.
The nature of scientific "explanation" is well understood by men of science (in England, at least), and has been made familiar to the non-scientific world by John Stuart Mill. An event is scientifically "explained" when it is shown to be a case of a general law; a law is "explained" when it is shown to come under some more general law. In other words, the business of science is to show that the thing under examination always happens (or tends to happen) under certain circumstances which science can formulate with more or less exactness. But how or why the thing should happen thus, science does not undertake to explain: "what is called explaining one law of nature by another, is but substituting one mystery for another; and does nothing to render the general course of nature other than mysterious: we can no more assign a why for the more extensive laws than for the partial ones."[9] It is only "minds not habituated to accurate thinking" which imagine that the laws are the causes of the events which happen in accordance with them, "that the law of general gravitation, for example, causes the fall of bodies to the earth."[10] It may be a law of science, a perfectly true statement, that the phenomenon B always follows the phenomenon A; but that statement, true as it is, is not the cause of B. That A is always followed by B is demonstrated by science. Why it should be followed by B is as mysterious as magic—as mysterious as that the waving of the magician's wand should be immediately followed by the rising of a palace from the ground. How the one thing can follow the other, is no part of science's business to explain.
Science, therefore, is essentially descriptive: with ever-increasing accuracy it describes things and the order in which they happen. Evolution, then, as a scientific theory, is also purely descriptive: it describes the way in which things have come to be what we see them to be, the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is. But when the purely scientific and descriptive part of the work is done, when science has formulated the order of the events which have led up to the existing state of the universe, when the process of evolution has been described, there still remain the questions which science refused even to try to answer, and there also remain other questions more vital to science. There arises the question, In what sense is evolution a real process? do the laws of science exist only in the minds of men of science? is the process of evolution merely the description which is given of it (as according to some thinkers a thing is only the sensations which we have of it), or is it something more?
Obviously the question whether evolution is a real process, whether there is any reality in science, is one which cannot be answered, either in the affirmative or in the negative, without some idea of what "reality" means, of what the "real" is. "What is the meaning of the word real? This is the question which underlies every metaphysical inquiry; and the neglect of it is the remaining cause of the chronic antagonisms of metaphysicians."[11] Before we are logically entitled to say that evolution is a real process, we must answer the question, "What is the essence, the ultimate reality of things? who or what is the Being that is manifested in 'all thinking things, all objects of all thought'?"[12]