Evolution

by F. B. Jevons

There are those whose belief in demonology furnishes them with a reason and an excuse for the misdeeds of man. The belief in necessity exhibits demonology as a doctrine of science: man would fain do right, but the uniformity, which is the necessity, of Nature allows him no choice. It is Nature, the environment, which is the abode and headquarters of necessity, the enemy of the ethical process, the arch-demon of scientific demonology. And the proof that he exists is that he must. What must be, must be, because it must.

The attempt to render morality scientific ends in a result fatal to morality; and the reason seems clear. It is that science is not morality, nor are the principles of science those of morality. Science is knowledge, morality is action. Knowledge, to be knowledge, has to presuppose that Nature is uniform and that the things it deals with are real. So, too, action, to be moral, requires the belief that our moral ideals are real and that we are free to choose between good and evil. The optimist who would have us believe that science includes all the remaining articles of the common faith, and the pessimist who argues that it excludes them, alike fall into the error of imagining that science, the knowledge of what is, is the whole of knowledge, and that the assumptions which are required in order to describe what is will enable us to do and to know what ought to be. Science, which is a true description of part of our experience, becomes a misleading half-truth when it is offered as an exhaustive account of the whole. If, knowing the rules of chess and having a record of the moves in a solitary (and unfinished) game, we refused to inquire why the pieces moved, on the ground that if we succeeded in the inquiry we should have made no addition to our knowledge of the way in which the pieces do move, we should never understand the game. But we should be nearer the truth than if we assumed that a piece caused its own movements or those of the other pieces; and that will or purpose was quite incompatible with the uniformity of their movements.

The fact is that we have to play the game—we are not merely spectators—and as a matter of fact, also, men do assume that they can freely choose what moves they will make and that there are certain moves which they ought to make. The assumptions which they make, not exactly for the sake of playing the game, but in the act of playing it, are neither included in the assumptions of science nor excluded by them. To play the game at all, it is necessary to have some knowledge (or to act as though we had some knowledge) of how the pieces move, to know that bishops move diagonally, that bodies tend to gravitate at a certain rate. Man cannot indeed act or make the slightest movement without deflecting or starting some of the processes of Nature and of his own psychological mechanism: it is through them that he operates, and by means of them that he plays the game. In the beginning he has but little knowledge of what the consequences will be if he touches this or that spring of the mechanism. Yet the knowledge is necessary for him, if he is to play the game as he ought, i.e. to attain the moral ideals of which he is more or less (less at first) conscious. In acquiring this knowledge he uses his faculty of abstraction, that is his power of concentrating his attention on one aspect of a thing or problem, to the exclusion of the rest, in order to gain a clearer knowledge of it by giving it his undivided and undistracted attention. Thus, in order to understand how the mechanism of Nature or human nature actually does act, he concentrates his attention on the working of that mechanism in the abstract, i.e. wholly apart from the fact that it is at times started, at times interrupted, or redirected for the sake of realising (or thwarting) his ideals. The knowledge thus gained is science, and is, according to the agnostic, the optimist, and the pessimist, the only knowledge that man can have.

But it is clear that man can and does reflect, not only on the way in which the mechanism acts, but also on the use to which he puts it and the relation of that use to his ideals. These reflections may add nothing to his science, to his knowledge that rooks when moved must be moved parallel to the sides of the board, but they do add to his knowledge of the game. In fine, man gains a more important part of that knowledge by or in playing the game than he does by studying the rules. The rules acquaint him with the resources which are at his disposal, the capacities of the various pieces and the powers of the various forces of Nature or human nature. But it would be absurd to pass this off as a complete knowledge of the game. We may, by playing the game, add only to our knowledge of how the game ought to be played, of how the mechanism of Nature and human nature ought to be used, and not add to our knowledge of the fact that if and when the mechanism is set agoing it acts in the way described by science. But the one kind of knowledge, though not science, is just as true as the other, on the same terms, viz. if you accept the assumptions presupposed by it.

Science, then, is from the very terms of its constitution abstract, i.e. essentially incomplete. The very terms on which alone science is possible are that it shall study one aspect only of Nature, the mechanical, and shall ascertain what conclusions follow if we confine our attention to the mechanical factors and neglect certain other factors—the freedom of the will, final causes, and the moral and æsthetic ideals—which, though voluntarily neglected for the moment, are yet known to be important factors in the game of life as it is played by us. As often as we act, however, we set those factors, temporarily neglected by science, in action; and there is no reason why, when we have acted, we should not reflect upon our action, disengage the assumptions which are presupposed by our actions, and then reconsider the world and life in the light of the assumptions on which our actions and the actions of all men are based, viz. the freedom of the will and the reality of our ideals. Thus viewed, the world becomes the scene and life the opportunity of using the forces of Nature and our own psychological mechanism for the purpose of achieving the ideal.

But free-will and the moral ideal are not the only factors in the world as it is presented to the common consciousness, or in life as it is carried on by humanity, which are neglected by science, and which have to be restored by subsequent reflection, if we wish to see life true and see it whole. Science declines to entertain the question why things happen, or whether there is any purpose in events; and moral faith only guarantees that there is that which man ought to do, and that he is free to do it. But science, in neglecting the action of final causes, omits a factor which not only must be replaced before we can have any adequate understanding of the part which man plays in the world, but which, by the testimony of the common consciousness of mankind, manifests itself in the phenomena of Nature.

The description which science gives of the sequences and co-existences of material and physical phenomena is consistent with itself, and is all that is required by the assumptions of science. It is only when we reflect upon the further assumptions which we make, or rather act upon as moral agents, that we find science inadequate or—if it professes to be the whole account of the world and man—misleading. And it is only by restoring those factors for which our moral consciousness is the evidence that we can remedy the defect or correct the error. The attempt made by the optimist to dispense with the testimony of consciousness to the reality of the moral law, and the attempt of the pessimist to dispense with the freedom of the will, were both failures.

In the same way, both the scientific and the moral interpretation of the world are judged by the religious consciousness to be abstract, and are seen, when viewed in the light of its presuppositions, to be inadequate, if not misleading. The inadequacy of the moral assumptions which are made by the common consciousness of mankind is manifest, when we reflect that while those assumptions serve to decide the question—left open by science—as to the "Why?" of human actions, they do not decide the same question as to the events of Nature, but leave it open as it was left by science, whether final or mechanical causation is the ultimate explanation of Nature.

The problem what we are to do and to think in life and of life is one which for its solution requires that the whole of our experience should be taken into account: if it is to account for the sum total of the facts of which we are conscious, it must take for its basis the totality of those facts and nothing less extensive. It is true that the very vastness of the field to be surveyed—the whole of the common consciousness of mankind—makes a division of labour necessary, and compels us to concentrate ourselves at different times on different aspects of it, and to treat each of the phases of our experience—religious, moral, and scientific experience—for the moment as though it alone existed. But it is equally true that this isolation of first one phase and then the other is merely a temporary device, designed and adopted for a purpose; and that that purpose is to enable us ultimately to bring the whole of our experience to bear on the problem of what to do and to think.

Legitimate as it is, when we are working at the details of the problem, to distinguish the moral consciousness from the scientific, and the religious consciousness from the moral, it is necessary to bear in mind that these distinctions are merely abstractions. In thought we may and do so distinguish, but in fact and experience consciousness is a unity. The same man who is conscious of sense-phenomena is also conscious of moral obligation: the "I" which is conscious of moral experience is the same "I" that is conscious of spiritual experience.