It is not until we introduce the element of material progress that it becomes possible to maintain with any plausibility that there is a divergency of interests between the contributors to it, or that they who sowed have been sacrificed to us who reap. It is when we compare the shivering savage with our sheltered civilisation, primitive man's struggle for existence with civilised man's enjoyment of existence, that we begin to be anxious about the cost of evolution—that is to say, that our little faith in the value of the ideal begins to torment us. In our unreadiness to sacrifice ourselves we forget that it is possible for civilised man also to make sacrifices—perhaps the greater because he has the more to forego—and that the savage has his tribal traditions, embodying his ideal of a good man, to live up to; his tribal customs, which he may violate with self-reproach, or fulfil with satisfaction; his conceptions of the truth about man's relations to the past, the world, and the supernatural. The savage also has his ideal, which he sets above his pleasure, and for which he faces pain in many a cruel rite. Shall we say that its realisation is no reward to him? or that in realising it he does not as faithfully contribute his mite to the fulfilment of the Divine purpose as we? We make too much of our superiority. We make, also, too little of the savage's enjoyment of existence. Take the lowest savages known to us, the native tribes of Central Australia, and turn to the most recent and the best accounts of their manner of life; and it is certain that their existence is enjoyed by them. Is ours without exception enjoyed by us?
If it is easy to be led by sentimentalism into mistakes about what our fellow-man thinks of the question whether life is worth living, it is still easier to be misled with regard to our fellow-creatures lower in the scale. Here all is conjecture, and it is on this uncertain ground that rests the charge brought against Nature of waste and cruelty. There is the cruelty with which, in order to secure the survival of the few and fittest, the environment kills off the many who are unfit—an argument of great force, if the survivors were immortal. There is the waste of bringing into life thousands of creatures unfit, and therefore doomed to a speedy extinction. But death is the common lot; and as for waste and failure, if the short-lived creatures fulfil their purpose, they are not failures; and if their purpose is by competition to force the development of the potentially fit, then they fulfil their purpose. A man may be entered for a race for no other purpose than to force the pace. As for happiness, wild animals, to judge by their usual fit condition and by the evidence of sportsmen, do enjoy existence. But they, at any rate, have no ideals—whatever the savage may have. Yet it is conceivable that the bird that builds its nest finds some satisfaction in doing so, and that the animal that lays down her life to save her young ones has some sense of love. What is revealed as the ideal in man may be inchoately manifested as instinct in the undeveloped consciousness of the animal. If so, then the animal's life has independent value and is not merely valuable as a means to a distant future end.
To sum up: science declines to take the teleological view of Nature, or to admit final causes or ends. To speak, therefore, of survival in the struggle for existence as an end, may be excellent sense, but it is unscientific: it implies an assumption of a kind about which science is agnostic. If we do, however, make this one deviation from agnosticism, we have then no difficulty in showing that evolution is a failure, for its end is survival, and we all die; and there is no compensation, or, if there is, posterity gets it, not we—an aggravation of the original injustice.
If survival in the struggle for existence is the only end that we personally recognise in the conduct of our own lives, we are quite consistent in judging it to be the only end of other lives, and in condemning the Universe, for then there is neither goodness nor any wisdom in it.
On the other hand, our faith in that wisdom and goodness is not genuine so long as we are prepared to stake only our arguments on it, and not our lives.
XIII.
EVOLUTION AS PURPOSE
Evolution, as a scientific theory, is a description of the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is. The method employed is that of science, and proceeds upon the assumption of the uniformity of Nature and the universality of the law of causation. The existence of a thing is proof that the conditions necessary to produce it preceded it. Thus from what is we infer with certainty what has been: the occurrence of Z is proof that Y preceded, and so from Y we can infer X, and so on, to the beginning of the alphabet. Eventually, that is, we are carried back, in theory at least, to an initial arrangement of things which not only gave birth to the actual order of evolution, but was such that no other order of events could have followed from it. Were it possible, in fact, to get back to this original collocation of causes and to formulate it, the formula would explain the universe as it is and has been, the totality of things.
Unfortunately the formula, though it would explain everything else, would not explain itself, and would therefore, so far, fail to explain anything. Or, to put it in other words, though certain causes, collocated in the proper way, would, on this view of evolution, explain everything which ensued from that collocation, we should still want to know why the causes were collocated in that particular way rather than in any other. To say that that collocation was not the outcome of a previous collocation is really to say that there was originally no antecedent necessity why this or any other order of evolution should take place at all; that Z hangs on Y, Y on X ... and A on nothing at all; that the formula which is to render all things intelligible is itself unmeaning. Or, if we say that things had no beginning—matter and force being indestructible—then there is no initial collocation, that is to say, no formula, even in theory, to explain all things: we cannot even imagine the process of evolution to be intelligible.