The larger part of the process of evolution is known to us only from the outside: we observe its effects in the animal world and in inorganic nature, but its inner workings we have to reach by inference. One part of the evolution process, however, we know from the inside—that part which is carried on through us. We are some of the innumerable channels through which the motive force of the process is transmitted; and the knowledge which its transmission through us gives us is more intimate and direct than that which we get from observing the external effects it produces elsewhere. The evolution of society, for instance, is a part of the general process of evolution, and is a process which is carried on through us and expresses the resultant of the totality of our sentiments and actions towards one another. What light, then, if any, is thrown by sociology on the general question of purpose?
Mr. Herbert Spencer has familiarised us with the lesson that in politics and social experiments it is the unforeseen and unintended results of legislation which are far the most important, and that the industrial organisation of the country, or we may now say of the world, is not the fulfilment of any design preconceived by any governmental agency, but the unintended result of innumerable actions on the part of men who never dreamed that their action would have any such outcome. The reason of this is to be sought in the fact that society is an organism and that its growth follows the same laws as those which regulate the structural development of an am[oe]ba or a rhizopod. Thus, both society and the animal organism must be fed. To be fed, both must appropriate nutriment from the environment. That nutriment must be taken up and must be distributed to all parts of the organism, social or animal, if all parts are to be fed—and all must be fed, because all are mutually dependent, and to neglect one would disorganise the whole. Channels of communication must be established between all parts, in order that food may be conveyed from the organ which took it from the environment to the organs which require it for support. What marks the process of evolution in both cases is the increasing division of labour and the increasing interdependence of the parts on one another. The animal organism, like the social organism, is made up of a multitude of living units, each one of which is continually adjusting itself to the requirements of all the rest. The increasing complexity in the structure of an animal organism is possible only because the living units of one part take upon themselves new functions, or devote themselves exclusively to one function, in order to benefit the units of a distant part. If they purposed or were purposed to produce that result, they could not behave differently or better. But this appearance of purpose is mere semblance: the minute cells of an animal organism have no intention of producing even a rhizopod or an am[oe]ba. The explanation of this mimicry of purpose lies in the fact of the mutual interdependence of the parts: no change can take place in one organ of society or of the animal without being transmitted through the whole, just as you cannot remove one of the undermost of a cartload of bricks without more or less disturbing all the rest. But what is true of the bricks or of the units of the animal organism is true of the units of the social organism: what we discover in their action and reaction on one another is the operation, not of voluntary purpose, but of invariable laws of cause and effect.
According to this argument, then, the living units of the animal organism resemble in their action those of the social organism sufficiently to warrant us in arguing from the one to the other, and in concluding that there is purpose in the action of neither. But it is obvious that, if the resemblance is great enough to justify us in arguing from the animal to the social organism, it also opens the way for the argument to travel the return journey, from the social organism to the animal, and to reach the conclusion that there is purpose in both. Let us therefore consider what each of these two opposite conclusions requires us to believe.
On the one hand, before accepting the argument that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism because there is none in that of the animal, we must prove that there is none in that of the animal. But that, as we have already urged, is exactly what has not been proved: the utmost that science claims to prove is that the units of the animal organism do behave in a certain way. That way is exactly the way in which they would behave if they were designed to do so; and science leaves it, so far, a perfectly open question whether they were or were not so designed. The argument, therefore, that there is no purpose in the action of the social organism, because none in the animal, breaks down at the threshold. Yet it is on the unproved and unprovable assertion that the appearance of purpose in the animal organism cannot possibly be due to design, and must therefore be a delusion, that we are expected to deny the evidence of our own experience and consciousness and to believe that we, the units of the social organism, have no purpose in the daily acts by which we extend trade or discharge our social functions.
Thus the surmise that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is a conjecture which, so far as it is applied to the pre-human stages of the evolution process, simply plays upon our ignorance; and which, when applied to that part of the evolution process which is carried on through us, we know to be absurd. On the other hand, if there is such similarity between the laws of the one part of the process and the laws of the other part, it must be as allowable to argue from the part and the laws which we do know to the part and the laws that we do not know, as it is to explain the known by what is confessedly unknown. In other words, if the evolution of the social organism is known to be due to purpose, then it is a reasonable inference that animal evolution, which, we are told, follows the same line and laws, is due also to purpose—and if not to any purpose entertained by the cells of the animal organism, then to that of a Will of which their action is the expression.
It is, however, maintained that the continuous social changes which constitute the evolution of society, so far from being the result of the purpose of any individual or of any government, are frequently the very opposite of what was intended by the authors of the changes, and always are notoriously beyond our power to forecast. But the fact that my plans are modified or diverted by my successors or by my coadjutors does not prove that there was no purpose in my plans, or that there was none in the modifications introduced by my successors. And the total result of our united action and purposes may be something different from what any of us individually intended and yet express a common purpose, which is shown by the result to have been more or less present to all of us. A cathedral begun in the Norman style may have taken generations to build and may end in Gothic; and it will express the ideas common to the several builders, in much the same way that a composite photograph reproduces most distinctly the features in which all the persons photographed coincide, and other features more or less distinctly according to the extent to which they are shared in common by the different subjects. Or, to express the effect of the successive actions of succeeding generations, we may borrow an illustration from the game of chess. It is possible for five players to play, taking it in turns to move, so that every player makes one move out of five, and plays alternately for White and Black. The result, with good players, is a brilliant and well-developed game, which is not the game as purposed or intended by any one of the five players, but as continually modified and improved by each every time that he took it up. When, then, we reflect how many players in the game of life there are even in a small society, we can well understand that, though each has his own way of serving the common purpose, none can forecast the result.
Perhaps it will be said that the chess-players have a common purpose, and the players in life's game have none. The reply is that science assumes they have; science assumes that they play to win in the struggle for existence; and only on the assumption that men have common purposes is it possible to frame any scientific account of their actions. The science of Political Economy assumes that it is a common purpose of men to acquire wealth, and that their actions are determined by that purpose. It then goes on to show that if that is their purpose, then the conditions under which it can be and is effected are of a certain kind, e.g. men must buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. It is not necessary to assume, nor does Political Economy assume, that man can only purpose to acquire wealth, or that he must under all circumstances do so. In the same way it is wholly unscientific in sociology to assume that success in the struggle for existence is either a thing that man must aim at, or the only thing that he can aim at: the soldier dies for his country, the martyr for his faith. The institutions of a nation—legal, political, social, and religious—express the predominant purposes for which successive generations of the community have laboured; and the evolution of mankind is the history of the various degrees of success with which men have realised the ideals which they have purposed to attain. The successive reforms by which progress has been effected have all been purposed, and have all been purposed by men who believed, rightly or wrongly, that in so doing they were serving God and their fellow-men, and that the ideals of truth, justice, equality, fraternity, love, compassion, and mercy express God's will and the Divine purpose.
If, then, the outcome of the pre-human period of evolution has been, as a matter of fact, and amongst other things, such as to prepare the earth for man's habitation and to provide him with a mechanism, physiological and psychological, such that he can use it, if he will, to promote what he considers to be progress and advance, it is not unreasonable for him to regard past phases of evolution as so many steps leading to the realisation of the ideals which he cherishes, in his best moments, as his highest purposes. The continuity of evolution and the unity of its process authorise or even compel him to use that part of the process which is carried on through him as a means to interpret the rest. As, in the game of chess played by five players, each player inherits from his predecessor the game as it stands, and carries on, with improvements or modifications, the scheme which he inherits, so in life each player in turn becomes conscious of the ideals which he too may, or may not, as he wills, carry one step nearer to their goal. It is in the continuity with which these ideals are transmitted through one consciousness after another that the continuity of human evolution consists. We are, or may be if we choose, particles in the medium by which a purpose not our own (save inasmuch as we choose to make it so) is carried onwards to its destination. The medium through which progress has travelled in the past is Nature; the medium through which it is now travelling is human nature. By us the ideal, as it is transmitted through our consciousness, is recognised as implying the presence in us of a purpose higher than our own. Whether in the medium of Nature there is any dim consciousness of the progress towards which the changes in Nature conspire, we know not. But the uniformity of Nature and human nature requires us to see in those natural changes the operation of the same power travelling in the same direction as it does through us. In its passage through us it is made known to us as the object of our highest aspirations; the ideal of purity, of holiness, and love; the God for whom the human heart, mistakenly or not, has always sought, and never sought in vain.