Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

In England Huxley endeavored to emphasize the complete separation of religion and science, though no one really knew better than he how fatally they interlock at every step. Spencer, in providing evolution with a metaphysical apparatus, extended its bearing into all the regions of speculative thought. It is not probable that he is much read at present, but his ‘First Principles’ spread a wide leaven of agnosticism among the youth of a generation ago, and I do not know where you will find a more desolating statement of the possible barrenness of evolutionary results than in the conclusion of his Autobiography: ‘Then behind these mysteries lies the all-embracing mystery—whence this universal transformation which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity and will go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity? And along with this rises the paralyzing thought—what if, of all this that is thus incomprehensible to us, there exists no comprehension anywhere? No wonder that men take refuge in authoritative dogma.... Lastly come the insoluble questions concerning our own fate: the evidence seeming so strong that the relations of mind and nervous structure are such that cessation of the one accompanies dissolution of the other, while simultaneously comes the thought, so strange and so difficult to realize, that with death there lapses both the consciousness of existence and the consciousness of having existed.’[177]

II

After considering Darwin’s view of the practical working of his discovery, it is interesting to sum up, so far as is possible in such vague and indefinite matters, one’s own impression of the effect of the popular acceptance of that discovery. And here I must emphasize that I am not dealing with philosophical or scientific theories, least of all with any such theories of my own, but am simply trying to suggest what seem to me the indirect and secondary workings of scientific theory in the minds of vast masses of people, even of those conventionally connected with the churches of various denominations. It is hardly necessary to say that Darwin’s own teaching cannot be held directly responsible for those workings, and that many of them he would have completely rejected. Moreover, it must also be recognized that Darwin in large measure summarized and embodied the general scientific drift of the age. Especially we must not overlook the immense influence of practical as well as theoretical science in affecting contemporary life. An excellent editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature (May 8, 1926) emphasizes the importance of scientific invention and machinery on nineteenth- and twentieth-century living, and this importance, both direct and indirect, is almost incalculable. For example, printing has spread thought among the masses. The sewing-machine has changed the world of woman. The extraordinary development of transportation has enormously increased the superficial bustle and distraction of life, to the serious detriment of meditative and spiritual interests. Nevertheless, the evolutionary theory may be regarded as typifying and formulating all these complicated tendencies more fully and effectively than any other. How the theory has worked is well suggested in the pregnant words of Professor Osborn, though he is careful to insist that it is the misunderstanding, not the understanding, of evolutionary doctrine, that has caused the evil: ‘It may be said without scientific or religious prejudice that the world-wide loss of the older religious and Biblical foundation of morals has been one of the chief causes of human decadence in conduct, in literature, and in art. This, however, is partly due to a complete misunderstanding of creative evolution, which is a process of ascent, not of descent.’[178]

Let us attempt to follow the workings of evolution in various phases of life and thought. Take, first, politics. We cannot perhaps establish two strongly opposed points of view in regard to the phenomena of political life better than by contrasted quotations. President Coolidge, speaking on October 29, 1926, said: ‘I do not know any adequate support for our form of government except that which comes from religion.’[179] Professor Keller, writing of ‘Societal Evolution,’ says: ‘What moves men ... is not thought, but emotion. And what sets emotion going is interest.... What sets the revolutions in motion, with the result of drastic selection in the codes, is not the cerebration of any one over great issues, but the unendurable discomfort and awakened emotions of the masses. Their interests have been so outraged that anything seems likely to be better than the present.’[180]

The great democratic movement of the past hundred and fifty years naturally far antedated Darwinism. Its roots were laid in the eighteenth century, with the teachings of the French philosophers, chiefly Rousseau, and the practical action of the American and French Revolutions. But the views of evolutionary science fitted admirably with the intense individualism of democracy, its proclamation of the right of the individual man to assert himself against every and all others, high or low, rich or poor.

After democracy has made its way in the world, it is interesting to see the effort of theology to claim it and to urge that the value and importance of the individual is a gradual effect and an essential element of Christian doctrine. It is true that Christianity has always proclaimed the equality of all souls before God and their equal need of salvation. But it is equally true that the Church has always got along comfortably with every sort of tyranny and for centuries solemnly sponsored the divine right of kings, alleging at all times the unfailing text, ‘Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.’ And it is more deeply true that the natural Christian emphasis upon the importance of another world tends to create indifference to the political concerns of this, so that, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, revivalists like Moody could regard political movements and reforms as matters of minor consequence in face of the imminent cataclysm which would wipe out this world and its doings altogether. The most vigorous and energetic insistence on the rights of man as a mortal came from those who concerned themselves very little with his immortality.

And if indifference to the other world affected politics, it has had an even greater effect in the more general regions of sociology. So long as the poor and wretched were taught—by the rich—that their sojourn here was infinitesimally insignificant compared with the bliss that awaited them hereafter, they could endure with comparative patience. Lazarus could let the dogs lick his sores with fair content, while he was comforted with the reflection that an equally bad day was coming for Dives, and a great deal more of it. But when he became convinced that this world was all, Lazarus bestirred himself, and invented Socialism and Anarchism and Bolshevism and many other isms with capital letters, which might enable him to attend to the matter of Dives right here and to see to it that, if he himself could not share all the blessings of the rich, at least the rich might be made as miserable as he. We have become so gradually accustomed to an adjustment to the standpoint of this world that we hardly realize how completely and vastly it has entered into the views and opinions of even those who do not explicitly admit it.

Take again the influence of science in the realm of art. From the close of the eighteenth century external nature began to play a rôle in the arts that it had never played before and the prominence of landscape in painting was as notable as natural description in literature. But during the first half of the nineteenth century this natural influence was romantic, imaginative, emotional. With the middle years the scientific tendency made itself felt, and art became more closely and intensely realistic. This is perhaps most generally obvious in the literary world, and the great novelists of France from Balzac on embody the scientific movement of which Darwin is so eminently representative. Most significant of all in this regard is the great epic of Zola, the history of the Rougon-Macquart family, in twenty solid volumes. I am not for a moment vouching for the solidity of Zola’s science, which may be quite as fantastic in its way as the romance of Dumas. The point is that Zola believed himself to be typifying and illustrating scientific tendencies, and that the popularly accepted notion of the struggle for existence, with all its blind and bitter cruelty, its pitiful tragedy of the warfare and merciless destruction of the animal world, was transferred to humanity in the endless pages, as gloomy as they are powerful, of the great French imaginative drama. And it is interesting, as we come right down to the present day, to find a thoughtful critic attributing the ugly and realistic tendencies of current American fiction not to any passing upheaval caused by the World-War, but to just this gradual influence of scientific thought making itself felt everywhere: ‘What we are looking at is not the product of a decade or an episode, even so supreme an episode as battle, but the fructifying of scientific doctrines that for several decades have been seeping into society. What we are witnessing is the yielding of the romantic view of life to the scientific.’[181]

Thus scientific conceptions, working in the popular mind, have fixed it upon the affairs of this world, and have reduced the various phases of the other, formerly so immensely important, to a shadowy inconsistency. Science, for example, has disposed of hell with ludicrous completeness. The old material hell, as Dante and the Middle Ages viewed it, a repository definitely under ground, with devils busily engaged over boiling cauldrons, has surely vanished, never to return. In the scientifically arranged physical universe there is no place for it. Even my friend Moody, whose ideas of heaven were so specific, does not attempt any such physical location of hell. And it is true that the orthodox still take refuge in moral torments, prolonged if not eternal horrors, which the erring spirit in wilful perversity inflicts upon itself. But it is doubtful if even the orthodox continue to take even these very seriously. There cannot be many persons who still suffer from the brooding gloom with which the concrete vision of hell genuinely oppressed thousands of sensitive souls in ages past. And in some respects this may be set down as a gain, since the misery to the sensitive souls was very real, while how far the fear of hell acted as a deterrent to souls of another order is always open to question. But, gain or loss, it will hardly be disputed that the boiling depths of hell have largely boiled away.

Unfortunately hell, in departing, has shown a marked tendency to drag heaven with it. The same material difficulty of course obtains here also. Moody used to proclaim that heaven was tangible, mapable, a city like New York, only with more agreeable streets and doubtless better traffic arrangements. But it is hard for the most devout believer to-day to take so concrete a view. And it is not only that the pearly gates and golden pavements have gone. Their disappearance has given a rude jar to the belief in any kind of future life whatever. I am merely speaking of the average American man in the street, and perhaps of even the woman also. The negative views in such matters announced shortly before his death by so good, so upright, so in the largest sense Christian a man as Luther Burbank, are beyond a doubt the views more or less definitely formulated of millions of men in America to-day. The best they can say is, that it is their business to live the life here in the most energetic, straightforward, profitable way they can, to see that after their deaths their wives and children are provided for, and to leave any other lives to take care of themselves.