The Faith of the Millions (2nd series)

by George Tyrrell

We need only add a few criticisms on this second conception.

1. It is true that every creature struggles more intensely and vigorously for the lower kind of life, or for "mere life," as we might say, than for any of those things which alone would seem to make life worth the having. But this only means that to live at all is the most fundamental condition of living well and fully and enjoyably. The higher life cannot stand without the lower, which it includes, but the lower is not therefore the better, nor is it the end for whose sake the higher is desirable; but conversely. Not until men have got bread enough to eat will they have leisure or energy to spare for the animal grades of vitality. When the means of bodily subsistence grow scarce, then the faculties that were previously set free to seek the bread of a higher and fuller life are diverted to the struggle for bare animal existence, and progress is thrown back; but when there is abundance for all, secured by the labour of a few from whom the remainder can buy, then fuller life becomes once more possible for that remainder. The struggle for bodily food gives an advantage to, and "selects" naturally, those mental and other powers which facilitate its attainment; but just as man does not only eat and labour in order to live, but also (however it may shock conventional ethics) lives in order to eat and labour; so the new energies called forth by competition do not merely secure that grade of life in whose interests they are evoked and perfected, but extend the sphere of vitality, in so much as their own play adds a new element to life and gives it a new form.

The part played by struggle and competition in this process of Evolution is naturally exaggerated by those who deny any latent tendency other than that of mere persistence in being; who repudiate an internal expansiveness towards fuller kinds of existence, drawn out or checked by the environment.

Competition plays a prominent part when there is question of the lower grades of life, in so far as these depend on a pabulum that is limited in quantity. In such cases competition, within certain limits, will secure the bringing-out of latent powers by which the lower level of life is maintained and a higher level entered upon; the lower being secured by the superimposition of the higher.

But how does it do so? Not by creating anything, but by giving the victory to those individuals who already were ahead of their fellows in virtue of a fuller development of their nature from within; in clearing the ground for them and letting them increase and multiply.

2. Again, we should notice that development in one direction may be at the cost of development in another. The struggle for any lower form of existence than that already attained, is inevitably at the cost of the higher. The degrading effects of destitution are proverbial. Craft, cruelty, selfishness, and all the vices needed for success in a gladiatorial contest are often the fruits of such competition. Also, commercial progress seems on the whole to be at the expense of progress in art and the higher tastes, sacrificing everything to the production of the greatest possible quantity of material comforts. If it sharpens the wits and sensibilities in some directions, it blunts them in others.

Now, the first sense suggested to us in these days by the word "progress," is material progress—all that came in with steam; and this narrow conception vitiates much of our reasoning. It is in this realm undoubtedly that competition is such a factor of rapid advance; but we forget that the food of what the best men have ever considered the best life, is not limited or divisible; but like the light and air is undiminished how many soever share it. Whatever advance there has been in the life of the mind and of the higher tastes and sensibilities, cannot directly be explained by competition, but simply by the quiet upward working of Nature's inherent forces. We look with scorn at the unprogressive East, satisfied that there can be no progress, no life worth living, where there is no rush for dollars. But I think we have yet to learn the meaning of ex Oriente lux.

Much of our immorality and our social evil comes from the fact that those who have developed the faculties of a higher grade of life, seek the lower as an end in itself, and not simply so far as it is a condition of the higher and no further. The Gospel precept, as usual, enunciates only the law of reason and nature, when it bids us to "Seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice," that is, to put our best life in the front, and to make it the measure and limit of any other quest. The neglect of this principle gives us high living and plain thinking, instead of "high thinking and plain living;" and takes the bread out of the mouths of the poor. The competition for pleasures and luxuries and amusements, may indeed develop certain industries and cause progress in certain narrow lines, but it is at the cost of the only progress worth the name.

The conflict between this "struggle-theory" and ethics has been freely acknowledged by Professor Huxley and others; every attempt to educe unselfishness from selfishness has failed. The moral man even in our day has rather a bad time of it; what chance would he have had of surviving to propagate his species in the supposed pre-moral states of human society? Who can possibly conceive mere rottenness being cured by progress in rottenness; or a man drinking himself into temperance? On the other hand, it is at least conceivable that in the wildest savage there is some little seed of a moral sense—weak, compared with the lowest springs of action, just because it is the highest and therefore only struggling into being; and that in the slow lapse of time events may here and there prove that honesty is the best policy; and that honesty once tasted may be found not only useful for other things, but agreeable for itself, and may be cherished and strengthened by social and religious sanctions.

There is, however, a reaction on foot which tends to reconcile the breach between ethics and evolution, by reducing the part played by competition within reasonable bounds, and making it subservient to the survival, not of the most selfish, but of the most social individuals. Definite variations from within, modified between narrow limits by accidental variation from without, is coming to be acknowledged as the chief factor of progress. But we should not forget that to allow an internal principle of orderly development is, not merely to modify the popular evolution theory by a slight concession to its adversaries; it is rather to make it no longer the supreme explanation of development, but at most a slight modification of the more mysterious theory which it was its boast and merit to have supplanted. According to Geddes and Foster and others of their school, it is the species-subserving qualities that Nature selects; and these, in the higher grades of life, are equivalent to the altruistic, social, and ethical qualities. It is in virtue of the parental and maternal instincts of self-sacrifice, self-diffusion, self-forgetfulness in the interests of the offspring, that species are preserved and prevail. Selfish egoism leads eventually (as we see in some modern countries where laizzez-faire liberalism prevails) to social disruption, decadence, and chaos; and this is the universal law of life in every grade. At first indeed the unit struggles to live, for life is the condition of propagation; but the root of this instinct is altruistic; it is the whole asserting itself in the part; and all "self-regarding" instincts are to be likewise explained as subordinate to the "other-regarding" instincts. As soon as this sub-ordination is ignored in practice, regress takes the place of progress. The transit, we are told, from the unicellular to the multicellular organism cannot be explained by individualism, but implies a diminution of the competitive, an increase of the social and subordinative tendency. The argument from economics to biology and back again, is said to be nearing exposure; the "progress of the species through the internecine struggle of its individuals at the margin of subsistence," is the outgoing idea. Yes, and with it goes out all that made Evolution a simple and therefore popular explanation of the world; and there comes in that "organic" conception of the process which clamours for theism and finalism as its only coherent complement.