3. But though Evolution so conceived makes the "argument from adaptability," as well as the arguments for theism, stronger rather than weaker; we must not shut our eyes to the difficulty created by the fact (too little insisted upon by Evolutionists) that there is no solid reason for thinking that progress is all-pervading. We have already said that progress in commerce may be regress in art or in religion or in morality. Also, progress in benevolence may co-exist with regress in fortitude and purity; progress in one point of morality with regress in another; progress in ethical judgment with regress in ethical practice. And in every realm, growth and decay, life and death, seem so to intertwine and oscillate that it is very gratuitous to designate the total process as being one or the other. Spencer confesses that the entire universe oscillates between extremes of integration and disintegration. Why we should consider the universe at present to be rising rather than falling, waxing rather than waning, one cannot say. The easier presumption is that it is equally one and the other, and always has been. Even were we rash enough to pronounce progress to be on the whole prevalent within the narrow field of our own experience, surely it were nothing but the inevitable "provincialism" of the human mind to pass per saltum from that, to a generalization for all possible experience. Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive basis in actual experience, and must draw its life from some deeper source.
Why then should we so presume that our moral and religious ideas are really progressive and not regressive, as to regard their interpretation as approximating to the truth? The answer is simply that our argument from adaptability does not require the assumption in question, but only that we should be able to distinguish higher from lower tendencies, progressive from regressive movements, without holding the optimistic view that on the whole the forward tendency is at present prevailing. It is not because we live in the nineteenth century that we consider our moral perceptions truer than those of the ancient Hebrews, but because we at once comprehend and transcend their ideas (in some respects), as the greater does the less. In many points surely the relation is inverted and we feel ourselves transcended (or may at least suspect it), by those who lived or live in ruder conditions than our own. David has perhaps taught us more than we could have taught him; and there are other vices than those proper to semi-barbarism. It is not by reference to date or country, or grade of material progress, that we assess the value of moral judgments, but by that subjective standard with which our own moral attainments supply us in regard to all that is equal or less, similar or dissimilar. To deny this discernment is to throw the doors open to unqualified scepticism; to admit it, is all that we need for the validity of our inference.
4. If Evolution is really of this oscillatory character; if at all times much the same processes have been going on in different parts of this universe as now—one system decaying as another is coming into being; is it not more reasonable to imagine (for it is only a question of imagining) that the primordial datum was not uniform nebula, but matter in all stages of elaboration from the highest to the lowest—the same sort of result as we should get from a cross-section at any subsequent moment in the process? What reason is there for assuming primordial homogeneity, since every backward step would show us, together with the unravelling of what is now in process of weaving, a counter-balancing weaving of what is now in process of disintegration? Were this earth all, we might dream of universal advance by shutting our eyes to a great many incompatible facts; but when our telescopes show us the co-existence of integration and disintegration everywhere, what can we conclude but that in the past as in the future, no alteration is to be looked for beyond the shifting of the waves' crest from side to side of the sea of matter—the total ratio of depressions to elevations remaining exactly constant.
Were the other view of an original universal homogeneity correct, how conies it that we have still co-existent every stage of advance from the lowest to the highest, and that there is not a greater equality?—a difficulty which does not exist if we suppose things to have been on the whole, as they are now, from the very first. But whichever view we take; whether we suppose all things collectively to oscillate between recurring extremes of "sameness" and "otherness;" or every stage of the wave of progress from crest to trough, to be simultaneously manifested in the universe at all times, the old difficulty of "the beginning" will force itself upon us. A process ab aeterno is at least as unimaginable as the process of creation ex nihilo; if it be not altogether inconceivable to boot. And the alternative is, either a primordial state of homogeneous matter which contains the present cosmos in germ, and from which it is evolved without the aid of any environment—such a germ claiming a designer as much as any ready-made perfect world; or else, a primordial state of things like that which we should get at any cross-section of the secular process, in which every stage of life and death, growth and decay, evolution and involution, is represented as now. This would include fossils and remains of past civilizations which (in the hypothesis) would never have existed; and would be in all respects as difficult as the crudest conception of the creation-hypothesis. And if this absurdity drives us back to primordial homogeneity, as before, we must remember that here, too, though not so evidently, we should have all the signs of an antecedent process that was non-existent. Life and death, corruption and integration, are parts of one undulatory process. Cut the wave where you will its curve claims to be finished in both directions and suggests a before as well as an after. If, in the very nature of things, the pendulum sways between confusion and order, chaos and cosmos, each extreme intrinsically demands the other, not only as its consequent, but as its antecedent; and the first chaos, no less than any succeeding one, will seem the ruin of a previous cosmos. Therefore we are driven back upon a process ab aeterno with every stage of evolution always simultaneously represented in one part or other of the whole. Whatever mitigation such a conception may offer, surely we may be excused for still adhering to that simpler explanation which involves a mystery indeed, but nothing so positively unthinkable as a process without a beginning.
5. This same conception of a process without beginning, favours the notion that since life was possible on our globe all species may well have co-existed in varying proportions. From the sudden spread of population through almost accidental conditions, we can imagine how certain species might have been so scarce as to leave no trace in geological strata, whereas those which enormously preponderated at the same time would have done so. A change of conditions might easily cause the former to preponderate, and their sudden appearance in the strata would look as though they had then first come into being. In a word, we can have good evidence for the extinction of species, but scarcely any for their origination.
This supposition is not adverse to the derivation of species from a common stock, but rather favours the notion that as in the case of the individual the period of plasticity is short compared with that of morphological stability, so if there was such an arboreal branching out of species from a common root, it took place rapidly in conditions as different from ours as those of uterine from extra-uterine life; and that the stage of inflexibility may have been reached before any time of which we have record.
But in truth when we see in the world of chemical substances an altogether similar sedation of species where there can be no question of common descent as its cause, we may well suspend our judgment till the established facts have excluded the many hypotheses other than Evolution by which they may be explained.
As long as Evolution claims to be no more than a working scientific hypothesis, like ether or electric fluid—a sort of frame or subjective category into which observed facts are more conveniently fitted, it cannot justly be pressed for a solution of ultimate problems; but when it claims to be a complete philosophy and as such to extrude other philosophies previously in possession, it must show that it can rest the mind where they leave it restless; or that it has proved their proffered solutions spurious. This, so far, it has absolutely failed to do. At most it may determine more accurately the way in which God works out His Idea in Creation. It can stand as long as it is content to prescind from the question of ends and origins; but then it is no longer a complete philosophy. As soon as it attempts to solve those problems it becomes incoherent and unthinkable. Its true complement is theism and finality, which flow from it as naturally, if not quite so immediately as the "argument from adaptability." Deus creavit is so far the only moderately intelligible, or at least not demonstrably unintelligible, answer given to the problem of In principio.
We have then in this second and soberer form of the philosophy of Evolution, an attempt to explain the order of the universe without explicit recourse to the hypothesis of an intelligent authorship and government of the world: that is to say, independently of theism and finality; and so far as this explanation admits all the effects and consequences of an intelligent government, without ascribing them to that cause, it admits among their number the value of the "argument from adaptability," and allows us to infer that the postulates of man's higher moral needs correspond approximately to reality, of which they are in some sense the product; and that the "wish to believe" is less likely to be a source of delusion in proportion as the belief in question is higher in the moral scale.
But it is also clear how unsuccessful this attempted philosophy is in many ways; and with what difficulties and mysteries it is burdened. At best it can prescind from finalism by a confession of incompleteness and philosophical bankruptcy; by resolutely refusing to face the problem of the whole—of the ultimate whence and whither. If it would positively exclude theism or finalism it must ascribe all seeming order and adaptation to the persistence of some blind force, subduing all things to itself, to "existence," or to "life" striving to assert and extend itself. It is this conception that seems best to bring the mystery of the universe within the comprehension of the popular mind, and is more in keeping with those "aggregation theories" of our day which regard dust as the one eternal reality whose combination and disguises delude us into believing in soul and intelligence and divinity. But on closer examination the words "life" and "existence" answer to no simple reality or force which can be regarded as governing nature, and from this radical fallacy of language a whole brood of further absurdities spring up which make the popular form of Evolution-philosophy utterly incoherent.