The receptive attitude of the public towards such a philosophy as Spencer's had been made possible by Darwin's discoveries, which were reinforced by the growing science of palaeontology and the accumulating material evidence of the great antiquity of man. By the simultaneous advances of geology and biology man's perspective in time was revolutionised, just as the Copernican astronomy had revolutionised his perspective in space. Many thoughtful and many thoughtless people were ready to discern—as Huxley suggested—in man's "long progress through the past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." and Winwood Reade, a young African traveller, exhibited it in a vivid book as a long-drawn-out martyrdom. But he was a disciple of Spencer, and his hopes for the future were as bright as his picture of the past was dark. THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN, published in 1872, was so widely read that it reached an eighth edition twelve years later, and may be counted as one of the agencies which popularised Spencer's optimism.
That optimism was not endorsed by all the contemporary leaders of thought. Lotze had asserted emphatically in 1864 that "human nature will not change," and afterwards he saw no reason to alter his conviction.
Never one fold and one shepherd, never one uniform culture for all mankind, never universal nobleness. Our virtue and happiness can only flourish amid an active conflict with wrong. If every stumbling-block were smoothed away, men would no longer be like men, but like a flock of innocent brutes, feeding on good things provided by nature as at the very beginning of their course. [Footnote: Microcosmus, Bk. vii. 5 ad fin. (Eng. trans. p. 300). The first German edition (three vols.) appeared in 1856-64, the third, from which the English translation was made, in 1876. Lotze was optimistic as to the durability of modern civilisation: "No one will profess to foreknow the future, but as far as men may judge it seems that in our days there arc greater safeguards than there were in antiquity against unjustifiable excesses and against the external forces which might endanger the continued existence of civilisation.">[
But even if we reject with Spencer the old dictum, endorsed by Lotze as by Fontenelle, that human nature is immutable, the dictum of ultimate harmony encounters the following objection. "If the social environment were stable," it is easy to argue, "it could be admitted that man's nature, variable EX HYPOTHESI, could gradually adapt itself to it, and that finally a definite equilibrium would be established. But the environment is continually changing as the consequence of man's very efforts to adapt himself; every step he takes to harmonise his needs and his conditions produces a new discord and confronts him with a new problem. In other words, there is no reason to believe that the reciprocal process which goes on in the growth of society between men's natures and the environment they are continually modifying will ever reach an equilibrium, or even that, as the character of the discords changes, the suffering which they cause diminishes."
In fact, upon the neutral fact of evolution a theory of pessimism may be built up as speciously as a theory of optimism. And such a theory was built up with great power and ability by the German philosopher E. von Hartmann, whose PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS appeared in 1869. Leaving aside his metaphysics and his grotesque theory of the destiny of the universe, we see here and in his subsequent works how plausibly a convinced evolutionist could revive the view of Rousseau that civilisation and happiness are mutually antagonistic, and that Progress means an increase of misery.
Huxley himself, [Footnote: See Agnosticism in Nineteenth Century (Feb. 1889); Government: Anarchy or Regimentation, ib. (May 1890); Essays on Evolution and Ethics (1894).] one of the most eminent interpreters of the doctrine of evolution, did not, in his late years at least, entertain very sanguine views of mankind. "I know of no study which is so saddening as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set forth in the annals of history.... Man is a brute, only more intelligent than other brutes"; and "even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability." There may be some hope of a large improvement, but otherwise he would "welcome a kindly comet to sweep the whole affair away." And he came to the final conclusion that such an improvement could only set in by deliberately resisting, instead of co-operating with, the processes of nature. "Social progress means the checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another which may be called the ethical process." [Footnote: Huxley considers progress exclusively from an ethical, not from an eudaemonic point of view.] How in a few centuries can man hope to gain the mastery over the cosmic process which has been at work for millions of years? "The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations."
I have quoted these views to illustrate that evolution lends itself to a pessimistic as well as to an optimistic interpretation. The question whether it leads in a desirable direction or not is answered according to the temperament of the inquirer. In an age of prosperity and self-complacency the affirmative answer was readily received, and the term evolution attracted to itself in common speech the implications of value which belong to Progress.
It may be noticed that the self-complacency of the age was promoted by the popularisation of scientific knowledge. A rapidly growing demand (especially in England) for books and lectures, making the results of science accessible and interesting to the lay public, is a remarkable feature of the second half of the nineteenth century; and to supply this demand was a remunerative enterprise. This popular literature explaining the wonders of the physical world was at the same time subtly flushing the imaginations of men with the consciousness that they were living in an era which, in itself vastly superior to any age of the past, need be burdened by no fear of decline or catastrophe, but trusting in the boundless resources of science might securely defy fate.
4.
[It was said in 1881 by an American writer (who strongly dissented from Spencer's theory) that the current view was "fatalistic." See Henry George, Progress and Poverty. But it may be doubted whether those of the general public who optimistically accepted evolution without going very deeply into the question really believed that the future of man is taken entirely out of his hands and is determined exclusively by the nature of the cosmic process. Bagehot was a writer who had a good deal of influence in his day; and in Physics and Politics (1872), where he discusses Progress, there is no suggestion of fatalism. In France, the chief philosophical writers who accepted Progress as a fact protested against a fatalistic interpretation (Renouvier, Cournot, Caro; and cf. L. Carrau's article on Progress in the Revue des deux Mondes (Oct. 1875)).