It is about as profound to suppose that the earth and its contents, and the suns, stars, and systems of space, were all made for a single species inhabiting an obscure ball located in a remote quarter of the universe as it is to suppose that the gigantic body of the elephant was made for the wisp of hair on the tip of its tail. Man is not the end, he is but an incident, of the infinite elaborations of Time and Space.
XI. Ethical Implications of Evolution.
The doctrine of organic evolution, which forever established the common genesis of all animals, sealed the doom of anthropocentricism. Whatever the inhabitants of this world were or were thought to be before the publication of ‘The Origin of Species,’ they never could be anything since then but a family. The doctrine of evolution is probably the most important revelation that has come to the world since the illuminations of Galileo and Copernicus. The authors of the Copernican theory enlarged and corrected human understanding by disclosing to man the comparative littleness of his world—by discovering that the earth, which had up to that time been supposed to be the centre and capital of cosmos, is in reality a satellite of the sun. This heliocentric discovery was hard on human conceit, for it was the first broad hint man had thus far received of his true dimensions. The doctrine of evolution has had, and is having, and is destined to continue to have, a similarly correcting effect on the naturally narrow conceptions of men. It tends to fry the conceit out of us. It has been impossible since Darwin for any sane and honest man to go around bragging about having been ‘made in the image of his maker,’ or to successfully lay claim to a more honourable origin than the rest of the creatures of the earth. And if men had accepted the logical consequences of Darwin’s teachings, the world would not to-day—a half-century after his revelation—be filled with practices which find their only support and justification in out-of-date traditions. But logical consequences, as Huxley observes, are the official scarecrows of that large and prolific class of defectives usually known as fools. The doctrine of evolution is accepted in one form or another by practically all who think. It is taught even in school primers. But while the biology of evolution is scarcely any longer questioned, the psychology and ethics of the Darwinian revelation, though following from the same premises, and almost as inevitably, are yet to be generally realised. Darwin’s revelation, like every other revelation that has come to the world, is perceived most tardily by those working in departments where the phenomena are the most intangible and complicated.
Darwin himself called ‘the love for all living creatures the most noble attribute of man.’ Giant as he was, he perceived more clearly than any of his contemporaries, more clearly even than his successors, the ultimate goal of evolving altruism. For he says: ‘As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. There is, then, only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. Experience, however, shows us how long it is, if such men are separated from him by great differences of appearance or habits, before he looks upon them as his fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man is one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except for their pets. The very idea of humanity, so far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue seems to arise from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.’[1]
The influences of a doctrine old enough and precious enough to have become embodied in the life and institutions of a race persist generally, through mere momentum, long after the substance of the doctrine has passed away. This is eminently true of that misconception which has come down to us regarding the nature and origin of man and his relations to the rest of the universe. Darwin has lived, shed his light over the world, and passed back to the dust whence he came. Men no longer believe that other races and other worlds were really made for them. But they continue to act in about the same manner as they did when; they did believe it. This assertion applies not simply to those half-baked intelligences who have only the rudest and most antiquated notions about anything but also to thousands of men and women who pretend to have up-to-date conceptions of themselves and the universe—men and women noted even for their activity in reminding others of their inconsistency—men and women who
‘Compound for sins they are inclined to,
By damning those they have no mind to.’
The doctrine of Universal Kinship is not a new doctrine, born from the more brilliant loins of modern understanding. It is as old almost as human philosophy. It was taught by Buddha twenty-four hundred years ago. And the teachings of this divine soul, spreading over the plains and peninsulas of Asia, have made unnumbered millions mild. It was taught also by Pythagoras and all his school of philosophers, and rigidly practised in their daily lives. Plutarch, one of the grandest characters of antiquity, wrote several essays in advocacy of it. In these essays, as well as in many passages of his writings generally, he demonstrates that he was far ahead of his contemporaries in the breadth and intensity of his moral nature, and in advance even of all except a very few of those living to-day, 2,000 years after him. Shelley among the poets of modern times, and Tolstoy in these latter days, are others among the eminent adherents of this holy cause.
Wherever Buddhism prevails, there will be found in greater or less purity, as one of the cardinal principles of its founder, the doctrine of the sacredness of all Sentient Life. But the Aryan race of the West has remained steadfastly deaf to the pleadings of its Shelleys and Tolstoys, owing to the overmastering influence of its anthropocentric religions. Not till the coming of Darwin and his school of thinkers was there a basis for hope of a reformed world. To-day the planet is ripe for the old-new doctrine. Tradition is losing its power over men’s conduct and conceptions as never before, and Science is growing more and more influential. A central truth of the Darwinian philosophy is the unity and consanguinity of all organic life. And during the next century or two the ethical corollary of this truth is going to receive unprecedented recognition in all departments of human thought. Ignorance and Inertia are fearful facts. They endure like granite in the human mind. But the tireless chisels of evolution are invincible. And the time will come when the anthropocentric customs and conceptions, which are to-day fashionable enough to be ‘divine,’ will have nothing but a historic existence. The movement to put Science and Humanitarianism in place of Tradition and Savagery, which is so weak, languishing, and neglected to-day, is a movement which has for its ultimate destiny the conquest of the Human Species.
[1.] Darwin: Descent of Man, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.