Natural selection and the possible evolution of gods.
If evolution may be conceived as possessing from the beginning a certain aim and as being on the whole providential,—a metaphysical hypothesis which unhappily is guiltless of the smallest trace of scientific induction,—it may also be conceived as resulting in beings capable of proposing to themselves a certain aim, and of dragging nature after them toward it. Natural selection would thus finally be converted into moral and, in some sort, divine selection. Such an hypothesis is, no doubt, as yet a rash one, but is at least in the direction of the trend of scientific thought, and it is not formally in contradiction with present knowledge. Evolution, in effect, can and will produce species and types superior to humanity as we know it; it is not probable that we embody the highest achievement possible in life, thought, and love. Who knows, indeed, but that evolution may be able to bring forth, nay, has not already brought forth, what the ancients called gods?
Possibility of arresting process of dissolution.
Such speculation offers a permanent support for what is best in the religious sentiment for sociality, not only with all living and knowing beings, but with the creatures of thought and superior power with which we people the universe. Provided such beings are in no sense anti-real, provided they might somewhere exist, if not in the present at least in the future, the religious sentiment may attach itself to them without check from the scientific sentiment. And in so doing it becomes one with the metaphysical and poetic impulse. The believer is transmuted into a philosopher or a poet, but into a poet whose poetry is his life, and who dreams of a universal society of real or possible beings who shall be animated to a goodness of will analogous to his own. The statement that Feuerbach proposed, of what is essential in moral and religious sentiment (the reaction of human desire on the universe), may then be interpreted in a higher sense as referring to a desire and a hope both that, first, the sociality with which we feel ourselves personally to be animated may, as biology would lead us to believe, be discovered in all beings that exist at the summit of universal evolution; and second, that these beings thus placed at the front by evolution, will one day succeed in securing what they have gained, in preventing dissolution, and that they may thereby permanently establish in the universe the love of social or rather universal well-being.
The highest possible conception in the realms of morals.
Thus understood, the religious sentiment may still be regarded as ultra-scientific, but no longer as anti-scientific. It is, no doubt, taking much for granted to suppose that beings who have arrived at a high degree of evolution may determine from that point on the direction that the evolutionary process is to take, but, after all, since we are unable to affirm with certitude that such is not or may not become the fact, the moral and social sentiment urges us to act in such manner as to turn as far as in us lies the process of evolution in that direction. If, as we have said, morality is a species of productivity, every moral being must turn his eyes toward the future, must hope that his work will not die, must watch over the safety of that portion of himself that he has delivered to someone else—of his love—by which not only he has devoted himself to others, but has made others in a sense his own; has acquired rights over them, has conquered them, so to speak, by subjecting himself to them. By labouring for humanity and for the universe with which humanity is bound up, I acquire certain rights over the universe. There arises between us a relation of reciprocal dependence. The highest conception of morals and metaphysics is that of a sort of sacred league between the higher beings of the earth, and even of the universe, for the advancement of what is good.
II. What scientific facts may be urged in bar of such hopes as to the destiny of the universe and of humanity?
Immanence of dissolution.