This last statement is probably true of all plants and of all animals except that as applied to the human race it needs some transcendently important qualifications which students of evolution are very apt to neglect. I shall by and by point out these qualifications. At present we may note that the development of civilization, on its political side, has been a stupendous struggle for life, wherein the possession of certain physical and mental attributes has enabled some tribes or nations to prevail over others, and to subject or exterminate them. On its industrial side the struggle has been no less fierce; the evolution of higher efficiency through merciless competition is a matter of common knowledge. Alike in the occupations of war and in those of peace, superior capacity has thriven upon victories in which small heed has been paid to the wishes or the welfare of the vanquished. In human history perhaps no relation has been more persistently repeated than that of the hawk and the wren. The aggression has usually been defended as in the interests of higher civilization, and in the majority of cases the defence has been sustained by the facts. It has indeed very commonly been true that the survival of the strongest is the survival of the fittest.
Such considerations affect our mood toward Nature in a way that is somewhat bewildering. On the one hand, as we recognize in the universal strife and slaughter a stern discipline through which the standard of animate existence is raised and the life of creatures variously enriched, we become to some extent reconciled to the facts. Assuming, as we all do, that the attainment of higher life is in itself desirable, our minds cannot remain utterly inhospitable towards things, however odious in themselves, that help toward the desirable end. Since we cannot rid the world of them, we acquiesce in their existence as part of the machinery of God's providence, the intricacies of which our finite minds cannot hope to unravel. On the other hand, a thought is likely to arise which in days gone by we should have striven to suppress as too impious for utterance; but it is wiser to let such thoughts find full expression, for only thus can we be sure of understanding the kind of problem we are trying to solve. Is not, then, this method of Nature, which achieves progress only through misery and death, an exceedingly brutal and clumsy method? Life, one would think, must be dear to the everlasting Giver of life, yet how cheap it seems to be held in the general scheme of things! In order that some race of moths may attain a certain fantastic contour and marking of their wings, untold thousands of moths are doomed to perish prematurely. Instead of making the desirable object once for all, the method of Nature is to make something else and reject it, and so on through countless ages, till by slow approximations the creative thought is realized. Nature is often called thrifty, yet could anything be more prodigal or more cynical than the waste of individual lives? Does it not remind one of Charles Lamb's famous story of the Chinaman whose house accidentally burned down and roasted a pig, whereupon the dainty meat was tasted and its fame spread abroad until epicures all over China were to be seen carrying home pigs and forthwith setting fire to their houses? We need but add that the custom thus established lasted for centuries, during which every dinner of pig involved the sacrifice of a homestead, and we seem to have a close parody upon the wastefulness of Nature, or of what is otherwise called in these days the Cosmic Process. Upon such a view as this the Cosmic Process appears in a high degree unintelligent, not to say immoral.
III
Caliban's Philosophy
Polytheism easily found a place for such views as these, inasmuch as it could explain the unseemly aspects of Nature offhand by a reference to malevolent deities. With Browning's Caliban, in his meditations upon Setebos, that god whom he conceived in his own image, the recklessness of Nature is mockery engendered half in spite, half in mere wantonness. Setebos, he says,
"is strong and Lord,
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: So He."
Such is the kind of philosophy that commends itself to the beastly Caliban, as he sprawls in the mire with small eft things creeping down his back. His half-fledged mind can conceive no higher principle of action—nothing more artistic, nothing more masterful—than wanton mockery, and naturally he attributes it to his God; it is for him a sufficient explanation of that little fragment of the Cosmic Process with which he comes into contact.