Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

The need has been felt in all ages and in all countries; and the answers, the partial satisfactions of the needs which have been found by the mind of men, are correspondingly diverse.

Savages have endowed the objects around them, living and inanimate, with supernatural qualities. At a higher grade of development they have created gods made with hands, visible images of their fears or their desires, by whose worship and service they assuaged the urgent need within their breast. Still later, turning from such crudity, they became servants and worshippers of unseen gods, conceived under the form of persons, but persons transcending human personality, beings in whom was vested the control of man and of the world.

Up to this point there had been an increase of spirituality in the constructions by which human thought satisfied its need; none the less, the ideas underlying the mode of these constructions had not materially altered. As Voltaire so pungently put it, man had created God in his own image.

What remains? there remains to search in the external world, to find there if possible a foundation of fact for the belief drawn from the inner world of mind, to test the conceptions of a supreme being or supereminent power against ever more and more touchstones of reality, until the most sceptical shall acknowledge that the final construction represents, with whatever degree of incompleteness, yet not a mere fragment educed to fill a void, however inevitable, to satisfy a longing, however natural, but the summary and essence of a body of verifiable fact, having an existence independent of the wishes or ideals of mankind.

It was the striving after some such certainty that led Matthew Arnold to his famous definition of God as “something, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.” Dissatisfaction with the assertion that belief in a very special and undemonstrable form of Divinity was necessary as an act of faith has, in a large measure, helped the widespread revulsion against orthodox Christianity. It was the need for some external, ascertainable basis for belief which led such different minds as William James and H. G. Wells to approach religion, and in such diverse ways as in the “Varieties of Religious Experience” and in “God the Invisible King.” It is this same need which is leading the representatives of Christianity to lay ever greater stress upon the reality and pragmatic value of the religious experience, less and less upon dogmas and creeds.

It will be my attempt in this brief paper to show how the facts of evolutionary biology provide us, in the shape of a verifiable doctrine of progress, with one of the elements most essential to any such externally-grounded conception of God, to any construction which shall be able to serve as permanent satisfaction of that deepest need whereof we have spoken.

Any such construction must take account of many separate parts of reality. In the first place, it must consider those realities inherent in the mind of man: his desire for goodness; the sense of value which all agree is attached to certain experiences of mystics and to certain religious emotions; his ideals and their importance for the conduct of life. But in the second place it must consider those realities which are independent of man and of his mind—the ascertainable body of hard fact, those things which existed before ever he existed, which would exist were he to disappear, with which he must struggle as best he may. Lastly, there is the need for intermediation between the one and the other reality, between the inner felt and the outer known.

Mr. Wells,[1] if you remember, erected a new trinitarianism, which in broad outlines corresponded with this division. With his particular construction, I do not in many respects agree. But that some form of trinitarianism is a reasonably natural method of symbolizing the inevitable tripleness of inner experience, outer fact, and their interrelation is obvious enough. In the particular trinitarianism of Christianity, the reality apprehended to exist behind the forces of Nature is called the Father, the upspringing force within the mind of man, especially when it seems to transcend individuality and to overflow into what we designate as the mystical, is called the Holy Ghost, and the activity, personal or vicarious, which mediates between the individual and the rest of the universe, reconciling his incompleteness and his failures with its apparent sternness and inexorableness, is called the Son.

Some men lay more weight on one of these aspects than on the others. I know a clergyman of the Church of England who, on being reproached during a theological argument with failure to pay sufficient respect to the doctrine of God the Father, replied: “I am not interested in God the Father”; and I know intellectually-minded men who wish to reject the validity of all religious experience because their minds are so made that they pay more attention to external fact and because their reason refuses to let them agree with the interpretations of fact propounded by most religious bodies. But, for a properly balanced construction, for the finding of something which shall serve not as the basis of a creed for this or that sect, but of a creed for humanity, of something which instead of dividing shall unite, we need all aspects.

The idea of Progress constitutes, as I hope to show, the most important element in the first part of our construction—that which attempts to synthesize the facts of Nature; and besides, no inconsiderable portion of the third, the interrelation of inner and outer.