Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

This last point may be first dealt with. It has often been urged as an argument against the doctrine of progress that we can trace no advance in the capabilities of the individual man throughout history, and it has even been asserted that no such advance has occurred during pre-history. To this latter criticism there is the obvious reply that at some period there was an origin of human from non-human organisms, and that during the period of transition at least (and probably for a considerable time afterward) there naturally must have been a raising of the upper level of attainments, and still more of possibility. The main point at issue, however, is not to be gainsaid. It appears[13] that comparatively early in the evolution of man, there appeared, in some branches of the stock, a type of mental organization which has not yet been improved upon. An individual possessing it is capable, when developing in proper environment (the most important single elements of which are the organization and tradition of the community to which he belongs) of attaining to possibilities which, measured in terms of the potentialities of any previous organism, are wellnigh boundless. He can survey the whole of mankind, penetrate the future with prophecy, bring the gamut of experience within a work of art, discover the laws by which the universe operates. Judged thus, Goethe is no greater and no less great than Leonardo, Shakespeare than Dante or Æschylus, Darwin than Pasteur, Kant than Plato.

The best type of human mind operating to the best advantage, is introduced to possibilities so vast in comparison with its paltry span of existence that it can never realize more than a fraction of them. Furthermore, since the incidence of natural selection has fallen, from long before historical time, upon the community and its traditions far more than upon the individual, and since the conditions under which the possibilities of the individual can be even qualitatively realized have been rarely forthcoming, it is not surprising that the level of possibility itself has not been raised. Indeed, only too often there has been reversed selection, and the exceptional man has suffered from his exceptional endowments.

There is no theoretical objection whatever to the idea that new types of mind, new modes of thought, new levels of attainment, could be reached by life: the mental difference between low types of men and men of genius is almost as great as that between man and ape. The difference in practical intelligence between a hen, a dog, a chimpanzee, and a man is largely a difference in the complexity of the situations which can be grasped as a whole so that the right way out is adopted as the result of this unitary comprehension.[14] There is no reason to doubt that other types of mental mechanism are possible which would make our grasp of complex situations appear pitiful and hen-like in its limitations, which would enable their possessors to see and solve in a flash where we can only grope and guess or at best calculate laboriously and step by step. But this will not take place, first until the community-environment is made as favourable as possible for such development, and secondly until there is begun a deliberate biological encouragement of new possibilities of intuition, say, or of communication between mind and mind.

As regards the second point, the raising of the average as opposed to the upper level of attainment, not much need be said. That part of our civilization which can be thought of as progressive is largely concerned with this very thing—with making it possible for men to realize in larger measure their inherent possibilities. Further, in so far as there exists selection within the community, it largely, under present conditions, encourages qualities such as intelligence and initiative, which are biologically progressive. And finally, when Eugenics shall become practical politics, its action, so far as we can see, will be at first entirely devoted to this raising of the average, by altering the proportion of good and bad stock, and if possible eliminating the lowest strata, in a genetically mixed population.[15]

Since, however, the main stress in human evolution has been upon the community and upon tradition, it is here that we shall expect to find most definite evidences of progress, and it is here that we do in fact find them.

We have in the first place the increase of the size of units, familiar to us already in lower forms. This, however, is tending to a limit, which will be attained when the present competition of sovereign states has been replaced (as, if we can read the future from the past, it inevitably will be) by some form of federation covering the globe. We find an immense increase of control over environment—a theme so hackneyed as to need no labouring. We find an almost equally striking, if less spectacular, increase in independence. Man becomes less and less at the mercy of the forces of nature and of other organisms, attains much more to self-regulation. This has depended upon increased efficiency of “organs”—here the extra-organismal organs we call tools and machines; and upon increased rapidity and certainty of communication both within and between units. There has been an almost overwhelming increase (displaying too not a uniform but an accelerated motion) of knowledge, of the possibilities of acquiring new knowledge, and of what may be called the “group-memory”—the power of storing and rendering knowledge available, and this in its turn brings about a huge increase in the size of the environment with which man either physically or mentally comes into contact.

As regards increase of harmony or co-ordination, human communities have advanced but little, although in the increase of powers of communication there has been laid the foundation for such possibility.

That this lack of progress is partly due to the extreme rapidity of change in type of unit and of the units’ increase in size, is not doubtful; a further ground for it, however, is to be found in the fact that human societies present a new biological problem, in so much as it is impossible, man being what he is, to solve the relationship of individual and community, of smaller and larger unit, in the simple way in which it has always been solved before—by specialization and subordination of the individuals.[16] The early development of codes of law, codes of ritual, and codes of morals represents the first attempt at a solution of the problem: the modern rise of arbitration as a method of settling disputes between whole units and large groups within units is another important step in the same direction. Nevertheless, it is here that the most drastic change of method will have to be brought into being if man’s development is to continue progressive.

There is, however, a weighty criticism of the validity of human progress. Granted that human science and invention have made enormous strides, that knowledge has increased and convenience multiplied—is man, the living, feeling, personal human being, any the better in essentials for all of this—has it not merely made life more complex at the expense of its depth, more rapid at the expense of its tranquillity and suavity? This is especially obvious in the field of art. It is impossible to maintain that any one of a certain number—a hundred, or perhaps a thousand—of great poets, painters, sculptors, or musicians is greater or has achieved finer things than any other of the number. What is more, in most arts—notably sculpture, painting, and poetry, the possibilities of expression and achievement do not increase, and once a certain pitch of skill is reached, tend to extinguish themselves in technique and virtuosity. When this happens, new ideas generally come upon the scene and work up again from a relatively primitive to a complicated technique along a more or less different path—and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

This is not so true of architecture, and still less so of music. In intellectual matters it is clearly not true of mathematics, where each advance provides the foundation for the solution of more complex problems, nor, similarly, of much of science. But even in this intellectual domain, where the accumulation of knowledge is so evident, where the increasing difficulty and complexity of the problems soluble and solved is so remarkable—even here the individual achievement can scarcely be properly said to increase, certainly not the individual merit or the individual satisfaction. Newton’s achievement was no less splendid because to-day any fourth-rate mathematician can use the calculus, nor Euclid’s for that his discoveries can be explained to every schoolboy; while for Harvey to discover the circulation of the blood or for Dalton to demonstrate the particulate nature of matter was certainly no slighter task than that needed to show the reality of internal secretion or to discover the infra-atomic world of electrons. The task occupied all their powers, its accomplishment satisfied them; and the powers themselves have not increased—only the ways in which men have learned to use them.