Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

This criticism has been partly dealt with before. We have seen that the present organization of human mind introduces its possessor to a practical infinitude of possibility. We have also seen that there is no theoretical obstacle to be seen at present to an increase of human powers, be it in range of comprehension, intensity of feeling, or brilliance of intuition. More to our present purpose is the reply that, whereas in all these ways the inherent capabilities have not increased, yet the opportunities of realizing these capabilities have for the bulk of the population increased—in particular, for instance, of gratifying the more complex and the more intellectual emotions, with the multiplication of theatres, of books, of pictures, of concerts. Here, for once, the average has advanced more than the upper level. Whatever overstress and maladjustment the complexity of modern civilization has brought with it, it has certainly made it easier for more men and women to realize more of their potentialities now than a thousand years ago, and far more than a hundred thousand years ago.

There are, then, these facts to set on the credit side of Progress’ balance-sheet. It is easy enough to see items on the debit side, and indeed to be so horrifiedly fascinated by it as not to have eyes for anything else. Human history is in one view but a long record of suffering, oppression, and folly. Slavery, torture, religious persecution, war, pestilence and famine, the greed of those who possess power, the dirt and sloth and ignorance of those who do not—the elements of the picture keep on recurring, if not in the old forms, then in new ones. Pain, disease, disappointment, and death are inevitable. Even when a civilization seems to be progressing, there always comes a time when it passes its zenith and topples through decay or defect to ruin. How is it possible to speak of progress when at this present moment there are vast poverty-stricken and slum populations with all the great nations, and when these same great nations have just been engaged in the most appalling war in history?

It is a formidable indictment: but I venture to assert that it can be met by the same argument with which, in the realm of biology, was met the argument from degeneration.

Such facts show at once that any idea of inevitable or of universal progress is untenable, the product of an irrational idealism which prefers its own desires to reality. They show further that, up to the present, suffering and pain on the one hand, and on the other degeneration in a certain number of individuals, are as universal and apparently inevitable in human as in animal evolution. But they do not show that some sort of progress may not have occurred—not necessarily the kind of progress that some of us would like, not necessarily as rapid as could be desired, but yet indubitably and solidly Progress. We have seen that in the hundreds of thousands of species which constitute life, that which has been increased most obviously is the upper level of certain qualities—primitive forms have persisted, degenerate forms have arisen side by side with and in spite of the steady improvement in the highest types. This has happened in man also.

The upper level of control and of independence in human group-units, and in a certain number of fortunate individuals, has obviously increased; but there are the slums, there are the drab lives of thousands in great cities, there are poverty, degeneracy, and crime. All that we can say is that to many at least it seems theoretically possible that man should be able to reduce the amount of degeneration, waste, and pain, to increase the changes to be summed up as progressive.

The future Golden Age of Millenniarism is as impossible a notion as the past Golden Age of Mythology, and more demoralizing. Bury, with pardonable sarcasm, speaks of the result hoped for in it as “a menagerie of happy men ... in which the dynamic character of history disappears.” But once we have accepted (as the great majority accept) life as somehow worth living, the belief in progress asserts only (though there is much in that “only”) that life may be made more worth living to a larger proportion of people, although effort and failure always will and always must be conditions of its operation. As Goethe said, “Let humanity last as long as it will, there will always be hindrances in its way, and all kinds of distress, to make it develop its powers.”

It is important to remember, what we have already noted, that the history of mankind is largely the history of competition between group-units or communities. When rare communities have been able to escape from this race of competition and have deliberately devoted the energy and resources thus set free to better community-regulation and an improvement in the lives of the individuals composing them, then, like Denmark, they have moved rapidly along a path of real progress. Once an efficient federation of communities has come into being, Progress can knock at the door with some chance of being admitted. In general, it is enough for our present purpose to have shown that some modicum of progress has occurred within the species Man; and that some of the characteristics which most saliently mark him off from other organisms—his powers of generalization and his self-consciousness—are in themselves germs, potentialities of great progress in the future, because through them blind biological progress can become economical, foreseeing, and conscious of herself.

There remains for me only one task—to investigate more closely the relation of that fact of evolutionary direction which we have called biological progress, to our ideas of value. What we have found is that there exists a certain general direction of movement in the evolution of living things; towards the increase of certain of their properties. But when we make a further analysis, we find that movement in this direction is movement towards a realization of the things judged by the human mind to have value. It is movement towards an increase of power, of knowledge, of purpose, of emotion, of harmony, of independence. Increases in these faculties combine, once a certain stage in mental development is reached, to mean the embracing of ever larger syntheses by the organism possessing them—practical syntheses, as in business, or exploration, or administration; intellectual, as in philosophy or in the establishment of scientific laws; emotional, as in love or in the passion for nature; artistic, as in a symphony or great drama. These capabilities are greater in man than in the higher animals, in the higher animals than in the lower, more and more windows being closed and powers pruned away as we descend the scale.

It is immaterial whether the human mind comes to have these values because they make for progress in evolution, or whether things which make for evolutionary progress become significant because they happen to be considered as valuable by human mind, for both are in their degree true. There is an interrelation which cannot be disentangled, for it is based on the fundamental uniformity and unity of the cosmos. What is important is that the human idea of value finds its external counterpart in an actual historical direction in phenomena, and that each becomes more important because of the relationship.

Much of what I have written will appear obvious. But if it has been obvious, it will be because I have here attempted to focus attention on some of the corollaries of a single fundamental truth—so obvious that it often escapes notice, but so fundamental that its results cannot but fail to obtrude themselves upon us. I mean the unity of phenomena—not merely the unity of life, put on a firm footing for all time by Darwin, though that is for my purpose the most important, but the unity of living and non-living, demanding a monistic conception of the universe. For the present, the stellar host (possibly, as recent astronomy seems to assert, assembled not in one system but in a multiplicity of universes, floating through space like a shoal of jelly-fishes in a Mediterranean bay)—the stars seem alien from our life, alien or at best neutral. All that links us to them is that we are built of the same stuff, the same elements.