But the last half-century has at least enlarged our view so that we can perceive that we, as living things, are not alien to the rest of life—that we march in the same direction, and that our hostility to and struggles with other organisms are in part but the continuation of the old struggle, in part the expression of the fact that we have acquired new methods for dealing with the problems of existence.
The origin of life itself, and its movement in time—both these are found to face in the same direction as ourselves. St. Paul wrote that all things work together for good. That is an exaggeration: but they work together so that the average level of the good is raised, the potentialities of life are bettered. In every time and every country, men have obscurely felt that, although so much of the world, taken singly, was evil, yet the clash of thing with thing, process with process, the working of the whole, somehow led to good.
This feeling is what I believe is clarified and put on a firm intellectual footing by biology. The problems of evil, of pain, of strife, of death, of insufficiency and imperfection—all these and a host of others remain to perplex and burden us. But the fact of progress emerging from pain and battle and imperfection—this is an intellectual prop which can support the distressed and questioning mind, and be incorporated into the common theology of the future.
Dean Inge, in his Romanes Lectures,[17] quotes Disraeli’s caustic words, “The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization,” and quotes them with approval. He bitterly criticizes what we may sum up as Millenarianism (although this after all is but a crude and popular aspiration after what the Christian would call the Kingdom of God on earth). And, after exalting Hope as a virtue, closes with the somewhat satirical statement, “It is safe to predict that we shall go on hoping.”
He has been so concerned to attack the dogma of inherent and inevitable progress in human affairs that he has denied the fact of progress—whether inevitable we know not, but indubitable and actual—in biological evolution: and in so doing he has cut off himself and his adherents from one of the ways in which that greatest need of man which we spoke of at the outset can be satisfied, from by far the greatest manifestation in external things of “something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.”
One word more, and I have done. There remains in some ways the hardest problem of all. The greatest experiences of human life, those in which the mind appears to touch the Absolute and the Infinite—what of their relation to this notion of progress? They are realized in many forms—in love, in intellectual discovery, in art, in religion; but the salient fact about all is that they are felt as of intensest value, and that they seem to leave no more to be desired. Doubtless when we say that at such moment we touch the Infinite or the Absolute we mean only that we touch what is infinite and absolute in comparison with our ordinary selves. None the less, the sense of finality and utter reality attendant on them is difficult to bring into line with our idea of progress.
“I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright.”
The Dean too has felt this so strongly that he has made it the keystone of his argument. As he says, “Spiritual progress must be within the sphere of a reality which is not itself progressing, or for which in Milton’s grand words ‘progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own perfection, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever.’”