Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

Putting it summarily, we can say that, with the rise of mind to dominance, various activities of mind come to be pursued for their own sake, to have value in themselves. Our life is worth living not only for the sake of eating and drinking, sleeping, athletics, and sexual pleasure. There is a value attached to knowledge for its own sake, apart from the possible access of control that it may bring. But this is new, a property of man alone; not even Athena’s owl will exert itself through laborious years to understand celestial mechanics or physiology. The highest anthropoids do not attempt to create works of art, which for man come to have value in themselves. Natural beauty comes to have its value too; a cow (so far as known!) does not interrupt the business of its life to admire the sunset, whereas men may and do. Behaviour also is implicated; with the entry upon the scene of that practically unlimited number of possible reactions which give us what we call free will and choice, there comes a conviction that some modes of action are higher than others; and so a scale of moral values comes into being.[47]

Nor is it merely that values, in the strict sense, are created; nor that new values come into being. But with the enlargement of mind and its more perfect organization, there arises a new method of appraising values, and so a new type of value altogether. I mean of course the so-called absolute values. Absolute values are never absolute in the sense of absolute completeness; they are relative to two things—to external reality and to our mental powers and organization.[48] They are abstractions; we generalize the value in our minds, and at the same time raise it to the highest pitch of intensity we can. An interesting point arises from this way of thinking. Apart from the guarantee of our own convictions, the observable direction of living nature is our guarantee of right: or one had better say that it is at once the guarantee and the touchstone of our convictions. But two things may be moving in the same direction, and, if one be moving much slower than the other, the slower may impede the faster; a pedestrian procession making eastward along Fleet Street will hold up the life of the city for a time, and cows walking along railways are treated as obstacles by trains proceeding in the same direction. So it comes about that much that was once progressive in organic evolution has become an obstacle or a drag to psychozoic evolution; it is relatively retrogressive, and, from our present standpoint, bad. To take the simplest and most fundamental example: evolution by blind natural selection was the method of progress for organisms below man. Unceasing struggle and courage was the chief factor in producing the grandeur and strength of the lion, the swiftness and grace of deer, the brilliance and lightness of the birds. But if the same end can be obtained both more quickly and more bloodlessly by new methods, then the old stands condemned. Here lies the key to the problem propounded by Huxley in his Romanes Lecture—the problem of man’s relation to the rest of the cosmic process, at once sprung from it by gradual generation and separated from it by an absolute and unbridgeable chasm, at once one with it and in deadly combat with it and all its ways.

Our mode of envisaging the problem illuminates it, and shows it as inevitable and intelligible instead of insoluble and tormenting; and illuminates too many other minor problems of good and evil. But all this is a side-issue: revenons à nos moutons.

Unknown, or neutral, or hostile power: a movement similar in direction to the direction in which history on the whole shows we are moving, and to that which we desire with our highest aspirations, but operating blindly; an acceleration of that movement by the coming of mind to biological predominance, with certain consequent minor changes in direction by major changes in speed and in methods. Three tendencies, but all founded in one unity, and each arising out of the other—that is the picture drawn for us by the present state of science. In this sense, and in this only, can it be said that “all things work together for righteousness.”

One word on an important side-issue—the problem of evil in man, of stagnancy and degeneration in organic evolution. Degeneration often does occur—a reversal, in other words, of the main tendency. But the positive fact remains that the maximum level is progressively raised, and that we find that stagnation of development and even sometimes degeneration have been factors indirectly helping on the main direction.

We must accept the positive main direction for what it is—an external sanction of faith; confess that we do not understand the detailed working of the whole, but see in the change of methods brought about by the rise of mind a hope that we shall gradually learn at least to dispense with much waste and evil and degeneration in the further course of evolution.

This main direction gives us cause for optimism. The exceptions to it temper that optimism. But the direction is there.

As we shall see later, we may either call the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos the manifestations of God, who in this case must be the Absolute God, and unknowable except through these manifestations. Or we may confine the term God to its anthropological usage, as denoting the objects of human religion, in which case we must admit that the term God as understood by man is constituted by man’s idea of the forces acting in the cosmos, so that not only are these forces involved, not only a possible Absolute God behind them, but also the organizing power of human mind.

I wish you here to agree to my adopting the second alternative and giving the name of God to the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos as perceived and grasped by human mind. We can therefore now say that God is one, but that though one, has several aspects. There is one aspect of God which is neutral to us, in a way hostile, mere Power operating in the vastness of the stellar universes, apprehended only as orderly, tending in a direction which appears to be in the long run inimical. It is to this aspect of God that Mr. Wells has given the name of the Veiled Being—a somewhat primitive term for a true idea. There is another aspect, which is the one seen operating in that sphere which comprises the whole of life upon this earth—a sphere infinitesimal in relation to the whole, yet still vast in relation to ourselves. This aspect of God is our refuge and guarantee, for here we find our assurance that our human life is a part of a whole that is not antagonistic, but moves in the same general direction as do our history and our aims. There does exist, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” And this second aspect is not wholly separate from the first, in spite of its difference of direction; for the first is its parent, physically and temporally, and the direction of biological progress is the continuation of a line of development marked out, within the opposed inorganic direction, even from the first.