Social Rights And Duties: Addresses to Ethical Societies. Vol 2 [of 2]

by Leslie Stephen

There is, however, another side from which I must briefly consider the question of heredity; and it is a side which, I think, is really more important, because it involves issues of facts, and has suggested some more reasonable prejudices. It is, undoubtedly, very common that when a theory has obtained a certain currency it should be applied rashly beyond its proper limits. When the speculations of Darwin encouraged us to believe that the natural selection might be analogous to artificial selection, that different species of animals have been produced as varieties of dogs and pigeons have been produced by breeders, it was, at least, tempting to apply the same formula directly to other cases. Some men of science have endeavoured to show that genius or criminality is hereditary; and that, if one man writes a great poem and another picks a pocket, it is always in virtue of their hereditary endowment. Within certain limits, this statement is not surprising, and I shall be very glad when men of science can tell us what those limits may be. Without being a man of science, I fully believe that our congenital characteristics form, as I have said, certain impassable limits to our development. One baby is a potential Shakespeare, and, probably, only one in a million. The qualities with which he starts, again, are, no doubt, derived from his parents, though we do not, as yet, understand in what way; whether, for example, we should infer that Shakespeare's parents had more than usual capacity, or were especially healthy, or had some peculiar form of one-sided development which generated the disease called poetical genius; or whether he may have inherited qualities from a remote ancestor, which had remained latent for several generations. In any case, he was at birth only a potential Shakespeare. He might have died of the measles, or been made stupid by a sunstroke, or have taken to drink in bad company, or have run away to sea, or been sent to the University and become a mere bishop or professor of casuistry; in short, though he could not easily have done very much better work than he did, he might have done inconceivably less. That is to say, his congenital qualities implied certain powers; but what he would do with them remained to be partly determined by an indefinite variety of external circumstances acting upon him in various ways. Hence, we have always the complex problem, what, given certain raw material in the shape of new-born babies, will be the characteristics of the finished product in the shape of a grown-up population? If the social state is determined from the inherited qualities directly, we should be able, for example, to infer from a given proportion of criminals, that a certain number of children were born with a corresponding physical constitution, with "foreheads villainous low," and prognathous jaws, and with the other peculiar signs which mark the felon from his birth. In that case, again, we should infer, I suppose, that the only possible means of improving the social state would be by somehow improving the breed; perhaps, by appointing some of the inspectors who play so great a part in modern society, to examine infants, and get rid of those who were thus distinguished, by the means now adopted in the case of superfluous puppies. One objection to this system is, of course, that men of science have not yet shown that they are qualified for exercising such a supervision; and there are other difficulties upon which I need not dwell. This much, indeed, we may grant without any scientific prepossessions whatever. It is clearly very desirable that every generation should raise up for its successors as many children with sturdy bodies and vigorous brains as possible; and it is to be hoped that the objection to transmitting disease and imbecility may be more generally recognised, and, in some shape or other, have an influence even upon the strongest passions. But I am only concerned with the general theory, which, if I understand it rightly, would appear to imply that the characteristics of a society are irrevocably fixed by the characteristics of the children born into it; and, whether this theory be true or false, we must admit that it has a considerable bearing upon morality. If, in fact, we hold it to be rigidly true, we should have to suppose that no serious improvement can be produced in society at large, except by breeding a superior race of men. This, again, is a discouraging prospect. Let me quote what has been said by an authority who expresses, I believe, the accepted scientific view. "There can be no doubt," says Professor Huxley, "that vast changes have taken place in English civilisation since the days of the Tudors. But I am not aware that there is a single particle of evidence in favour of the conclusion that this evolutionary process has been accompanied by any modification of the physical or the mental characters of the men who have been the subjects of it. I have not met with any grounds for suspecting that the average Englishmen of to-day are sensibly different from those that Shakespeare knew and drew." The statement, I imagine, might be very much extended. I do not suppose that the average cockney of to-day is a superior animal, physically or morally, to the average Athenian of the days of Pericles, or even, it may be, to the pre-historic savages who made flint implements for the amusement of our antiquaries. Briefly, whatever change has taken place, within historical period, has been a social change, not a change in the structure of the individual. This is surely conceivable. We need only consider, for example, how vast a change has been made in all the conditions of life by the modern applications of practical science. Whether, in other respects, we are better or worse than our forefathers, we have an enormously greater aggregate of wealth now than we had, say, two centuries ago; we can support four times the population, though the condition of the lowest stratum may not be better. And this amazing advance of wealth is not due to the fact that Englishmen of to-day have better brains for mathematics than the Englishmen of Newton's time; but to the accumulation of capital, the improvement of the natural conditions of the soil, the turning to account of vast masses of material, previously neglected; to the invention of machinery, and so forth; all of which imply, not necessarily the very slightest improvement of natural capacity, but simply the growth of knowledge, and the fact that each generation has preserved more than it has consumed. What we call progress or civilisation, which means, whatever else it may or may not mean, a gigantic increase in the power of man over nature, is due, therefore, to the one fact that man can accumulate. He can modify the earth in such a way as to facilitate the labours of the coming generations; he can make tools which last beyond his own time, and which themselves become, as it were, the ancestors of incomparably superior tools; he can, moreover, accumulate and transmit knowledge, not merely the knowledge of facts, but the knowledge of scientific laws and of useful inventions, and of the right methods of investigating facts. When Newton made a discovery, he made it for all the following generations; and, though it may well be that no superior or even equal intellect has since arisen to carry on his work, the dwarf now stands on the shoulders of the giant. It is not simply that we know more facts. The modes of mathematical inquiry differ as much from those which Newton could employ, as the latest steam engine from the crude fire machine before the time of Watt; and an average undergraduate can solve with ease problems which once puzzled the greatest intellects that ever appeared among men. Man, then, can accumulate; and that simple fact enables every generation enormously to surpass its predecessors. Accumulation, again, is, of course, a form of inheritance. We are born heirs to the intellectual as well as to the material fortunes of our ancestors. But, it is obvious, this is something very different from heredity. It supposes an alteration, not in the man, but in his surroundings or his education in the widest sense; not in his intellectual capacity, but in the knowledge which it can attain and the rules which it has worked out. In order that a man may be capable either of bequeathing or inheriting, he must have certain faculties; he must be an observing, remembering, reasoning animal; but he may become indefinitely richer, not from any improvement in his powers of observing and remembering and using, but simply from the change in his position. People's memories, it is sometimes suggested, have been weakened by the invention of printing. But, weakened or not, we have an incomparably greater knowledge of the past than was formerly possible, because we can now keep our memories upon our bookshelves, in the form of histories and encyclopædias, and know every fact that we want to know when we want it, without troubling ourselves to fill our minds with all the knowledge that may ever be possibly useful. A library is an external and materialised memory. But without illustrating so plain a point any further, I simply take note of what it implies: that is, that, as Professor Huxley has pointed out, all that distinguishes the present state of things from the state of things in the time of Elizabeth, or, perhaps, at the time of remote Egyptian dynasties, may be due, not to any change in the individual, but to what is called the social factor. The inference from the individual to the society, or from the society to the individual, is, therefore, rigidly impossible, because, given the man, the position in which he is placed and the stage of development of the society to which he belongs, are relevant facts which exercise an incalculably great influence.

If this be true, what follows? We remark, in the first place, that the evolution of which we speak in regard to natural history, the process by which the present population of the globe has gradually grown out of the population of remote geological epochs, is slow. The changes which it may produce are not sensible within a generation—for, indeed, the very nature of the case implies that they must take many generations—not perhaps even within such a period as is covered by all authentic history. It is not, of course, on that account to be overlooked for scientific purposes. Monkeys must have grown into men before they could begin to accumulate capital, either material or spiritual. The faculty of accumulating must itself have been developed. Only when once it was developed, another process would begin, the process of social evolution, which, however it may resemble the other, or possibly be in some sense its continuation, proceeds, at least, at a totally different rate. The difference is comparable, one may say roughly, to the difference between the speed of an express train and the speed of a four-wheeled waggon. Beneath the surface, it may be, the slower process is still continuing; men, for anything I can say to the contrary, may be acquiring larger brains and more sensitive bodies; and it is further possible, or rather obvious, that if we can do anything to facilitate this proceeding, to behave so as to give nature a better chance of turning out better work, we ought to do so. Only nature is pretty sure to take her time about it. How far, again, one process is to be considered as a continuation of the other, or as a modification, or even as in opposition to it, is a point which I cannot now touch. What I have to say is simply this: that if we take any two periods of society, the present, for example, and that of a thousand or five thousand years ago, we shall find enormous or incalculably great differences in the social structure, in the amount of knowledge, in the character of the ethical, religious, and philosophical beliefs, and in the relations between the individuals of which the society is constructed; but between the individuals at the two periods we may find hardly any definable difference whatever. For anything we can say, we should be able, if we could move people about in time as well as in space, to exchange a thousand infants of the nineteenth century A.D., for a thousand of the nineteenth century B.C., and nobody would be able to detect the difference which would result.

Hence it follows, in my opinion, that the evolutionary process with which moralists and political philosophers have practically to deal, is what I have called the social, and not the individual process. We inherit thoughts as we inherit wealth; we inherit customs and laws and forms of worship, and indeed our whole mental furniture; we can add enormously to our inheritance, and can transmit the augmented fund to our descendants. But the other process of inheritance, to which the word "heredity" is taken to apply, is not, immediately at least, cumulative. We inherit the old faculties, bodily and mental, unaltered, or with infinitesimal alterations, though we live in a different environment, and are ourselves as much altered as our environment. The modern social organism is built up, if I may say so, of cells almost identical in their properties with those of the old organism, although the mode of combination gives entirely new properties to the whole, and brings out new actions and reactions among the constituent cells themselves.

I have been touching the edge of certain problems of great interest but enormous complexity, and I shall venture to indicate the difference between these views and some which have recently attracted much attention. Mr. Kidd's work upon "Social Evolution" has made the phrase popular; but, instead of using it in my sense, he speaks as though "social evolution" involved what I have called individual evolution. In order to keep within limits, I will confine myself to one case upon which he lays great stress. It will show sufficiently why I hold his mode of reasoning to be inconclusive. Mr. Kidd has achieved success by very excellent qualities, by remarkable literary ability, and by his uniformly high tone of moral feeling. I should, therefore, be very sorry to speak of him otherwise than respectfully. Mr. Kidd, however, chooses to maintain a thesis in which he has certainly no personal interest,—the thesis, namely, that a little stupidity may be a very good thing. This view is, perhaps, intelligible when we observe that he also maintains that the progress of the race depends upon its holding "ultra-rational," which I think he would find it hard to distinguish from "irrational," beliefs. In support of this view he writes a chapter to prove that "progress is not primarily intellectual". The argument of which I have spoken is part of this proof. The Greeks, he tells us, were a race intellectually superior to ourselves. They were, so Mr. Galton informs him, two degrees above modern Englishmen in the scale of intelligence, and as superior to us as we are to the negro. And yet, says Mr. Kidd, this marvellous race died out, and no trace of its blood is now to be found in the present population of the world. Let us look shortly into the logic of this argument, and consider how far it is entitled to be regarded as scientific reasoning.

First of all, I should ask, what precisely is meant by "the Greeks"? The argument is founded partly on the number of great thinkers, poets, and artists, in proportion to the population. Now, it is obviously essential to a scientific statement that we should know what is the population indicated. If we compare the number of great men at Athens in its best period with the number of free Athenians, we shall get one ratio; if we admit the Athenian slaves, or add Bœotia and other Greek States to our population, we get quite a different ratio. And the difference is of immense importance. The smaller the population, the higher the excellence indicated by a given number of great men; but, also, the smaller the population, the less is the wonder that it should have died out or been swallowed up in the whirlpools of political, religious, and social convulsions. A similar remark applies in regard to the period during which this race flourished. When did they begin and when did they cease to be superior to other people? Till the statement is more precise we do not even know what are the phenomena to be explained; and the case is susceptible of any number of explanations. Did the superior race cease to be prolific; or was it prolific, but of inferior descendants; and, if so, was it because it was mixed with races of an inferior stamp; or was it because its position exposed it to the attacks of more numerous enemies; or because its energy led it to attempt impossible feats? Has it died out, or has it been swamped by other races? To answer such questions is absolutely necessary before we can say positively that the higher organisation was the cause of the decay, or that it did not cause the decay by some indirect process due to the special combination of circumstances. But to answer such questions, if they be answerable at all, would require the investigations of a lifetime, and a mastery of a whole series of studies, historical, statistical, ethnological, and so forth, in which I am an absolute ignoramus. But I cannot perceive that Mr. Kidd claims more than second-hand information.

But, secondly, there is another obvious question to which an answer is necessary. Mr. Kidd and Mr. Galton deduce their view about Greek intellect, first, from the proportion of great men. Does, then, the occurrence of a group of great men at a certain period prove a superior organisation in the race? That leads to a very familiar problem: What were the causes of what we may call the flowering times of arts and sciences? We are all familiar with the phenomenon; with the sudden display of astonishing excellence at Athens, at Florence, or in the England of Elizabeth. It seems to be the rule that processes which may have been going on quietly for centuries suddenly culminate; that artistic, poetic, or philosophic excellence becomes unprecedentedly common for a generation or two, and that the impulse then dies away as rapidly. It is the kind of problem which is satisfactorily solved by the authors of university prize essays, which somehow fail to convince the world or to be republished by their writers. Are we, then, entitled to argue from the great works an organic superiority in the race? Must we suppose, for example, that Englishmen at the time of Shakespeare and Bacon and Spenser and Raleigh were an abler race than their descendants, because, when there was a very much smaller number of educated men, they produced more first-rate authors than have been produced by generations much more numerous and more generally cultivated? This seems to me at least to be a very rash hypothesis; and some of the obvious remarks made in our university essays seem to me to indicate considerations which, though not conclusive, cannot be neglected. It is clear, for example, that particular stages of intellectual progress are abnormally stimulating; that, as the last step to a pass in the mountains suddenly reveals vast prospects, while a hundred equally difficult steps before made no appreciable change, so there are mental advances which, as at the time of Bacon, seemed suddenly to disclose boundless prospects of knowledge. It is the Pisgah sight of the promised land which causes a burst of energy. Or, again, a certain social condition is obviously required; philosophers and poets may exist potentially among barbarous tribes, but they cannot get a chance to speak, and they have no opportunity of communication with other thinkers. The intellect may be impelled in various directions, some of which leave no trace of a tangible kind. The amount of intellectual power implied in building up the Roman Empire may have been as great as that implied in developing Greek art; and in America, as we are often told, intellect turns to dollar-making, instead of book-writing. So, conversely, the outburst of power may indicate, not greater faculties, but special opportunities, or special stimulus, applied to already existing faculties. Everybody who has written an æsthetic treatise has pointed to all manner of conditions which were in this sense favourable to the Greeks. How far such conditions were sufficient I cannot even guess; but at least an allowance must be made for them before we can argue from the achievements to the intrinsic power of the race which achieved. I do not see that it is even "proved" that the average Athenian was in the least superior in this sense to the average Englishman. It would require a lifetime of study to pronounce any opinion worth having. I fully confess that, so far as a vague impression is worth anything, it is the most obvious impression, after looking at the Elgin marbles, that the Greeks were possessed of a finer organisation than ourselves. Still, I cannot accept as certain the quasi-mathematical formula that the Greek is to the Englishman as the Englishman to the negro.

This, however, suggests another and very difficult series of problems. Mr. Kidd is arguing against intellectual superiority. He, of course, does not argue that the general superiority of a race leads to its disappearance; but that a one-sided superiority—an improvement of one set of faculties at the expense of others—may have that result. This at once suggests a whole series of psychological problems. The intellect and the emotional nature are not two separate organs, each capable of independent development. Every mental process involves both, and neither faculty can be developed without reference to the other. Mr. Kidd accepts the conclusion that certain primitive races were as clever as ourselves, because their brains were as large. If the argument be sound, it proves equally that their emotional nature was as well developed as ours; for no one can doubt that the brain is the physical condition of feeling as well as of thought. Even the most abstract thought, as he elsewhere notices, implies certain moral qualities. Newton remarked that he was superior to other men, not because his intellect was clearer, but because he attended more persistently to his problems. The statement, I think, involves a fallacy. Newton himself, no doubt, did better the longer he kept a problem before him. He inferred, unjustifiably, that of two different men, the one who could keep up his attention longest would be the best. That does not follow. The difference may indeed be moral as well as intellectual; and it is quite true that a power of sustained attention is of the highest importance in mathematics, and that that power supposes a moral quality; but, conversely, the power of attention probably implies also the power of clear intellectual vision. A muddle-headed man would find attention useless. This is, of course, still clearer in the case where the mind is exercised upon questions of human interest. The statesman and the dramatist both depend upon their power of sympathy and the strength of their emotions, as much as upon their logical capacity. To feel for others I must imagine their position: if I imagine it, I can hardly avoid feeling for them. "Altruism" is the product, in other words, of a process both intellectual and moral.

Now, remembering this, we see the difficulty of pronouncing upon the nature of the Greek organisation. Perhaps the commonest of all remarks upon Greek work is the symmetry and harmony, the "all-roundness," if I may say so, of the development implied. Poetry and philosophy, art and science seem to be so blended in their work that we cannot tell which faculty is predominant. What, then, is the inequality of development which is essential to Mr. Kidd's argument? They were wanting, he seems to answer, in "altruism". What does this mean? The astonishing power of the Greeks was certainly as conspicuous in poetry and art as in anything else; and that power surely implies development of the emotional as well as of the intellectual nature. By a defect of "altruism," I take him to mean that these emotions did not flow along the channel of general philanthropy. They were wanting then, as I should put it, rather in cosmopolitanism than in altruism. If altruism means care for something outside yourself, where could we find better examples of altruism than at Thermopylæ or Marathon? Was it not due to Greek altruism in this form (some historians would say) that Mr. Kidd is not now living under the rule of a Persian Satrap? The altruism, no doubt, meant an intense and patriotic devotion to a small State, or an interest in Greek as against barbarian, and was compatible with much brutality to individuals and acquiescence in slavery. But this does not indicate an absence of the emotions themselves, but simply their confinement within narrow limits, by the conditions under which they were placed. Slavery, for example, is abominable; but I see no reason for supposing that the slave-holders in America were worse men by innate constitution than their opponents. They were corrupted by their position.

This, in any case, leads to another problem. Were the Greeks more or less altruistic than other races? If you could show that altruistic races had survived while the Greeks perished, there might be a presumption that the want of altruism was the cause of their decay. But this again does not seem to be the case. Hardly one of the ancient races, indeed, has survived unvaried. The Romans were at least as brutal as the Greeks, and, one would say, as far from "altruistic". Yet they overpowered the Greeks. How, then, can it be inferred that the Greeks perished because of defective altruism? The struggle for existence was between races equally defective to all appearance in that quality; and it must be a sophistry to signalise its absence in one as the cause of its disappearance. There is, indeed, one race to which every one would turn as the most prominent example of survival, namely, the Jews. The Jews have enormous merits and great intellectual endowments; but can anybody say that they were altruistic in the sense of being cosmopolitan? Are they not conspicuous, beyond any race, for the narrower forms of altruism, rejection of a cosmopolitan creed, even when it arose among them, and exclusive devotion to the welfare of their own people? I think that it would be perfectly easy to argue that the Greeks died out just because of their cosmopolitan and therefore dispersive tendencies, and that the Jews have held out from a judicious adherence to narrower views of self-preservation. But personally I regard all such "arguments" as really belonging to the extra-scientific regions of rhetorical illustration.

This suggests one other point which requires consideration. Mr. Kidd regards it as proved that progress has been due to the Christian religion, which revealed the new moral doctrine. The Christian religion introduced, it seems, that belief in the supernatural which is essential to altruism. It seems to me to be inconsistent with his own principles, that he should attribute progress to what is essentially, on his own showing, an intellectual change: that is, to a change in belief and even to a change which, in comparison with the old polytheism, was distinctly sceptical and rationalistic. But one point is clear. The introduction of Christianity may be interpreted more consistently in a totally different way. The Greek who became a Christian was not provided with a new set of emotions, but his emotions were directed into new channels. He ceased to care for Athens, because Athens had ceased to be an independent State; he began to be cosmopolitan when he was forced to be part of a cosmopolitan empire. The important distinction was no longer the distinction between Athenian and Spartan, but between the different classes in the world-wide system. That is to say, the "altruism" which came in with Christianity was not the product of a new dogma suddenly dropped from heaven; but of the new social condition, which made it inevitable that the forces which previously stimulated a local patriotism should now exert themselves nearer a cosmopolitan organisation. This is, of course, a commonplace; but, for that reason, it should not be simply ignored. It suggests one other consequence of Mr. Kidd's theory. It is proved, he says, that the progress of the Western world is due to Christianity. His "proof," as I suppose, is that the States which have sprung out of the old Empire of the West have been Christian and have progressed. How, then, about the Empire of the East? If the great Kingdoms of the West are the unique example of progress, what is the unique example of decay? Surely, the regions where Christian dogmatic theology was defended by Athanasius and Chrysostom. If you wish to point out a region where the race has actually gone backwards, you would refer to the Turkish Empire. Why, if Christianity was the sole cause of progress in one quarter, was it comparable with complete decay in the other? Does the Eastern theory about the filioque explain it? Or were the Mohammedans more "altruistic" than the Christians? Or is it that it is absurd, especially upon Mr. Kidd's own doctrine, to assign the dogmatic creed of a race as the sole cause of its character and its success in the struggle for existence?