Morals and the Evolution of Man

by Max Simon Nordau

If one could believe in a Ruling Power and the plan of the universe as its work, would it not be terribly cruel and revoltingly unjust that this power, instead of treating all living beings alike, should make a kind of selection of grace and lead some up to a higher level while it condemned others to lasting lowliness, and that it should ordain that on the road from the unicellular organism to man, countless connecting links should be left hopelessly behind and not be permitted to continue their ascent? Or must we admit the humiliating conclusion that a greater amount of consciousness does not necessarily imply higher rank and greater dignity, and that a protista, with its almost unimaginably pale and narrow consciousness, can have just as great a feeling of well-being as man with his immeasurably superior intellectual life; that therefore the protista suffers no wrong if it never gets beyond its present stage of evolution; and finally that the amount of the outer world which man can absorb in his consciousness is as far removed from the entirety of the universe as the contents of the protista's consciousness are from that of the human mind? No answer can be found to these questions. Whatever purports to be an answer, be it introduced as theology or as philosophy, is visionary or nonsensical. We must resign ourselves to moving in a very small circle moderately illuminated by Reason, while all around, if we seek to penetrate beyond it, we perceive gruesome darkness.

Evolution, that is a progress from the comparatively simple to the more complicated, is a striking fact—I say comparatively simple advisedly, for even in the unicellular organism the processes are far removed from the absolutely simple. We do not know from what part of the organism the impulse to evolution comes. Here we meet with the same mystery which shrouds growth, its duration, its measure and its bounds. As the conception is lacking, a word has been found, viz., entelechy, which Driesch introduced into biology, the co-operation of all parts of the organism for the purpose not only of preserving it but also of making it more efficient in the matter of self-preservation and more perfect. A critical investigation of entelechy would involve the broaching of the whole question of life. It does not come within the scope of this work. I shall therefore content myself with a very few remarks. Entelechy works as if it were reasonable and acted with a set purpose. If you think it out exhaustively it forces you to the assumption that life is an intellectual principle, even in the protoplasm of the cell, long before there is any perceptible trace of consciousness; that this intellectual principle makes use of matter, builds it up, organizes it, moulds it into material and tools for construction, and sets up a mechanism in which and by which it develops itself. As far as we can see the purpose of life is life itself. Entelechy directs all the work of the organism in such a way that it becomes more and more capable of self-preservation, that its efficiency becomes greater, that it can absorb more of the outer world and can react more vigorously upon the outer world. In other words, life strives continuously to make its embodiments more permanent, securer, richer and more manifold.

However, if we do not know how the impulse to evolution originates, we can at least form an idea of the mechanism of evolution. Fundamentally life consists in the absorption of cosmic movements or vibrations, and their transformation into another form of movement. The living cell is a machine which makes use of cosmic energy for physio-chemical work. Metabolism, warmth, electric manifestations, movement, and as their concomitant a graduated consciousness, are the result of this work which is carried out by cosmic energy in the cell power machine.

To start with, this machine works in the very simplest fashion. It uses up its motive power as fast as it acquires it. Energy flows in and immediately flows out again in another form. The organism is like a pipe or a vessel without a bottom, so that its contents cannot be stored. The lower organisms which obey tropisms are such bottomless vessels. They are continually and inevitably subjected to the same attractions and repulsions and have no means to withstand them. But at a certain stage of evolution—how? why? Driesch replies: Entelechy!—a new part is developed in the machine, something like the cam on a cogwheel which forces it to come to rest. Or, to keep to the earlier simile, the bottomless vessel acquires a bottom with a tap that can be opened and closed. With this arrangement the organism is able to store the energy it has received and then to make use of it according to its needs, to do much more or much less work with it, to achieve much greater or much smaller effects, than it would be capable of doing with the amount of energy it receives from outside in a given unit of time. It is obvious how much more efficient the organism becomes if it can store up energy and can adapt to its needs the amount used up. This new part of the machine is Inhibition.

It appears early, and takes part in the general development of the organism; it is indeed the strongest factor in this development. Before Inhibition intervenes the organism has only one response to stimulus: reflex action. This is of the character of an electric discharge. It may be stronger or weaker, but is uniform in kind. It varies quantitatively but not qualitatively. In the lower organisms it is a contraction of the cell protoplasm, a movement. In the higher organisms, in which the life processes are carried out on the principle of the division of labour and which have developed various organs for this purpose, each organ performs the action of its specific function; the muscle contracts, the nerve sends out a nervous impulse, the gland forms a secretion, and so on. All reflex actions have this in common, that they serve no other purpose than that of relaxing tension in the organism. They do not imply any co-ordinated effort to promote the comfort and the welfare of the living being. They cannot fulfil any complicated task. They exhaust the organism which, after a series of reflex actions, becomes insensitive to stimuli and must rest for a time before it can react again.

Beginning from that stage of evolution where inhibition intervenes, reflex action loses the character of an automatic response to impulse and becomes disciplined. Inhibition tries to suppress reflex action. Its success is more or less complete according to the sensitiveness and life energy of the tissue receiving the stimulus and the degree to which the mechanism of inhibition is developed. The organism retains its tension, remains charged with energy, and is able to carry out work for definite purposes. In place of anarchistic reflex action which occurs regardless of the needs of the organism, we find economy of energy, co-ordination of effort, movement directed to a profitable end. It is only inhibition which can raise the organism from its state of passivity, its helpless dependence upon tropism, to a being in which a will is beginning to dawn and which by its will becomes self-determinative. Inhibition is a function of the will; it is the will's tool. Even Plato dimly perceived this, and he expresses it in the metaphorical language peculiar to himself, when, in the "Republic," he compares a human being to a creature made up of three animals: a hundred-headed sea-serpent which must at one and the same time be fed and tamed, a blind lion, and a man who tames the serpent by means of the lion. These three animals are desire (ἐπιθυμία), courage (θυμός), and mind (νοῦς). We say in biological language, reflex action, inhibition, and will or volitional reason.

All the concepts that are referred to here: purpose, co-ordination, inhibition and will, are every one of them dependent upon one fundamental concept, consciousness. Without it they are unthinkable. Schopenhauer's unconscious will is a word without meaning. I have postulated consciousness as the inseparable concomitant of life. It is probably the essence of life. In its lowest stage it is too dim, its contents too meagre and blurred, properly to distinguish the organism in which it dwells from the world around. In a higher state of development, when it gradually grows clearer and begins to be filled with more sharply defined ideas, it learns to keep its organism and the surrounding world apart, and tries to make the attitude of the former to the latter one of self-defence, self-preservation and self-development. From this stage of development onward, concepts begin to connect and group themselves in such a way that consciousness contains not only an image of the immediate present, but also memories of the past and a forecast of the future. The ability to prolong the present into the future, to understand the actual as a cause of the effects that follow and to foresee these effects, that is the starting point of logic and reason. It is the necessary antecedent of the will, which would have no meaning if it were not the effort to realize a conception of actions and their consequences, previously worked out by consciousness. Will is a function of consciousness which, in pursuance of the well-known biological law, creates an instrument for its purposes, and this instrument is inhibition. The higher an organism stands on the ladder of evolution the more energetically and surely does inhibition work, the nicer and the more masterly does its intervention in the original reflex actions grow.

Thanks to the piling up of reserves of energy, which is a result of inhibition, the organism can carry out its work of differentiation, can develop organs and organic systems, and obtain the power to perform more complicated functions; these render it ever more independent of the outer world and enable it to affect the outer world to an increasing extent. Inhibition plays an important part in differentiation. Its apparatus becomes organized. The nerve centres from which the inhibition proceeds form a ladder of which each rung is subordinate to the next. The peripheral nerves are controlled by the nerve centres in the spinal cord, these again by the centres in the medulla oblongata, and then in succession by the cerebellum and the cerebrum, and finally by the corticle. On the principle of least resistance, on which all life is based, the highest centres of inhibition unburden themselves by granting the lower ones a certain measure of independence. The reaction to the most ordinary and frequent stimuli is controlled and organized in its character and strength by the apparatus of inhibition, so that it ensues automatically, and no active inhibition, that is, no conscious effort of the will, is required. The simplest of these automatic reflex movements take place below the level of consciousness.

Those organized complexes of movement, however, which we call instincts, are carefully watched by the consciousness and subjected to severe check if they appear to run counter to the supposed interest of the organism. The hereditary complexes of movement constituting instinct are highly organized and oppose inhibition, only yielding to it when it is stronger than they are. This can be observed in animals which are capable of taming and training. All the artificial actions and omissions that man teaches them are triumphs of inhibition over automatism. Among human beings it is only the elect who can vigorously suppress their instincts by inhibition directed by Reason. The being that has attained the summit of organic evolution on earth is man, in whom only the lower, vegetative life processes are liable to the influence of tropism and primary reflex actions, while all the higher and highest functions are the work of Reason, which arms the will with inhibition and suppresses all impulses and actions that hinder its purposes. It is characteristic of these functions that they are first worked out as concepts by the consciousness before they are realized as movements.

It was essential for Morality to find this whole organic structure ready to its hand before it could become a factor in human life. This structure had been developed and perfected by the organism for its own purposes, for the defence and enrichment of its life, to ward off painful and obtain pleasurable feelings. Morality took possession of it and used it for its own ends, which do not at the first glance coincide with the aims which the individual immediately perceives and imagines, and may indeed be diametrically opposed to these, preventing pleasurable emotions, causing him pain and even endangering his life.