The Meaning of Evolution

by Samuel Christian Schmucker

The question of course is not to be decided by our likes or our dislikes. If the evolution of man is true it will not make it less true because the process is not to our liking. It is our part, if this be the truth, to accept it as we do any other truth. Surely those of us who are moral of thought are not willing to disbelieve a truth because it is unpleasant.

The newness of the idea is the chief reason for our dislike of it. This lowliness of origin should not be distasteful to us. Nothing about Abraham Lincoln seems to us more wonderful than that a man who towered head and shoulders above his generation, indeed above most generations of men, in his fineness of life, in his nobility of purpose, in the integrity of his aims, should have been of exceedingly humble extraction. It only adds to the glory of his later achievements that he should have lived in a cabin, have spent his young manhood splitting rails and running a flat-boat, and have gained his education almost unaided from a few books and much meditation in front of a log fire.

That the greatest military General on the Union side of the Civil war should have been the son of a country tanner, and as a boy, not over-shrewd in the matter of bargains, adds to the glory of his later life. The simplicity of his childhood gives new luster to the power with which he led the forces of a nation to victory, and then went to a battle no less noble in his long fight for honor while suffering from disease and approaching death. Why then should we feel that such beginnings in the lower world are too humble for man? Why do we think his present superiority diminished by his lowly origin? Why can we not see that precisely the reverse is true? The more humble the level from which he sprang the more gloriously creditable is his present position. Instead of being ashamed of having risen from the brute, it should be the glory of man that he has so sprung. His chief superiority lies in the fact that while they have remained where they are, he has so completely outdistanced them as to have placed a gap between himself and them that seems almost impassable. Furthermore, if man with his present glory of intellect and of moral impulse, has sprung from a creature whose superiority to the ape lay chiefly in its potentialities, then it does not yet appear what he shall be. We can judge the future only by the past. Through the long ages the development has been very slow. Through the last hundred thousand years the development of man has been wonderfully rapid, compared with what went before, though it seems slow enough when we look at it from the standpoint of our historical and traditional reports. But with this added impulse, this rapid improvement that has come with the development of mind instead of muscle, of tooth and of claw, we have every promise of an evolution that shall far surpass anything that has yet come. To-day our leaders are way beyond the average of the mass. Who shall doubt that in a not too distant to-morrow, the masses shall be where the leaders of to-day now are. We shall not then have reached a dead level of superiority. Our leaders will have moved on as rapidly as have the masses, and will be as far ahead of them then as they are now. It shall be their work to apprehend new virtues, and to work them out in their lives. The masses, seeing the beauty of the lives of the leaders, recognizing in those lives the revelation of the divine power which they have apprehended, will hunger to learn of them and to lead lives like theirs. To this process who shall set an end? The advance is slow, as in all evolution; but anyone who wishes to do so may easily detect the direction of the current.

The evolution of man's physical frame probably has nearly ceased. Gradually organs that are useless to him are passing away. Slowly his hands are becoming more delicate and refined and skilled. But his evolution has begun to work itself out on entirely other lines. We sometimes hear that the men of the past were the full equivalent of the men of to-day. Scholars like to tell us that the population of Athens was finer in quality than any population that has existed since. We must remember that group after group of men may be expected to specialize intellectually and fail to develop morally and physically. Under these conditions this little branch of the human race runs through its forced flowering and comes to an end. With the study of history and the earnest investigation of these lives of the past, new possibilities arise within the human family. The next race that flowers may take longer to decay because it understands better the weaknesses that carried away the preceding civilization. In time there will arise a civilization that understands the past. A whole people will some time realize that intellectual development alone will not save it, or Athens would have lasted; that moral development alone will not suffice, or Judæa had been permanent; that physical development will not serve, or Sparta would stand to-day. Some day there will arise a nation that will see to it that every intellectual advance is accompanied by an equivalent moral and physical advance. When this time comes we shall have a race which can survive. Are we to be that race? The sins of man are generally the dregs of his brute ancestry. Bestiality of life was once common enough to attract no attention. Kings and nobles were not supposed to be clean so long as they confined their bestial relations to those below them in rank. Gradually men are becoming ashamed of uncleanness in life. Some day there will be no difference so far as purity of life is concerned, between the two who present themselves at the altar asking the blessing of God on their union.

If anyone doubts that English speaking people are becoming cleaner of life he needs only to consult the literature of the past. No one dreams of finding fault with Chaucer because his stories related in the company of men and women often would not bear such telling to-day. Shakespeare, with all his wonderful genius, needs expurgating if one would read him aloud comfortably to a mixed audience. And these are the shining stars. When we drop below them, the literature of their time becomes nearly impossible to read. Fielding and Smollett and Stern helped to build up the English novel, but the stories they tell speak of the grossness of their time in language that is unmistakable. We are by no means clean to-day. A fair proportion of our novels leave much to be desired. The stage is the scene of much we could wish to see cleaner. Above all this grossness there towers a sweetness and beauty of thought, and an earnestness of purpose, a sincerity of effort, which makes the present time fuller of moral purpose, fuller of the desire to be clean and to help others to be clean, than graced any previous period in the history of either England or America.

Under the change from country to city life man has suffered. Here too evolution is necessary. City life tells hard on the second generation and nearly destroys the third; but we have come to understand the difficulty and are fast remedying it. It is more than possible that the next generation will see such changes in the life of the worker in the great center, as shall effectively stop the physical deterioration that has come to the city dweller. God grant that modern civilization has had teaching enough and learned its lesson well enough. God grant further that we may give over slaughtering our most ambitious and vigorous young men in battle to settle questions which battle can never settle. God grant that we have come to a turning of the ways where the life of men, women and children, no matter how humble their station, shall stand higher in value than the profits of any commercial venture. God grant that we will soon be firm enough to declare that a business which can only live by sacrificing the health and strength of the workers must be counted an unprofitable business, and be allowed to cease. God grant finally that the American people may learn from the past to guard against a like fate in the future; that here may be the people whose strength, intelligence and uprightness shall lead the world; not for the sake of exceeding the world, but with the high mission of setting to the world an example of what can come to a vigorous, free and God-fearing people.

In the early history of the evolution of man the struggle almost always concerns the individual. Gradually the family comes to be the fuller unit. Only that is success which leads to the success of this higher group. After a time the family broadens to the tribe, and then the tribe to the nation. The evolution of social institutions is at present going on at an enormously rapid rate. Throughout the civilized world democracy is coming to its own. Even where the form of monarchy still prevails, the subjects of the monarch are having more and more rights. The people of England are surely as free as are the people of the United States. Increasingly all forms of government will secure for all their subjects, no matter what their station in life, a fair share of the general prosperity. In this field, human evolution is perhaps more rapid than in any other.

Any individual human being is a network of traits and peculiarities. He has all the ordinary attributes of humanity, but to the whole complex he gives an individual peculiarity which is totally his own. Where did he get his qualities? In the earlier times the fairies were supposed to have blessed him or cursed him in his cradle. A later age saw in the stars the rulers of man's destiny. He was jovial, or saturnine, or martial, depending on the planet which was in the ascendant at the time of his birth. Now we know "it is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." Everything a man is comes to him from within or from without; from nature or from nurture; from his heredity or from his environment. From our ancestors we get all the possibilities of our lives. To a certain extent we are slaves to our heredity, but not by any means to any such extent as to make us hopeless, unless our heredity is miserably bad. To the great mass of us come larger potentialities than we ever develop, and such possibilities of degradation as, fortunately, few of us ever reach. Within an enormously wide range, man is the architect of his own fortune. Only such traits develop as find a stimulus in the environment. Accordingly, a very large proportion of the development a man may achieve depends upon the circumstances under which he is placed, or, what is far more to the point, in which he may place himself. Man is not the blind sport of a relentless destiny. It is his to choose his environment; it is his to modify his environment when he cannot leave it. To an extent which no other animal has ever approached, man is the arbiter of his own destiny. A hypothetical ass may stand helpless between two equidistant bales of hay, but no human being is ever so helpless a sport of his environment. As it is, he may drift or he may rove as he pleases. To one man the current may be stronger than to another. There may be now and then a child so feeble-minded as to be unable to decide the course of its own life. It will not be long before society will see to it that such a life leaves behind it no strain cursed with its fatal weakness. In this effort to advance, man has all the advantage that comes from concentrated social effort. No man may live to himself. To every man in our community who desires it, a helping hand will be stretched. Often a hand will be stretched to him and he will be steadied whether he will or not, until his own will reforms itself and gains the mastery.

Inasmuch as all that is in man comes from his environment or from his heredity, the only way in which the race of men can be advanced is by improving their environment or by bettering their heredity. The first of these is the province of the sociologist; the second that of the eugenist. The sociologist has for some time been giving his careful attention to the improvement of the environment. In every large city, a man must build for himself a house fit to live in, if he build it at all. Whether he erects it for himself or for another makes no difference. Society will no longer allow him to build a home which is a detriment to the one who lives in it. Not only must he make himself a decent home but he must keep it in decent condition. The community will not allow him to endanger his own health, or that of his neighbor, by an insufficient method of attending to his garbage, or by a lack of ordinary cleanliness. If he will not clean his premises himself, the law sees to it that they are cleaned for him. Already we are beginning to understand that no man has a right to employ another man or woman or child at wages which are not sufficient to maintain the one thus employed. The wages of many people are exceedingly meager, notably those of women and children. He can read but ill the signs of the times who does not foresee an early end to the exploiting of the labor of these helpless creatures. Humanity has determined firmly that these things must pass, that the young child must not labor long or hard, that a woman must not be taxed beyond her strength. Already in England there is a partially successful movement which will doubtless spread to this country to provide that a woman be granted a little time before and after the birth of her child during which she shall not be allowed to suffer because her power to earn a wage is temporarily gone. These things cannot fail in the long run to strengthen the people. They strengthen chiefly the present generation. The blight of the fact that acquired characters cannot be transmitted, meets us here. This improved environment can only slowly, if at all, improve the race, and every effort made in this direction must be repeated with each generation.

Under such circumstances is it to be wondered at that the eugenist is hoping to raise the strain? Any improvement he can bring about is not only valuable for the generation in which it comes but is carried on into the generations which follow. This is the hope that strengthens and sustains him in his effort. The science of eugenics is so new, so little is surely known concerning the transmission of human characters, that no one is able as yet wisely to say what course is to be pursued in improving the race. But the problem is so interesting and its outcome so overwhelmingly important that men will never cease striving to know, and may, before many years, begin wisely to guide us in our efforts to provide a finer stock.