Natural Selection, some would have us believe, is the dominant law of living nature, and all would agree that it is an important law. Let us then, if we are to follow Nature, put it into practice. But Natural Selection means the Survival of the Fittest in the Struggle for Life. It consequently means the Extermination of the Less Fit, a little fact often left out of count. It means in three words "Might is Right," and was not that exactly the proposition by which we were confronted in this war? If Natural Selection be our only guide, let us sink hospital ships, destroy innocent villages and towns, exterminate our weaker opponents in any way that seems best to us. It was all summed up centuries ago by the author of the Book of Wisdom: "Let us oppress the poor just man, and not spare the widow, nor honour the ancient grey hairs of the aged. But let your strength be the law of justice: for that which is feeble is found to be nothing worth." That is Natural Selection in operation in human life when human beings have been stripped of all "mythical ideas of Sin:" not a pretty picture nor a condition of affairs under which we should like long to exist. Some of the other resemblances are less dreadful, but none the less instructive. Let us take the matter of Mimicry. There is a form of protective mimicry whereby the living thing is like unto its surroundings, and thus escapes its enemy. We find it in warfare in the use of khaki dress, in white overalls in snow-time, in other such expedients. But there is also a form of Aggressive Mimicry in which a deadly thing makes itself look like something innocent, as the wolf tried to look in "Little Red Riding Hood." "The Germans were beginning their attack on Haumont. Their front-line skirmishers, to throw us into confusion, had donned caps which were a faint imitation of our own, and also provided themselves with Red Cross brassards" (The Battle of Verdun. H. Dugard). Not to be tedious on this point, which really does not require to be laboured, let me finish with one quotation from a vivid series of war-pictures. Boyd Cable is writing of men in the trenches: "Civilised Man, in his latest art of war, has gone back to be taught one more simple lesson by the beast of the field and the birds of the air; the armed hosts are hushed and stilled by the passing air-machine, exactly as the finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch and field are frozen to stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the beat of its passing wing."
No; an existence passed under conditions of this kind and as the normal state of affairs is not an existence to be contemplated with equanimity. We are anxious that science and scientific teaching should be assisted in every possible way. But let us be quite clear that while science has much to teach us and we much to learn from her, there are things as to which she has no message to the world. The Minor Prophets of science are never tired of advising theologians to keep their hands off science. The Major Prophets are too busy to occupy themselves with such polemics. But the theologian is abundantly in his right in saying to the scientific writer "Hands off morals!" for with morality science has nothing to do. Let us at any rate avoid that form of kultur which consists in bending Natural History to the teaching of conduct, uncorrected by any Christian injunctions to soften its barbarities.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Since these lines were written, this state of affairs has come to an end and the first Fellow has been elected for his purely scientific attainments, in the person of the distinguished geologist, Professor Joly, F.R.S.
[31] It was the late distinguished Provost, Sir John Mahaffy, at whose instance the change in the Fellowship system was introduced.
[32] Conklyn, Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men. Princeton University Press, 1915.