"Thou shalt not kill, but needs't not strive
Officiously to keep alive."
Thus wrote Clough; but our author, it appears, would go further than this. "The preservation of an infant so gravely diseased that it can never be happy or come to any good is something very like wanton cruelty. In private life few men defend such interference" (S. 10). And so such unfortunates should be got rid of, and will be "as soon as scientific knowledge becomes common property"—when "views more reasonable, and, I may add, more humane are likely to prevail." Lest we should be depressed by this massacre of the innocents, we are told that "man is just beginning to know himself for what he is—a rather long-lived animal, with great powers of enjoyment if he does not deliberately forgo them" (S., p. 9). In the past, poor fool that he has been, he has not availed himself of his opportunities: "Hitherto superstition and mythical ideas of sin have predominantly controlled these powers." Let us, however, take heart: "Mysticism will not die out; for those strange fancies knowledge is no cure; but their forms may change, and mysticism as a force for the suppression of joy is happily losing its hold on the modern world" (ib., ib.). Let us eat and drink—and, it may be added, sin—for to-morrow we die. Such is the new gospel of science, an old enough gospel, tried and found wanting years before its latest prophet arose to proclaim it to the world. Surely no more ridiculous utterance ever was made; for its author evidently did not pause to consider that the sins which make life pleasant to some (for example, Thuggery) are apt to have quite another aspect to those through whose victimisation the pleasure is obtained. There is also here such a thing as the conscience, which has to be taken into account. Even the biological hedonist must originally possess such a thing and, it may be supposed, must deal with it as he would with the gravely diseased children, and as something which would "predominantly control his powers of enjoyment."
Seriously, it may be doubted if a more pagan code of morals has ever been laid down, and this in the Encyclical of Science for the year, a code bad enough to make poor Mendel turn in his grave could he—good, honest man—be aware of it, and imagine that he was in any way responsible for it, which, by the way, is in no way the case.
§ 2. SCIENCE AS A RULE OF LIFE
Saint or sinner, some rule of life we must have, even if we are wholly unconscious of the fact. A spiritual director will help us to map out a course of action which will assist us to shake off some little of the dust of this dusty world; and a doctor will lay down for us a dietary which will help us to elude, for a time at least, the insidious onsets of the gout. Even if we take no formal steps, spiritual or corporeal, some rule of life we must achieve for ourselves. We must, for example, make up our minds whether we are to open our ears and our purse to tales of misery, or are to join ourselves with those whose rule of life it is to keep that which they have for themselves. What is true of each of us is none the less true of each and every race—even more true; for each race must make up its mind definitely as to which rule it will follow. And at the moment there is still doubt and indecision in this matter.
"The moral problem that confronts Europe to-day is: What sort of righteousness are we, individually and collectively, to pursue? Is the new righteousness to be realised in a return to the old brutality? Shall the last values be as the first? Must ethical process conform to natural process as exemplified by the life of any animal that secures dominancy at the expense of the weaker members of its kind?"[13] Such are the questions raised by a man of science occupying the Presidential Chair of an important society and speaking to that society as its President.
As to the Christian ideals little need be said, since we know very well what they are, and know this most especially, that practically all of them are in direct opposition to what we may call the ideals of Nature, and exercise all their influence in frustrating such laws as that of Natural Selection. "Nature's Insurgent Son," as Sir Ray Lankester calls him,[14] is at constant war with Nature, and when we come to consider the matter carefully, in that respect most fully differentiates himself from all other living things, none of which make any attempt to control the forces of Nature for their own advantage. "Nature's inexorable discipline of death to those who do not rise to her standard—survival and parentage for those alone who do—has been from the earliest times more and more definitely resisted by the will of man. If we may for the purpose of analysis, as it were, extract man from the rest of Nature, of which he is truly a product and a part, then we may say that man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says 'Die!' man says 'I will live.'"[15]
To this it may be added that, under the influence of Christianity, man goes a step further and says: "I will endeavour that as many others as may be shall live, and live happy, healthy lives, and shall not untimely die." The law of Natural Selection could not be met by more direct opposition. I have said that this is under the influence of Christianity, yet the impulse seems to be older than that, to be part of that moral law which excited Kant's admiration, which he coupled with the sight of the starry heavens, an impulse, we can scarcely doubt, implanted in the heart of man by God Himself. It is a remarkable fact that in many—some would say most—of the less civilised races of mankind we find these social virtues, which some would have us believe are degenerate features foisted on to the race by an enervating superstition.
Dr. Marett has carefully examined into this matter, and his conclusions are of the greatest interest.[16]