In other words, all we can say is that Nature has supplied us with certain forces or chemic tendencies and responses, and has also provided (rather roughly in certain instances) the checks and balances which govern the same. Our puny strengths will permit us to do only so much; no more. That these strengths are being enlarged from time to time is rather obvious (consider a man like John D. Rockefeller, or Napoleon, and an ape). At the same time the limitations essential to balance, reciprocity, part with part and force with force, are apparently never set aside entirely. Both Rockefeller and Napoleon find themselves decidedly limited in their powers, compelled to compromise with many things in moving to attain their dreams. And their wishes in the main have far transcended the dictates of ethics, as these have hitherto been conceived. For the most part they ignored reported or written ethics, sticking by seemingly unethical forces, subtlety, craft, the power to do all that their strength or their instincts permitted them to do. And Nature appears to have no objection to them or their results, has furthered them indeed, nor has She apparently to millions of creatures like them in spirit, or worse, as we see worse here, for She permits their appearance and uses the result.
Let me vary the argument slightly.
The shelves of our law libraries are packed to suffocation and moldering to decay with laws ethically intended to govern things which man has never yet been able to govern entirely and probably never will be, although the instinct so to legislate probably conforms to the mechanistic instinct for balance and proportion in all things. In England they hung men for sheep-stealing a few hundred years ago, and yet sheep were and still are stolen in England. It is death to kill your neighbor, and yet when did man ever cease killing his neighbor? Is it not as often and as indifferently done to-day as ever? It means from one to twenty years in the penitentiary in America to steal, and yet men steal. It is written that one should never covet his neighbor’s wife and that adultery is a crime, yet when has the ultimate conception of these things been more than a dream? Man, or at least a part of him, a fragment of the chemical whole of which he is a part or an expression, wishes and writes laws to confirm these, but in spite of all so-called spiritual instruction, an ordered scheme of spiritual rewards and punishments, he is still not chemically able to accommodate himself to these things—not all of him, at least. Nature, his sheer, rank human nature, which sinks deep below into mechanistic, chemical and physical laws and substances, will not let him. Instead he resorts to subtlety, craft—a very unspiritual but plainly natural or chemical thing. The fact is that the power of certain individuals to do is only limited by the power of certain other individuals to resist, and their natures and tendencies are by no means the same. Yet this squares with the first or pyknotic law of energy, as laid down by Vogt.[A] The self-integrating force of one individual is limited by the self-integrating force of all other individuals; which is, if it is anything, Newton’s law working out in human affairs. There is a rough law of balance indicated by this opposition and strain, but nothing more.
I once talked with a discouraged, or let us say pessimistic, humanitarian, the twenty best years of whose life had been devoted to corrective and ameliorative work among dependents and defectives, young and old, criminals, the physically undermined and the insane. This man had worked to have various laws passed in various States which would tend to lessen the brutality of their treatment and also to bring about some method whereby their self-reproduction would be painlessly stopped. His idea, after twenty years of experimenting, was that the processes by which the criminal and defectives generally were being gathered and governed and improved, however laudable in theory, was destined to eventually prove economically impossible and so shirked. The tares were too many, too elusive, too expensive to gather and govern. “The thing can’t be done,” I remember his saying. “As society is at present governed or constituted something which is by no means humanitarian or ideal prevails, and in spite of the best intentions of idealists or philanthropists you have the enormous toll of inefficiency and nepotism to contend with. Always the old Adam breaks loose somewhere, and by the time you have investigated and reinvestigated and built institutions and passed laws and elected officials the thing becomes a social and financial burden beyond reckoning—lost,” he added, “in abstrusities and bad management. Politicians juggle with it, and newer reformers or reactionaries undo what you have done. Besides,” he concluded, “normal, healthy men and women do not appear to be able to concern themselves with the day-to-day variations and aberrations of dependent defectives and criminal types. You have the spectacle then of official and even medical neglect, brutality, rotten meat being served to criminals or those detained or cared for—in short, all the horrors that spring from some curious opposition in Nature to anything which is not able to take care of itself. Her plan apparently is to let them die. I tell you that the law of the survival of the strongest cannot be set aside. Any attempt to do so merely begets a vast tangle of effort and expense which results in the final operation of that law anyhow.”
My own observations of the working of various plans and theories calculated to improve or “save” mankind coincide with this and suggest to me the conclusion that there is, on the one hand, inherent in the chemic impulses and appetites of life (which man does not create), an instinct toward individuality which may be for good or for ill, plus, on the other hand, this law of balance or equation but over which neither the humanitarian nor the idealist, any more than the criminal or indifferent or self-seeking realist, has any control whatever. If this were not true there would be no explaining such strange social developments as the lusts of certain individuals, the vast animal hungers and abnormalities which seem to contradict any possibility of an exact social equation. While the ascetic passions and self-sacrifice of such men as St. Francis, Jesus, Buddha and the like may belie an entirely material or animal interpretation of this very material scene, the more material one of an Alexander VI., a Medici, a Morgan and a Gould do suggest that an equation or balance between the types is holding in Nature. Men do fight and die for idealistic or moral beliefs just as plainly as they do for material ends. This would indicate, as I said before, a desire for rough balance or equilibrium in Nature between the starkest extremes of its creative impulses—equation, equation. Nothing more nor less.
But a God directing and calling?
Oh, no; not that necessarily, but a condition in Nature itself perhaps which will not permit it to move save by a process of checks and balances—variety in unity, and vice versa.
If one takes no more varied types than Christ and Nero, or Alexander VI. and St. Francis, one sees how plain this is, in so far as our earthly state is concerned. God, or Nature, or Life, permits both, creates both. In these examples one sees how the impulses of the flesh always vary and how difficult it is, where millions outrival these in secret tendencies and impulses, to suggest a working harmony; and yet there is a harmony and they do harmonize, or, by triturating the one the other maintain a working balance, the tendencies of the one being offset by those of the other, and vice versa.
No less latitude, perhaps, could or would serve in a world or a universe which breeds individuals by quadrillions, momentarily perhaps, and which conceals or contains forces of whose impulses, emotions, necessities we know nothing, and so equation is and can be the only answer. What can we know, for instance, of the impulses or morals of the Sun, whose heat apparently breeds all forms of life we know here, horrific and otherwise? And yet we also know that heat is balanced by cold in the universe; light by no light; matter by force; tenderness by savagery; lust by asceticism; love by hate; and so on ad infinitum. No thing is fixed. All tendencies are permitted apparently. Only a balance is maintained.
The thing which the evolutionist has discovered and put forward with considerable enthusiasm is this: that life in every form has tended to evolve from the simple to the complex, and only through a vast complexity or organization has it managed to attain this spectacle of things which we call life or beauty—division of itself, as it were. The complexity of the individual thing which we call a tree or a flower or an animal, or, if you please, a social state (and indeed those more or less abstruse things which we know as arts and sciences), are but a further evolution of the complexity of the world machine, and life has brought them about and apparently saved them to the world, possibly for the purpose of partial self-expression. At the same time there has always been involved in this process the law of the survival of the strongest or temporarily and accidentally most favored, a process which the humanitarians are never prone to accept because it belies the theory of saving anything except by a compensative condition of slaughter and neglect of other things less strong—or, as the phrase has it, unfit things. In the theory of the religionist and the moralist the horrific processes that work in the sea and the jungle, and other unsocialized and enigmatic phases of imminent life, are entirely outside the scheme of a just and merciful God or Creator, not countenanced by Him! When His will is known and His suggestions are obeyed, these will be overcome and disappear! Well, this may be true, only it does not appear from any material or mental examination of the scene.