On every side I hear from fellow-enthusiasts detailed schemes for next year’s garden, vows of perpetual gardendom. I do not echo them. I have been initiated; a certain bond with my kind is mine henceforth. But the purest of human pleasures, as Bacon called it, is likewise the most tyrannous. Other joys may be caught up in Gideon’s fashion, while one marches on one’s way. Once the garden possesses you, it leaves no room for anything beside. The garden-seat of Adam and Eve has been universally regretted. But what had they to do except name the creatures, dig, sow, and reap? They did not have to pay their way with money, nor answer letters, nor read the newspapers, nor vote, nor keep track of the bacterial count in the milk they drank, nor study past history in order to interpret the present, nor even to learn the science of horticulture.
WAR FOR EVOLUTION’S SAKE
In its last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting and degrading methods of its conduct bear the “made in Germany” stamp, so does the Neo-Darwinian conception of evolution and its method bear the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to the winner, nothing to the loser.
In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning, wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth.
Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and the all-mighty and all-sufficient factor is natural selection on a basis of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature’s principle is mutual fight and antagonism.
Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy. In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people; namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. The Gott of the German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth from Gott und uns; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.
I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was well illustrated by the conditions of the moment—and it was a memorable one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and cunning, apparently winning in this biological struggle for existence,—and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its evolution in harmony with natural law.
But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law.
First we can say of this natural law that it isn’t natural law. Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute evolution.
The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.