Transcriber's Notes

This volume additionally contains the October 1901 Publisher's Catalogue, however the catalogue is not listed in the regular Table of Contents and is located after the final Chapter.

Other [Transcriber Notes] appear at the end of this e-text.

THE CHURCHMAN'S LIBRARY

Edited by J. H. Burn, B.D.

EVOLUTION

THE CHURCHMAN'S LIBRARY

EDITED BY
JOHN HENRY BURN, B.D.

Examining Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Aberdeen.

THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY. By W. E. Collins, M.A., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, King's College, London. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. [Ready.

THE CHURCH AND THE SACRAMENTS. By E. T. Green, M.A., Professor of Hebrew and Theology at St. David's College, Lampeter.

THE CHURCHMAN'S PRIMER. By G. Harford-Battersby, M.A.

THE CHURCHMAN'S DAY BOOK. By J. H. Burn, B.D.

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH IN THE COLONIES AND MISSION FIELD. By Allan B. Webb, D.D., Assistant Bishop to the Bishop of Brechin.

HISTORY OF THE PAPACY. By J. P. Whitney, M.A.

OUR CONTROVERSY WITH ROME. By J. M. Danson, D.D.

THE WORKMANSHIP OF THE PRAYER BOOK. By John Dowden, D.D., Bishop of Edinburgh. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. [Ready.

A POPULAR INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT. By Angus M. Mackay, B.A.

A POPULAR INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT. By J. H. Shepherd, M.A.

THE HEBREW PROPHET. By L. W. Batten, Ph.D.

AN INTRODUCTION TO TEXTUAL CRITICISM. By A. M. Knight, M.A., Fellow and Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Camb.

SOME OLD TESTAMENT PROBLEMS. By John P. Peters, D.D., D.Sc.

SOME NEW TESTAMENT PROBLEMS. By Arthur Wright, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Queens' College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo, 6s. [Ready.

BIBLE REVISION. By J. J. S. Perowne, D.D., Bishop of Worcester.

DEVOTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE PAULINE EPISTLES. By John Gott, D.D., Bishop of Truro.

PREACHING. By Frederic Relton, A.K.C.

ENGLISH HYMNS AND HYMN TUNES. By H. C. Shuttleworth, M.A., Professor of Pastoral and Liturgical Theology, King's College, London.

THE WITNESS OF ARCHÆOLOGY. By C. J. Ball, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn.

ENGLISH ECCLESIOLOGY. By J. N. Comper.

CONFIRMATION. By H. T. Kingdon, D.D., Bishop of Fredericton.

INSPIRATION. By Canon Benham, D.D.

MIRACLES. By Thomas B. Strong, B.D., Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER. By V. H. Stanton, D.D., Ely Professor of Divinity, Cambridge.

EVOLUTION. By Frank B. Jevons, M.A., D.Litt., Principal of Bishop Hatfield's Hall, Durham. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN HERE AND HEREAFTER. By Canon Winterbotham, M.A., B.Sc., LL.B. Cr. 8vo, 3s. 6d. [Ready.

THE GREAT WORLD RELIGIONS FROM A CHRISTIAN STANDPOINT. By H. E. J. Bevan, M.A., Gresham Professor of Divinity.

COMPARATIVE RELIGION. By J. A. MacCullock.

ENGLISH ECCLESIASTICAL LAW. By W. Digby Thurnam.

EVOLUTION

BY
FRANK B. JEVONS, M.A., D.Litt.
PRINCIPAL OF BISHOP HATFIELD'S HALL, DURHAM

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
1900

PREFACE

The object of this volume is to raise the question: if we accept the Theory of Evolution as true in science, how should it modify the thought and action of a man who wishes to do his best in this world? The question is necessary because we find that different and inconsistent conclusions on the point have been reached by men speaking in the name of science and speaking with authority. These differences are due not to anything in science, but to certain extra-scientific assumptions. To test the worth of such assumptions is the work of philosophy; and this volume is accordingly an essay in philosophy. Science is but organised common sense. Science and Religion both claim to deal with realities. The realism of common sense, therefore, the form of philosophy to which both seem to point, is that which is set forth here.

CONTENTS

EVOLUTION

I.
OPTIMISM

Innumerable writers at the end of the nineteenth century have reviewed the changes which in the last fifty years have come over the civilised world. The record indeed is admitted on all hands to be marvellous. Steam, electricity, machinery, and all the practical inventions of applied science have added enormously to the material wealth, comfort, and luxury of mankind. Intellectually, the bounds of pure science have been vastly enlarged; and the blessings of education have been extended to the poorest members of the community. Philanthropic and religious activity manifests itself in a thousand different organisations. We are never tired of repeating, that changes which in the first half of the century would have been pronounced impossible and incredible, at the end of the century are accomplished facts.

But amongst all these changes one is almost universally overlooked, and that the most characteristic, the most remarkable, and the most important: the face of civilisation has come to be illumined by hope. Great as is the progress of the last fifty years, we count it as nothing compared with that which is in store for us. To the discoveries of science it is felt that no bounds can be set; what a day may bring forth in the way of the extension of man's control over the forces of Nature, what secrets of Nature the chemist in his laboratory may light upon at any moment, no man can surmise, but everyone is confident that things will be discovered as marvellous to us now as the telegraph and telephone to our predecessors of the pre-scientific age. In the treatment of political and social questions the same deep-seated conviction prevails that progress can and will be made: the conditions and causes of poverty can be ascertained by patient study, and when ascertained can be dealt with. The laws of physical health and cleanliness have not refused to reveal themselves, nor are moral health and cleanliness without their laws. In fine, if the best energy of the age is everywhere devoted to the increase of knowledge, the advancement of morality, and the diffusion of comfort, it is because everywhere there is hope. In the social as in the individual organism hope raises the tide of life, increases vitality, and stimulates the system. Hence this general discharge throughout the nervous system of society, manifesting itself in the vigour and energy with which all schemes for improvement are taken up and carried out. That discoveries will be made and progress effected is as certain as that gold is to be found in a goldfield; the only practical question is, By whom? Who is to be the lucky man?

To us who have witnessed the advance which has given rise to this universal hope, the hope itself seems so reasonable and so justifiable that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is without parallel in the history of mankind. Never, of course, has any generation of men imagined its own lot perfect; all have had their ideals, and all have believed their ideals to be true. But whereas we place the realisation of our ideals in the future, all previous generations have placed it in the past: the Golden Age till now has always been regarded as the starting-point of man's history, not its goal. All races have looked back with pride upon a heroic past; all mythologies tell of the better and brighter lot that was in the beginning man's; all poets sing of the brave days of old; all fairy tales begin with "once upon a time." The historians of Greece and Rome discovered no progress in the history of their countries, but only degeneration from the patriotism and simplicity of earlier times, or at best a series of changes making its round like the circle of the year's seasons. The philosophers of Greece are mainly occupied, when they deal with sociological questions, with the causes of corruption and decay of constitutions; and, if they frame ideal constitutions, they intend them to be final; they do not imagine them to have any possibility of growth. In modern times the same tendency has been equally manifest. Political revolutions have always aimed, not at introducing a new, but at restoring an old state of things: the actors in the French Revolution even dressed and posed as ancient Greeks and Romans. In philosophy, civilisation, as being artificial, has been regarded as a degeneration from a "natural" state of man which was at once primitive and perfect.

In the individual, optimism may be dismissed as a mere mood, or as a tendency to cheerfulness not based on any rational estimate either of the future or of the past. But when a whole generation of men, when, indeed, the whole civilised world, looks to the future, not with careless levity, but with the calm assurance of confidence in the progress that is and is to be, we cannot dismiss its optimism offhand. Astonishing as it is, that the world as it grows older should grow more hopeful, there are good reasons for the fact.

The child's estimates of distance, magnitude, and importance differ from those of the adult. The estimates, however, persist in memory, and we have all discovered, on revisiting familiar scenes of childhood, how exaggerated our childish estimates were when compared with the actual facts. It is this exaggeration of memory, this illusion of the mind's eye, that psychologically is the foundation of the tendency to idealise the past. To us as children the exploits of our elders were marvellous in our eyes; and they remain as marvels in the memory, as marvels, however, which, as all marvels do, belong to the past. The past becomes the wonderland in which were performed the great deeds, not only of our fathers' time, but of the old times before them. The past becomes the poet's treasury, from which he produces things new and old—the abiding-place of all things good and great and beautiful which are not, but ought to be, and therefore once were.

To measure progress, as indeed to measure any movement and determine its rate and direction, some fixed points are necessary. As long, therefore, as there is no contemporaneous record of events, fixed in writing, there is no possibility of checking the laudator temporis acti and of reducing the unconscious exaggerations of his memory to their due proportions. But even if there were, in the lowest stages of culture the rate of progress is too slow to be perceptible at the time. In the beginning man is at the mercy of his environment: it is only when he has learnt to modify it to his needs that progress begins to move. And by the time that man has passed from savagery to barbarism, and has emerged from barbarism to civilisation, the conviction that the present and the actual are things of naught as compared with the ideal past, is too intimately inwrought with his religion, his mythology, his philosophy, and the accepted history of his race and its heroic origin to allow him to see facts as they are, or to divine the true trend of human affairs. Further, there is a very practical reason for his looking with suspicion and not with confidence on social changes. It is only as the result of a long course of slow evolution that society has attained to a condition of fairly stable equilibrium. In the beginning society may be compared to a man hanging on for bare life, with a precarious foothold, to the face of a sheer cliff: when the least movement may prove fatal, all movement is dreaded. Thus the characteristic of all early societies is that they are impeded by "the cake of custom" and rigid with the immobility of conservatism.

To those who hold that experience mechanically impresses itself upon the mind and so automatically expresses itself as truth, it must appear somewhat strange that mankind should have advanced for thousands of years without knowing that they had progressed; and still more strange that it was not as an induction from experience, but on a priori grounds that they arrived at the conclusion. Yet so it was. The mere contemplation of the rise and fall of empires no more suggested the presence and persistence of a constant tendency to progress than the mountainous wave which threatens to engulf the ship suggests that the sea-level is a scientific truth. But when Darwin established his theory that man was descended from the brute, all was clear: it became certain a priori that the long history and "pre-history" of man must have been one of progress and advance. When the descent of man was established, his ascent came to be studied, and human evolution was seen to be synonymous with progress. Savages were seen to be the nearest existing representatives of primitive man, and there was an end to the idea that the primitive state was perfection. The comparative method, once applied to the study of mankind, was able to set side by side examples of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, which illustrated every step in the process of the evolution of society, and showed that, though the forms of society may fluctuate as do the waves of the sea, society itself is steady in its advance and progressive in its evolution. This conclusion, which at first was a deduction drawn from the animal descent of man, has now the independent support of an enormous amount of evidence. The existence of a Stone Age, palæolithic and neolithic, of a Bronze Age and an Iron Age, and the succession of those ages in the order named, are established facts of science. That the culture of nomad peoples is lower than that of pastoral tribes; that pastoral tribes advance in culture when they become agricultural; that agriculture, implying settled habits and fixed homes, leads to the foundation of cities and the formation of civic life; that the city-states of the ancient world give way to the nation-states of modern times: are all accepted facts, bridging the apparent chasm between civilisation and savagery, and demonstrating the action of the law of continuity in the evolution of society.

But, it will be observed, all these facts and arguments taken together only prove what has been—not what will be. They show that from a level little higher than the brute man has attained to what he is; but is this enough to guarantee his continuous rise? In other words, have we reached the real source of that universal hope which, as we have said, is characteristic of this stage of man's evolution? The bark of man's destiny hitherto has been wafted by a favouring and a steady gale, and it is natural enough for the unreflecting to take it for granted that the wind will always set from the same happy quarter. But the question will obtrude itself whether we are justified in the presumption.

If man shaped his own course, we might at least say that there was no reason why he should not continue to steer in the same direction as hitherto. But the most remarkable lesson that sociology has to teach us is that the course which he has followed so continuously has not been of his own steering. As we have already seen, man until this present generation has uniformly kept his eyes fixed on the quarter from which, not to which, he has imagined himself to be travelling, and, like a reluctant emigrant, has lamented the increasing distance between him and the happy shore from which he sailed. Or, to change the metaphor, society is an organism. Like all organisms, it starts as a relatively structureless mass; then, in accordance with the principle of the division of labour, different functions come to be performed by different parts; thus special organs are developed for the performance of special functions; division of labour further implies co-operation of the various organs and the development of the necessary means of communication and connection. All this is necessary for that evolution of society which we call progress; and of all these changes in the structure of society but few were ever intentionally planned by man. Mr. Herbert Spencer has familiarised this generation with the idea that the foreseen consequences of any intended change are insignificant as compared with the consequences unforeseen and unintended. Hence the general rule that the structural developments on which the evolution of society depends are but rarely the result of the coercive and conscious changes effected by government: in practically all cases they are the unintended consequences of the spontaneous actions of individuals aiming at something else and unconsciously promoting the evolution of society. So, too, the animal organism is made up of living units, each of which unconsciously performs the part necessary to be played by it, if the organism is to live; and each unit, unconsciously again, even modifies the part it plays, in order to promote the changes which constitute the evolution and the progress of the organism.

We must therefore dismiss the idea that the progress of mankind and the evolution of society have been planned by man or are due to his design; and we must recognise the presence in human affairs of some unseen, impelling power which is continually guiding them to good issues and shaping them to ends not even rough-hewn by men. This power, it is evident, must be one not limited in its action to the social organism, but manifesting itself in animal organisms also, since there also it produces similar results. That power, we need hardly say, is to be sought in "the struggle for existence": wherever organisms are in excess of the means for supporting them, competition for food, for life, must ensue; and in this case the battle is to the strong, the race to the fleet. But of course strength is a relative term: what in some circumstances is a source of strength, in others may be a cause of weakness; and, generally, the very qualities which in some cases are of the highest value may in others be useless to their possessor. It is therefore the creature which possesses the particular kind of superiority required by the circumstances in which it finds itself, which is the creature that is likely to fare best, and is most likely to survive in the struggle for existence. But, further, the circumstances tend to produce the very superiority which they require: they ruthlessly reject and condemn to destruction every organism which fails to satisfy their requirements, thus leaving the field in possession of those organisms which have the required superiority. The next generation, therefore, is bred not from chance parents, but from parents which have been selected, by natural causes and the force of circumstances, as carefully as by the breeder who wishes to produce a prize animal. Every successive generation thus must be superior to that which preceded it. Advance is the very breath of every organism's being, the condition without which existence is impossible. To the talents which it has, every being must add other talents, or be cast out into the darkness of non-existence; whereas to the good and faithful servant who exercises all the powers entrusted to him even wider rule is given. Neither this world nor the next is for the idle or for the stupid. The intelligence must be alert to detect the slightest element of possible superiority, and the will resolute to work it to the utmost of its worth. Man must be wise in his generation; and the wise man makes friends even with the mammon of unrighteousness, and that quickly.

If, then, it is by the perpetual and strenuous exercise of all its powers that an organism achieves the degree of superiority which is its contribution to the universal work of progress, it follows that "the performance of every function is, in a sense, a moral obligation," and that "the moral man is one whose functions are all discharged in degrees duly adjusted to the conditions of existence." Here, as elsewhere, the individual, to exist, must comply with the conditions of existence; and progress consists in more perfect compliance with the conditions. There is, however, a difference between the highly evolved organism, man, and the less complex organisms; between animal and human evolution; between biological and moral progress. In the case of the lower and simpler organisms, the creature is prompted simply and safely by its emotions to the performance of those functions on which its existence and the evolution of its species depend. But the evolution of man has been so rapid in its later stages, the social environment which he has himself created is so different from the circumstances in which he originally found himself, that his adjustment to his environment has become, so to speak, much looser, and consequently it is now no longer the case that actions in themselves pleasant are also necessarily beneficial in their consequences to the individual and to society. Moral progress, therefore, will manifest itself in the readjustment of man to his altered conditions. The consequence of that adjustment, when complete, will be that actions which are right—that is, are beneficial to the individual and to society—will always be pleasurable, not only in their consequences, but also immediately and in themselves. To this ideal, when all men will delight always in the thing that is right, and when all have attained to a height of morality now reached only by the few, man is being slowly but surely urged by the force which is the motive power of all evolution, the struggle for existence, regulated by the law which directs all progress, that of the survival of the fittest.

Here, then, we have the reason of the hope that is characteristic of our generation; here the foundation of the calm confidence with which we count on the continuance of progress as a thing assured us. It is not merely that progress has been made in the past, that the gale hitherto has steadily blown us on a favourable course. We have learnt that it must of necessity always blow from the same quarter. Man's course is not dependent on man's fitful will: the wind and waves obey not him, but the Power which directs all evolution, and "our strength in ages past" is shown by science to be "our hope in years to come."

II.
ILLUSION

It seems, then, according to the optimistic view set forth in the previous chapter, that Evolution is necessarily Progress, and progress is movement in the line of our moral aspirations produced ad infinitum. The changes that are and always have been taking place are and always have been changes for the better; the forms of existence which incessantly succeed one another necessarily develop from lower to higher, from good to better. And this conclusion is not a matter of religious faith, but of scientific necessity. The only forces and causes that it presupposes are those which we see and feel at work every day around us. For the reconstruction of the past history of the earth's surface, geology only requires to assume the operation during infinite past time of those agencies which at this moment may be seen to be slowly changing the face of the earth. The cooling of the earth's surface follows the same laws, and can be calculated with the same certainty as the cooling of a red-hot poker. The law of gravitation, which determines the movements of the heavenly bodies, is equally exemplified in the fall of an apple to the ground. In fine, the universe consists of bodies of matter in motion; the movements which occur within the range of human observation are sufficient to enable us from them to calculate the paths which they follow when they pass beyond our ken, and the correctness of our calculations is demonstrated when they reappear at the time and place predicted. The chemist recovers on one side of his equation every atom which the other side requires him to account for. The stars in their courses confirm the calculations of the astronomer. Matter is in perpetual course of redistribution, and the same everlasting laws which determine the forms into which it is incessantly being redistributed necessarily determine that those forms shall perpetually improve.

This optimistic view of evolution has met with general welcome, but on very different grounds in different cases. Believers in Divine Providence have eagerly greeted it as a startling and irresistible demonstration that their belief in a Providence over-ruling all things for good was true. No suspicion here was possible that the argument had been sophisticated by those with whom the wish was father to the thought. By science the testimony of science could hardly be impeached; and here was science on independent reasonings of its own, starting from purely materialistic ground, compelled by the force of its own arguments to bear witness to the truth which religion had so long proclaimed on the strength of faith alone. To this generation a sign had indeed been given.

On the other hand, the optimistic interpretation of evolution was welcomed with equal ardour by those for whom it removed the last difficulty they had in believing that there was no God. Hitherto the deeply rooted desire to believe that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, good must triumph ultimately, and right-doing never be confounded, had seemed to necessitate belief in a righteous God. But now the necessity for any such assumption was done away with: the perpetual triumph of the good was a necessary aspect or expression of the mechanical action of particles of matter upon one another, as much as the law of gravitation itself, and based on exactly the same kind of evidence. From this it followed that religious belief was but a passing phase in the process of evolution, useful enough as long as the real evidence for our faith in the good was unknown, but destined to dwindle to a mere rudiment and survival as fast as men become capable of seeing the truth of the matter, and of realising that religion is superfluous because it can offer nothing that is not independently assured by science. At the same time and in the same way the hope of future blessedness is brought down from the unsubstantial clouds of an imaginary heaven to the solid ground of a materialistic science, which never travels beyond the evidence of the senses.

Since, then, minds, which differ otherwise so much, are agreed that the optimistic interpretation of evolution is the true one, it seems not unreasonable to ask each how far they are prepared to push their optimism. We will ask the one side whether the reason why they believe in the goodness of God really is that, as a matter of fact, they see that good is incessantly triumphant around them, and triumphant as a matter of absolute necessity. Surely whether we consider what we daily see of life, or whether we consider the struggle with evil in our own souls, it is a mockery to say that good invariably triumphs here and now; and there must be illusion in the argument that would prove that it does. Could an argument that is based on the assumption that matter and motion are the only realities issue in anything but illusion when extended to spiritual experience?

To the other side we may put the question somewhat differently. It is agreed that all the many changes which are incessantly taking place in the universe, and which, added together, constitute what is called the cosmic process, are incessantly and inevitably working for good, and themselves are always rising from good to better. But what of the Force, or Power, or Cause, or Reality which underlies them and of which they are the manifestation? May we infer that because they are good, it is good? That if the fruits are good, the tree must be good also? To this the reply will be that it is the manifestations which we know; they alone are known to us; they alone can be known to us. That which underlies them is not manifest; and that which is not manifested to us obviously cannot be known to us: it is the Unknowable. Obviously, therefore, it is impossible for us to say whether it is good or not. To affirm and to deny that it is good would both equally be to profess knowledge of the unknowable. Religion may profess—and, indeed, all religions have professed—to possess this inconceivable and impossible knowledge. But religion is not science.

On this view, then, there are limits to the optimism of evolution: to apply the term "good" to that which manifests itself as the cosmic process in evolution is mere illusion. But this raises a further question: If it is unmeaning to call the Unknowable Reality good, what precisely is the meaning and value of the term "good" when applied to those forms in which the Unknowable manifests itself to us?

To begin with, it is clear that if everything has been evolved, then our moral aspirations also are the products of evolution. It is they, indeed, that distinguish man from the brute; but even of them the law of continuity holds good: we can see not only how in man the virtues have been developed by civilisation, but we can trace the germs of conscience in that civilised animal the dog, as we can certainly see maternal affection, devotion, and self-sacrifice in the fiercest of undomesticated animals. In other words, the struggle for existence is waged better in co-operation than by individual effort; co-operation implies the subordination of individual impulse to the interests of the species or society; and such subordination, taking different forms in different stages of social development, is what we call virtue.

In the next place, the theory of evolution is built upon the ancient truth that nothing abideth long in one stay. Matter and motion are in perpetual course of redistribution, entering into countless combinations, and assuming innumerable forms, which succeed each other like the waves of the sea, and like them are no sooner formed than they are gone. It follows, then, on this showing, that our moral aspirations are as transitory as other products of evolution. Indeed, as we look back over the pages of history we can see them always changing before our eyes—what is approved by savages is disapproved later; the virtues of the military stage of social development give way to those fostered, by the industrial organisation of society. In a word, our moral aspirations, being the outcome of evolution, have neither the permanence of matter and motion which are everlasting and indestructible, nor the reality which is the attribute of the Unknowable alone.

If any confirmation of this conclusion were required, it would be found in the fact that only a living, conscious being can entertain moral aspirations, or desire the good, or hunger and thirst after righteousness. And life and consciousness are but transitory phases of evolution. The earth's crust, the geologic record, testifies to the former existence of fauna now extinct. The science of heat makes it certain that the earth must cease to be habitable for any form of life; and with the extinction of consciousness, good and the desire for good, right and the striving after right, will be no more: matter and motion, brute matter and blind forces, knowing nothing of good or evil, will resume their ancient, desolate domain.

If, pursuing the same train of thought, we ask what meaning the optimistic evolutionist puts upon the word "good," we shall see that, according to him, the distinction between good and bad is one that applies, and can only apply, to certain moments in the process of evolution, but not to the process as a whole, just as we have already seen that according to the optimistic evolutionist the distinction does not apply to the Unknowable Reality of which the process of evolution is a manifestation. The law of life is laid down to be the struggle for existence, with the consequent survival of the fittest. In the struggle, that is good which is struggled for, viz. existence; and that conduct, in man or brute, is good which conduces to success in the struggle and enables the organism to maintain its existence. This can only be done by the adaptation of the organism to its environment, of the constitution to the conditions. It follows, therefore, that "good" is a purely relative term: it is only applicable with reference to organisms, and even in their case only to success and whatever contributes to success in the struggle for existence. But to the cosmos before the struggle for life begins, and after life and its struggles have relapsed into the insentience of unconscious matter, the term cannot be applied. Matter and motion, which exist before and after life's appearance, are everlasting and indestructible. Their existence is assured, and implies no struggle. They are eternal, organic life compared with them is momentary. The portion, then, of the cosmic process which can be spoken of as good is infinitesimal compared with the whole. Save for the brief moment during which organic life exists, it is as illusory to speak of the cosmic process as good as it is to apply the term to the Unknowable.

But if so much of our optimistic interpretation of evolution has proved to be an illusion which consists in the simple fallacy of using the word "good" in connections in which it has no meaning, can we hope to rescue the very small fragment that remains? Perhaps we may argue, that since that is good which conduces to human existence, the whole of the cosmic process up to now, having paved the way and prepared the earth for man, must be good. Thus at one stroke we seem to regain half at least of the territory we have lost. But it is only seeming, once more illusion, for the cosmic process which has prepared the earth for man's existence has also prepared it for his destruction: his good, his existence, and his destruction are equally indifferent to it. This conclusion is confirmed by the reflection that to regard the cosmic process as giving any consideration to man would be to ascribe purpose, consciousness, a knowledge of good and evil, and a preference for good, to the Unknowable of which the cosmic process is the continuous manifestation.

It is therefore mere illusion to imagine that evolution necessarily tends to good: it is absolutely indifferent to it. And as we must judge of the parts by the whole, we must conclude that human evolution follows the same laws as evolution in general. The steps in human evolution, like those in evolution at large, are not progress, are not changes working to a good end, but merely changes. Evolution is not progress, but mere change, as far as good and evil are concerned, a mere marking of time, or at most a series of movements in which advance and retreat cancel each other in the long-run.

At the same time, the evolution theory enables us to see plainly a cause at work which would inevitably produce in human minds the illusion that existence is good. Just as any species of animals which found a pleasure in actions ultimately entailing the destruction of the species would be condemned to extinction, so too only those varieties of the genus homo could survive in whom the conviction of the goodness and desirability of existence was strong enough to call forth the activities on which existence was dependent.

The optimistic interpretation of evolution is based on the "struggle for life" theory that "existence" sums up the good for which man struggles; and we have sought to show that the optimism which is based on this assumption must result in the conclusion that progress is an illusion. Some readers, however, may hold that mere existence is not the only good that man is capable of struggling for.

III.
PESSIMISM

"The prospect of attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity. And there have been many of them."[1]

The theory which sees in evolution nothing but the redistribution of matter and motion leads to an optimistic view of things which on examination proves to be a misleading illusion. From illusion to pessimism is but a step.

The facts on which the theory of organic evolution is based are two. The first is that no two individuals of any species are born exactly alike; and that of two different individuals one must be superior to the other, i.e. better fitted to survive under the conditions then and there prevailing. The next is that parents transmit their qualities to offspring; and the superiority of superior parents is thus transmitted and accumulated from generation to generation. Organic evolution, therefore, consists in more and more perfect adaptation of the organism to the environment. And this adaptation is effected by the physical destruction of those creatures which are weakly and not adapted to cope with the environment.

According to the theory that evolution is progress, the progress or evolution of humanity obeys the same laws, is impelled by the same forces, and follows the same line as the evolution of organisms in general; and consists accordingly in increasing adaptation to the environment. Imperfect adaptation manifests itself whenever a man's impulses or desires move him to perform acts which are immediately or eventually prejudicial to his own or to society's existence. Adaptation will be perfect when all acts which are necessary for the existence of the individual and of the society are pleasant in themselves—when not only going to the dentist's will be a duty, but the extraction will be a pleasure desired for its own sake.

Though Mr. Huxley maintained that it was a misleading illusion to lead people to expect any such state of untroubled happiness, he was far from denying that progress has been made in the past by man, or from despairing of further progress in the future. But progress does not, according to him, consist in adaptation to environment; it is not effected by means of the struggle for existence; it neither obeys the same laws, nor is impelled by the same forces, nor follows the same lines as organic evolution in general. Nor does it consist in the substitution of personal pleasure for a sense of duty as the motive of action: on the contrary, it consists in a fuller and fuller recognition of the claims of others.

The idea that evolution means progress, and by its very nature necessarily results in perfection, owes much of its popularity to the fallacious interpretation given to the phrase "survival of the fittest." In any scientific use of the phrase, "fittest" simply means "fittest to survive." But in popular usage it is supposed to mean "ideally or ethically best." But the fittest to survive are not necessarily the ideally best: they are, scientifically speaking, simply those best adapted to the circumstances and conditions under which they live. And the circumstances and conditions, the environment, may or may not be favourable to the survival of the ethically or æsthetically best: they may be favourable to the growth of weeds and to the destruction of beautiful flowers, in which case the cosmic process will wipe out the beautiful flowers, and the movement of evolution will be æsthetically retrogressive, not progressive.

Adaptation to environment, therefore, is no indication or test of progress, or of what is good or right or true or beautiful. Everything that exists is shown, by the mere fact of its existence, to be adapted to its environment. If, therefore, such adaptation is evidence that the thing is ideally satisfactory, it will follow that whatever is, is right. At the same time, our conception of right and good will be emptied of all meaning: a "right" or "good" thing will simply mean a thing which exists. The epithets will simply predicate existence, not a quality; and consequently we shall have to call the successful villain and the prosperous traitor good, and their methods right. They have adapted themselves to their conditions, and have flourished in consequence.

Adaptation to environment could only mean progress provided that the environment was uniformly such as to favour the survival of those alone who were ideally fit to survive. But it is not: instances are not uncommon in which organisms, having attained to a certain degree of complexity and heterogeneity of structure, subsequently, as a consequence of adapting themselves to their environment, lose it and revert to an earlier stage of development, relatively simple, homogeneous, and structureless. Such reversion or regressive metamorphosis is as much a part of the organism's evolution as its previous progressive metamorphosis; and progress and regress both are equally the result of adaptation to environment. Further, though reversion and regress may now be only occasional, it is certain that as the earth cools down they must become universal: the altered conditions of temperature, etc., will allow only the lower forms of life to survive, and will eventually extinguish even them.

As regards organic evolution in general, then, the struggle for existence and the action of the environment do not necessarily tend to result in progress. As regards the evolution of man in particular, Mr. Huxley went further and maintained that they were absolutely inimical to human progress, which has been effected, not because, but in spite of them, and is the result not of obeying the cosmic process, but of defying it.

The qualities which brought success in the struggle for existence to man as an animal were rapacity, greed, selfishness, and an absolute and cruel indifference to the wants and sufferings of others. On the gratification, at all cost to others, of his animal desires, his animal existence depended: it was the "ape and tiger" within him that made him victor in the struggle for existence; it was the environment that imposed this as the condition of success.

The qualities which make man a human being are tenderness, pity, mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, and love. It is in their growth—the "ethical process"—that human progress consists, and not in the ruthlessness by which the cosmic process effects the evolution of other organisms. These qualities—human and humane—do not make for success in the struggle for existence. They are not adapted to the environment provided by Nature. Their owners were not the fittest to survive, and consequently paid the penalty—physical destruction—as far as the cosmic process could exact it. If the struggle for existence and the action of the environment have not succeeded in keeping man down to the level of the brute, it is because man has deliberately set himself to oppose the cosmic process and the blind forces, knowing nothing of right and wrong, pity or love, by which it effects the evolution of the brute. The struggle for existence is fatal to the development of the qualities which are peculiarly characteristic of humanity, and man accordingly has suspended the struggle for existence. In place of warring with his fellow-man, he has begun to co-operate with him. He has learnt to some extent to postpone the gratification of his own wants to the satisfaction of those of others. He no longer destroys the weakly, the sick, the helpless, the useless, or even the criminal; and, if the environment threaten their destruction, he sets to work to alter the environment. Man no longer seeks to conquer Nature by obeying her: he studies her forces in order to command them to his will. Adaptation to environment is the implement by which she shapes human evolution to ends that are not his ends; he wrests the weapon from her hands, and by adaptation of the environment undoes her work, fosters the growth of those qualities which tend towards his ideal, and does away with the conditions which harbour ignorance and error, selfishness and sin.

Human progress, then, consists in perpetual approximation to the ideals of charity, love, and self-sacrifice. Life is exhibited as a struggle against evil, against the ape and tiger within us which we inherit from our ancestor—the brute. The evil is real, the struggle is hard but worthy, and not the less worthy because it is not directed to our personal happiness and gratification. "The practice of self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be something much better."[2]

Thus far this criticism of life, though stern, is not pessimistic. On the contrary, in it man seems to have recovered the freedom of action and the power of independent judgment which, as the mere product of the cosmic process, he could not enjoy according to the optimistic theory. If life is a struggle, at any rate man can fight the good fight, if he will; and he can judge for himself which is the higher, the adaptation to environment which puts man on a level with the ape and tiger, or the adaptation of environment which, for the sake of his ideals, sets him in conflict with the cosmic process.

It is when we proceed to conjecture the issue of the struggle, as thus stated, that pessimism begins to invade us. However valiantly man may fight, whatever temporary victories he may gain here or there, his defeat in the end is inevitable: the same cosmic forces which, working through him, have won him his trifling victories have preordained his ultimate destruction. As far as it is possible for science to forecast the future, it is certain that in the end man will fall a victim to his environment, and join the other extinct fauna of the earth. With him the ethical process ceases; with him perish the hopes, the aspirations, and the ideals for which he strove as being of greater worth than aught that evolution, the redistribution of matter and motion, could offer or produce.

If this were all, the picture would be sufficiently gloomy: man alone in the universe, surrounded by forces which act without regard to good or evil, without sympathy or heed for right or wrong, indeed, with the effect of impartially extinguishing both in the end. But it is not all. As the conditions grow more and more unfavourable to man's existence upon earth, as the margin of the means of subsistence contracts, and the presence of universal want increases, the ape and tiger in man will begin to assert themselves once more. In the face of starvation, the instinct of self-preservation will become imperious. Once more, as in the earliest days, man will live by rapacity, cruelty, and selfishness alone. Before man yields possession of the earth to the brutes, he will himself revert to brutishness. The puny barriers behind which man has for a moment sheltered himself from the action of the cosmic process, and nursed the feeble flame of those aspirations after higher things which distinguish him from the brute, must inevitably be swept away by the restless and relentless tide of insentient matter, perpetually redistributed by aimless motion, which constitutes the cosmic process.

The pity of it is that the process of evolution should require not merely man's physical destruction, but his moral destruction also; that the ruin of his body should be preceded by the ruin of his soul; that in his regressive metamorphosis he should be compelled, by the struggle for existence and the instinct of self-preservation, to play the traitor to one after another of his ideals of tenderness, of pity, and of love. The fittest to survive will be those who are most completely adapted to the altered environment, who are resolved to succeed in a struggle for existence in which success can be obtained by brutishness alone. The least fitted to the new conditions, and the first to perish therefore, will be those with whom self does not come first. With their destruction the competition between their less scrupulous survivors will become fiercer and still more cruel. And this process will be repeated again and again, each generation transmitting cunning and cruelty intensified to the next. Our great cities already breed men degraded below the level of the lowest savages known to us, but even they can give us but little idea of what the struggle for existence will yet produce from the ruins of civilisation in the course of the Evolution of Inhumanity.

While proclaiming that "the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best fitted for success in that struggle," and that at the best the ethical process can maintain itself only for a relatively short time, "until the evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet," Mr. Huxley held that our duty lay "not in imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it."[3] "Cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature," and though we know that the enemy's triumph must be complete, that the defeat of the good cause is preordained, that we and ours must be annihilated, we must remain at our posts, fighting to the end without hope.

It seems, then, that man possesses two kinds of knowledge: he knows to some extent what is, and to some extent he knows what ought to be. And both kinds of knowledge are equally valid. He judges that a thing is, and he judges also that a thing ought to be. Both judgments are equally true, but apparently both are not equally final, for if man judges that what is, ought not to be, he is impelled to alter what is, so that in the end the thing that ought to be is also the thing that is. The judgment of what ought to be, the ideal, is thus proved, or rather made, to be the finally correct one. On the other hand, if man is defeated in his attempts to adjust the things that are to his judgment of what they ought to be, he does not acquiesce in his defeat; he refuses to accept the result as final; the end of the matter is not there; things are not what he strove to make them, but they ought to be. What is has nothing to do with what ought to be. But what ought to be may make a good deal of difference to what is.

The ethical process, in its conflict with the cosmic process, may not in the end prove victorious; but that makes no difference to the fact that it ought to be victorious. It is this deep-seated conviction which made Mr. Huxley say that we must declare war to the last against cosmic nature, the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The victory of the enemy may be certain, but it will none the less be wrong; it may be permanent, but as long as it lasts it will be wrong. If matter and motion are eternal and indestructible, morality is equally everlasting and immutable. Unless this is so, unless the triumph of the cosmic process is wrong, once and always, why are we called upon to endure sorrow and pain and suffering rather than submit to it? Our judgment that it is wrong is as independent of time as is our judgment that particles of matter gravitate towards one another. We have no reason for believing that the latter will continue to be true for a longer time than the former. Indeed, if matter and motion, having achieved their victory over the ethical process, were then and there to be annihilated, their victory would continue to be wrong, though they had ceased to be. Right may triumph or wrong may triumph, but right is right and wrong is wrong for evermore. It is vain to tell us in the same breath that we must stake our all upon our moral judgments and that our moral judgments are not to be relied on. Every impeachment of their validity is an invitation to us to give up the struggle against the enemy of ethical nature. And if we are really resolved to fight the good fight and quit ourselves like men, we thereby affirm that our moral judgments are at least as valid as our judgments on matters of fact, and that, if our knowledge of what is is true objectively, our knowledge of what ought to be has in it at least an equal element of objective truth.

If, then, the cosmic process is real and objective, in so far as it is a perpetual manifestation of the Unknown Reality which underlies all things, then the ethical process, having the same reality and objectivity, is also a manifestation of the Unknowable. The perpetual redistribution of matter and motion is not the only way in which the Unknowable manifests itself to men: it also gives a shape to itself in the form of the highest and purest aspirations of which man is conscious within himself. It might seem, therefore, at first sight as though a mere dispassionate consideration of the actual facts of life, quite apart from any religious presuppositions or presumptions, forced us at last into the presence of a God, the source and author of all goodness. But, in the first place, those who hold to the dogma of Agnosticism, that what underlies things as they are known to us is the Unknowable, cannot admit that we know or can find out whether the Unknowable is good or bad. Induction, the logical method to which science owes so many of its discoveries, and by which we proceed from the known to the unknown, does not avail us here. No logical method could discover what is not merely unknown, but absolutely unknowable.

In the next place it is reasonable enough that those who begin by believing in a Divine Providence should also believe that right will triumph in the end, if not in the world as it is manifested to us now and here, in space and time, then in that real world, that kingdom of heaven, of which this world is but an imperfect manifestation, or to which it is but a distant and slowly moving approximation. For those, however, who refuse to assume the reality of a Divine Providence the case is different. They base themselves on facts of experience: they observe that to some small extent what ought to be tends to substitute itself for what is, thanks to the action of man exclusively, and not to any inherent tendency to good in cosmic nature, but rather in spite of the resistance to good caused by the necessary action of the mechanical laws of nature. From their observation of the conditions under which man has succeeded in modifying what is into what ought to be, they forecast the extent to which that process may be carried in the future; and their conclusion is that the process is doomed to eventual failure, is doomed not merely to cease, but to give way to a process in the opposite direction, by which what ought to be will be displaced by what ought not, by which ethical nature will succumb to cosmic nature.

Now, if there be no God, or if being Unknowable He must be eliminated from our words, thoughts, and deeds as a negligible and useless quantity for rational purposes, it is a natural enough conclusion that right must eventually succumb to wrong. It is but a reassertion of the familiar thesis that without religion morality cannot permanently be maintained. On this occasion, however, the thesis is advanced not as a piece of religious prejudice or theological insolence, but as the teaching of science and the inevitable outcome of evolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 44.

[2] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 44.

[3] Evolution and Ethics, pp. 31, 45, 83.

IV.
IDEALISM

The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly, what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be real. But whereas those losses are but personal, and possibly our regrets selfish, this loss is more than personal, and the regret not merely selfish. It is not merely that we personally have held a mistaken opinion, or that any self-sacrifice—miserably small and unworthy in the retrospect—that we have made has been made for a losing cause. It is that apart from our personal share in the matter, which rated at its true value is as naught, the thing is wrong; it ought not to be. Of that we are just as certain as that our past life has not been what it ought to have been, what it might have been. The past is past beyond recall, but for the future hitherto there has been hope and faith, faith that what ought to be may be, even for us, hope that it will be so. But now, in place of hope and faith, we have the scientific certainty that the future of humanity is devoted to the triumph of the thing that ought not to be. The only consolation left to us is the inextinguishable, the unconquerable conviction that right is right even though it should not prevail. To this conviction we must hold, though the heavens should fall. To it we must hold, though it bring, as bring it must, according to Mr. Huxley, sorrow and pain and the renunciation of our own happiness.

These are hard sayings. But there is a yet harder to be added to them. Even though it should involve the renunciation of our intellectual superiority to other people, we must hold to our conviction. If we are in earnest about our moral convictions, we shall reject any suggestion that they are not after all really true, even if that suggestion seems to afford the only way of escaping from the conclusion that faith in religion has the same basis in reason as faith in science.

In proclaiming our conviction that right is right, we affirm and intend to affirm that it is so not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. In the same way, an established scientific truth is not one of those matters about which reasonable persons, who are competent to judge, may reasonably hold different opinions: it is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact. Indeed, both kinds of truth, moral truths and scientific truths, are quite independent of individual and personal opinion. There are people in whose opinion the earth is flat; but the earth is not flat, nor can their opinion alter the fact. There was a time when all the laws of nature were unknown to man or misconceived by him; but they operated as usual, quite unaffected by his ideas. So there are people who consider successful roguery ideal, and who would make a fortune by promoting fraudulent companies, if they could; but honesty remains a duty, in spite of their ideas. Right is right, even though there be brutes in human form; and right was right, even when the ape and tiger ruled in man, and even though they were fine fellows, in their own opinion. Cruelty and selfishness never were right at any time, and never will be. The laws of morality, like the laws of science, are objectively true: they do not vary with the opinions men entertain about them; the earth, for instance, did not move or cease to move round the sun according as men imagined Galileo to be right or wrong, nor has right ceased to be right even when the world has been most depraved.

A moral judgment, then, like a scientific judgment, is objective, not subjective; it is not the expression of a mere opinion, but the statement of a fact which has an existence independent of man. If now we ask what sort of an existence it has, it is clear that what is and what ought to be have not in all cases the same kind of existence: the thing which is may sometimes also be the thing that ought to be, but often it is not. Now, when the latter is the case, when a thing is felt to be a crying evil, a foul injustice that calls for remedy, in what sense does the justice exist on which we call to drive out the injustice? The thing which ought not to be exists, and is in possession. The thing which ought to be delays its coming. Shall we say, then, that, while that is so, it exists indeed, but exists as an ideal, as something which we know ought to be and are resolved shall be? That it must present itself to some mind or other as an object of desire, and as a possibility capable of fulfilment, is certain. That it does so present itself to man is what we mean when we attribute to him the power of moral judgment and moral action. But when we speak of man's moral judgments as being objectively true, we imply that they exist not merely in his mind, but also elsewhere. But ideals can only exist in a mind; judgments can be pronounced only by a judge. When, therefore, we affirm that in objectivity and validity our moral judgments are on a par with our scientific judgments, and that our knowledge of what ought to be is as real and true as our knowledge of what is, that the existence of ethical nature, with its demands upon our reason, is a fact as indisputable as the existence of cosmic nature, we are implicitly affirming also the existence of a mind, other than human, from whose moral judgments the laws of morality derive their validity; and as those laws are eternal and immutable, as right is right always and from eternity to eternity, so must be the mind in which they are and from which they proceed.

To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. When the desire to amend our life is strong upon us, when we are most conscious of the heavy difference between actual amendment and amendment in idea alone, then we are most certain of the reality of the moral ideal as a fact, both of immediate consciousness at the moment and of permanent significance for us and for all men. To say that our moral convictions correspond to no real facts is simply to deny to them any validity at all. To say that the facts to which they correspond are real, but are purely subjective, being but moods, and often passing moods, of the individual, is merely to say that our moral convictions are illusions and right-doing only fancy. Nor do we mend matters if we add that all men are more or less subject to these moods, that right and wrong are purely human institutions; for if their value in the individual is naught, their existence in the multitude does but add to ciphers ciphers. On the other hand, if the moral ideal is no figment of man's imagination, if its existence does not come and go with his fitful moral struggles, then its permanent abode, the centre from which it manifests itself, must be in some permanent intelligence at the centre of things.

The Pessimistic interpretation of evolution suggests another way of reaching the same conclusion. That form of Pessimism represents cosmic nature as indifferent, if not hostile, to ethical nature; the former by its law of the struggle for existence favours the survival of the strongest and the most selfish; the latter with its moral laws strives to suspend the struggle for existence, and to defeat the selfishness which the former seeks to perpetuate and extend. Human evolution is in its essence the struggle of man as a moral being against nature as non-moral or anti-moral; and the curve traced by human evolution is the resultant of the opposition of the two forces—the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, nature. During the first part of its course the line of human evolution rises, but during the latter part it is doomed to fall; and the curve will be completed when man, having traversed every stage of moral degradation, is merged once more in the brute matter to which originally he owed his being. Against this victory of cosmic nature man, as a moral being, protests and fights. He protests that it is wrong—wrong, not because it brings him more pain than pleasure, for right-doing also may have that result, but wrong without regard to his feelings, so that any impartial spectator who witnessed the struggle would condemn and regret the issue. If this is not so, if the condemnation is the expression merely of human prejudice, then there is nothing in the defeat of ethical nature or in the victory of its enemy, cosmic nature, really to regret; the difference between right and wrong is not an absolute or real distinction, corresponding to real facts, and the victory of cosmic nature, even if it runs counter to man's prejudices, is not thereby shown to be really wrong, though man naturally is under the illusion that it is.

The coarse and immoral piece of vulgarity which condones an act of wrong-doing on the ground that "it will be all the same a hundred years hence," is, with an extension of time, as applicable to the race generally as to the individual in particular. In a million, or a billion, years hence it will, according to the pessimistic interpretation of evolution, be all the same: matter and motion will alone exist, completely indifferent to right and wrong. What does it matter, then, whether we do right or wrong? Ultimately, it will make no difference: the distinction between right and wrong is not one of permanent value, or based on any lasting difference in things. Nor is it strange that a cause which is based on an illusion should be doomed to defeat. What is strange is that anyone should invite us to renounce happiness for such an unmeaning struggle.

The only reply to such loose talk is that it does matter, here and now, always and to all time, that right should triumph over wrong. It will not do to say that it matters now, but will not matter hereafter, for, if it is of no importance then, neither is it of any importance now. But if right-doing is the most important thing in the world, more important than happiness, more important to all time even than the perpetual redistribution of matter and motion, to whom is it important? Not exclusively, nor even primarily, to ourselves; for the essence of right-doing is the attempt to put self away and forget it, the yearning to be lifted above personal considerations and thought of self, the conviction that whilst it matters all the world to me, to do the right, the matter does not end with me. The matter is not of merely personal importance to me, nor important simply because I choose to think it so. Its value and significance are apprehended—alas! too rarely—by me, they are not created by me. Its significance and importance are real, not fictitious; that reality is not created by man, it is not a human prejudice, but exists independent of man and what he thinks. To matter and motion, those perpetual manifestations of the Power or Reality which underlies them, nothing can have any meaning or importance: it is only to a mind that things can be significant or important. If, then, the importance of right-doing is real, it is because it really matters to the Power, which underlies all things, that we should do right; and that Power must be of the nature of an intelligence, for it is only a mind which can either apprehend values or assign them. If the microcosm, man, can pass a valid sentence of condemnation upon the macrocosm, nature, it is only because and so far as his moral nature places him in direct communication with the heart of things and gives him knowledge of the will of that Power on which microcosm and macrocosm alike depend for their existence. If the distinction between right and wrong is one by which man can correctly judge between himself and the cosmos, the distinction and the judgment must proceed from a source superior to both. If it is not, then the Pessimistic interpretation of evolution falls to the ground, because it is based on the assumption that its condemnation of cosmic nature is a correct judgment. Not only does Pessimism fall, but the element of truth and reality which Pessimism contains must also be abandoned; if the distinction between right and wrong is not sufficient for the task put upon it by Pessimism, neither is it sufficient for us to build our lives on. In fine, either the ultimate defeat of the ethical process matters, or it does not. If it does not, why suffer sorrow and pain in the vain endeavour to stave it off? If it does, then to whom? No longer to man, for he will have joined the extinct fauna. Therefore to some moral intelligence to whom the triumph of right is a matter of importance.

From this dilemma the only escape seems to be frankly to admit that a billion years hence it will be "all the same," but to deny that, because it will be all the same then, it is a matter of indifference now. This argument, then, maintains that it will be all the same ultimately, and that it is an illusion to imagine that when man is extinct it can possibly matter. Here and now, however, and indeed as long as mankind continues to exist, right-doing is of the highest conceivable importance to man, more important even than happiness. But it is only as long as mankind continues to exist that it can continue to be important: its importance only exists in man's mind, and perishes with it. To say, therefore, that the ultimate defeat of the ethical process will, when established, be regrettable, is only to say that if we, or any other moral judge, were there to see it, we should feel regret about it; but we cannot possibly maintain that, because a moral judge would regret it, if he were there, therefore there will be one there to regret it. Of course, it is possible that the Unknowable may be a moral intelligence of this kind, because everything is possible with regard to the Unknowable. But we can neither affirm nor deny that or anything else about the Unknowable, for then the Unknowable would cease so far to be unknowable.

The contention of this argument, then, is that for us men, and (as far as we have any positive knowledge) for us men alone, the laws of morality are real, intensely real; but their reality begins with man and ends with man. To this contention the reply is that as regards their reality the laws of morality are on exactly the same footing as the laws of science. Take the theory of evolution for instance: from scientific observations of what is going on now it infers what has been and what will be, it reconstructs the past and forecasts the future; it frames pictures of the globe as it was before man was evolved; it forms conceptions of the earth as it will be long after man is extinct. These conceptions and pictures, however, exist only in the mind of man, for the future does not yet exist and the past has ceased to be. That is to say, evolution is an inference, or rather a mass of inferences, which like all inferences exist in the mind, could not have existed before the mind, and cannot exist when the mind has ceased to be. Science, being the work of the mind (for we cannot say that it requires no intelligence), is just man's notion of what has been, is, and will be, in the same way that morality is man's conception of what ought to be. If we say that what ought to be will cease and become meaningless when man is extinct, then we must say the same of what has been, is, and will be. If the good, the noble, the right, are merely human ideas of what ought to be, matter and motion are merely human conceptions of what is. If the reality of the former is only to be found in the human mind, so is the reality of the latter. If the reality of the one is to cease with human existence, so must the reality of the other. On the other hand, if either is to exist when mankind is no more, it is only in some mind that it can exist. It is only for a person that anything can be right or good. It is only a person that can see the past summed up or the future contained in the present. If it is legitimate and logical to infer that what is will continue to be after man's disappearance from the earth, so it is to draw the same inference with regard to what ought to be. If science is true really, and does not merely appear so to man, it must be true for some mind other than human: by an intelligence alone can truth be apprehended, or the right approved. But if truth is limited to the human mind, and ceases with it, then evolution must cease to be true when men cease to exist. Nay, in that case it cannot claim to be true at all, or rather does not claim to be true, but only seeming. On the other hand, if the law of gravity, for instance, was true before man's appearance, its truth must have dwelt in some mind. If it was not true then, we have no better reason for believing it to be true now. In fine, truth and right, what is and what ought to be, must either be dismissed as mere human imaginings, or be accepted as everlasting facts of an Eternal Moral Consciousness.

Shall we, then, say that the description which science gives of the constitution and working of the universe is indeed consistent and coherent enough with itself, and is a logical deduction from its premises, but to assert that it expresses or even corresponds to any reality beyond itself is a statement which we have no right to make? To take up this position is simply to maintain that science is consistent and logical, but that we have no reason or right to believe that it is true. If our accounts are based on imaginary figures, they may be kept as strictly as you please, but they will never show us our true position. Indeed, if our premises are incorrect to start with, the more logical our inferences are, the more certain our conclusions are to be wrong.

Shall we, then, say that the account which science gives of the cosmic process is not only consistent and logical, but expresses or corresponds to a reality? Then in that case the cosmic process, so far as it is truly expressed by science, is a logical process. But it is only a mind which can be logical or can go through a logical process. Once more, therefore, the facts of science as much as the facts of morality imply that the real is an Intelligence. In fine, the truth of science and the truth of morality are bound up together and have the same basis. If the one is valid for facts beyond the range of human observation, so is the other. If the one implies a consciousness other than human, equally so does the other.

It may be said that to regard the ruling principle of the cosmos as a moral agent is to commit the anthropomorphic fallacy. What, then, shall we say of science, which is engaged in demonstrating that the cosmic process is always logical? That science simply describes the facts as they are, and that if they are logical, it is not her fault? Then the presence of an intelligence other than human is revealed to science in the facts; and it is false to say that science merely imports her own intelligence into them. In the same way, the presence of a moral personality other than our own is revealed to us in the facts of conscience, and not imported into them by us. The presence of the Comforter is one of the facts apprehended by the religious consciousness; it is not merely the religious man's way of interpreting some other fact. From this conclusion the only way of escape is to say that anthropomorphism is a fallacy, and that it is a fallacy to which the human mind, by its very constitution, is always and inevitably subject. This argument gets rid at one blow of all indications of any intelligence or morality other than human. But how? Simply by begging the question, by tacitly taking it for granted that there is no other personality than human personality. In that case it is obvious, indeed, that man's perpetual discovery of personal power in the forces of nature, of more than human wisdom in nature's laws, and of more than human goodness in the human heart, is and must be fallacious. But only on the assumption that there is no wisdom in the world but man's, no love in all the universe but his, can we say that man reads into the facts a wisdom and a love which are not there. Are we, then, prepared to say that, in giving us a logical account of the cosmic process, science has—naturally and necessarily indeed, but none the less completely—been mistaken? If the scientific account corresponds to the facts, then the facts behave logically. If it is the anthropomorphic fallacy to imagine that things can behave logically, then science's description of the facts must be fallacious.

Perhaps it will be sought to save science by saying that science is anthropomorphic, but not fallacious. This, however, gives away the whole case: it is an admission that, in interpreting the cosmic process as a logical process, science is simply recognising, and rightly recognising, the logical character of the facts—the anthropomorphic interpretation happens to be right. But we must note that it is not right because it is anthropomorphic, but anthropomorphic because it faithfully describes the facts. Science aims at describing and formulating facts as they are: if the laws of science are rational, it is because she found reason already in the facts, and not because she put it there. She does not make the laws of nature, neither does she dictate the behaviour of facts, nor is their behaviour merely her way of interpreting facts. Man discovers in nature wisdom, which is an attribute of personality, not because he cannot help being anthropomorphic in his views, but because nature is a manifestation of the power and wisdom of a personality other and greater than man's. So far, then, is this discovery from creating a presumption that man makes nature after his own image, that it constitutes a proof that man is made in the image of that personal will and wisdom which is expressed in nature as well as manifested in man. In discovering personality we discover what is fundamentally real in nature, and for us what is fundamentally real is also our highest ideal.

We have already remarked that paradoxical though it sounds to say that the ideal is real, the seeming paradox does express a fact—the fact at once of our consciousness of the difference between what is and what ought to be, and of our conviction that what ought to be is no mere illusion. Truth and goodness, wisdom and love, are all at the same time ideal and real. The truth to which it is the ideal of science to approximate is no mere chimera. So far as it is truth, it is not merely man's way of looking at the facts or an interpretation which he puts upon them: it is a statement of the facts, as accurate and precise as science can make it. The ideal, being an ideal, will never be fully attained; but that the truth is there to be found out is proved every time science reaches a new truth, that is to say, a truth which before its discovery was indeed not apprehended by man, but certainly was not therefore either untrue or non-existent. The truth was in the facts; for what man knows of nature he has learnt from nature, and what he finds there is not the projection of human wisdom but the revelation of a more than human wisdom. Man's knowledge is real in proportion as it approaches the ideal. The ideal is not man's surmise, or vague conception, or anticipation of what he may hereafter come to know, for such surmises are always proved to be more or less erroneous. Neither is it man's conviction that the truth exists, if only he could find it out. It is actual truth and knowledge which now exist, and, being truth and knowledge, must exist in some mind, and certainly do not exist in man's mind. Science, so far as it has approached the ideal, has done so not by being anthropomorphic, but by ceasing to be anthropomorphic—that is to say, by casting aside presumptions of what according to man's notions ought to be or a priori must be, and substituting for such preconceptions a patient, reverent study of the facts as they are.

To regard the knowledge thus gained as being at once purely human and the only reality is to say that the evolution of the universe exists only in the speculation of human thinkers, and consequently that the world as it was before man existed was created by the speculation of minds which were not in existence then and which were only subsequently evolved. How can man have been evolved out of his own speculations? How can his speculations have existed before he did? Man owes his origin to the same Power whose wisdom is revealed in nature to science, and manifested to all in all around us. Of the existence of a Power, not ourselves, we have evidence in everything that affects us. It is a fact of consciousness, but it is a fact which from its very nature does not exist solely in our consciousness. Therein it resembles ideal wisdom or goodness, which exists in us, so far as our wisdom or goodness is real, but is far from being exhausted by its partial presence in us.

The ideal in morality, again, is not the mere desire to do good or to be good, just as the ideal in knowledge is not the mere desire to know the truth. And if goodness is the object of moral desire, as truth is the object of intellectual desire, in neither case is the object of desire purely imaginary, a mere idea or conception of something which might be, but as a matter of fact is not. We do not desire imaginary pleasures or imaginary goodness, we want the reality; and to tell us that that reality exists only in idea, only in our own imagination, is a misleading half-truth. True, we must have some idea of it, or else we could not desire it. But neither could we desire it if it were presented to us as purely imaginary. In other words, the object of moral desire is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as both actual and possible, as existing simultaneously for us and beyond us. The case is the same with ideal truth: we could not desire it, unless we had some conception of it, unless it were to some degree or in some way present to our consciousness; yet, at the same time, the knowledge which we desire to have but do not yet possess is certainly, so far as we do not possess it, beyond our consciousness. It is because we have not got it that we want it. And the object of desire, what we want, is not imaginary truth, but real truth; just as in our better moments we want to do not what we imagine to be right, but what is really right. The Real, therefore—real truth, real goodness—is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, and desired, at the moment of desire, as existing both for us and beyond us.

The proviso, "at the moment of apprehension, at the moment of desire," is important, because it strikes at the root of all forms of subjective idealism. They all assume that the only thing directly apprehended is what exists for us; that consequently the supposed existence of any real thing or person beyond us is a mere inference, and an inference the truth of which we have no means of checking, because it is a statement about things of which we have no direct apprehension or knowledge. On this assumption, therefore, the only things man directly apprehends are his own states of consciousness, his own sensations, etc. Are we to call them real or not? If they are not real, his whole life is a dream, his speculations fancies, and his desires illusions. If they are the only reality of which he can be certain, then the only truth is that which man knows, the only good is that which man does, the only world is that which man thinks, the only God is that which man makes, the magnified, non-natural shadow of man projected on to the mists of the Unknowable.

It is important, therefore, to insist that the Real—the reality of existence, of knowledge, of goodness—is not an inference, but a matter of direct apprehension. It is certain that goodness or knowledge to be an object of desire must be presented to us in idea; but it is equally certain that the mere idea is not what we desire. The object of desire is directly apprehended as in our consciousness and beyond it. The natural world around us is also directly apprehended as at once in our consciousness and beyond it: it is presented to our minds, but it is presented as real.

It is important also to note that the real does not forfeit its reality to our apprehension when and because it takes up its abode in us: goodness does not cease to be good because we do it, nor truth cease to be truth because we know it. It does not follow that because the ideal cannot be fully realised, it cannot be realised at all. On the contrary, the conviction that it cannot be completely attained is itself the guarantee that it can be attained partially. Yet it has been assumed that if a thing is apprehended by us it cannot be real, that real knowledge begins just where our knowledge ends, that the further we push our knowledge forward the further real knowledge recedes from our view. On this assumption is built the theory of the Unknowable, the theory that whatever is known to man is a state of man's consciousness; that states of consciousness are subjective, are merely the appearances of things, not the things themselves; that the real things, the things themselves, are unknowable; their appearances alone can be known to man; therefore the real is for ever unknowable. "The reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown."[4] Consequently, inferences about the Real are valueless and futile. By way of compensation, however, our knowledge of the unreal is, on this theory, varied and extensive: it includes, for instance, the theory of evolution and the whole of science.

But the assumption which leads to this strange conclusion is opposed to the facts. The fact, as we have contended, is that the real in consciousness is continuous with the real beyond consciousness, and is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as being thus continuous, and is not reached by any process of inference. The real is not a matter of inference, but of apprehension. Its existence cannot be deduced from anything else; it is that from which all conclusions must be deduced. I cannot prove that a thing is real any more than I can prove that I have toothache. There is no need.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Herbert Spencer, First Principles, ch. iv. § 22, p. 69.

V.
THE REAL

We began, at the beginning of this book, by accepting Evolution as a fact, as all ordinarily educated persons in the present state of scientific knowledge are practically bound to do. Accepting it as a fact, we proceeded to inquire what, if anything, it had to tell us about the moral government of the world; and we found that very different interpretations were put upon the theory of Evolution by different authorities. According to one interpretation the process of Evolution was a continual progress from good to better: good could only give way to higher good. According to another interpretation goodness was a transient, evanescent phase in the process of evolution, of no permanent value: the ethical process was doomed to be defeated by its enemy, the cosmic process. According to a third interpretation the notion of good was a pure illusion, necessary indeed, inasmuch as without it there would be no survival for man in the struggle for existence, but none the less an illusion.

Much as these interpretations differ from one another as to the moral significance of the process of evolution, or indeed as to whether evolution has any moral significance at all, they are agreed upon one point. They are agreed that it is impossible to draw any inference from the facts of evolution as to the moral government of the universe. To affirm its moral government would be to claim knowledge of the Unknowable, which is an obvious absurdity. It would be to attribute power, consciousness, wisdom, and goodness to the Real; and the Real is and must ever be unknown.

This identification of the Real with the Unknowable leads us into the following ridiculous impasse: the vast majority of men look, and must always look, for guidance and information to science and theology; and theology is knowledge of the unknowable; science, knowledge of the unreal. Those who are content with this blind alley may remain in it. We propose to try to find our way out of it.

If we analyse our perception of any material object, that is to say, of any object which we perceive by means of the senses, we shall find that our perception of the object consists of the sensations which we have of it. To perceive an orange is to see that it is yellow, to feel that it is round, to smell it, taste it, and so on. These various sensations together constitute our perception of the orange. Now, the subjective idealist says that the perception is the orange, and that the orange is the perception. To the beginner in philosophy that sounds absurd: he knows that his perception is not the orange, and that the orange is something more than his perception of it. But when he is asked, "What more? If the orange is not the perception, what is it?" he does not generally produce any satisfactory reply; and then he is told that his notion, that there is anything in the orange except his own perception or sensations, is obviously not a fact of sensation or a thing directly observed, but merely a belief or inference of his. On the other hand, he generally puts a very natural question to his instructor: "If the orange is merely my perception, what becomes of the orange when I do not perceive it? Granted that it exists whenever I look at it, what becomes of it in the intervals when I am not looking at it? Does it exist then, or does it not?"

To this Bishop Berkeley replies that it does; that it exists then in exactly the same way as it does now, that is to say, it exists in idea (i.e. perception or sensation); but as it does not exist in my perception, when I am not looking at it, it must exist in the perception of some other mind, to which all things at all times are present.

With the fact which forms Berkeley's conclusion I have no quarrel. What I should like to show is that it does not follow from these premises.

Berkeley's argument is: All men believe, and rightly believe, that the things they see are permanent. The things they see are ideas (perceptions, sensations) of a mind. Therefore the permanent world is the idea of a permanent mind.[5]

But "the things they see" is an ambiguous expression. If by "the things that I see" is meant "my sensations of sight," then they are not permanent, for they only last as long as I look at the object, and consequently any argument based on their supposed permanence falls to the ground. On the other hand, if "the things that I see" are permanent, then they are not merely my sensations of sight—in which case subjective idealism is wrong, and my perception of a thing is not the whole account of the thing and does not exhaust its reality. The things which I perceive are not my sensations: they are things of which I have sensations. In fine, they are apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as being both within and without consciousness.

To the question whether a thing exists when I am not looking at it, John Stuart Mill replies, in effect, that as often as I look at it I shall see it; that if I were looking I should see it. This is true enough; but it is no answer to the question. When further pressed, Mill further replies that, if things do not exist when we do not look, we should nevertheless necessarily be deluded by the association of ideas into imagining that they do exist when not looked at. Here, again, it is perfectly true that, if things are not real, it is a delusion to imagine they are. But that is no answer to the question. It is, in fact, a question which the subjective idealist cannot answer. To say "No! Things out of consciousness are non-existent," is to say that effects of which the causes are unobserved are effects produced by non-existent causes. To say "Yes" is to admit that things can exist out of consciousness as well as in, which is what subjective idealism is there to deny.

We submit, then, that the analysis of experience which subjective idealism makes is not an exhaustive analysis; and that, when the man of common sense says that in looking at anything he is aware both of his sensations of sight and of something more, he is stating the actual facts as they are given in experience to all of us.

We apprehend a thing as being both our sensations and something more. When the idealist says that the latter half of this apprehension is a misapprehension, he rejects an observed fact of experience, not because he does not find it in his experience, but because it seems to him impossible that it should be there. He argues that to say we can be conscious of what is not in our consciousness is to say that we can be conscious of something of which we are unconscious—a patent nonsense. He might admit, for the sake of argument, that possibly a thing could exist both in consciousness and out, and even that we might know that it so existed. But he cannot admit that a man is conscious of what he is not conscious of.

He is not required to admit it. He is required to admit that our perceptions are not the only things of which we are conscious; or, to put it in other words, that our states of consciousness are not the only things of which we are conscious. And he is required to admit it simply and solely on the ground that it is a fact of common observation and everyday experience. Thus, for instance, we perform actions, and (usually) we are conscious of performing them. But the action is something more and other than our consciousness of it. Or is someone going to maintain that doing and knowing are the same thing? Is anyone prepared to push the illusion-argument so far as to say that the idea that we do things is a mere delusion? If it is not a delusion, if it is, on the contrary, a fact, then our actions are not states of consciousness, but things of which we are conscious. We apprehend them, in the very act of apprehension, as realities distinct from the consciousness which we have of them. And we have the very same guarantee for their reality as we have for the reality of our perception or sensations of them, viz. the fact that we are conscious of them.

In the same way, when we push a solid object or feel the impact of a moving body, we are as conscious of that body as of our muscular sensations: our sensations make up our perception of the object, but are not the object. They constitute the state of consciousness, but that state is not the only thing we are conscious of. The object is apprehended as being in consciousness and not as merely being our consciousness of it.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, at least, is quite clear that our states of consciousness are not the only things of which we are conscious; he holds even that we are vaguely conscious of that which transcends our consciousness. Thus, our personality is not a state of consciousness, yet we are conscious of it, and "its existence is to each a fact above all others the most certain."[6] And, as for the real, "our firm belief in objective reality, a belief which metaphysical criticism cannot shake," is not merely "a positive though vague consciousness of that which transcends consciousness," but "has the highest validity of any"[7] of our beliefs.

But though Mr. Spencer admits, or rather insists, that we know that the Real is, he denies that we know what it is. In other words, he accepts the validity of one half of every act of experience and denies the validity of the other half. Our analysis of experience has shown us that we apprehend the real, in the very act of apprehension, as being both a state of our consciousness and something more than that state. To say that one half of the apprehension is a misapprehension is to say that both are invalid. If what is present in consciousness is merely appearance and not the real thing, then our states are the only things of which we are conscious, and the existence of anything more is not a fact of experience and observation—still less can it have the highest validity of any of our beliefs.

We may be asked, "Granted that the Real is more than a state of our consciousness, what more is it?" and, if no answer is forthcoming, we may be told that after all then, it seems, we know that the Real is, but not what it is. The reply is: So far as the Real is out of consciousness we may not know what it is; as far as it is in, we do. By "being conscious of a thing" we mean knowing what the thing is—not necessarily complete knowledge, but some.

If it be said that, on our own showing, a thing and the knowledge of it are different, and that consequently however great our knowledge may become there always remains, and must always remain, something which we cannot know, because it is ex hypothesi, not knowledge, we must reply that this objection is but a restatement of the inveterate fallacy of idealism—the fallacy that states of consciousness are the only things we can be conscious of; that if we know a thing the thing ceases to be anything but our knowledge of it; that to be conscious of performing an action is proof that no action is really performed, and that the only doing is knowing.

We act, and we know that we act. Reality must be accorded to both or denied to both; it cannot be accorded to one and denied to the other. Indeed, knowledge itself is action, a series of actions. But it is also something more, just as an action of which we are conscious is something more than our consciousness of it.

But we are conscious not only of our own actions, but of the reactions of things on us, and of the interactions of things on one another. We apprehend all three—action, reaction, and interaction—as real; we know not only that they are, as being realities, but also what they are as states of consciousness. As states of consciousness they are successive sensations or perceptions; as more than states of consciousness they are power or force.

The study which science makes of the interactions of things on one another reveals those interactions as conformable to law and happening in such a way that their occurrence can be logically deduced, and even foretold, from their laws. In a word, they happen in a way that can be reasoned out, and they constitute together a logical process. The reality, the power, the activity which is exhibited in this process is exhibited therefore as a rational activity, as reason active; and both the reason and the action are apprehended by us as real, and not as mere states of our consciousness.

If the scientific account of the universe and the theory of evolution, so far as they are true, are not mere exercises of the imagination, but represent events and changes which actually have taken place and are taking place beyond the range of actual observation, it must be because they are logical inferences from real events and real changes which are matters of direct observation. If the observed events have no reality, we have no ground for believing the unobserved or inferred facts to have any. Unless the real events follow a logical sequence, our inferences must be fallacious in proportion as they are logical. We believe the inferred facts to be real because we believe the observed facts to be real; and the observed facts are presented to us and apprehended by us to be not merely our sensations but also realities. On no other ground can we or do we trust science to guide us in life.

Nor do we trust morality on any other ground. So far as we trust the impulse to do right, or base any calculations upon it or draw any inferences from it, we do so because we apprehend it, in the act of apprehension, as both a state of our consciousness and something more. As in the impact of a moving body we apprehend not merely our sensations, but also the presence of a real power, so in the impulse to good we apprehend not only our consciousness thereof, but the presence of a real power, with regard to which we know not only that it is, but to some extent what it is—a power which would have us do good and be good.

If material things are but ideas of ours, so the Right and Good may be. If the latter are mere aspirations and nothing more, the former are mere sensations and nothing more. But if in things we are conscious of a power not ourselves, so are we in our consciousness of the Right and Good: our aspirations are inspirations. We apprehend their reality in exactly the same way as we apprehend the reality of material things—by direct observation. And we have exactly the same evidence—the evidence of immediate consciousness.

"Let no man spoil you with philosophy." The statements that "knowledge is the only reality," "the only Real is the Unknowable," are contradictory not only of each other, but of those facts in the common experience of mankind which afford the only safe foundation for philosophy as well as for science. Both statements logically imply that our only knowledge is of the unreal; and from knowledge of the unreal to the unreality of knowledge is a necessary step. But existence is not merely knowledge: existence is also action. A thing is that which it does, and not merely that which it is known to do. Or rather a thing never does anything: only a person can act. The "action" or "behaviour" of a thing is only a metaphor.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] See [Appendix] on Bishop Berkeley's Idealism.

[6] First Principles, ch. iii. § 20.

[7] Ibid., § 26.

VI.
EVOLUTION AS THE REDISTRIBUTION OF MATTER AND MOTION

Assuming the process of evolution to be a fact, we have inquired what is the value of that fact, what significance it has for man as a moral being, anxious to direct his life in accordance with the best lights he can obtain. In our attempts to draw any inference from the facts of evolution as to the moral government of the universe, we have always found ourselves ultimately confronted by the notice—The Real is Unknowable. Obviously, if "the ultimate of ultimates," the Real Power or Force, of which all things and beings are manifestations, is unknowable, we cannot know whether it cares or does not care for what is true or good. But if the Real is Unknowable, then the knowledge which we do possess is not knowledge of the real, and consequently all our science is unreal knowledge; the theory of evolution is a system of delusive inferences from unreal facts. That, however, is a thing which we could not believe. Doubtless our knowledge is small compared with our ignorance. Doubtless there is much which the human mind could not understand without becoming more than human. Doubtless, also, every addition to our knowledge involves a readjustment and correction of our previous inferences; and a considerable addition, such as the theory of evolution was, causes a considerable change in our conception of the universe and its laws. But all these admissions cannot compel us to admit that science is wholly unreal knowledge, or that evolution is an entirely unreal process. We sought, accordingly, to show that we have some, if only partial, knowledge of the real, that that knowledge is not wholly inferential, but that so far as it is inferred it is inferred from real facts, the reality of which is directly apprehended in the common experience of mankind.

As a matter of fact, those writers who proclaim the unknowability of the Real, when they are writing as philosophers, abandon it when they are engaged in science. When they are working out the theory of evolution, they take it for granted that the process of evolution is a reality, that the common experience of mankind is trustworthy to some extent, and that to that extent the Real is knowable and known. They assure us that, though the knowledge we have is not knowledge of the Real, it is just the same for us as if it were—if the Real could enter into our consciousness, we really should not know the difference. "Thus then we may resume, with entire confidence, those realistic conceptions which philosophy at first sight seems to dissipate."[8]

On examination, however, it turns out that the entire confidence which is thus restored to the reality of material things is not extended to the reality of those ideals of the good, the beautiful, and the holy which play their part in the lives of men and in the evolution of mankind—or not to all of those ideals.

Now, it is scarcely to be hoped that a theory which begins by ignoring certain facts in the common experience of mankind, or by denying their reality, can end in a satisfactory explanation of them. Either it will be consistent and proclaim them to be illusions, or it will be inconsistent and quietly include them from time to time as it goes on—in which case the explanation it gives of them will be no explanation. Thus, for instance, as we have already argued, the Optimistic interpretation of evolution, professing to exhibit the Ideal of morality as one of the ultimate consequences of the redistribution of matter and motion, ends by denying any difference between what is and what ought to be, and thus reduces the moral ideal to a mere illusion. The Pessimist, on the other hand, insisting on the reality, and to some extent the supremacy of the moral ideal, confesses his inability to explain its validity as being due to evolution: the fact that it has been evolved does not account for its validity, because the tendency to evil has been also evolved, but is not, therefore, to be yielded to.

The object of this chapter is to examine the hypothesis that the process of evolution is nothing but a perpetual redistribution of matter and motion, and to show that the hypothesis cannot explain, and as a matter of fact does not explain, all the facts which it is framed to account for.

The theory of evolution is an attempt—one of many attempts that men have made—to explain the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is. It differs from most other attempts in that it endeavours to give a scientific explanation of the process, and that consequently it does not profess to go back to the beginning or to discover the origin of the process.

The nature of scientific "explanation" is well understood by men of science (in England, at least), and has been made familiar to the non-scientific world by John Stuart Mill. An event is scientifically "explained" when it is shown to be a case of a general law; a law is "explained" when it is shown to come under some more general law. In other words, the business of science is to show that the thing under examination always happens (or tends to happen) under certain circumstances which science can formulate with more or less exactness. But how or why the thing should happen thus, science does not undertake to explain: "what is called explaining one law of nature by another, is but substituting one mystery for another; and does nothing to render the general course of nature other than mysterious: we can no more assign a why for the more extensive laws than for the partial ones."[9] It is only "minds not habituated to accurate thinking" which imagine that the laws are the causes of the events which happen in accordance with them, "that the law of general gravitation, for example, causes the fall of bodies to the earth."[10] It may be a law of science, a perfectly true statement, that the phenomenon B always follows the phenomenon A; but that statement, true as it is, is not the cause of B. That A is always followed by B is demonstrated by science. Why it should be followed by B is as mysterious as magic—as mysterious as that the waving of the magician's wand should be immediately followed by the rising of a palace from the ground. How the one thing can follow the other, is no part of science's business to explain.

Science, therefore, is essentially descriptive: with ever-increasing accuracy it describes things and the order in which they happen. Evolution, then, as a scientific theory, is also purely descriptive: it describes the way in which things have come to be what we see them to be, the process by which the totality of things has come to be what it is. But when the purely scientific and descriptive part of the work is done, when science has formulated the order of the events which have led up to the existing state of the universe, when the process of evolution has been described, there still remain the questions which science refused even to try to answer, and there also remain other questions more vital to science. There arises the question, In what sense is evolution a real process? do the laws of science exist only in the minds of men of science? is the process of evolution merely the description which is given of it (as according to some thinkers a thing is only the sensations which we have of it), or is it something more?

Obviously the question whether evolution is a real process, whether there is any reality in science, is one which cannot be answered, either in the affirmative or in the negative, without some idea of what "reality" means, of what the "real" is. "What is the meaning of the word real? This is the question which underlies every metaphysical inquiry; and the neglect of it is the remaining cause of the chronic antagonisms of metaphysicians."[11] Before we are logically entitled to say that evolution is a real process, we must answer the question, "What is the essence, the ultimate reality of things? who or what is the Being that is manifested in 'all thinking things, all objects of all thought'?"[12]

Now, to these questions, as to the Being and Becoming of the universe, science has nothing to say. Science does not even afford the materials for an answer to them, any more than to those other questions as to how or why things should happen in the way which science describes. Science describes things, but does not undertake to prove that things exist. Science is organised common sense, and common sense takes it for granted that things exist. Having made this assumption, science proceeds to investigate with scientific exactness the order in which events succeed one another and co-exist with one another, within the range of direct observation; and infers that, even when they are beyond the range of direct observation, they continue to occur in the same order of sequence and co-existence. But here again science refuses to have anything to do with any metaphysical questions as to how or why things should thus occur. All sorts of conjectures may be made, and have been made, to explain why B should follow A, or co-exist with it. But science is not pledged to any of them. The only thing she undertakes to show is the fact of the sequence or co-existence; and this she can do without assuming the truth of any of these conjectures. Indeed, the progress which science has made is largely due to the fact that she has steadily declined to have anything to do with such conjectures—having found out by experience that they simply distract her from her proper business of observing with the utmost exactness what actually does take place. It may be that A in some mysterious and wholly inexplicable way "produces" B, that is to say in technical phraseology, is "the efficient cause" or "mechanical cause" of B. It may be that the sequence of B upon A is a volition of the Being which is manifested in all thinking things, in all objects of all thought. Science cannot prove, and will not even discuss, either suggestion: she confines herself to the assertion that, as a matter of careful and exact observation, B does follow A. Whether we call A an efficient cause or not, matters not to science: call it so or refuse to call it so, the fact once established by science, that B follows A, remains. The theory of efficient or mechanical causes is doubtless of importance, but not to science. If it is proved to be false, not a single fact of science is shaken.

The mechanical theory may be true or may be false, but in either case it is a metaphysical theory. If science is descriptive—descriptive of the uniform succession and co-existence of facts—then science no more proves the mechanical theory to be true than it proves the volitional theory to be true. Both are theories as to why facts should succeed one another in the order described by science; and science does not undertake to prove the truth of such theories, nor does she wait for them to be proved or disproved.

Many men of science, however, are also philosophers, and hold, as they are fully entitled to hold, that the mechanical theory is the true interpretation of nature. Now, "mechanics is the science of motion; we can assign as its object: to describe completely and in the simplest manner the movements which occur in nature."[13] On the mechanical theory, therefore, "the object of all science is to reduce the phenomena of nature to forms of motion, and to describe these completely and in the simplest manner ... the only complete description is that afforded by a mathematical formula, in which the constants are supplied by observation. This permits us to calculate those features or phases of phenomena which are hidden from our observation in space or in time."[14] This, we need hardly add, is in agreement with Mr. Herbert Spencer's view of the theory of evolution as a description of the process of the redistribution of matter and motion.

It seems, then, that according to this particular metaphysical theory, which maintains the mechanical explanation of nature to be the true one, the object of all science is to describe (with mathematical accuracy, where possible) the movements of things in space. But science is universal; evolution extends to the whole cosmic process. Therefore, the only things with which science has to do, or which are factors in the cosmic process, are things moving in space.

As a metaphysical argument this theory seems to us unsatisfactory. It converts, simply and illegitimately, the proposition sanctioned by common sense, that material things are real, into the proposition opposed to common sense, that all real things are material. It assumes, apparently unconsciously and certainly without proof, that the only things capable of scientific description are movements in space, the only laws in the universe mechanical laws.

Historically, material things were the first to be studied and described with scientific exactness. It is only natural, therefore, that the methods and assumptions which have been employed with conspicuous success by the physical sciences should be extended, tentatively at least, elsewhere. It is equally natural that protests should be raised, and the extension proclaimed by philosophers to be illegitimate—"impoverishing faith without enriching knowledge."[15] "To regard the course of the world as the development of some blind force which works on according to universal laws, devoid of insight and freedom, devoid of interest in good and evil, are we to consider this unjustifiable generalisation of a concept, valid in its own sphere, as the higher truth?"[16]

It is not, however, likely that science will drop a generalisation, however "unjustifiable" in metaphysics, if it works in practice. The question is whether it does work; and that is plainly a question of fact, not a question of metaphysics. We want to know therefore, first, whether things moving in space are the only things with which we are acquainted in common experience; and, next, whether all the changes which take place within the range of scientific observation are or can be explained by the laws of mechanics.

It is clear that, if the mechanical theory of science and of evolution is to be successfully maintained, both these questions must be answered in the affirmative. It is equally clear that, if we confine ourselves to the actual facts, both questions must be answered in the negative.

Thoughts, ideas, conceptions, sensations, feelings, emotions are things of which we have experience at every moment of our waking lives; and none of them are things which occupy space or move in space. A thought is not a thing which can be measured by a foot-rule, as things in space can be; the greatness of an idea is not one which measures so many yards by so many; a conception has no cubic contents; a toothache cannot be put in a pair of scales, nor can any process of chemical analysis be applied to hope or fear. We find ourselves, therefore, in this dilemma: if the mechanical theory is true, and science can deal only with things moving in space, then psychology and sociology are not sciences, and their subject-matter never can be made amenable to scientific treatment. On the other hand, if psychology is a science, then science deals with things which do not move in space.

We submit that psychology is a science, that our sensations, emotions, ideas, etc., can be observed, and can be described scientifically, that is to say, that their uniform sequences and co-existences can be stated with accuracy and formulated as laws. We submit further that our definition of science should be based on facts, and not framed to suit a metaphysical theory. A satisfactory definition of science must include all the sciences. The definition put forward in the interests of the mechanical theory excludes arbitrarily the mental and moral sciences, and implies that their subject-matter is beyond the power of science to deal with. The exclusion and the implication are consequent upon the suggested limitation of science to things moving in space, and are of the essence of the mechanical theory. Both the exclusion and the implication are unnecessary if we adhere to the older conception of science, as it occurs in Mill, which claims for science all phenomena of which the sequences and co-existences can be observed, described, and formulated as laws.

What we have said with regard to science applies also of necessity to Evolution. If Evolution is simply the continual redistribution of matter and motion, if matter and motion are the only things subject to evolution, then consciousness and conscience are not subject to evolution. On the other hand, if they too have had and are having their evolution, then the redistribution of matter and motion does not sum up the process of evolution, and is not a correct statement of the process. If it were an induction drawn from a consideration of all the facts of evolution, it would cover them all. But it does not: it excludes a large class of important facts, because their exclusion is demanded in the interests of a particular metaphysical theory—the mechanical theory. It implies that the operation of evolution is confined to a limited set of facts. If the implication is false, then evolution is a bigger thing than the mere redistribution of matter and motion.

The way in which it is usually attempted to force the mechanical theory to square with the facts, or rather to cut the facts to fit the theory, is to point to the connection between the mind and the brain, and to proclaim the consequent dependence of mind on matter. Now, that there is a connection between mind and brain is certain. What the connection is exactly is as yet uncertain. But the fact that two things co-exist, are connected with one another and vary together, does not prove that the one thing is the other. On the contrary, it postulates that the two things, though related, are different. The mechanical theory either commits the fallacy of mistaking connected things for identical things, or it fails to prove the very thing necessary for its justification, viz. that thoughts, emotions, etc., are things occupying space and moving in space. The chemical and physiological changes which take place in the brain are movements in space. But it does not follow that the corresponding pains or ideas float about in the air or move from one point in space to another.

Further, as a metaphysical theory, this identification of matter with mind is a double-edged weapon: it cuts both ways: if mind is matter, matter is mind; if mind is thinking matter, then matter is latent thought; and thought is consequently exhibited not as being the last product of evolution, but as a factor in it from the beginning. But this identity of mind and matter is a purely metaphysical speculation: it is a conjecture to explain how it is that two phenomena can co-exist in the way in which they are observed to do. Such conjectures science does not require: she does not undertake to explain why things are, but to describe—if possible with mathematical exactness—the order of their sequence or co-existence. This function science can discharge equally well whether the changes of consciousness are or are not supposed to be movements in space. Metaphysicians may argue the point; in the meantime science is describing and formulating the laws of mind and endeavouring to correlate the changes of consciousness with the physical changes of the brain and the nervous system. The mechanical theory neither helps nor hinders science in her work.

But science does throw some difficulties in the way of the mechanical theory; or, rather, the facts of science refuse to fit into the theory. If the stream of consciousness is nothing but a series of physiological and chemical changes, the laws of the one ought to be identical with the laws of the other, and both with the laws of mechanics, on the mechanical theory. But they are not. Those concise descriptions of mental phenomena which constitute the laws of psychology ought to coincide with those other concise descriptions of fact which constitute the laws of chemistry, if the facts described by the two sciences are the same. But the two sets of laws have, to say the least, more differences than resemblances.

This brings us to our second point. Our first point was that if the concise description of evolution, which sums it up as the process by which matter is continually redistributed in space, is to be proved to be true, it must be shown that movements in space are the only events which we know to take place. Our second point is that, unless it can be shown that mechanical laws are the only laws at work in the universe, this description of evolution does not find room for the whole working of the process of evolution.

Whether the only laws in the universe are mechanical laws is primarily a question of fact; and on the facts, as known to us at present, the answer to the question is a decided negative. The laws of psychology and of ethics are neither identical with nor have they been deduced from any physical laws. As a hypothesis designed to explain the way in which the world works, the redistribution of matter and motion neither includes nor accounts for those laws which are of most importance to man.

This appeal to the facts which are actually known is, however, often conceived to be in reality an appeal to our ignorance: mental laws have not as yet been shown to be deducible from physical laws, but they may be. So, too, the fact that no attempt to extend the gravitation formula from astronomy to any other department of science has yet succeeded, is no proof that it never will be so extended. Neither, we may remark, does it constitute any presumption that it will. Are there, then, any other grounds for presuming that mental law may yet be shown to be merely a case of some physical law? To some minds there seem to be grounds for presuming that it not only may, but must. However great our ignorance of the details of the process of evolution, there are certain broad facts which are beyond dispute. It is indisputable that there was a period in the history of the earth when there was no life upon it; that the elements which constitute living matter are themselves lifeless; that consciousness is correlated somehow with those organic compounds, the elements of which are inorganic. These facts together constitute an irresistible presumption that ultimately mind and matter must obey the same laws.

But this is not the desired conclusion. The conclusion desired is that mind must obey matter's laws. The fact that mind and matter obey the same ultimate laws is a different thing, and rather indicates that even the redistribution of matter and motion requires ultimately some other explanation than merely mechanical laws afford. To the religious mind it is quite intelligible that mind and matter should obey the same laws—God's laws.

It may be said, however, that we have not done full justice to the presumption raised by the broad facts of evolution. When there was no life upon the earth, the only laws in operation must have been physical laws, and consequently the laws of life and consciousness must have been produced by the laws of matter.

Now, this argument in effect amounts to a denial of any difference between the mechanical composition and the chemical combination of bodies. Bodies when mechanically compounded continue to follow the same laws as they obey when uncompounded, and their conjoint action can be deduced and foretold from the laws to which they are subject in their separate state: "Whatever would have happened in consequence of each cause taken by itself happens when they are together, and we have only to cast up the results."[17] With chemical combination the case is quite different: the chemical compound exhibits properties and behaves in ways which are quite different from the properties and behaviour of its elements, and could not be foretold from any observation of them. Water, which is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, exhibits no trace of the properties of either. "If this be true of chemical combinations, it is still more true of those far more complex combinations of elements which constitute organised bodies, and in which those extraordinary new uniformities arise, which are called the laws of life. All organised bodies are composed of parts similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substance considered as mere physical agents.... The tongue, for instance, is, like all other parts of the animal frame, composed of gelatine, fibrin, and other products of the chemistry of digestion, but from no knowledge of the properties of those substances could we ever predict that it could taste, unless gelatine or fibrin could themselves taste; for no elementary fact can be in the conclusion which was not in the premises."[18]

What is thus true of physiology and of those chemical combinations on which it is based, is true also of sociology and the psychological facts on which it is based. "When physiological elements are combined, the combination reveals properties which were not appreciable in the separate elements. The increasingly complex combination or association of organic elements may produce an entirely special set of phenomena.... Their combination exhibits something more than the mere sum of their separate properties. Thus, no knowledge of man as an individual would enable us to forecast all the institutions which result from the association of men and which can only manifest themselves in social life."[19]

It is clear, then, that the mechanical theory of evolution can only maintain itself by obliterating the distinction between mechanical juxtaposition and chemical combination. The obstacles which stand in the way of this obliteration, at the outset, are two. First, the behaviour of a chemical compound bears no resemblance to the behaviour of its constituents when separate. Next, the laws of the compound cannot be deduced or exhibited as consequences of the laws of the separate elements. To these two objections it may be replied, first, that though the compound bears no resemblance to its separate constituents, the character of every aggregate must be determined by that of its component parts; and, next, that with more knowledge we shall come to see the way in which the laws of the separate components generate the law of the whole. Perhaps, by way of illustration, we may employ an analogy. A number of bricks can be placed on one another to form a cube; a number of cannon balls will form a pyramidical pile. The aggregate of bricks resembles in shape the separate bricks; the aggregate of balls does not resemble a ball in shape. Yet the pyramidical shape of the pile of cannon balls is as certainly determined by the shape of the separate balls, as the cubical shape of the heap of bricks is determined by that of the separate bricks. Now, we do not know the geometrical structure of chemical atoms; but, on this analogy, it is reasonable to suppose that, if we did, we should see at once that the structure of a chemical compound is dependent on, though different from, that of its elements. So too in sociology, the aggregate, society, is not a human being, but the character of any given society is determined by the character of its individual members.

This last illustration, however, brings us to a fresh difficulty in the way of the mechanical theory. As is observed in the remarks quoted previously from Monsieur Bernard, the peculiar characteristic of those more intimate combinations which form the subject-matter of chemistry, physiology, and sociology is that in them the combining elements reveal properties which were not perceptible in them previous to their combination. It may be true that the character of these more intimate combinations is determined by the properties of their constituents, but it is by the properties which they reveal when in combination, not by those which are manifest in them when uncombined. Therein lies the difference between mechanical compounds and chemical combinations; and it is that difference which the mechanical theory does not account for. The more intimate, chemical, physiological, and sociological combinations take place in virtue of properties which require the combination to reveal them. In sociology it is not the juxtaposition of individual men, but their co-operation, which makes a society. In chemistry, the formation of chemical compounds implies the affinity of the elements.

It seems, then, that the mechanical theory contains half the truth, but not the whole truth. The half-truth which it insists on is that in both mechanical and chemical combinations there is juxtaposition of the constituent elements. The half of the truth which it overlooks is that when the elements are juxtaposed in one way they develop or manifest new qualities, when juxtaposed in the other way they do not. The mechanical theory asserts that the only factors in evolution are matter and the force which moves matter about: it takes into account the external factors, but leaves out the internal force or spontaneity in virtue of which things in a suitable environment develop new qualities. Doubtless the juxtaposition of the elements is a condition without which they would not manifest their new properties: the redistribution of matter and motion is a condition of evolution, but it does not constitute evolution. Rather, it is the continual revelation of these new qualities which constitutes evolution, chemical affinity and all its consequences in chemistry, spontaneous variation and all its consequences in the evolution of organic life.

From this point of view it becomes clear why the laws of a chemical compound neither are nor can be exhibited as consequences of or deductions from the laws of its separate constituents. The properties which the law of the compound describes are not the properties which the separate elements exhibit. The living matter of biology, the active atoms of chemistry, are not products of the lifeless, inert matter of mechanics; but are different and higher revelations of the same power which is manifested in different degrees in all. It is this progressive manifestation, and not the mere drifting about of bits of matter, which constitutes evolution. The redistribution of matter and motion may be a concomitant of evolution, but it is not evolution. "The continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations," which Mr. Herbert Spencer[20] offers as a definition of life, may be a condition of the maintenance of an organism; but life is and means to each one of us, and to the humblest thing that breathes, much more than that. Mr. Spencer's definition of life leaves, for instance, consciousness out, as of no account in life, and would be equally applicable to many automatic, self-adjusting machines. The definition constitutes an admission that life and consciousness cannot be exhibited as a consequence of the redistribution of matter and motion. They appear at a certain (or uncertain) point in the process of redistribution, and they have as concomitants certain further redistributions; but they are neither the consequence of nor are they identical with that redistribution; nor can their laws be reduced to mere cases of the laws of matter and motion.

The doctrine that evolution consists in nothing but movements in space, amounts to the assertion that we know nothing about things and men except that they move. In point of fact, we know a good deal more. We know that men think, and that the movement of thought is not a movement in space. We know that the vibrations of the ether are movements in space and that they are also something more: they are known to us also as sights, sounds, etc. No explanation or concise statement of the process of evolution can be satisfactory, or even scientific, which begins by denying the relevance and even the reality of the most important part of our knowledge. If the "first principles" of evolution are to be scientific, they must be inductions drawn from observation and based on some similarity in the phenomena observed, in which case, and in which case alone, they will apply to both classes of phenomena, mental and material. If any "principle" is true of one class alone, it is shown thereby not to be a "first principle": it is not universally applicable.

This raises the question whether there can be any first principles in this sense, whether mind and matter are, to some extent, subject to the same laws; or whether the resemblances which are sometimes drawn are not merely metaphors more or less expanded. Thus we speak of "weighty" objections; but will anyone maintain that ideas are subject to, or exemplify, the law of gravitation? We speak of ideas as "coherent" or "incoherent"; does anyone suppose that they stick together in the same way and from the same causes as material objects cohere?

Mr. Herbert Spencer has written a chapter[21] under the title "Society is an Organism," in which he points out many resemblances between society and an organism. But Mr. Spencer himself "distinctly asserts"[22] that the resemblances imply nothing more than that in both society and organisms there is "a mutual dependence of parts." That is to say, sociology does not herein "exemplify" some of the laws of biology, but sociology and biology both exemplify certain laws which hold good wherever there is a mutual dependence of parts.

Again, Mr. Spencer says[23] that "evolution is definable as a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter"; and, having shown how and why the homogeneous and the incoherent in the domain of physics tend to become coherent and heterogeneous, he proceeds to show that there is a similar process in the evolution of knowledge, and to say "these mental changes exemplify a law of physical transformations that are wrought by physical forces."[24] Now it doubtless is a fact that with intellectual development there goes a more accurate discrimination of differences at first unnoticed, a readier perception of resemblances at first undetected, a consequent segregation and classification of ideas, and a recognition of heterogeneity where homogeneity was at the first glance supposed to prevail. Doubtless, too, as a result of this process, there is greater coherency in our ideas. But is all this anything more than expanded metaphor? If it is something more, how can these mental changes "exemplify" a law of physics when ideas neither stick physically to each other nor gravitate to one another like the particles of the original, homogeneous, nebular mass? If mental and material phenomena can to some extent obey the same laws, and these laws are scientific inductions, there must be some resemblance between the phenomena.

That resemblance cannot be physical or spatial, because mental phenomena do not occupy space, or possess weight, or exist in three dimensions. As far as one can see, it consists in two points: both classes of phenomena (1) are objects of thought and (2) are displays of force or power. This implies that movements in space are displays of the same force as is manifested in the non-spatial movements of thought. The force which is displayed in consciousness as Will appears in space as motion. Both classes of phenomena, however, are not only displays of force, but also objects of thought. The reality of a phenomenon of either class consists in its being the manifestation of Will to or in consciousness. The reality of the two classes is co-extensive with their similarity, and is the sole foundation for any true inferences or justifiable generalisations about them.

If the law of "the instability of the homogeneous" is a first principle, and is a scientific induction based upon a real similarity between the mental and material phenomena of which it is offered as an explanation, it becomes interesting to inquire how far the similarity extends. In the case of mental evolution the essential feature of the process is that the mind gradually comes to perceive resemblances and to discriminate differences which, though they were present all the time, were not at first appreciable. In other words, the apparently homogeneous was, from the beginning, really heterogeneous. Now this fact, which is true in the sphere of mental evolution, finds its exact parallel in the evolution of the material universe, if the account given above of mechanical compounds and chemical combinations be true. What appears first in the process of evolution, and is exemplified by mechanics, is matter apparently inert. But when the particles of this apparently inert matter enter into chemical combinations with one another they reveal a fresh set of properties, quite different from those exhibited by them previous to their combination; and, when they enter into physiological relations, they display yet further additional properties. This progressive manifestation it is, and not the accompanying "dissipation of motion and integration of matter," which constitutes evolution in the material world, and finds its exact parallel in mental evolution. In both cases we have Will manifested as object of thought; and in both cases we judge most truly of that which is manifested when we judge it by its most complete manifestation. In both cases the apparent homogeneity is not the ultimate fact underlying everything, but is only the first-fruits of that which is yet to come.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] First Principles, § 46.

[9] Mill, Inductive Logic, bk. iii. ch. xii. p. 549.

[10] Ibid.

[11] First Principles, ch. iii. § 46.

[12] Seth, Chambers's Encyclopædia, s.v. "Philosophy."

[13] Kirchoff, Vorlesungen über mathematische Physik, i. p. 1.

[14] Mertz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i. pp. 382, 3, note.

[15] Lotze, Microcosmus, E. T., ii. p. 718.

[16] Lotze, Microcosmus, E. T., ii. p. 718.

[17] Mill, Inductive Logic, bk. iii. ch. vi.

[18] Mill, Inductive Logic, bk. iii. ch. vi.

[19] Claude Bernard, quoted in L'Année Sociologique, première année.

[20] Principles of Biology, v. § 30.

[21] Principles of Sociology, vol. i. part ii.

[22] Ibid., § 260.

[23] First Principles, § 127.

[24] Ibid., § 153.

VII.
NECESSITY

We have seen that if material things can alone be treated of by science, if things which can be seen and handled are alone amenable to the methods of science, then there can be no science of mind, and no scientific laws to regulate mental phenomena. In the same way, if the field of evolution is completely filled by the redistribution of matter and motion, then there is no room left in the theory of evolution in which to accommodate the history of ideas or of morals, there is no evolution of thought or morality, no continuity between higher and lower in the intellectual development of man and the brute.

We may admit that the methods of mental and moral science, of sociology and political economy, are not identical with those employed by physics or chemistry or astronomy. But we cannot admit that the facts which, if not the proper study of mankind, are at any rate of the greatest interest to man, are not subject to or part of the process of evolution, and cannot be reduced to scientific law and order. The methods of the philosophical sciences may not be the same as those of the exact sciences; but neither are the methods of chemistry those of astronomy—just as the instruments of the astronomer are not those of the chemist. The exactness which is attained by those sciences that can apply the methods of mathematics to their subject-matter cannot be rivalled by philology or psychology. But it is not to all the material sciences that the mathematical methods can be applied: meteorology deals with matter in motion, but not yet with exactitude. The intangible and invisible, but none the less real, facts of our mental and moral experience can be measured to some extent by the statistics and averages and curves employed by the sociologist, the demographer, and political economist: the intensity of a desire may be estimated roughly and relatively by the "effective demand" for its object, the will to live by the number of suicides.

Again, we may admit that the laws of the exact or material sciences do not extend to mental science, without thereby forfeiting the right to subject mental phenomena to scientific investigation and analysis. Chemistry does not cease to be a science because chemical affinity cannot be exhibited as a case of the gravitation formula. Need psychology renounce the claim to be a science because the laws of the association of ideas cannot be deduced, say, from the laws of motion?

Of course, if science has no other object than to describe with mathematical accuracy the exact way in which material things move, if no method is scientific which does not result in such a formula, and if no generalisation, however true, is scientific which does not formulate motion in space, then, indeed, it is unscientific to talk of the evolution of mind and thought, of man and of society.

On the other hand, the movements of material things in space are facts of which we are aware, phenomena of which we are aware through our senses; in a word, they are sense-phenomena. We are aware of them as existing simultaneously and in combination, or as succeeding one upon another; and no truth, even of the most mathematical and exact of the sciences, does, or can do, more than express with mathematical exactness the precise conditions under which these sense-phenomena co-exist or follow one another, or the precise conditions without which such co-existence or sequence cannot take place. A mathematical science dealing with material things states only and always that certain sense-phenomena occur invariably and uniformly under certain conditions. The exact sciences move within the limits of the Uniformity of Nature and the law of Universal Causation; and their subject-matter consists of sense-phenomena, i.e. of things which, as known to science, are objects of perception to some mind.

But sense-phenomena are not the only mental phenomena of which we are aware: there are ideas which we do not see or handle, or smell or taste, but of which we are nevertheless distinctly conscious. Thought has its movement, ideas have their co-existence and sequences, the association of ideas has its laws. There is a uniformity of human nature as well as of external nature; there are conditions under which certain actions are always performed, and without which they would never be done. Whether the body of propositions in which these conditions are formulated be accorded or denied the name of science, matters little. But it is difficult to see what are the so great differences between these phenomena and sense-phenomena that make the latter amenable and the former insusceptible to scientific treatment. Is it that ideas are invisible? So is weight, yet the gravitation formula is scientific. Is it that thought is impalpable? So is colour, so is sound—yet there are optics and acoustics.

Be this as it may, what makes things material susceptible to scientific treatment is a quality which is not peculiar to them, but which is shared by them in common with things immaterial: it is that they are objects of which the mind is immediately aware, phenomena present to some consciousness, and that they are phenomena which appear in consciousness as co-existent and successive in certain definite uniform modes which can be detected by thought and formulated in general propositions, or laws.

If the theory of evolution comprehends all things, mind and morals as well as matter and motion; if the law of continuity connects all things together, immaterial as well as material, in a process which moves without break or interruption; it is because all things agree in the fact that they are presented (whether in sense or in idea) to the mind, and because they are presented in the continuity of consciousness.

But the object of the scientific mind is not to observe and record all the phenomena presented to it in the continuity of consciousness. On the contrary, it neglects and rejects many; but always with a purpose, viz. that of ascertaining and describing, as precisely as possible, the conditions under which a given co-existence or sequence occurs (and therefore may be expected to recur) and without which it fails to occur. In other words, science assumes that everything has a cause, and that in accordance with the uniformity of nature what has happened once will happen again in the same circumstances; that a cause will, in the absence of counteracting causes, produce its effect. Without these assumptions science cannot treat of any subject: no department of knowledge can be dealt with scientifically if these assumptions are not admitted with regard to that department. On the other hand, if by the aid of these assumptions we are enabled to reduce any set of phenomena to law and order, our success is of itself sufficient ground for regarding the assumptions as warrantable and justifiable. For science, at any rate, the only question is whether as a matter of fact they do enable us to determine under what conditions given co-existences or sequences will ensue, or what conditions such a co-existence or sequence necessarily implies.

With regard to human activity, mental and physical, it is plain matter of fact that such uniformities of sequence and co-existence not only can be but are demonstrated to prevail; and the extension of the scientific principle of cause and effect to the domain of human will and action is scientifically justified. The comparative sciences which deal with man and his works and words—archæology, anthropology, philology—are perpetually engaged in demonstrating, with fresh proofs every day, the uniformity of human nature: in similar circumstances men have always behaved in similar ways. To satisfy the same needs, they have manufactured similar instruments at similar stages of development: flint arrow-heads from Mexico or Japan resemble those taken from British barrows; the pottery of early Greece is hard to distinguish from that of Peru; the purpose of many stone implements of unknown antiquity has been discovered by a comparison of the use to which similar tools are put by savages still existing. That man's words, as well as his works, exhibit law, order, and uniformity in their growth, as well as in their phonetic decay, is shown by the science of comparative philology. That in the face of the same problems similar analogies have been used to produce similar solutions, is revealed by comparative mythology: the imagination, which might have seemed most free to throw off the trammels of law and of monotonous uniformity, falls in similar circumstances into very similar grooves.

If the will of man is not revealed in the things which he makes, in the words which he speaks, and the thoughts which he thinks, it is difficult to know where to look for its manifestation. If, on the other hand, it is manifested in these ways, then, whether it be free or not, it is clearly uniform in its action; and the extension to it of the law of causation seems fully justified by the results.

The recognition of the universality of the law of causation must not, however, be supposed to carry with it any implication that there are no differences between, say, the organic and inorganic, or that the laws of the one are identical with or deducible from those of the other; the association of ideas may be a scientific and established fact, and yet not obey the same laws as the adhesiveness of material substances. What unites all things into a continuous, coherent, and systematic cosmos, into a scientific whole, is first the fact that, whether phenomena in sense or phenomena in idea, they are all objects of thought; and next the fact that they all exhibit the universality of causation and the uniformity of nature.

Whether this uniformity which binds man and nature into one consistent whole is a uniformity of will or a uniformity of necessity, is quite another question. It is a metaphysical and not a scientific inquiry; and the metaphysical answer, whatever it may be, is one for which science does not and need not pause. So long as nature is granted to be uniform, it matters not to science whether the uniformity is of necessity or is freely willed. In either case the sequences or co-existences described by science will continue, under the circumstances described, to happen as described.

It is, however, commonly assumed that actions which are uniform are, by their very uniformity, proved to be necessitated; and that unless what happens was bound to happen, there can be no uniformity and no science. Hence on the one hand the recognition of the freedom of the will has been denounced as fatal to all scientific conceptions of human nature; while on the other hand the uniformity of human nature and action has been denied as being inconsistent with the freedom of the will. The one side has pointed to one set of facts, which prove irresistibly that men do will the same thing under the same circumstances. The other side has pointed to the equally undeniable fact of our consciousness of freedom.

The essential feature in our consciousness of freedom is our conviction that in the present we can do or abstain from doing a contemplated action, and in the past, though we did the thing, we might have abstained from it or have done something else. Now, whether this possibility that what took place might not have taken place is a real one or only a delusion, matters not to science. If real and true, it is indeed fatal to one particular metaphysical theory, viz. that every event which ever occurred was bound to occur and could not have happened otherwise; but it leaves every truth of science, every one of those concise descriptions of what takes place under given circumstances, absolutely intact. The freedom of the will is anathematised in the name but not in the interests of science.

That becomes clear when we reflect that the laws of science are, and do not pretend to be more than, hypothetical statements. The gravitation formula does not state that bodies do as a matter of fact actually fall at the rate of sixteen feet in the first second, and so on. The statement, if made, would be untrue: a feather floats much more slowly to the ground. Still less does the formula affirm that all bodies move towards each other—and for a very good reason: many bodies are at rest. The formula makes no definite statement as to what actually does occur: it merely states what would or will happen under certain circumstances; and it is doubly or trebly hypothetical. First, it asserts conditionally that if, and only if, bodies are free to move, they will tend to move towards each other at the rate of sixteen feet in the first second, and so on. Next, even if this condition be fulfilled in a particular case, and a given body is free to move, say, towards the earth, the law of gravitation does not assert that the body will absolutely, or unconditionally, or of necessity fall sixteen feet in the first second: it only affirms that the body tends to move at that rate, and the word "tends" conveys in its meaning a second hypothesis. What is meant by saying that a body tends to fall, or tends to move in a straight line, is simply that the body will fall or move in the direction or at the rate mentioned, provided that nothing happens to prevent it. The law of gravitation then, like every other law of science, from the very terms in which it is stated, contains two hypotheses: if bodies are free to move, then they tend to move at a certain rate. Further, like every other law of science, it is based on a third hypothesis, which, as it is assumed by all scientific laws, is not expressly referred to by any. That third hypothesis is that nature is uniform: if a body is free to move it will, in the future as in the past, tend to move at a certain rate, provided that nature is uniform.

Now, throughout all this, it is obvious that science knows nothing about "necessity." Indeed, it is obvious that science, by the trebly hypothetical form of all its laws, has taken particular pains to avoid prejudging the question whether what happens was bound to happen. As we have already said, science takes care to frame its statements in such a way that they are quite independent of metaphysical theory, and will remain as true within their limits if the theory of necessity prove erroneous as they will if it turns out to be correct.

Nor can it be said, thus far, that the laws of science lead us to the theory of necessity as their logical conclusion. It may be true that if I walk over a precipice I shall fall to the bottom, in accordance with the law of gravitation. But it does not logically follow that therefore I must walk over. It may be true that a suspension bridge will fall in the same way, if the supports be removed; but it does not follow that they are therefore bound to give way. It may be true that if nature is uniform certain sequences will happen; but it does not therefore follow that nature must be uniform. In other words, the theory of necessity, if true, cannot be based on science, but must rely on some metaphysical considerations. Science does not undertake to prove even that nature is uniform, much less that it is uniform of necessity. The opposite theory, that the uniformity of nature or of human nature is due to the action of a will freely manifesting itself as uniform, may be considered superfluous from the scientific point of view. But the theory of necessity from the same point of view is equally superfluous. As long as events do happen uniformly, science has all she wants—whether their uniformity is of will or of necessity is for her quite a superfluous question. And if science were all that man wanted, these rival metaphysical theories would be of no interest to him either. But the persistency of the attempt to extract some support for the metaphysical theory of necessity out of the facts of science shows that men of science, being men, must have their metaphysics.

Are there, then, other facts of science, or assumptions essential to science, which require the metaphysical theory of necessity as their presupposition or entail it as their natural consequence? Probably the reply will be that there is one such principle: that of the Universality of the Law of Causation. The assumption that everything must have a cause may be on the part of science a pure assumption, and one which, like the Uniformity of Nature, cannot be proved by science; but it does, it may be said, assume the existence of a necessity in things.

It does, it may be replied, but whether the necessity which science assumes is the same as that maintained by the metaphysical theory in question, may be doubted. The metaphysical theory is that everything which happens happens of necessity, and could not have happened otherwise than it did. The assumptions which science makes with regard to causation are that nothing can happen unless the conditions requisite to its production are fulfilled, and that when those conditions are present the result necessarily follows. The question is whether this scientific necessity is the same as that metaphysical necessity; or, if they are not the same, whether either is a logical consequence from the other.

They are not the same: the scientific assumption is hypothetical, the metaphysical absolute. The former says that things will happen in one way, if certain conditions are fulfilled, in another if they are not; the latter that they absolutely must happen in this way, and not in that; and that it is an illusion to imagine that they can happen either this way or that. Science allows us the alternative; the metaphysical theory declares that the alternative is an impossibility or an illusion. The metaphysical theory may be right, but it is not the same thing as the scientific assumption. Neither can it be exhibited as a logical presupposition of or consequence from the scientific assumption. From a hypothetical "if" you cannot logically get an absolute "must." It may be a scientific truth that, if an electric spark is passed through two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, a drop of water will be formed. But it does not follow that therefore an electric spark must be passed through them.

It is obvious that the difference between science and metaphysics in the matter of necessity is that, whereas science cautiously says, "If certain conditions are fulfilled, certain results will ensue," metaphysics boldly says, "The conditions on which the whole future depends are already absolutely fixed." Once more, this metaphysical theory may be true; but, if so, it is not from science that it derives its truth. The transition from the "if" of science to the "must" of metaphysics is illogical, though not unnatural, and is facilitated by a certain amount of obscurity, which can be thrown over it by drawing illustrations from the past. Thus, if an event has already taken place, we may infer with certainty from the fact of its occurrence that the conditions necessary to produce it were realised. And as each of those conditions must have had a cause, we can infer again that the conditions requisite to produce them were fulfilled. And so we may travel back ad infinitum along a never-ending chain of cause and effect, always moving from one fixed and necessitated event to another event equally necessitated and fixed. Thus the whole past history of the universe may be exhibited as a necessary sequence of events; and the inference may be drawn, and for the purposes of the theory of metaphysical necessity must be drawn, that because the occurrence of an event proves that the conditions required for its production were realised, therefore they and they alone were bound to be realised. Yet this is simply our old familiar non sequitur thrown into the past tense. It is true that if I walk over a precipice I shall fall, according to the law of gravitation. But I am not therefore bound to walk over. It is true that the man who fell over the cliff obeyed the law of gravity. But we cannot infer either from the law of gravitation or from the fact of his falling that he was bound to fall. We can infer that the conditions requisite to produce the fall were present, but we cannot infer from the fall that they were bound to be present. It may be quite true that they were bound to be present, but the effect which followed on them cannot be alleged either as the cause or the proof of such necessity. We must look for the reason of the necessity—if there be any necessity in the case—elsewhere. Shall we, then, say that the conditions of the fall were themselves effects of prior causes, without which they would not have happened? That again is true, but the fact that Z would not have happened had not Y preceded, is not in itself any proof that Y was bound to happen. And so we may travel back ad infinitum along the never-ending chain of cause and effect without ever finding ourselves in a position to infer from the law that everything must have a cause, that this cause was bound to operate rather than that. The occurrence of Z is no proof that Y was bound to happen, nor is the fact that Y really happened any proof that its cause X was bound to occur—and so we may work back to the beginning of the alphabet. The fact that B took place shows that A actually occurred, but not that A, rather than A₁ or A₂, was bound to occur. And if A is the beginning, what was the nature of the necessity (prior to the beginning of things) which determined in favour of A rather than A₁ or A₂?

We may indeed say, if we like—since no one can prevent us from saying things without proof or probability—that the mere fact that A happened shows that it was bound to happen. But then we might just as well have said it of Z, and saved ourselves the trouble of going through so much alphabet to get so little result. We might just as well say that as the explosion or the accident did happen as a matter of fact, it could not possibly have been prevented: Z was bound to happen under the circumstances, therefore the circumstances could not have been altered; only one result was possible under the conditions, therefore no other conditions were possible.

Or—to go back to the beginning of the alphabet once more—we may say with science that we are content with the fact that A did happen, or, since science does not profess to take us back to an absolute beginning (force and matter being eternal and without beginning), let us say we may, like science, be content with the fact that K can be shown to have happened; but whether K, rather than K₁ or K₂, was bound to occur there is nothing in science to show. If we take up this, the scientific, attitude, two consequences follow. First, there is nothing in science to require or countenance the metaphysical theory of necessity. Next, what is true of K is equally true of L or M or Z. The fact that L or M or Z occurred proves that the conditions did combine in the way necessary to produce L or M or Z, not that they were bound to combine in that way and could not have combined so as to produce L₁ or L₂, or Z₁ or Z₂ or Z₃.

Perhaps it may be said that the following is the proper way of stating the case: We have reason for believing that, as a matter of scientific necessity, if L is at work it can only produce M, and not M₁ or M₂ (the application of a light to a barrel of gunpowder can have only one result). But L was at work, therefore M alone could result. Quite true, but that does not show that the light was bound to be applied, or that the powder might not have been damp. In fine, the moment the conditions requisite for the explosion are combined, the explosion is necessary, M is the only possible result; but until then the explosion is not necessary, and the result may be M₁, or M₂, or M₃. A cause (i.e. the conditions combined) can only have one effect; but until it has that effect it is not the cause, and may never be. Pre-existent causes, which must inevitably produce predetermined effects, are figments of the metaphysical imagination. Conditions which may, and, subject to the trebly hypothetical laws of science, will combine in certain ways are scientific facts.

In fine, the Uniformity of Nature, in the sense in which Nature is assumed, both by science and by common sense, to be uniform, simply amounts to the assumption that under the same conditions the same consequences will ensue. But this uniformity neither requires nor entails necessity. The very form chosen by science for the expression of scientific laws proclaims the fact: "If bodies are free to move," "if counteracting causes be absent," "a body tends to move in the same straight line." Whatever necessity is introduced into the truths of science thus expressed is obviously imported from without, and is no part of science. We may, if we choose, read necessity into science, but there is no warrant in science for doing so. Science is absolutely without prejudice on this point. If everything that happens happens of necessity, the gravitation formula will receive no accession to its truth. If there be no necessity in the case, each and every truth of science remains valid as long as the same consequences do ensue in the same circumstances.

Since, then, science observes an armed neutrality in this dispute, and is concerned only to guard that assumption of the uniformity of nature which is vital to her existence, we must turn elsewhere for a decision of the question.

We began this chapter with an expression of our full adhesion to the view which insists upon the uniformity, not merely of nature, but also of human nature. We rejected the idea that there is no science of man, and has been no evolution of mind, as a patent absurdity, and a violent contradiction of admitted facts. Any theory of evolution and any definition of science which fails to comprehend human nature is thereby condemned as inadequate and inaccurate. For those, then, who with us accept the continuity and uniformity between nature and man there will be no difficulty in arguing from the one to the other: which of the two we shall start from will depend mainly upon circumstances, upon which is the more accessible in any particular inquiry, and which is likely to afford the best "take-off." In the present case the action of inanimate objects upon one another can be accounted for on either hypothesis, i.e. that such action is willed by some superior power or that it is necessitated by some previous action, which is necessitated by some other previous action, and so on for ever, without ever reaching any original or originating necessity. Both hypotheses will fit all the facts of all the physical sciences; both are hypotheses; and science can do and does do without either one or the other. Nor does our observation of the observed facts of nature enable us to say, with regard to any actual fact of this kind, either that it could or that it could not have happened otherwise than it did. In fine, as long as we confine ourselves to the subject-matter of the physical sciences, as long as we start in this case from nature, we cannot find anything to disturb the equal balance of the two hypotheses, which are two hypotheses and nothing more. But when we turn from nature to human nature, when we consult our own experience of our own actions, the case is notoriously different. Our experience in that case is that of two or more suggested and possible actions we are free to choose whichever we will; and our memory of past acts of choice testifies that though we actually chose one particular course, we might have abstained from it in favour of some other alternative. Here, too, as in the case of purely physical causation, the fact that a thing happened is proof conclusive that, in accordance with the law of universal causation, the conditions necessary to its occurrence were fulfilled; but it constitutes no proof or probability that the conditions were bound to be fulfilled. The fact that we chose to act in a certain way does not in the least convince us that we were bound to choose that action and that action alone. On the contrary, our memory is clear and our conviction is certain that our choice was free. In the physical and the spiritual spheres alike it is true that, when all the conditions requisite for a given effect are combined, the result must ensue. And in both spheres it is equally true that until the conditions are effectively combined no such necessity exists. In the case of our own actions we are directly and immediately conscious of the fact that it is our own will which effects this combination. For us, therefore, who hold, with Professor Huxley, that the uniformity and continuity of nature with human nature is essential to any rational and scientific view of the universe and to every comprehensive theory of evolution, it is natural to interpret physical by spiritual causation. We know from direct and personal experience of certain cases of causation that, though a particular effect necessarily ensued from a certain combination of conditions, the conditions might have been combined differently and with a different result. There is, therefore, nothing unreasonable in the inference that with regard to the events in nature the conditions which produced them might have combined differently and with different results; and that the determining factor was a will (not our own) conscious of its own freedom.

Thus far, then, the case stands thus, that in the observed facts of nature there is nothing to incline the balance in favour either of Necessity or Free-will; and that if those facts constituted the whole of our experience we should have no reason to believe the one rather than the other. But when we turn to the consideration of events of which we are the cause, we know that our contribution to the sum of conditions on which the event depends is a free-will offering which we make or decline to make as we like. That consideration would not in itself be sufficient to warrant us in inferring a similar absence of necessity in the combination of the conditions which produce natural events. If, for instance, we had reason to believe or evidence to show an absolute chasm between nature and human nature, an impossibility of their being subject to any common laws or conceptions; or if, like primitive man or the savage, we had not the accumulated observations of science to demonstrate the truth of evolution and the law of continuity—then we should have no reason or little reason, as the case might be, for interpreting nature's action and human action by one another.

The savage, as is well known, does, without any scientific authority whatever, assume straight off an entire uniformity of nature with human nature. He jumps at conclusions: he takes it for granted that everything which moves has a will of its own, like himself. But though the savage shares with the savant the impulse to believe in an essential continuity binding together man and nature, that impulse is about all they have in common. In the savage it expresses itself in an absolute identification, entirely ignoring all differences, between the two: the tree or the river has to be a conscious, rational creature, though its behaviour bears more difference from than resemblance to that of a human being. In the savant, the same impulse is trained to fertility by being constantly subjected to the guidance of observed facts: man as an animal organism is subject to the same physiological laws as other similar organisms; as an organic compound, to the same chemical changes; as a body possessing inertia, to the same physical laws. The savant's belief, however, in the continuity of nature and human nature is consistent with or rather implies points of difference between the two; e.g. man possesses a consciousness which the river does not, man is, the river is not, a conscious cause. Great though these differences be, still they are not in the eyes of science and from the point of view of evolution great enough to constitute a breach of continuity, for human actions are with the growth of science increasingly seen to be part of the uniformity of nature: the human cause only produces its effect provided that all the requisite conditions are forthcoming. Indeed, there is a danger, in some tendencies of modern thought, of ignoring the differences and of confounding continuity with identity. The distinction between the animate and the inanimate, which was hardly reached by the savage, is in danger of being overlooked by the modern materialist—an error which would be paralleled in religion by a relapse from monotheism into nature-worship. And as in the pathology of religion there is a constant tendency to substitute for religious faith a trust in the automatic efficacy of rites and ceremonies, which is a falling away into mere magic, so in metaphysic there is a tendency, in the name of science falsely invoked, to substitute for the actions of agents consciously free the operation of an automatic and magical necessity. Freedom of the will is constantly taken, or rather mistaken, both by its supporters and opponents, to mean the power of acting without a motive, and to imply that from identically the same combination of conditions one result can ensue at one time and quite a different one at another; and freedom of the will in this sense, and with this implication, is rightly rejected as inconsistent with the uniformity of nature. Freedom, however, means not the absence of motive, but the presence of more motives than one, for where there is no alternative there is no freedom, and where there is an alternative there is a choice between two things. The fact that conscious action is always action with a motive has nothing in it repugnant to the uniformity of nature, unless uniformity of nature is arbitrarily assumed to be identical with necessity. Nor has the uniformity of nature, i.e. the fact that the same action issues from the same combination of conditions, anything in it inconsistent with the freedom of the will, unless the occurrence of an event proves that it was bound to occur. The laws of science—whether physical science or mental and moral science—are hypothetical statements: if the love of gain predominates in men, then all the consequences predicted by the science of Political Economy will ensue. But this proves neither that the love of gain must nor even that it does prevail. The uniformity which marks the actions of men as often as this motive prevails is sufficient for the purposes of science, and is consistent with the freedom of the will; it does not imply that men act without a motive, nor that the same conditions produce now one effect and now another. Until the conditions which are necessary for the production of a physical event are effectively combined, physical science knows no necessity to make them combine in that particular way; if they combine in some other way, and with some other result, that combination will equally illustrate the truth of science (which says, if A then B, if A₁ then B₁), and the result will equally accord with the uniformity of nature. The same considerations apply to human nature, and if applied will be found consistent with the freedom of the will. Until the mind is made up, i.e. so long as there are alternative courses open to it, the man is free, just in the same way as in physical science, until the combination of conditions is effected, the result may or may not follow. If one alternative is adopted one set of consequences will ensue, if another, another; but whichever is adopted the results will be in accordance with the uniformity of nature, the law of cause and effect will not have been violated, the mind will not have acted without a motive, or under the influence of necessity. In fine, the universality of the law of causation lies in the fact that, however the conditions combine, each combination can only produce its peculiar effect; and whatever effect occurs can be the result only of its appropriate conditions. To say with the necessitarian that, unless at the beginning of things the course of events was unalterably fixed once and for ever, there can be no science, is to deny the universality of the laws of science, to maintain that they are true only of one particular succession of events, and would not be true of any other. In point of fact, however, the laws of science, by their hypothetical form, are adapted to cope with what is at least as striking as the uniformity of nature, that is, the diversity of nature: they apply not merely to one, but to all possible combinations of circumstances. In what way a body will move depends upon the conditions at work; but Science is not such a maimed and crippled thing that she refuses to consider its motion until she has been assured that, of the various conceivable conditions that might be brought to bear on the body, only one can, as a matter of fact, be brought to bear. On the contrary, the universality of her laws lies in the fact that they apply to all possible combinations, not merely to combination A producing B, but to A₁ producing B₁, A₂ producing B₂, and so on. The origin of all terrestrial life may be traced back, let us say, to the fortuitous combination of chemicals which constituted the first speck of protoplasm; and sundry important consequences can be shown by science to have flowed from that fortuitous concurrence. The origin of any particular species may be traced back to the accidental appearance of a sport or variety which happened to be better adapted to the environment than the parent forms were.

But, if these accidental and fortuitous occurrences had not taken place, the subsequent course of things upon earth, though there might have been no life, would still have been just as much in accordance with the uniformity (and the diversity) of nature, and equally amenable to scientific explanation. The theory that the first speck of protoplasm or the ancestral variety of a species was bound by a metaphysical necessity to occur just when and where it did, is of no use to science: if A had not happened, A₁ or A₂ or A₃ would have done, and the resulting B or B₁ or B₂ or B₃ would have been equally in accordance with the uniformity of nature and equally explicable by science.

If, then, in the physical world neither science nor the uniformity of nature requires us to believe in necessity, there is no antecedent presumption that necessity must be the law of the spiritual world: we may examine the facts of our own inner experience without prejudice. What the freedom of the will implies is that the mind has present to it more alternatives or motives than one, and that they are real alternatives and real motives, i.e. motives which may really in this particular case influence action, alternatives any one of which may be adopted in this case. The circumstances or conditions in which a man makes up his mind are, until he has made up his mind, so to speak, held in solution, and may be precipitated this way or that at his choice, or not precipitated at all, unless he chooses. The fact that in the same circumstances the same result ensues is no argument against the freedom of the will, if it be remembered that the will is itself one of the circumstances which contribute to the result, just as the mass of a body, as well as the force applied to it, helps to determine its velocity. The statement of the case then becomes this: if all the circumstances of the case be the same, and the will be the same, the consequences (i.e. the determination of the will) also will be the same. But the necessitarian position requires the statement that if all the circumstances be the same, then without any further proviso the will is determined by the circumstances; or, to put it another way, that the will does not in any way contribute to the result, which is just as though we were to say that the mass of a body had nothing to do with its velocity. But if the will does contribute to the result, i.e. to the determination of itself, it is in part self-determining.

That there must be some circumstances present, if there is to be any self-determination on the part of the will, we have already admitted; the freedom of the will implies the presence of more alternatives or motives than one—and we always have the alternative of acting or abstaining from action. But this admission only limits the powers of the will; it does not lessen its liberty. The mind can only choose between the alternatives offered to it; but as long as it has real alternatives it is free. That there must be definite circumstances if there is to be any definite determination of the will is in accordance with the fact that a cause is not some one individual thing, but a sum of conditions, every one of which is necessary to the effect, and the absence of any one of which is enough to prevent the occurrence of the result. It is a vulgar error to single out some one of the conditions (e.g. the force acting on a body) and dub it the cause, to the neglect of all the other conditions (e.g. the body's mass) which are equally necessary to the effect. It is the error committed by the necessitarian who calls the circumstances the cause, in the case of a determination of the will, and neglects the part played by the will itself.

This point of view illustrates the untenability of another objection to the freedom of the will, viz. that it implies that under the same conditions different results can ensue, or, to put it in other words, that without any change in the conditions either this or that consequence may issue. Freedom of the will is thus alleged to be inconsistent with the uniformity of nature, with the law that a cause must produce its effect. The fallacy here obviously lies in assuming that, in a modification of the will, the circumstances by themselves constitute the cause, whereas in point of fact the cause consists of the sum of the conditions, i.e., in this case, of the circumstances and the will taken in combination. Alter any one of the conditions, and the effect will be changed—whether the condition which is changed be one of the circumstances or be the will, matters not. Conversely, if under the same circumstances a man acts one way one time and another another, the inference is not that the uniformity of nature has been violated, and that the same conditions produce different effects, but that one of the conditions was different; and as ex hypothesi the circumstances (i.e. all the conditions except the will) were in this case the same, it remains that the condition which was different in this case was the will.

Really, it is the theory of necessity which violates the uniformity of nature, for it requires us to believe that provided certain of the conditions (viz. all the circumstances except the will) are the same, then the result must be the same, no matter how much the remaining condition (the will) changes. We may, indeed, evade this conclusion by simply denying that the will is one of the conditions of its own modifications, and we may say that the wax contributes nothing to the form which it takes on when impressed by the seal. The truth is that if the will or the wax appears in the result, it must have been present and active as one of the conditions: it contributes to its own determination, and is in part self-determining.

If it be in accordance with the uniformity of nature and with our experience of what actually happens, that the circumstances should be the same and the will different on two different occasions, then the theory of necessity breaks down: if we can will and act differently under the same circumstances, we have all the freedom we want. But if—all the circumstances, save the will, being the same—the resulting modification or determination of the will is different, then the difference of result must be due to some difference in the conditions; all the conditions save one were ex hypothesi the same; the remaining condition, therefore, viz. the will, must have changed. What caused the change? Not the circumstances: one attempt to explode a barrel of gunpowder may resemble another in all the circumstances save one (the dampness of the powder), but the circumstances which remain the same (application of the spark, etc.) are not the cause of the difference in the remaining condition.

If, then, we do as a matter of fact at times under the same circumstances will different things, and if the circumstances are not the cause of the change of will, then the will changes itself, i.e. is self-determining, self-modifying. And, as we all know from experience, it determines itself at the moment of choice, not before. Until all the conditions requisite for the effect are combined, neither physical nor mental science requires us to assume that they must combine in this particular way—that the light must be applied to the powder because an explosion will take place if it is applied, that the motive of gain must be adopted because it will be gratified if it is obeyed.

Whether the conditions combine so as to produce A, or so as to produce B, the uniformity of nature is equally obeyed in either case, the law that a cause must produce its effect is equally fulfilled, and either sequence is as amenable to scientific explanation as the other. But though science and the uniformity of nature both require us to believe that when the conditions are combined the result will follow, neither requires us to assume that the combination is fixed before it is effected. And this is true equally of purely physical events and of human actions. This truth, in the case of the latter class of actions, is expressed by the statement that alternative courses of action are open to the agent, and that they are real alternatives, alternatives such that any one of them may in this particular instance be followed. From the point of view of science and of the uniformity of nature, we do not conceive that there is any difference in this respect between human actions and physical events: if science is to include both kinds of sequence and to render a rational account of them, we must assume that the principles on which conditions combine or fail to combine are the same in both cases. If physical events and human actions are both constituents in the process of evolution, there must be a continuity between them. It follows, therefore, that, in the case of physical events as well as of human actions, until the conditions are combined in such a way as to involve one determinate result to the exclusion of all others, they might combine in other ways with other results—in fine, that before the combination is effected there are always other alternatives.

At this point it becomes necessary to take into account the diversity as well as the uniformity of nature—in this case a diversity which will lead us to a higher uniformity. To the human agent alternative courses of action are open in the sense that he is conscious of their possibility and that after deliberation he adopts one or other of them. With purely physical phenomena and material things the case is different: they may be combined in this way or in that; the alternative is indeed open, so long as the combination is not effected, but it is not open to them nor is it adopted, when adopted, by them. It is adopted for them. In some cases by man. In all cases by that by which alone alternative courses of action can be contemplated and adopted—a conscious will. The course and form which man imparts to material things—to his implements or his works of art—make them so far the expression of his will; for the rest they are equally an expression of will, though of a will not his.

For those at the present day who unfeignedly accept the general principles of evolution and philosophise from them, a dualistic philosophy is impossible. They cannot hold that matter is subject to evolution and that mind is not; and the continuity of the process of evolution forbids us to suppose that there is any real discontinuity between that which appears at one stage as matter and at another as mind. There is no discontinuity if material things (i.e. the things of which we have sense-perception, but which differ from our sensations in being permanent) are on the one side the permanent expressions of Will and on the other are the transient impressions made on us in the shape of sense-phenomena.

What is true thus of the content of evolution, of that which is in process of evolution, is true also of the law of the process. We cannot suppose that it extends only to matter—that the behaviour of matter is susceptible of a rational explanation and the behaviour of mind is not. The continuity of the process excludes the possibility of a dual control: either the power which manifests itself in all things is intelligent throughout or it is not. If there is no reason in the behaviour of things, but only necessity, then those human actions and conceptions which man considers to be the result of his reason are really the result of unintelligent necessity.

It is the latter hypothesis which is expressed by the necessitarian theory. The ordinary belief of mankind—a belief which it is impossible to resist at the moment when you are making up your mind whether you will do this or not—is that you can do the thing or not, that the alternatives are real and the motives such that either of them may be acted on. The necessitarian hypothesis is that the alternatives are not real, that even before you have made up your mind there is only one alternative which you can follow—the other courses are only apparent alternatives, because you cannot choose or act on any of them; the other motives are not real motives, because by a necessity dating from the beginning of things they cannot possibly influence you on this occasion. Your action is as automatic as that of a piano which responds to the touch. The difference is that you think about the stimulus received and the piano does not. Consequently the piano makes no mistakes; you make two. You think of various possible consequences of the stimulus—which are all impossible—and you imagine that the one which you choose is the consequence of your intelligent choice, whereas it is the automatic outcome of that iron law of necessity which binds together the whole process of evolution.

It will be readily understood that a hypothesis of this kind, which is apparently in violent conflict with the plainest facts of our daily personal experience, and gives the lie to that consciousness of freedom which we all possess, would not be held in theory—it cannot be acted on in practice—unless it appeared to be the consequence of some well-established facts. It is, of course, held by its supporters to be a logical consequence from the uniformity of nature and the law of universal causation, and to be a necessary pre-supposition if we are to give any scientific account of human nature and its evolution. If, as we have argued at length in this chapter, that is not the case, if the law of universal causation only requires that a thing cannot take place unless the requisite conditions combine—and not that conditions, which did or may combine, were or are bound to combine—the question still remains, what if any value the hypothesis has on its own intrinsic merits.

In the first place it is a hypothesis which can never either be proved or disproved. The hypothesis is that our supposed consciousness of freedom is an illusion, that if we imagine we are free to choose what we will do, or that we could in the past have chosen otherwise than we did, we are deceived. The hypothesis is not based on any facts of consciousness: it is a suggestion that consciousness may be deceptive. It may: there is no means of proving or disproving the suggestion, for any reply must proceed from one consciousness to another, both of which are suspected by the maker of the suggestion to be not wholly trustworthy. We cannot ask him to concede to us, in order that we may convince him by argument, the very point which is in dispute.

In the next place, the hypothesis of necessity does formally account for all the facts which it is designed to explain: it accounts for the whole process of evolution. If everything that happens does so because it must, then the mere occurrence of any step in the process carries its own explanation with it: the mere fact that it occurred shows that it was bound to occur. If we ask, "Why was it bound to occur?" the answer is, "Because it was." Various intermediate reasons may be interpolated—because everything must have a cause, and every cause must have its effect—but if we ask, "Why must everything have a cause? why must every cause produce its effect?" the ultimate answer is always, "It must because it must." If we ask, "What proof is there that it must?" there is none. As we have already said, the hypothesis is one which does not admit either of proof or disproof.

The case is much the same with the opposite theory of freedom. Formally, the hypothesis that the whole process of evolution is throughout the expression of self-determining will is adequate to account for all the facts. But it is a hypothesis which can be neither proved nor disproved if the testimony of consciousness to our freedom may not be accepted. We cannot prove that the testimony of consciousness is true or to be trusted in this or any other matter. We take it on faith. The questions arise, therefore, Is it reasonable to take anything on faith? and if so, what? and why?

VIII.
INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE

The theory of Design is singularly tenacious of existence, as many errors and all truths are. Science still speaks of "organs," that is of "tools" (ὄργανα), and of organs as performing "functions"; for the fact remains that organs are the instruments by means of which the organism acts, and that they have each their appropriate work to do, their function to perform, though science may decline to draw the inference that the instruments were designed to perform the work they do.

The Argument from Design was a comparatively simple affair as long as the organism and the environment were assumed to have been separately created: you had only to show how marvellously and perfectly they fitted one another when brought together, and it followed that they must have been designed to fit—to say they only chanced to fit was obviously absurd. But when science discovered that organism and environment were not thus independent of one another, the marvel vanished: if the environment shaped the organism, or the organism modified the environment to suit itself, no wonder that they fitted one another. It ceases to be remarkable that rivers should always flow by great cities, when we reflect that men selected sites near rivers. And chance seemed to have been established by Evolution where Design once reigned; for, if the only forms of life which can flourish in a given spot are those which are suited to the place, all we can say is that, if one form is fit to survive, it will; and if it is not, some other will. Whatever form survives will do so, not because it was designed to do so, but because it happened to be suited to its surroundings. In fine, organisms and their organs are what they are because circumstances and their past history have made them so: they have been evolved, not designed.

A little reflection, however, is enough to show that the Argument from Design is not completely excluded by evolution: things in general are what circumstances and their past history have made them; but were not those very circumstances designed to evolve what they did? Nay, are we not compelled to assume that they were so designed, if we believe in a Designer?

If, however, we ask Natural Science to discuss these questions with us, she declines the invitation on the ground that it is not her business to do so: her business is to find out in what way, not with what purpose, animal life has come to assume the various forms in which we know it; and she can do this, her business, quite well—indeed better—without discussing such questions. If it were proved that the history of animal life upon this earth had been intended from the beginning to follow the lines on which it has actually developed, not one of the problems which Natural Science has yet to solve would be brought a whit nearer solution; nor would she be any the better off, if it were proved that there was no design. She therefore very properly declines to discuss the question: there may be a Design and a Designer, or there may not; she does not know; if it is the business of science to answer the question, it must be of some other science, not of Natural Science.

So too Physical Science, when asked whether the laws of motion and matter were not designed to produce the effects which they actually do cause, replies that they may or may not, but that the law of gravitation, for instance, is equally true for her purposes, whether bodies were or were not designed to fall to the earth at the rate of sixteen feet in the first second, and so on. It may be the business of some other science to answer such questions: it is not the business of Physical Science.

And so the inquirer may go the round of the whole family of Sciences. It is an extraordinarily industrious family. It has an enormous amount of work to do: it has to feed, clothe, and generally provide for all mankind. And it can only carry on at all by a very careful division of labour: each science has her allotted task, and can only get the day's work done in the day by strictly confining herself to that task. Each science has her own questions to answer, and can only succeed in doing so by refusing to listen to any others.

The inquirer may think it strange that, in all this vast and active organisation for answering questions, no provision should be made for answering what seem to him to be some of the most important questions of all; and if he has been brought up really to believe in science, he will think it too strange to be true; he will persist with his questions, and will be eventually rewarded for his faith by discovering that there is a science which undertakes to answer them—Theology. But he will also discover that Theology is not very cordially esteemed by her sister sciences—not that they are jealous of her because she has the presumption to profess to answer questions which they acknowledge to be too high for them, but because there are grave suspicions as to her legitimacy: it is doubted whether she is a Science at all. She is, they are afraid it must be admitted, untruthful, immoral, and certainly altogether unscientific: she says what she cannot prove, and says she believes it. But they know she only pretends to believe it: they, of course, do not believe anything on insufficient evidence; what hypocrisy, then, to pretend that anyone can really believe anything except what is proved by scientific methods! They are thankful to say that they have no "faith." However, she may improve; she is certainly very backward; still, she may grow up into a common-sense science like her sisters; and then she will give up the foolish idea that she can answer questions which they cannot.

And now what truth is there in the picture thus drawn?

If there be a God, there is no other fact in the world of such awful or such blessed import to man. Religion is based on faith that there is a God. To tell the religious mind that there is no scientific proof of the existence of God is to tell it nothing new. Those were not the terms on which we took up our faith—that we should have scientific proof of everything before we did anything. On the contrary, religion begins when, and only when, a man begins "to walk humbly with his God," to know that he knows nothing except that his soul cleaves to God and humbly trusts in Him. We do not bargain so much belief, and no more, for so much proof: we give "ourselves, our souls and bodies." The gift is free. The soul shrinks from saying even that it has proof of God's existence; it only knows it hopes and longs for Him. "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for," and the strength of our assurance is as the strength of our hope. But scientific proof is not the thing hoped for: it is not what is desired when the soul is conscious of but one thing, that it thirsteth, like the hart after the water-brooks, for the living God. The humble confession of our illimitable ignorance is the foundation of our faith and will ever be its sure refuge, its inexpugnable stronghold. It is only when, being ignorant, we are tempted to deny our ignorance, that trouble begins. We drop the substance for the shadow when we believe not in God, but in some proof of God.

To the man of science all this talk about faith appears mere folly, sheer unreason, a morbid wallowing in ignorance from pure love of ignorance; and there are others who, whilst admitting that proof is not what is wanted by some minds, yet are aware, from their own sad experience, that other minds yearn for it, and can know no peace without it. And if we ask what kind of proof it is that they require, the answer is plain: it is the same kind as science insists on. Then let us go to the man of science and wait at his door: he at any rate is not ignorant, and we, if ignorant, at least are willing to learn. That he should rather look down upon us is only what might be expected in a man who by sheer force of reason has discovered the sole source of truth and built up the whole fabric of science. Certainly, when he has taken us over his palace and shown us its marvels—the balances he uses to weigh the sun, the plates with which he photographs invisible stars, the cinematographic pictures of the earth's past history, his forecasts of the future of the solar system—we are not merely willing but eager to learn how it is all done. And when we come to know him, we find that in spite of the marvels, all of his own making, by which he is surrounded, he is not puffed up, as he might have been: indeed he is, he assures us, only an ordinary man. "Scientific investigation is not, as many people seem to suppose, some kind of modern black art."[25] It is simply plain, ordinary common sense, consistently applied; and, above all, persistently declining to accept anything without sufficient evidence. In ordinary life, says the man of science, we do not swallow any statement that anybody chooses to make—we ask for some evidence; and if science waxes every day, and religion wanes, it is merely because science has made it the rule of her being never to believe anything without sufficient evidence, and religion has not.

Naturally, then, we wish to know what is "sufficient evidence" in the eyes of science, since everything, we are told, depends on that. The reply is brief: whatever is based on the Uniformity of Nature has sufficient evidence. If we are inclined to be puzzled by the "Uniformity of Nature," we are soon reassured; it is literally the most ordinary thing in the world, there is no difficulty about it. Man is born into a world in which changes are unceasingly taking place. Some things change even as the clouds shift—every second, and in a way patent to all beholders. Others change imperceptibly and with great slowness, as e.g. the level of the dry land or the shape of the coast-line. But all things change, πάντα ῥεῖ. Nothing abideth long in one stay. It is these changes which bring all things good to man, and also all things ill. If, then, man is to survive, he must learn to evade the latter changes, which threaten to crush him, and he must be there in time to profit by the former. Such was the problem presented to primitive man, and such it still is for every one of us to-day: the successful man is the one who is beforehand with the world, and, if he is beforehand it is because he has learned to read the signs of the times and the seasons. In a word, he has learned to recognise that changes are not always mere chances, that some changes are uniformly preceded by certain others, and may consequently be foreseen. In the beginning the changes that man can forecast are few indeed: his prevision is no greater than the brute's. The child does not foresee that fire will burn; he learns by experience. And whatever man can forecast, he has learned it all by experience. It is a slow way of learning, it has taken man thousands upon thousands of years to learn what he knows now; still he has learned to know the causes of countless things, to control the causes and to anticipate the effects of many. But more important, more valuable than all his experience and all his knowledge of what produces what, of what uniformly precedes or follows what, is the final and comprehensive truth which at last he reaches, that nothing happens arbitrarily, that everything in nature is uniform. That, the Uniformity of Nature, is the great truth in which all others are summed up: to its establishment have gone the labours of all past generations of mankind, to its support the whole experience of the race contributes. It is the truth of truths, the test of truth: whatsoever is established on it shall not be shaken, whatever contravenes it shall not endure.

The Uniformity of Nature is the base not only of all science, but of every act of reason in the most commonplace affairs of ordinary life; and, though you may not know it, you assume it every moment. Why are you sure that the sun will rise to-morrow? Because Nature is uniform. Why do you know that fire will burn? Because Nature is uniform. Why that all men are mortal? Why that a cause will always produce its effect? Because of the Uniformity of Nature. For each and all of these beliefs the evidence is sufficient; it is the Uniformity of Nature. How different, says the man of science, is the procedure of science, that is of common sense, from the unscientific methods of theology! Why do we believe that the earth will bring forth her kindly fruits in due season? Because it is God's will? That is a hypothesis; it may be true or it may not; it cannot be proved or disproved; there is no evidence against it, but there is no evidence for it. Very different is the answer of science and common sense: it is that the earth will produce crops in accordance with certain natural causes, mechanical and chemical. That also is a hypothesis which may or may not be true. Yes, but it is one for which there is some evidence—the Uniformity of Nature. In the same way, if anyone were to say that the result of the next general election depended not on the electors but on the planets, we should decline to believe him, because there is no evidence to show that the planets have anything to do with it, and there is good evidence for believing that the votes of the electors have. In fine, the teaching of science is: demand sufficient evidence for everything, and always remember that by sufficient evidence is meant the Uniformity of Nature.

This sounds so simple and so convincing that we are tempted to try it. But first let us make sure that we have learned our lesson properly. In the course of long ages mankind has slowly accumulated enough experience to warrant the confident belief that Nature is uniform. Now, primitive man was of course a savage, and knew nothing of the Uniformity of Nature; he therefore could not have had sufficient evidence for believing anything in his experience. But it is on the accumulation of such experiences—every one of which we must reject because they were not based on the Uniformity of Nature—that our belief in the Uniformity of Nature is supposed to rest. In other words, it is based on them and they were based on nothing. This result of acting strictly up to the principle of not suffering anything to pass without sufficient evidence seems somewhat discouraging, until the man of science comes to our rescue and reminds us that just as we, without knowing it, have acted all our lives on the tacit assumption that Nature is uniform, so did primitive man; and that consequently there really was sufficient evidence and scientific proof for the savage's experiences, though of course he could not have framed it in words; and so, the bases of the Uniformity of Nature are really quite sound. But even now we are not altogether out of our difficulties, for granted that the savage, like ourselves, tacitly assumed Nature to be uniform, was there sufficient evidence for the assumption? and if so, what was the evidence? It could not be the Uniformity of Nature, because that is just the question; and, if it was anything else, it was not sufficient evidence.

It really seems rather difficult to get sufficient evidence for the axiom, viz. the Uniformity of Nature, on which the whole of science is built. And yet we must have sufficient evidence for it, or else we shall have to conclude that Science has no more logical foundation than Religion.

But once more the man of science comes to our assistance and explains that in the beginning, before the Uniformity of Nature is proved, it is only probable that what has once happened will happen again in similar circumstances, and at first perhaps not very probable; but when wider and wider experience still shows that what has once happened does actually happen again under the same circumstances, the Uniformity of Nature becomes more and more probable, until at last, if not actually proved, it is still the most probable hypothesis that we possess or can possess: "our highest and surest generalisations remain on the level of justifiable expectations; that is, very high probabilities."[26]

Now, with all respect to logicians like John Stuart Mill, and men of science like Huxley, we must point out that this begs the whole question. If we assume that Nature is uniform, then it is probable that what has often happened will happen again. But if we do not assume that Nature is uniform, then the repeated occurrence of a thing does not make it in the least probable that it will occur again. To assume without proof that Nature is uniform is to ask us to accept a statement without evidence, which, if we have learnt the lesson of science, we can hardly do. On the other hand, if we begin with the admission that Nature may or may not be uniform, but that, to begin with, we no more know whether it will actually prove to be uniform than we know whether a penny, when we are about to toss it, will fall head or tail; then, according to the mathematical theory of probability, it matters not how many times you toss the penny, the chances next throw are exactly the same as they were at the first throw—it matters not how many times Nature has proved uniform in the past, she is no more likely to prove uniform to-morrow than she was on the first of days. If it is really an open question at the beginning whether Nature is or is not uniform, it remains an open question to the end. The man of science need not admit that it is an open question, if he does not want to do so; but if he does admit it, then let him stick to it throughout; and let him reflect that if he begins by admitting it and ends by denying it, he has but gradually retracted his own free admission, and unconsciously been betrayed into denying what he began by admitting to be true.

The fact of the matter is that the axioms of science—the Uniformity of Nature and the Law of Universal Causation—not only are not proved by what experience we have had of them, but "cannot be proved by any amount of experience."[27] Not only can they not be proved by any amount of experience, they are incapable of being demonstrated at all: "they are neither self-evident nor are they, strictly speaking, demonstrable."[28] If, then, they are not and cannot be proved either by experience or in any other way, on what does the man of science ground his belief in them? On Faith. "The ground of every one of our actions, and the validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith, which leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings with the present and the future."[29]

FOOTNOTES: