Читать книгу A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution - Cora May Williams - Страница 21

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As Herbert Spencer's closest follower, John Fiske deserves to stand next him in order of analysis. Fiske accepts, though evidently with reluctance, what he terms "the terrible theory" of evolution, which establishes the fact of man's consanguinity with dumb beasts. In his book on "The Destiny of Man" (1884), he sets forth his theory of the evolution of society as foreshowing man's final destiny. With regard to the beginnings of psychical development in the course of evolution, he thus expresses himself: "At length there came a wonderful moment;—silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment at which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical changes to the brute ancestor of man. Through further ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until bye and bye the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of structure increased a thousandfold, while in other respects his appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes. … No fact in nature is fraught with deeper meaning than this two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psychical divergence between man and the group of animals to which he traces his pedigree. It shows that when humanity began to be evolved, an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that the process of zoölogical change had come to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its place. Henceforth along this supreme line there was to be no further evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the accumulation of psychical variations one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected. … Henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evolution was to be, not the genesis of species, but the progress of civilization. … In the deadly struggle for existence, which has raged throughout countless æons of time, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in order to bring forth that last consummate specimen of God's handiwork, the Human Soul."

And further, of the genesis of this Human Soul: "With the growth of the higher centres, the capacities of action become so various and indeterminate that definite direction is not given to them until after birth." By the increase of cerebral surface, infancy, which is the period of plasticity, is prolonged, Man becomes teachable, and though inherited tendencies and aptitudes still form the foundations of character, yet the career of the individual is no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, but individual experience comes to count as an enormous factor in modifying the career of mankind from generation to generation.

The psychical development of humanity since its earlier stages has been largely due to the reaction of individuals upon one another in those various relations which we characterize as social.

Foreshadowings of social relations occur in the animal world. Rudimentary moral sentiments are also clearly discernible in the highest members of various mammalian orders and in all but the lowest members of our own order. But in respect of definiteness and permanence, the relations between animals in a state of gregariousness fall far short of the relations between individuals in the rudest human society. The primordial unit of human society is the family, the establishment of which was made necessary and took place through the lengthening of infancy. When childhood had come to extend over a period of ten or a dozen years, a period which would have been doubled where several children were born in succession to the same parents, the relationships between father and mother, brothers and sisters, must have become firmly knit; thus the family came into existence, and the way was opened for the growth of sympathies and ethical feelings. The rudimentary form of the ethical feelings was that of the transient affection of a female bird or mammal for its young. First given a definite direction through the genesis of the primitive human family, the development of altruism has yet scarcely kept pace with the general development of intelligence; the advance of civilized man in justice and kindness has been less marked than his advance in quick intelligence. But the creative energy which has been thus at work through the bygone eternity is not going to become quiescent to-morrow; the psychical development of man is destined to go on in the future as it has in the past. And from the "Origin of Man," when thoroughly comprehended, we may catch some glimpses of his destiny.

The earlier condition of things was a state of universal warfare, on account of the limitation of the food-supply. This warfare was checked by the beginnings of industrial civilization, which made it possible for a vastly greater population to live upon a given area, and in many ways favored social compactness. A new basis of political combination was now furnished by territorial continuity and by community of occupation. The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and, moreover, in the free exchange of the products of labor, it ceased to be true that one man's interest was opposed to another's. Men did not, it is true, at once recognize this fact, but have done so only gradually. When the clan had grown into the state, and the state into the empire, in which many states were brought together in pacific relations, the recognized sphere of moral obligation became enlarged, until at length it comprehended all mankind. The coalescence of groups of men into larger and larger political aggregates has been the chief work of civilization; and the chief obstacle to such coalescence has been warfare. Great political bodies have arisen in three ways. The first, conquest without incorporation, proved itself suicidal. The second way was conquest with incorporation, but without representation; and this lacking, the government retrograded and gradually became a despotism. The third method, federation, has been the policy of the English government. The advantage of the habit of self-government has been shown in England's wide conquest and colonization. The federative method of political union, pacific in its very conception, is assuming an unquestionable sway and destined to become universal; the progress of the race will be, as it has been, with the gradual elimination of warfare.

In a race of inferior animals, any maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection. But in man there is a wide interval between the highest and lowest degree of completeness which are compatible with maintenance of life; in all grades of civilization above the lowest, there are so many kinds of superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstanding accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot, by itself, rectify any particular unfitness. Hence, the action of natural selection upon man has long since been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions. Therefore the wicked flourish. Vice is but slowly eliminated, because mankind has so many other qualities, besides the bad ones, which enable it, in spite of them, to subsist and achieve progress.

The fundamental difference between civilized man and the savage lies in the representative power, the imagination, by which men comprehend pleasure and pain in others. Use and disuse, in place of natural selection, have come to be paramount with man; and though the ethical emotions are still too feeble, they will be more and more strengthened by use, while the manifestation of selfish and hateful feelings will be more and more weakened by disuse. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state, in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state, in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The "original sin" of theology is the brute inheritance, which is being gradually eliminated; and the message of Christianity: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" will be realized in the state of universal peace towards which mankind is tending. Strife and Sorrow shall disappear. Peace and Love shall reign supreme. The goal of evolution is the perfecting of man, whereby we see, more than ever, that he is the chief object of divine care, the fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe.

We know soul only in connection with body. Yet nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; the molecular movements of the brain and the phenomena of thought and feeling are merely concomitants related in some unknown way. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. He who regards man as the consummate fruition of creative energy and the chief object of divine care, is almost irresistibly driven to the belief that the soul's career is not completed with the life upon the earth. Difficulties to this theory he will meet; yet the alternative view contains difficulties at least as great; nor is there any problem in the simplest and most exact departments of science which does not speedily lead us to a transcendental problem that we can neither solve nor elude. A broad common sense argument has often to be called in, where keen-edged metaphysical analysis has confessed itself baffled. The doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of man; the Darwinian theory, properly understood, replaces as much teleology as it destroys. In the Titanic events of the development of worlds from the nebular mist and their after-destruction, we may find no signs of purpose, or even of a dramatic tendency; but on the earth we do find distinct indications of a dramatic tendency; though doubtless not of purpose in the limited human sense. Are we to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks just for the pleasure of knocking them down again? On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. "I can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the evolution of humanity this divine spark [the soul] may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material forms and endure forever. Such a crowning wonder seems to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has been ineffably beautiful and marvellous in all its myriad stages."

Fiske gives some further definition of social evolution in man, in his "Cosmic Philosophy" (1874). He there denies the incompatibility of free-will with causation, saying that "it is the doctrine of lawlessness, and not the causationist doctrine, which is incompatible with liberty and destructive of responsibility."[54]

He further postulates heterogeneity of the environment as "the chief proximate determining cause of social progress," and defines such evolution as "a continuous establishment of psychical relations within the community, in conformity to physical and psychical relations arising in the environment, during which both the community and the environment pass from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the constituent units of the community become ever more distinctly individual."[55] "The progress of a community, as of an organism, is a process of adaptation—the continuous establishment of inner relations in conformity to outer relations. If we contemplate material civilization under its widest aspect, we discover its legitimate aim to be the attainment and maintenance of an equilibrium between the wants of men and the outward means of satisfying them. And while approaching this goal, society is ever acquiring in its economic structure both greater heterogeneity and greater specialization. It is not only that agriculture, manufactures, commerce, legislation, the acts of the ruler, the judge, and the physician, have, since ancient times, grown immeasurably multiform, both in their processes and in their appliances; but it is also that this specialization has resulted in the greatly increased ability of society to adapt itself to the emergencies by which it is now beset."[56] Religion, too, is adjustment; form after form has been outgrown and perished, yet the life of Christianity, incorporated in ever higher forms, is continually renewed. The omission of the moral feeling, as a factor, from Comte's interpretation of the progress of society, is a fatal defect, since moral and social progress depend more on feelings than on ideas. As Wallace shows, tribes which combined for mutual help and protection, restrained appetite by foresight, and felt sympathy, would have an advantage in the struggle for existence.

"As surely as the astronomer can predict the future state of the heavens, the sociologist can foresee that the process of adaptation must go on until, in a remote future, it comes to an end in proximate equilibrium. The increasing interdependence of human interests must eventually go far to realize the dream of the philosophic poet, of a Parliament of Man, a Federation of the World.

"'When the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,' and when the desires of each individual shall be in proximate equilibrium with the means of satisfying them and with the simultaneous desires of all surrounding individuals."[57]