Читать книгу Evolution - F. B. Jevons - Страница 5

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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."