Читать книгу Evolution - F. B. Jevons - Страница 7

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"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.