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THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION: ITS SCOPE AND PURPORT[5]

It was not strange that among the younger men whose opinions were moulded between 1830 and 1840 there should have been one of organizing genius, with a mind inexhaustibly fertile in suggestions, who should undertake to elaborate a general doctrine of evolution, to embrace in one grand coherent system of generalizations all the minor generalizations which workers in different departments of science were establishing. It is this prodigious work of construction that we owe to Herbert Spencer. He is the originator and author of what we know to-day as the doctrine of evolution, the doctrine which undertakes to formulate and put into scientific shape the conception of evolution toward which scientific investigation had so long been tending. In the mind of the general public there seems to be dire confusion with regard to Mr. Spencer and his relations to evolution and to Darwinism. Sometimes, I believe, he is even supposed to be chiefly a follower and expounder of Mr. Darwin! No doubt this is because so many people mix up Darwinism with the doctrine of evolution, and have but the vaguest and haziest notions as to what it is all about. As I explained above, Mr. Darwin's great work was the discovery of natural selection, and the demonstration of its agency in effecting specific changes in plants and animals; and in that work he was completely original. But plants and animals are only a part of the universe, though an important part, and with regard to universal evolution or any universal formula for evolution Darwinism had nothing to say. Such problems were beyond its scope.

The discovery of a universal formula for evolution, and the application of this formula to many diverse groups of phenomena, have been the great work of Mr. Spencer, and in this he has had no predecessor. His wealth of originality is immense, and it is unquestionable. But as the most original thinker must take his start from the general stock of ideas accumulated at his epoch, and more often than not begins by following a clue given him by somebody else, so it was with Mr. Spencer when, about forty years ago, he was working out his doctrine of evolution. The clue was not given by Mr. Darwin. Darwinism was not yet born. Mr. Spencer's theory was worked out in all its parts, and many parts of it had been expounded in various published volumes and essays before the publication of the "Origin of Species."

The clue which Mr. Spencer followed was given him by the great embryologist, Karl Ernst von Baer, and an adumbration of it may perhaps be traced back through Kaspar Friedrich Wolf to Linnæus. Hints of it may be found, too, in Goethe and in Schelling. The advance from simplicity to complexity in the development of an egg is too obvious to be overlooked by any one, and was remarked upon, I believe, by Harvey; but the analysis of what that advance consists in was a wonderfully suggestive piece of work. Baer's great book was published in 1829, just at the time when so many stimulating ideas were being enunciated, and its significant title was Entwickelungsgeschichte, or "History of Evolution." It was well known that, so far as the senses can tell us, one ovum is indistinguishable from another, whether it be that of a man, a fish, or a parrot. The ovum is a structureless bit of organic matter, and, in acquiring structure along with its growth in volume and mass, it proceeds through a series of differentiations, and the result is a change from homogeneity to heterogeneity. Such was Baer's conclusion, to which scanty justice is done by such a brief statement. As all know, his work marked an epoch in the study of embryology; for to mark the successive differentiations in the embryos of a thousand animals was to write a thousand life histories upon correct principles.

Here it was that Mr. Spencer started. As a young man, he was chiefly interested in the study of political government and in history so far as it helps the study of politics. A philosophical student of such subjects must naturally seek for a theory of evolution. If I may cite my own experience, it was largely the absorbing and overmastering passion for the study of history that first led me to study evolution in order to obtain a correct method. When one has frequent occasion to refer to the political and social progress of the human race, one likes to know what one is talking about. Mr. Spencer needed a theory of progress. He could see that the civilized part of mankind has undergone some change from a bestial, unsocial, perpetually fighting stage of savagery into a partially peaceful and comparatively humane and social stage, and that we may reasonably hope that the change in this direction will go on. He could see, too, that along with this change there has been a building-up of tribes into nations, a division of labour, a differentiation of governmental functions, a series of changes in the relations of the individual to the community. To see so much as this is to whet one's craving for enlarged resources wherewith to study human progress. Mr. Spencer had a wide, accurate, and often profound acquaintance with botany, zoölogy, and allied studies. The question naturally occurred to him, Where do we find the process of development most completely exemplified from beginning to end, so that we can follow and exhaustively describe its consecutive phases? Obviously in the development of the ovum. There, and only there, do we get the whole process under our eyes from the first segmentation of the yolk to the death of the matured individual. In other groups of phenomena we can only see a small part of what is going on; they are too vast for us, as in astronomy, or too complicated, as in sociology. Elsewhere our evidences of development are more or less piecemeal and scattered, but in embryology we do get, at any rate, a connected story.

So Mr. Spencer took up Baer's problem, and carried the solution of it much further than the great Esthonian naturalist. He showed that in the development of the ovum the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity is accompanied by a change from indefiniteness to definiteness; there are segregations of similarly differentiated units resulting in the formation of definite organs. He further showed that there is a parallel and equally important change from incoherence to coherence; along with the division of labour among the units there is an organization of labour: at first, among the homogeneous units there is no subordination—to subtract one would not alter the general aspect; but at last, among the heterogeneous organs there is such subordination and interdependence that to subtract any one is liable to undo the whole process and destroy the organism. In other words, integration is as much a feature of development as differentiation; the change is not simply from a structureless whole into parts, but it is from a structureless whole into an organized whole with a consensus of different functions, and that is what we call an organism. So while Baer said that the evolution of the chick is a change from homogeneity to heterogeneity through successive differentiations, Mr. Spencer said that the evolution of the chick is a continuous change from indefinite incoherent homogeneity to definite coherent heterogeneity through successive differentiations and integrations.

But Mr. Spencer had now done something more than describe exhaustively the evolution of an individual organism. He had got a standard of high and low degrees of organization; and the next thing in order was to apply this standard to the whole hierarchy of animals and plants according to their classified relationships and their succession in geological time. This was done with most brilliant success. From the earliest records in the rocks, the general advance in types of organization has been an advance in definiteness, coherence, and heterogeneity. The method of evolution in the life history of the animal and vegetal kingdoms has been like the method of evolution in the life history of the individual.

To go into the inorganic world with such a formula might seem rash. But as the growth of organization is essentially a particular kind of redistribution of matter and motion, and as redistribution of matter and motion is going on universally in the inorganic world, it is interesting to inquire whether, in such simple approaches toward organization as we find, there is any approach toward the characteristics of organic evolution as above described. It was easy for Mr. Spencer to show that the change from a nebula into a planetary system conforms to the definition of evolution in a way that is most striking and suggestive. But in studying the inorganic world Mr. Spencer was led to modify his formula in a way that vastly increased its scope. He came to see that the primary feature of evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion. According to circumstances, this process may or not be attended with extensive internal rearrangements and development of organization. The continuous internal rearrangement implied in the development of organization is possible only where there is a medium degree of mobility among the particles, a plasticity such as is secured only by those peculiar chemical combinations which make up what we call organic matter. In the inorganic world, where there is an approach to organization there is an adumbration of the law as realized in the organic world. But in the former, what strikes us most is the concentration of the mass with the retention of but little internal mobility; in the latter, what strikes us most is the wonderful complication of the transformations wrought by the immense amount of internal mobility retained. These transformations are to us the mark, the distinguishing feature, of life.

Having thus got the nature of the differences between the organic and inorganic worlds into a series of suggestive formulas, the next thing to be done was to inquire into the applicability of the law of evolution to the higher manifestations of vital activity—in other words, to psychical and social life. Here it was easy to point out analogies between the development of society and the development of an organism. Between a savage state of society and a civilized state, it is easy to see the contrasts in complexity of life, in division of labour, in interdependence and coherence of operations and of interests. The difference resembles that between a vertebrate animal and a worm.

Such analogies are instructive, because at the bottom of the phenomena there is a certain amount of real identity. But Mr. Spencer did not stop with analogies; he pursued his problem into much deeper regions. There is one manifest distinction between a society and an organism. In the organism, the conscious life, the psychical life, is not in the parts, but in the whole; but in a society, there is no such thing as corporate consciousness: the psychical life is all in the individual men and women. The highest development of this psychical life is the end for which the world exists. The object of social life is the highest spiritual welfare of the individual members of society. The individual human soul thus comes to be as much the centre of the Spencerian world as it was the centre of the world of mediæval theology; and the history of the evolution of conscious intelligence becomes a theme of surpassing interest.

This is the part of his subject which Mr. Spencer has handled in the most masterly manner. Nothing in the literature of psychology is more remarkable than the long-sustained analysis in which he starts with complicated acts of quantitative reasoning and resolves them into their elementary processes, and then goes on to simpler acts of judgment and perception, and then down to sensation, and so on resolving and resolving, until he gets down to the simple homogeneous psychical shocks or pulses in the manifold compounding and recompounding of which all mental action consists. Then, starting afresh from that conception of life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism to outer relations in the environment—a conception of which he made such brilliant use in his "Principles of Biology,"—he shows how the psychical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of adjustments or correspondences, and how the development of psychical life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration of such correspondences. Intellectual life is shown to have arisen by slow gradations, and the special interpretations of reflex action, instinct, memory, reason, emotion, and will are such as to make the "Principles of Psychology" indubitably the most suggestive book upon mental phenomena that was ever written.

Toward the end of the first edition of the "Origin of Species," published in 1859, Mr. Darwin looked forward to a distant future when the conception of gradual development might be applied to the phenomena of intelligence. But the first edition of the "Principles of Psychology," in which this was so successfully done, had already been published four years before—in 1855—so that Mr. Darwin in later editions was obliged to modify his statement, and confess that, instead of looking so far forward, he had better have looked about him. I remember hearing Mr. Darwin laugh merrily over this at his own expense.

This extension of the doctrine of evolution to psychical phenomena was what made it a universal doctrine, an account of the way in which the world, as we know it, has been evolved. There is no subject, great or small, that has not come to be affected by the doctrine, and, whether men realize it or not, there is no nook or corner in speculative science where they can get away from the sweep of Mr. Spencer's thought.