CHAPTER X
INVOLUTION
MANY years ago, in the clay which in every
part of the world is found underlying beds of coal, a peculiar fossil was
discovered and named by science Stigmaria. It occurred in great abundance and
in many countries, and from the strange way in which it ramified through the
clay it was supposed to be some extinct variety of a gigantic water-weed. In
the coal itself another fossil was discovered, almost as abundant but far more
beautiful, and from the exquisite carving which ornamented its fluted stem it
received the name of Sigillaria. One day a Canadian geologist, studying
Sigillaria in the field, made a new discovery. Finding the trunk of a
Sigillaria standing erect in a bed of coal, he traced the column downwards to
the clay beneath. To his surprise he found it ended in Stigmaria. This
branching fossil in the clay was no longer a water-weed. It was the root of
which Sigillaria was the stem, and the clay was the soil in which the great
coal-plant grew.
Through many chapters, often in the dark,
everywhere hampered by the clay, we have been working among roots. Of what are
they the roots? To what order do they belong? By what process have they grown?
What connection have they with the realm above, or the realm beneath? Is it a
Stigmaria or a Sigillaria world?
Till yesterday Science did not recognize them
even as roots. They were classified apart. They led to nothing. No organic
connection was known between lower Nature and that wholly separate and all but
antagonistic realm, the higher world of Man. Atoms, cells, plants, animals were
the material products of a separate creation, the clay from which Man took his
clay-body, and no more. The higher world, also, was a system by itself. It rose
out of nothing; it rested upon nothing. Clay, where the roots lay, was the
product of inorganic forces; Coal, which enshrined the tree, was a creation of
the sunlight. What fellowship had light with darkness? What possible connection
could exist between that beautiful organism which stood erect in the living,
and that which lay prone in the dead? Yet, by a process doubly verified, the
organic connection between these two has now been traced. Working upwards
through the clay the biologist finds what he took to be an organism of the clay
leaving his domain and passing into a world above --a world which he had
scarcely noticed before, and into which, with such instruments as he employs,
he cannot follow it. Working downward through the higher world, the
psychologist, the moralist, the sociologist, behold the even more wonderful
spectacle of the things they had counted a peculiar possession of the upper
kingdom, burying themselves in ever attenuating forms in the clay beneath. What
is to be made of this discovery? Once more, Is it a Stigmaria or a Sigillaria
world? Is the biologist to give up his clay or the moralist his higher kingdom?
Are Mind, Morals, Men, to be interpreted in terms of roots, or are atoms and
cells to be judged by the flowers and fruits of the tree?
The first fruit of the discovery must be that
each shall explore with new respect the other's world, and, instead of
delighting to accentuate their contrasts, strive to magnify their infinite
harmonies. Old as is the world's vision of a cosmos, and universal as has been
its dream of the unity of Nature, neither has ever stood before the imagination
complete. Poetry felt, but never knew, that the universe was one; Biology
perceived the profound chemical balance between the inorganic and organic
kingdoms, and no more; Physics, discovering the correlation of forces,
constructed a cosmos of its own; Astronomy, through the law of gravitation,
linked us, but mechanically, with the stars. But it was reserved for Evolution
to make the final revelation of the unity of the world, to comprehend
everything under one generalization, to explain everything by one great end.
Its omnipresent eye saw every phenomenon and every law. It gathered all that is
and has been into one last whole--a whole whose very perfection consists in the
all but infinite distinctions of the things which it unites.
What is often dreaded in Evolution--the danger of
obliterating distinctions that are vital--is a groundless fear. Stigmaria can
never be anything more than root, and Sigillaria can never be anything less
than stem. To show their connection is not to transpose their properties. The
wider the distinctions seen among their properties the profounder is the
Thought which unites them, the more rich and rational the Cosmos which
comprehends them. For "the unity which we see in Nature is that kind of Unity
which the Mind recognizes as the result of operations similar to its own--not a
unity which consists in mere sameness of material, or in mere identity of
composition, or in mere uniformity of structure; but a unity which consists in
the subordination of all these to similar aims, not to similar principles of
action--that is to say, in like methods of yoking a few elementary forces to
the discharge of special functions, and to the production, by adjustment, of
one harmonious whole."[93]
Yet did Sigillaria grow out of Stigmaria? Did
Mind, Morals, Men, evolve out of Matter? Surely if one is the tree and the
other the root of that tree, and if Evolution means the passage of the one into
the other, there is no escape from this conclusion--no escape therefore from
the crassest materialism? If this is really the situation, the lower must then
include the higher, and Evolution, after all, be a process of the clay? This is
a frequent, a natural, and a wholly unreflecting inference from a very common
way of stating the Evolution theory. It arises from a total misconception of
what a root is. Because a thing is seen to have roots, it is assumed that it
has grown out of these roots, and must therefore belong to the root-order. But
neither of these things is true in Nature. Are the stem, branch, leaf, flower,
fruit of a tree roots? Do they belong to the root-order? They do not. Their
whole morphology is different; their whole physiology is different; their
reactions upon the world around are different. But it must be allowed that they
are at least contained in the root? No single one of them is contained in the
root. If not in the root, then in the clay? Neither are they contained in the
clay. But they grow out of clay, are they not made out of clay? They do not
grow out of clay, and they are not made out of clay. It is astounding sometimes
how little those who venture to criticize biological processes seem to know of
its simplest facts. Fill a flower-pot with clay, and plant in it a seedling. At
the end of four years it has become a small tree; it is six feet high; it
weighs ten pounds. But the clay in the pot is still there? A moiety of it has
gone, but it is not appreciably diminished; it has not, except the moiety,
passed into the tree; the tree does not live on clay nor on any force contained
in the clay. It cannot have grown out of the seedling, for the seedling
contained but a grain for every pound contained in the tree. It cannot have
grown from the root, because the root is there now, has lost nothing to the
tree, has itself gained from the tree, and at first was no more there than the
tree.
Sigillaria, then, as representing the ethical
order, did not grow out of Stigmaria as representing the organic or the
material order. Trees not only do not evolve out of their roots, but whole
classes in the plant world--the sea-weeds for instance-- have no roots at all.
If any possible relation exists it is exactly the opposite one--it is the root
which evolves from the tree. Trees send down roots in a far truer sense than
roots send up trees. Yet neither is the whole truth. The true function of the
root is to give stability to the tree, and to afford a medium for conveying
into it inorganic matter from without. And this brings us face to face with the
real relation. Tree and root--the seed apart--find their explanation not in one
another nor in something in themselves, but mainly in something outside
themselves. The secret of Evolution lies, in short, with the
Environment. In the Environment, in that in which things live and move and
have their being, is found the secret of their being, and especially of their
becoming. And what is that in which things live and move and have their being?
It is Nature, the world, the cosmos--and something more, some One more, an
Infinite Intelligence and an Eternal Will. Everything that lives, lives in
virtue of its correspondences with this Environment. Evolution is not to unfold
from within; it is to infold from without. Growth is no mere extension from a
root but a taking possession of, or a being possessed by, an ever widening
Environment, a continuous process of assimilation of the seen or Unseen, a
ceaseless redistribution of energies flowing into the evolving organism from
the Universe around it. The supreme factor in all development is Environment.
Half the confusions which reign round the process of Evolution, and half the
objections to it, arise from considering the evolving object as a
self-sufficient whole. Produce an organism, plant, animal, man, society, which
will evolve in vacuo and the right is yours to say that the tree lies in
the root, the flower in the bud, the man in the embryo, the social organism in
the family of an anthropoid ape. If an organism is to be judged in terms of the
immediate Environment of its roots, the tree is a clay tree; but if it is to be
judged by stem, leaves, fruit, it is not a clay tree. If the moral or social
organism is to be judged in terms of the Environment of its roots, the moral
and social organism is a material organism; but if it is to be judged in terms
of the higher influences which enter into the making of its stem, leaves,
fruit, it is not a material organism. Everything that lives, and every part of
everything that lives, enters into relation with different parts of the
Environment and with different things in the Environment; and at every step of
its Ascent it compasses new ranges of the Environment, and is acted upon, and
acts, in different ways from those in which it was acted upon, or acted, at the
previous stage.
For what is most of all essential to remember is
that not only is Environment the prime factor in development, but that the
Environment itself rises with every evolution of any form of life. To regard
the Environment as a fixed quantity and a fixed quality is, next to ignoring
the altruistic factor, the cardinal error of evolutional philosophy. With every
step a climber rises up a mountain side his Environment must change. At a
thousand feet the air is lighter and purer than at a hundred, and as the effect
varies with the cause, all the reactions of the air upon his body are altered
at the higher level. His pulse quickens ; his spirit grows more buoyant; the
energies of the upper world flow in upon him. All the other phenomena
change--the plants are Alpine, the animals are a hardier race, the temperature
falls, the very world he left behind wears a different look. At three thousand
feet the causes, the effects, and the phenomena change again. The horizon is
wider, the light intenser, the air colder, the top nearer; the nether world
recedes from view. At six thousand feet, if we may accentuate the illustration
till it contains more of the emphasis of the reality, he enters the region of
snow. Here is a change brought about by a small and perfectly natural rise
which yet amounts to a revolution. Another thousand feet and there is another
revolution--he is ushered into the domain of mist. Still another thousand, and
the climax of change has come. He stands at the top, and, behold, the Sun. None
of the things he has encountered in his progress toward the top are new things.
They are the normal phenomena of altitude--the scenes, the energies, the
correspondences, natural to the higher slopes. He did not create any of these
things as he rose; they were not created as he rose; they did not lie
potentially in the plains or in the mountain foot. What has happened is simply
that in rising he has encountered them-- some for the first time, which are
therefore wholly new to him; others which, though known before, now flow into
his being in such fuller measure, or enter into such fresh relations among
themselves, or with the changed being which at every step he has become, as to
be also practically new.
Man, in his long pilgrimage upwards from the
clay, passes through regions of ever varying character. Each breath drawn and
utilized to make one upward step brings him into relation with a fractionally
higher air, a fractionally different world. The new energies he there receives
are utilized, and in virtue of them he rises to a third, and from a third to a
fourth. As in the animal kingdom the senses open one by one--the eye
progressing from the mere discernment of light and darkness to the blurred
image of things near, and then to clearer vision of the more remote; the ear
passing from the tremulous sense of vibration to distinguish with ever
increasing delicacy the sounds of far-off things --so in the higher world the
moral and spiritual senses rise and quicken till they compass qualities unknown
before and impossible to the limited faculties of the earlier life. So Man, not
by any innate tendency to progress in himself, nor by the energies inherent in
the protoplasmic cell from which he first set out, but by a continuous feeding
and reinforcing of the process from without, attains the higher altitudes, and
from the sense-world at the mountain foot ascends with ennobled and ennobling
faculties until he greets the Sun.
What is the Environment of the Social tree? It is
all the things, and all the persons, and all the influences, and all the forces
with which, at each successive stage of progress, it enters into
correspondence. And this Environment inevitably expands as the Social tree
expands and extends its correspondences. At the savage stage Man compasses one
set of relations, at the rude social stage another, at the civilized stage a
third, and each has its own reactions. The social, the moral, and the religious
forces beat upon all social beings in the order in which the capacities for
them unfold, and according to the measure in which the capacities themselves
are fitted to contain them. And from what ultimate source do they come? There
is only one source of everything in the world. They come from the same source
as the Carbonic Acid Gas, the Oxygen, the Nitrogen, and the Vapour of Water,
which from the outer world enter into the growing plant. These also visit the
plant in the order in which the capacities for them unfold, and according to
the measure in which these capacities can contain them.
The fact that the higher principles come from the
same Environment as those of the plant, nevertheless does not imply that they
are the same as those which enter into the plant. In the plant they are
physical, in Man spiritual. If anything is to be implied it is not that the
spiritual energies are physical, but that the physical energies are spiritual.
To call the things in the physical world "material" takes us no nearer the
natural, no further away from the spiritual The roots of a tree may rise from
what we call a physical world; the leaves may be bathed by physical atoms; even
the energy of the tree may be solar energy, but the tree is itself; The tree is
a Thought, a unity, a rational purposeful whole; the "matter" is but the medium
of their expression. Call it all--matter, energy, tree --a physical production,
and have we yet touched its ultimate reality? Are we even quite sure that what
we call a physical world is, after all, a physical world? The preponderating
view of science at present is that it is not. The very term "material world,"
we are told, is a misnomer; that the world is a spiritual world, merely
employing "matter" for its manifestations.
But surely here is still a fallacy. Are not these
so-called social forces the effect of Society and not its cause? Has not
Society to generate them before they regenerate Society? True, but to generate
is not to create. Society is machinery, a medium for the transmission of
energy, but no more a medium for its creation than a steam engine is for the
creation of its energy. Whence then the social energies? The answer is as
before. Whence the physical energies? And Science has only one answer to that.
"Consider the position into which Science has brought us. We are led by
scientific logic to an unseen, and by scientific analogy to the spirituality of
this unseen. In fine, our conclusion is, that the visible universe has been
developed by an intelligence resident in the Unseen."[94] There is only one theory of the method of Creation in the
field, and that is Evolution; but there is only one theory of origins in the
field, and that is Creation. Instead of abolishing a creative Hand, Evolution
demands it. Instead of being opposed to Creation, all theories of Evolution
begin by assuming it. If Science does not formally posit it, it never posits
anything less. "The doctrine of Evolution," writes Mr. Huxley, "is neither
theistic nor anti-theistic. It has no more to do with theism than the first
book of Euclid has. It does not even come in contact with theism considered as
a scientific doctrine." But when it touches the question of origins, it is
either theistic or silent. "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature," says
Weismann, "which aim at a purpose, we must admit a cause, . . .
inconceivable in its nature. of which we can only say one thing with certainty,
that it must be theological."
The fallacy of the merely quantitative theory of
Evolution is apparent. To interpret any organism in terms of the organism
solely is to omit reference to the main instrument of its Evolution, and
therefore to leave the process, scientifically and philosophically,
unexplained. It is as if one were to construct a theory of the career of a
millionaire in terms of the pocket-money allowed him when a schoolboy.
Disregard the fact that more pocket-money was allowed the schoolboy as he
passed from the first form to the sixth; that his allowance was increased as he
came of age; that now, being a man, not a boy, he was capable of more wisely
spending it; that being wise he put his money to paying uses; and that interest
and capital were invested and re-invested as years went on--disregard all this
and you cannot account for the rise of the millionaire. As well construct the
millionaire from the potential gold contained in his first sixpence--a sixpence
which never left his pocket--as construct a theory of the Evolution of Man from
the protoplasmic cell apart from its Environment. It is only when interpreted,
not in terms of himself, but in terms of Environment, and of an Environment
increasingly appropriated, quantitatively and qualitatively, with each fresh
stage of the advance, that a consistent theory is possible, or that the true
nature of Evolution can appear.
A child does not grow out of a child by
spontaneous unfoldings. The process is fed from without. The body assimilates
food, the mind assimilates books, the moral nature draws upon affection, the
religious faculties nourish the higher being from Ideals. Time brings not only
more things, but new things; the higher nature inaugurates possession of, or
by, the higher order. "It lies in the very nature of the case that the earliest
form of that which lives and develops is the least adequate to its nature, and
therefore that from which we can get the least distinct clue to the inner
principle of that nature. Hence to trace a living being back to its beginning,
and to explain what follows by such beginning, would be simply to omit almost
all that characterizes it, and then to suppose that in what remains we have the
secret of its existence. That is not really to explain it, but to explain it
away; for on this method, we necessarily reduce the features that distinguish
it to a minimum and, when we have done so, the remainder may well seem
to be itself reducible to something in which the principle in question does not
manifest itself at all. If we carry the animal back to protoplasm, it may
readily seem possible to explain it as a chemical compound. And, in like
manner, by the same minimizing process, we may seem to succeed in reducing
consciousness and self-consciousness in its simplest form to sensation, and
sensation in its simplest form to something not essentially different from the
nutritive life of plants. The fallacy of the sorites may thus be used to
conceal all qualitative changes under the guise of quantitative addition
or diminution, and to bridge over all difference by the idea of gradual
transition. For, as the old school of etymologists showed, if we are at liberty
to interpose as many connecting links as we please, it becomes easy to imagine
that things the most heterogeneous should spring out of each other. While,
however, the hypothesis of gradual change--change proceeding by infinitesimal
stages which melt into each other so that the eye cannot detect where one
begins and the other ends--makes such a transition easier for
imagination, it does nothing to diminish the difficulty or the wonder of
it for thought."[95]
The value of philosophical criticism to science
has seldom appeared to more advantage than in these words of the Master of
Balliol. The following passage from Martineau may be fitly placed beside
them:--"In not a few of the progressionists the weak illusion is unmistakable,
that, with time enough, you may get everything out of next-to-nothing. Grant
us, they seem to say, any tiniest granule of power, so close upon zero that it
is not worth begrudging--allow it some trifling tendency to infinitesimal
movement--and we will show you how this little stock became the kosmos, without
ever taking a step worth thinking of, much less constituting a case for design.
The argument is a mere appeal to an incompetency in the human imagination, in
virtue of which magnitudes evading conception are treated as out of existence;
and an aggregate of inappreciable increments is simultaneously equated,--in its
cause to nothing, in its effect to the whole of things. You
manifestly want the same causality, whether concentrated in a moment or
distributed through incalculable ages; only in drawing upon it a logical theft
is more easily committed piecemeal than wholesale. Surely it is a mean device
for a philosopher thus to crib causation by hair-breadths, to put it out at
compound interest through all time, and then disown the debt."[96]
It is not said that the view here given of the
process of Evolution has been the actual process. The illustrations have been
developed rather to clear up difficulties than to state a theory. The time is
not ripe for daring to present to our imaginations even a partial view of what
that transcendent process may have been. At present we can only take our ideas
of growth from the growing things around us, and in this analogy we have taken
no account of the most essential fact--the seed. Nor is it asserted, far as
these illustrations point in that direction, that the course of Evolution has
been a continuous, uninterrupted, upward rise. On the whole it has certainly
been a rise; but whether a rise without leap or break or pause, or--what is
more likely--a progress in rhythms, pulses, and waves, or--what is unlikely-- a
cataclysmal ascent by steps abrupt and steep, may possibly never be proved.
There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the
fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps--gaps which they
will fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps? What view of Nature or of Truth
is theirs whose interest in Science is not in what it can explain but in what
it cannot, whose quest is ignorance not knowledge, whose daily dread is that
the cloud may lift, and who, as darkness melts from this field or from that,
begin to tremble for the place of His abode? What needs altering in such
finely-jealous souls is at once their view of Nature and of God. Nature is
God's writing, and can only tell the truth; God is light, and in Him is no
darkness at all.
If by the accumulation of irresistible evidence
we are driven--may not one say permitted--to accept Evolution as God's method
in creation, it is a mistaken policy to glory in what it cannot account for.
The reason why men grudge to Evolution each of its fresh claims to show how
things have been made is the groundless fear that if we discover how they are
made we minimize their divinity. When things are known, that is to say, we
conceive them as natural, on Man's level; when they are unknown, we call them
divine--as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its divinity. If God
is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we be when these
gaps are filled up? And if they are never to be filled up, is God only to be
found in the dis-orders of the world? Those who yield to the temptation to
reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to
forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God
appears periodically, He disappears periodically. If He comes upon the scene at
special crises, He is absent from the scene in the intervals. Whether is
all-God or occasional-God the nobler theory? Positively, the idea of an
immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the
occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology. Negatively, the
older view is not only the less worthy, but it is discredited by science. And
as to facts, the daily miracle of a flower, the courses of the stars, the
upholding and sustaining day by day of this great palpitating world, need a
living Will as much as the creation of atoms at the first. We know growth as
the method by which things are made in Nature, and we know no other method. We
do not know that there are not other methods; but if there are, we do not know
them. Those cases which we do not know to be growths, we do not know to be
anything else, and we may at least suspect them to be growths. Nor are they any
the less miraculous because they appear to us as growths. A miracle is not
something quick. The doings of these things may seem to us no miracle,
nevertheless it is a miracle that they have been done.
But, after all, the miracle of Evolution is not
the process but the product. Beside the wonder of the result, the problem of
the process is a mere curiosity of Science. For what is the product? It is not
mountain and valley, sky and sea, flower and star, this glorious and beautiful
world in which Man's body finds its home. It is not the god-like gift of Mind
nor the ordered cosmos where it finds so noble an exercise for its illimitable
powers. It is that which of all other things in the universe commends itself,
with increasing sureness as time goes on, to the reason and to the heart of
Humanity--Love. Love is the final result of Evolution. This is what stands out
in Nature as the supreme creation. Evolution is not progress in matter. Matter
cannot progress. It is a progress in spirit, in that which is limitless, in
that which is at once most human, most rational, and most divine. Whatever
controversy rages as to the factors of Evolution, whatever mystery enshrouds
its steps, no doubt exists of its goal. The great landmarks we have passed, and
we are not yet half-way up the Ascent, each separately and all together have
declared the course of Nature to be a rational course, and its end a moral end.
At the furthest limit of time, in protoplasm itself, we saw start forth the two
great currents which by their action and reaction, as Selfishness and
Unselfishness, were to supply in ever accentuating clearness the conditions of
the moral life. Following their movements upward through the organic kingdom,
we watched the results which each achieved --always high, and always waxing
higher; and though what we call Evil dogged each step with sinister and
sometimes staggering malevolence, the balance when struck was always good upon
the whole. Then came the last great act of the organic process, the act which
finally revealed to teleology its hitherto obscured end, the organization of
the Mammalia, the Kingdom of the Mothers. So full of ethical possibility is
this single creation that one might stake the character of Evolution upon the
Mammalia alone. On the biological side, as we have seen, the Evolution of the
Mammalia means the Evolution of Mothers; on the sociological side, the
Evolution of the Family; and on the moral side, the Evolution of Love. How are
we to characterize a process which ripened fruits like these? That the very
animal kingdom had for its end and crown a class of animals who owe their name,
their place, and their whole existence to Altruism; that through these Mothers
society has been furnished with an institution for generating, concentrating,
purifying, and redistributing Love in all its enduring forms; that the
perfecting of Love is thus not an incident in Nature but everywhere the largest
part of her task, begun with the first beginnings of life, and continuously
developing quantitatively and qualitatively to the close--all this has been
read into Nature by our own imaginings, or it is the revelation of a purpose of
benevolence and a God whose name is Love. The sceptic, we are sometimes
reminded, has presented crucial difficulties to the theist founded on the
doctrine of Evolution. Here is a problem which the theist may leave with the
sceptic. That that which has emerged has the qualities it has, that even the
Mammalia should have emerged, that that class should stand related to the life
of Man in the way it does, that Man has lived because he loved, and that he
lives to love--these, on any theory but one, are insoluble problems.
Forbidden to follow the Evolution of Love into
the higher fields of history and society, we take courage to make a momentary
exploration in a still lower field--a field so far beneath the plant and animal
level that hitherto we have not dared it conceivable that in inorganic Nature,
among the very material bases of the world, there should be anything to remind
us of the coming of this Tree of Life? To expect even foreshadowings of ethical
characters there were an anachronism too great for expression. Yet there is
something there, something which is at least worth recalling in the present
connection.
The earliest condition in which Science allows us
to picture this globe is that of a fiery mass of nebulous matter. At the second
stage it consists of countless myriads of similar atoms, roughly outlined into
a ragged cloud-ball, glowing with heat, and rotating in space with
inconceivable velocity. By what means can this mass be broken up, or broken
down, or made into a solid world? By two things-- mutual attraction and
chemical affinity. The moment when within this cloud-ball the conditions of
cooling temperature are such that two atoms could combine together the cause of
the Evolution of the Earth is won. For this pair of atoms are chemically
"stronger" than any of the atoms immediately surrounding them. Gradually, by
attraction or affinity, the primitive pair of atoms--like the first pair of
savages-- absorb a third atom, and a fourth, and a fifth, until a "Family" of
atoms is raised up which possesses properties and powers altogether new, and in
virtue of which it holds within its grasp the conquest and servitude of all
surrounding units. From this growing centre, attraction radiates on every side,
until a larger aggregate, a family group--a Tribe--arises and starts a more
powerful centre of its own. With every additional atom added, the power as well
as the complexity of the combination increases. As the process goes on, after
endless vicissitudes, repulsions, and readjustments, the changes become fewer
and fewer, the conflict between mass and mass dies down, the elements passing
through various stages of liquidity finally combine in the order of their
affinities, arrange themselves in the order of their densities, and the solid
earth is finished.
Now recall the names of the leading actors in
this stupendous reformation. They are two in number, mutual attraction and
chemical affinity. Notice these words--Attraction, Affinity. Notice that the
great formative forces of physical Evolution have psychical names. It is idle
to discuss whether there is or can be any identity between the thing
represented in the one case and in the other. Obviously there cannot be. Yet
this does not exhaust the interest of the analogy. In reality, neither here nor
anywhere, have we any knowledge whatever of what is actually meant by
Attraction; nor, in the one sphere or in the other, have we even the means of
approximating to such knowledge. To Newton himself the very conception of one
atom or one mass, attracting through empty space another atom or another mass,
put his mental powers to confusion. And as to the term Affinity, the most
recent Chemistry, finding it utterly unfathomable in itself, confines its
research at present to the investigation of its modes of action. Science does
not know indeed what forces are; it only classifies them. Here, as in every
deep recess of physical Nature, we are in the presence of that which is
metaphysical, that which bars the way imperiously at every turn to a
materialistic interpretation of the world. Yet name and nature of force apart,
what affinity even the grossest, what likeness even the most remote, could one
have expected to trace between the gradual aggregation of units of matter in
the condensation of a weltering star, and the slow segregation of men in the
organization of societies and nations? However different the agents, is there
no suggestion that they are different stages of a uniform process, different
epochs of one great historical enterprise, different results of a single
evolutionary law?
Read from the root, we define this age-long
process by a word borrowed from the science of roots--a word from the
clay--Evolution. But read from the top, Evolution is an impossible word to
describe it. The word is Involution. It is not a Stigmaria world, but a
Sigillaria world; a spiritual, not a material universe. Evolution is
Advolution; better, it is Revelation--the phenomenal expression of the Divine,
the progressive realization of the Ideal, the Ascent of Love. Evolution is a
doctrine of unimaginable grandeur. That Man should discern the prelude to his
destiny in the voices of the stars; that the heart of Nature should be a so
human heart; that its eternal enterprise should be one with his ideals; that
even in the Universe beyond, the Reason which presides should have so strange a
kinship with that measure of it which he calls his own; that he, an atom in
that Universe, should dare to feel himself at home within it, should stand
beside Immensity, Infinity, Eternity, unaffrighted and undismayed--these things
bewilder Man the more that they bewilder him so little.
But one verdict is possible as to the practical
import of this great doctrine, as to its bearing upon the individual life and
the future of the race. Evolution has ushered a new hope into the world. The
supreme message of science to this age is that all Nature is on the side of the
man who tries to rise. Evolution, development, progress are not only on her
programme, these are her programme. For all things are rising, all worlds, all
planets, all stars and suns. An ascending energy is in the universe, and the
whole moves on with one mighty idea and anticipation. The aspiration in the
human mind and heart is but the evolutionary tendency of the universe becoming
conscious. Darwin's great discovery, or the discovery which he brought into
prominence, is the same as Galileo's--that the world moves. The Italian prophet
said it moves from west to east; the English philosopher said it moves from low
to high. And this is the last and most splendid contribution of science to the
faith of the world.
The discovery of a second motion in the earth has
come into the world of thought only in time to save it from despair. As in the
days of Galileo, there are many even now who do not see that the world
moves--men to whom the earth is but an endless plain, a prison fixed in a
purposeless universe where untried prisoners await their unknown fate. It is
not the monotony of life which destroys men, but its pointlessness; they can
bear its weight, its meaninglessness crushes them. But the same great
revolution that the discovery of the axial rotation of the earth effected in
the realm of physics, the announcement of the doctrine of Evolution makes in
the moral world. Already, even in these days of its dawn, a sudden and
marvellous light has fallen upon earth and heaven. Evolution is less a doctrine
than a light; it is a light revealing in the chaos of the past a perfect and
growing order, giving meaning even to the confusions of the present,
discovering through all the deviousness around us the paths of progress, and
flashing its rays already upon a coming goal. Men begin to see an undeviating
ethical purpose in this material world, a tide, that from eternity has never
turned, making for perfectness. In that vast progression of Nature, that vision
of all things from the first of time moving from low to high, from
incompleteness to completeness, from imperfection to perfection, the moral
nature recognizes in all its height and depth the eternal claim upon itself.
Wholeness, perfection, love--these have always been required of Man. But never
before on the natural plane have they been proclaimed by voices so commanding,
or enforced by sanctions so great and rational.
Is Nature henceforth to become the ethical
teacher of the world? Shall its aims become the guide, its spirit the
inspiration of Man's life? Is there no ground here where all the faiths and all
the creeds may meet--nay, no ground for a final faith and a final creed? For
could but all men see the inner meaning and aspiration of the natural order
should we not find at last the universal religion--a religion congruous with
the whole past of Man, at one with Nature, and with a working creed which
Science could accept?
The answer is a simple one: We have it already.
There exists a religion which has anticipated all these requirements--a
religion which has been before the world these eighteen hundred years, whose
congruity with Nature and with Man stands the tests at every point. Up to this
time no word has been spoken to reconcile Christianity with Evolution, or
Evolution with Christianity. And why? Because the two are one. What is
Evolution? A method of creation. What is its object? To make more perfect
living beings. What is Christianity? A method of creation. What is its object?
To make more perfect living beings. Through what does Evolution work? Through
Love. Through what does Christianity work? Through Love. Evolution and
Christianity have the same Author, the same end, the same spirit. There is no
rivalry between these processes. Christianity struck into the Evolutionary
process with no noise or shock; it upset nothing of all that had been done; it
took all the natural foundations precisely as it found them; it adopted Man's
body, mind, and soul at the exact level where Organic Evolution was at work
upon them; it carried on the building by slow and gradual modifications; and,
through processes governed by rational laws, it put the finishing touches to
the Ascent of Man.
No man can run up the natural lines of Evolution
without coming to Christianity at the top. One holds no brief to buttress
Christianity in this way. But science has to deal with facts and with all
facts, and the facts and processes which have received the name of Christian
are the continuations of the scientific order, as much the successors of these
facts and the continuations of these processes--due allowances being made for
the differences in the planes, and for the new factors which appear with each
new plane--as the facts and processes of biology are of those of the mineral
world. We land here, not from choice, but from necessity. Christianity--it is
not said any particular form of Christianity--but Christianity, is the Further
Evolution.
"The glory of Christianity," urged Jowett, "is
not to be as unlike other religions as possible, but to be their perfection and
fulfilment." The divinity of Christianity, it might be added, is not to be as
unlike Nature as possible, but to be its coronation; the fulfilment of its
promise; the rallying point of its forces; the beginning not of a new end, but
of an infinite acceleration of the processes by which the end, eternal from the
beginning, was henceforth to be realized. A religion which is Love and a Nature
which is Love can never but be one. The infinite exaltation in quality is what
the progressive revelation from the beginning has taught us to expect.
Christianity, truly, has its own phenomena: its special processes; its factors
altogether unique. But these do not excommunicate it from God's order. They are
in line with all that has gone before, the latest disclosure of Environment.
Most strange to us and new, most miraculous and supernatural when looked at
from beneath, they are the normal phenomena of altitude, the revelation natural
to the highest height. While Evolution never deviates from its course, it
assumes new developments at every stage of the Ascent; and here, as the last
and highest, these specializations, accelerations, modifications, are most
revolutionary of all. For the evolving products are now no longer the prey and
tool of the Struggle for Life--the normal dynamic of the world's youth. For
them its appeal is vain; its force is spent ; a quicker road to progress has
been found. No longer driven from below by the Animal Struggle, they are drawn
upward from above; no longer compelled by hate or hunger, by rivalry or fear,
they feel impelled by Love; they realize the dignity reserved for Man alone in
evolving through Ideals. This development through Ideals, the Perfect Ideal
through which all others come, are the unique phenomena of the closing
act--unique not because they are out of relation to what has gone before, but
because the phenomena of the summit are different from the phenomena of the
plain. Apart from these, and not absolutely apart from these--for nothing in
the world can be absolutely apart from anything else, there is nothing in
Christianity which is not in germ in Nature. It is not an excrescence on Nature
but its efflorescence. It is not a side track where a few enthusiasts live
impracticable lives on impossible ideals. It is the main stream of history and
of science, and the only current set from eternity for the progress of the
world and the perfecting of a human race.
We began these chapters with the understanding
that Evolution is history, the scientific history of the world. Christianity is
history, a history of some of the later steps in the Evolution of the world.
The continuity between them is a continuity of spirit; their forms are
different, their forces confluent. Christianity did not begin at the Christian
era, it is as old as Nature; did not drop like a bolt from Eternity, came in
the fulness of Time. The attempt to prove an alibi for Christianity; to
show that it was in the skies till the Christian era opened, is as fatal to its
acceptance by Science as it is useless for defence to Theology. What emerges
from Nature as the final result of Creation is none other than that immortal
principle which, reinforced, is the instrument and end of the new Creation.
The attempt of Science, on the other hand, to
hold itself aloof from the later phases of developments which in their earlier
stages it so devotes itself to trace, is either ignorance or sheer affectation.
For that Altruism which we found struggling to express itself throughout the
whole course of Nature, What is it? "Altruism is the new and very affected name
for the old familiar things which we used to call Charity, Philanthropy, and
Love."[97] Only by shutting its eyes can
Science evade the discovery of the roots of Christianity in every province that
it enters; and when it does discover them, it is only by disguising words that
it can succeed in disowning the relationship. There is nothing unscientific in
accepting that relationship; there is much that is unscientific in dishonouring
it. The Will behind Evolution is not dead; the heart beneath Nature is not
stilled. Love not only was; it is; it moves; it spreads. To ignore the later
and most striking phases is to fail to see what the earlier process really was,
and to leave the ancient task of Evolution historically incomplete. That
Christian development, social, moral, spiritual, which is going on around us,
is as real an evolutionary movement as any that preceded it, and at least as
capable of scientific expression. A system founded on Self-Sacrifice, whose
fittest symbol is the Leaven, whose organic development has its natural analogy
in the growth of a Mustard Tree, is not a foreign thing to the Evolutionist;
and that prophet of the Kingdom of God was no less the spokesman of Nature who
proclaimed that the end of Man is "that which we had from the beginning, that
we love."
In the profoundest sense, this is scientific
doctrine. The Ascent of Man and of Society is bound up henceforth with the
conflict, the intensification, and the diffusion of the Struggle for the Life
of Others. This is the Further Evolution, the page of history that lies before
us, the closing act of the drama of Man. The Struggle may be short or long; but
by all scientific analogy the result is sure. All the other Kingdoms of Nature
were completed; Evolution always attains; always rounds off its work. It spent
an eternity over the earth, but finished it. It struggled for millenniums to
bring the Vegetable Kingdom up to the Flowering Plants, and attained. In the
Animal Kingdom it never paused until the possibilities of organization were
exhausted in the Mammalia. Kindled by this past, Man may surely say, "I shall
arrive." The succession cannot break. The Further Evolution must go on, the
Higher Kingdom come--first the blade, where we are to-day; then the ear, where
we shall be to-morrow; then the full corn in the ear, which awaits our
children's children, and which we live to hasten.
END
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY
ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
[93] Duke of Argyll, The Unity of
Nature, p. 44.
[94] Balfour Stewart and Tait, The Unseen
Universe, 6th edition, p. 221.
[95] Edward Caird, The Evolution of
Religion, Vol. I., pp. 49-50.
[96] Martineau, Essays, Philosophical and
Theological, p. 141.
[97] Duke of Argyll, Edinburgh Review,
April, 1894.