Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays
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Thomas H. Huxley >> Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays
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We could not affirm that the arguments for design in Nature are
conclusive to all minds. But we may insist, upon grounds already
intimated, that, whatever they were good for before Darwins book
appeared, they are good for now. To our minds the argument from design
always appeared conclusive of the being and continued operation of an
intelligent First Cause, the Ordainer of Nature; and we do not see that
the grounds of such belief would be disturbed or shifted by the
adoption of Darwins hypothesis. We are not blind to the philosophical
difficulties which the thoroughgoing implication of design in Nature
has to encounter, nor is it our vocation to obviate them It suffices us
to know that they are not new nor peculiar difficulties--that, as
Darwin s theory and our reasonings upon it did not raise these
perturbing spirits, they are not bound to lay them. Meanwhile, that the
doctrine of design encounters the very same difficulties in the
material that it does in the moral world is Just what ought to be
expected.
So the issue between the skeptic and the theist is only the old one,
long ago argued out--namely, whether organic Nature is a result of
design or of chance. Variation and natural selection open no third
alternative; they concern only the question how the results, whether
fortuitous or designed, may have been brought about. Organic Nature
abounds with unmistakable and irresistible indications of design, and,
being a connected and consistent system, this evidence carries the
implication of design throughout the whole. On the other hand, chance
carries no probabilities with it, can never be developed into a
consistent system, but, when applied to the explanation of orderly or
beneficial results, heaps up improbabilities at every step beyond all
computation. To us, a fortuitous Cosmos is simply inconceivable. The
alternative is a designed Cosmos.
It is very easy to assume that, because events in Nature are in one
sense accidental, and the operative forces which bring them to pass are
themselves blind and unintelligent (physically considered, all forces
are), therefore they are undirected, or that he who describes these
events as the results of such forces thereby assumes that they are
undirected. This is the assumption of the Boston reviewers, and of Mr.
Agassiz, who insists that the only alternative to the doctrine, that
all organized beings were supernaturally created just as they are, is,
that they have arisen spontaneously through the omnipotence of
matter.[III-11]
As to all this, nothing is easier than to bring out in the conclusion
what you introduce in the premises. If you import atheism into your
conception of variation and natural selection, you can readily exhibit
it in the result. If you do not put it in, perhaps there need be none
to come out. While the mechanician is considering a steamboat or
locomotive-engine as a material organism, and contemplating the fuel,
water, and steam, the source of the mechanical forces, and how they
operate, he may not have occasion to mention the engineer. But, the
orderly and special results accomplished, the why the movements are in
this or that particular direction, etc., is inexplicable without him.
If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he supposes to have
occurred and the results we behold were undirected and undesigned, or
if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers
phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is needed to show
that such belief is atheism. But the admission of the phenomena and of
these natural processes and forces does not necessitate any such
belief, nor even render it one whit less improbable than before.
Surely, too, the accidental element may play its part in Nature without
negativing design in the theists view. He believes that the earths
surface has been very gradually prepared for man and the existing
animal races, that vegetable matter has through a long series of
generations imparted fertility to the soil in order that it may support
its present occupants, that even beds of coal have been stored up for
mans benefit Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the
consequence of physical agencies than the accumulation of vegetable
matter in a peat bog and its transformation into coal? No scientific
person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive
development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or
aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast
extent, from which the specific existing worlds have been developed one
by one What theist doubts that the actual results of the development in
the inorganic worlds are not merely compatible with design but are in
the truest sense designed re suits? Not Mr. Agassiz, certainly, who
adopts a remarkable illustration of design directly founded on the
nebular hypothesis drawing from the position and times of the
revolution of the world, so originated direct evidence that the
physical world has been ordained in conformity with laws which obtain
also among living beings But the reader of the interesting
exposition[III-12] will notice that the designed result has been
brought to pass through what, speaking after the manner of men, might
be called a chapter of accidents.
A natural corollary of this demonstration would seem to be, that a
material connection between a series of created things--such as the
development of one of them from another, or of all from a common
stock--is highly compatible with their intellectual connection, namely,
with their being designed and directed by one mind. Yet upon some
ground which is not explained, and which we are unable to conjecture,
Mr. Agassiz concludes to the contrary in the organic kingdoms, and
insists that, because the members of such a series have an intellectual
connection, "they cannot be the result of a material differentiation of
the objects themselves,"[III-13] that is, they cannot have had a
genealogical connection. But is there not as much intellectual
connection between the successive generations of any species as there
is between the several species of a genus, or the several genera of an
order? As the intellectual connection here is realized through the
material connection, why may it not be so in the case of species and
genera? On all sides, therefore, the implication seems to be quite the
other way.
Returning to the accidental element, it is evident that the strongest
point against the compatibility of Darwins hypothesis with design in
Nature is made when natural selection is referred to as picking out
those variations which are improvements from a vast number which are
not improvements, but perhaps the contrary, and therefore useless or
purposeless, and born to perish. But even here the difficulty is not
peculiar; for Nature abounds with analogous instances. Some of our race
are useless, or worse, as regards the improvement of mankind; yet the
race may be designed to improve, and may be actually improving. Or, to
avoid the complication with free agency--the whole animate life of a
country depends absolutely upon the vegetation, the vegetation upon the
rain. The moisture is furnished by the ocean, is raised by the suns
heat from the oceans surface, and is wafted inland by the winds. But
what multitudes of raindrops fall back into the ocean--are as much
without a final cause as the incipient varieties which come to
nothing! Does it therefore follow that the rains which are bestowed
upon the soil with such rule and average regularity were not designed
to support vegetable and animal life? Consider, likewise, the vast
proportion of seeds and pollen, of ova and young--a thousand or more to
one--which come to nothing, and are therefore purposeless in the same
sense, and only in the same sense, as are Darwins unimproved and unused
slight variations. The world is full of such cases; and these must
answer the argument--for we cannot, except by thus showing that it
proves too much.
Finally, it is worth noticing that, though natural selection is
scientifically explicable, variation is not. Thus far the cause of
variation, or the reason why the offspring is sometimes unlike the
parents, is just as mysterious as the reason why it is generally like
the parents. It is now as inexplicable as any other origination; and,
if ever explained, the explanation will only carry up the sequence of
secondary causes one step farther, and bring us in face of a somewhat
different problem, but which will have the same element of mystery that
the problem of variation has now. Circumstances may preserve or may
destroy the variations man may use or direct them but selection whether
artificial or natural no more originates them than man originates the
power which turns a wheel when he dams a stream and lets the water fall
upon it The origination of this power is a question about efficient
cause. The tendency of science in respect to this obviously is not
toward the omnipotence of matter, as some suppose, but to ward the
omnipotence of spirit.
So the real question we come to is as to the way in which we are to
conceive intelligent and efficient cause to be exerted, and upon what
exerted. Are we bound to suppose efficient cause in all cases exerted
upon nothing to evoke something into existence--and this thousands of
times repeated, when a slight change in the details would make all the
difference between successive species? Why may not the new species, or
some of them, be designed diversifications of the old?
There are, perhaps, only three views of efficient cause which may claim
to be both philosophical and theistic:
1. The view of its exertion at the beginning of time, endowing matter
and created things with forces which do the work and produce the
phenomena.
2. This same view, with the theory of insulated interpositions, or
occasional direct action, engrafted upon it--the view that events and
operations in general go on in virtue simply of forces communicated at
the first, but that now and then, and only now and then, the Deity puts
his hand directly to the work.
3. The theory of the immediate, orderly, and constant, however
infinitely diversified, action of the intelligent efficient Cause.
It must be allowed that, while the third is preeminently the Christian
view, all three are philosophically compatible with design in Nature.
The second is probably the popular conception. Perhaps most thoughtful
people oscillate from the middle view toward the first or the
third--adopting the first on some occasions, the third on others. Those
philosophers who like and expect to settle all mooted questions will
take one or the other extreme. The Examiner inclines toward, the North
American reviewer fully adopts, the third view, to the logical extent
of maintaining that "the origin of an individual, as well as the origin
of a species or a genus, can be explained only by the direct action of
an intelligent creative cause." To silence his critics, this is the
line for Mr. Darwin to take; for it at once and completely relieves his
scientific theory from every theological objection which his reviewers
have urged against it.
At present we suspect that our author prefers the first conception,
though he might contend that his hypothesis is compatible with either
of the three. That it is also compatible with an atheistic or
pantheistic conception of the universe, is an objection which, being
shared by all physical, and some ethical or moral science, cannot
specially be urged against Darwins system. As he rejects spontaneous
generation, and admits of intervention at the beginning of organic
life, and probably in more than one instance, he is not wholly excluded
from adopting the middle view, although the interventions he would
allow are few and far back. Yet one interposition admits the principle
as well as more. Interposition presupposes particular necessity or
reason for it, and raises the question, when and how often it may have
been necessary. It might be the natural supposition, if we had only one
set of species to account for, or if the successive inhabitants of the
earth had no other connections or resemblances than those which
adaptation to similar conditions, which final causes in the narrower
sense, might explain. But if this explanation of organic Nature
requires one to "believe that, at innumerable periods in the earths
history, certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash
into living tissues," and this when the results are seen to be strictly
connected and systematic, we cannot wonder that such interventions
should at length be considered, not as interpositions or interferences,
but rather--to use the reviewers own language--as "exertions so
frequent and beneficent that we come to regard them as the ordinary
action of Him who laid the foundation of the earth, and without whom
not a sparrow falleth to the ground."[III-14] What does the difference
between Mr. Darwin and his reviewer now amount to? If we say that
according to one view the origination of species is natural, according
to the other miraculous, Mr. Darwin agrees that "what is natural as
much requires and presupposes an intelligent mind to render it so--
that is, to effect it continually or at stated times--as what is
supernatural does to effect it for once."[III-15] He merely inquires
into the form of the miracle, may remind us that all recorded miracles
(except the primal creation of matter) were transformations or actions
in and upon natural things, and will ask how many times and how
frequently may the origination of successive species be repeated before
the supernatural merges in the natural.
In short, Darwin maintains that the origination of a species, no less
than that of an individual, is natural; the reviewer, that the natural
origination of an individual, no less than the origination of a
species, requires and presupposes Divine power. A fortiori, then, the
origination of a variety requires and presupposes Divine power. And so
between the scientific hypothesis of the one and the philosophical
conception of the other no contrariety remains. And so, concludes the
North American reviewer, "a proper view of the nature of causation
places the vital doctrine of the being and the providence of a God on
ground that can never be shaken."[III-16] A worthy conclusion, and a
sufficient answer to the denunciations and arguments of the rest of the
article, so far as philosophy and natural theology are concerned. If a
writer must needs use his own favorite dogma as a weapon with which to
give coup de grace to a pernicious theory, he should be careful to
seize his edge-tool by the handle, and not by the blade.
We can barely glance at a subsidiary philosophical objection of the
North American reviewer, which the Examiner also raises, though less
explicitly. Like all geologists, Mr. Darwin draws upon time in the
most unlimited manner. He is not peculiar in this regard. Mr. Agassiz
tells us that the conviction is "now universal, among well-informed
naturalists, that this globe has been in existence for innumerable
ages, and that the length of time elapsed since it first became
inhabited cannot be counted in years;" Pictet, that the imagination
refuses to calculate the immense number of years and of ages during
which the faunas of thirty or more epochs have succeeded one another,
and developed their long succession of generations. Now, the reviewer
declares that such indefinite succession of ages is "virtually
infinite," "lacks no characteristic of eternity except its name," at
least, that "the difference between such a conception and that of the
strictly infinite, if any, is not appreciable." But infinity belongs to
metaphysics. Therefore, he concludes, Darwin supports his theory, not
by scientific but by metaphysical evidence; his theory is "essentially
and completely metaphysical in character, resting altogether upon that
idea of the infinite which the human mind can neither put aside nor
comprehend."[III-17] And so a theory which will be generally regarded
as much too physical is transferred by a single syllogism to
metaphysics.
Well, physical geology must go with it: for, even on the soberest view,
it demands an indefinitely long time antecedent to the introduction of
organic life upon our earth. A fortiori is physical astronomy a branch
of metaphysics, demanding, as it does, still larger "instalments of
infinity," as the reviewer calls them, both as to time and number.
Moreover, far the greater part of physical inquiries now relate to
molecular actions, which, a distinguished natural philosopher informs
us, "we have to regard as the results of an infinite number of in
finitely small material particles, acting on each other at infinitely
small distances"--a triad of infinities--and so physics becomes the
most metaphysical of sciences. Verily, if this style of reasoning is
to prevail--
"Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And naught is everything, and everything is naught."
The leading objection of Mr. Agassiz is likewise of a philosophical
character. It is, that species exist only "as categories of
thought"--that, having no material existence, they can have had no
material variation, and no material community of origin. Here the
predication is of species in the subjective sense, the inference in the
objective sense. Reduced to plain terms, the argument seems to be:
Species are ideas; therefore the objects from which the idea is derived
cannot vary or blend, and cannot have had a genealogical connection.
The common view of species is, that, although they are generalizations,
yet they have a direct objective ground in Nature, which genera,
orders, etc., have not. According to the succinct definition of
Jussieu--and that of Linnaeus is identical in meaning--a species is the
perennial succession of similar individuals in continued generations.
The species is the chain of which the individuals are the links. The
sum of the genealogically-connected similar individuals constitutes the
species, which thus has an actuality and ground of distinction not
shared by genera and other groups which were not supposed to be
genealogically connected. How a derivative hypothesis would modify this
view, in assigning to species only a temporary fixity, is obvious. Yet,
if naturalists adopt that hypothesis, they will still retain Jussieus
definition, which leaves untouched the question as to how and when the
"perennial successions" were established. The practical question will
only be, How much difference between two sets of individuals entitles
them to rank under distinct species? and that is the practical question
now, on whatever theory. The theoretical question is--as stated at the
beginning of this article--whether these specific lines were always as
distinct as now.
Mr. Agassiz has "lost no opportunity of urging the idea that, while
species have no material existence, they yet exist as categories of
thought in the same way [and only in the same way] as genera, families,
orders, classes," etc. He
"has taken the ground that all the natural divisions in the animal
kingdom are primarily distinct, founded upon different categories of
characters, and that all exist in the same way, that is, as categories
of thought, embodied in individual living forms. I have attempted to
show that branches in the animal kingdom are founded upon different
plans of structure, and for that very reason have embraced from the
beginning representatives between which there could be no community of
origin; that classes are founded upon different modes of execution of
these plans, and therefore they also embrace representatives which
could have no community of origin; that orders represent the different
degrees of complication in the mode of execution of each class, and
therefore embrace representatives which could not have a community of
origin any more than the members of different classes or branches; that
families are founded upon different patterns of form, and embrace,
representatives equally independent in their origin; that genera are
founded upon ultimate peculiarities of structure, embracing
representatives which, from the very nature of their peculiarities,
could have no community of origin; and that, finally, species are based
upon relations--and proportions that exclude, as much as all the
preceding distinctions, the idea of a common descent.
"As the community of characters among the beings belonging to these
different categories arises from the intellectual connection which
shows them to be categories of thought, they cannot be the result of a
gradual
material differentiation of the objects themselves. The argument on
which these views are founded may be summed up in the following few
words: Species, genera, families, etc., exist as thoughts, individuals
as facts."[III-18]
An ingenious dilemma caps the argument:
"It seems to me that there is much confusion of ideas in the general
statement of the variability of species so often repeated lately. If
species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation
theory maintain, how can they vary? And if individuals alone exist, how
can the differences which may be observed among them prove the
variability of species?"
Now, we imagine that Mr. Darwin need not be dangerously gored by either
horn of this curious dilemma. Although we ourselves cherish
old-fashioned prejudices in favor of the probable permanence, and
therefore of a more stable objective ground of species, yet we
agree--and Mr. Darwin will agree fully with Mr. Agassiz--that species,
and he will add varieties, "exist as categories of thought," that is,
as cognizable distinctions--which is all that we can make of the phrase
here, whatever it may mean in the Aristotelian metaphysics. Admitting
that species are only categories of thought, and not facts or things,
how does this prevent the individuals, which are material things, from
having varied in the course of time, so as to exemplify the present
almost innumerable categories of thought, or embodiments of Divine
thought in material forms, or--viewed on the human side--in forms
marked with such orderly and graduated resemblances and differences as
to suggest to our minds the idea of species, genera, orders, etc., and
to our reason the inference of a Divine Original? We have no clear idea
how Mr. Agassiz intends to answer this question, in saying that
branches are founded upon different plans of structure, classes upon
different mode of execution of these plans, orders on different degrees
of complication in the mode of execution, families upon different
patterns of form, genera upon ultimate peculiarities of structure, and
species upon relations and proportions. That is, we do not perceive how
these several "categories of thought" exclude the possibility or the
probability that the individuals which manifest or suggest the thoughts
had an ultimate community of origin.
Moreover, Mr. Darwin might insinuate that the particular philosophy of
classification upon which this whole argument reposes is as purely
hypothetical and as little accepted as is his own doctrine. If both are
pure hypotheses, it is hardly fair or satisfactory to extinguish the
one by the other. If there is no real contradiction between them,
nothing is gained by the attempt.
As to the dilemma propounded, suppose we try it upon that category of
thought which we call chair. This is a genus, comprising a common chair
(Sella vulgaris), arm or easy chair (S. cathedra), the rocking-chair
(S. oscillans)--widely distributed in the United States--and some
others, each of which has sported, as the gardeners say, into many
varieties. But now, as the genus and the species have no material
existence, how can they vary? If only individual chairs exist, how can
the differences which may be observed among them prove the variability
of the species? To which we reply by asking, Which does the question
refer to, the category of thought, or the individual embodiment? If the
former, then we would remark that our categories of thought vary from
time to time in the readiest manner. And, although the Divine thoughts
are eternal, yet they are manifested to us in time and succession, and
by their manifestation only can we know them, how imperfectly! Allowing
that what has no material existence can have had no material connection
or variation, we should yet infer that what has intellectual existence
and connection might have intellectual variation; and, turning to the
individuals, which represent the species, we do not see how all this
shows that they may not vary. Observation shows us that they do.
Wherefore, taught by fact that successive individuals do vary, we
safely infer that the idea must have varied, and that this variation of
the individual representatives proves the variability of the species,
whether objectively or subjectively regarded.
Each species or sort of chair, as we have said, has its varieties, and
one species shades off by gradations into another. And--note it
well--these numerous and successively slight variations and gradations,
far from suggesting an accidental origin to chairs and to their forms,
are very proofs of design.
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