Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays

T >> Thomas H. Huxley >> Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays

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* Adam Smith makes the pithy observation that the man who
sympathises with a woman in childbed, cannot be said to put
himself in her place. ("The Theory of the Moral Sentiments,"
Part vii. sec. iii. chap. i.) Perhaps there is more humour than
force in the example; and, in spite of this and other
observations of the same tenor, I think that the one defect of
the remarkable work in which it occurs is that it lays too much
stress on conscious substitution, too little on purely reflex
sympathy.

** Esther v. 9-13. ". . . but when Haman saw Mordecai in the
king's gate, that he stood not up, nor moved for him, he was
full of indignation against Mordecai. . . . And Haman told them
of the glory of his riches . . . and all the things wherein the
king had promoted him . . . Yet all this availeth me nothing,
so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate."
What a shrewd exposure of human weakness it is!

It is needful only to look around us, to see that the greatest
restrainer of the anti-social tendencies of men is fear, not of the
law, but of the opinion of their fellows. The conventions of honour
bind men who break legal, moral, and religious bonds; and, while
people endure the extremity of physical pain rather than part with
life, shame drives the weakest to suicide.

Every forward step of social progress brings [30] men into closer
relations with their fellows, and increases the importance of the
pleasures and pains derived from sympathy. We judge the acts of others
by our own sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sympathies of
others, every day and all day long, from childhood upwards, until
associations, as indissoluble as those of language, are formed between
certain acts and the feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It
becomes impossible to imagine some acts without disapprobation, or
others without approbation of the actor, whether he be one's self, or
any one else. We come to think in the acquired dialect of morals. An
artificial personality, the "man within," as Adam Smith* calls
conscience, is built up beside the natural personality. He is the
watchman of society, charged to restrain the anti-social tendencies of
the natural man within the limits required by social welfare.

* "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," Part iii. chap. 3. On the
Influence and Authority of Conscience.

XI.

I have termed this evolution of the feelings out of which the
primitive bonds of human society are so largely forged, into the
organized and personified sympathy we call conscience, the ethical
process.* So far as it tends to

* Worked out, in its essential features, chiefly by Hartley and
Adam Smith, long before the modern doctrine of evolution was
thought of. See Note below, p. 45.

[31] make any human society more efficient in the struggle for
existence with the state of nature, or with other societies, it works
in harmonious contrast with the cosmic process. But it is none the
less true that, since law and morals are restraints upon the struggle
for existence between men in society, 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.*

* See the essay "On the Struggle for Existence in Human Society"
below; and Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 276, for Kant's
recognition of these facts.

It is further to be observed that, just as the self-assertion,
necessary to the maintenance of society against the state of nature,
will destroy that society if it is allowed free operation within; so
the self-restraint, the essence of the ethical process, which is no
less an essential condition of the existence of every polity, may, by
excess, become ruinous to it.

Moralists of all ages and of all faiths, attending only to the
relations of men towards one another in an ideal society, have agreed
upon the "golden rule," "Do as you would be done by." In other words,
let sympathy be your guide; put yourself in the place of the man
towards whom your action is directed; and do to him what you would
like to have done to yourself under the circumstances. However much
one may admire the generosity of such a rule of [32] conduct; however
confident one may be that average men may be thoroughly depended upon
not to carry it out to its full logical consequences; it is
nevertheless desirable to recognise the fact that these consequences
are incompatible with the existence of a civil state, under any
circumstances of this world which have obtained, or, so far as one can
see, are, likely to come to pass.

For I imagine there can be no doubt that the great desire of every
wrongdoer is to escape from the painful consequences of his actions.
If I put myself in the place of the man who has robbed me, I find that
I am possessed by an exceeding desire not to be fined or imprisoned;
if in that of the man who has smitten me on one cheek, I contemplate
with satisfaction the absence of any worse result than the turning of
the other cheek for like treatment. Strictly observed, the "golden
rule" involves the negation of law by the refusal to put it in motion
against law-breakers; and, as regards the external relations of a
polity, it is the refusal to continue the struggle for existence. It
can be obeyed, even partially, only under the protection of a society
which repudiates it. Without such shelter, the followers of the
"golden rule" may indulge in hopes of heaven, but they must reckon with
the certainty that other people will be masters of the earth.

What would become of the garden if the [33] gardener treated all the
weeds and slugs, and birds and trespassers as he would like to be
treated, if he were in their place?

XII.

Under the preceding heads, I have endeavoured to represent in broad,
but I hope faithful, outlines the essential features of the state of
nature and of that cosmic process of which it is the outcome, so far
as was needful for my argument; I have contrasted with the state of
nature the state of art, produced by human intelligence and energy, as
it is exemplified by a garden; and I have shown that the state of art,
here and elsewhere, can be maintained only by the constant
counteraction of the hostile influences of the state of nature.
Further, I have pointed out that the "horticultural process," which
thus sets itself against the "cosmic process" is opposed to the latter
in principle, in so far as it tends to arrest the struggle for
existence, by restraining the multiplication which is one of the chief
causes of that struggle, and by creating artificial conditions of
life, better adapted to the cultivated plants than are the conditions
of the state of nature. And I have dwelt upon the fact that, though
the progressive modification, which is the consequence of the struggle
for existence in the state of nature, is at an end, such modification
may still be effected [34] by that selection, in view of an ideal of
usefulness, or of pleasantness, to man, of which the state of nature
knows nothing.

I have proceeded to show that a colony, set down in a country in the
state of nature, presents close analogies with a garden; and I have
indicated the course of action which an administrator, able and
willing to carry out horticultural principles, would adopt, in order
to secure the success of such a newly formed polity, supposing it to
be capable of indefinite expansion. In the contrary case, I have shown
that difficulties must arise; that the unlimited increase of the
population over a limited area must, sooner or later, reintroduce into
the colony that struggle for the means of existence between the
colonists, which it was the primary object of the administrator to
exclude, insomuch as it is fatal to the mutual peace which is the
prime condition of the union of men in society.

I have briefly described the nature of the only radical cure, known to
me, for the disease which would thus threaten the existence of the
colony; and, however regretfully, I have been obliged to admit that
this rigorously scientific method of applying the principles of
evolution to human society hardly comes within the region of practical
politics; not for want of will on the part of a great many people; but
because, for one reason, there is no hope that mere human beings will
ever possess enough intelligence to select the fittest. And I [35]
have adduced other grounds for arriving at the same conclusion.

I have pointed out that human society took its rise in the organic
necessities expressed by imitation and by the sympathetic emotions;
and that, in the struggle for existence with the state of nature and
with other societies, as part of it, those in which men were thus led
to close co-operation bad a great advantage.* But, since each man
retained more or less of the faculties common to all the rest, and
especially a full share of the desire for unlimited
self-gratification, the struggle for existence within society could
only be gradually eliminated. So long as any of it remained, society
continued to be an imperfect instrument of the struggle for existence
and, consequently, was improvable by the selective influence of that
struggle. Other things being alike, the tribe of savages in which
order was best maintained; in which there was most security within the
tribe and the most loyal mutual support outside it, would be the
survivors.

* Collected Essays, vol. v., Prologue, p. 52.

I have termed this gradual strengthening of the social bond, which,
though it arrest the struggle for existence inside society, up to a
certain point improves the chances of society, as a corporate whole,
in the cosmic struggle--the ethical process. I have endeavoured to
show that, when the ethical process has advanced so far as to secure
[36] every member of the society in the possession of the means of
existence, the struggle for existence, as between man and man, within
that society is, ipso facto, at an end. And, as it is undeniable that
the most highly civilized societies have substantially reached this
position, it follows that, so far as they are concerned, the struggle
for existence can play no important part within them.* In other words,
the kind of evolution which is brought about in the state of nature
cannot take place.

* Whether the struggle for existence with the state of nature
and with other societies, so far as they stand in the relation
of the state of nature with it, exerts a selective influence
upon modern society, and in what direction, are questions not
easy to answer. The problem of the effect of military and
industrial warfare upon those who wage it is very complicated.

I have further shown cause for the belief that direct selection, after
the fashion of the horticulturist and the breeder, neither has played,
nor can play, any important part in the evolution of society; apart
from other reasons, because I do not see how such selection could be
practised without a serious weakening, it may be the destruction, of
the bonds which hold society together. It strikes me that men who are
accustomed to contemplate the active or passive extirpation of the
weak, the unfortunate, and the superfluous; who justify that conduct
on the ground that it has the sanction of the cosmic process, and is
the only way of ensuring the progress of the race; who, if [37] they
are consistent, must rank medicine among the black arts and count the
physician a mischievous preserver of the unfit; on whose matrimonial
undertakings the principles of the stud have the chief influence;
whose whole lives, therefore, are an education in the noble art of
suppressing natural affection and sympathy, are not likely to have any
large stock of these commodities left. But, without them, there is no
conscience, nor any restraint on the conduct of men, except the
calculation of self-interest, the balancing of certain present
gratifications against doubtful future pains; and experience tells us
how much that is worth. Every day, we see firm believers in the hell
of the theologians commit acts by which, as they believe when cool,
they risk eternal punishment; while they hold back from those which am
opposed to the sympathies of their associates.

XIII.

That progressive modification of civilization which passes by the name
of the "evolution of society," is, in fact, a process of an
essentially different character, both from that which brings about the
evolution of species, in the state of nature, and from that which
gives rise to the evolution of varieties, in the state of art.

There can be no doubt that vast changes have taken place in English
civilization since the reign [38] of the Tudors. But I am not aware of
a particle of evidence in favour of the conclusion that this
evolutionary process, has been accompanied by any modification of the
physical, or the mental, characters of the men who have been the
subjects of it. I have not met with any grounds for suspecting that
the average Englishmen of to-day are sensibly different from those
that Shakspere knew and drew. We look into his magic mirror of the
Elizabethan age, and behold, nowise darkly, the presentment of
ourselves.

During these three centuries, from the reign of Elizabeth to that of
Victoria, the struggle for existence between man and man has been so
largely restrained among the great mass of the population (except for
one or two short intervals of civil war), that it can have had little,
or no, selective operation. As to anything comparable to direct
selection, it has been practised on so small a scale that it may also
be neglected. The criminal law, in so far as by putting to death or by
subjecting to long periods of imprisonment, those who infringe its
provisions, prevents the propagation of hereditary criminal
tendencies; and the poor-law, in so far as it separates married
couples, whose destitution arises from hereditary defects of
character, are doubtless selective agents operating in favour of the
non-criminal and the more effective members of society. But the
proportion of the population which they influence [39] is very small;
and, generally, the hereditary criminal and the hereditary pauper have
propagated their kind before the law affects them. In a large
proportion of cases, crime and pauperism have nothing to do with
heredity; but are the consequence, partly, of circumstances and,
partly, of the possession of qualities, which, under different
conditions of life, might have excited esteem and even admiration. It
was a shrewd man of the world who, in discussing sewage problems,
remarked that dirt is riches in the wrong place; and that sound
aphorism has moral applications. The benevolence and open-handed
generosity which adorn a rich man, may make a pauper of a poor one;
the energy and courage to which the successful soldier owes his rise,
the cool and daring subtlety to which the great financier owes his
fortune, may very easily, under unfavourable conditions, lead their
possessors to the gallows, or to the hulks. Moreover, it is fairly
probable that the children of a "failure" will receive from their
other parent just that little modification of character which makes
all the difference. I sometimes wonder whether people, who talk so
freely about extirpating the unfit, ever dispassionately consider
their own history. Surely, one must be very "fit," indeed, not to know
of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one's life, when it would have been
only too easy to qualify for a place among the "unfit."

[40] In my belief the innate qualities, physical, intellectual, and
moral, of our nation have remained substantially the same for the last
four or five centuries. If the struggle for existence has affected us
to any serious extent (and I doubt it) it has been, indirectly,
through our military and industrial wars with other nations.

XIV.

What is often called the struggle for existence in society (I plead
guilty to having used the term too loosely myself), is a contest, not
for the means of existence, but for the means of enjoyment. Those who
occupy the first places in this practical competitive examination are
the rich and the influential; those who fail, more or less, occupy the
lower places, down to the squalid obscurity of the pauper and the
criminal. Upon the most liberal estimate, I suppose the former group
will not amount to two per cent. of the population. I doubt if the
latter exceeds another two per cent.; but let it be supposed, for the
sake of argument, that it is as great as five per cent.*

* Those who read the last Essay in this volume will not accuse
me of wishing to attenuate the evil of the existence of this
group, whether great or small.

As it is only in the latter group that any thing comparable to the
struggle for existence in the state of nature can take place; as it is
[41] only among this twentieth of the whole people that numerous men,
women, and children die of rapid or slow starvation, or of the
diseases incidental to permanently bad conditions of life; and as
there is nothing to prevent their multiplication before they are
killed off, while, in spite of greater infant mortality, they increase
faster than the rich; it seems clear that the struggle for existence
in this class can have no appreciable selective influence upon the
other 95 per cent. of the population.

What sort of a sheep breeder would he be who should content himself
with picking out the worst fifty out of a thousand, leaving them on a
barren common till the weakest starved, and then letting the survivors
go back to mix with the rest? And the parallel is too favourable;
since in a large number of cases, the actual poor and the convicted
criminals are neither the weakest nor the worst.

In the struggle for the means of enjoyment, the qualities which ensure
success are energy, industry, intellectual capacity, tenacity of
purpose, and, at least, as much sympathy as is necessary to make a man
understand the feelings of his fellows. Were there none of those
artificial arrangements by which fools and knaves are kept at the top
of society instead of sinking to their natural place at the bottom,*
the struggle for the means [42] of enjoyment would ensure a constant
circulation of the human units of the social compound, from the bottom
to the top and from the top to the bottom. The survivors of the
contest, those who continued to form the great bulk of the polity,
would not be those "fittest" who got to the very top, but the great
body of the moderately "fit," whose numbers and superior propagative
power, enable them always to swamp the exceptionally endowed minority.

* I have elsewhere lamented the absence from society of a
machinery for facilitating the descent of incapacity.
"Administrative Nihilism." Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 54.

I think it must be obvious to every one, that, whether we consider the
internal or the external interests of society, it is desirable they
should be in the hands of those who are endowed with the largest share
of energy, of industry, of intellectual capacity, of tenacity of
purpose, while they are not devoid of sympathetic humanity; and, in so
far as the struggle for the means of enjoyment tends to place such men
in possession of wealth and influence, it is a process which tends to
the good of society. But the process, as we have seen, has no real
resemblance to that which adapts living beings to current conditions
in the state of nature; nor any to the artificial selection of the
horticulturist.

[43] To return, once more, to the parallel of horticulture. In the
modern world, the gardening of men by themselves is practically
restricted to the performance, not of selection, but of that other
function of the gardener, the creation of conditions more favourable
than those of the state of nature; to the end of facilitating the free
expansion of the innate faculties of the citizen, so far as it is
consistent with the general good. And the business of the moral and
political philosopher appears to me to be the ascertainment, by the
same method of observation, experiment, and ratiocination, as is
practised in other kinds of scientific work, of the course of conduct
which will best conduce to that end.

But, supposing this course of conduct to be scientifically determined
and carefully followed out, it cannot put an end to the struggle for
existence in the state of nature; and it will not so much as tend, in
any way, to the adaptation of man to that state. Even should the whole
human race be absorbed in one vast polity, within which "absolute
political justice" reigns, the struggle for existence with the state
of nature outside it, and the tendency to the return to the struggle
within, in consequence of over-multiplication, will remain; and,
unless men's inheritance from the ancestors who fought a good fight in
the state of [44] nature, their dose of original sin, is rooted out by
some method at present unrevealed, at any rate to disbelievers in
supernaturalism, every child born into the world will still bring with
him the instinct of unlimited self-assertion. He will have to learn
the lesson of self-restraint and renunciation. But the practice of
self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be
something much better.

That man, as a "political animal," is susceptible of a vast amount of
improvement, by education, by instruction, and by the application of
his intelligence to the adaptation of the conditions of life to his
higher needs, I entertain not the slightest doubt. But so long as he
remains liable to error, intellectual or moral; so long as he is
compelled to be perpetually on guard against the cosmic forces, whose
ends are not his ends, without and within himself; so long as he is
haunted by inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as
the recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him to
acknowledge his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; 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.

That which lies before the human race is a [45] constant struggle to
maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State
of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop
a worthy civilization, capable of maintaining and constantly improving
itself, 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.

Note: (See p. 30).--It seems the fashion nowadays to ignore
Hartley; though, a century and a half ago, he not only laid the
foundations but built up much of the superstructure of a true theory
of the Evolution of the intellectual and moral faculties. He speaks of
what I have termed the ethical process as "our Progress from
Self-interest to Self-annihilation." Observations on Man (1749), vol.
ii p. 281.

[46]

II.

EVOLUTION AND ETHICS.

[The Romanes Lecture, 1893.]

Soleo enim et in aliena castra transire, non tanquam transfuga sed
tanquam explorator. (L. ANNAEI SENECAE EPIST. II. 4.)

THERE is a delightful child's story, known by the title of "Jack and
the Bean-stalk," with which my contemporaries who are present will be
familiar. But so many of our grave and reverend Juniors have been
brought up on severer intellectual diet, and, perhaps, have become
acquainted with fairyland only through primers of comparative
mythology, that it may be needful to give an outline of the tale. It
is a legend of a bean-plant, which grows and grows until it reaches
the high heavens and there spreads out into a vast canopy of foliage.
The hero, being moved to climb the stalk, discovers that the leafy
expanse supports a world composed of the same elements as that below
but yet strangely new; and his adventures there, on which I may not
dwell, must [47] have completely changed his views of the nature of
things; though the story, not having been composed by, or for,
philosophers, has nothing to say about views.

My present enterprise has a certain analogy to that of the daring
adventurer. I beg you to accompany me in an attempt to reach a world
which, to many, is probably strange, by the help of a bean. It is, as
you know, a simple, inert-looking thing. Yet, if planted under proper
conditions, of which sufficient warmth is one of the most important,
it manifests active powers of a very remarkable kind. A small green
seedling emerges, rises to the surface of the soil, rapidly increases
in size and, at the same time, undergoes a series of metamorphoses
which do not excite our wonder as much as those which meet us in
legendary history, merely because they are to be seen every day and
all day long.

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