Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays
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Thomas H. Huxley >> Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays
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By insensible steps, the plant builds itself up into a large and
various fabric of root, stem, leaves, flowers, and fruit, every one
moulded within and without in accordance with an extremely complex
but, at the same time, minutely defined pattern. In each of these
complicated structures, as in their smallest constituents, there is an
immanent energy which, in harmony with that resident in all the
others, incessantly works towards the maintenance ,of the whole and
the efficient performance of the part which it has to play in the
economy of nature.
[48] But no sooner has the edifice, reared with such exact
elaboration, attained completeness, than it begins to crumble. By
degrees, the plant withers and disappears from view, leaving behind
more or fewer apparently inert and simple bodies, just like the bean
from which it sprang; and, like it, endowed with the potentiality of
giving rise to a similar cycle of manifestations. Neither the poetic
nor the scientific imagination is put to much strain in the search
after analogies with this process of going forth and, as it were,
returning to the starting-point. It may be likened to the ascent and
descent of a slung stone, or the course of an arrow along its
trajectory. Or we may say that the living energy takes first an upward
and then a downward road. Or it may seem preferable to compare the
expansion of the germ into the full-grown plant, to the unfolding of a
fan, or to the rolling forth and widening of a stream; and thus to
arrive at the conception of "development," or "evolution." Here, as
elsewhere, names are "noise and smoke"; the important point is to have
a clear and adequate conception of the fact signified by a name. And,
in this case, the fact is the Sisyphaean process, in the course of
which, the living and growing plant passes from the relative
simplicity and latent potentiality of the seed to the full epiphany of
a highly differentiated type, thence to fall back to simplicity and
potentiality.
[49] The value of a strong intellectual grasp of the nature of this
process lies in the circumstance that what is true of the bean is true
of living things in general. From very low forms up to the highest--in
the animal no less than in the vegetable kingdom--the process of life
presents the same appearance [Note 1] of cyclical evolution. Nay, we
have but to cast our eyes over the rest of the world and cyclical
change presents itself on all sides. It meets us in the water that
flows to the sea and returns to the springs; in the heavenly bodies
that wax and wane, go and return to their places; in the inexorable
sequence of the ages of man's life; in that successive rise, apogee,
and fall of dynasties and of states which is the most prominent topic
of civil history.
As no man fording a swift stream can dip his foot twice into the same
water, so no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the
sensible world that it is.[Note 2] As he utters the words, nay, as he
thinks them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the present has
become the past; the "is" should be "was." And the more we learn of
the nature of things, the more evident is it that what we call rest is
only unperceived activity; that seeming peace is silent but strenuous
battle. In every part, at every moment, the state of the cosmos is the
expression of a transitory adjustment of contending forces; a scene,
of strife, in which all the combatants fall in turn. What is [50] true
of each part, is true of the whole. Natural knowledge tends more and
more to the conclusion that "all the choir of heaven and furniture of
the earth" are the transitory forms of parcels of cosmic substance
wending along the road of evolution, from nebulous potentiality,
through endless growths of sun and planet and satellite; through all
varieties of matter; through infinite diversities of life and thought;
possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a
conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable
latency from which they arose. Thus the most obvious attribute of the
cosmos is its impermanence. It assumes the aspect not so much of a
permanent entity as of a changeful process in which naught endures
save the flow of energy and the rational order which pervades it.
We have climbed our bean-stalk and have reached a wonderland in which
the common and the familiar become things new and strange. In the
exploration of the cosmic process thus typified, the highest
intelligence of man finds inexhaustible employment; giants are subdued
to our service; and the spiritual affections of the contemplative
philosopher are engaged by beauties worthy of eternal constancy.
But there is another aspect of the cosmic process, so perfect as a
mechanism, so beautiful as a work of art. Where the cosmopoietic energy
[51] works through sentient beings, there arises, among its other
manifestations, that which we call pain or suffering. This baleful
product of evolution increases in quantity and in intensity, with
advancing grades of animal organization, until it attains its highest
level in man. Further, the consummation is not reached in man, the
mere animal; nor in man, the whole or half savage; but only in man,
the member of an organized polity. And it is a necessary consequence
of his attempt to live in this way; that is, under those conditions
which are essential to the full development of his noblest powers.
Man, the animal, in fact, has worked his way to the headship of the
sentient world, and has become the superb animal which he is, in
virtue of his success in the struggle for existence. The conditions
having been of a certain order, man's organization has adjusted itself
to them better than that of his competitors in the cosmic strife. In
the case of mankind, the self-assertion, the unscrupulous seizing upon
all that can be grasped, the tenacious holding of all that can be
kept, which constitute the essence of the struggle for existence, have
answered. For his successful progress, throughout the savage state,
man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with
the ape and the tiger; his exceptional physical organization; his
cunning, his sociability, his curiosity, and his imitativeness; his
ruthless and [52] ferocious destructiveness when his anger is roused
by opposition.
But, in proportion as men have passed from anarchy to social
organization, and in proportion as civilization has grown in worth,
these deeply ingrained serviceable qualities have become defects.
After the manner of successful persons, civilized man would gladly
kick down the ladder by which he has climbed. He would be only too
pleased to see "the ape and tiger die." But they decline to suit his
convenience; and the unwelcome intrusion of these boon companions of
his hot youth into the ranged existence of civil life adds pains and
griefs, innumerable and immeasurably great, to those which the cosmic
process necessarily brings on the mere animal. In fact, civilized man
brands all these ape and tiger promptings with the name of sins; he
punishes many of the acts which flow from them as crimes; and, in
extreme cases, he does his best to put an end to the survival of the
fittest of former days by axe and rope.
I have said that civilized man has reached this point; the assertion
is perhaps too broad and general; I had better put it that ethical man
has attained thereto. The science of ethics professes to furnish us
with a reasoned rule of life; to tell us what is right action and why
it is so. Whatever differences of opinion may exist among experts
there is a general consensus that the ape and [53] tiger methods of
the struggle for existence are not reconcilable with sound ethical
principles.
The hero of our story descended the bean-stalk, and came back to the
common world, where fare and work were alike hard; where ugly
competitors were much commoner than beautiful princesses; and where
the everlasting battle with self was much less sure to be crowned with
victory than a turn-to with a giant. We have done the like. Thousands
upon thousands of our fellows, thousands of years ago, have preceded
us in finding themselves face to face with the same dread problem of
evil. They also have seen that the cosmic process is evolution; that
it is full of wonder, full of beauty, and, at the same time, full of
pain. They have sought to discover the bearing of these great facts on
ethics; to find out whether there is, or is not, a sanction for
morality in the ways of the cosmos.
Theories of the universe, in which the conception of evolution plays a
leading part, were extant at least six centuries before our era.
Certain knowledge of them, in the fifth century, reaches us from
localities as distant as the valley of the Ganges and the Asiatic
coasts of the Aegean. To the early philosophers of Hindostan, no less
than to those of Ionia, the salient and characteristic feature of the
phenomenal world was its [54] changefulness; the unresting flow of all
things, through birth to visible being and thence to not being, in
which they could discern no sign of a beginning and for which they saw
no prospect of an ending. It was no less plain to some of these
antique forerunners of modern philosophy that suffering is the badge
of all the tribe of sentient things; that it is no accidental
accompaniment, but an essential constituent of the cosmic process. The
energetic Greek might find fierce joys in a world in which "strife is
father and king;" but the old Aryan spirit was subdued to quietism in
the Indian sage; the mist of suffering which spread over humanity hid
everything else from his view; to him life was one with suffering and
suffering with life.
In Hindostan, as in Ionia, a period of relatively high and tolerably
stable civilization had succeeded long ages of semi-barbarism and
struggle. Out of wealth and security had come leisure and refinement,
and, close at their heels, had followed the malady of thought. To the
struggle for bare existence, which never ends, though it may be
alleviated and partially disguised for a fortunate few, succeeded the
struggle to make existence intelligible and to bring the order of
things into harmony with the moral sense of man, which also never
ends, but, for the thinking few, becomes keen er with every increase
of knowledge and with every step towards the realization of a worthy
ideal of life.
[55] Two thousand five hundred years ago, the value of civilization was
as apparent as it is now; then, as now, it was obvious that only in
the garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is
capable of bearing be produced. But it had also become evident that
the blessings of culture were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn
into a hothouse. The stimulation of the senses, the pampering of the
emotions, endlessly multiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant
widening of the intellectual field indefinitely extended the range of
that especially human faculty of looking before and after, which adds
to the fleeting present those old and new worlds of the past and the
future, wherein men dwell the more the higher their culture. But that
very sharpening of the sense and that subtle refinement of emotion,
which brought such a wealth of pleasures, were fatally attended by a
proportional enlargement of the capacity for suffering; and the divine
faculty of imagination, while it created new heavens and new earths,
provided them with the corresponding hells of futile regret for the
past and morbid anxiety for the future. [Note 3] Finally, the
inevitable penalty of over-stimulation, exhaustion, opened the gates
of civilization to its great enemy, ennui; the stale and flat
weariness when man delights-not, nor woman neither; when all things
are vanity and vexation; and life seems not worth living except to
escape the bore of dying.
[56] Even purely intellectual progress brings about its revenges.
Problems settled in a rough and ready way by rude men, absorbed in
action, demand renewed attention and show themselves to be still
unread riddles when men have time to think. The beneficent demon,
doubt, whose name is Legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old
faiths, enters into mankind and thenceforth refuses to be cast out.
Sacred customs, venerable dooms of ancestral wisdom, hallowed by
tradition and professing to hold good for all time, are put to the
question. Cultured reflection asks for their credentials; judges them
by its own standards; finally, gathers those of which it approves into
ethical systems, in which the reasoning is rarely much more than a
decent pretext for the adoption of foregone conclusions.
One of the oldest and most important elements in such systems is the
conception of justice. Society is impossible unless those who are
associated agree to observe certain rules of conduct towards one
another; its stability depends on the steadiness with which they abide
by that agreement; and, so far as they waver, that mutual trust which
is the bond of society is weakened or destroyed. Wolves could not hunt
in packs except for the real, though unexpressed, understanding that
they should not attack one another during the chase. The most
rudimentary polity is a pack of men living under the like tacit, or
expressed, [57] understanding; and having made the very important
advance upon wolf society, that they agree to use the force of the
whole body against individuals who violate it and in favour of those
who observe it. This observance of a common understanding, with the
consequent distribution of punishments and rewards according to
accepted rules, received the name of justice, while the contrary was
called injustice. Early ethics did not take much note of the animus of
the violator of the rules. But civilization could not advance far,
without the establishment of a capital distinction between the case of
involuntary and that of wilful misdeed; between a merely wrong action
and a guilty one. And, with increasing refinement of moral
appreciation, the problem of desert, which arises out of this
distinction, acquired more and more theoretical and practical
importance. If life must be given for life, yet it was recognized that
the unintentional slayer did not altogether deserve death; and, by a
sort of compromise between the public and the private conception of
justice, a sanctuary was provided in which he might take refuge from
the avenger of blood.
The idea of justice thus underwent a gradual sublimation from
punishment and reward according to acts, to punishment and reward
according to desert; or, in other words, according to motive.
Righteousness, that is, action from right motive, [58] not only became
synonymous with justice, but the positive constituent of innocence and
the very heart of goodness.
Now when the ancient sage, whether Indian or Greek, who had attained to
this conception of goodness, looked the world, and especially human
life, in the face, he found it as hard as we do to bring the course of
evolution into harmony with even the elementary requirement of the
ethical ideal of the just and the good.
If there is one thing plainer than another, it is that neither the
pleasures nor the pains of life, in the merely animal world, are
distributed according to desert; for it is admittedly impossible for
the lower orders of sentient beings, to deserve either the one or the
other. If there is a generalization from the facts of human life which
has the assent of thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that
the violator of ethical rules constantly escapes the punishment which
he deserves; that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree, while,
the righteous begs his bread; that the sins of the fathers are visited
upon the children; that, in the realm of nature, ignorance is punished
just as severely as wilful wrong; and that thousands upon thousands of
innocent beings suffer for the crime, or the unintentional trespass of
one.
Greek and Semite and Indian are agreed upon [59] this subject. The book
of Job is at one with the "Works and Days" and the Buddhist Sutras;
the Psalmist and the Preacher of Israel, with the Tragic Poets of
Greece. What is a more common motive of the ancient tragedy in fact,
than the unfathomable injustice of the nature of things; what is more
deeply felt to be true than its presentation of the destruction of the
blameless by the work of his own hands, or by the fatal operation of
the sins of others? Surely Oedipus was pure of heart; it was the
natural sequence of events--the cosmic process--which drove him, in
all innocence, to slay his father and become the husband of his
mother, to the desolation of his people and his own headlong ruin. Or
to step, for a moment, beyond the chronological limits I have set
myself, what constitutes the sempiternal attraction of Hamlet but the
appeal to deepest experience of that history of a no less blameless
dreamer, dragged, in spite of himself, into a world out of joint
involved in a tangle of crime and misery, created by one of the prime
agents of the cosmic process as it works in and through man?
Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos might well seem
to stand condemned. The conscience of man revolted against the moral
indifference of nature, and the microcosmic atom should have found the
illimitable macrocosm guilty. But few, or none, ventured to record
that verdict.
[60] In the great Semitic trial of this issue, Job takes refuge in
silence and submission; the Indian and the Greek, less wise perhaps,
attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable and plead for the defendant.
To this end, the Greeks invented Theodicies; while the Indians devised
what, in its ultimate form, must rather be termed a Cosmodicy. For,
although Buddhism recognizes gods many and lords many, they are
products of the cosmic process; and transitory, however long enduring,
manifestations of its eternal activity. In the doctrine of
transmigration, whatever its origin, Brahminical and Buddhist
speculation found, ready to hand[Note 4] the means of constructing a
plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man. If this world
is full of pain and sorrow; if grief and evil fall, like the rain,
upon both the just and the unjust; it is because, like the rain, they
are links in the endless chain of natural causation by which past,
present, and future are indissolubly connected; and there is no more
injustice in the one case than in the other. Every sentient being is
reaping as it has sown; if not in this life, then in one or other of
the infinite series of antecedent existences of which it is the latest
term. The present distribution of good and evil is, therefore, the
algebraical sum of accumulated positive and negative deserts; or,
rather, it depends on the floating balance of the account. For it was
not thought necessary that a complete settlement [61] should ever take
place. Arrears might stand over as a sort of "hanging gale;" a period
of celestial happiness just earned might be succeeded by ages of
torment in a hideous nether world, the balance still overdue for some
remote ancestral error. [Note 5]
Whether the cosmic process looks any more moral than at first, after
such a vindication, may perhaps be questioned. Yet this plea of
justification is not less plausible than others; and none but very
hasty thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity.
Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its
roots in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the
great argument from analogy is capable of supplying.
Everyday experience familiarizes us with the facts which are grouped
under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious
marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More
particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we
call "character," is often to be traced through a long series of
progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this
"character"--this moral and intellectual essence of a man--does
veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another, and does
really transmigrate from generation to generation. In the new-born
infant, the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is little
more [62] than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these
become acutalities; from childhood to age they manifest themselves in
dulness or brightness, weakness or strength, viciousness or
uprightness; and with each feature modified by confluence with another
character, if by nothing else, the character passed on to its
incarnation in new bodies.
The Indian philosophers called character, as thus defined,
"karma."[Note 6] It is this karma which passed from life to life and
linked them in the chain of transmigrations; and they held that it is
modified in each life, not merely by confluence of parentage, but by
its own acts. They were, in fact, strong believers in the theory, so
much disputed just at present, of the hereditary transmission of
acquired characters. That the manifestation of the tendencies of a
character may be greatly facilitated, or impeded, by conditions, of
which self-discipline, or the absence of it, are among the most
important, is indubitable; but that the character itself is modified
in this way is by no means so certain; it is not so sure that the
transmitted character of an evil liver is worse, or that of a
righteous man better, than that which he received. Indian philosophy,
however, did not admit of any doubt on this subject; the belief in the
influence of conditions, notably of self-discipline, on the karma was
not merely a necessary postulate of its theory of retribution, but it
presented [63] the only way of escape from the endless round of
transmigrations.
The earlier forms of Indian philosophy agreed with those prevalent in
our own times, in supposing the existence of a permanent reality, or
"substance," beneath the shifting series of phenomena, whether of
matter or of mind. The substance of the cosmos was "Brahma," that of
the individual man "Atman;" and the latter was separated from the
former only, if I may so speak, by its phenomenal envelope, by the
casing of sensations, thoughts and desires, pleasures and pains, which
make up the illusive phantasmagoria of life. This the ignorant take
for reality; their "Atman" therefore remains eternally imprisoned in
delusions, bound by the fetters of desire and scourged by the whip of
misery. But the man who has attained enlightenment sees that the
apparent reality is mere illusion, or, as was said a couple of
thousand years later, that there is nothing good nor bad but thinking
makes it so. If the cosmos is just "and of our pleasant vices makes
instruments to scourge us," it would seem that the only way to escape
from our heritage of evil is to destroy that fountain of desire whence
our vices flow; to refuse any longer to be the instruments of the
evolutionary process, and withdraw from the struggle for existence. If
the karma is modifiable by self-discipline, if its coarser desires,
one after another, can be extinguished, the ultimate [64] fundamental
desire of self-assertion, or the desire to be, may also be destroyed.
[Note 7] Then the bubble of illusion will burst, and the freed
individual "Atman" will lose itself in the universal "Brahma."
Such seems to have been the pre-Buddhistic conception of salvation, and
of the way to be followed by those who would attain thereto. No more
thorough mortification of the flesh has ever been attempted than-that
achieved by the Indian ascetic anchorite; no later monachism has so
nearly succeeded in reducing the human mind to that condition of
impassive quasi-somnambulism, which, but for its acknowledged
holiness, might run the risk of being confounded with idiocy.
And this salvation, it will be observed, was to be attained through
knowledge, and by action based on that knowledge; just as the
experimenter, who would obtain a certain physical or chemical result,
must have a knowledge of the natural laws involved and the persistent
disciplined will adequate to carry out all the various operations
required. The supernatural, in our sense of the term, was entirely
excluded. There was no external power which could affect the sequence
of cause and effect which gives rise to karma; none but the will of
the subject of the karma which could put an end to it.
Only one rule of conduct could be based upon the remarkable theory of
which I have endeavoured to give a reasoned outline. It was folly to
continue [65] to exist when an overplus of pain was certain; and the
probabilities in favour of the increase of misery with the
prolongation of existence, were so overwhelming. Slaying the body only
made matters worse; there was nothing for it but to slay the soul by
the voluntary arrest of all its activities. Property, social ties,
family affections, common companionship, must be abandoned; the most
natural appetites, even that for food, must be suppressed, or at least
minimized; until all that remained of a man was the impassive,
extenuated, mendicant monk, self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances,
which the deluded mystic took for foretastes of the final union with
Brahma.
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