But there is another side of the problem which is, perhaps, of more importance and which epistemology generally overlooks. If new variations can arise, not only in organic but perhaps also in inorganic nature, new tasks are placed before the human mind. The question is, then, if it has forms in which there is room for the new matter? We are here touching a possibility which the great master of epistemology did not bring to light. Kant supposed confidently that no other matter of knowledge could stream forth from the dark source which he called "the thing-in-itself,"
than such as could be synthesised in our existing forms of knowledge.
He mentions the possibility of other forms than the human, and warns us against the dogmatic a.s.sumption that the human conception of existence should be absolutely adequate. But he seems to be quite sure that the thing-in-itself works constantly, and consequently always gives us only what our powers can master. This a.s.sumption was a consequence of Kant"s rationalistic tendency, but one for which no warrant can be given.
Evolutionism and systematism are opposing tendencies which can never be absolutely harmonised one with the other. Evolution may at any time break some form which the system-monger regards as finally established.
Darwin himself felt a great difference in looking at variation as an evolutionist and as a systematist. When he was working at his evolution theory, he was very glad to find variations; but they were a hindrance to him when he worked as a systematist, in preparing his work on Cirripedia. He says in a letter: "I had thought the same parts of the same species more resemble (than they do anyhow in Cirripedia) objects cast in the same mould. Systematic work would be easy were it not for this confounded variation, which, however, is pleasant to me as a speculatist, though odious to me as a systematist." ("Life and Letters", Vol. II. page 37.) He could indeed be angry with variations even as an evolutionist; but then only because he could not explain them, not because he could not cla.s.sify them. "If, as I must think, external conditions produce little DIRECT effect, what the devil determines each particular variation?" (Ibid. page 232.) What Darwin experienced in his particular domain holds good of all knowledge. All knowledge is systematic, in so far as it strives to put phenomena in quite definite relations, one to another. But the systematisation can never be complete. And here Darwin has contributed much to widen the world for us. He has shown us forces and tendencies in nature which make absolute systems impossible, at the same time that they give us new objects and problems. There is still a place for what Lessing called "the unceasing striving after truth," while "absolute truth" (in the sense of a closed system) is unattainable so long as life and experience are going on.
There is here a special remark to be made. As we have seen above, recent research has shown that natural selection or struggle for life is no explanation of variations. Hugo de Vries distinguishes between partial and embryonal variations, or between variations and mutations, only the last-named being heritable, and therefore of importance for the origin of new species. But the existence of variations is not only of interest for the problem of the origin of species; it has also a more general interest. An individual does not lose its importance for knowledge, because its qualities are not heritable. On the contrary, in higher beings at least, individual peculiarities will become more and more independent objects of interest. Knowledge takes account of the biographies not only of species, but also of individuals: it seeks to find the law of development of the single individual. (The new science of Ecology occupies an intermediate position between the biography of species and the biography of individuals. Compare "Congress of Arts and Science", St Louis, Vol. V. 1906 (the Reports of Drude and Robinson) and the work of my colleague E. Warming.) As Leibniz said long ago, individuality consists in the law of the changes of a being. "La loi du changement fait l"individualite de chaque substance." Here is a world which is almost new for science, which till now has mainly occupied itself with general laws and forms. But these are ultimately only means to understand the individual phenomena, in whose nature and history a manifold of laws and forms always cooperate. The importance of this remark will appear in the sequel.
V.
To many people the Darwinian theory of natural selection or struggle for existence seemed to change the whole conception of life, and particularly all the conditions on which the validity of ethical ideas depends. If only that has persistence which can be adapted to a given condition, what will then be the fate of our ideals, of our standards of good and evil? Blind force seems to reign, and the only thing that counts seems to be the most heedless use of power. Darwinism, it was said, has proclaimed brutality. No other difference seems permanent save that between the sound, powerful and happy on the one side, the sick, feeble and unhappy on the other; and every attempt to alleviate this difference seems to lead to general enervation. Some of those who interpreted Darwinism in this manner felt an aesthetic delight in contemplating the heedlessness and energy of the great struggle for existence and antic.i.p.ated the realisation of a higher human type as the outcome of it: so Nietzsche and his followers. Others recognising the same consequences in Darwinism regarded these as one of the strongest objections against it; so Duhring and Kropotkin (in his earlier works).
This interpretation of Darwinism was frequent in the interval between the two main works of Darwin--"The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man". But even during this interval it was evident to an attentive reader that Darwin himself did not found his standard of good and evil on the features of the life of nature he had emphasised so strongly. He did not justify the ways along which nature reached its ends; he only pointed them out. The "real" was not to him, as to Hegel, one with the "rational." Darwin has, indeed, by his whole conception of nature, rendered a great service to ethics in making the difference between the life of nature and the ethical life appear in so strong a light. The ethical problem could now be stated in a sharper form than before. But this was not the first time that the idea of the struggle for life was put in relation to the ethical problem. In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes gave the first impulse to the whole modern discussion of ethical principles in his theory of bellum omnium contra omnes. Men, he taught, are in the state of nature enemies one of another, and they live either in fright or in the glory of power. But it was not the opinion of Hobbes that this made ethics impossible. On the contrary, he found a standard for virtue and vice in the fact that some qualities and actions have a tendency to bring us out of the state of war and to secure peace, while other qualities have a contrary tendency. In the eighteenth century even Immanuel Kant"s ideal ethics had--so far as can be seen--a similar origin. Shortly before the foundation of his definitive ethics, Kant wrote his "Idee zu einer allgemeinen Weltgeschichte" (1784), where--in a way which reminds us of Hobbes, and is prophetic of Darwin--he describes the forward-driving power of struggle in the human world. It is here as with the struggle of the trees for light and air, through which they compete with one another in height. Anxiety about war can only be allayed by an ordinance which gives everyone his full liberty under acknowledgment of the equal liberty of others. And such ordinance and acknowledgment are also attributes of the content of the moral law, as Kant proclaimed it in the year after the publication of his essay (1785) (Cf. my "History of Modern Philosophy" (English translation London, 1900), I. pages 76-79.) Kant really came to his ethics by the way of evolution, though he afterwards disavowed it.
Similarly the same line of thought may be traced in Hegel though it has been disguised in the form of speculative dialectics. ("Herrschaft und Knechtschaft", "Phanomenologie des Geistes", IV. A., Leiden, 1907.) And in Schopenhauer"s theory of the blind will to live and its abrogation by the ethical feeling, which is founded on universal sympathy, we have a more individualistic form of the same idea.
It was, then, not entirely a foreign point of view which Darwin introduced into ethical thought, even if we take no account of the poetical character of the word "struggle" and of the more direct adaptation, through the use and non-use of power, which Darwin also emphasised. In "The Descent of Man" he has devoted a special chapter ("The Descent of Man", Vol. I. Ch. iii.) to a discussion of the origin of the ethical consciousness. The characteristic expression of this consciousness he found, just as Kant did, in the idea of "ought"; it was the origin of this new idea which should be explained. His hypothesis was that the ethical "ought" has its origin in the social and parental instincts, which, as well as other instincts (e.g. the instinct of self-preservation), lie deeper than pleasure and pain. In many species, not least in the human species, these instincts are fostered by natural selection; and when the powers of memory and comparison are developed, so that single acts can be valued according to the claims of the deep social instinct, then consciousness of duty and remorse are possible.
Blind instinct has developed to conscious ethical will.
As already stated, Darwin, as a moral philosopher belongs to the school that was founded by Shaftesbury, and was afterwards represented by Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, Comte and Spencer. His merit is, first, that he has given this tendency of thought a biological foundation, and that he has stamped on it a doughty character in showing that ethical ideas and sentiments, rightly conceived, are forces which are at work in the struggle for life.
There are still many questions to solve. Not only does the ethical development within the human species contain features still unexplained (The works of Westermarck and Hobhouse throw new light on many of these features.); but we are confronted by the great problem whether after all a genetic historical theory can be of decisive importance here. To every consequent ethical consciousness there is a standard of value, a primordial value which determines the single ethical judgments as their last presupposition, and the "rightness" of this basis, the "value"
of this value can as little be discussed as the "rationality" of our logical principles. There is here revealed a possibility of ethical scepticism which evolutionistic ethics (as well as intuitive or rationalistic ethics) has overlooked. No demonstration can show that the results of the ethical development are definitive and universal. We meet here again with the important opposition of systematisation and evolution. There will, I think, always be an open question here, though comparative ethics, of which we have so far only the first attempts, can do much to throw light on it.
It would carry us too far to discuss all the philosophical works on ethics, which have been influenced directly or indirectly by evolutionism. I may, however, here refer to the book of C.M. Williams, "A Review of the Systems of Ethics founded on the Theory of Evolution"
(New York and London, 1893.), in which, besides Darwin, the following authors are reviewed: Wallace, Haeckel, Spencer, Fiske, Rolph, Barratt, Stephen, Carneri, Hoffding, Gizycki, Alexander, Ree. As works which criticise evolutionistic ethics from an intuitive point of view and in an instructive way, may be cited: Guyau "La morale anglaise contemporaine" (Paris, 1879.), and Sorley, "Ethics of Naturalism". I will only mention some interesting contributions to ethical discussion which can be found in Darwinism besides the idea of struggle for life.
The attention which Darwin has directed to variations has opened our eyes to the differences in human nature as well as in nature generally.
There is here a fact of great importance for ethical thought, no matter from what ultimate premiss it starts. Only from a very abstract point of view can different individuals be treated in the same manner. The most eminent ethical thinkers, men such as Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant, who discussed ethical questions from very opposite standpoints, agreed in regarding all men as equal in respect of ethical endowment. In regard to Bentham, Leslie Stephen remarks: "He is determined to be thoroughly empirical, to take men as he found them. But his utilitarianism supposed that men"s views of happiness and utility were uniform and clear, and that all that was wanted was to show them the means by which their ends could be reached." ("English literature and society in the eighteenth century", London, 1904, page 187.) And Kant supposed that every man would find the "categorical imperative" in his consciousness, when he came to sober reflexion, and that all would have the same qualifications to follow it. But if continual variations, great or small, are going on in human nature, it is the duty of ethics to make allowance for them, both in making claims, and in valuing what is done. A new set of ethical problems have their origin here. (Cf. my paper, "The law of relativity in Ethics," "International Journal of Ethics", Vol. I. 1891, pages 37-62.) It is an interesting fact that Stuart Mill"s book "On Liberty"
appeared in the same year as "The Origin of Species". Though Mill agreed with Bentham about the original equality of all men"s endowments, he regarded individual differences as a necessary result of physical and social influences, and he claimed that free play shall be allowed to differences of character so far as is possible without injury to other men. It is a condition of individual and social progress that a man"s mode of action should be determined by his own character and not by tradition and custom, nor by abstract rules. This view was to be corroborated by the theory of Darwin.
But here we have reached a point of view from which the criticism, which in recent years has often been directed against Darwin--that small variations are of no importance in the struggle for life--is of no weight. From an ethical standpoint, and particularly from the ethical standpoint of Darwin himself, it is a duty to foster individual differences that can be valuable, even though they can neither be of service for physical preservation nor be physically inherited. The distinction between variation and mutation is here without importance.
It is quite natural that biologists should be particularly interested in such variations as can be inherited and produce new species. But in the human world there is not only a physical, but also a mental and social heredity. When an ideal human character has taken form, then there is shaped a type, which through imitation and influence can become an important factor in subsequent development, even if it cannot form a species in the biological sense of the word. Spiritually strong men often succ.u.mb in the physical struggle for life; but they can nevertheless be victorious through the typical influence they exert, perhaps on very distant generations, if the remembrance of them is kept alive, be it in legendary or in historical form. Their very failure can show that a type has taken form which is maintained at all risks, a standard of life which is adhered to in spite of the strongest opposition. The question "to be or not to be" can be put from very different levels of being: it has too often been considered a consequence of Darwinism that this question is only to be put from the lowest level. When a stage is reached, where ideal (ethical, intellectual, aesthetic) interests are concerned, the struggle for life is a struggle for the preservation of this stage. The giving up of a higher standard of life is a sort of death; for there is not only a physical, there is also a spiritual, death.
VI.
The Socratic character of Darwin"s mind appears in his wariness in drawing the last consequences of his doctrine, in contrast both with the audacious theories of so many of his followers and with the consequences which his antagonists were busy in drawing. Though he, as we have seen, saw from the beginning that his hypothesis would occasion "a whole of metaphysics," he was himself very reserved as to the ultimate questions, and his answers to such questions were extorted from him.
As to the question of optimism and pessimism, Darwin held that though pain and suffering were very often the ways by which animals were led to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial to the species, yet pleasurable feelings were the most habitual guides. "We see this in the pleasure from exertion, even occasionally from great exertion of the body or mind, in the pleasure of our daily meals, and especially in the pleasure derived from sociability, and from loving our families." But there was to him so much suffering in the world that it was a strong argument against the existence of an intelligent First Cause. ("Life and Letters" Vol. I. page 310.)
It seems to me that Darwin was not so clear on another question, that of the relation between improvement and adaptation. He wrote to Lyell: "When you contrast natural selection and "improvement," you seem always to overlook... that every step in the natural selection of each species implies improvement in that species IN RELATION TO ITS CONDITION OF LIFE... Improvement implies, I suppose, EACH FORM OBTAINING MANY PARTS OR ORGANS, all excellently adapted for their functions." "All this," he adds, "seems to me quite compatible with certain forms fitted for simple conditions, remaining unaltered, or being degraded." (Ibid. Vol. II.
page 177.) But the great question is, if the conditions of life will in the long run favour "improvement" in the sense of differentiation (or harmony of differentiation and integration). Many beings are best adapted to their conditions of life if they have few organs and few necessities. Pessimism would not only be the consequence, if suffering outweighed happiness, but also if the most elementary forms of happiness were predominant, or if there were a tendency to reduce the standard of life to the simplest possible, the contentment of inertia or stable equilibrium. There are animals which are very highly differentiated and active in their young state, but later lose their complex organisation and concentrate themselves on the one function of nutrition. In the human world a.n.a.logies to this sort of adaptation are not wanting. Young "idealists" very often end as old "Philistines." Adaptation and progress are not the same.
Another question of great importance in respect to human evolution is, whether there will be always a possibility for the existence of an impulse to progress, an impulse to make great claims on life, to be active and to alter the conditions of life instead of adapting to them in a pa.s.sive manner. Many people do not develop because they have too few necessities, and because they have no power to imagine other conditions of life than those under which they live. In his remarks on "the pleasure from exertion" Darwin has a point of contact with the practical idealism of former times--with the ideas of Lessing and Goethe, of Condorcet and Fichte. The continual striving which was the condition of salvation to Faust"s soul, is also the condition of salvation to mankind. There is a holy fire which we ought to keep burning, if adaptation is really to be improvement. If, as I have tried to show in my "Philosophy of Religion", the innermost core of all religion is faith in the persistence of value in the world, and if the highest values express themselves in the cry "Excelsior!" then the capital point is, that this cry should always be heard and followed. We have here a corollary of the theory of evolution in its application to human life.
Darwin declared himself an agnostic, not only because he could not harmonise the large amount of suffering in the world with the idea of a G.o.d as its first cause, but also because he "was aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose." ("Life and Letters", Vol. I. page 306.) He saw, as Kant had seen before him and expressed in his "Kritik der Urtheilskraft", that we cannot accept either of the only two possibilities which we are able to conceive: chance (or brute force) and design. Neither mechanism nor teleology can give an absolute answer to ultimate questions.
The universe, and especially the organic life in it, can neither be explained as a mere combination of absolute elements nor as the effect of a constructing thought. Darwin concluded, as Kant, and before him Spinoza, that the oppositions and distinctions which our experience presents, cannot safely be regarded as valid for existence in itself.
And, with Kant and Fichte, he found his stronghold in the conviction that man has something to do, even if he cannot solve all enigmas. "The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man"s intellect; but man can do his duty." (Ibid. page 307.)
Is this the last word of human thought? Does not the possibility, that man can do his duty, suppose that the conditions of life allow of continuous ethical striving, so that there is a certain harmony between cosmic order and human ideals? Darwin himself has shown how the consciousness of duty can arise as a natural result of evolution.
Moreover there are lines of evolution which have their end in ethical idealism, in a kingdom of values, which must struggle for life as all things in the world must do, but a kingdom which has its firm foundation in reality.
XXIII. DARWINISM AND SOCIOLOGY. By C. Bougle.
Professor of Social Philosophy in the University of Toulouse and Deputy-Professor at the Sorbonne, Paris.
How has our conception of social phenomena, and of their history, been affected by Darwin"s conception of Nature and the laws of its transformations? To what extent and in what particular respects have the discoveries and hypotheses of the author of "The Origin of Species"
aided the efforts of those who have sought to construct a science of society?
To such a question it is certainly not easy to give any brief or precise answer. We find traces of Darwinism almost everywhere. Sociological systems differing widely from each other have laid claim to its authority; while, on the other hand, its influence has often made itself felt only in combination with other influences. The Darwinian thread is worked into a hundred patterns along with other threads.
To deal with the problem, we must, it seems, first of all distinguish the more general conclusions in regard to the evolution of living beings, which are the outcome of Darwinism, from the particular explanations it offers of the ways and means by which that evolution is effected. That is to say, we must, as far as possible, estimate separately the influence of Darwin as an evolutionist and Darwin as a selectionist.
The nineteenth century, said Cournot, has witnessed a mighty effort to "reintegrer l"homme dans la nature." From divers quarters there has been a methodical reaction against the persistent dualism of the Cartesian tradition, which was itself the unconscious heir of the Christian tradition. Even the philosophy of the eighteenth century, materialistic as were for the most part the tendencies of its leaders, seemed to revere man as a being apart, concerning whom laws might be formulated a priori. To bring him down from his pedestal there was needed the marked predominance of positive researches wherein no account was taken of the "pride of man." There can be no doubt that Darwin has done much to familiarise us with this att.i.tude. Take for instance the first part of "The Descent of Man": it is an acc.u.mulation of typical facts, all tending to diminish the distance between us and our brothers, the lower animals. One might say that the naturalist had here taken as his motto, "Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted." h.o.m.ologous structures, the survival in man of certain organs of animals, the rudiments in the animal of certain human faculties, a mult.i.tude of facts of this sort, led Darwin to the conclusion that there is no ground for supposing that the "king of the universe" is exempt from universal laws. Thus belief in the imperium in imperio has been, as it were, whittled away by the progress of the naturalistic spirit, itself continually strengthened by the conquests of the natural sciences. The tendency may, indeed, drag the social sciences into overstrained a.n.a.logies, such, for instance, as the a.s.similation of societies to organisms. But it will, at least, have had the merit of helping sociology to shake off the pre-conception that the groups formed by men are artificial, and that history is completely at the mercy of chance. Some years before the appearance of "The Origin of Species", Auguste Comte had pointed out the importance, as regards the unification of positive knowledge, of the conviction that the social world, the last refuge of spiritualism, is itself subject to determininism. It cannot be doubted that the movement of thought which Darwin"s discoveries promoted contributed to the spread of this conviction, by breaking down the traditional barrier which cut man off from Nature.
But Nature, according to modern naturalists, is no immutable thing: it is rather perpetual movement, continual progression. Their discoveries batter a breach directly into the Aristotelian notion of species; they refuse to see in the animal world a collection of immutable types, distinct from all eternity, and corresponding, as Cuvier said, to so many particular thoughts of the Creator. Darwin especially congratulated himself upon having been able to deal this doctrine the coup de grace: immutability is, he says, his chief enemy; and he is concerned to show--therein following up Lyell"s work--that everything in the organic world, as in the inorganic, is explained by insensible but incessant transformations. "Nature makes no leaps"--"Nature knows no gaps": these two dicta form, as it were, the two landmarks between which Darwin"s idea of transformation is worked out. That is to say, the development of Darwinism is calculated to further the application of the philosophy of Becoming to the study of human inst.i.tutions.
The progress of the natural sciences thus brings unexpected reinforcements to the revolution which the progress of historical discipline had begun. The first attempt to const.i.tute an actual science of social phenomena--that, namely, of the economists--had resulted in laws which were called natural, and which were believed to be eternal and universal, valid for all times and all places. But this perpetuality, brother, as Knies said, of the immutability of the old zoology, did not long hold out against the ever swelling tide of the historical movement. Knowledge of the transformations that had taken place in language, of the early phases of the family, of religion, of property, had all favoured the revival of the Herac.l.i.tean view: panta rei. As to the categories of political economy, it was soon to be recognised, as by La.s.salle, that they too are only historical. The philosophy of history, moreover, gave expression under various forms to the same tendency. Hegel declares that "all that is real is rational,"
but at the same time he shows that all that is real is ephemeral, and that for history there is nothing fixed beneath the sun. It is this sense of universal evolution that Darwin came with fresh authority to enlarge. It was in the name of biological facts themselves that he taught us to see only slow metamorphoses in the history of inst.i.tutions, and to be always on the outlook for survivals side by side with rudimentary forms. Anyone who reads "Primitive Culture", by Tylor,--a writer closely connected with Darwin--will be able to estimate the services which these cardinal ideas were to render to the social sciences when the age of comparative research had succeeded to that of a priori construction.
Let us note, moreover, that the philosophy of Becoming in pa.s.sing through the Darwinian biology became, as it were, filtered: it got rid of those traces of finalism, which, under different forms, it had preserved through all the systems of German Romanticism. Even in Herbert Spencer, it has been plausibly argued, one can detect something of that sort of mystic confidence in forces spontaneously directing life, which forms the very essence of those systems. But Darwin"s observations were precisely calculated to render such an hypothesis futile. At first people may have failed to see this; and we call to mind the ponderous sarcasms of Flourens when he objected to the theory of Natural Selection that it attributed to nature a power of free choice. "Nature endowed with will! That was the final error of last century; but the nineteenth no longer deals in personifications." (P. Flourens, "Examen du Livre de M. Darwin sur l"Origine des Especes", page 53, Paris, 1864. See also Huxley, "Criticisms on the "Origin of Species"", "Collected Essays", Vol. II, page 102, London, 1902.) In fact Darwin himself put his readers on their guard against the metaphors he was obliged to use. The processes by which he explains the survival of the fittest are far from affording any indication of the design of some transcendent breeder.
Nor, if we look closely, do they even imply immanent effort in the animal; the sorting out can be brought about mechanically, simply by the action of the environment. In this connection Huxley could with good reason maintain that Darwin"s originality consisted in showing how harmonies which hitherto had been taken to imply the agency of intelligence and will could be explained without any such intervention.
So, when later on, objective sociology declares that, even when social phenomena are in question, all finalist preconceptions must be distrusted if a science is to be const.i.tuted, it is to Darwin that its thanks are due; he had long been clearing paths for it which lay well away from the old familiar road trodden by so many theories of evolution.
This anti-finalist doctrine, when fully worked out, was, moreover, calculated to aid in the needful dissociation of two notions: that of evolution and that of progress. In application to society these had long been confounded; and, as a consequence, the general idea seemed to be that only one type of evolution was here possible. Do we not detect such a view in Comte"s sociology, and perhaps even in Herbert Spencer"s?
Whoever, indeed, a.s.sumes an end for evolution is naturally inclined to think that only one road leads to that end. But those whose minds the Darwinian theory has enlightened are aware that the transformations of living beings depend primarily upon their conditions, and that it is these conditions which are the agents of selection from among individual variations. Hence, it immediately follows that transformations are not necessarily improvements. Here, Darwin"s thought hesitated. Logically his theory proves, as Ray Lankester pointed out, that the struggle for existence may have as its outcome degeneration as well as amelioration: evolution may be regressive as well as progressive. Then, too--and this is especially to be borne in mind--each species takes its good where it finds it, seeks its own path and survives as best it can. Apply this notion to society and you arrive at the theory of multilinear evolution.
Divergencies will no longer surprise you. You will be forewarned not to apply to all civilisations the same measure of progress, and you will recognise that types of evolution may differ just as social species themselves differ. Have we not here one of the conceptions which mark off sociology proper from the old philosophy of history?
But if we are to estimate the influence of Darwinism upon sociological conceptions, we must not dwell only upon the way in which Darwin impressed the general notion of evolution upon the minds of thinkers. We must go into details. We must consider the influence of the particular theories by which he explained the mechanism of this evolution. The name of the author of "The Origin of Species" has been especially attached, as everyone knows, to the doctrines of "natural selection" and of "struggle for existence," completed by the notion of "individual variation." These doctrines were turned to account by very different schools of social philosophy. Pessimistic and optimistic, aristocratic and democratic, individualistic and socialistic systems were to war with each other for years by casting sc.r.a.ps of Darwinism at each other"s heads.
It was the spectacle of human contrivance that suggested to Darwin his conception of natural selection. It was in studying the methods of pigeon breeders that he divined the processes by which nature, in the absence of design, obtains a.n.a.logous results in the differentiation of types. As soon as the importance of artificial selection in the transformation of species of animals was understood, reflection naturally turned to the human species, and the question arose, How far do men observe, in connection with themselves, those laws of which they make practical application in the case of animals? Here we come upon one of the ideas which guided the researches of Galton, Darwin"s cousin. The author of "Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development" ("Inquiries into Human Faculty", pages 1, 2, 3 sq., London, 1883.), has often expressed his surprise that, considering all the precautions taken, for example, in the breeding of horses, none whatever are taken in the breeding of the human species. It seems to be forgotten that the species suffers when the "fittest" are not able to perpetuate their type.
Ritchie, in his "Darwinism and Politics" ("Darwinism and Politics" pages 9, 22, London, 1889.) reminds us of Darwin"s remark that the inst.i.tution of the peerage might be defended on the ground that peers, owing to the prestige they enjoy, are enabled to select as wives "the most beautiful and charming women out of the lower ranks." ("Life and Letters of Charles Darwin", II. page 385.) But, says Galton, it is as often as not "heiresses" that they pick out, and birth statistics seem to show that these are either less robust or less fecund than others. The truth is that considerations continue to preside over marriage which are entirely foreign to the improvement of type, much as this is a condition of general progress. Hence the importance of completing Odin"s and De Candolle"s statistics which are designed to show how characters are incorporated in organisms, how they are transmitted, how lost, and according to what law eugenic elements depart from the mean or return to it.
But thinkers do not always content themselves with undertaking merely the minute researches which the idea of Selection suggests. They are eager to defend this or that thesis. In the name of this idea certain social anthropologists have recast the conception of the process of civilisation, and have affirmed that Social Selection generally works against the trend of Natural Selection. Vacher de Lapouge--following up an observation by Broca on the point--enumerates the various inst.i.tutions, or customs, such as the celibacy of priests and military conscription, which cause elimination or sterilisation of the bearers of certain superior qualities, intellectual or physical. In a more general way he attacks the democratic movement, a movement, as P. Bourget says, which is "anti-physical" and contrary to the natural laws of progress; though it has been inspired "by the dreams of that most visionary of all centuries, the eighteenth." (V. de Lapouge, "Les Selections sociales", page 259, Paris, 1896.) The "Equality" which levels down and mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), prevents the aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales from holding the position and playing the part which, in the interests of all, should belong to them.
Otto Ammon, in his "Natural Selection in Man", and in "The Social Order and its Natural Bases" ("Die naturliche Auslese beim Menschen", Jena, 1893; "Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre naturlichen Grundlagen".
"Entwurf einer Sozialanthropologie", Jena, 1896.), defended a.n.a.logous doctrines in Germany; setting the curve representing frequency of talent over against that of income, he attempted to show that all democratic measures which aim at promoting the rise in the social scale of the talented are useless, if not dangerous; that they only increase the panmixia, to the great detriment of the species and of society.
Among the aristocratic theories which Darwinism has thus inspired we must reckon that of Nietzsche. It is well known that in order to complete his philosophy he added biological studies to his philological; and more than once in his remarks upon the "Wille zur Macht" he definitely alludes to Darwin; though it must be confessed that it is generally in order to proclaim the in sufficiency of the processes by which Darwin seeks to explain the genesis of species. Nevertheless, Nietzsche"s mind is completely possessed by an ideal of Selection.
He, too, has a horror of panmixia. The naturalists" conception of "the fittest" is joined by him to that of the "hero" of romance to furnish a basis for his doctrine of the Superman. Let us hasten to add, moreover, that at the very moment when support was being sought in the theory of Selection for the various forms of the aristocratic doctrine, those same forms were being battered down on another side by means of that very theory. Attention was drawn to the fact that by virtue of the laws which Darwin himself had discovered isolation leads to etiolation. There is a risk that the privilege which withdraws the privileged elements of Society from compet.i.tion will cause them to degenerate. In fact, Jacoby in his "Studies in Selection, in connexion with Heredity in Man", ("Etudes sur la Selection dans ses rapports avec l"heredite chez l"homme", Paris, page 481, 1881.), concludes that "sterility, mental debility, premature death and, finally, the extinction of the stock were not specially and exclusively the fate of sovereign dynasties; all privileged cla.s.ses, all families in exclusively elevated positions share the fate of reigning families, although in a minor degree and in direct proportion to the loftiness of their social standing. From the ma.s.s of human beings spring individuals, families, races, which tend to raise themselves above the common level; painfully they climb the rugged heights, attain the summits of power, of wealth, of intelligence, of talent, and then, no sooner are they there than they topple down and disappear in gulfs of mental and physical degeneracy." The demographical researches of Hansen ("Die drei Bevolkerungsstufen", Munich, 1889.) (following up and completing Dumont"s) tended, indeed, to show that urban as well as feudal aristocracies, burgher cla.s.ses as well as n.o.ble castes, were liable to become effete. Hence it might well be concluded that the democratic movement, operating as it does to break down cla.s.s barriers, was promoting instead of impeding human selection.
So we see that, according to the point of view, very different conclusions have been drawn from the application of the Darwinian idea of Selection to human society. Darwin"s other central idea, closely bound up with this, that, namely, of the "struggle for existence" also has been diversely utilised. But discussion has chiefly centered upon its signification. And while some endeavour to extend its application to everything, we find others trying to limit its range. The conception of a "struggle for existence" has in the present day been taken up into the social sciences from natural science, and adopted. But originally it descended from social science to natural. Darwin"s law is, as he himself said, only Malthus" law generalised and extended to the animal world: a growing disproportion between the supply of food and the number of the living is the fatal order whence arises the necessity of universal struggle, a struggle which, to the great advantage of the species, allows only the best equipped individuals to survive. Nature is regarded by Huxley as an immense arena where all living beings are gladiators.
("Evolution and Ethics", page 200; "Collected Essays", Vol. IX, London, 1894.)
Such a generalisation was well adapted to feed the stream of pessimistic thought; and it furnished to the apologists of war, in particular, new arguments, weighted with all the authority which in these days attaches to scientific deliverances. If people no longer say, as Bonald did, and Moltke after him, that war is a providential fact, they yet lay stress on the point that it is a natural fact. To the peace party Dragomirov"s objection is urged that its attempts are contrary to the fundamental laws of nature, and that no sea wall can hold against breakers that come with such gathered force.
But in yet another quarter Darwinism was represented as opposed to philanthropic intervention. The defenders of the orthodox political economy found in it support for their tenets. Since in the organic world universal struggle is the condition of progress, it seemed obvious that free compet.i.tion must be allowed to reign unchecked in the economic world. Attempts to curb it were in the highest degree imprudent. The spirit of Liberalism here seemed in conformity with the trend of nature: in this respect, at least, contemporary naturalism, offspring of the discoveries of the nineteenth century, brought reinforcements to the individualist doctrine, begotten of the speculations of the eighteenth: but only, it appeared, to turn mankind away for ever from humanitarian dreams. Would those whom such conclusions repelled be content to oppose to nature"s imperatives only the protests of the heart? There were some who declared, like Brunetiere, that the laws in question, valid though they might be for the animal kingdom, were not applicable to the human.