THE "PALL MALL" ON EVOLUTION.
THERE is a certain writer in the Pall Mall Gazette who would compare well with the most powerful of the so-called "giants" of the old days,—to use Macautay's expression,—in the vigour,
fertility, and graphic character of his literary work, but with a bitterness, a naughtiness, a (so to speak) "invincible ignorance" all his own. No man with any true appreciation of literary style can help being struck by the strength with which he hammers away year by year at impressing his very masculine and strongly-conceived, though narrow and, on many sides, positively obtuse creed, on the minds of a shallow-hearted generation,—the effectiveness with which be is constantly draw- ing and drawing again for us the spectacle of a mind of strong, upright, and sombre conceptions as to the government of the universe by a probable God, as to the chequered destinies of man, and the worthlessness of the fatal subterfuges by which weak- minded people try to escape from the disagreeable necessity of seeing facts as they are. The present writer; at least, may say that he so much enjoys the vigour of the ever-varying, yet ever-identical pho- tograph which this graphic writer paints of himself on the literature of the day, that he would gladly purchase it, even at the cost of being blundered against, thumped and contemptuously shot into the gutter, by this not very accurate-sighted giant of the literary world, who is always reminding one of Matthew Arnold's Titan, "with deaf ears and labour-dimmed eyes, staggering on to
his goal." This goal, as regards the ultimate intellectual creed of the writer we are referring to, seems certain to be a sort of
Carlylian glorification of Force, physical, intellectual, and volun- tary, as at once the source and upshot of things,—though he betrays a much stronger respect for positive law, and a much clearer insight into the practical utility of government, when not representing an individual will but only a good system, than Mr. Carlyle has ever confessed. The writer we speak of, whom we suppose, at least,
that we discern in the author of the paper in last Tuesday's Pall Mall on Old and New Apologetics,'—which is, in fact, a supercilious attack on the article we published last week called "The Materialist's Stronghold,"—would certainly not be im- proved, but injured, as a literary force, by taking more pains to understand the positions he assails, for after one has once made a familiar acquaintance with him, he becomes the most unprofitable,
though he remains the most interesting of writers, his great power consisting in that figure of speech which, when it can be sufficiently varied not to weary, is, as Carlyle himself, we think, observed, the greatest of all rhetorical forces, repetition. Except when dealing with legal topics, no one seems less capable than this author of enter-
ing into an intellectual position somewhat removed from his own, or of even caring to discriminate one aim from another in the writers he buffets. It is hardly possible, for instance, that he can have , cared to understand the sense,of what we were writing about in our last number, for his criticism is just as wide of it as if he had really read no more than the fifteen lines he extracts. No doubt he read the whole, but apparently in that spirit of con- temptuous indifference to the argument which would not give him a chance of distinguishing between one branch of it and another. As far as we can see, this writer has made up his mind that it is sorry work theorising about the origin of things ; that if you can believe in God at all, it is only by a happy leap from the convic- tion of your own personal identity to the analogical presumption that some infinitely mightier self underlies the government of the universe ; and he evidently holds that all attempts to find any harmony between the facts of the universe and the moral pecu- liarities of man, are more or less the futilities of weak minds, which cannot bear to confess either the inscrutability of the world, or the obvious inconsistency between their moral code and that which the said world embodies. Such indiscriminate con- tempt, however, for everything which at a superficial glance seems to belong to a given class of despised things, is not the best intellectual condition for discriminating between what does and what does not belong to that claws. Assuredly we were never more amused, after the first vexation of so ridiculous a misunder- standing had passed, than by reading the Pall Mall's criticism on what, as it supposed, we had been saying. The fact is that the writer of the criticism shows in it no inkling at all either of the true meaning of the theory of evolution, or of the aim of our remarks upon it, and yet we do not think the fault lay with us.
We were not attempting in the least, as the writer seems to fancy, to vindicate the ways of God to the lower animals by accounting for their sufferings. Except parenthetically, there was not, and could not have been, consistently with the sub- ject on hand, any remark at all bearing on such a subject. Au- for trying to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, we should say that no effort could be more futile, our imagination being entirely limited by the actual world we live in. Our - point was very much narrower, and as far as we can see, quite within the grasp of finite intellects. It was to consider whether the hypothesis of ' evolution ' is inconsistent with the intellectual character of the ultimate source of evolution. We may remind our readers that what we started from was the assertion of Professor Challis and the Guardian that mathematicians are leas materialistic in their view of science than physicists and biologists. We observed that even if it were so, that was natural enough, because there is nothing but absolute and unvarying order discovered as yet in those regions of Nature which are susceptible of mathematical treatment, while in the region of those sciences which have given rise to the hypothesis of Evolution, you get the apparent signs both of groping or tenta- tiveness, and in some sense also of failure. Our point, then, was not to discuss a difficulty which was just as great before the hypothesis of evolution had been advanced as it has been since, —the difficulty of understanding anima suffering as proceeding from a Divine purpose,—but solely to consider the new difficulty, if any, introduced by the hypothesis of Evolution, and that only in relation to those phenomena which are supposed to indicate blindness and failure. Anything beyond that was beyond our purpose altogether, and what the Pall Mall imputes to us was not only not in our reticle, but could only have been there as a con- sequence of the grossest confusion between several very different subjects. Our sole points were these,—Do the discoveries and hypotheses of Darwin justify the conception that there is, in any sense inconsistent with the purely intellectual origin of things, hesi- tation and failure in Nature? Does Nature grope and hesitate P Does she improve only by dint of starving-out previous blunders, or rather by a process perfectly consistent, even to human minds, with deliberate prescience -of, and intention to create, all the organic forms and phenomena which occur? What we ventured to point out was, first, that the apparent tentativeness of Nature is a mere fiction of our disturbed imagination ; that in the organic, no less than in the inorganic world, there is no hesitation, and that the appearance of it is due simply to the great varieties of form which arise in any complex structures under the influence of varying circumstances, all of which are equally traceable to fixed causes, so far as we can judge at all, though all are not equally perfect in structure. The appearance of hesitation, then, really is, in all probability, not hesitation at all, but due simply to the tendency in the forces at the sources of evolution, whatever they are, to produce among organic forms a variety which we do not find among the inorganic,—forms which, in relation to man's view of them, are better and worse, more and less struc- turally perfect—in other words, forms between which comparison and competition is possible, which is hardly the case as regards the inorganic world. We then went on to our second point, —Does improvement in Nature proceed by blundering and the correction of blunders? Is the phenomenon of organic degenera- tion one of preliminary blundering and subsequent correction of blunders, or not? And it was in discussing this question that we used the language which has led to our able contemporary's very uninformed criticism. The fact of deterioration of type, of course, we admitted, but we thought, and think, that fact perfectly consistent, considering the drift and final end of organic evolu- tion, with intelleAual prescience and specific intention:—" Why," we said, "should variations of a degenerate character ever be admitted, if there be a Divine mind giving its law to natural change ? Of course no complete answer can be given to such a question, but considering the world as the stage on which a. moral freedom is to be disciplined, it is not inexplicable why that liability to degeneration which- is the greatest danger in moral growth is visible to man on every side, in natural things as well as moral, as one of the catastrophes to which, both naturally and super- naturally, he is liable. Without the constant sight of the tend- ency to degeneration in things natural, without being daily taught that it needs, in some sense, a physical struggle not merely for nature to keep on advancing, but to keep from falling back, the meaning and risk of the same liability in things moral and spiritual would not be half as vivid as it is. It is, after all, by no means a matter for surprise that nature should not merely reflect back, but even in a manner anticipate, the inertia, the indolence, the degeneracy, as well as the activity, the industry, and the re- fining transformations, of human trial." Now we should have thought the drift of this remark—which might have been, no doubt, less succinctly and more elaborately explained—in relation to a theory of evolution, intelligible enough.. It is the very gist of that hypothesis,—and of this the writer in the Pall Mall is either ignorant or forgetful,—that the higher forms of life are moulded on the lines, and developed out of the experience,.of the lower forms of life. Without the experience of high tension and • conflict in things natural, the high tension and conflict in things moral would not and could not be what it is. When we spoke of what was " visible " to men on every side, we never imagined that any one could be so dull or so careless as to harp on that expression alone, to the exclusion of the much larger one used in the following sentence, as to our being "daily taught that it needs in some sense a physical struggle, not merely for nature to keep on advancing, but to keep from falling back." The whole context of course required the assumption that it is not merely what we see, but what we experience in every way, as the consequence of a nature moulded on the same lines with the animal creation out of which our organism is evolved, which is an essential condition of the moral experience to which we referred. Had there not been conflict and strife in nature, there would not have been the natural competitiveness and emulation out of which moral competitiveness and emulation are subse- .qnently developed. It is the end of the evolution, so far as we can see it, which makes it possible to judge how far the inter- mediate steps are to be attributed to an intellectual and not to a materialistic origin. And so anxious were we to mark this, that we went on at the close of our paper to point out what the critic in the Pall Mall takes not the slightest notice of, that though it is by the "natural development of the brain" that the highest organic forms are evolved, yet in the moral region something better and much higher than competitive selection grows out of the highest types formed by competitive selection itself,—, pity,'
reverence,' and 'sacrifice' being the moral ideals which more and more emerge out of the earlier and narrower moralities of emulation and conflict. The very sum and substance of all we were driving at was just this,—When the long process of evolution cornea to such an end, is it possible to regard the final outcome, so far as we see it, as otherwise than preconceived and provided for by the power which worked in the germinal forms out of which itgrows ? If it is not possible, then, in spite of the difficulty which deterio- rated organic forms seem to interpose to an intellectual origin for evolution, we must assume that the phenomenon called dete- rioration' is an essential of the whole process, since without it we could not have had a nature educated by the very principle of what seems to us often cruel struggle. Only when we remember that this cruelty of struggle ends in a type of excellence that rises above cruelty of struggle, into a competition not cruel, but the reverse of cruel, can intellectual foresight be attributed without inconsistency to the source of the evolution. Now, this being, as every careful and candid reader of our article will at once admit, our drift, what can be more ridiculously off the question than this exceedingly caustic, but very irrelevant attack?—
" So, then, it seems that all this vast quantity of thoroughly literal misery is inflicted with an eye to a purely figurative application. Large batches of the lower animal world are told off for punishment in a variety of ways, in order that man may feel twice as 'vividly' as before something which his own suffering and those of his fellows might, if physical suffering really conveys this lesson, have taught him quite vividly enough before. Myriads of sentient beings are to be created for destruction in order that Nature may 'not merely reflect back, but even in a manner anticipate, the inertia, the indolence, the degeneracy, as well as the activity, the industry, and the refining transformations of human trial.' Was ever the employment of such means—means so childishly circuitous, so gratuitously inhuman, so wantonly dispropor- tioned to their end—attributed to any human, not to say to any superhuman intelligence ? But, again, if this be the lesson, and if the lesson were worth teaching at such cruel cost, what antecedent probability was there that it would be correctly learned ? nay, how many have ever had the opportunity of learning it? How many of the races of mankind who are brought closest to this sad but, we are now told, edifying spectacle are likely to draw the same trans- cendental moral from it that is drawn by a super-subtle theologian in_ a London journal? And outside these races how much of all this suf- fering is witnessed or even known of ? But the questions do not bear asking, nor does the answer bear stating. Freed from the haze of sentimental theology, the matter stands thus: that we are asked to believe that, for ages before man appeared on the earth, and in vast spaces where the foot of man has never penetrated and never can pene- trate—for what of the ocean, and the 'moral lesson' of the unwit- nessed struggle among its innumerable inhabitants ?—Nature has been engaged in creating and destroying countless creatures, in order that a few appreciative minds may derive benefit to their moral sensibilities, and deduce from it a lesson of which ninety-nine out of every hundred of their fellow-creatures can find no trace whatever. But the return upon the old lines of defence is, we see, complete. After the lapse of a century we are landed once more in the philosophy of Pangloss. We still live in the 'best of all possible worlds '—only a little less stress is to be laid on the word 'best,' and a little more on the word possible.' The world is as good as it could possibly be—consistently with supply- ing the necessary discipline to man's 'moral freedom' through countless forms of suffering."
That is smart writing, but what is the use of smashing what has not been asserted,—unless it be as an interesting specimen of moral gymnastic ? We hardly mentioned the word " suffering " at all, except to remark parenthetically, what we believe to be true, but what the writer of this criticism forgets to say,—that there is no reason to believe that the individuals of a vanishing type-, suffer materially more than the individuals of a multiplying type. There are fewer and fewer of them, as time goes on, and the few that remain may have, on an average, shorter and probably more difficult lives ; but none the less, when we talk of nature stamping-out the inferior types, we deceive ourselves by a metaphor ;—the individuals of that type live the same sort of lives and come to the same sort of ends as the individuals of the improving types, though probably a little sooner and, on an average, on terms a little harder. Still the picture which we vie apt to represent to ourselves under the phrase, "starving-out the worse types," is an erroneous one,—the process being in the main that fewer are produced, and that the few that are produced live shorter lives. But that remark was purely parenthetic. The notion of apologising in our last week's article for the suffering of the world,—except in relation to the appearance of blundering and want of foresight which the occurrence of such suffering might seem to involve,—never entered the writer's head. Ri object was simply to bring out that the liability to degeneration of type is intelligible as a part of the physical evolution of organic forms, when one sees, and only when one sees, that it is the mould out of which ultimately our moral nature springs,—just as liability to be hustled off the pathway by a blundering literary giant is an incident of newspaper criticism to which one becomes reconciled, when one sees, and only when one sees, that it is one of the conditions out of which the congruity and efficacy of newspaper discussion evolve themselves.
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