EVOLUTION AND POLITICS.

THE future historian of literature and philosophy, we imagine, will pause, when he reaches the seventh decade of our century, to describe a change in general thought, feeling, and expression, more permanent than any other that

was equally sudden, and more important than any other that was equally obvious. We at least who have watched the rise of the idea of Evolution on the horizon of thought, cannot dis- cover in the past any previous emergence of an idea entirely intellectual which modified so profoundly and immediately all thought and all feeling. The convictions of unprejudiced and original thinkers were not more changed by it than the assump- tions of the conventional and the thoughtless ; the whole back- .ground of thought was altered. Tarn to a novel or a sermon of the pre-Darwinian era, and you feel on foreign ground. " The Origin of Species by Natural Selection," giving, as it did, in simple, carefully moderate language, the message which the world was waiting to hear, altered at once what we may call, for want of a better expression, the atmosphere of orthodoxy. Men had seen the varied hues of the "imponderable agencies" disappear in the single ray of force ; the continuous develep- ment of the later geology substituted for the magic of " cata- clysms." No wonder that a work which repeated this process of simplification in the mysterious domain of life became at once the popular study of a generation. The oneness of life behind growth came to be regarded as the clue to all mystery ; and differences the moat vast that language can express, or thought can conceive, were resolved into statements of mere time sequences ; so that the very meaning of Before and After seems now enlarged to include all that our fathers understood as causation ; and wherever we describe a sequence, we are supposed to announce a law. But let us describe, in better words than our own, the influence on all thought, of that new philosophy which came in with the belief in the origin of .species by natural selection.

" No characteristic of modern intellectual method is more striking, or more fertile in results," says one of the deepest thinkers of our time,* " than the application of the idea of Time to the contents of the Cosmos, as well as to the vicissi- tudes of the human race. Science formerly addressed itself to the world as an ordered system of bodies in space, not indeed without incessant movements, but all repeating them- -selves as night and day, as life and death, and, since their insti- tution, unaffected through the ages which they count There was therefore no continuous tale to tell ; but only a fixed -constitution to define, and a circulating list of changes pro- vided for and predicted from its law On the other hand, it was the drama of mankind that unfolded itself indefinitely through Time, with new persons and new scenes, now tragic, now brilliant, but never reproducing the same attitudes and -events. There was thus the strongest antithesis between the studies of the synchronous order of the external world, and -of the successive order of human experience : there was nothing historical in the former ; and nothing scientific in the latter If formerly the book of Nature was but a -collection of separate tales, it is now turned into a continuous

-epic, unfolding itself from end to end The conception of Nature itself " (under this new aspect) " parts with almost all that had been taken for granted, and is resolved into that -of a perpetual becoming, so that nothing ever is, but something -always happens ; and to give account of it, you must relate the before and after. Hence the newer methods of science have more and more become historical,—i.e., have devoted themselves to the successive processes, rather than the syn- chronous conditions, of phenomena; and with such daring glances into the past, that the regressus in infinitum, which was once the absurdity, has almost become the favourite iinstrament of our philosophers."

In these profound and accurate words we have a description of all that is fascinating in the philosophy of Evolution, and a suggestion of all in it that is dangerous. It is not wonderful that the discovery of continuity beneath the most striking differences should powerfully affect all thought ; it is not possible that what affects all thought should not create some .error. All difference is now supposed to veil a fundamental unity; all change is regarded as some form of growth. Every antithesis becomes a mere change of Now and Then, and the idea of a fundamental contrast is expunged from the catalogue of possible existence. Crime is a later stage .of misfortune, indignation the twilight of dawning pity. Time is the universal harmoniser. How large a part of what every thinker must concede is here justified and illustrated ! How much of what every one, whether thinker or not, must feel! The search for -Unity beneath differences is the very

• Mr. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, II , 335 foil.

aim of philosophy; the discovery of a unity that harmonises the most striking differences is the great lesson of experience. When the young man says " I," he means something with definite preferences, with limited aims ; when the old man says " I," he means something in which are combined all that is various. He knows:—it is at least a very meagre develop- ment which does not teach the lesson—that within the unity of self all opposites are harmonised. A packet of old letters shows excuse and condemnation as indissoluble elements of one retrospect ; it seems a short distance from that revelation to the discovery that good and evil, too, are but stages in a single process. The philosophy which echoes the lesson of memory may well become the fashion of the hour, as well as the possession of the ages.

But so far as it is the fashion of the hour, the thinker will be on his guard against its distorted inferences and disregarded limitations. To describe any general tendency is to formulate a warning, and none is more urgently needed than that which protests against the assumption that the discovery of unity beneath difference forms the aim of all intellectual toil. It is too little to say that this assumption substitutes the half for the whole. The discovery of the One behind the Many is the most impressive half of this aim, the most interesting to the popular imagination ; it is far more arduous to point out differences, to dissolve the strong cement of popular association, and break up a manifold unity into its constituents. Far more necessary is it at the present moment to protest against the instinct that confuses than against the instinct that divides. We are now in an epoch like that which, after the acceptance of the Newtonian philosophy, rendered true ideas of chemistry difficult of acceptance, because they seemed to oppose them- selves to Newton's great generalisation. We confront all that seems opposite to Evolution, as the chemists of that day opposed all that seemed opposite to Gravitation. It is the perennial tendency of men of science ; and Science bears a perennial testimony against it, ever warning us, that so far as the East is from the West, so far is the light of truth to be expected to dawn on a new generation from the spot where its latest revelations have been made to the seekers of the past.

No instance of the tendency of our time to insist every- where on a premature simplicity seems to us more dangerous than the fatalism introduced into political life, by the fact that Evolution now exists in the public mind as an underlying axiom, supposed to guarantee every assertion which it may suggest. We have explored the inheritance of the past, and have discovered it to be infinitely larger than we had supposed. We have discovered that what our ancestors thought, we feel. We see that their experience has become our intuition. The human race, in the depth of its being, is permitted no oblivion, for below conscious memory lies the ineffaceable record of desire and impulse, and that record is enforced upon the superficial and the frivolous, in ways they little anticipate. The sudden discovery coincides with a perennial temptation ; men are but too ready to surrender themselves blindly to every maxim that can set up a plausible connection with the principle of moral inheritance. That principle is brought home at once to what is highest and lowest in human nature. It soothes our indolence, and gratifies our demand for unity ; it bribes what is corrupt in humanity, and appears to satisfy what is strongest in it. It is welcomed by the coward and the

slave that lurks somewhere in the heart of every man ; and then, again, it is welcomed by the benign spirit that pleads hi every heart for justice to the coward and the slave. A principle appealing thus forcibly to our best and worst is entangled with all the dangers of ready and universal acceptance. For there is no single truth concerning human nature that is not a fragment, and when the fragment is treated as the whole, it matters little, for some important purposes, whether in itself it be false or true.

The Past itself is a fragment. All that man can remember is incomplete and incoherent, apart from that which he has to expect. And the fact that he can expect nothing except death with the same certainty with which he remembers everything, should warn him that he will fatally mutilate his being if he deem that his equipment for contemplating the future is com- posed exclusively of memory and reason. Night and day are not more adjusted to his passive and active powers in the out- ward world than are time past and time to come in the inner ; and he who spends the hours of sunshine in slumber does not so disastrously invert the indications of Nature as he who

provides for the future by carrying on and expanding his recollections of the Past. Doubtless that is a part of all wise anticipation. The inexorable Past remains to each one of us, the unseen comrade of our journey; we know in the night- watches, and often in the busiest hours of the day, that what we leave behind us is in some sense ever with us. But we know also that each one of us is called on to exercise a selective power towards this heritage of the Past, "and say which seed shall grow, and which shall not ;"—that just as the race would cease if all men refused the position of a father, so, if they refuse a position in the moral world which we can only describe as that of creator, there will be an end of all that gives the race its aspiration and its hope.

The fact that it is impossible to put into language im- pregnable to attacks from the side of the logical under- standing, what it is that we mean when we speak of such a duty, is no refutation of the argument which urges it on all who recognise an ideal in the manly life. The rational faculty contemplates the Present alone ; those powers by which we come into connection with both the Future and the Past have each an element of mystery. It is allowed by those who would banish from the world of speculation all that is mysterious, that memory contains such an element. No one can explain the predominance of the faintest memory over the most vivid dream. The knowledge that some shadowy mental image, whose outline we detach with effort from the dim background of the Past, contains a record, is an ultimate and inexplicable fact, secured from dispute by those who would explain everything only by the absolute universality of its experience. The most audacious sceptic has never suggested that the vista which seems to open to the Past, may be a mere drop-scene from the hand of phantasy. Yet those who dispute that man can will, do not advance a less audacious defiance to all the deepest convictions of our being, or rely upon facts of more significance than one who should dispute that man can remember. If Memory seem more explicable than Will, it is merely because the one is a condition, present to the mind which would explain it, while the other is an act, which he may forget, all that is most characteristic of which he may deny. And it is not only on intellectual grounds that men are tempted to deny that they can command anything to begin ; the hatred of mystery is reinforced by the love of ease; the doubts of the thinker represent the indolence of the agent. The vigorous line from a forgotten poet,-

" And that grows fate that was but crime before,"

describes an undeniable fact. There does come a point when a man can only exhibit the sequence of cause and effect, when it is as impossible for him to meet temptation to which he does not yield, as to touch fire by which he is not burnt. But nobody, when dealing with an individual, ever tries to hasten this stage of moral decay. Every word of exhortation that is ever spoken by sane lips is a summons to that faculty in man which confronts the future from the side of Will. We know, in speaking thus, that we are saying only a part of the truth. Resolve—break with this evil habit—conquer this temptation who does not feel, when he makes any appeal of this character, that the imperative will bear no translation into the future P We say, " Be strong !" and every action of the past shows that the man is weak : we know that he will remain weak ; we do not expect a few words from us to possess any magical power ; but we know also that to assume this weak- ness in any address to himself, is the way to make him weaker. We cannot forget that his only hope lies in an appeal to some- thing in him that is strong. Only when men address a nation do they assume that when any action is shown to need resolute will, it is proved impossible.

How is it that when decisions far more important than any which can be undertaken by an individual are at stake, men give up all that they urge with earnestness in proportion to the importance of any individual concern P How is it that men suppose themselves then most nearly to approach the duty of the statesman, when they take the attitude which in the friend or the brother they would condemn as fiendish treachery or incredible folly P Whatever be the answer to such a question, we may rest satisfied that the remedy for such a delusion lies at its source. All true appreciation of history leads away from such a perversion of history ; none can study the past without recognising that all in it which is glorious depends on the recognition, by the men to whom it owed its nobility, that they were responsible for the future.

They felt, if we remember them now with gratitude—it was felt thus by most whom we remember at all—that a nation, if in many respects its life differs from that of an individual, is not a poorer or a less varied being ; that whatever the change needed in all conceptions of individual duty before they became applicable to a State, a blank impoverishment of such conceptions is at any rate no part of the needed expan- sion. They would not have said this, for the simple reason that no one would before our .day have denied it. The notion that men are associated only by their animal nature ; the rejection of any idea of a national duty,—this is an eclipse, peculiar to our own day, of the truth that has made life worth living in the past. We look for manlier counsels, for richer .beliefs, 'with unshaken confidence, to the-' Future. That men can long cease to believe in the responsibilities of national life, seems to us as impossible as that they should ever cease to believe in the identity of individual life,—both are inexplic- able, both belong to that region of faith where all is enshrined that it most concerns the life of man to accept as a reality.