CHAPTER III
NATURAL SELECTION AND THE LAW OF LOVE
“Truth justifies herself; and as she dwells
With hope, who would not follow where she leads?”
Wordsworth.
“La plus haute tâche de l'action morale est le travail pour le bien des générations futures.”—Forel.
Before looking more closely than we are commonly apt to do at the meaning of the phrases “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest,” let us exercise the right of man the moral being, as distinguished from man the scientist or observer of Nature, to pass ethical judgments upon the facts which it is the business of all the sciences, except ethics itself, merely to record and interpret in and for themselves. We are beginning at last, half a century after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, to realise the power of the law of selection; what is the moral judgment which is to be passed upon it? In a passage from the last page of Herbert Spencer's Autobiography, we find words which may be quoted on both sides: “When we think of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small and great, which, murdering and being murdered, have gradually evolved,[5] how shall we answer the question—To what end?”
“Murdering and being murdered” suggests the adverse, and “have gradually evolved,” the favourable, ethical judgment.
Many thinkers, finding Nature “so careless of the single life,” finding the murderous struggle for existence the dominant fact of the history of the living world, return an adverse verdict. Amongst them are to be found not merely those who are inclined, by temperament or imperfect education, to rebellion against any conclusions of science, but also, as we saw in the second chapter, such a great biologist as Huxley. In another part of the lecture already cited he says that the Stoics failed to see
“… that cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The logic of facts was necessary to convince them that the cosmos works through the lower nature of man, not for righteousness, but against it. … The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”
In other words, honesty is the worst policy: and to worship natural selection is to deify the devil.
The reader will realise that, if we are to succeed in establishing the claim of natural selection to be the natural model upon which those who desire the progress of society are to base their policy, it is necessary to controvert the doctrine that natural selection is an anti-moral process. But let us hear the other side.
The directly contrary view, then, is taken that though, truly enough, there has been and is much “murdering and being murdered,” yet organisms “have gradually evolved” towards fitness for their surroundings, or the milieu environnant of Lamarck, which we translate environment; and that since fitness or adaptation obviously makes for happiness, and since the moral being man has himself been thus evolved, the process of natural selection, “murdering and being murdered” notwithstanding, is essentially beneficent.
The controversy is embittered and complicated by the fact that ultimate questions of religion and philosophy are involved. Is the Universe moral, as Emerson asserted it was, or is it immoral? A recent opponent of the orthodox creed of a benevolent Deity teaches that “The Lesson of Evolution” is to disprove the idea of benevolence behind or in Nature: “The story of life has been a story of pain and cruelty of the most ghastly description.” The age-long fact of “murdering and being murdered” is the weapon with which he attacks the theist: who, per contra, points to the beneficent result, the exquisite adaptation of all species to the circumstances of their life, and the evolution of love itself.
We may remind ourselves of those great lines of Mr. George Meredith,
“… sure reward
We have whom knowledge crowns;
Who see in mould the rose unfold,
The soul through blood and tears.”
The one camp points to the “blood and tears” and asks for a verdict accordingly. The other points to “the soul” as their product, and asks for a verdict accordingly. But surely we need only to have the case fairly stated, in order to realise that the “blood and tears” are true but only half the truth, “the soul” true but only half the truth. Natural Selection is a colossal paradox—the doing evil that good may come. The evil is undoubtedly done, and the good undoubtedly comes. Is not this the only verdict that is in consonance with all the facts? Is it not less than philosophic to look at the process alone, or to look at the result alone? Is any real end to be served by the incessant cry that we should keep our eyes fixed on the “blood and tears” alone, or on “the soul” alone? Is not the poet right when he says that the sure reward of knowledge is not to see either half of the truth as if it were the whole, but to see unfold “the soul through blood and tears?”
Any attempt to cast up accounts between the evil of the process and the good of the result—especially any attempt based on the assumption that the process has yet achieved its final result—would be not only premature in the eyes of those who can look forwards, but would be irrelevant to our present enquiry. I certainly am with those who repudiate as misleading Mill's description of Nature as a “vast slaughter-house,” and will declare that, apart from self-conscious and supremely sensitive man, it is easy to exaggerate the misery and to minimise the joy of the sub-human world. But our business here is with the process and its results in man himself, in whom alone are possible the heights of ecstasy and the depths of agony: and the thesis—the sublime thesis, we may avouch—of the present discussion is that, whatever the balance between the evil of the process of Natural Selection and the good of its results in the natural state, yet when it is transmuted, as it may be, by the moral intelligence of man, according to the principles of race-culture or eugenics, the good of the result can be attained, more abundantly and incomparably more rapidly, than ever heretofore, whilst the evil of the process can be abolished altogether. True or false, is this not a sublime thesis?
Nature must be cruel to be kind.—If organic fitness or adaptation to the circumstances of life is to be secured, Nature must choose for future parents, out of every new generation, only those whose inborn characters make for this adaptation, and who, in virtue of the fact we call heredity, will tend to transmit this fitness to their offspring. Now it is often convenient to personify Nature, but we must not be misled.