IV DARWIN RE-INTERPRETED 83 ultimately of intelligence, appears as the event to which the whole creation moves; and, accordingly, man is once more, as in pre-Copernican days, set in the heart of the world, somehow centrally involved in any attempt to explain it. The mere concentration of men's minds upon the biological history tended to discount the influence of the astronomical outlook in dwarfing man's importance. And, after all, the evolution of life may take place similarly on innumerable other planetary worlds where the conditions permit; the point is the central importance of the living and sentient as compared with its inorganic environment. The very term environment indicates a subsidiary function, and the usage is characteristic of the biological point of view. So again, what presented itself to the earlier evolutionists as the naturalizing of man appears to a later generation rather as a humanizing of nature, in view of the continuity of the process by which the higher emerges from the lower. We all remember Professor Huxley's denunciation of 'the cosmic process', his poignant insistence on the sheer breach between ethical man and pre-human nature, insomuch that he represented 'the ethical process' on which society depends as essentially a reversal of the cosmic process at every step. In place of ruthless self-assertion, it demands selfrestraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help, his fellows.' As regards pre-human animal nature, Professor Huxley held, in fact, what he himself characterizes as 'the gladiatorial theory of existence'; and this is admittedly impossible to harmonize with any ethical ideal hitherto known among men. This gladiatorial theory is itself a reflection of the omnipresent struggle for existence which so exclusively dominates the picture of nature given us by Darwin and his immediate successors. To this vivid idea, indeed, suggested to Darwin by his reading of Malthus, and reflecting, as Professor Geddes and others have pointed out, the keen competitive conditions of an industrial age, we owe the whole theory of natural selection. But later biologists have greatly modified the original Darwinian conception. It seems certain that natural selection is only one cause among several that determine the course of evolution. And animate nature, as these writers remind us, presents other aspects than that of a relentless struggle for a scanty subsistence. It has its aspects of bountiful plenty and of peaceful happiness. But, above all, animal life is not expressible in terms of the economics of modern commercialism. Its foundations are laid, as Professor Arthur Thomson says, on the facts of sex and parenthood. In the attraction of mate for mate and in the care of offspring, as well as in the further facts of association and co-operation in flocks and herds, we can see prefigured the altruistic virtues which form the staple of our human morality.' The exclusive individualism of the early evolutionists was in some measure due to the economic doctrines and practice of their age. But it is to be noted that, even if we look only at the struggle for existence itself, that struggle takes place not only or chiefly between individuals, but in its intensest form between different societies; and in that struggle the qualities which make for social efficiency are those which are most important, and which are furthered therefore by the principle of natural selection. We may expect, accordingly, as Karl Pearson says, that 'Science will ultimately balance the individualistic and socialistic tendencies in evolution better than Haeckel and Spencer seem to have done '.2 Science has, in fact, already begun to do so, and it is an ironic reflection that Nietzsche's apotheosis of the gladiatorial theory and the purely individualistic ideal was given to the world as the last word of biological science, just as the patient 1 Cf. Geddes and Thomson's Evolution, p. 175; Kropotkin's Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; Pearson's Grammar of Science, chap. ix, sections 15 and 16. IV LEARNING BY EXPERIENCE 85 pioneers of that science were correcting that one-sided statement, and even abandoning natural selection itself as the sole principle of explanation. Biology, finally, with its fundamental conception of evolution, has emphasized the contrast between history, as the ground-character of the living being, and the cycles of merely physical change, conceived as a ceaseless weaving and unweaving, of which no memory or trace remains in the inner nature of the things which undergo it. In a sense, as Bergson suggestively points out, the world of physics is not in time at all; real duration begins with life and that organic memory which shows itself in the formation of habits. Changes, for the living being, are experiences by which it learns, by which its very nature is moulded. All adaptation depends on this capacity of learning, and the capacity is observable in living beings at a very low stage. Thus in the righting reactions of the star-fish, the initial movement of each single arm is determined in the first instance separately by external stimuli or immediate internal conditions. But as soon as the least result with regard to righting is reached, a unified impulse appears; the actions of the parts are co-ordinated, and single stimuli are disregarded. For a living being, therefore, the past lives on as a vital moment in the present. Its nature at any given moment resumes, as it were, its whole past history; and its action in response to any given stimulus is determined not only by the present stimulus but, to an indefinitely greater extent, by its own accumulated past. We instinctively feel the term ' experience' to be out of place where this plasticity, this capacity of learning, is conceived to be absent. On such experience depends the possibility of progress; and whether the idea of progress can be applied in an ultimate reference or not, it is certainly the only idea which brings order and unity into our human world. Here again, therefore, biology, with its stress on the concrete reality of time, appears in the true line of advance. There can, at least, be no doubt that the twentieth century opens with a very remarkable revival of general interest in philosophy; and, as I have tried to show, it is not the least hopeful sign of this movement that the impulse has come not so much from the professional philosophers as from men of science, in virtue of insights reached and problems raised in the progress of scientific thought. There is, doubtless, as always where a movement spreads to wider circles, much crude statement and wild theorizing by philosophically uninstructed writers. But there is a hopefulness even in the determination expressed in so many quarters to be done with academic tradition, and to discuss the universe from its foundations entirely without prejudice. There is a new spirit abroad in the philosophical world, a freshness of outlook, a contagious fervour, a sense of expectancy, which have long been absent from philosophical writing. The greater part of the nineteenth century was, philosophically, a period of reaction and criticism, an age great in science and in history, but suspicious of philosophy, distrustful of her syntheses, too occupied for the most part with its own concrete work to feel the need of them, and otherwise prone to take refuge in positivism or agnosticism. The philosophy of the century was in these circumstances mostly in a minor key, critical and historical rather than creative, reviewing its own past and demonstrating the necessity of its own existence, rather than directly essaying the construction of experience. But now it seems as if, with a century's accumulation of fresh material, philosophy were girding herself afresh for her synthetic task. I have tried in this lecture to trace the liberating influence of biology in helping to bring about this changed attitude of mind. The revolutionary discoveries in physics that have marked the turn of the century have also, I think, by the sense of new horizons which they have given us, powerfully helped to mature a more philosophical view of the nature IV A PHILOSOPHICAL REVIVAL 87 and function of physical concepts and laws. In view of the sudden transformation which has overtaken the very elements of the old physical scheme, there has been reborn the confidence that experience is richer than any of the formulae in which we may have sought to confine it. Nay come up hither. From this wave-washed mound Then reach on with thy thought till it be drowned. 'D. G. Rossetti, sonnet 37, The Choice.' |